Chapter 506 – Hellish frost [12]

Unfortunately, the weather didn’t improve over the next few hours. Not even after I went through every prayer I could remember, directed at practically every god I knew, or had yet to forget. Believe me when I say I really tried.

I prayed to whatever deity came to mind, regardless of how obscure their religion was or how long it had probably been since anyone had last spoken their name. If there was even the slightest chance that one of them might hear my prayers and decide to do something about the situation, I was willing to give it a shot.

Even my sisters got dragged into it. By that point, I was desperate enough to completely abandon my pride and accept whatever solution happened to present itself. The most embarrassing part, though, was when I ended up praying to myself.

Or rather... to the version of myself from before I lost my memories. Because, honestly, I didn’t exactly feel divine, much less crazy enough to look at myself and think that praying to my own existence was a perfectly normal thing to do.

I mean, I know I’m pretty damn powerful and all, but that doesn’t mean I have some kind of god complex. I was just a relatively harmless anomaly who liked ice cream and wanted to get along with humans. Was it really too much to ask for a peaceful life without any worries?

That being said, while the prospect of my prayers actually working would have been pretty nice... it would also have been a little weird. After all, it would probably create an absurd number of other religious problems that I’d rather not even begin to imagine. In the end, none of my prayers had been answered by any of the gods I’d prayed to before. And, to be honest, that had left me feeling a little grumpy.

I mean, if my sisters and I existed, then why the hell didn’t any of the gods worshiped around the world exist too? Where was the logic in that? I wasn’t demanding an immediate answer or expecting some god to magically appear in front of me, but it would have been nice, just once, to get some confirmation that I wasn’t praying to an empty void.

Still, being grumpy wasn’t going to help with anything. Especially not now, considering the temperature seemed to be dropping more and more as the hours passed. How exactly did I know that? Well... I’d barely left the top of the building since I arrived in the city.

Every now and then, I’d move away and float around, exploring the surrounding area a little, but I always ended up coming back to the same spot for some reason. Probably because it was close enough to the city center to give me a decent view of everything around me.

It wasn’t the tallest building I could have been on, not by a long shot, but the view was still pretty good. Anyway, I spent several hours sitting in the same place, simply watching everything from a distance and waiting as time passed. And that was when a small problem came up. Let’s just say... my ass kind of got stuck.

My body itself hadn’t been affected by the cold. I could barely even feel it. The problem was the building I was sitting on. The surface had completely frozen over during the time I’d been sitting there, and apparently, I hadn’t noticed just how much ice had accumulated.

When I finally tried to stand up... I couldn’t. I pulled once. Nothing. I tried again, using a little more force. Still nothing. I stood there for a few seconds, staring blankly at the ground as I tried to process what was happening. To be honest, the whole situation was incredibly embarrassing.

In the end, I didn’t have much of a choice. I ended up tearing off a small piece of the structure I’d been sitting on just to free myself. It was probably one of the dumbest possible ways to end several peaceful hours of simply watching the city.

I let out such a completely incoherent yell afterward that Laura and Emily immediately asked over the communicators if something had happened. Naturally, I didn’t tell them what had actually happened. I simply replied that all this snow falling was starting to annoy me. Which, to be fair, was also true.

It just wasn’t exactly the reason they were trying to figure out. I mean... how the hell was I supposed to explain that I’d literally gotten my ass stuck to the top of a building because I’d simply forgotten that everything around me was freezing over? I couldn’t.

There was no way. I’d never be able to look either of them in the eye again after admitting something like that. I sighed internally. I really liked being the way I was now. Being completely immune to this ridiculous cold was, without a doubt, one of the best things that could have happened to me. The problem was that this same immunity made it much harder to notice when something unusual was happening around me.

If my body couldn’t feel the cold, then I had no way of realizing that a surface was freezing over until something more obvious caught my attention. Like, for example, discovering that I was literally stuck to a building. Maybe I should start paying a little more attention to my surroundings... Maybe.

Or I could simply stop sitting around on freezing surfaces long enough to become part of the architecture. That also seemed like a reasonable solution. I huffed again, a thin white mist escaping my lips and dissipating into the air as I shifted around in place. I sat back down on the building, although this time, naturally, I was much more aware of the possibility of my... rear end freezing over.

