The team-building was over. Back to work!
The morning sun had begun to rise in the east, staining the sea orange-red. Along the distant Prodence coastline, the newborn land lay silent in the faint mist, like a giant beast that had just surfaced.
Sakazuki and Aramaki sat on the basalt at the crater's edge, gazing at the sky.
Boer was up there.
He had become a blazing sun-not figuratively, but literally.
His body hovered a thousand meters in the air, suffused with a spectral blue glow that lit up the sky.
He was white. He was blue. He was a kind of holiness that people dared not look at directly.
Tiny bubbles began rising across the distant sea. They came up from the seabed and burst the instant they touched the air, releasing wisps of white steam that spread into a thin layer of mist over the water.
Aramaki sat by the shore, bored out of his mind.
He twitched his fingers, extending a slender branch from his fingertip. Like a nimble hand, it hooked a flat stone out of a distant pile of rubble. Then he turned sideways and flicked his wrist, sending the stone flying low over the sea.
One skip, two, three... The long throw bounced over a dozen times across the golden water before slowly sinking.
He looked away and grew an orange tree. Branches sprouted from his palm, budded, flowered, and bore fruit, all in less than ten seconds. Golden oranges hung heavily from the branches, their skins gleaming with an oily sheen in the sunset.
He picked one and tossed it to Sakazuki.
Sakazuki caught it but did not eat it. He merely held it, rubbing his thumb over its rough peel, his gaze fixed on that "blazing sun" in the sky.
High