"AERENDYL!" Hina screamed into the clouds as she slowly beat her wings, hovering in a massive stretch of open air, rising and falling by a few centimeters but mostly only hovering. Nobody answered her call for a moment, and then Aerendyl seemed to materialize with a small puff of smoke like something out of a children's cartoon.
"What's up, Badger Girl? Shouldn't you be resting, not flying around already? It hasn't even been twelve hours."
"Aerendyl I need to go home, to Japan. I don't need to stay there, but I need to visit, one day, maybe two, please. I have to, this isn't up for debate."
"Okay, it isn't up for debate." Aerendyl nodded, hovering just the same as Hina. "I'm not opposed, especially when you're only asking for a day or two... but I do need to know why, of course, it's not the most simple thing to open a rift to another world."
"My father. I haven't been thinking clearly but you said I can go to other worlds as an angel, right? So let me just, let me tell my father what happened, that I'm technically still alive, even if we don't ever see each other again after this it has to happen Aerendyl-"
"Hold- Hold on, Hina, slow down. Nobody is saying you can't occasionally visit your family- in fact, I fully support it. You probably won't even look too out of place depending on where you go in Japan, right? You'll just need to keep your magic under control is all... and not remain there permanently, as fate would have it. Yeah though, I won't stop you, that's a good reason for wanting to visit home, come with me alright?"
"Alright-" Hina nodded, trying not to seem too surprised. Honestly, she wasn't sure why but she'd expected Aerendyl to put up a fight... and instead, he simply led her down to a cloud and paused.
"I only gave you half the truth. Opening up a rift is easy, incredibly so- but everybody in heaven will feel the magical shift, so I needed a reason before I could open it, to explain to others. Are you going to be okay going in with that appearance?"
"What do you mean?"
"We could, magically, make you look more human for a while, if you want."
"Then no, thank you, I'll go as I am, though I'll need to do some clothes shopping and limit the weird cosplay look to my head and tail."
"Alright, Hina, good luck. Will you have money for that?"
"I had a bank account, they don't close it when you die, somebody else has to... there's a good chance I can still go ahead and get money from it, my dad isn't the type to make those moves."
"Alright, Hina, then... good luck, simple as that. One day you'll learn to open your own rifts but," Aerendyl shrugged his shoulders and knelt down, walking forward, trailing his finger along the cloud... and as he did, a gap split down the center, showing only hazy, indistinguishable shapes. "I can't really open up one for a specific place, but I can open a rift that holds value to you, so you'll know the place you land, I just don't know the area myself. I won't pressure you with a rift later... so you can call my name when you're ready to return, or I'll come for you in two days, alright?"
"Alright, Aerendyl, and... thank you. Somehow I didn't expect this to be so easy."
"It doesn't always have to be complicated rituals and candlelit chambers and beautified, sugar coated slavery, that's just a human thing. Now go ahead, Hina. Have you told your friends what's going on?"
"I told two of them and left a note on my way out, so it'll be fine. Thanks, friend," Hina murmured and hopped into the portal.
~~~
Hina's stomach lurched as she suddenly found herself sitting in a scene that was, admittedly, almost alarming for it's familiarity and how awful this situation would be only a few hours before... she was sitting in a student's desk about as far away from the window as she could get, front right corner. This was her homeroom class, and the desk specifically where Aika had strode up to Hina and confessed her romantic feelings... but now there were no students, only sunlight streaming through the tall glass windows, glistening on the polished desks... and the scratching of pen on paper.
"Wha- hello?" The teacher, Hina's old homeroom teacher, looked up with no small amount of alarm on his face. "Who the hell are you?!"
"A-Ah, um..." Hina looked sideways, unsure how she should answer- but she needed to, of course, or the police would be called. Then, she should lie, right...? What lie sounded any more believable than the truth, though...?
"It's... Hinata Nakamura," Hina answered quietly, only knowing how to utter the truth just then.
"What...? What the hell sort of joke do you think you're-?!"
"It's alright, sir," Hina cut him off, slowly standing up. "You don't have to believe me, I doubt anybody at all would... but it's me, who dated Aika and was devastated when I got a C in your class two years ago before you switched grades. Me who lived with my dad and foreign mother, who never spoke much, worked a job and kept to himself..." Somehow Hina found herself beginning to tear up, her gaze to the teacher intensifying. This was so sudden, had it even occurred to her an hour ago yet...? "Me, Hinata Nakamura who fell down the subway stairs and snapped my neck... and yet, here I am, come home for a time, and it's fine if you don't believe me b-but..."
"Hinata... there's no way, Hinata died months and months ago, and besides, you're obviously not him!"
