Heavy rain was pouring from the skies over the city of Deckstoru.

It had rained many times there and it was always pretty much the same – drops of water fall from the clouds and hit the ground.

What was special about the rain that fell on the city on 13 May, 59 AOA* was that drops of water weren’t the only thing falling from the skies.

No. It also rained naked unconscious people that day.

A boy in his late teens with chestnut hair that remained spiky in spite of the rain and grass-green eyes was passing through a park on his way home when the above mentioned strange weather phenomenon occurred.

He wore a navy blue jacket with short sleeves and navy blue pants, which had silver lightning patters at the end of the legs of the pants and at the end of the sleeves and the waist area of the jacket. The shoulders and the outside of the collar of the jacket were also covered in another fabric with light gray color while underneath the jacket he wore a T-shirt made of a strange mail-like material with bluish-gray color.   

The people who were at the park and on the streets around it at the time had focused on finding shelter from the rain.

The spiky-haired boy named Hikaru* Summerbolt wasn’t one of them.

Instead of walking fast and not paying attention to his surroundings, he tried to absorb every detail of his environment.

Why? Because he loved the rain. He loved lightning bolts even better. And thunderstorms he loved most of all.

Hence he was irritated by the panicked expressions of the people in the park around him who behaved as if an apocalyptic event had been unleashed upon them, neither them nor he realizing that such an event was going to take place in that very park soon enough.

Suddenly there was a chill in the air.

Not all that unusual. But this chill wasn’t like the one you would usually feel during an early summer rain.

It pierced the young man who took pride in being able to handle the cold quite well through the bones and made him shiver and stop in the middle of a lane in the park.

What followed was even more shocking as a small crystal that at first seemed to be made of glass fell on his lips. It was a snowflake.

Slightly disturbed by the changes of the weather, he increased his pace a bit as he continued down the lane but evidently he didn’t do it fast enough since he was still in the park when a light ripped through some of the clouds above him.

Lightning bolts now appeared in the sky which would’ve made Summerbolt very happy under different circumstances but that wasn’t the case now as the lightning bolts turned white near the area enveloped in white light and the sound of thunder caused by their appearance was much louder than usual.

As the air turned colder, a ray of white energy was shot down from the part of the sky where there were no clouds, hitting the ground in the park not five meters from where Hikaru stood.

The roar of the ray hitting the ground could be heard in every corner of Deckstoru and the tremor caused by this could also be felt across the city but no one experienced it as fully as the spiky-haired teenager. He was enveloped in silence due to the deafening sound of the ray as it hit the park and thrown back by its momentum, crushing in a nearby shrub.

As he fell to the ground it took a while for him to find his footing or for his ears to stop ringing from the strain they had experienced.

He himself could not tell how long had passed but one thing was certain: the chill in the air had disappeared as had much of the snowflakes and all of the lightning bolts in the sky, now fully covered in gray clouds with no white light or energy being visible anywhere.

Hikaru shook his head a few times to fully come back to his senses, the last of the five that responded being his sense of smell.

Fire. Something was burning.

His nose directed him to the source of the smell – a smoke-covered crater next to the lane down which he was walking when the energy ray hit the ground.

The smell of the grass and some of the shrubs burning as well as that of the smoke that came as a result of this was normal but the color of the flames was not.

They were pale blue in color and as Summerbolt came closer to the crater he felt a chill coming from them as well as the usual heat emitted by fire.

Another disturbing characteristic of these flames was the fact that although their volume was small, the heavy downpour of the rain didn’t seem to affect and cause them to diminish one bit.

Inquisitive in nature, Hikaru went inside the crater to inspect the strange flames up close. What he found amidst the smoke shocked him much more that the pale blue fire ever could.

He felt he stepped on something upon reaching the centre of the crater. Something soft. Definitely not dirt. With a waving motion of his arm the veil of smoke around the boy was cleared so he could get a better look at what he had stepped on, finding out it was a hand.

In particular, the hand belonged to a naked unconscious girl that looked around the same age as Summerbolt.

She had long straight snow-white hair that turned light blue towards the end of the tresses, light, almost pale skin, rosy lips, rather small in stature but her most striking feature was the birth mark she carried on her left cheek.

Two short diagonal lines parallel to each other.

There were a few scratches and bruises on her skin but there were no signs of more serious injuries.

Hikaru checked for a pulse on her neck and found the girl was alive, hearing something just then.

