Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 10 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Does Andou Jurai Dream of Branching Paths?

In the mornings, my sister, Andou Machi, and I had an unspoken agreement: whoever got up first would make a point of waking up the other. Whenever I’d sleep in, my sister would come to haul me out of bed, and whenever she’d sleep in, I’d return the favor. That meant that I’d end up waking her up more often than not, though she would always swear that she wakes me up most of the time, actually. The truth would remain an eternal mystery.

Well, it would in a big-picture sense, anyway. On that day in particular, the truth was very evident—and, regrettably, the truth was that I’d been the one to sleep in.

“Awright! Up and at ’em, you little turd-brain!” my sister roared as she barged into my room, pulled the sheets off my bed, then used the momentum of that motion to sweep a kick in my direction, knocking me straight to the ground.

“Bwaugh!”

“Sheesh—how long were you planning on sleeping in for, huh?!” Machi fumed.

“That...really hurt, you know?” I grumbled from the ground. “Couldn’t you have picked a nicer way to wake me up?”

“Tried it. Didn’t work. Your fault for not getting up the first time.”

“No, you didn’t! Don’t you dare lie to my face! That was a hundred percent your first try, wasn’t it? I was actually half awake already, so I know for a fact that you didn’t try anything gentler!”

“Sure I did. In my mind’s eye.”

“And you expected that to work?!”

“Maybe I thought that my beloved little brother would manage to pick up on the telepathic signals I’d been sending his way.”

“Maybe if your little brother’s really so beloved, you could consider picking a less brutal wake-up call next time...”

“Anyway, getcher ass outta bed, Jurai. You’ve got an escort today, I guess—there’s a girl waiting outside for you.”

“A girl? You mean Hatoko?” I asked, and I was surprised to see my sister shake her head.

Oh, huh. It made sense on reflection—if it had been Hatoko, she would’ve come in to say hi to everyone. Even if she hadn’t come in on her own initiative, my mom or sister would’ve almost certainly dragged her in by force. In the first place, even though Hatoko and I walked to school together pretty often, we’d always meet up partway there. We almost never went all the way to each other’s houses.

Okay, but if it’s not Hatoko, who is waiting for me outside?

First things first, I had to get ready. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and quickly got dressed.

“Ahh, crap! It’s getting late—I really did oversleep,” I muttered to myself as I glanced at the clock.

I knew exactly why I’d slept in: it was because I’d stayed up late the night before ironing out the details of Operation Take Takanashi Sayumi Down in Single Combat. Our rematch was scheduled for today after school, and if I went in without a solid plan, my defeat was assured. I’d learned very well just how tough she was during our battle last year, and I knew that I’d have to use every trick in the book to steer our confrontation away from hand-to-hand combat and toward a battle of wits...

But no, wait, that won’t work either! Sayumi has wits and intellect to spare—she makes me look like a rank-and-file chump in that field too!

Sayumi was so skilled in the martial and intellectual arts, you could very well say that I’d lost the second I’d agreed to square off with her. I couldn’t afford to give up, though! Maybe some people would take this as an opportunity to give their upperclassman a win and let her graduate on a positive note, but I wasn’t about all that. If I was going to fight her, I’d be giving it my best. I’d be fighting to win! I would come up with a plan to engage her, fair and square, to the best of my ability! That, after all, is exactly what Sayumi would be expecting from me...

“...”

...or so I thought, but some part of me had the strangest inkling that I might have had the wrong impression about all this.

Hmm. Maybe she didn’t want a rematch after all...? When I really think about it, I have no idea what the point of that would even be. But if it’s not a rematch—if she isn’t trying to reassert her superiority in battle—then what is going on here? Why would Sayumi want to meet with me behind the gym?

“...Oh, crap! I’ve gotta get going!”

I’d finished changing at that point, and I dashed out of my room at top speed. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I had time to scarf down breakfast, but decided to give it a pass and headed straight for the front door. Not only would eating risk making me late, I also didn’t want to make the mystery girl who was apparently outside wait for me any longer than she already had. And, speaking of that mystery girl...

“Huuuh?”

The moment I stepped outside and saw who was there, my eyes widened with shock. I seriously doubt it was possible for me to look more perplexed than I did in that moment.

“Kudou...? What are you doing at my house?”

It was, indeed, Kudou. She was wearing a red coat with a checkered scarf, and she had black tights on for good measure. It was a very fall outfit, well suited to the chilly autumn morning, but it did nothing to answer the fundamental question in my mind: Why? Why was Kudou waiting by my front door?

I stood there in a confused daze until Kudou noticed my presence and turned to face me. The instant she laid eyes on me, her face lit up in a smile. And what a smile it was—a real full-faced grin like I’d never seen on her before. Then she clasped her hands together behind her back, tilted her head, and said, “Tee hee! Here I am!” in the most stunningly cutesy voice I’d ever heard come out of her mouth, with an expression to match. “Hee hee! Did I surprise you? I’ve been waiting around this whole time to see if I could!”

My jaw was on the ground. My thought process: ceased. I’m pretty sure my soul actually departed from my body for a split second.

U-Umm. Huh? What even...? Since when was Kudou the sort of person who’d say stuff like that? Or do stuff like this, for that matter? Is she going through some sort of personality breakdown, or— No. No, wait. I know this Kudou.

A powerful sense of déjà vu came over me. A day that I would’ve preferred to have left locked away in the annals of history was being dredged up from the depths of my memory. I’d seen this Kudou—a version of Kudou that was downright excruciating to watch—once before.

“Okay! Let’s head to school, all right...darling? ♥”

“Hgkgh?!”

The inflection when she said “darling,” so cloyingly sweet I could practically hear the little heart behind the question mark, sent me into a full-body shiver. Not on account of fear or cold, though—this was a shiver of pure, unspeakable shame. It was an awkward sort of secondhand embarrassment so powerful it literally gave me goose bumps and sent chills racing down my spine. To think that, in this day and age, she would call me darling again...

I remember this. I remember this unbearably powerful level of cringe very, very well!

“K-K-K... Kudou...?” I stammered fearfully.

