Chapter 1: Sagamicizm of the One-Ten-Three
“...AAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!”
I let out a deathly scream—a wail of purest, irrepressible despondency. The time: after school. The place: my own home, in my own room. I simply lay there on my bed, paying no regard to how much I was annoying my neighbors as I shrieked and lamented, a waterfall of tears pouring down my cheeks.
Despair: the complete loss of all hope. There couldn’t have been a better word to sum up my current state of mind. A wish far greater than any other had been severed—a truly once-in-a-millennium stroke of luck the likes of which I would never see again had been wasted—and now I was tormented by regret and hopelessness that defied description.
“I-It’s back!” I choked out between heaving sobs. “It’s baaack...”
It was like a foreign body situation—or rather, a foreign member situation. I’d even go so far as to call it a sense of defilement. The almost nostalgic presence between my legs—one that I’d known very well since the moment I was born—gave me no choice but to scream to the high heavens.
“I-I’m... I’m... I’m a guy agaaaaaain!”
For those of you who might not have a solid grasp on the situation, a quick summary of the sequence of events that led to this point:
Summer vacation was long gone, the cultural festival had passed, and the second semester was well underway when, one day, the first love of a girl with painfully limited romantic experience triggered a large-scale incident. The girl in question was Takanashi Sayumi, a third-year student at Senkou High. She had just stepped down from her position as president of the literary club the day before, and, having been relieved of the obligations and restrictions that came with that position, she’d resolved to tell the boy she’d set her sights on how she felt about him. In other words, she’d committed to confessing her love to Andou Jurai.
In the end, however, when the moment loomed large, she hesitated. This was (I assume) her very first time telling a boy she loved him, and she just couldn’t bring herself to take that final, fateful step forward. She couldn’t work up the courage on her own...and so she sought to obtain it in a manner that was probably not in the spirit of the rules. Route of Origin, Takanashi Sayumi’s supernatural power, gave her the ability to return anything to the way it was meant to be, and its definition of “anything,” it seemed, extended beyond the boundaries of physical, three-dimensional objects. It could act upon concepts just as easily, and on that day, she used it on her own feelings of love, of all things.
Now then, what is the way that a feeling of love is meant to be? That’s simple enough: there is no one correct answer, because the answer is different for everyone. As Kaneko Misuzu put it, “Everyone’s different, and that’s just fine.” That’s just how it goes with love. In other words, you could say that not having a way one’s feelings of love are meant to be is the way they’re meant to be...but I guess I’d be wading a little too deep into the rhetoric swamp if I tried to make that argument.
In any case, Route of Origin was given a challenge that would make even the most vaunted of philosophers shrug, and in response, it defied its wielder’s will and went on a rampage. As a result, everyone who held feelings of love for Andou Jurai was caught up in its effects. Kanzaki Tomoyo was stricken with a case of chuunibyou, Kushikawa Hatoko turned into a yandere, Himeki Chifuyu became a high schooler, Takanashi Sayumi started wearing glasses, Kudou Mirei went mad with love—and I, Sagami Shizumu, turned into a girl.
Working backward from how the phenomenon manifested, it seemed most likely that the hidden desires within all of our hearts had been brought to the surface. That was just conjecture, of course, but in my case, at least I could say with absolute confidence that it was perfectly on the mark. I had, after all, always wanted to get turned into a girl.
For as long as I could remember, I’d dreamed of becoming a beautiful young maiden. No real surprise that I was super into gender benders—that is, stories in which the protagonist gets their gender swapped (guy to girl, in my case) for whatever reason. Andou had made it clear in the past that he wasn’t into the genre at all, and to be fair, I could understand why it would weird some people out, but personally? I loved the stuff.
Watching a story’s protagonist freak out after waking up with a girl’s body one morning was indescribably arousing to me. I mean that very literally—indescribably arousing. There were simply no words that could do justice to the unique sort of excitement it brought me. The thought of a protagonist getting to experience a woman’s body, a woman’s erogenous zones, a woman’s arousal—all sensations that a guy could never possibly hope to savor—filled me with a guilty sort of ebullient pleasure like no other.
Did I, as a guy, want to have my way with the transformed protagonist? Or did I want to be the one getting transformed and letting a guy have his way with me? I couldn’t say—trying to explain it was a hopeless effort—but whatever the case, the budding excitement in my heart and loins was without question the real deal.
The fact of the matter, however, was that in reality, inexplicable overnight gender-bending just wasn’t a thing. It was a fantasy on the same level of realism as getting transmigrated to another world or getting caught up in a death game. To be fair, the fact that it was a scenario that wasn’t realistic was probably why it had such a profound, taboo-tinged appeal that drew so many people to it so intensely, but the point is that it was something that could never, ever happen in real life. I knew that very well, so my desire to be turned into a girl was nothing more to me than a fantasy that crossed my mind on occasion. I had no expectations whatsoever that it would ever actually happen...but then...
But then, it actually did.
Somehow, my dream had been granted. I woke up one morning and found that I’d turned into a girl. And—though it might be weird to say this about myself—I was a pretty darn cute girl, at that. I was a self-admitted sleazebag of a guy, and widely acknowledged as such, but I’d still never lacked for girls attempting to court me, thanks mostly to the good looks I’d inherited from my mother.
I’m no narcissist, to be clear. My feelings on my own appearance didn’t go any further than an objective “Yup, I’m pretty handsome, all right” every once in a while when I looked in a mirror, and I wasn’t particularly attached to my own good looks. The moment I saw the female version of me in the mirror, however, my heart began pounding like a drum. Huh? Who the hell is that hottie? I thought. I fell for her in an instant. It was literal love at first sight.
The word “narcissist,” by the way, is derived from Narcissus, a figure in Greek mythology. Narcissus was a beautiful young man who fell in love with the image of his own face reflected in a spring—and in that moment, I suddenly understood how he’d felt at the time very well. I’m so glad I was born handsome, I thought. If I’d finally gotten gender-swapped only to come out on the other side as an uggo, all that joy I was feeling would’ve been replaced with pure revulsion.
Anyway, the point is that the excitement I felt from turning into a girl was genuinely beyond description for me. The circumstances being what they were, there was only one thing that I could possibly do next: masturbate. Drop everything, pants included, and just go at it. Explore every one of my new body’s forbidden nooks and crannies—bushwhack through the untamed thicket to brave the terrible crevasse beneath, blazing a valiant trail with but a single finger. Savor every drop of pleasure that a woman’s body, supposedly many times more sensitive than a man’s, had to offer—
Actually, no, wait a minute. This will be my first time getting off in a girl’s body—a momentous occasion. This doesn’t exactly feel like a situation where “Haste makes waste” applies, but on the other hand, there’s no way that taking it too lightly would be a good idea. I should get as prepared as I possibly can and make sure I have no regrets by the time I’m done!
So I did a little shopping. The moment school was over, I went out and bought a bunch of...well, let’s just call them toys. Not even I’m enough of a degenerate to put the specific details of my purchase down in writing here, so let’s just say I was well stocked on items in the “lubricating” and “vibrating” categories. I’d prepared everything I could need to make sure that my first self-pleasure experience as a girl would be the best it could possibly be.
