Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 11 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Sagamicizm of the Summer Autumn

The next thing I knew, I found that I’d somehow traveled quite a long distance away from the restaurant. I was on the outskirts of town, far enough that you’d have to take a bus or a taxi to get there. How I’d managed it was a mystery—I certainly didn’t remember, anyway. It was almost like my subconscious had driven me to run away from the place where I’d had my conversation with Takanashi, and before I knew it, it had carried me here.

“Well...crap. I don’t remember a thing,” I muttered to myself. I could recall up to the point where I was talking with Takanashi, but when and how we’d said our goodbyes was a complete blank. “Hmm... She must have said something that’d crossed a line—something that could’ve uprooted the foundations of who I am as a character. My brain must have purged whatever she said from my memory—along with the surrounding period of time—to make sure that my mind and personality didn’t break down... Huh. I guess I’m a surprisingly delicate, weak-minded sort of character, when all’s said and done.”

I spoke with total objectivity, observing myself from an outside perspective, which helped give me the presence of mind to stay calm and get a grasp of my situation. Being able to stay calm in a situation like this was probably a bad sign, from a certain perspective, but I decided not to let that bother me.

I took a look around at my surroundings. I was standing on a long, paved road, with no immediately visible cross streets in either direction. Down the road lay a quiet, sleepy townscape, and far up along it were the nearby mountains, covered in trees that had turned striking shades of orange and crimson as fall had set in. A shorter distance up the road, meanwhile, was the large, sturdily built front gate to a school.

“Let’s see here... I know this place... Oh, of course—this is right near Sakuragawa Girls’ Academy, isn’t it?”

Sakuragawa Girls’ Academy was a girls’ school located in the foothills by our town. It had a long, storied history as being the place where local well-to-do young ladies were educated, and it was rather famous in the area as a result. It was a good long distance away from the town center, but its grounds were relatively massive in exchange, and its security measures were supposedly airtight. As a result, it had an excellent reputation with students and parents alike.

“So, Takanashi shattered my psyche, and I ended up wandering my way all the way over here in a daze, then?” I said to myself with a nod. It was a nonsensical thing to do on my part, at first blush, but I did have a rational explanation in mind for why I’d ended up here in particular. I’d paid this school a number of visits as of late, and the route there had become something of a matter of muscle memory for me. My malfunctioning mind, then, must have replayed that routine.

Why had I been to this school so often recently? Simply put, my ex was a student here—that being, of course, the ex who had dumped me on the day of the cultural festival, on the basis that the way I looked at elementary school girls made me look “like some sort of deviant nutjob.” Up until that point, though, I’d come pick her up at school whenever she called me over. We’d take the bus into town and walk around together, doing the sort of stuff that most ordinary couples did...not that our relationship had lasted particularly long, of course.

“We got together right around when Summer Comiket was going on, so...I guess it lasted about a month?” I said to myself.

That was just about an average-length relationship for me. It was very typical for the girls I dated to break up with me right around the one-month mark, usually on account of my geeky hobbies. My all-time shortest relationship on record, by the way, lasted for just three days in total. I’d suggested that we play an eroge in my room together, and she’d dumped me on the spot. Heroines who were super into eroge were a whole trend in light novels just a little while back, but apparently, it didn’t have any basis in reality after all. My longest relationship, on the other hand...

“...I guess that’d be Tamaki, huh?”

When all was said and done, the two of us had stayed together for the better part of a year. I absolutely never changed my habits or lifestyle, whether or not I had a girlfriend at any given moment, so Tamaki probably deserved the bulk of the credit for having matched my pace and keeping our relationship going. She’d never criticized me for my hobbies and interests, and she’d done her best to meet me halfway in whatever ways she could. She’d buy the books I was reading and read them herself too, despite the fact that I’d never recommend them to her. I’d even tried loaning her an eroge once, just to see what would happen, and she’d cleared every single route. I’m sure she’d thought it was boring—in fact, I’d bet she’d probably thought it was intolerably disgusting—but she’d seen it through to the end anyway just because I’d recommended it to her. And what had she said in the end? “It was a hoot.” She’d been lying, of course. That much had been obvious.