"Again, sensei, I don't expect you to believe me... but it's true. All that Shintoism stuff about reincarnating into another life... that's what happened, but the life wasn't... wasn't here, in Japan." With these words, her old teacher slowly stood from his chair, cautiously walking around and sitting in a desk beside Hina, furrowing his brow.
"This preposterous... but if I said that I believed you, how would you explain from there?"
"It's such a long story, and it sounds like something from a bad anime... but myself and ten others, we were killed off in our own worlds, and apparently not all of them were Earth, or an Earth like this...? It was supposed to be... gods I know this sounds like garbage but... we were supposed to be summoned as heroes, and three of us went wrong, myself included. My body changed in s-so many ways and I landed in the mud..." Hina stopped, shaking her head. "There's no way you believe this for a second, I should get out of here..."
"Just, keep talking as if I believe you entirely. I want to see if this story makes any sense," the teacher spoke quietly, intensely holding Hina's gaze.
"I was... I was found by a Devil, a girl with blue skin and white hair, orange eyes with black scleras... but no matter how horrifying that sounds when I say it aloud, I woke up in a warm bed with clothes to change into, and she and I made fast friends..." Hina paused here, reminiscing on a certain few moments early on. How their lust had evolved to love, over such a short time... but in the beginning, it had definitely been more physical attraction than spiritual, there was no denying that. "She was planning to flee the kingdom that meant to summon me; it was racist, sexist, where anything other than human was hated and women were second class citizens... so we ran together. The kingdom though... it was called Starria, and it was hunting down the failed summons, maybe trying to make sure word of their failures didn't spread- except for one of them, they kept and tried to turn into some sort of bridled show pony... but she ended up dead first." The teacher was staring as intensely as ever, but he didn't interrupt, so Hina continued.
"We flew like hell, and stopped by some sort of college for mages, and on the way another girl joined us, part pixie and part demon... she seemed almost innocent at first, but it didn't last long. The knights hunting us... they tracked us to the college, and we barely escaped with our lives. We only did, as weak as we were then, because a man claiming to be an elf came and bailed us out, killed the knights; apparently elves are a very small number there, but even the weakest are strong enough to kill twenty trained men with ease. We made it to a border village... but now we'd left dead knights in our wake, and they attacked the village in full force." Hina swallowed, shaking her head slowly, but sensei only waited patiently.
"The thing was, this village- Lop, it was named- was right on the border of a kingdom that was not, at all, racist. As such, it wasn't farmers who ran to meet the soldiers but rather Devils and Angels, part humans, animals, vampires and kitsune and every imaginable kind of creature... in the end, the kingdom's racists didn't stand a chance and..." Hina swallowed, shaking her head. "There, I killed one of the other summoned heroes and met my not-really-my-sister when I stopped a pair of knights from raping her. We ran, almost as soon as the battle was over, the whole village and I... and there was another attack, a final, desperate attempt because I made allies with the other living failed summon, a girl who'd become a potentially world ending demon...?"
"World ending? So these summoned heroes... are they halfway to gods in their own right, hypothetically speaking?"
"Yes, among humans, they are gods when trained. While I was in that village, over the border... I was attacked by a sort of witch, and infected with a sickness- I don't fully understand, but I was told the creature feeds on and traps all of the hate and negativity around them, and somehow she injected it into me. From there, my life started to rapidly fall apart, and I myself started to turn into a demon, entirely; supposedly the King of Starria wanted to force those who supported me to kill me themselves, stop me from becoming a martyr that people rallied around when I died. But the angels... there are angels, apparently, I'll get there... they kept sealing my sickness, putting off the climax of things until finally I reached the Capitol of the nation I'd run to. Supposedly there was some sort of spring there that could heal me... but the queens, there are three, broke my seal and magically sent me all the way back to the Capitol of Starria." Sensei's eyes widened- he knew where this was going.
"I don't remember much, but by then I had four allies... and with their help and that of the angels I think, I murdered half the nation's army, body then some kind of massive horrific god, slaughtered every remaining s-summoned hero and then in the end, killed the king just the same...!" Hina swallowed and shook her head. "I-I um... I left the castle and that elf caught up to me... he revealed himself as an archangel at some point, I think, and did what he called purifying me... it cut the demon in me down to almost nothing, but it made me largely angel as well... and now, there probably isn't a human alive who could actually kill me. I visited heaven with the war complete, and started learning some key things as I was trained to become stronger, faster, deadlier. There are millions of worlds like Earth with intelligent life, and some have nothing, some have science and some that are particularly blessed by the gods are teeming with magic."
"Gods... so you're saying you, know the true religion, what's really up there?"
"Yes, and it's everything," Hina murmured, slowly drawing the only weapon she possessed just now, the kitsune's fang, the orange dagger she'd been given as a sign of stautus. "This was gifted to me by Inari, we forged an alliance after he tested my strength."