And so, I stepped into my house, fully armed and ready to rumble. I locked the front door, went to my room, locked that door as well, and was just about to drop my underwear and set forth into a world of unfathomable pleasure...when I noticed that said underwear had, somewhere along the way, turned from the pure-white panties I’d been expecting into one of my usual pairs of boxer shorts. And that wasn’t all—I realized that a valley had become a mountain as well, if you catch my drift.
“I was so close... I was so close!” I groaned in mourning, kicking my legs with impotent frustration. Ahh, dammit all! If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve come right home without stopping by the smut shop! I should’ve just rubbed one out with my fingers as quickly as possible! There’s probably a cucumber or an eggplant in the fridge that would’ve done the job just fine!
I’d been thrown for too much of a loop to do anything at all that morning, and all I’d had time to do at school was conduct a survey of the girls’ restroom and locker room. As a result, my time as a girl had ended without me having ever so much as prodded the actual goods.
“This can’t be happening... I turned into a girl and didn’t get to do anything sexy at all?!” I mean, like...am I in a shonen magazine or something?! What is this, Ranma 1/2?!
I spent a moment longer groaning and sniffling, then finally let out a heavy sigh. I hadn’t recovered from the state of shock I’d been thrown into yet, but I also knew that blubbering about it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I sat up, then took a look into the bag of adult toys that I’d bought on the way home.
“Ugh... What am I supposed to do with these now? It seemed like such a good idea to buy three sizes back then, since I didn’t know how tight I’d be down there...”
Actually, now that I’m thinking about this with a clearer head, was I really planning on taking my own virginity with a factory-made lump of rubber? It seemed almost tragic when I thought about it in those terms...tragic, or horrifying. The excitement of turning into a girl had clearly robbed me of all composure.
Looking at my situation from a more objective point of view had helped me calm down a little, so I took the chance to inspect myself and my surroundings a little more closely. My body had completely returned to its male form, and my uniform had been swapped from a girl’s to a guy’s as well. My skirt was now a pair of slacks, my panties were boxers, and the C-cup bra I’d been wearing had been wiped from existence entirely. It wasn’t just that my body had gone through a transformation. My clothing and possessions—all of my character-defining accessories—had been returned to their former state.
“Everything about the world’s alterations—or, really, our characters’ alterations—has gone back to normal... I guess that probably means that Takanashi finally told him,” I muttered to myself. It was the only explanation I could think of for why the changes that Route of Origin’s rampage had made to the world would have been undone. “Sheesh. You could’ve taken your time, Takanashi! Then all these sex toys might not have gone to waste.”
Upon reflection, it struck me that I’d said something along the lines of “I’ll simply stand back and watch, like the reader I am. I’d like nothing more than to observe how Takanashi Sayumi’s time as a heroine comes to a close”—a pretty cool line, all around—then totally ignored her actual confession-of-love event after school in favor of running home to get myself off. Even I was starting to think I was beyond help.
“I wonder how it went, though. Did it work out well for her?” I mumbled...but to be honest, I already knew the answer. Takanashi had most assuredly failed. I felt confident in saying that the two of them were definitely not an item now. I didn’t have any proof to back that claim up, but I could still make it with certainty.
Andou’s feelings—his capacity for love, if you will—were frozen. They’d been that way ever since we were in the eighth grade. He just didn’t have what it took to decide to go out with any one specific individual, and unless he found some way to work past his eighth-grade trauma...
“Well, I guess I can just ask her how it all went tomorrow. For now, I have to figure out a way to work off all this frustration,” I said to myself. I’d been just one step away from the main event, only for it to be postponed—indefinitely. It probably goes without saying that I was dealing with a lot of pent-up lust.
“My clothes and underwear changed into stuff a guy would wear, so you’d think those would change into stuff for a guy too,” I grumbled bitterly as my gaze dropped to the bag once more. Everything I’d been wearing had transformed right along with me when I’d turned back into a boy, but the bag of obscenities had remained completely unchanged.
Dammit, Route of Origin! You couldn’t have been just a little more flexible? If you had to change my sex back, you could’ve had the decency to swap out all those women’s sex toys for a bunch of TENGAs or something! What’s a guy even supposed to do with all these vibrating...
“...I guess I could just shove one up my—” I began, but just before my frustration drove me in a risky—actually, make that straight up out-of-bounds—direction, I was forced to put my business on hold yet again, this time by a sudden phone call.
“By the way, Saitou, do you ever use toys when you masturbate?”
“Pfff!”
I’d been called over to a certain chain restaurant, where I found myself sitting directly across from a crusty, Kitaro-haired hag...or rather, from Saitou Hitomi, who had just spewed a whole mouthful of water across the table. Fortunately, I managed to dodge the spray just in time.
Ugh, nasty. I wouldn’t have bothered dodging if it had been a little girl’s saliva-infused water—in fact, I would’ve dodged into the blast if that’d been the case—but getting covered in a twenty-whatever-year-old’s drink was no better than getting covered in sewage. I wasn’t about to let that happen.
Saitou spent a moment coughing and spluttering, then looked back up at me. “Huh? Wha... Excuse me?!”
“Oh, don’t worry! You can rest assured that I’m not even slightly interested on a personal level in how you go about doing your business,” I said placidly as she started wiping off the table with her napkin, eye still wide open with shock. “I just happen to be in a bit of a situation at the moment. I’ve come into possession of a number of women’s sex toys, and I don’t have anything to do with them.”
Saitou gave me a look. “What sort of situation would end like that?” she asked.
“I was just thinking that I could pass them off to you if you wanted them,” I said, waving her question aside.
“I-I do not want them!”
“No need to be shy!”
“That’s really not the problem here!”
“Are you sure? I’ll cut you quite the deal if you take them here and now.”
“You were planning on charging me?!”
“Here, take a look at this one! See how it’s ribbed for your—”
“Wha— No! Do not pull that crap out here!” Saitou shouted, her face flushing bright red as I brought out one of the vibrating thingies I’d obtained as an example. Judging by how genuinely put off she looked, it struck me that she probably wasn’t just being awkward about it—she really wasn’t interested at all.
Hmm. Shame. That’s a very rare instance of me trying to do something nice for someone, wasted.
“Look...Sagami?” Saitou sighed.
“Yes?”
“Let me set something straight. We’re not, you know...we’re not that close, are we? We barely know each other, actually. We’re friends of friends at best, right?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Okay. So...shouldn’t you be a little less overfamiliar with me?” she said with a look of pure and earnest distaste. I had apparently gotten way on her bad side. Not that getting on a twenty-something woman’s bad side was a problem at all, in my mind.
“So it’s a familiarity problem, huh...? That’s a tough one,” I said. “I mean, I’m the sort of person who says whatever he thinks, especially when I’m talking with people I’m not particularly close to. I always end up thinking that it doesn’t matter whether or not they like me, so I may as well just say whatever I feel like saying.”
“So what you’re saying is you’ve got issues.”
“But the thing is, looking at myself from an objective point of view, I’m not particularly close to most people. That means I end up treating pretty much everyone without any real sort of restraint or consideration.”
“...So what you’re saying is you’re an asshole.”
“Oh. But now that I think about it...that might actually have something to do with why I’m so popular,” I said, mostly to myself, as the idea sprung to mind.
Saitou looked puzzled. “How’s that? You mean people find your frankness charming, or something?”