“Oh, come on, darling! Why are you still acting like I’m a stranger? Honestly,” Kudou said with a bashful squirm as she shot me an uncomfortably affectionate glance. Her eyes were limpid, and her cheeks faintly flushed. The look on her face was, to be brutally frank, the look of a lustful maiden. “You can call me Mirei from now on, okay? ♥”

That statement on its own would’ve been enough to rob me of my words even without the cutesy smile, but it certainly didn’t lessen the impact. I didn’t know how this had happened, and I certainly didn’t know why, but when it came to the what of the matter, I had no doubts. Before me stood the version of Kudou who had fallen head over heels for me after a terrible misunderstanding.

A quick recap, for everyone who might have forgotten: Kudou’s character, like a certain alien overlord whose name starts with the letter F, had progressed through four distinct forms up to this point.

Her first form: Ordinary Kudou. The passionate and strict president of our school’s student council. This was the version of Kudou who, half a year beforehand, had arrived at the literary club and stated her intention to have it shut down.

Her second form: Cocky Kudou, aka Battle-Mode Kudou. A form in which she gets a little too confident in her power and decides to talk way more smack than she could ever live up to. Bearer of a “Look down on me, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do” sort of attitude, but in spite of her big mouth, still a timid and delicate girl on the inside. Also kind of a ditz, as evidenced by the fact that this was the form that had screwed up and revealed her true identity to us. A form that had seen a revival just the other day.

Her third form: Infatuated Kudou, aka Love-Drunk Kudou. A form in which Kudou lives for love and love alone, sparing not even a sidelong glance for anything else, which naturally results in a complete disregard for her surroundings. This version of Kudou has no scruples when it comes to PDA—in fact, I’d gotten the impression she enjoyed making a show of her affection. If an action would make the people around you roll their eyes at how sappy of a girlfriend you were being, this Kudou had probably done it.

And, her final form: Recent Kudou. The passionate and capable president of our school’s student council. An individual with an ample supply of common sense, whose words and deeds made her intelligence clear for all to see. A truly remarkable leader who’d led the year’s cultural festival to a stunning success before stepping down from her position at the height of her career. Similar in many ways to her first form.

That concludes the list of Kudou’s forms to date. It’s probably pretty clear by now that she was a girl who had been through a number of vast and sudden personality shifts, and each time she’d changed forms, a boatload of drama and hardship always seemed to follow. She’d more or less settled down into her final form recently, to be fair, to the extent that, in my mind, Final Form Kudou was as close to a True Kudou as there could ever be. I’d more or less assumed that the other forms had been consigned to the history books...until I found myself walking arm in arm with her, listening to her happily hum away as we strolled to school. There was simply no denying it: this was her second form, Infatuated Kudou, back with a vengeance.

It was the early morning, in a quiet residential area. There weren’t many other people around, but that didn’t mean that nobody was there to see us. Kudou, however, had linked arms with me with an air of complete shamelessness, almost as if she was trying to show it off to the whole world. The skip in her step was making it weirdly uncomfortable to match her pace too.

“H-Hey, Kudou?” I said.

“Harrumph!” Kudou said with a sulky pout. To be clear, that was the word “harrumph,” not an actual harrumphing noise. I’d never seen a more obviously performative expression of displeasure.

“Ah, uh... M-Mirei?” I hopefully corrected myself.

“That’s me! What is it, darling?” said Kudou, her pout shifting in an instant into a full-blown smile. And, like...it was cute, okay? Like, honestly, it really was, but my mind just couldn’t keep pace with the situation I’d landed in, cute smile or not.

“So, sorry to drag this up all over again...but just to be extra sure, this isn’t, like, a prank, or some sort of weird dare you’re being subjected to, right?”

“How many times do I have to answer that question? A prank? A dare? What are you talking about?” said Kudou. “Well, then again, I guess you could sort of call it a prank! I did keep it secret that I’d be waiting for you, since I thought you’d be happy to see me when you were least expecting it! I’d call it more of a surprise than a prank.”

“Okaaay...”

“Oh! But I guess that probably makes it seem like I’m saying it’s your fault I had to wait around outside, doesn’t it? For the record, I only did it because I wanted to! And besides, stuff like this doesn’t bother me at all when I know I’m doing it for you!”

“Riiight,” I droned.

At first, I’d thought that there must have been a hidden camera somewhere filming my consternation at Kudou’s sudden and complete change in personality, but upon further reflection, there was no way Kudou would play along with something that mean-spirited. That said, there was still a part of me that desperately wished this was all just a prank.

“Okay then, Kudou—if this isn’t a prank, then what are you trying to accomplish here?” I asked.

“Huh? Whatever do you mean?” replied Kudou with a cock of her head. She seemed to honestly not understand what I was getting at.

“I mean, like... You know, the waiting outside my house thing, and the linking arms, and calling me ‘darling’...”

“Oh, is that what you meant? Honestly, darling, you’re such a bully with these questions sometimes,” said Kudou with a satisfied nod and a slight blush. “I’m doing it because I love you, obviously!”

“...”

“Eek! Oh jeez, I actually said it! C-Come on, darling, do you have to put me on the spot like this? You’re impossible, sometimes!”

“Umm... Huh? Wait, then, Ku—I mean, Mirei...are we, like, dating?”

Had I awakened to an alternate personality that had asked Kudou out behind my back? Had we been dating without my knowledge? Or maybe a warp in reality had led to third-form Kudou time-slipping her way from right after I’d given her power its name to now?

That possibility meant that I had to just come out and ask whether or not the two of us were an item. “Are we, like, dating?” is maybe one of the single scummiest questions a guy could ever ask, and I knew it, but circumstances being what they were, I think I get a pass for playing that particular card. I figured that if she said something along the lines of “What, are you that desperate to hear me say it out loud?” I would have to start seriously considering the alternate personality or time slip theories...

“No, we aren’t dating.”

...but Kudou confirmed what I already knew without a second thought. She laid it out very clearly, though I did have to note a certain hint of sadness to how she’d said it.

“You turned me down, after all—and not very nicely.”

I...didn’t know what to say to that.

“Or, actually, I guess you didn’t exactly turn me down, did you, darling? All you did was correct my huge misunderstanding. I’d jumped to a totally wrong conclusion and gotten all worked up after reading the letter you’d left in my shoe cubby, and you did everything you could to cope with me nicely,” Kudou continued.

