Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 11 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Sagamicizm of the Mother and...

If you were to ask me whether or not I’m alive, what could I possibly say other than “Yes, I am”?

There’s no big twist about me having been a ghost all along coming up, I assure you. I am alive. Alive and well. I breathe, I eat, I excrete, I jack off—I have the same bodily functions and metabolic cycle that every other flesh-and-blood human being does.

I’m alive...but what if? What if, in spite of all the irrefutable proof of my mortality, I were to operate under the assumption that I am, in fact, dead? If I were to do so, then there’s one thing I could say with certainty: I would know, without question, the precise day on which I died.

On that day, I experienced death. On that day, I was ejected from this world’s dramatis personae. On that day, I became the reader I am.

There are a few people out there who know about what happened back then...but there’s only one individual in this world whom I personally, deliberately told the truth to. Just him—my former friend and current acquaintance.

“Hey, mom. Been a while. I brought a friend to see you today.”

I was in the second ward of the local general hospital—the ward where long-term inpatients were lodged—in an individual room on the third floor. The room was plain and undecorated, its only feature to speak of being a white bed with white sheets where a woman lay sleeping. Though her face was emaciated, there was still something about her—a certain clear, striking beauty—that made it impossible to think she was wasting away. Her name was Sagami Shizuka, and she was my mother.

“Whoops! My mistake. Not a friend—an acquaintance. It’s a little complicated, but I’ll explain the whole situation some other time,” I said as I sat down on the stool by the bed, then turned to look back at the doorway. “Well, Andou? Don’t just stand there. You’re blocking the hallway. Come on inside.”

Andou didn’t say a word, but he stepped inside and silently slid the door shut. I pulled over a second stool for him, which he stiffly sat down on. He looked shaken...or, well, more like he was at a loss for how he should react to the situation he found himself in.

“Let me introduce you, mom. This is Andou Jurai. We go to different middle schools, but things sort of just worked out and we ended up getting to know each other,” I said, speaking to her like I always did. My mom, as always, didn’t reply. All I could make out from her was the ever so faint sound of her breathing as she slumbered away. You’d almost think she wasn’t alive at all.

I gave Andou a look. He still seemed rather nervous, but he said “Nice to meet you” and offered a slight nod in her direction.

It was spring—the start of our third year in middle school. We’d settled into our vague and ambiguous “acquaintances, not friends” relationship, never drawing too close or drifting too far away from one another...and now, I had decided to bring Andou with me to visit my mom. I hadn’t had any big reason for doing so—I’d just felt like it. I’d decided to tell him my origin as a reader purely on a whim.

“She looks so peaceful, doesn’t she?” I said, my words cutting through the heavy, stifling atmosphere that had fallen over the room. “It’s almost hard to believe, right? She really is alive, though. She is.”

“...”

“Huh? Andou, that was a Touch joke. Isn’t this the part where you’re supposed to say something like ‘This is no time for stupid reference humor’? You’re making it look like I bombed my delivery!”

“No...I won’t call you out. This really isn’t the time for that either,” Andou said with an incredibly uncomfortable look on his face.

I snickered. “Let me guess: you’re thinking about how awkward this is, right?”

“Not really, no...”

“Ha ha ha! It’s fine—no need to be considerate. Though I suppose not acting considerate would be hard in its own right, wouldn’t it? It’s downright awkward to get thrust into a situation that’s this heavy. How are you supposed to react to being introduced to some guy’s comatose mother?” I said with a cheerful grin.

Andou didn’t match my upbeat tone. “Is she sick?” he asked after a pause.

“Not sick, no,” I replied. “She got into an accident, that’s all. A good long while ago, a truck ran straight into a bus. It was a disaster, really. My mom and I were out shopping, and the truck driver lost control after the collision and flew off the road, straight toward us. I made it out unscathed, miraculously enough, but my mom wasn’t so lucky. She survived—barely—but she hasn’t woken up at all since.”

“Since when...?”

“Oh, coming up on a decade ago, I’d think?”

Andou took in a sharp breath.

“Maybe she got sent off to another world! You never know,” I continued. “Have you heard about that trend, Andou? People getting hit by trucks, dying, and getting reincarnated in another world is the big thing in web novels these days. Maybe my mom’s off in some fantasy world with skills and a status box, living the slow life and enjoying every minute of it!”

I was playing the clown, but Andou still didn’t even try to chastise me. The look on his face was grave. It was like he felt he had to say something, but he couldn’t bring himself to squeeze out anything more than a belated, mumbled “That...must be tough.”