“No, no, nothing of the sort. Let me ask you this, Saitou: what are the typical characteristics of a man who’s nice but unpopular, physical appearance aside?”
“Who knows?”
“The way I see it, there’s one big factor that unites them: they’re all scared of making girls hate them.”
Saitou fell silent, so I carried on.
“They’re scared of making girls hate them, so they don’t strike up conversations with them, or ask for their contact info, or ever contradict or disagree with them, or invite them on dates, or choose any of the destinations and activities if they do end up on a date, or do anything that doesn’t match the girl’s preferences in every situation. They’re completely unassertive, always paying obsessive attention to girls’ reactions to each and every little thing—and guys like that, on the whole, are never particularly popular at all.”
“You...may have a point, I suppose. Having someone be too accommodating is tiring in its own right,” Saitou admitted in a slightly condescending tone. I got the sense that she had next to no experience with romance, so I chalked her putting on an experienced act up to her pride as an elder.
“As for me? I’m not scared of making girls hate me at all. I can look someone in the eye without noticing or caring about how they feel about me in the slightest. I’ll live my life the way I want to, and whether that makes people like me or hate me doesn’t matter to me one bit.”
“You might be a little like Akutagawa, in that sense,” Saitou said after a pause.
“‘Akutagawa’?” I repeated.
“He’s one of our members,” said Saitou. “He’d be a pretty cute kid, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a bratty little know-it-all. It’s like he’s completely incapable of being considerate. I get the sense he’s just not interested in other people...or that he’s not interested in the world at all, really.”
“Oh? In that case, we’re not alike at all,” I said. “If anything, we’re exact opposites. I couldn’t possibly be more interested in people and the world. I like trying out all sorts of things because I’m so interested. It’s just that I don’t care whether or not I end up being liked or hated as a result of all that.”
Saitou gave me an appraising look. “If you like someone, I think it’s pretty normal for you to want them to like you as well. You don’t get that at all?”
“Hmm. No, I can’t say I understand the feeling,” I said.
I liked plenty of girls—but I didn’t have any girls whom I wanted to like me. I’d been attracted to people too, but I’d never felt the need for someone to be attracted to me. I’d wanted to fall for them, even, but I had never wanted them to fall for me.
According to John Lennon, apparently “Love is wanting to be loved.” Assuming he was right about that, it struck me as possible that I was a man who would never know love. All I wanted was to admire the people I liked, as much as I possibly could, just like I admired the characters in the manga and anime I consumed. It was a complete one-way street, in my mind—a one-sided feeling I forced on them. That was what being a reader meant to me, and it was how a reader should be, the way I saw it.
“Of course, this whole ‘guys who aren’t afraid of making girls hate them get popular’ theory only applies to the popularity stage of the equation,” I said. “When it comes to dating or marriage, considerate guys do way better than self-centered ones. Just look at me! I’m pretty darn popular all around, but my relationships never last long.”
“I don’t think that’s something you should be bragging about,” Saitou said in a reproachful tone before letting out a quiet sigh. “You know, the way you talk about yourself almost makes it sound like you’re talking about a stranger.”
That actually struck home with me, to a surprising degree.
“All right, Saitou. I think it’s time we moved on to the actual topic at hand, shall we?” I said as the drinks we’d ordered arrived. “I assume you didn’t call me out here just to chat, did you?”
“Ah, right. I didn’t, no,” Saitou replied. She took a sip of her coffee, which she’d added milk and sugar to, then looked me in the eye. “It may be a secret, and it may be in name only, but you are technically still a member of Fallen Black. I thought that I should check in with you, just for formality’s sake.”
Saitou paused for just a moment.
“Tell me, Sagami—whose side are you on?”
“Thought so,” I said with a nod. That single question was enough to let me guess, broadly, what I’d been called out for. “So it’s finally started. Fallen Black is falling apart.”
I’d had a fairly clear idea that this would happen for quite some time.
Fallen Black was an organization founded and led by Kiryuu Hajime, made up of his so-called twelve wings of sable darkness. There weren’t actually even close to twelve people in the organization, of course, but apparently he’d rolled the idea that the fallen angel Lucifer had twelve wings into his personal mythological headcanon somewhere along the way, so he’d named the group with that fact in mind. I really couldn’t have come up with a more disgustingly chuuni-riffic explanation if I’d tried. While we’re on the subject, he’d unilaterally appointed me to be the secret thirteenth wing of the organization a while back. Can’t say I was particularly happy about that.
Anyway, partly as a result of the fact that Fallen Black was a collection of idiosyncratic and self-assertive weirdos, and partly because Kiryuu didn’t have even the tiniest trace of leadership ability, there was barely any sense of camaraderie to speak of among the crew. Solidarity was nonexistent, and it felt like everyone was moments away from ripping out each other’s throats at any given instant...and now, it seemed they’d finally devolved into actual infighting.
“I guess this was pretty much inevitable,” I said. “Actually, I’m rather surprised it took this long.”
The usual progression for this sort of thing was for the group to start out at odds but gradually find a sense of unity and respect for one another as they overcame trial after trial, eventually forming bonds of trust so great they could never be broken—and from the very start, I’d put the odds of Fallen Black following that classic structure at next to nothing. Considering their boss’s overall nature, I think anyone could’ve seen this coming a mile away...and that was doubly true considering the true reason Kiryuu had chosen to assemble a team to fight alongside in the first place.
“How much has Hajime told you so far, Sagami?” asked Saitou.
“Very little. He only tells me about events that have already wrapped up. He barely ever clues me in on what he’s thinking or planning, and I never make any effort to drag that sort of information out of him. I’m not into spoilers,” I replied. “That said, I’m pretty sure I already know what you’re about to tell me,” I added as an afterthought. “By that, I mean I’m already aware that Kiryuu Hajime was the winner of the Fourth Spirit War.”
Saitou’s unhidden eye widened with shock. “You knew...?”
“I knew. Or, really, I’d heard all about it from him back when he was still fighting in that Fourth War,” I explained. It goes without saying that I hadn’t fought alongside him or anything of the sort. I’d taken the same stance then that I did now—my involvement was limited solely to enjoying his stories every once in a while.
“So, then... You’re telling me that you knew everything this whole time and you’ve just been feigning ignorance so you could keep watching us for kicks?” said Saitou. She sounded exasperated, but not at all angry with me. I got the sense she thought that getting mad wouldn’t be worth the effort.
“That’s just how I am,” I admitted. Feigning ignorance so I could keep watching for kicks was, after all, a reader’s specialty.
“As for me...I learned about the truth behind the current Spirit War from a spirit named Zeon,” said Saitou.
“Zeon...wasn’t that the spirit who decided to rebel against the War Management Committee? The one who’s more or less Umeko’s creator?” I asked.
Saitou nodded. “Zeon defied the committee and created Umeko as part of his plot to try to bring an end to the Fifth Spirit War—but it turns out he only did all of that out of a mixture of pride and love for his work.”
“How do you figure?”
“From what I can tell, he just couldn’t put up with how this War happened. He couldn’t stand the idea of a Spirit War being turned into a mere human’s plaything.”
Ahh, yes. That would do it. It was easy to imagine how vexing and intolerable the situation would feel if I were in his shoes.