Hearing her say that I’d “coped with her nicely” actually made me feel a little ashamed of myself, to be honest. The way I saw it, nothing I’d done over the course of that incident had been commendable in the slightest. But that wasn’t what was really important here—what mattered was that the time slip theory had just been ruled out entirely. She remembered the love letter misunderstanding perfectly well...which raised just as many questions as it answered.

“So then, why...?”

“Why? Why do you even have to ask? You being in love with me was a misunderstanding, yeah...but me being in love with you is an undeniable fact!” said Kudou. She’d made so little effort to mince words—gone to such truly negligible lengths to soften the statement—that just listening to her was making me feel intense secondhand embarrassment all over again. “That’s why I make sure to let you know that you’re my darling whenever I can, and why I try to show how much I love you every time there’s a chance! Hee hee hee!”

While I was stricken with a blank-minded state of befuddlement, Kudou tugged me even closer to her. We were both dressed for the chilly weather, which made it a little hard to tell, but I was still pretty sure she’d pulled my arm right into her chest.

“H-Hey, hold on, Mirei—let’s give the arm-in-arm thing a rest, okay?! We’re out in public!” I yelped.

“Honestly, darling, you can be so shy sometimes!” Kudou said with a pouty frown. She did let my arm go, thankfully, though she definitely wasn’t happy about it. That was one of Love-Drunk Kudou’s distinctive characteristics: her romantic inclinations were more or less out of control, but she was also docile enough to actually listen to her darling’s requests. “Okay, darling—if linking arms is too much for you, how about we hold hands in one of our pockets instead?”

“I-In a pocket?”

“Yeah! Like, your coat pocket.”

Holding hands in a coat pocket? Isn’t that, like, one of those things that couples do all the time in the winter? It sounded incredibly embarrassing, and I really didn’t want to do it...but on the other hand, it was also really hard to say no right after shutting down her dream of walking arm in arm.

“All right,” I said after a moment of hesitation. “I’ll do it.”

“Yaaay! Thanks, darling!” squealed Kudou.

I’d more or less resigned myself at that point. It was embarrassing, yeah, but compared to linking arms, I’d gotten off lightly. I put my hands in my pockets, and waited for her to slip one of hers in as well. I was not, needless to say, brave or experienced enough when it came to romance to be the one proactively holding her hand.

Kudou let out an oddly mischievous chuckle, then—for some reason—she circled around behind me. Before I had a chance to react, she reached out with both hands, almost like she was about to hug me, and slid them into my pockets on either side, her left hand into my left pocket and vice versa. The next thing I knew, both of my hands were being firmly squeezed at once.

“Nooope, nope nope nope! This is definitely wrong!” I shouted.

“What about it?” Kudou asked.

“The whole thing! Why both hands?! This is definitely supposed to be a one-handed thing!”

“How other people do it isn’t my problem! This is the standard method, as far as I’m concerned.”

“L-Look, just back off, please!”

“Nuh-uh, I don’t think so! You said I could, darling—no take-backs!” Kudou practically cooed from behind me, strengthening her grip at the same time. Anyone watching us would definitely have thought she was just plain hugging me.

I-I underestimated her... I should’ve realized that when Kudou’s in this form, she has literally nothing but happy-go-lucky rom-com schlock on her mind! Her common sense and decency have been overridden by pure affection!

In the end, there was no dissuading her. I gave up and resigned myself to carrying on toward school with her clinging to my back.

“K-Kinda feels like we’ve got a two-person conga line going, huh?”

“It kind of does! Our love for each other’s going to dance the night away, darling!”

That was my limit. I just couldn’t take another exchange like that, and plodded along in an exhausted silence until a familiar figure came into view.

“Ah. Hatoko!”

My childhood friend was waiting for me up ahead of us, at the same crossroad as usual. Meeting there and heading to school together was basically our morning routine.

“Ah, Juu! Good...morning?” Hatoko said as she turned to face me, her expression stiffening up the moment she actually saw me. That, frankly, was fair. Anyone would be weirded out by a guy and a girl our age walking along in a musicless conga line first thing in the morning.

“W-Wait a second, Hatoko! It’s not what you think! Just listen to me—I swear there’s a perfectly good explanation for this,” I frantically babbled.

I grappled for a decent excuse for a moment, but then it struck me that, really, I didn’t actually need to excuse myself at all. If anything, this was the perfect opportunity for me to explain the situation to Hatoko and have her help me come up with a solution. Anyone could see that Kudou wasn’t in her right mind, and I knew for a fact that as long as I explained myself clearly, Hatoko would understand.

Just as I was thinking that I’d have to slip free of Kudou’s grasp and talk with Hatoko one-on-one, however, a chill shot down my spine. The chill that I’d felt from Kudou earlier, to be clear, was one of awkward secondhand shame. This, on the other hand, was the sort of chill that meant I was in trouble. In fact, my survival instincts were screaming that my life was in imminent danger.

I looked over reflexively...and my gaze met Hatoko’s. There was something new in her eyes—a darkness so deep and vast, it was downright terrifying. It was an abyss so dark, it felt like it could draw my soul in and consume it whole if I made the mistake of peering in too deeply.

“H-Hatoko...?”