He directed his attention toward the sound which came from the many short metallic poles with three dark orange lines on them on circular platforms spread throughout the park as they were throughout the streets of the city.

The small orbs atop the antennas on each side of the poles that were dark until now had started flashing in blue, the shells of the poles opening up and alarm lights coming out, starting to turn and emitting an amber light, all of this accompanied by loud alarm sounds.

Hikaru knew all too well what those sirens meant. They indicated a deva energy output above the legally permitted levels.

That meant the reason for this energy ray hitting the park, for the strange flames that had sprung around the crater formed by the ray and the appearance of this naked unconscious girl within that crater was someone or something’s deva.

Given the situation, Summerbolt had two options: leave the girl so that the proper authorities could deal with her or take her and leave as fast as possible in order to help her himself.

Within a minute after the activation of the deva sensor alarms he had covered the white-haired girl with his jacket as best as he could and had used short-distance teleportation through his lightning deva to leave the park and appear on the street beyond the boulevard that ran parallel to the park.

The output of his teleportation was much lesser than that of the energy ray considering the power he felt from it so no one would notice the spiky-haired teenager’s actions.

As the area started to fill up with people drawn to the sound of the alarms, he strode off, knowing full well he had just broken a law. Again. He didn’t mind much as first and foremost he was a deviant. And deviants needed to support each other in order to survive in this world controlled by ordinari.

That was his and the Summerbolts’ motto.

As usual, abiding by this motto was going to get him in a lot of trouble, starting with the fact that his focus on the girl had prevented him from realizing someone was following him.

That someone revealed himself when Hikaru reached a completely empty back alley, turning out to be a boy the same age as him with golden yellow hair that was much less spiky and whose fringe was longer, yellow eyes being visible between the strands of the fringe, his skin color being a few tones darker than Summerbolt’s, body-wise being a bit more muscular and taller than the spiky-haired teenager.

The undergarment this boy wore seemed to be made of the same mail-like material like Hikaru’s T-shirt, combining small amounts of gray and large amounts of bright yellow, the parts that covered his upper trapezius being black, having a large black pitchfork-like symbol on the chest. No jacket or any upper layer of clothing though and only dark yellow shorts with square patters on them reaching just above his knees on the lower half of his body, some parts of him being covered in other ways.

Namely, he had a black sleeve that covered his left arm from just beneath the shoulder to the wrist with golden bands at both ends, a stocking with a similar design being put on his right leg from under the knee to the ankle.

The boy across Summerbolt had a villainous grin on his face and that angered the spiky-haired teenager. He’d been caught too soon by none other than his greatest enemy – Seiren Blackscale.

‘-Going somewhere, Summerbolt? Like away from the crime scene in that park over there?’

‘-How’d you know there’s a crime scene there?’

‘-Found that one where that white energy ray hit the ground?’

‘-What’s it to you?’

‘-She a deviant?’

‘-Don’t know yet. You haven’t answered my previous questions, though.’

‘-I don’t answer questions used to answer my questions. Since I asked first, you ought to start talking.’

‘-Make me.’

Seiren’s grin disappeared now. He had dropped the act.

‘-I could do that but I don’t think drawing unnecessary attention to the two of you would benefit you.’

Summerbolt and Blackscale were indeed rivals for as long as they had known each other, but first and foremost they were deviants and their top priority was always helping their kind.

‘-Getting involved in this won’t benefit you either, Blackscale. Might as well walk away and pretend you didn’t see me.’

‘-You’re really overestimating yourself if you think you can deal with this alone.’

‘-I’d prefer to risk it than accept help from you.’

‘-And under normal circumstances I would never help you. But I would like to help her.’

It would be easier if they worked together and something needed to be done about this girl as fast as possible.

He had even warned Seiren about the danger but the bastard insisted so whatever happened to him from here on would be on his head.

‘-Alright then. Let’s see if you can be of any use to her.’

‘-Probably more than you.’

The duo had been formed. These two were capable of achieving great things when they set aside their differences but neither one knew that even their teamwork wasn’t going to be enough to get them out of the trouble they were heading towards.

 

AOA* – coming from the chronology system on the planet of Saiten (where the action takes place) in the present, all years prior to 59 years ago having the acronym BOA after them, meaning “Before the Ordinari Advent”, all years after – the acronym AOA, meaning “After the Ordinari Advent”;

 

Hikaru* – from Jap. “hikari” – light;