The current Fifth Spirit War’s origins were vastly different from those of the four Wars that preceded it. Everything about it, after all, had been orchestrated to suit the whims of a single man. That was true of the War’s governing rules, of course, but it went further than that. Even the spirits that oversaw the event—entities that, under ordinary circumstances, would stand far above the human participants—were at his beck and call. When all was said and done, the current War’s true manager was none other than Kiryuu Hajime himself.
“Heh! When you put it that way, it’s no wonder Zeon snapped. A spirit like him probably sees this whole deal as nothing more than a humiliating farce. I’d bet the other spirits aren’t particularly happy with the situation either, deep down. Their whole committee’s more or less serving as Kiryuu’s slaves right now, after all.”
“I guess Hajime’s just as unpredictable for the spirits as he is for us,” said Saitou.
“That’s a given. Who would ever imagine asking someone what wish they’d like granted for being the last man standing in a battle royal and having them answer, ‘I wanna do it again’? No sane person would ever make that choice.”
The stated prize for winning the War was the right to have any one wish granted. Just how literally the phrase “any wish” should be taken, however, struck me as an open question. If you wished for a hundred million yen, or a harem, or to be turned into the hottest guy (or girl) around, or for the panties off a hot babe—you know, normal wishes—the spirits would probably grant it, no problem. I couldn’t see them having an issue with ethically dubious wishes like asking for someone to be killed or brought back to life either. They were entirely nonhuman entities, and I couldn’t imagine that they would understand or care about the common sense or standards of good and evil that human society valued.
Let’s think about it from the other way around, then: what sort of wishes wouldn’t the spirits be willing to grant? Off the top of my head, I assumed that making like Hiei in the Dark Tournament arc and wishing for the bloody deaths of everyone who had played a part in organizing the War would be rejected outright. I just couldn’t see any of the spirits in charge being willing to grant a wish that would directly harm them. But that said—how would they react if you wished for another Spirit War? That seemed...tough to call. Really tough to call.
A wish like that wouldn’t directly harm any spirits, sure, but you certainly couldn’t say that it wouldn’t affect them. It was just as easy to imagine them saying “How dare a lowly human such as you stick your nose into the management of our sacred rite?” as it was to imagine them saying “Yeah, sure! We made a killing off the betting this time around, so running another one right away suits us just fine.” We didn’t even know what sort of event the Spirit War was from the spirits’ perspective, so the best we could do was groundlessly speculate, but if I’d had to hazard my own guess, I’d have said that opinions among the spirits were split. The presence of a traitor like Zeon seemed proof enough of that.
One way or another, we knew how it’d turned out: the spirits had, as a collective, decided to accept the wish. No sooner had the Fourth Spirit War ended than the Fifth Spirit War had kicked off, just like Kiryuu Hajime had wanted it to. Against all odds, he had managed to send waves throughout a whole nonhuman world—all thanks to an unprecedented wish that one would never imagine a human thinking to make.
That brought a sudden thought to mind: it struck me that Kiryuu had always been the sort of person who’d liked it when Jump extended its popular series past their intended endings. In a sense, he’d done the same thing—he’d extended the Spirit War, dragging out the time he could spend in his beloved world of supernatural battles as long as he could. As far as he was concerned, the situation the War put him in was as fun as anything had ever been. Maybe from his perspective, this Fifth Spirit War is just The Spirit War: Part 2.
“You know...around this time last year, Hajime showed up at my place out of nowhere. He looked like he’d been through hell, and he ended up asking me to join the Spirit War that same night. Thinking back on it...I’m pretty sure that was right after the Fourth War had ended and when the Fifth was just starting up. He was hurt because he’d just fought Fan...I mean, he’d just fought Yusano Genre,” Saitou said, almost as if she was talking to herself. “He said something back then: ‘I’ve gotten sick of running single-player.’ I never imagined he’d meant it that literally.”
“He got his fill of single-player during the Fourth War,” I said, “so this time, he decided to go with multiplayer instead...”
In the Fifth Spirit War, the battle would continue until the field was pared down to eight remaining Players, the Final Eight, all of whom would have their wishes granted. In previous Spirit Wars, however, only the last remaining Player got a wish. The battle royal would continue until only one superpowered contestant remained.
The Final Eight setup had been added to the Fifth Spirit War’s rules at Kiryuu’s request. I didn’t even have to pause to think to figure out why he’d done so: it’d raised the odds of Players forming factions and working together. It was always likely that some participants would choose to form teams even in a true battle royal, but when eight individuals could all have their wishes granted, the odds of factions developing skyrocketed.
When all was said and done, Kiryuu had gotten what he’d wanted. The Players who’d chosen to go it alone in the Fifth Spirit War had quickly been weeded out, while those who’d gathered allies survived. The whole event had turned into a de facto team competition, and Kiryuu had gotten to enjoy the multiplayer session he’d planned out to the fullest. He’d written the script and played the leading role, exulting in every moment of the show he’d staged.
In spite of myself, I couldn’t help but let a chuckle slip out. Honestly. You really are just the absolute best, Kiryuu Hajime—no, Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First. I couldn’t ask for a more interesting character to follow.
I knew for a fact I’d never get tired of watching him. We’d known each other for quite a long time, yet I still never had the foggiest idea what he was thinking, nor could I ever begin to imagine what he would do next. I mean, really—who would fight their way to the end of a battle royal, earn the right to have a wish granted, then ask to do it all over again? No ordinary human could come up with an idea like that—it was a thought that only a truly terminal case of chuunibyou could bring about in someone.
“So, I’m guessing Fallen Black’s infighting started thanks to the truth coming out?” I speculated.
Everyone had believed the battle royal had been orchestrated by nonhuman entities, but in truth, it was a charade set up by a single man. In effect, Kiryuu had deceived all of his teammates—and, for that matter, every single Player in the Spirit War. It was easy to imagine him and his allies having a falling-out once that piece of information got leaked.
“Oh...yeah. Well, that was part of it, but there was a bit more to it than that, I think. A lot’s happened lately...” said Saitou. A distant expression came across her face as her words trailed off. That look told me that when she said “a lot” had happened lately, most of it had probably not been good.
The last time I’d met up with Kiryuu and Saitou was during summer vacation, when the two of them had come to give me a ride home after Takanashi and Andou’s date at the pool. I hadn’t been in touch with either of them since then, and apparently, I’d missed quite a lot in the intervening period. While the people of the literary club and I had been completely absorbed in the cultural festival and other school events, the world of supernatural battles had been going through its own series of striking developments. Their world had still been moving along, even while I wasn’t reading their story—just like the characters in manga and anime are alive, even when they’re not on-screen.
“To make a long story short, a bunch of stuff happened that caused Fallen Black to completely fall apart,” said Saitou. “We’re a hundred percent opposed to each other now, and I’m pretty sure there’s no chance that the team will get back together again, so I thought that I should at least check in and see how you feel about it for good measure. Whose side is the secret thirteenth wing of Fallen Black going to join?”
Finally, we’d returned to the core of the matter. I crossed my arms and paused to think.
“Whose side am I on, huh...? Frankly, I didn’t even know that the team had split up until just now,” I said. “I don’t know what the fight was all about or who’s on whose side.”
“Oh. Fair enough—sorry.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mind at all! And for that matter, knowing who’s fighting who won’t change my answer. Regardless of the particulars, I’m not on anyone’s side, and I’m not opposed to anyone. I’m simply a reader—nothing more, nothing less. I’ll casually poke my head in from time to time, just like always, but you can feel free to act as if I’m not a factor in the slightest.”