Had I been touched by the depths of her consideration? Not really. I’d been more curious about just how far she’d be willing to go, so when I’d picked out a second eroge to lend her, I’d gone with something that, secretly, I hadn’t been even the slightest bit into: a scat fetish game. Not just any scat game either—I’d gone and bought one that had been notorious for being so absurdly out-there with its content that even I would’ve been repulsed by it, then I’d lied and told her that I’d been super hooked on it lately.

Shockingly enough? She’d actually played it. She’d pushed through, coming out in a zombielike state of dead-eyed exhaustion after having genuinely completed it from start to finish—including the bad endings that’d had a reputation for dying your entire screen in a repulsive shade of brown.

Had I been moved by her heroic effort? No. In fact, I’d laughed my ass off. I’m pretty sure I cackled harder than I’d ever cackled before.

“That...was probably a dick move, huh?” I reflected. I did feel just a little guilty about it, looking back. I was famous for my complete and unflappable shamelessness, so the fact that I felt any sort of guilt was, I imagined, a sign that I’d gone altogether too far on that one. I’d put her through something that might well have traumatized her for a lifetime for shits and giggles...but she’d kept going out with me anyway.

I never understood why. To this day, I still didn’t get what she’d seen in a guy like me. And yet, no matter what I did...

“Oh?” I grunted, shaking myself out of my momentary stroll down memory lane as I noticed a trio of schoolgirls walking through the Sakuragawa Girls’ Academy front gate.

“It’s gotten ever so late, hasn’t it?” said one of the girls.

“Truly!” said another. “Honestly, Midori, we told you not to dawdle.”

“P-Pardon me, Miss Sumire!” said the third—seemingly the youngest.

“Now now, Sumire,” said the first girl, “you mustn’t be so harsh on her. It was only thanks to Midori’s helping hand that our poster turned out so wonderfully, after all.”

Yup—those are some well-to-do young ladies, all right. I don’t even know how to describe it...everything about them just screams it, somehow.

The majority of the students at Sakuragawa Girls’ were more or less your prototypical pure and innocent maidens. My ex had been the same way. They were the sort of girls who could say “Good day to you” and “I beg your pardon” with a straight face and actually mean it. Frankly, I was pretty into all that. Most of them were cute, not to mention sheltered—and most importantly of all, the odds of them being virgins were way higher than average. I was convinced that a veritable field of lilies was blooming within that school, if you catch my drift.

The three girls who had just stepped through the gate were each high-level specimens in their own right. The one in the middle, who had long hair tied back in a pair of braids and was wearing glasses, was... Wait, huh? Isn’t that...?

“I can’t believe how time has flown! There’s only two weeks left before the election now, Aki.”

“You’re right... I must admit, I’m a little apprehensive. Being the student council’s president is such a heavy responsibility—can I truly bear it? Not to mention that all the other candidates are wonderful girls, each qualified in her own right.”

“Really, Aki, this is no time to be so timid! Have some confidence in yourself!”

“M-Miss Sumire’s right! I know you’d be a wonderful president, Miss Aki!”

“Tee-hee! I appreciate the sentiment, Sumire—and yours as well, Midori. I suppose my pessimism got the better of me for a moment. Rest assured, I have no intention of backing down after everything we’ve done! I’ll do my utmost to ensure that neither you nor the others who have supported me have anything to regret, whether or not I... Ah.” The girl with the braids grunted, her words trailing off as she finally noticed the pointed stare I was directing at her.

“Is something the matter, Aki?”

“N-No, um... That is... I’ve just remembered something I have to do. I’m terribly sorry, but I’ll have to bid you farewell for the time being.”

