There are Five Great Powers governing all of space and time: Order, Chaos, Life, Death and the Balance between them.

Nowhere are the clashes between these Powers less apparent and more important than on an unsuspecting human world called Saiten, however.

A world whose own Balance would shift and change the cosmos forever because of one …

Chapter 一:                                                                                    DISCOVERY

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

It had rained many times there, so this particular fact was not all that strange.

What was strange about the rain that fell on the city on 13 May of year 59 After the Ordinari Advent (AOA) was that drops of water weren’t the only thing falling from the skies.

It also rained naked unconscious people.

A boy in his late teens passing through a park on his way home became the target of the above mentioned strange weather phenomenon in particular.

Unlike the people at the park and on the streets around it who had focused on finding shelter from the rain, the boy named Hikaru Summerbolt was walking with a rather slow pace and had a big smile on his face.

He had chestnut hair that remained spiky in spite of the rain and grass-green eyes that seemed to be absorbing every detail of his environment. And he found great joy in every detail caught by his gaze.

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

If anything could ruin this perfect moment for him, it would be the panicked expressions of the people around him who behaved as if an apocalyptic event had been unleashed upon them. Neither them, nor he realized that such an event was going to take place in their immediate vicinity soon enough.

First, there was a chill in the air. A chill that 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 to 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 nose. It was a snowflake.

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

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

As the air turned colder, a beam of white energy was shot down from the cloudless part of the sky, hitting the ground in the park not five meters from where Hikaru stood.

The roar of the beam as it reached the earth could be heard in every corner of Deckstoru and the tremor caused by this could also be felt across the city. No one experienced it as fully as the spiky-haired teenager, however.

He was enveloped in silence due to the deafening sound of the beam as it hit the park and thrown back by its momentum, crushing in a nearby shrub. As the young Summerbolt 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.

When he was up again, the rain-lover himself could not tell how long had passed, but one thing was certain: the chill in the air had disappeared. Much of the snowflakes and all of the lightning bolts, white light and energy were gone as well, in their absence gray clouds having covered the whole sky again.

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 had been walking when the energy beam had reached 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 the young 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.

Upon reaching the centre of the crater, he felt he stepped on something. 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 the young Summerbolt.

She was of a rather small stature, with mid-length snow-white hair that turned light blue toward the end of the tresses, light skin and rosy lips, but her most striking feature was the birth mark 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 right after. This made him direct 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. After their emergence, the lights lit up in amber and started spinning, all of this being accompanied by loud alarm sounds.

The young Summerbolt knew all too well what those sirens meant. A deva energy output above the limits permitted by the law.

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

Given the situation, Hikaru 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 navy-blue jacket as best as he could. What followed after was a usage of short-distance teleportation via his lightning deva to leave the park and appear on the street beyond the boulevard which was parallel to it.

The output of his teleportation was significantly smaller than that of the energy beam considering the power he felt from it, so the spiky-haired teenager hoped no one would notice his 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 (a human possessing a deva). And deviants needed to support each other in order to survive in this world controlled by ordinari (humans without devas). That was his and the Summerbolt family’s 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 had been following him. That someone revealed themselves when Hikaru reached a completely empty back alley.

It was 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 the young Summerbolt’s.

The golden-haired young man who was also a bit taller and more muscular than the spiky-haired teenager had a villainous grin on his face and that angered the girl’s savior. 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 this one where that white energy beam 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 more attention would be good for you two.’

Hikaru and Seiren had indeed been rivals for as long as they had known each other, but if there was anything more important than their rivalry, it was helping their kind. So when a deviant was in trouble, they were able to set aside their differences and maybe even care for the other until their mission was complete.

‘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 normally I would never help you. But I would like to help her.’

Not even Hikaru could deny it would be easier if they worked together and something needed to be done about this girl as fast as possible. Also, despite having been warned about the danger, Seiren had kept insisting, so his rival decided to trust him for the moment instead of wasting more time to deal with his stubborness.

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

‘Probably more than you.’

Knowing what great things the rivals could achieve when they worked together, Hikaru thought the girl’s safety was guaranteed now. However, neither his, nor Seiren’s previous experience couldn’t possibly prepare them for the trouble they were going to get into by deciding to help her.