Vision

Notice: Edited on November 1st 2023.

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I remain still as I stare at her not knowing what to say. Not only do I have no idea who the person she just mentioned is, who she is, heck, I don't even know who I am. More like, I don't know what I am.

Am I a ghost? Didn't I die? Wait a minute. Is this the cycle of reincarnation that those monks in eastern movies rambled about? I thought all of that stuff was nonsense...

It should be nonsense. If that was the case here, I should be reborn as an infant, and shouldn't remember my past life... Huh...? I can't... remember? But I could've sworn I remembered everything just a-

DAMN IT.

I clench my head as I feel an excruciating headache while trying to keep in my voice as much as possible. My vision is hazy, but I can see the girl panicking and I assume, calling out my name. I feel like something is moving in my brain. My vision grows hazier by the second. The moment everything became dark in my sight, the pain stopped.

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I feel like my eyes are closed. I open them. What met my sight was a scene that I would never forget for the rest of my life(?) (I am still not sure about being alive, okay?).

Horrible. Disgusting. I can't seem to find the right words to describe the sight in front of me.

Corpses with dismembered limbs and huge chunks of their flesh missing are all over the place. I am standing(?) on the road of some city - except that the city is completely in shambles. The buildings around me are all... barely recognizable. The road has cracks and holes in it as far as the eye can see Everything is a wreck.

Crashed cars, street dyed red and black with blood. It truly is a horrific sight, yet... I am unsure of how I feel about it. Just a moment ago, all I felt was disgust, yet now... it appears as a beautiful work of art in my eyes.

I take a step forward, but I fail? What? I look down and realize that I have no legs - no, I don't have a body to being with, let alone legs. It's almost as if... I don't exist (in the physical sense). I imagine why I can't move around, and suddenly, I move. Huh? I didn't even try to move.

I repeat what I just did, and once again, I move. It appears that based on what sort of movement I envision, my 'soul(?)' will move.

'Go forward', I voice and visualize, and that's exactly what happens. I wish to contemplate further regarding my current situation, but my thoughts are suddenly interrupted by a loud and violent roar.

I look over at the source of the noise, only to be bewildered by the sight of a man riding a - what I assume is - a dragon. Yes, a dragon. To be specific, the western kind. The ones with four legs and giant wings.

The dragon suddenly makes a turn and flames burst forth from its mouth.

Looking toward the direction the flames are heading to, I spot several flying figures. They seem to be doing so using their... wings? How does that even work? I thought that wings wouldn't work with a humanoid body due to the weight class being completely different to that of a bird's. Hold on, why do I know this? Haven't I forgotten everything? I mean, I still can't remember shit, but I just know things?

From what I can see, there are three types of wings. A magnificent pure white pair of wings. A raven-black pair of wings. And a featherless dark pair of wings that look like tree branches.

Those wings seem to remind me of something, but I can't figure out what no matter how much I rack my brain. Perhaps, that is also a part of the huge chunk of my memories I seem to be missing.

Focusing back on what I see, I see the dragon-rider jump off of his dragon. The sky abruptly turns darker, and I can see ominous black clouds forming a spiral there at a ridiculous speed. Then the dragon rider's hands start glowing with electrical sparks appearing all over his arms.

He punched. Not the flying humanoids, but the air. He punched the air in their direction...

BOOM

I feel the reverberation of a strong shockwave as I see ripples appear in the sky in the direction he punched, followed by electrical currents striking down two of the winged humanoids.

The dragon-rider seems to have the ability to fly? Or is he just floating... I can't tell. He needs no wings to do that; he just floats there casually as if bending the laws of physics (which most likely is the case here).

The winged people that weren't affected by the cannon-ball of an attack begin spreading out and surround the dragon-rider.

What follows next is an absurd battle of supernatural powers. One dragon-rider versus several winged people with varying abilities. It might seem unfair due to the numerical advantage the winged humanoids have, but neither side seems to be gaining an advantage over the other.

I just realized that my intent to see the battle more clearly has brought me closer to them. Right now, I am standing about fifteen to twenty-five meters away from them as the two sides fight arduously.

After some time, I take note of the dragon rider's chest which has began glowing in an eerie red. No... It's not just him. All of them have are glowing near their chest, although in different colors. The dragon rider's glow is the brightest of them all and seems to be getting brighter by the second. This doesn't seem to be affecting their battle though.

Still, going by their reaction to the growth of the glow (more like, lack of one), the winged humanoids either don't see it, or it's not anything unusual worth worrying about.

Then, it abruptly disappears. The glow just vanished. I take a look at the others, and they still have a glow, but the dragon rider's isn't visible to me anymore.

Following that, he breezily creates some distance between him and a winged humanoid he was fighting before smiling in a way that I can only describe as creepy. His left hand which was balled into a fist opens up, revealing a gem-like thing in the middle of his palm.

The jewel(?) starts glowing in red, with the light growing to cover the entirety of his left arm. He then punches the air once again, but this time in the direction of the sky above.

The glow covering half of his arm disappears and a red circle appears in the sky. The circle seems to have runes or symbols - I'm not sure - written in it and is growing at a fast pace. In a matter of seconds, it encompasses a huge portion of the sky.

"Inferno reducto!" exclaims the dragon-rider with evident vigor.

As soon as his oddly familiar voice fades out, extremely bright red flames begin materializing out of the circle and swallow up everything within its vicinity.

The only ones that remain unaffected by the flames are none other than the dragon-rider and myself. With the flames having died down, I notice that none of the winged humanoids are visible. Even the corpses that had fallen to the ground earlier have disappeared, most likely turned into ashes.

The dragon-rider scratches the back of his head and smiles. Then, he suddenly snaps his head in my direction, his smile growing wider.

Before I can even react, the space around me starts fading out, and soon, the only thing that's left is myself floating in a perpetual white space.

[A precognition of a disaster. Not unheard of, but a fairly rare occurrence.] A soft voice resounds within my head.

Following the voice, something starts materializing in front of me into a humanoid figure. Once the materialization is done, I am dumbstruck by the identity of the person in front of me: My sister who just so happens to be the only part of my life which I actually remember properly. Well, only towards the end of it anyway.