Episode Forty: Epilogue. (August 2nd, 2123. Division-A, Southwest District.)

The purple light that lingered in his pupils had faded. The world was washed of color and drained of life. The sky, although sprawling and expansive, was a dull and unsaturated blue that peeked through the gray clouds that stretched along the horizon. The air was thin and cold, drying his lips and freezing his lungs. No birds, no planes- the world, for the most part, was silent- All except for the humming of the planet itself.

The cold, rough dirt slid in between his fingertips. Beneath the thin soil was a feather folded in his palm. Tilting his hand, the earth fell back into place. The wind was strong, moaning as it traveled through the drained ocean bed. The fish had been long dead and their skeletons decomposed. Flatness sprawled out for miles, only reaching an abrupt stop when the ground took a steep rise into a treacherous mountain range.

Snowflakes danced slowly with the light showers of rain and ash. The precipitation wet his dull, brown hair. Piles of snow mixed with ash dotted across the landscape, filling in the dips and pockets dug into the thirsty soil. The world was abandoned, desolate, and cold.

Ovular, metallic automobiles swayed on the curvature of their underbelly with the breeze, their now dead engines groaning as the cold, foreign air passed through them. Hundreds, thousands of these pods were dropped into the seabed. Locked inside the capsules were countless people, either sedated or dead. But one of the pod's glass domes had been lifted.

Crouched over himself, knelt down on the ground, was Akino. Angrily grinding his forehead against the dirt, he glared into oblivion. His hair was brown, his eyes were green, and aggravated tears drops hung from his eyelashes. The boy clenched his fist tight, the veins popping out from the roof of his hand.

"Matoi!" He growled with a raspy, exhausted voice. His mouth grew large as he shouted her name, bearing his gritting teeth. "I'll… kill you!!!"