A series of perfectly rich-girlesque good-day-to-yous later, the girl with the braids split off from her pair of friends...and started making her way directly toward me. She’d been carrying her bag in front of her at first, both hands grasping its handle as she’d walked with a prim and proper gait, but the moment her friends were out of eyeshot, she slung the bag over one shoulder and picked up her pace, making a beeline for me with a bold, purposeful stride. Her whole vibe had done a complete one-eighty, so instantly it was downright hilarious.

“Okay, Shizu, what’s the deal? What’re you here for? I’d kinda really rather not have to deal with a sleazy creep like you hanging around my school, ’kay?” the girl—Natsu Aki—said with an undisguised scowl as she crossed the road and stepped up to me. Her well-to-do-little-lady persona had vanished so thoroughly, you’d almost think it had been one big hallucination. It was a stunning transformation.

“It’s been a while, Aki,” I said.

“Think you could not call me by my first name, thanks?”

“How about Nakki, then?”

“Hmph. Sure, that works.”

It does? Really? Calling her by a nickname felt more overfamiliar than calling her by her first name, no matter how I looked at it, but apparently, her standards and mine just weren’t aligned whatsoever.

Natsu Aki was the third wing of Fallen Black, and she had the power Head Hunting. She was a second-year in high school, same as me, and while her braids gave her a plain and pure sort of look, her personality was as bright and uninhibited as the trendiest teen you’d ever meet...or at least, I’d thought that was what she was like, anyway.

“So, is that how you try to play yourself off at school, Nakki?” I asked. Stuffy, rich-girl speech mannerisms; an ambition to join the student council; an aura of absolute and immaculate purity—the Aki I’d just witnessed could hardly have been more different from the one I knew.

“More or less,” said Aki. “I’m doing the reliable older sister figure thing, basically. I’m not really into the idea of being on the council, but everyone in my class and all the underclassmen in my club kept badgering me until I agreed to go for it.”

“You’re pretty good at playing the innocent little rich girl, huh?” I said, going out of my way to make it sound like I was mocking her.

Aki, however, didn’t get upset at all. “Playing innocent, huh...?” she muttered thoughtfully. “I dunno about that. Could always be the opposite, right?”

“The opposite?”

“You met the Player me first, Shizu, so I take it you think that’s the real version—but dontcha think it’s possible that that’s the personality I had to make up? Maybe I’ve been putting up a front and bluffing my rear off this whole time so that everyone else in the Spirit War won’t think I’m easy pickings, and the ‘proper little lady at school’ version of me’s actually who I am at heart.”

“Oh? Is that your game?” It felt like she’d gotten one up on me. I had indeed been caught up in my own preconceptions. I had baselessly concluded that the pure and proper rich girl persona had to be the fake one because that’s just how it always worked—completely disregarding the fact that a pure and helpless girl putting on a bad-girl persona to stay alive in a world of supernatural battles was also a respectable trope in its own right. “So, which one is the real Natsu Aki, in the end?”

“Who knows?” said Aki. “Maybe they’re both real, or maybe they’re both fake. I act totally differently when I’m talking to my parents at home too, by the way.”

“Oh? That sounds hard to keep up.”

“Nah, not really. I mean, everyone acts differently from situation to situation, right? It’s pretty normal stuff—especially for girls.”

“Hmm. You might have a point. People do have to read the room and keep up a persona pretty much all the time nowadays, even when we’re online.”

As long as people have to communicate with one another, the ability to take a hint and act accordingly will be valued, so knowing how to put on a persona is an absolute necessity as a result. That goes without saying on social media services where people use their real names, but it doesn’t stop there—the ability to take a hint and go with the flow is vital even on anonymous message boards. The whole point of those places is to let all their users raise irresponsible, impulse-driven stinks about whatever they want, sure, and people might compare them to the crazed scribblings you find on bathroom walls sometimes, but even there, communicating with others still requires you to be able to read the situation to some degree.

“I can’t say that I get the ‘especially for girls’ part though,” I noted.