“Figures,” Saitou said with a tired nod. It seemed she’d anticipated that my answer would be something along those lines. Clearly she hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she’d come to talk with me “just for good measure.” She was a very conscientious person like that—I’d known it since the moment we’d first met.
“So then, Miss Saitou—just out of personal curiosity, who is on whose side? Who’s fighting who?” I asked, urging the conversation along. I wasn’t planning on backing anyone, but speaking as a reader, I was rather interested in how exactly the falling-out had transpired.
“Hajime and I...”
Of course. Just as I—
“...are on opposite sides.”
...thought? Huh? Wait. Hm? Scratch that—this is rather out of left field. If I’d tried to predict how exactly Fallen Black had fragmented into factions, I would have said that Saitou, at least, would remain by Kiryuu’s side. She was his devoted follower in the most cultlike sense of the phrase, and I’d expected her to stay blindly obedient to the bitter end.
“Come to think of it, you already stood up to him once before, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, I did. Back when we were first dealing with Umeko,” said Saitou.
“The whole rest of the team sided with you, but in the end, your rebellion sort of just fizzled out, or something to that effect.”
“It sure did. We failed back then, so I guess you could say this time’s a grudge match.”
“A grudge match?”
“That’s right. A grudge-driven rebellion,” said Saitou. There was something astonishingly bright about her expression. She didn’t look cheerful, by any means, but it was the face of a woman whose mind was unclouded by doubt or hesitation.
I paused for a moment to think. “You mentioned that you heard about the truth of the Fifth Spirit War from a spirit named Zeon, yes? Are you opposing Kiryuu because Zeon told you to?” I asked.
“No, no, not at all—though this might be exactly what Zeon wanted me to do, when you put it that way. He seemed to want me to help bring an end to the War Hajime’s been controlling, and as soon as possible,” said Saitou. “But the rebellion? That’s all by my own free will. I’m not doing anyone’s bidding.”
She spoke quietly, and once again, her lack of any sort of hesitation struck me. I knew very well that she wasn’t being driven by an emotional outburst—this was a path that she’d chosen after careful and serious consideration.
“So, then...is it that you couldn’t forgive Kiryuu for lying to you for so long?” I asked.
“Hmm. I’m not so sure,” Saitou said, cocking her head and smiling slightly. “I can’t say I don’t feel that way at least a little, but the truth is I’m not all that mad or resentful about it. Hajime’s never bothered filling me in on any of the plots he dreams up, after all.”
“Well then, what is driving you?”
“I guess you could say...that this was inevitable.”
“Inevitable? Really?”
“Yeah. The way I see it, what I should be doing right now isn’t following Hajime blindly—it’s opposing him in any and every way I possibly can. I’ve felt that way ever since Umeko died,” said Saitou.
I didn’t say anything. For a moment, I couldn’t say anything. I was overwhelmed by a pure, impossibly vast sense of tragedy.
“She...died? Y-You’re lying, right? Umeko’s not really dead, is she...?”
“I’m not lying. Umeko died. I was holding her in my arms when she vanished. I can’t believe you’d think for a second I’d lie about something like... W-Wait, Sagami?” said Saitou, her eye widening with shock once more—presumably on account of the fact that I’d started weeping uncontrollably. “Wh-Why are you crying?”
“O-Of course I’m crying,” I said through heaving sobs. “Umeko... My little Umeko’s dead?!”
“She...really wasn’t yours,” said Saitou. There I was, so grief-stricken I couldn’t hold back my tears, yet for some reason, she seemed more dumbfounded by me than she’d ever seemed before, to a degree I’d not imagined possible.
“What...?” I sniffled. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“It’s nothing, really. Just...I had no idea it was possible for someone to cry in a way that’s so completely impossible to sympathize with,” said Saitou.
“That’s so rude... How could you say that to me when I’m this torn up over Umeko’s death?”
“That’s the thing, actually. You met her once, and now you’re bawling over her like you’d known her your whole life.”
I really was quite sad, by my standards, but apparently when someone like me broke down in tears, it came across as hollow no matter how genuine it actually was. I’d brought that upon myself, sure, but it was still sort of tragic.
“I just can’t believe it... How could she have died?” I asked.
Umeko—the girl formerly known as System—had been born for the sole purpose of achieving victory. It was her destiny from the moment she’d been brought into this world, so how had she ended up getting killed? It was doubly inexplicable since it wasn’t supposed to be possible for losing in the Spirit War to cause a Player’s death. It was supposed to be a no-risk, high-reward sort of event for its human participants, after all—that was, in fact, its biggest draw.
“Her time was up, that’s all,” Saitou answered. “Umeko wasn’t a human or a spirit. Her existence was something unique and ambiguous...which is why she wasn’t made to live for long from the start, apparently.”
“So...she died because her lifespan was up? Poor Umeko.”
“Stop. Don’t pity her,” Saitou said in a firm, unyielding tone. “Umeko told me something once: ‘To feel pity for the seven-day lifespan of a locust is nothing more than the arrogance of humanity.’”
I didn’t reply.
“Hajime started the Fifth Spirit War for fun, and as a result, Umeko was born. Then, just a little while afterward, her life came to an end. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and it doesn’t make anyone pitiable. Umeko lived her life to the fullest. She lived a life that no one would ever be ashamed of. I know that...but,” Saitou added, a frail smile coming across her face, “knowing it doesn’t mean I can accept it. I just can’t bring myself to, and I know that I won’t be satisfied until I’ve given Hajime a really good punch or two.”
I could tell she’d found herself in a truly difficult, downright unsolvable labyrinth of an internal conflict. Since Tanaka Umeko—System—had been created by the spirit rebel Zeon to put an end to Kiryuu Hajime’s Spirit War, one might argue that Kiryuu Hajime’s brain-dead scheme to drag the War out was the reason she’d been born in the first place, and by extension, the reason she’d had to die.
It would have been easy to denounce Kiryuu for his actions, if it weren’t for the fact that doing so would equate to denouncing Tanaka Umeko’s very existence. It would be tantamount to viewing her as a poor, pathetic little girl who hadn’t even been able to live for a full year—equivalent to saying that she would have been better off never having been born at all. That, apparently, was something that Saitou Hitomi couldn’t tolerate. She refused to see Umeko as deserving of pity.
That said, she also couldn’t just roll over and accept things as they were. Some part of her was beyond the control of her sense of reason, and she couldn’t stop that part of her from pitying the poor girl and her untimely death in spite of everything. Saitou’s kindness, in this instance, had turned out to be a double-edged sword.
And so, faced with an unresolvable deadlock of an internal conflict, Saitou Hitomi had made a choice: to take a stand against Kiryuu Hajime. It didn’t exactly feel like she was being driven by airtight logic, but I also had to admit that I understood where she was coming from. Kiryuu was the source of the whole problem, after all. Why wouldn’t she want to punch the guy right in the kisser?
“So then, Miss Saitou,” I said, “I know that you’re opposing Kiryuu, but what about the others? Have they all sided with you for a coup d’état like last time? Or...don’t tell me you’re going up against them all on your own? That seems like a tall order, just in terms of pure numbers.”
