It was after the regime of politicians—and the scientists who had echoed and enabled them—collapsed. But power never tolerates a vacuum. What seeped into that brief gap were religious leaders. The world had suffered devastation so severe that extinction was practically breathing down its neck.

  Fire disasters or water disasters. If neither, then a world filled only with wailing. In such a place, people longed for something unseen. Rationality had always competed with God, and once the standard-bearers of rationality fell from power, it was only natural that God—regardless of any divine will—would once again be invoked and exploited.

  There were also politicians who brazenly claimed that all problems could be solved far more easily than anyone expected, dazzling the masses. They were even less hesitant than their predecessors. Reducing everything to a matter of confrontation or military operation, they never apologized to anyone when controversies arose—not even, it seemed, to themselves.

  Rather than acknowledging mistakes, their stance—their ego—was that the mistakes had never existed in the first place. Their slogans of “Make ~ great again!” delivered with an even more overt pretense of omnipotence, traced back to a real estate tycoon–turned–U.S. president from half a century earlier, now remembered as a farcical emblem of rise and collapse.

  Even when one sensed that a kind of “memory trait,” designed and accumulated to ensure the survival of the human species, had ultimately been misarranged, inertia remained heavy, and deviating from its course was difficult. People had become like ants endlessly tracing a circle, guided by pheromones they themselves secreted, until death. The leaders were the first—and last—ants to release that circular trail.

  At first, such politicians were believed to be new alternatives, capable of saving everyone from the situation. As if possessed, people policed one another, incinerated context, and exercised violence. In front of politicians—or those who had placed them on the stage—the crisis response systems prepared until then ceased to function in any meaningful way.

  A vast order was already assumed to be predetermined, and people believed their actions merely rendered that order more sacred and more complete. With no discernible difference between the inside and outside of the chapel, it became impossible to tell whether religion had vanished or whether society had become a fully theocratic state.

  Naturally, religious leaders and political leaders began to resemble one another more and more. Election campaigns took on the tone of prayer meetings, while prayer days began to resemble party conventions meant to display power.

  Politicians, without exception, repeated crudely childish performances—slicking their hair with heavy wax, adorning themselves with colors and patterns evoking national flags, religions, or folk beliefs. That code functioned almost like scripture.

  This was hardly new. Since the emergence of parliamentary democracy, it had grown tiresomely familiar. Italy’s March on Rome in the 1930s. The modern history of a South Korean leader impeached after a failed self-coup in the 2020s. American Pie. And bye.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  People who locked the slaughterhouse’s back door with their own hands and ran straight ahead, hoping—without realizing it—that their throats would be cut quickly and painlessly. The more people tried to flaunt their individuality, the more they became part of something else, until they came to believe that rapid convergence into a single color was necessary. That required immense heat and pressure, like the processes that shape the Earth’s geology. In truth, it should have taken hundreds of millions of years—but people could not wait that long. They had to exist now. What was approaching was not something new, but something already decided; only its speed was being adjusted.

  Some time later, perhaps due to the aftereffects of the Great Conflagration, natural disasters of unimaginable scale struck one after another. Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and typhoons intertwined and collided, leaving no choice but to pray that their energies would cancel out and fade to zero. The Earth, reddened and overheated by the firestorm, lost its patience and began to howl in earnest.

  Bound by a fate dependent on the Earth’s skin, humanity continued to linger in the jaws of the planet like a cleaner fish unaware that its privilege had been revoked. When even the islands of the great oceans and Oceania could no longer escape fear and terror, panic spread. There was nowhere safe.

  Until then, people had concealed their fear behind collective madness—but madness alone could no longer mask it. Fear kept leaking out between them, and from that point on, people could endure only by seeing fear reflected in others’ eyes and claiming sameness.

  The ones who concealed their fear until the very end were the final leaders. By then, he had long been living a life that moved only between Wilson and the house below the cliff, ever since reaching adulthood. In an environment where he neither met nor could meet anyone, he honed only stagnant, cynical judgments. Trying to sharpen himself further, he scraped and cut away at his own flesh until he became a stub of a pencil. He grew increasingly distant from people, and the villagers, as they did with one another, naturally distanced themselves from him as well.

  The leaders pushed to the front were merely humans who had lost their sense of balance to a fatal degree—far worse than anyone else in the species—having completely broken even their instinctive perception of danger and biological warning signals. People could no longer endure further failure, and so they handed all authority to their leader. Once he became a dictator, his blindness accelerated everything at terrifying speed.

  Even now, the details remain unknown. Before he could fully process a single breaking news alert, another would erupt, one after another, just as when the path of the Great Conflagration had once been broadcast live. Reports of war between this country and that. Reports of air defense systems being exhausted or neutralized. Reports that ground troops were imminent—or that invasions had already begun.

  The number of target countries grew, the distance shrank, and the news became increasingly complex, forecasting global hegemony and order based on unfolding combat. Then, at some point, it all simplified into blunt statements: one country attacking or occupying another. Soon the news itself thinned out. Television and YouTube broadcasts ceased altogether. And then, suddenly, all electricity here went out at once. Naturally, gas and water stopped as well.

  Everyone rushed into the streets. From the highest hill, where he had been on watch overlooking the village, his eyes caught sight of an “Anarchism T-shirt.” Voices swelled everywhere, but the voice of the leader—chosen to bind them into one—was nowhere to be heard. Instead, a siren blared from an old loudspeaker, so cobwebbed it was doubtful any government office still paid attention to it.

  “A nuclear strike is imminent! A nuclear strike is imminent! Evacuate immediately! Evacuate immediately!”

  He recalled the nuclear blast emergency manual he had once seen. He flattened himself against the ground, covered his eyes and ears, assumed a plank-like position, and focused on exhaling air from his lungs in steady rhythm. Screams surged up from below the cliff like a tidal wave. The cessation of those screams and an unbearable searing heat struck him simultaneously. Overwhelmed by the blast wind, he could neither move nor remain still at will, and so he focused all his senses on simply staying as he was. Perhaps people who had survived ancient civilizations and unprecedented acts of arson, settling here against all odds, were now wailing as they turned their backs to the nuclear storm. As those who had not burned or vanished strained toward higher ground with all their strength, a tsunami as tall as the cliff itself swallowed the village.

  The villagers were trapped by the sea, without even a moment to say goodbye.