“People say that putting on acts is second nature to girls, don’t they?” Aki somewhat boastfully replied.

When she put it that way, I had heard a whole theory about how way back in the day, the men would go out to hunt and the women would be left at home to wait around together. In that case, being ostracized from the social group would effectively be a death sentence for women—according to some people, anyway. Maybe the tendency to prefer acting as a group—and to falsify their personalities and put on acts to fit into that group—was a baked-in habit for girls on a genetic level.

“Girls all put on acts and play innocent—some more so, some less,” said Aki. “I do it, and Fanfan’s basically the living embodiment of it. Who else... Oh, yeah—Hinotama too! She was pretty amazing, actually.”

Hinotama...? Oh, she means Tamaki. Hinoemata Tamaki, thus, Hinotama. Aki’s sense for nicknames was as superbly questionable as ever, clearly.

“Hinotama’s act was so intense, she played a whole different gender!” said Aki. “Now that was one hell of a persona if I’ve ever seen one.”

“I don’t know...isn’t that a whole different thing?” I countered. “She was just cross-dressing, right?”

“Nah, she wasn’t just cross-dressing,” Aki said definitively. The look on her face was hard to read, in a way that was unusual for her. “When she was with us, she became a guy. It felt less like she was trying to hide the fact that she was a girl, and more like...like she was trying to be a guy with everything she had. I dunno why, though.”

“That...might have been my fault,” I muttered.

Aki blinked. “Huh? Wait, hold the phone! What’s that mean? You know her, Shizu?”

“Well, we are exes, so yeah,” I admitted freely. I didn’t see any particular reason to hide that fact. “Some things happened, we broke up, and I said some pretty harsh stuff to her when we split apart in the end. ‘I can’t even see you as a girl anymore,’ or something along those lines. I was thinking she might’ve decided to act like a guy in the world of supernatural battles as a way of getting back at me, maybe.”

I laid out the theory more or less as it came to mind...and only after I finished did I realize how incredibly embarrassing it would be if I turned out to have been off the mark. I would end up looking like some sort of hypernarcissist, in the worst case.

“Huh! That’s a shock. Your ex, seriously? And she didn’t dress like a guy when you were together? She just acted like a normal girl?” asked Aki.

“Right,” I said. “She liked a sort of rustic style of clothing—big loose dresses and stuff. But, well...I guess she did do an awful lot of acting, come to think of it. I’m sure she wasn’t actually interested in any of my hobbies at all, but she’d always listen to me like they were the most interesting things in the world, and she’d play the games I recommended, and she’d go with me to watch all the anime movies I wanted to see...”

...and she’d cheat on me behind my back, I added internally. Certainly couldn’t say that part out loud. Even I had at least that much common decency.

“When I think back on it, she might’ve been overacting a little,” I continued. “She was... How to put it...? She was doing her best to act like the ideal girlfriend, essentially. She made herself look cheerful and understanding, she never acted selfishly, she tried to understand my interests... She was pretending to be the sort of girl that guys wish they could have.”

That was the persona she’d tried to put on—the persona she’d maintained, however hard she’d had to push herself to do so. When I’d learned that Tamaki had cheated on me, she’d apologized to me over and over again at first. When she’d realized that it wasn’t going to work, though, her personality took a turn—twisting and boiling over as she’d lashed out in a frenzy at me.

Don’t you know how much I’ve been putting up with this whole time?!

I tried so, so hard to be what you wanted me to be!

She’d screamed excuse after excuse at me—though of course, she’d done it in a no-holds-barred Fukushima accent. She’d confessed at maximum volume that everything she’d done up to that point had all been an act. She’d held back and pushed herself to put on a persona to the point that she was practically screaming “Compliment me! Praise me!” over and over. At the time, all I’d thought about it was that it was really obnoxious.

“I wonder why she pushed herself so hard to keep the act up? If pushing and pushing was just going to make her explode in the end, then she could’ve just not bothered acting in the first place,” I said quietly.