“That’s, uh, a little complicated,” said Saitou. “To start, Fan actually broke away from Fallen Black before all this. She’s been doing her own thing for a while now. I decided to take Hajime down a little while afterward, and from there the team split in two.”
“Who landed where?”
“Toki and Aki sided with me, and Akutagawa stuck with Hajime.”
Hmm. So those are the teams. Not exactly what I was expecting, but not unbelievable either.
“Oh—and Hinoemata’s on Hajime’s side too.”
“Hinoe—? Oh, right...there was another guy on your team, wasn’t there?” I said. He hadn’t really come up much, so I’d actually forgotten about him entirely. Not that I’d put much effort into remembering him, to be fair. I’d never been particularly interested in male characters to begin with.
“Oh, that’s not quite right,” said Saitou. “I mean, I’d thought she was a boy for the longest time too, but I learned that she’s actually a girl just recently.”
“Huh? Wait, for real?” Hold the phone—this changes everything! Some rando dude doesn’t interest me in the slightest, but a pretty girl pretending to be a dude? Now you’ve got my attention!
“I’d always thought she was just a somewhat slender pretty boy. It’d never crossed my mind that she was actually a girl,” said Saitou. “I guess her given name is androgynous, in retrospect.”
“Why, what’s her name?” I asked, fantasies of cross-dressing beauties running rampant through my mind. I’d let my curiosity take the wheel—but when I got my answer, my mood took another sharp and abrupt U-turn.
Frankly? I lost all interest in a heartbeat. Her name, after all, was the same as the name of a heroine whose story, in my mind, was already over. Let me put it this way: it felt like starting up an eroge with a main heroine who’s totally your type, only to realize that she has the same name as your mother or the ugliest girl in your class. Just a total letdown.
Hinoemata Tamaki: the seventh wing of Fallen Black. Counting Kiryuu, the zeroth wing, and me, the thirteenth, that made Fallen Black a nine-person organization, with her having apparently been the last member to join. She was the newest of newbies—even Umeko had entered the fold before her. The latest member, and the last member, in enough senses of the word to easily render it worthy of italicization.
Her supernatural ability: Lost Regalia, the power to divert the royal road. In other words: the power of regicide. Before Hinoemata Tamaki, any king, regent, or reigning power would be cast down. It was the one and only power capable of opposing Tanaka Umeko, a girl born specifically to overcome any and all Players with a balance-shattering power that would never allow her to face defeat.
Lost Regalia was, in short, a hard counter to anything absolute. In fact, it had very likely been brought into being specifically to prevent System, a power that ran contrary to the very foundational principles of the Spirit War, from bringing said War to a premature end...or, at least, that was Kiryuu’s theory, as relayed to me by Saitou. According to him, it was the Spirit War’s equivalent to how the human body creates antibodies to eliminate invading viruses. The War responded to the presence of an irregular element by introducing an irregular element of its own. I didn’t know how much that theory held water—and, in fact, I was prepared to call it more of a fantasy than a theory—but Hinoemata’s power just happening to be of a nature that could be described that way was, apparently, an undeniable fact.
“Of course, the whole thing ended with the absolute and her hard counter never actually coming into conflict,” I said to myself. “Or...maybe they did actually fight, and Saitou just didn’t tell me about that part? She said that Umeko died because her lifespan ran out, but maybe that only happened because she used up too much of her power fighting her natural enemy?”
As wild, baseless theories and speculation ran through my mind, I passed through the entryway to my apartment building, returned to my room, dropped off the bag of toys that Saitou had refused to accept, then headed right back out again. I stepped into the elevator and pressed a button—not going down to the first-floor entry hall, but rather, going up this time. Less than ten seconds later, I arrived at the building’s rooftop, which was a garden area surrounded by a tall metal fence. It wasn’t the most beautiful garden you’d ever seen, or the most plain—just a perfectly average collection of flowerbeds—but I wasn’t there for the flowers, anyway. I was there for the boy I found as I advanced through the greenery.
“Hey there. It’s been a while,” I casually called out as I approached him. He was sitting on a bench, eyes glued to a handheld gaming console, and he only barely bothered glancing up from his screen to look over at me.
“Oh...you,” the boy said without even removing his headphones as his gloomy gaze fell upon me. The eye contact only lasted an instant before he looked back to his video game. A complete lack of courtesy and friendliness was one of his—that is, Akutagawa Yanagi’s—core character traits.
But meh—he’s cute, so he gets a pass for it. It’s worth noting, by the way, that I still wasn’t quite ready to give up on my “Akutagawa is secretly a girl” headcanon. “Yanagi” is a unisex name, and when cute boys with potentially feminine names show up in anime and manga, it’s standard operating procedure for folks in the business to assume that there’s at least a solid chance they’re actually a cross-dressing girl. (For the sake of argument, let’s just say Tsugumi Seishiro and her masculine name are an outlier.)
“So, playing a puzzle game today? You certainly are fond of logical genres like that, aren’t you?” I said.
“Not particularly...” said Akutagawa. “I’m just killing time.”
“I’m a visual novel person, myself. Do you ever play those?”
“...Those aren’t real games.”
Hmm. Looks like our tastes are as mismatched as ever. Then again, he was also the sort of gaming extremist who would say things like “Games don’t need characters or stories” and “Devs should use all the time they spend fussing over graphics to fine-tune the gameplay instead.” In other words, he was a gameplay supremacist—the sort of gamer who gets really salty about how rhythm games have largely been turned into a fodder genre for moé freaks lately. I, meanwhile, was the sort of gamer who’d be all “Whatever, get to the good stuff already” when a dating sim introduced even the slightest bit of actual gameplay, so our perspectives really couldn’t possibly have been less compatible.
Anyway, as to why Akutagawa Yanagi was hanging out on the rooftop of the apartment building I lived in—the very simple answer was that he lived there too. My place was on the second floor, and his was way up top on the twelfth. It was quite the coincidence, from a certain perspective, but when you factored in how the current Spirit War was centered entirely around the town we lived in, it wasn’t really all that surprising that a Player would wind up living in the same apartment as me.
Despite the closeness of our lodgings, we hadn’t actually come into contact at all before this whole thing had started. I’d spoken to him for the first time after the Fifth Spirit War had already kicked off, and we’d only seen each other a few times since. I’d only recently learned that he could be found up on the roof once a week, when he’d use one of those bug bomb canisters to smoke out any cockroaches that might’ve sneaked into his room. Apparently, the kid really couldn’t stand bugs.
Oh, while we’re on the subject, Saitou had clearly been under the impression that I didn’t know about Akutagawa at all, but the truth was that we had met and spoken several times beforehand. Actually—to be totally honest—I’d made one-on-one contact with all the members of Fallen Black who’d been around before Umeko had joined. I’d given the same “I’m the organization’s secret member, and you and Kiryuu are the only ones who know that I exist” speech to literally all of them. I hadn’t really had a super deep plan in mind with the whole thing—I just hadn’t liked the idea of them spreading rumors about me behind my back, so I’d taken a “my existence is a secret” stance to head that off at the pass.
“So, I hear you sided with Kiryuu,” I said. It felt like we’d had enough pleasantries, so I cut straight to the heart of the matter. Akutagawa’s expression didn’t change, and he didn’t even bother nodding, but I decided to take the lack of a denial as confirmation and moved right along. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d really like to know—why did you choose him?”