“Juu... Huh? What’s wrong? Hey. Why are you acting like you’re scared of me? Why? Hey, Juu? Why? That’s so weird. Why would seeing me scare you? It’s weird. You know it’s weird, right? Are you scared because you think I’m going to get mad at you? Does that mean you think you’ve done something wrong? It does, right? Right? By the way, weren’t you trying to say something a second ago? You said, ‘It’s not what you think,’ didn’t you? What did that mean? What were you talking about? I won’t understand if you don’t explain yourself, you know? It’s not what I think? What’s not what I think? Oh, you know, I just noticed that there’s someone behind you. That’s right. I only just noticed. I didn’t see them at all until just a second ago. Didn’t notice even a little bit. I only saw you, and had no idea anyone was there. Hey, what are you doing? What is this? What’s going on? Juu, why’s a girl hugging you from behind? Hey, Juu, why? Why? Why? Is she what I have the wrong idea about? What about her? It sounded like you were making an excuse—that means you feel guilty toward me about something you’re doing, doesn’t it? Are you doing something you can’t bring yourself to tell me about? Would you be in trouble if I found out about it? Hey, Juu, tell me. If you have something to say, then say it. Explain it in a way that I can understand. Or, actually... Sorry. You don’t have to tell me after all. You don’t have to tell me anything anymore. I get it. I’m being weird, right? It’s annoying to have your childhood friend pry into your private life like this. We’re just childhood friends, after all. It’s not like we’re dating or married—we just happen to hang out because we live near each other and get along well. Sure, we’ve been together since elementary school, but that doesn’t mean we can meddle in each other’s lives all the time, right? Who even knows if we’ll still be together a few years from now? Maybe we’ll end up going to different colleges, drift farther and farther away from each other, get jobs at totally different companies in totally different industries, and end up so distant from each other that I’ll only learn that you’re getting married when I get an invitation to your wedding ceremony. I’m sorry, Juu. I’ve probably said too much, haven’t I? But please understand, okay? I want you to understand how I feel. I don’t care if anyone else understands me, but I at least want you to, Juu. I’m only saying all these things because you’re special. You’re important to me, Juu. That’s why I can’t help but run my mouth to you. I know that I’m doing it, but I just can’t help myself. This is all about you, so how could I? I just can’t help myself when I end up thinking about you. Hey, Juu. Let me ask again—what are you doing? Why’s that girl hugging you from behind? Why does it look like the two of you are so close? Oh. Don’t misunderstand me, okay? I’m not jealous, or anything. I wasn’t thinking that I wanted to hug you like that at all. That wouldn’t be nearly enough to satisfy me, after all. I wouldn’t want a half-hearted hug like the ones that normal couples give. I’d want to give you a real, full-body hug from behind, so close that I could feel your clavicle, and your hips, and your shoulders... Ah, no, that’s not what I meant to say. I’m sorry, that was a really weird tangent. Forget about it. Forget about it, okay? Please. Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. Hey, Juu? You don’t have to worry—I understand, okay? You don’t actually like this, do you? She hugged you from behind out of nowhere and you’re upset about it, right? You must be. I understand. Of course I understand—it’s you, after all. I’m your childhood friend, so it’d be weird if I didn’t understand. You wouldn’t be happy about a girl pressing herself up against you like that, would you, Juu? You’d just be confused and uncomfortable, right? You would, right? There’s no way you’d enjoy it, would you? You’re not just acting uncomfortable but secretly celebrating inside, right? You’re not, right? That’s definitely not what the Juu I know would do. If you were, though...what would I even do? If you really were turning into the sort of perv who would enjoy something like this, then as your childhood friend, I’d have to stage an intervention. I’d have to do something to help you, for sure. That’s right—I’d have to turn you back to normal. Ah... I’m sorry. This has been a really one-sided conversation, hasn’t it? Hey, Juu. If you have something to say, then you can go ahead and say it, okay? We’re childhood friends, after all. We can tell each other anything without holding back. They wouldn’t call us childhood friends if that weren’t true, would they? So come on, Juu. Tell me everything you have to say. If you want to tell me something, then just go ahead and do it. Hey, Juu. Come on, Juu. Juu. Juu. Juu? Hey, Juu? Juu, are you listening? Juu. Juu. Juu? Can you hear me, Juu? Hey, Juu. Come on, Juu? Juu? Juu. Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu, Juu—”

Holy crap, did she seriously just do that?! She must’ve been talking for at least three print pages there! That was the sort of ultra-length line that actually kills voice actors—the sort of line that gets a standing ovation from the whole studio if the actor manages the whole thing in one take! Her dialogue was so word-heavy that you have to imagine her voice actor would end up thinking “I can’t believe I’m getting paid the same rate as everyone else even after all that effort...” once they’re finished recording it! It definitely feels like we’ve been here before! And...actually, wait. Huh?

“H-Hatoko...? That is you, right?” I asked, my voice beginning to tremble. Not just my voice, actually—my whole body was starting to shiver. It was like a deep and penetrating chill had been cast over my soul, setting my teeth chattering. A clattering percussion of shivers was playing throughout my whole body, from my head to my toes.

“Huh? What are you talking about, Juu? Of course it’s me! Who else would I be?” Hatoko asked with a beaming smile. “I’m the same Hatoko who’s been by your side allll the way since kindergarten, and the same Hatoko who’ll be with you allll the way from now on till forever!”

Her smile really was as bright, tender, and cheerful as could be...but her eyes were another story. Nothing about how they looked said “smile” to me at all. No, her eyes were host to a crazed, maddening darkness. Just looking into them felt like it had shaved a solid three years or so off my life span. No evil eye, magic eye, or any other sort of eye-based power I’d heard of had ever scared me quite the way her eyes did in that moment.

Oh. Oh, god. Kudou’s not the only one who’s gone crazy.

If I had to describe the rest of the trip to school in a word, the only one that could really do it justice is “chaos.” Love-Drunk Kudou and Darkside Hatoko entered a war to end all wars, and my pockets were the territory they were feuding over. I’d...rather not get into the details, honestly. Like, I really don’t want to talk about it.

When all was settled and done, the two of them agreed to an even split—in other words, Kudou and Hatoko were each allowed to occupy one of my pockets. Hatoko wound up on my right side, and Kudou on my left. That left me walking to school holding hands with two girls at once, which was the sort of situation a lot of people would find enviable as could be, but I felt more like I was walking on coals than anything else. In fact, I felt like a dead man walking. Sure, their territorial dispute seemed settled for the time being, but only because they’d moved from direct hostilities to a brutal and extended cold war.

“Excuse me, Kushikawa—I know you’re jealous of me, but isn’t copying my hand-holding crossing a line? Shouldn’t this sort of thing be first come, first served?”

“Juu, Juu, Juu! Hee hee hee! Your hands really are warm, you know?”

“Hey! Are you listening to me, Kushikawa?”

“Hey, Juu—did you just hear a girl’s voice, or was it just me? That’s weird, though. We’re the only ones around, so I must have been hearing things! Yup. We’re the only people here, for sure! We walk to school like this every morning, after all. Just the two of us!”

“Oh? So you’re ignoring me? If that’s how you’re going to play, then I’ll just have to fight dirty too...”