"H-Hold on- how did Inari test your strength?"
"Ha had me battle one of his soldiers, a four- five?- I think four tailed kitsune, and I won." Sensei fell silent for a moment then, rocking back with a decidedly stunned expression on his face.
"Kitsune are said to rival the gods as they grow more tails, so...?"
"Sensei, I'm said to rival the Gods. Humans can't touch me, and the angels think other gods will be threatened by my status."
"Angels... so you've interacted with the Christian God and Inari so far...?"
"Yes. They refer to the Christian God as the One True God, saying he has the power to end and begin universes with a flick of the wrist, but supposedly he's only one of another race, the strongest of them all, simply referred to as gods." Slowly, Hina shuddered. "This morning, as the sun was rising, I think I hit the end of my training... I must have left two hundred angels collapsed in the clouds before I finally couldn't support myself any longer, and then I slept... but I woke up in the shower with the devil girl, angelic exposure made her half angel as well during our attack on the enemy capitol. She asked how wrong I thought it was for us heroes to be ripped from our families and homes just to serve people we don't know and owe nothing to, and I thought of... I thought of my dad, sensei. So, since an angel can... here I am."
There was a long moment of silence as Hina sheathed her knife, blinking slowly, tiredly and somewhat sadly.
"You don't look like a Christian Angel... are you hiding anything?"
"Wings and a halo, you mean? I am, but they aren't quite white... I can use the magic of demons, called Hellfire, and the magic of angels and humans, and supposedly no blade can pierce my skin..." Hina muttered darkly, suddenly drawing the Inari knife and plunging it down at her hand, straight and true. Sensei himself yelped, but the blade only glanced to the side as Hina let out a half-disgusted snarl, not feeling much more than a poke. Inari had said it was a relatively ordinary knife, so she assumed as much.
"Can I-I... see the wings and halo?"
"Sure, sensei," Hina muttered softly, standing and slowly walking to the empty corner of the room, turning and facing the man who'd once instructed her almost daily. Sighing softly, she let her wings spread slowly to the sides, not fully opening because of the confined room as her halo appeared as a sliver and circled into a full thing, then flared with that gray-blue light. Once sensei stared for a long moment, Hina snapped the angel's features away, looking away.
"It really is me, sensei, as much as this must sound like utter lies... can you deny it, now?" Raising her hand and flipping her palm downward, Hina sent lightning crackling along her fingers and dropped it to the other hand, but it was a ball of flame that vanished upon landing. "Angel? Demon? Human? Tanuki? I'm nothing and everything at this point, and I've made godly allies... which means godly enemies are bound to come next, but for just today and tomorrow, I've come home, to try and explain to my dad."
"Hinata... you should know, Aika died with you. I believe you, which is why I say... she didn't try to grab you, or trip. Witnesses say it was like an invisible hand threw her in, it's spawned urban ghost stories among the teenagers... from what you've said, do you think you might have met Aika in the other world?"
"There's no..." Hina blinked rapidly, caught off guard and about to heatedly deny, but...
Charlotte, an Arch of Hell and truly a fluke summon, technically bound to obey any order Hina gave.
Emily, a girl who'd hinted she used to look quite different, who'd mentioned her parents before, her past.
Aurelia much the same, never fully exposing a good amount about her past, both in relationships and habits...
-but Nao? Nao, who had quite literally given off the feeling of a childhood girlfriend next door to Hina, who'd never talked about her past, who was summoned at the same time as Hina... who seemed softer and less intense, almost reserved as a Japanese child would be raised... foreign, lava like eyes but keeping her brown hair simply kept and indulging in such fashions as lolita when given the chance... less crazed lust and a whole lot more soft affection when the time for it was right... slowly, Hina's jaw metaphorically dropped to the floor.
"I-I think... I need to be paying better attention..." As Hina said it, sensei breathed a visible sigh of relief.
"That's two of my students I now know are still alive, again, and thank... any and all gods for it, I guess. So, no religion is wrong?"
"Satanism is pretty wrong in my opinion, but no religion is incorrect, it seems," Hina answered with a dry laugh and a watery smile.
"Heh... ha, haha, aha...!" Sensei began to laugh, and Hina joined him, the two a very strange pair as they broke out into loud and raucous laughter. It lasted for several long moments before silence fell again, and then Hina's old teacher stood.
"How about I drive you home, Hina? I don't think you'd like to fly through Japan, and maybe just now isn't the time to be alone. We could stop by the cafe everybody talks about, didn't you work there? Might be some fond memories."
A pause, and then; "Thanks, sensei. I-I'll take you up on that."