“Huh? Are you even listening to yourself?” Aki replied with a grimace. “You know exactly why she pushed herself. Why would a girl do her best to act like the perfect girlfriend? Because she loves her boyfriend, that’s why! I mean, no crap, right?”

I didn’t say a word.

“When girls put on an act like that...actually, not just girls—when anyone puts on an act or builds up a social identity, the reason’s always super simple. It’s because they want people to like them, or at least don’t want people to hate them. That’s all there is to it, isn’t it?”

Again, I said nothing—but I did feel a certain sinking sensation in my gut. Wanting to be liked? Not wanting to be hated? They were feelings that I’d never experienced and, as such, feelings that I’d never been able to pick up on at all.

Oh—is that how it was? Tamaki had wanted me to like her? She’d wanted me not to hate her?

“Ah, right! Talking about Hinotama just reminded me—I’ve been wondering how things ended up turning out with her and Andou Jurai. You know anything, Shizu?” Aki abruptly asked.

“Huh?” I grunted. “You know about Andou, Nakki?”

“I mean, yeah. He’s supposed to be childhood friends with that apron girl we kidnapped a while back, isn’t he? ’Course I know about him. The other day—like, before Fallen Black split up—Hinotama asked me to go take a look at him too.”

Natsu Aki’s supernatural power, Head Hunting, gave her the ability to learn everything there was to know about a person’s power, from top to bottom, as long as she could get so much as a single glance at them. If Tamaki asked Aki to look into Andou, then... Hmm. I guess she was trying to get a grasp on Andou’s power before she staged her sneak attack?

“What a letdown of a power, though, seriously. Dark and Dark, I think he called it? How could you get any more useless than making black fire that doesn’t even burn? Like, seriously, the name’s more impressive than the actual power!”

Strictly speaking, Aki’s ability let her learn about her target’s power by reading said target’s mind. That meant that if her target happened to have named their power, she would pick up on that piece of info as well. And not only that...

“And then the other power he awakened to later—Dark and Dark of the End? That one’s super useless too!”

...she could also see aspects of powers that her target was keeping in reserve, revealing their hidden trump cards with ease. Her power had no direct combat capabilities, but when it came to information warfare, it was downright unparalleled.

Huh...? Wait a second. No, seriously, wait. What is this feeling? Why am I getting chills? 

An indescribably acute sense of impending doom had just come over me. It was like...like how it feels to be browsing Twitter and accidentally stumble across spoilers for the last episode of a late-night anime you’ve recorded, or to follow a manga volume to volume and get spoiled by someone who’s up-to-date on the magazine release. And, while that sense of dread was crashing into me...

“It lets him make flames that really do burn super hot, but they burn him too? How’re you supposed to use that?”

She said it so casually. She simply revealed the truth behind Andou’s hidden power without the slightest hint of gravitas. The hidden power that had been cloaked in mystery for so, so long...

“...”

Sh-She seriously just said that?! Whaaaaaat?! Now?! Now, really?! Is this seriously when and how that’s getting revealed?! All that endlessly dragged-out foreshadowing, for this?!

No, no, this can’t be happening. The big reveal of Andou’s secret power was something that the readers—that I—had been on the edge of our seats waiting for since it was first introduced! I’d had so many chances to look into it, and I’d been so tempted to do so, but I’d held myself back!

I’d been convinced that it wouldn’t be revealed until the absolute climax of the final Guiltia Sin Jurai versus Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First battle. I’d been so excited for it...and I’d never even dreamed that it’d get spoiled for me, least of all in such a stupid way. Seriously, what the hell kind of slipshod reveal was that? At least...at least give it a bit of emphasis by putting line breaks around it or something!

Like this—opening up space around the line gives it a real “Look! This is the big moment!” feeling, doesn’t it?!