“Hey, Juu—don’t you think walking with both hands in your pockets is kind of dangerous? You should probably take your other hand out, just to be safe! And I mean really whip it out—hard and fast enough that you’d knock someone right over, if they were standing next to you!”

“Hey, ow! I said ow! Would you please stop squeezing my hands so hard, you two?!” I wailed. The strength of their grasps had been increasing in direct proportion to the strength of the hostility they were projecting toward each other. Thankfully, my screaming did convince them both to loosen their grips right away. They were both nice people at heart, after all. They were nice, and I knew it...but, still...

“Ah, I’m so sorry, darling! How could I possibly make this dire of a mistake?! Don’t worry—I’ll rub it better right away! A nice massage should help! Here, see? Pain, pain, fly away!”

“I-I’m sorry, Juu! I’m so sorry, honestly... If it leaves any lasting pain, I promise I’ll stand in for your right arm for as long as I have to! I’ll do it for the rest of my life, even! Anything you need, just say the word!”

On one hand, I had a girl treating me like I was a little kid, and on the other, I had a girl who’d jumped directly to the most uncomfortably heavy place imaginable. They were both running completely out of control.

“Hey, umm...we’re nearly at school, so maybe the two of you should, y’know, let go...? Ahh, y’know what? Forget about it. Full steam ahead!” I said, abandoning my attempt to make them give me some space before it had really even started. I’d caved in an instant under the physical and psychological pressure coming at me from both sides.

Nothing I could possibly say was going to extract me from this situation, apparently, so I gave up on talking my way out entirely and resigned myself to walking up to school with a girl on either side of me. As we approached the school gates, however, my attention was seized by something else.

A single individual stood out from the crowd. He was the one outlier—the one solitary figure who cut a sharp contrast with the students around them. He stood with his back to the school’s gate, leaning up against it with his arms crossed. His silver hair glimmered brightly in the early morning sunlight, his eyes were concealed by a pair of round sunglasses, and his jet-black coat seemed to symbolize the profound weight of his sins. He was practically the physical embodiment of blasphemous corruption, and the moment I saw him, a single name sprang instantly to mind.

“K-Kiryuu Hel—” ...dkaiser Luci-First would have been the next words out of my mouth, if it weren’t for me noticing something that made me cut myself off mid name and cock my head in confusion.

For a single wonderful instant, I’d thought that the fated moment had finally arrived. I’d thought that the reunion I’d been waiting for was here, and that his and my paths had finally come together as one. For just a split second, my head had filled with glorious fantasies about what would become of the world now that we had been brought together...

“H-Huh?”

...but when I looked a little harder at the figure before the school gate, a sense that something was just off about him smacked all those fantasies into the dirt. He was...small. Just overall much too small, in every sense. Kiryuu was a strikingly tall, slim, and handsome man, whereas the silver-haired, black-coated figure by the gate was actually a little shorter than me. He looked more dainty than slim, and although the bulky scarf wrapped around his neck made it a little hard to tell, I was starting to think he might actually be a she...

“Oh!” I exclaimed as a realization struck me.

That’s right! I had completely forgotten—or, rather, it hadn’t been on my mind to begin with. It’d happened a few months back, on the day I’d gone to the summer festival. As fireworks had bloomed in the sky above, I’d reunited with a girl who’d loomed large in my memories for many a year. I’d first met her when I was in the eighth grade, and upon encountering her for the second time, I’d learned that the version of her I’d first come into contact with had been lost for all eternity. Never again would the girl I’d met that day set forth into town clad in the same garments she’d been wearing when I’d first laid eyes on her...or so I’d thought.

“Kye ki ki!”

The silver-haired, black-coated girl let out a forced, unnatural laugh, carefully pronouncing its every oddly specific syllable. In many ways, it was quite similar to my own signature “mwa ha ha.” She stepped forward, arms still crossed, and walked right in front of me before looking me in the eye. “I shall confess, I did not imagine I would cross paths with you in this time and place. It seems the two of us are bonded by the fates themselves, Guiltia Sin Jurai!”

There it was—the classic “shall,” a staple of her chuuni-era vocabulary. It was, however, paired with something she hadn’t even known back during those days: my true name. In other words, we weren’t dealing with an irregularity in spacetime or with three years’ worth of her memories having been erased. She remembered everything—it was just her personality that had regressed to her chuuni phase.

“T-Tomo—”

“Cease! You’d do well to not speak that name aloud...assuming, that is, you value your life,” she spat with a glare that probably would’ve been intimidating if it weren’t for the fact that, between her sunglasses being kinda big and her face being on the smaller side of things, she looked more like one of those stock caricatures of shady Chinese salesmen you see in manga sometimes than anything else. “Kye ki ki! I’m most unamused when the children of man deign to flaunt taboo and speak my name...but I suppose lacking a name of any sort is inconvenient in its own right. Very well! Henceforth, you shall call me by a new name—a name, it seems, the denizens of this realm have seen fit to grant me by their own initiative,” she said.

Now that was an outrageous preamble for a self-introduction if I’ve ever heard one! And wait, why’s she making it sound like she’s only vaguely aware of her own title?

“You may call me the Witch of Antinomy Who Smirks in the Face of Twilight: Endless Paradox!”

It was a title that I’d grown quite familiar with, and quite fond of to boot...but this was the first time that I’d ever seen her stand tall and proud and declare it to the world, as if it really was a title that she’d laid claim to herself.

I was struck dumb by what I’d just witnessed, and I froze on the spot. The girl before me was nothing less than the second coming of the God of Chuunibyou—or rather, nothing less than Kanzaki Tomoyo, whose chuunibyou had somehow begun a catastrophic relapse.

There’s a saying in Japanese that goes “What happens twice will happen thrice.” Meanwhile, people also say that “the third time’s the charm.” I bring this up because, like... Okay, so this is probably a really awkward turn of phrase to use in the immediate aftermath of a certain someone’s loud and proud declaration of a certain title she’d thought up for herself, but I have to say it anyway: those two sayings were, in my mind, yet another example of an endless paradox.