It wasn’t exactly a pleasant sensation. That said, there wasn’t anything particularly significant happening at the moment. I mean, the entire city looking like a completely dead ghost town could certainly be considered a pretty significant event, but considering the situation had already been dragging on for several days, I wasn’t exactly counting that as news anymore.

Actually, when I said significant events, I was specifically referring to the last twenty-four hours. Not that I’d been sitting on the same building for that entire time. I definitely hadn’t been that patient. But as far as Emily and Laura had told me, nothing worth paying attention to had happened recently.

No unusual activity. No new anomalies. And, most importantly, nothing that required my intervention. So, after considering every possibility, my only truly viable option was... Wait. Wait for something to happen. It was an extremely simple plan. Maybe too simple. But at the moment, I didn’t exactly have many better options.

In the meantime, I also thought about the agents sent by the High Council to eliminate the anomaly that was currently causing the climate imbalance. That said, I had absolutely no idea where they might be right now. I’d completely lost track of them after the last time I saw them, which also happened to be the same occasion when they decided to treat me rather rudely.

I wasn't exactly holding a grudge. I wasn't that petty. But I couldn't exactly say that I had any particularly favorable feelings toward them, either. If it were up to me, I'd probably keep a reasonable distance. That had also been one of the reasons I'd decided to go off on my own instead of sticking with the group.

I had no intention of making small talk or trying to force some kind of connection after the way they'd treated me when I'd been trying to help them. I could understand why they were suspicious, of course. After all, I was an anomaly, and they'd been sent there specifically to deal with threats like me. Still, understanding the reason behind something didn't necessarily mean I found the way they'd treated me justified.

I closed my eyes for a moment, pushing all those thoughts into the deepest corners of my mind before opening them again. Then I expanded the range of my vision across the surrounding area, letting my perception pass through the streets and buildings around me. I didn't find anything I hadn't already seen over the past few hours.

Homeless people remained scattered across the sidewalks, some completely motionless, without the slightest sign that they were breathing. Others were still breathing, but so weakly and irregularly that it was hard to imagine how much longer they could keep it up. Inside the houses, things weren't much better.

Entire families huddled together, trying to preserve as much body heat as possible. At least they were in a slightly better situation than those still exposed to the brutal cold outside, but they were still far from anything that could be considered safe or comfortable.

The worst part was knowing that all of this was merely a consequence. If the anomaly responsible for all this insane weather wasn't stopped, it hardly mattered where these people were or how hard they tried to protect themselves. In the end, everyone's fate would be more or less the same.

I wasn't going to lie and pretend I felt nothing when I saw the sheer number of homeless people who simply weren't breathing anymore. It was impossible to look at the scene without feeling some kind of weight in my chest... even if, technically speaking, I didn't even have a heart anymore.

That said, there was nothing more I could do for those who had already died. Although, to be fair... I'd tried to do something for those who were still alive. I'd asked my Alter Ego to create a sort of invisible dome around the entire city. It wasn't exactly visible, either.

In fact, no one would have been able to tell it was there just by looking at the sky. Its only noticeable effect was making the city subtly warmer. It wasn't much. But it made a difference. The dome consumed a considerable amount of my energy, so I couldn't increase its heat output much beyond that without starting to drain my own reserves.

Even so, it had been enough to prevent many more homeless people from freezing to death. For now, it was the best I could do. If I tried to do anything more, I'd probably end up in a much worse condition to deal with an anomaly capable of creating ice ages over the Earth whenever it pleased. It was while I was lost in thought that something caught my attention.

Through my aerial vision, which was still monitoring different parts of the city, I noticed some unusual movement relatively close to downtown. Snow had begun falling in that area. At first, there was nothing particularly strange about that. The problem was the way it was falling.

The flakes weren't simply coming down from the sky. They were gathering in midair and beginning to swirl erratically, forming small whirlwinds that seemed to obey some invisible force. The longer I watched, the stronger the impression became that the snow was being influenced by something.

I frowned at the sight: “What the hell is that...?” I muttered.

I expanded my perception toward the place where I'd noticed the strange phenomenon, trying to figure out what was happening. I couldn't immediately identify any obvious cause, but the uneasy feeling at the back of my mind only grew stronger.

I wasn't a seer. I didn't possess any ability that allowed me to see the future, let alone some kind of power that could predict events. And yet... I could say with absolute certainty that whatever was happening, it definitely didn't look like a good sign.