ร้อยวิธีพลีชีพในวันสิ้นโลก

“Hey, hey, you awake?” A girl’s voice woke me up, though I was a bit drowsy. There was a guy with wavy blond hair staring above me.

“It’s just a dream,” I whispered with my eyes shut.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “I don’t know what you are dreaming, but this is real.”

I opened my eyes again. There was a bushy brown-haired girl beside him, smiling and waving at me. Blowing a small sigh of relief, for a second there, I thought that girl’s voice came from him.

“Can you stand?” He offered his hand.

Once my senses became clear, I was lying on a concrete floor. The thick furry lining of my hoodie coat cushioned the back of my head. After he hoisted me to my feet, I glanced around while dusting my back, only to realize that we were in a plaza, along with hundreds of people. They were all kids and teenagers, from twelve to eighteen years old. Not a single grown-up was found among them. Even the blond guy and the bushy-haired girl were perhaps the same age as mine.

“Big crowd, huh?” he said.

“Yeah.” I nodded, but not much. This place could hold an entire concert. There were plenty of spaces for me to walk around. “Ugh…” My right shoulder began to surge in pain.

“You okay?” the girl asked.

“Just got an aching shoulder, but I’m alright.”

“Ah, we saw you falling a few meters in the air after you popped up out of nowhere seconds ago,” she said. “Must’ve hit your shoulder on the floor.”

“I see.” I massaged my right shoulder to ease the pain. “Where are we anyway?”

“Don’t know, but I have a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore,” she replied, referencing from the book, The Wizard of Oz, I assumed. “Maybe we should ask around, Wilt.”

Her blond friend nodded in response. “Excuse me,” Wilt cried to a small red-haired girl who was passing by while weaving her head like she was looking for someone. “Do you know where we are?”

She replied with a language we couldn’t recognize.

“Um, Katie?” Wilt said.

“It’s not French,” Katie whispered.

The two looked at me if I might understand her, but I shook my head in response. I watched many foreign movies that spoke Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Japanese; none of those languages and accents matched hers.

Looking disappointed, the red-haired girl glanced around to find someone who could speak her native tongue until she spotted something that made her eyes widen.

“Stonehenge.” We glanced in the direction where the red-haired girl was pointing, and we were shocked to see a familiar landmark encircling around us.

It really was Stonehenge.

Of course, everyone recognized Stonehenge, but this one was massive and in a completed set. Not like one in Britain, all in ruins. At that moment, I realized that we were in another world because there was no giant monument like that anywhere on Earth.

“What is this place? Where am I?”

“I want to go home.”

“Is anybody here who can speak English?”

“Hey! God of whatever, I didn’t ask for this!”

The crowd voiced out their shock and confusion, gaping at the monument. Many spoke in different languages I wasn’t familiar with, though I heard Spanish, Japanese, and German. Someone in the crowd tried to calm them down, but everyone was bickering and baffling to know where they were. The language barriers had brought things worse.

I understood how they felt. We were all taken from our homes and transported into this alien world. I had to keep my anxious nerves calm, knowing that panic wouldn’t help me anything. I must get away from this crowd before things might get escalated, or something terrible might happen.

As I was about to leave, Wilt grabbed my left shoulder. “We need to stick together.”

“What?”

Katie wagged her finger like a mother scolding her child. “Haven’t you learned anything from horror movies? Splitting up is a bad idea when you’re in an unfamiliar place.”

She was right. We had to stick together. The smart ones I was referring to. These two and the red-haired girl were the few people who had remained calm among the confused, restless crowd around us. Sticking with them was a better option for my sake. However, I was bewildered at how she said sounded almost optimistic since we had a problem here.

Suddenly, a pillar of light burst out in the middle of the plaza before it vanished in an instant, revealing a teenage girl in pink. Much to our dumbstruck, every one of us dropped our jaws. What surprised us even more, the girl was floating in the air, waving at us with a child-like grin.

“Welcome, braves, welcome,” she said with an Australian accent, her voice thundered throughout the plaza. “My name is Andromeda Galaxy.”

“I’d be surprised if that’s her real name,” Katie commented.

Agreed, her name did match her looks. She wore a galaxy-themed fluffy dress and winged sandals, like a magical girl straight from a cosplay convention. At this point, I wasn’t sure her long pink hair was either dyed or a wig.