Does something that happens twice inevitably happen a third time? Or is the third time the charm—the time that’s sure to break the established trend? It was an eternal debate, fought upon a battlefield in a far higher realm of reality than the one the mushroom-versus-bamboo-shoot feud occupied. Countless individuals throughout the ages had surely made heated arguments in favor of both sides.

Personally? I was a firm member of team “What happens twice will happen thrice.” After all, it just makes sense, doesn’t it? I think that anyone who’s watched a phenomenon occur two times in a row would jump to the immediate and logical conclusion that it would probably happen a third time as well. The fields of probability and statistics, I was certain, would both back me up on that.

Saying “the third time’s the charm,” on the other hand, was, well...just pure wishful thinking, honestly. That, and a sure sign of a poor loser. After all, people who say “third time’s the charm” are almost universally people who’d just failed to do something twice in a row. It usually comes across as them making excuses for their screwups. I’ve heard people claim that the actual intended meaning of the phrase is that the results you get on your first or second attempt could just be flukes, and it takes three attempts to know that you’re really seeing the truth of the matter. It definitely feels like the “you’ll get the results you want on attempt number three” interpretation is dominant in this day and age, but if that theory’s true, then “the charm” would have originally referred to “the accurate results” rather than “the results you want,” I guess.

Anyway, this is just one of those things that I tended to end up pondering when I was bored in class. All I’m really trying to say here is that I had never been fond of the baselessly optimistic “third time’s the charm” mentality...but now, all of a sudden, I found myself mortified by how proud I’d been of all the justifications I’d come up with over the years to justify my viewpoint. I was doing some serious soul-searching. I now understood very well how all those people throughout history had felt when, having faced thoroughly undesirable results twice in a row, they’d muttered the phrase “third time’s the charm” with the air of a devotee saying a prayer to their chosen deity.

I now saw the appeal of the phrase’s modern interpretation. When faced with two failures, some part of you ends up thinking “next time for sure” whether you like it or not. You find yourself desperately praying that the third attempt won’t produce the same results.

Boiling all of this down to the point that I’m really trying to make here, meeting three acquaintances who had apparently lost their minds in the time between now and yesterday in a row was seriously straining my psyche. Kudou had shifted into Love-Drunk Mode, Hatoko had gone full yandere, and now Tomoyo had regressed to her chuuni days. The moment I’d seen her getup and realized that something might be wrong with her too, I’d started mentally grasping at the “third time’s the charm” straw, only to find myself in a “what happens twice” scenario instead, as you can see.

Three of my friends had gone nuts in sequence. I’d been caught in a Triangle Attack—I’d been struck by a Jet Stream Attack. Difficult though it was to swallow, I had no choice but to accept that this madness was, in fact, actually happening to me. Two of them could’ve maybe been explained away, but once we’d reached the three mark, I just had to take it for what it was. Something was happening—something that I couldn’t even begin to identify, but that was having a clear and pronounced effect upon the world around me.

“So, uhh—hey, Kudou, Hatoko, Tomoyo? Can you guys hear me out for just a minute?” I said the moment the four of us had passed through the school’s front gate, taking great care to address my bizarro-mode friends as neutrally as possible. “This might seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but I’d like to ask you all some questions.”

My mind was playing a symphony of chaos and confusion, but I somehow managed to muster up the brainpower to make an effort to confirm their identities, for a start. I had to consider the possibility that they were experiencing some weird form of amnesia, or they were actually imposters disguised as my friends, or they’d had their minds controlled or personalities replaced by someone with a power that let them do that sort of thing. I knew those were absurd scenarios to take into serious consideration, but I had a feeling that if I ever wanted to make sense of this situation, I’d have to take it slowly and run through each and every possible explanation, no matter how unlikely they seemed.

I decided to start with Kudou. “So, M-Mirei... Can I ask you something first?”

“Sure! Go right ahead, darling. I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”

“Would you tell me something you like, to start?”

“My darling! ♥”

“...My bad,” I said. I just felt the need to apologize, though I couldn’t explain why. I had absolutely no clue what to call whatever the emotion I was feeling was. “O-Okay, then...what’s your favorite food?”

“Apple pie.”

“Oh, yeah, those are great. How about the opposite, then? Least favorite food?”

“Pickled plums. I’ve never been able to stand how sour they are.”

I nodded with understanding as, gradually, the fact that I’d already screwed up sank in. I, uh...didn’t actually know what foods Kudou liked or disliked to begin with. In fact, I didn’t know her well enough on a personal level to quickly determine whether or not I was talking with the real her, period. I briefly considered pulling a YuYu Hakusho and asking about her measurements, but I had a feeling that I couldn’t pull off the whole pervy-but-still-cool shtick that Urameshi Yusuke had going, so I decided against it.

“Okay...how about drinks you don’t like?” I asked, going with the single line of questioning where I did actually have something to work with.

“Black coffee. I told you that yesterday,” said Kudou, as expected.

Clearly, she hadn’t been kidding about not liking her coffee black—but, more so than that, the word “yesterday” struck me as noteworthy. That meant that she did, in fact, remember everything that had happened the day before, and by extension, she was the same girl I’d spoken with then. She hadn’t been replaced by an impersonator, and she hadn’t swapped bodies with someone like you see in anime sometimes. This was definitely the real, genuine Kudou, with the sole exception of her altered personality.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re next, Hatoko.”

“Okay! Go ahead! You can ask me anything! There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you, Juu!” Hatoko happily replied.

“Here goes, then: what are you into? And I mean, like, hobbies and stuff, not people.”

“I think you already know this, but I like comedy, for one thing!”

“Yup, figures. I knew that for sure. Okay, then—what sort of comedy are you into?”

“Acts that stick to the classics and don’t rock the boat.”

“And what sort of comedy do you not like?”

“Acts that try to get away with not having any real punch lines by calling themselves ‘surreal humor.’ You see that a lot these days in sketches and comedy groups that are trying to make themselves seem more modern.”

Yup! That’s Hatoko, all right! Literally no doubt about it! No one else would be that weirdly judgmental about comedy exclusively!