“No real reason,” Akutagawa curtly replied. “If I had to give one...I sided with him because he’s tough.”
“Oh? But if memory serves, back when you were up against F, you sided with Saitou and betrayed Kiryuu, didn’t you?”
“The point of that rebellion was to get one up on Kiryuu by stealing his prey...but this time, they’re trying to beat him. I don’t think she has any chance of pulling that off,” said Akutagawa. He’d made his call from as calculating and logical of a perspective as ever.
“You are aware that the whole Fifth Spirit War was orchestrated by Kiryuu himself, yes? Doesn’t that irritate you a little? If I were in your position, I’d probably feel like he deceived me,” I said.
“Not really... And actually, I don’t think that’s worth getting angry about in the first place. If getting a wish granted if you made it to the Final Eight was a lie, I’d understand being mad...but apparently that part was true. As far as we Players are concerned, it doesn’t make any difference whether the spirits set all this up or Kiryuu did.”
Ever the pragmatist, this kid, I thought. He kept a perfectly cool head, calmly assessing the outcomes of Kiryuu’s actions and dispassionately determining how they would benefit him. It was like he’d deemed anger and sadness to be unnecessary emotions and cast them aside without a second thought. He didn’t have the slightest hint of faith in his allies, and he didn’t expect them to have faith in him either—so even though he’d been betrayed, he felt nothing.
I’d thought that the battle against Hearts would have instilled at least the beginnings of a sense of team spirit in him, but apparently, Akutagawa’s fundamental nature hadn’t changed at all. He was a purely solitary individual. He wasn’t making an effort to be that way, per se—he just didn’t find anything about being alone unpleasant. He accepted solitude, something that most people feared deeply, without a hint of resistance. You could call it a talent, in a sense, but you could also say it was a sign of something he was lacking.
In that sense, I could sympathize with him at least a little. I’d told Saitou that I wasn’t like him at all—that he and I were exact opposites—but because we were exact opposites, it felt like the two of us were also rather similar, on a certain level. Both of us preferred to exist on the periphery of society—it’s just that he was driven to do so by indifference, while I was driven by an excess of interest.
Around that point, Akutagawa let out a quiet grunt. He looked up from his gaming console and reached a hand out in front of him, holding his middle and index fingers together then spreading them apart, like he was zooming in on a smartphone’s screen. That, I knew, was the gesture he used whenever he was putting his power into effect.
“Did you just use your power?” I asked, just to confirm.
“Yeah,” Akutagawa grunted offhandedly. “I’m making a town in the space between cities.”
Akutagawa’s power, Dead Space, gave him the ability to manipulate gaps freely. He could wrench open any gap that existed in the world, constructing a space of his own within it. The idea of a power that could let you make a whole new town in between towns was pretty outrageous at first blush...but when I really thought about it, compared to Chifuyu’s World Create, which could bring alternate dimensions or worlds into being without limitation, Dead Space actually came across as relatively low tier. The literary club’s abilities threw off the power curve something fierce.
“Making ‘gaps,’ huh...? That is a pretty unique power,” I said. “It’s not exactly formulaic, is it? Do you think you ended up with it because you wanted a quiet place where you could always go to be alone, maybe? Or—”
“No... It’s nothing like that,” said Akutagawa, sounding a little irritated. “My personality and my power have nothing to do with each other.”
“Oh? Isn’t that how it works, though? I thought Players were supposed to manifest powers that reflect their psyches on a deep, profound level?”
“...Analyzing people’s personalities by looking at their powers is no better than doing so by looking at their blood types. If it seems like someone’s power reflects their personality, that’s just the Barnum effect at work. You can justify anything that way, if you read into things deeply enough.”
Ahh, I see now. It sort of felt like he was implicitly shutting down every supernatural battle manga that used “people get powers that reflect their desires or personality” as part of its setup, but still, I could see his point.
Imagine, for instance, someone who has a superpower that lets them make fire. You could interpret that as coming from their burning rage, sure, but you could just as easily say it was their burning jealousy at work. Even if someone ended up with a power that seemed to have nothing to do with their personal traits, you could just say it was the embodiment of the true, hidden essence of their personality, and people would probably swallow it without question.
Did the powers Players manifested really have anything to do with their inner psyches? There was no way to say with absolute certainty, but it seemed clear that Akutagawa, at least, didn’t believe it at all. That, or he didn’t want to believe it. Maybe deep down, he just didn’t like what it said about him.
“So, why are you making a town right now?” I asked. “Did Kiryuu order you to?”
“No... I’m doing it as a favor for Hinoemata,” said Akutagawa.
“Hinoemata...”
“She asked me to make a town and trap some guy who goes to a local high school in it.”
“...”
“She just loves using people...but making a whole town and the surrounding landscape is sort of fun, so whatever. It’s like playing SimCity...”
“Hey, Akutagawa,” I said. “You said she asked you to trap a high schooler in there? What’s he like?”
“What’s he like...? Not really remarkable. He has dark hair, and he’s a little on the short side... Oh, and now that I think about it, he’s wearing the same uniform as you. I guess Hinoemata knows him.”
“Is that so?”
“...Do you know him too?”
“Yeah. He’s probably an acquaintance of mine,” I said. Not a friend—an acquaintance.
I didn’t have any concrete evidence to back up my assumption, but I was still quite certain I was right. It was all just too perfect to be a coincidence. The high schooler whom Akutagawa had trapped was Andou Jurai, and the one who’d set it up, Hinoemata Tamaki...was the same Tamaki whom I’d once gone out with. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind about it.
Come to think of it, didn’t she say her parents were getting a divorce? Maybe that’s why her surname changed. I completely lost interest in her the moment we broke up, so it never even occurred to me to look into that.
“So, what exactly is this Hinoemata person doing in the space you created?” I asked.
“Fighting,” said Akutagawa as he closed his eyes, presumably to sharpen his senses. I got the impression that he could tell what was happening in the spaces he created with his ability, at least to some extent. “It’s not much of a battle, though... Hinoemata’s the only one actually fighting. The high schooler’s just running away. He’s shouting at her—stuff like ‘Cut it out!’ and ‘Why are you doing this?!’ and the like.”
“Oh? And what’s Hinoemata saying in response?”
“Good question... She picked up some weird accent, all of a sudden. I can’t make out anything she’s saying at all.”
“Ha ha ha!”
“Anyway...it’s almost funny how desperate the high schooler is. It’s like he’s seriously terrified of getting hurt, and just as terrified of hurting her too. I heard he’s a Player, but...maybe he doesn’t know that we come back to life if we die?”
Fights between Players in the Spirit War posed no risk of death to any of their combatants. The loser would simply have their power and memories of the War stripped from them, allowing them to return to their daily lives entirely unharmed. It was, in short, a no-risk, high-reward competition to participate in—which was exactly why close to a thousand Players had willingly chosen to join in. I had to imagine that if it had been a real fight to the death, nowhere near that many people would have signed up. There weren’t that many people who were willing to literally risk their lives for the sake of a wish, and even fewer who would also be willing to kill someone with their own two hands for it.
A Player’s Spirit Handler was supposed to explain as much to them upon their entry into the War...but since Andou and his friends had been isolated from the War in spite of being given powers, he’d had absolutely no way of knowing any of that. No wonder he was running like his life depended on it—he really thought it did.