“Before we begin, I would like each of you to grab a translation stone like this one.” Andromeda showed us a blue pebble with strange symbols engraved on its surface. “You can get one right under your feet.” She pointed her finger at the scattered stones in the plaza.

One by one, we picked up a single pebble. Andromeda said this was a translation stone, so I turned to the red-haired girl.

“Um, excuse me.”

She immediately looked at me to her surprise, gasping, “You speak Finnish?”

Finnish? So she was from Finland. “No, not really. I can hear you speaking in English.”

“He’s right,” Wilt said. “I think this stone can translate languages.”

“I love poutine like I love volleyball,” Katie said.

All three of us gave her a perplexed look. “Huh?”

“Just checking, I was speaking in French. I can hear you all speaking French right now.”

Wilt guessed. “You were thinking in French, right?” Katie nodded in response, and he turned to the red-haired girl. “And you can hear us speaking Finnish.”

The red-haired girl nodded, relieved that we could understand her. Now we knew how these stones worked as a universal translator, just like in science fiction. The one used for communicating with aliens. By the looks of the multilingual crowd around us, this stone would come in handy.

Andromeda was pleased to see tensions slowly eased and the language barriers disappeared. She began refreshing our memories by recapping how and why the gods chose us to participate in the Game of Heavens and Earth.

I whispered, “Gods… Game…” Now I remembered how I got here in the first place. I was on a bridge, like almost every night for the past couple of months. I was sitting on its railing, thinking about how and why my life was always screwing up. It was one fateful night that a god appeared, a Greek god, to be exact. I went pale after staring at a mystical figure floating right in front of me that was supposed to exist only in myths until my mind had cleared that I wasn’t dreaming or delusional.

Once I calmed down, he told me to rejoice that I was chosen to be his champion. To my surprise, he revealed the existence of other pantheons. Aztecs, Chinese, Norse, Celtic, Egyptians… all of them, including his own, bowed to the absolute highest power: the Supreme God of Heavens.

One day, the Supreme God of Heavens decided to retire and disappear, leaving without instructions and an heir. All the gods held a heavenly council to discuss who would be the next Supreme God. However, tensions grew fiercer and fiercer among the rulers of different pantheons claiming to be the successor.

One god stepped forward from the millions of others from hundreds of pantheons. He was the god of games. Understanding that a war among all the gods would devastate the universe to its core, he proposed a competition, not just for the rulers but every single deity that was worshiped on Earth. Whether they be powerful or lesser ones, they’d been given a chance to win the holy throne.

The rules were simple, each of them chose a young mortal to be their champion, granting them their powers and weapons, and they would place them in a magical world they created as an arena. Whoever reached the finish line on the other side of the world first would be the winner, the winning god would become the next Supreme God, and the winning champion would be granted whatever desire to reshape our world. All the pantheons happily accepted the proposal, and so they dubbed it: the Game of Heavens and Earth.

After all the things that had happened, I still couldn’t believe everything he told me and from where I was standing were all real. I felt like those characters got sucked into a fantasy world, living their lives in adventures. That stuff only happened in fiction. Of course, I did like… no, I loved those stories, but I couldn’t believe this sort of situation actually happened to me.

“Hey,” Wilt called.

“Huh?” I snapped back to my senses.

“Don’t space out,” he said as the crowd started moving. “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“Follow Miss Tinker Bell, of course,” Katie replied.

Once Andromeda flew out of the plaza, Wilt and Katie asked me to stay with them. I could’ve gone by myself without needing anyone’s help. However, in this situation, it was best to stick with the smart ones like them. Katie also managed to ask the Finnish girl to join us.

“Wilt Wallace,” he told me his name.

“I’m Sam… Sam Roche.”

We shook hands, and he introduced his companion to me, “This is Katie Lestrange. We just met a while ago.”

“Um, thank you for having me in your group.”

“It’s no biggie,” Katie said. “Wilt said that we, smart ones, have to stick together.”

I was astonished that he thought the same thing as I did. We turned our attention to the Finnish girl.

“And you are?” Wilt asked for her name.

She paused for a bit before introducing, “Alexanystasha Simona-Romanov.” Our tongues got twisted trying to pronounce her long name.

“We’ll call you Alex for short,” Katie said perkily.

“Katie, that’s a bit rude,” Wilt murmured.

“I don’t mind,” the Finnish girl insisted with a shrug.

“See, she likes the name.” Katie grinned. “Come on, let’s go take pictures at Stonehenge.” She pushed us all toward the standing stones.