You’d think she was a leading figure in the industry listening to how she talked about it. On the one hand, she’d moan and groan about how there were way fewer comedy shows on TV recently, but on the other hand, she’d say stuff like “It feels like all it takes is an amateur being even just a little funny these days for everyone to start raving about them! I mean, so many models and actors—you know, normal people—have been showing up in variety shows lately. Maybe it’s because people lower the bar for what they consider funny when they know they’re not watching a professional perform? I like professional, polished comedy, myself, so I’m not really a fan of people who don’t put in that sort of time and effort getting all the screen time on those programs... But I guess that’s just a sign of the times, isn’t it?” She’d get so weirdly big-picture about it all that I always had to restrain myself from asking her just who the heck she thought she was vis-à-vis the world of comedy.

In any case, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that the obnoxiously nitpicky comedy fan before me was my childhood friend. And, with Hatoko’s identity confirmed, I only had one person left to verify.

“Kye ki ki! Fortune favors you, child of man. I find myself in the highest of spirits today, so I will allow you to ask me a single question—but no more!”

I had to pause for a moment to collect myself.

Hmm. How to describe what I’m feeling right now? Considering the sort of person I was, you’d think I would’ve been super hyped up about Tomoyo returning to her chuuni era...but for some reason, I just wasn’t really into it. Most likely, our first contact—the time we’d met while I was in the eighth grade—had left too strong of an impression on me. Seeing her in her silver wig, round sunglasses, and black coat felt like it was drawing me right back to that moment in time—that being a moment in time where I’d abandoned my own chuuni ways. Ironically, it seemed that the presence of the God of Chuunibyou rendered me into nothing more than your everyday mortal.

“Okay, here’s my question... Or, actually I guess it’s more of a comment? Now that I look at you...man, your whole getup’s just a blatant rip-off of Kiryuu’s style, isn’t it?”

“I-It’s not a rip-off! It’s totally original! My own design! Hajime basically ripped me off, actually!” Tomoyo spluttered, displaying one of the God of Chuunibyou’s distinctive characteristics: a tendency to revert to her normal self whenever she was thrown off-balance. “It’s not a rip-off, honestly... It’s... Ah, right! Kye ki ki—this holy garb has been passed down in my line for generations! I inherited it from my kinsman!”

“Hmm. Okay, so you borrowed it from him. On that note...didn’t you end up getting your whole outfit pretty dirty back then? I remember you falling over, like, a bunch of times. How’d that work out?” I asked. My mind drifted back to the winter’s day I’d met her in the park.

A dark shadow suddenly descended over Tomoyo’s face. “He got really mad,” she said in a sulky, spiteful tone that made it seem like she was on the verge of tears. “I mean, super pissed. Not even in a chuuni way—he just got, like, normal mad.”

“N-Normal mad, huh?”

“And when Hajime gets normal mad...it’s really scary...”

I tried to envision Kiryuu just plain flipping his lid. Oof, yikes. Yeah, I bet that would be freaky.

“Just remembering it is a serious drag,” said Tomoyo with a scowl. “Hmph! Why does he have to be so petty, anyway? All I did was borrow a few of his things without asking! He didn’t have to get that mad about it!”

“So you didn’t even have permission...?” She borrowed his clothes without asking, then rolled around in the dirt with them on? No wonder he flipped out!

That, at least, had brought my identity check to a close. My conclusion: it was extremely likely that all three of them were, in fact, the genuine articles. Their personalities had shifted dramatically on a surface level, but their memories and core traits were all the same as ever. I believed, from the bottom of my heart, that they were still fundamentally themselves. They seemed to have changed at a glance, but their essences remained as they’d always been.

Ideally, I would’ve spent way more time talking with them, but our first period was rapidly approaching. We had to cut our conversation off there and make our way to our classrooms. Love-Drunk Kudou seemed really reluctant to say goodbye, but even in her addled state, her usual dedication to her responsibilities remained as firm as ever, and she plodded her way toward the third-years’ classrooms. Tomoyo and Hatoko headed to year two, class three’s room, while I headed to my own homeroom—class one.

I let out a heavy, heavy sigh as I sat down at my desk. I’d been through one shocking revelation after another starting from the moment I’d left my house, leaving me in a state of mental exhaustion. I was still so confused and bewildered I couldn’t even begin to coax my train of thought back onto its rails, and even if I had been able to manage that, I wouldn’t have known what to think about in the first place. I was still struggling to comprehend the situation on a basic level, which was a pretty nasty roadblock in the way of figuring out how to cope with it. Just what the hell was happening to the people around me...?

“What’s wrong, Andou?”

As I sank into thought, a voice rang out from the seat beside me. It was a familiar voice—slightly garbled in a mumbly but nevertheless cute sort of way. It was a voice that soothed my troubled heart in an instant.

“You were frowning.”

“Ah... Yeah, I was just thinking about something, that’s all,” I replied.

“About today’s lunch?”

“I definitely wouldn’t brood this much over something like that, trust me.”

“Oh. Then, about how to inspire world peace?”

“Veering to some wild extremes, aren’t we?! It’s definitely not my job to brood about problems on that scale!”

“That’s no good, Andou.”

“Huh?”

“If everyone thinks that war and peace have nothing to do with them, then nothing will ever be resolved. The world will never get better. If everyone stops to really think about it, though, then maybe one day we’ll all make world peace happen.”

“Uh... Right,” I said. I had a feeling that she didn’t really have any right to be scolding me like that, but I agreed with her anyway for lack of any better options. She had a way of pulling out reasonable arguments at the weirdest of times, and I never knew how to cope with it. “Honestly, Chifuyu, sometimes I think I’m just no match for— Wait, Chifuyu?!”

I did a double take halfway through my sentence. The time was one minute before homeroom, and the place was class 2-1’s room at Senkou High. Why would Chifuyu be here, especially now?

“Huh? That’s me,” said the rather tired-looking girl in the seat beside me.

Her sleepy eyes and petite mouth bore distinct traces of how she’d looked in elementary school, but on the whole, her face looked distinctly adultlike. It was hard to tell how tall she was since she was sitting down, but I could estimate she was of average height for a high school girl. Speaking of high school girls, she was wearing one of our school’s standard-issue uniforms. Finally—unavoidably—my eyes were drawn to her chest. The space that was normally occupied by a sheer cliffside—a mousepad’s worth of padding, at most—now hosted a pair of distinct hills that boldly strained the confines of her uniform’s jacket.

