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

Epilogue

I awoke to find myself in the club room...though perhaps “awoke” isn’t the appropriate wording, considering I hadn’t been asleep. Rather, the next thing I knew, I was present in a world in which I had already been in the club room. That may not be the clearest description, but it’s the best way I can articulate the sensation. In any case, Tomoyo, Hatoko, Chifuyu, and Kudou were all present with me.

“Uh. H-Huh? What befell— I mean, how’d I get here?”

“Hmm? That’s so weird. What am I doing in the club room?”

“The last thing I remember, I was chasing my darling outside, and...huh? Nooo, no no no no! Wh-Why did I just call him darling?! I would never say something that disgustingly sappy about anyone! Not once, not ever!”

“...Huh? My boobs are gone.”

Some aftereffects clearly remained, but on the whole, the other four seemed to have returned to their usual selves. I raised a hand to my own face and found that I was no longer wearing glasses.

“We’re back, then,” I said.

We had returned from the altered world to our own. As to how everything had gone back to normal, I couldn’t even begin to guess. The world we’d been in until moments before had been created by Route of Origin, so I had assumed that I would have some sort of sense of awareness of it when it was about to be dispelled, but I hadn’t—not in the least. It had simply ended, without warning. It was like how it felt to be playing a video game only for someone to pull the console’s plug.

What on earth...no, who on earth did this? Just whose voice was it that I heard at the end of it all?

“Uhh, so, wait— What the hell’s going on? Seriously, what just happened? I thought we were all outside searching for Andou just a second ago?”

“But wait, Tomoyo. Why were we searching for Juu in the first place?”

“Because... I don’t know. But I think, uh... Ah, right! While we were looking for him, some weirdo with a baseball cap showed up at school, right? And it was someone you knew, right, Kudou?”

“I guess you could say that, but it’s not like I know him particularly well. I’ve only actually met Hinoemata once. But...something seemed a little off when I saw him earlier. I tried talking to him, and he ignored me entirely.”

“My boobs...”

The four of them still seemed quite confused. The name Hinoemata, meanwhile, gave me pause. It wasn’t a name I was familiar with, but if he’d intruded into the school grounds, then perhaps he was the source of the voice I’d heard...?

Just then, I sat up with a start. I’d just remembered something very important—more important than anything. I frantically glanced around the room...but he wasn’t there. The boy who’d been with me just moments before was nowhere to be seen.

“...Andou?”

☆

The next thing I knew, I had no clue where I was or how I’d gotten there.

The sun was setting in the sky, and I was seated on a patch of short, soft grass, with a river running just a little ways to my side. That settled the where, partially, but how I’d ended up seated by a riverbed was still in question.

The last thing I remembered was Sayumi hugging me, then the world around us suddenly beginning to fall to pieces. I hadn’t known how or why, but the world had seemed to be going back to the way it used to be—then, suddenly, I’d been whisked from my school to a place I’d never been before. It’d been one jaw-dropping plot twist after another, and I was getting a little sick of it.

Though, then again...the shock I felt when I saw the person who was standing before me made all the twists that had come before look downright petty in comparison.

“Ooh, now that’s a nasty glare! Cut it out, please. For what it’s worth, the way I see it, you actually owe me one for this. You were in trouble, and I helped you out of it, so where’s this aggression coming from? Kinda hurts, you know?” the teenager before me said in a rather aloof tone, their baseball cap pulled low enough to conceal their eyes. Their build was slender, but the jacket and jeans they were wearing gave them an extremely boyish look on the whole. They’d also freely introduced themself moments before—as Hinoemata.

“What do you mean, you helped me?” I asked.

“It’s simple,” said Hinoemata. “I forced my way into the world Takanashi’s power created, and I negated it wholesale. Ruining that sort of thing is pretty much my power’s bread and butter.”

“Your power, huh...?”

My visitor had a supernatural power, then, no question about it—and they knew about our powers, to boot. Discounting Kudou, that made them the very first superpowered individual we’d encountered outside of the literary club.

“Hinoemata, you said...? That makes you the person Kudou made friends with online, doesn’t it?” I asked. “So, then...does that mean you had something to do with her awakening to her power?”

“Bingo. I’m impressed you put that together.”

“The timeline matched up, that’s all.”

The general span of time when Kudou had awakened to her power and the span of time when she’d befriended someone who called themself Hinoemata more or less overlapped. Knowing that Hinoemata had a supernatural power made it very easy to suspect there was a deeper connection between the two events.

“Were you the one who gave us our powers too?” I asked.

“No,” said Hinoemata, “I had nothing to do with yours. That was someone else’s fault.”

Someone else. In other words, our powers really hadn’t come about as a natural or supernatural phenomenon—someone had caused us to awaken to them.

“Okay, but really...why the intense stare? Your eyes are looking a little bloodshot over there,” said Hinoemata, sounding rather confused.

I hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice I was doing it, but even after they’d pointed it out, not glaring was sorta beyond me. I was dealing with multiple overlapping layers of shock, bewilderment, and indignation that made not staring an impossibility.

Honestly? I just couldn’t help myself. It was sickening, after all. I could hardly stand to listen to the way the person before me was speaking.

“How long are you planning on talking so normally?” I asked.

“Ha ha ha... Guess that got you chafed, huh?” said Hinoemata, chuckling at me as they removed their baseball cap, finally looking me in the eye. “Ha ha ha! Ahhh, my slip, okay? Just went on prattling the way I’ve been used to. Been in boy mode more often than not, latewise. Wasn’t on the noggin to swap back for you.”

That distinctive accent, so tonally flat and peculiar in word choice. Those familiar features, once hidden beneath the cap but now clear to see. The moment our eyes met, I broke out in a cold sweat, and a piercing pain shot through my stomach. I couldn’t look away, though—no, I met her gaze with a glare.

“Tamaki...!”

“Yup. Been a tick, Jurai,” Tamaki said with a broad smile. It was the same smile she’d shown me when we’d bumped into each other before summer vacation—the same smile she’d worn so often in the eighth grade—and that’s exactly why it filled me with such an indescribable sense of anxiety.

Futaba Tamaki—or, no, not “Futaba” anymore, most likely. She’d come to this town to stay with her grandparents on account of her parents’ divorce. That problem was resolved by now—well, actually, I didn’t really have any grounds to say that for sure? But the point is that I knew her parents’ divorce had been set in stone and she’d gone back to live with her mother again. That’s why she’d left town. Hinoemata, then, was probably her mother’s maiden name.

“So, Jurai, I ambled on by today to spend a spell with you,” said Tamaki.

She still had a smile on her face...but there was an intense animosity deep within her gaze now, flickering in and out of sight. It was like something was broken in her—like a line within her had been crossed—and I could tell in an instant that it was dangerous.

“I’m the Seventh Wing of Fallen Black: Lost Regalia, aka Hinoemata Tamaki,” she said, declaring her name and title in grand fashion. And what a title it was too, so exceptionally cool that I couldn’t imagine Tamaki herself had come up with it.

“All right, Jurai, let’s get it going. It’s time for one of those supernatural battles you love so much.”

And thus, I departed from the world of the everyday into an extraordinary new reality of supernatural battles—for real. It was a world I’d never so much as touched before, and I was being dragged into it by a girl who I’d thought would remain forever sealed within the depths of my memories.

The end of the beginning had, at long last...begun.