“Hmm. Well, it’s probably not as bad as you think it is. The hospital staff handles most everything, really, and I’ve got gobs of money thanks to insurance and the legal settlement. That’s the only reason she’s been able to spend a decade hospitalized in a single room like this—it’s a real luxury.”

“I wasn’t talking about the money.”

“Of course you weren’t. You were talking about feelings.”

Silence fell once more. It was a quiet, peaceful moment, broken only by my mother’s faint breathing. Eventually, I spoke up again.

“So, Andou, what do you think?”

“About what...?”

“You know—my circumstances. My backstory.”

“...”

“It’s the sort of background a main character would have, isn’t it?” I said. “Pretty heroic, right? Makes me look like a protagonist, doesn’t it?”

Andou’s eyes widened. He looked at me like you’d look at a terrifying, man-eating monster.

“Having a relative or a lover who ends up in a coma, not waking up for years on end... That’s a whole trope, isn’t it? It’s all over the place. I can understand why, to be fair—it’s a convenient backstory to give a character for all sorts of reasons. Having a protagonist fight for the sake of an unconscious person makes them look super cool, for one thing, and you’ve got a built-in tearjerker of a happy ending if you just make them wake up again at the end of it all.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Sagami...?”

“Oh, I’m not trying to make fun of sob stories like that or anything! I’m pretty into nakige, after all. I know they’ve sort of fallen out of fashion lately, but I’m hoping the genre will have another boom one of these days.”

“...”

“Of course, I definitely wouldn’t want to see a nakige have the comatose heroine be the protagonist’s mother. Mother-son incest stuff really doesn’t do it for me. It’s cool when a battle manga protagonist fights for their mom’s sake, I guess... Hm. But that hasn’t really been in style either recently, has it? It feels like manga and anime mostly just pretend that the protagonist’s parents don’t exist these days. Fighting for a sister, though? Now that’s the ticket if you want to fire an audience up, in more ways than one. Having a main character fight to save their mother hasn’t really been a thing since the days of JoJo’s Part 3 and Flame of Recca—”

“Sagami!” Andou shouted. He probably just couldn’t take it anymore and had to cut me off.

“Andou, please, this is a hospital. Keep your voice down. You’ll wake my mom up at this rate!”

“...”

“Oh, wait—I guess that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? Ha ha ha!”

Andou’s furious shout hadn’t made so much as a dent in my attitude, and now he just glared at me. There was anger clouding his eyes—anger and terror.

“Why...? Why, Sagami? Why are you always, always like this?” asked Andou. “She’s your mother, isn’t she? So...how can you talk about her like she has nothing to do with you? Why are you acting like a third party? Why are you acting like you’re just reading all this in a story?!”

“I can’t help it. I’m a reader to the core. No matter who or what I’m looking at, that’s the only way I’ll ever be able to see things. My own parent’s no exception.”

Andou took another deep breath.

“After all,” I continued, “if I didn’t, I would break down in a heartbeat.”

“Huh...?”

“In order to stay myself, I had no choice but to become a reader,” I said. I said it like I was talking about someone else entirely—like my own nature was something that I’d observed from a detached, outside perspective.

Back then—on that day—the truck had lost control, practically rolling over itself as it barreled in my direction. I still remember exactly how shrill the sound of its body grating against the asphalt was. The instant before it scored a direct hit on me, however, something else slammed into me first, knocking me out of the way. That something was my mom.

The next thing I knew, the truck had sent her flying through the air. After dashing against the ground, she rolled to a stop and lay there, blood pouring from wounds all over her body, not moving a muscle. And me? I just stood there. Watching. Looking on at the scene before me, as if I were seeing it in a movie or an anime.

“My mom protected me, and she ended up in a coma as a result. Back then, I was too young to handle all the grief and guilt that made me feel...so I became a reader instead. Viewing anything and everything like it had nothing to do with me was the only way I could protect myself,” I said, as if—once again—I were talking about someone else entirely. I described my own history with all the attachment I’d feel reading out a random Wikipedia page, simply summarizing it in objective form. “I wasn’t transmigrated into a fantasy world, but still, on that day, I disappeared from this one. I was expelled from the world, and I’ve existed outside of it ever since.”

I was fully confident that if one read the cast list in the story of this world, my name would be absent. I was out of phase—in a different dimension—a different reality—a different story altogether than the one I’d been born in.

“And that, Andou, is why I’m not sad at all, to an almost shocking degree. You can’t make your readers cry by having a character’s parents get caught up in an accident without any foreshadowing these days. That’s more likely to make us laugh, if anything. I mean, really—having her get hit by a truck and end up in a coma out of nowhere? Talk about perfunctory! Couldn’t the setup have at least been a little more elaborate?”