Hinoemata, on the other hand, knew all about the no-death rule, so she had no reason to pull her punches as a result. She was operating under “It’s cool, we can just bring him back with the Dragon Balls!” logic, which meant that she didn’t have to worry about the consequences of hurting her foe at all. She could casually stroll right over a line that the vast majority of people would ordinarily balk at crossing.
“You know, Akutagawa, I’m really glad that the Spirit War isn’t an honest-to-goodness life-and-death battle royal. Series about death games and battles royal always love to go on about how it’s only when you’re pushed up against the wall in the most extreme way possible that your true nature is revealed, or how being put in a position where you have to risk your life is what proves your true worth. You see characters in those series say stuff like that all the time, right?”
“...I guess.”
“Well, I’m one of those people who thinks those lines are completely ridiculous. They’re so off base, it’s actually hilarious. If ‘the true essence of your self’ or whatever doesn’t come to the surface unless you’re put in a life-and-death situation, then I figure that’s probably not really your true essence at all, is it?”
If you’re put in a situation where you have to kill someone or otherwise die yourself, then does taking that person down make you an unfeeling monster? Does letting them beat you at the cost of your life make you a kind person? Not the way I saw it, that’s for sure. There was something just plain wrong with that logic. Who decided that the way someone acts when driven to an extreme is that person’s true self? Declaring that the way you act in a life-and-death situation is your true nature is no different than declaring that four-panel moé manga are universally shallow and pointless: all it does is display how narrow-minded of a person you are.
“The way I see it, a person’s nature or value—you know, their true self—comes out in more, I don’t know...casual settings? I think the commonplace probably exposes people’s true natures more than anything,” I said.
Sure, we wear masks of all sorts in our day-to-day lives, covering up our true natures with thick layers of humility, duplicity, hypocrisy, defensiveness, ostentation, and on and on...but aren’t the masks we choose to wear a component of our true natures in and of themselves?
“And in that sense, the fact that everyone just comes back to life if they die in the War is a perfect touch. Knowing that you’ll get bailed out no matter what happens—that you have an unbreakable safety net beneath you—makes the situation just flexible enough. It means that the Spirit War is a tale of supernatural battles between humans fighting with their pride on the line while also being a completely safe slice of life in which no one will ever die, no matter what.”
Supernatural battles taking place in a mundane, slice-of-life setting—an interval when supernatural battles became commonplace, you might say. A scenario that provides a happy mixture of danger and security in equal measure.
“Nobody has to die, and nobody has to kill anyone—that safety is exactly what allows people to cross the lines that they normally wouldn’t, right?”
“...And getting to see people cross those lines is what makes it fun for spectators like you to watch?”
“Exactly. Is that a problem?”
“No...but it’s tasteless. Watching this War for the sake of pure entertainment is even more tasteless than using it to gamble like the spirits do,” said Akutagawa. There wasn’t a sense of disgust in his tone, but the words he’d chosen were surprisingly scathing. Unfortunately, my feelings weren’t nearly sensitive enough to be hurt by that level of criticism.
“All right! I should be heading on my way,” I said. I’d accomplished what I’d come here for and then some. Not only had I confirmed Hinoemata Tamaki’s identity, I’d also learned where Andou was at the moment as a bonus. It had been a far more fruitful trip than I’d anticipated. “I’ll see you around, Akutagawa. Be sure to give me a call if Hinoemata and that high schooler’s battle takes any interesting turns, okay?”
“...No way. Not my problem.”
“Oh, don’t be like that!”
“It won’t take any interesting turns, anyway. Hinoemata’s power wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Ha! True enough,” I admitted. It was so well put on his part, I couldn’t help but chuckle.
I hadn’t known that Hinoemata was Tamaki until that day, but I’d heard about her power’s nature several times beforehand. Lost Regalia: the power to divert the royal road. To put it in extremely rough and simple terms, it gave her the ability to overrule anything that she perceived as following in the footsteps of the reigning exemplars—in other words, anything she saw as conventional.
It was a very vague power with a very hard-to-grasp set of abilities, but to give a concrete example of how it worked: no one would ever be able to suddenly awaken to a new ability when she was around. That was as conventional as a plot twist could be, and that meant she could deny it. It was why her power was the hard counter to System, a power that allowed its bearer to go through limitless awakenings—with System’s stock of unlimited asspull-awakenings sealed, the ultimate player would become nothing more than an ordinary little girl.
Before Tamaki, none could seat themselves upon the throne of convention. The reigning kings of storytelling would be dragged from their places of honor, one by one. Hidden powers wouldn’t awaken. Secret bloodlines wouldn’t be revealed. Transfer students wouldn’t show up at improbable times of the year. Rain wouldn’t suddenly begin to fall when something terrible happened to your family or friends. You could shout “Did we get him?!” and find that you did, in fact, actually get him. If someone fell off a cliff and their body was never found, they’d still just be plain dead. If you found yourself in a life-and-death dilemma, your allies wouldn’t show up at the last second to save you. You would never find yourself up to bat at the bottom of the ninth, three runs behind, with two outs and bases loaded. If you got hit by a truck and died, you wouldn’t be reborn in a fantasy world. Any conventional plot development—any of the tropes and clichés that held sovereignty over storytelling—could be rejected at will. Plot armor, contrivances, clichés, foreshadowing, and archetypes were all meaningless before her.
In terms of pure power, I guess you could say it wasn’t all that useful of an ability—but to Andou, who had found himself suddenly sealed off in a closed space and assaulted for no explicable reason, there could hardly have been a more threatening or terrifying power for her to have. It meant that no matter what happened, he wouldn’t suddenly awaken to a power that could allow him to break free of the space Akutagawa had made, and the other members of the literary club would never come running to save him.
“...Hm?” Akutagawa grunted, cocking his head.
“What is it?” I asked.
“If Hinoemata has her power on...then his friends shouldn’t be able to come help him.”
“That’s my understanding, yes.”
“And it’s not that they can’t come help him physically...it’s more like they can’t even realize that he’s in trouble at all. Or if they already knew he was in trouble when she activated her power, they’d just never be able to find him. If they already knew where he was, then they wouldn’t be able to make it in time... Her power acts on the world itself to make sure of it.”
“It doesn’t just affect people subconsciously—it can even manipulate how luck and coincidences play out. It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it? It sort of reminds me of how the Death Note works when you write the particulars of how someone is supposed to die in it.”
“So, then...why isn’t it working on you?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re that guy’s friend...aren’t you?”
Ahh, I see now. His logic was on point...but my explanation went without saying. “We’re not friends,” I replied. “Just acquaintances.”
Lost Regalia was in effect—of that, I had no doubt. It was already denying the possibility that Andou’s friends would come running to save him from mortal peril, just like they would in a convention-driven story. They probably hadn’t even realized that he was in danger to begin with. Their powers would easily be capable of breaking into the closed space Akutagawa had created, but that was an action they would never be able to take if they didn’t know that any of this was happening. I, however, had managed to gain that piece of information. I’d been allowed to learn where he was and what sort of situation he was in with ease.
Why? It’s incredibly simple: because Lost Regalia knew perfectly well that Sagami Shizumu would never, under any circumstances, come running to Andou Jurai’s aid.
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