Framing that revelation like it was just any other old line was just so sad for poor Andou. Just because the anime preempted the original novels on the reveal doesn’t mean it’s okay to treat it like an afterthought when the novels do get around to it, does it? Anime is anime and novels are novels, aren’t they?

“What’s wrong, Shizu? You’ve got this really sad look on your face.”

“It’s...nothing. I’m fine. I just suddenly remembered all the times I’ve had new transformations in Kamen Rider and Precure get spoiled for me by an ad before they were revealed in the actual show...”

“Huh. Weird.”

“Hey, Nakki? Is that really how Andou’s power works? The whole thing where he can make hot fire, but it burns him too, I mean...?”

“Yup, sure is.”

Apparently, she was serious. And, honestly? What a meta sort of power it was, when all’s said and done. People with flame-based powers not being burned by their own flames was more or less a given in supernatural battle stories, after all. Of course bathing your arm in flames would hurt like hell in real life, but in the world of fiction, it gets hand-waved away, easy as that. Quibbling about why flame-wielding characters’ clothes don’t get burned to cinders is a waste of everyone’s time. When I tried to think of characters with powers that had actually addressed that contradiction in-universe, Genthru was the only one I could come up with offhand.

“Oh, there was one more thing, actually,” said Aki. “I guess the flames he makes with that power never, ever go out, no matter what happens? Like, not even he can put them out, even if he wants to.”

Ooh, now that’s kinda cool, actually! A technique that can’t even be controlled by its own user is chuuniriffic in a really Andou sort of way... Or so I thought for a moment, but the next moment, it hit me that the person who’d be absolutely first in line to get burned to death by said unquenchable flame would be none other than Andou himself. It was a self-destruct skill if I’d ever heard of one. Okay, really, could he have possibly drawn a shorter straw? You didn’t have to commit quite this hard to being the comic relief, Andou! You could’ve stopped ages ago!

“So, how about it, Shizu? Any clue what Hinotama’s up to?” Aki asked, blithely disregarding the fact that she’d just dropped a nuclear-grade spoiler bomb right on my head.

“Oh... Yeah,” I said. “Sounds like she’s mid battle right about now. She had Akutagawa use his power to help her mess with Andou, apparently.”

“Oh? She got Gawanagi’s help...? Guess that means the other side’s short-staffed right about now, huh?”

Whoops. Maybe I should have kept that to myself? Aki’s casual probing had lured me directly into leaking what might very well have been quite relevant information to her.

As a dedicated observer who maintained a strict stance of neutrality, this was as dire of a mistake as I could possibly make...well, no, not really. I wasn’t planning on siding with either Kiryuu or Saitou, but I wasn’t terribly dedicated to staying directly in the middle either. To me, being a reader meant being an observer who didn’t devote himself exclusively to observing. After all, even if my intervention threw the board into a state of chaos, wouldn’t that just make watching the results play out more interesting?

Aki paused to think for a moment, then she pulled her phone out from her bag and started tapping away. She was contacting someone through LINE, best as I could tell.

“Getting in touch with Saitou?” I asked.

“Yup,” said Aki. “Just calling Tomi and Toks together for a quick strategy meeting.”

“You decided to fight back against Kiryuu, didn’t you?”

“Sure did. I’m in the same boat as Tomi, basically—I just wanna give Ryuu one good punch, that’s all,” said Aki.

What a refreshingly simple train of logic.

“Looks like Tomi and Toks are up to get together right away. You wanna come along, Shizu? Bet we could give you a ride to the station.”

“Hmm... No, I think I’ll refrain. I’ve already had a nice, long chat with Saitou...and I’d prefer not to meet with Toki at all, frankly.”

“Hm? Why? Can’t stand him?”

“It’s less that I can’t stand him and more that I can’t deal with him,” I explained.

There wasn’t any particular reason I couldn’t handle Toki—although I’d only met him once, frankly, I would’ve been happy to never meet him again. People like me were just viscerally, instinctually unable to jibe with delinquent bikers like him, and that’s a fact.