There’s only one sort of being that’s allowed to laugh in the face of people’s deaths and misfortune: the readers. If someone dies without warning, they’ll say “LMAO where’d that come from,” and if someone dies touchingly and emotionally, they’ll say “It’s so obvious that this is the part where we’re supposed to cry.” If a character hesitates for even a moment to take another person’s life, they’ll say “God, this is so obnoxious! Just off him already!” and if a character kills without hesitation, they’ll say “Man, it’s so nice that they don’t make a whole thing out of killing people each and every time. This is great.”

And so I, a fellow reader, will say this: if there’s a god, and if that god is the equivalent of this world’s author, then I will make fun of their work to the bitter end. I’ll flame that shit to hell and back again on the message board of my mindscape. My only comment on all of this will be “What sorta asspull plot twist was that?! LMAO!”

“So, Andou? What do you think? That’s what being a reader means to me. I don’t think that anyone particularly cares about the origin story of Sagami Shizumu, but now you know.”

“...”

“Are you disgusted? Or maybe you’re sympathizing with me?”

“...Why?” asked Andou, ignoring my question in favor of posing one of his own. “Why did you tell me all this?”

“Just a whim. No real reason, really,” I said. “If I had to give one, though...I was just curious about how you would react.”

You might think that my relationship with Andou would have changed after that day—but it didn’t. Disclosing the truth of my past didn’t prompt any sort of shift at all. Our peculiar acquaintances-not-friends relationship remained the same as ever, almost as if nothing had happened entirely.

On the other hand, of course, it’s possible that something did change in Andou’s state of mind regarding me, and I’d just never noticed. It would be rather shocking, after all, if an event of that magnitude prompted no development whatsoever. Andou might have had his own thoughts about the discussion, and he might have reevaluated what had happened up to that point in any number of ways.

Oh, on a similar subject—there was a bit of a near miss on that day in particular. It was actually a little funny, looking back. It almost felt like fate had intervened to lay down a bit of foreshadowing.

Almost immediately after Andou went home, a man had shown up for a visit as if to take his place. I suppose you could say that he was something akin to a childhood friend of mine. He was the son of the nurse in charge of my mom, specifically, and that association had led to us getting to know each other. I really, truly could never even begin to express my regret at the fact that the one childhood friend I had was, in fact, a guy.

The meeting between him and Andou that’d failed to transpire that day would finally occur a few years down the line, in a manner that I certainly had never anticipated. It was like they were meant for each other and the fates had finally brought them together. They were truly alike—two sides of the same coin—and as the former set out a canvas and painted the world he envisioned upon it, the latter was gradually, inevitably, drawn into that image...

“Bwa ha ha!”

Whatever Genre had done to ward people away hadn’t been undone the second she’d disappeared, so for some time afterward, I’d wandered along in a lonely state of complete solitude...until, suddenly, that silent world was invaded by a single man. His strikingly silver hair shone like a spotlight in the dark of night, even as his jet-black long coat melted into the inky void and his equally dark, rounded sunglasses gave the impression that he definitely couldn’t see where he was walking. He was laughing that same dry, peculiar laugh he always did when he appeared before me.

“Looks like I was a moment too late, huh?” said the man with a confident grin.

His was a name I knew very well. “It’s been a while, Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First.”

“Don’t call me Kiryuu. It’s Kiryuu Hel—” Kiryuu began, then froze in place midword.

Oh, come on. Really? “Hold on a second, Kiryuu. What was that? I try to play along with your little made-up backstory for once, and this is the reception I get?” I said with a sigh.

“...I can’t sense anyone in the vicinity, but I can tell I haven’t wandered into another world. No, what’s really going on is that we’ve been erased from the perceptions of anyone nearby, and anyone nearby has been erased from our perceptions as well. I know this power... It looks like Yusano Militaria’s been out and about lately.”

Oh, so we’re just pretending that tragic little slipup didn’t happen? I see how it is. I would’ve felt bad for hounding him too mercilessly for it, so I decided to just play along and ignore it as well.

“Well, good evening to you,” I sighed. “‘A moment too late,’ you said...? Does that mean you were trying to catch up with Genre?”

“That’s right,” said Kiryuu. “I was hoping to wrap things up with her nice and early.”

