Mecha Battle Beneath the Heavens

December 8, 2035. Winter. Clear.

Dad tells me about the world before the nuclear explosion. Back then, the sky was a brilliant blue, as if carefully painted with watercolors, clear as a spring of pure water. White clouds like tufts of cotton drifted through the blue, carried by the wind far into the distance. He says that was what the spring sky looked like. In summer, the sky was cloudless for miles, yet it liked to sneakily rain. The autumn sky was just as blue, but it favored long stretches of drizzle, sometimes lasting more than ten days, leaving everyone's clothes perpetually damp. But those days exist only in his memories now, and in my diary. Ever since the nuclear explosion, the world I see has been nothing but bleak. The sky is shrouded in great masses of gray-white clouds, and the blue I long for is nowhere to be seen.

The bunker, sunk a hundred meters underground, can withstand a nuclear blast, but the living quarters, originally designed for two thousand people, are now crammed with ten thousand. No one knows when we can return to the surface. The crowded, cramped, airless space makes it hard even to breathe. Yet everyone knows that every extra minute spent holding out in the bunker means a better chance of survival. So everyone waits quietly. Each person chooses silence of their own accord. There is no entertainment and no conversation.