“Oh, that’s right. Show me your English homework later, okay, Andou? I didn’t do it since I was planning on copying yours,” Chifuyu said with a perfectly casual air, acting like I was and had always been her classmate. Apparently, being in the same class did basically nothing to change the attitude she usually took with me.

Oh god. How could this be? Is this a miracle worthy of tears of joy, or a tragedy worthy of tears of blood?

Chifuyu...had become a high schooler. Her elementary school days, apparently, had been numbered.

Something’s wrong. Something’s very, very, very, very wrong. Something is very, verifiably, veritably wrong!

I could, under extreme duress, more or less accept everything that had happened up through my encounter with Tomoyo. She, Kudou, and Hatoko had all gone through dramatic personality alterations, but that was all there’d been to it. In the worst case, we could say something along the lines of “They all just ate something bad last night and went a little crazy” and have a workable explanation, albeit only just.

Chifuyu, however, was different. Very different. An elementary schooler had become a high schooler overnight. She wasn’t here to shadow a high schooler, and she hadn’t skipped several grades. She had actually grown and aged to fit the part of the high school girl she apparently now was, and she had become my classmate.

To make matters even stranger, nobody seemed to be questioning this bizarre development. The rest of my classmates didn’t say a word, and not even Miss Satomi called out Chifuyu’s presence once she’d arrived for homeroom. It was almost as if Chifuyu was supposed to be there. Looking back with that fact in mind, it struck me that Kudou, Hatoko, and Tomoyo hadn’t acknowledged each other’s transformations either. Tomoyo’s outfit alone was an obvious enough change that you’d think it would’ve been worthy of note, but nobody had so much as mentioned it. They’d almost acted like Tomoyo went to school dressed like that every day.

Something was wrong, no two ways about it, and the level of the irregularity had just jumped massively from a personal scale to a global one. We weren’t just dealing with altered personalities and memories—actual, physical reality had been changed. I had no choice but to accept that. It was the natural conclusion to draw. The world of today differed in a clear and distinct manner from the world of yesterday—the transformations of the people in my life served as decisive proof that my world had, in fact, gone totally nuts.

But then, another possibility struck me out of the blue: maybe I was the one who was off his rocker. Maybe they’d always been that way—Kudou had always been love-drunk, Hatoko had always been a yandere, Tomoyo had always had chuunibyou, and Chifuyu had always been my classmate. In other words, maybe these were their true forms, and my memories of them were, in fact, nothing more than delusions.

Take Chifuyu, for instance. Maybe she’d been my classmate from the start, but I’d fabricated memories of an elementary-school-aged version of her out of a desperate desire for her to have been that way, for whatever reason, then confused those delusions with reality in the long term. I...really didn’t want to think that was the case, frankly.

Or another possibility: maybe I’d somehow found my way into a parallel world. My soul might have been spontaneously swapped with some other Andou Jurai who’d made different choices than I had over the course of his life. If that were true, then the parallel me would probably be saying “Wh-Why is Chifuyu an elementary schooler?!” with a look of bug-eyed horror on his face right about now.

All sorts of explanations for my situation crossed my mind, one after another, all sharing a single trait: they were laughably absurd. Unfortunately, however, I’d fallen into such an intense state of paranoia that I couldn’t let myself dismiss even the most outlandish of theories. I couldn’t trust my own perspective, and I was rapidly losing faith in the credibility of my own memories. Had the world gone mad, or had I gone mad?

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright. I’d spent the first two classes of the day spacing out in a trancelike stupor, but the instant second period ended and our between-class break began, I bolted out of the classroom like a bat out of hell. I knew exactly where I was going, and I made a beeline for that destination at full speed.

Things had been off ever since this morning. My friends were different now. It didn’t just feel like their personalities and memories had been altered—it was more like...I don’t know...like their whole character profiles had been rewritten. Their backgrounds, personalities, ages, and social standings were different from those I was used to, some in ways more subtle than others.

That said, it wasn’t like everyone around me had gone crazy. My sister had seemed the same as ever when she’d woken me up earlier that morning, and Chifuyu aside, my classmates and homeroom teacher, Miss Satomi, had all seemed unaltered as well. There was, in short, one very simple and straightforward trait that connected everyone who had been impacted: they were all in possession of supernatural powers.

Kudou, Hatoko, Tomoyo, and Chifuyu—everyone who I’d currently confirmed to have been affected by this phenomenon—were girls with supernatural powers in my social circle. That understanding is what led me to sprint my way toward the third-years’ floor. There was still one superpowered individual I knew who I’d had yet to see that day: Takanashi Sayumi. What was going on with her at the moment? How had her personality traits been altered? I had to check, as soon as possible.

“Ah!” I exclaimed as, halfway down the stairs to the third-years’ floor, I very nearly ran straight into a student who was on her way up the very same staircase. It was Sayumi herself—we’d crossed paths on the landing.

“Andou... I’m glad I found you,” said Sayumi. “I was just on my way to your classroom, in fact.”

I didn’t reply—not immediately, anyway. Clearly, each of us had been searching for the other. By all rights, it was a stroke of luck that we’d bumped into each other so easily, but for the time being, I kept my mouth shut and withdrew to a safe distance on reflex. I was on full alert, for one simple reason: I could tell in an instant that something was different about her. I’m not talking about her personality. There was a very visible, external sort of disparity with her usual self.

Glasses. Sayumi was wearing glasses. She’d become a glasses character! If that wasn’t a massive shift in her traits, then I didn’t know what would be! And...okay, maybe it does look like I was making a mountain out of an especially unimpressive molehill, but I’d lost faith in the people around me so thoroughly that even that petty of a change was enough to put me in a state of red alert.

“S-Sayumi...?” I cautiously, fearfully probed.

“Andou,” Sayumi replied with a look of trepidation. “Just what on earth is going on? When Kudou arrived at our classroom this morning, she was acting slightly...no, extremely strange. It was almost like she’d gone back to how she’d behaved when she thought the two of you were dating...”

Kudou was acting strangely—and Sayumi had realized it. She’d recognized the change in our surroundings for what it was. She was aware of the storm of abnormalities that had overtaken our world. That proved two things to me: she was in her right mind, and it was the world that had gone crazy, not me.