Hmm. So he’s just as excited to battle Yusano Genre as she is to take him on. Evidently, Fallen Black had segued into a three-way struggle following its dissolution: Kiryuu Hajime’s team versus Saitou Hitomi’s team versus Yusano Genre and her myriad alternate personalities. Three forces locked in a three-way standoff—though “locked” might have been the wrong word, since two out of those three seemed liable to break out in open fighting at any moment.

“Genre seemed like she was aiming to take you on as well,” I said. “I don’t think you need to bother searching for her, actually. She’ll be showing up before too long to attack you herself, I’d say.”

“Oh?”

“She seemed like she was chomping at the bit for a rematch. Oh, and she has a secret weapon in store to use against you as well...though personally, I can’t say it struck me as much of a weapon at all. I have no idea what she thinks giving powers names, or changing them, or whatever could possibly—”

The next thing I knew, I felt Kiryuu grab onto my lapels and wrench me forward. I looked up in shock...and was shocked again when I saw his face. Kiryuu looked more shaken than I’d ever seen him before.

“What was that...? Wh-What are you talking about, Shizumu? Giving powers names? Changing them? Does that mean Genre...did away with Sex Eclipse? She got rid of the name I thought up for her power and gave it a new one herself?”

“Y-Yeah. I, uh, guess she got a new personality that’s really into all that naming stuff, or something...?” I stammered. It might have been bad form to reveal the details of Genre’s secret weapon, but the sheer pressure that Kiryuu was exuding in his apparent panic loosened my lips before I knew it.

“So...? What did she call it? What’s her power’s new name?” asked Kiryuu.

“Um... I believe it was the Queen of Snowy Oblivion, Faceless?”

“Wha—?!”

Kiryuu staggered backward and fell to a knee, releasing my lapels and pressing a hand to his face. He looked powerfully shaken.

“...N-Not bad. Not a bad name at all,” he said. “I can’t believe this... I completely underestimated her. Who would have thought that Genre of all people could ever drive me into a corner like this...?”

I found myself at a loss for a comment. Contrary to all my expectations, Genre’s secret weapon had, in fact, been tremendously effective. Some mysteries simply defied all imagination.

“‘Faceless’...referring to her natural state of expressionlessness, with ‘oblivion’ relating to its emptiness and ‘snow’ illustrating the cold impression it gives. Snow—in other words, snowflakes, alluding to the countless personalities within her, each like the crystallized form of a shapeless, fluid consciousness? Flakes of snow, drifting through the void that is her mindscape—all under the auspices of she who reigns supreme as queen of that snowy oblivion, an expressionless monarch with no face to call her own... Damn, she’s good!”

You’re reading way too deep into this! In fact, he’d come up with a more compelling explanation for the name than its creator had managed. His appreciation for the name had gone so far, it’d looped around and ended up being downright rude to the original artist. This is like when spin-off novels for manga take it upon themselves to retcon in explanations for inconsistencies in the original work! Stop it, please!

“Hah, hah... Ugh. We’re evenly matched...”

Oh, “evenly matched,” he says. At what, exactly?!

“Bwa ha ha... I was hoping to dispose of that specter of the Fourth nice and quickly, but it looks like she’s set on playing on my level now. She’s got guts to try to overwrite a name that I came up with, that’s for damn sure. You’ve strolled your way onto forbidden ground, Yusano Genre!”

It seemed that the one thing that would upset Kiryuu more than making fun of one of the names he’d come up with was overwriting one of the names that he’d come up with. Frankly, I couldn’t keep up with the pace of the conversation at all...

“A ‘specter of the Fourth,’ you say?”

...and so, I decided to turn it in a direction I was more comfortable with.

“Ah...that’s right. The battle between Kiryuu Hajime and Yusano Genre already came to a conclusion during the Fourth Spirit War,” I observed. “It’s long since over and done with. Having the two of you fight again would be nothing more than a rehash—running through the same plot development all over again. And, well, not to be rude, but...Yusano Genre just isn’t that compelling of a character in the first place. She’s certainly not the sort of character who’d be worth reintroducing to the plot and turning into a proper boss all over again. If you’re gonna bring back a boss character, then you should at least have the decency to portray them as a total scrub, like Mecha Frieza in the Cell Saga.” Let’s just call Resurrection ‘F’ an outlier. “Yusano Genre’s no boss character...or at the very least, you’re not thinking of her as one. So, then...who exactly is the final boss of this arc—of the Fifth Spirit War?”

Kiryuu didn’t answer that question—and so, I carried on with my theorizing.

“I’ve finally figured it out. I understand what you’re trying to use our school’s literary club for, Kiryuu.”

In the fall of last year, the literary club’s members had awakened to supernatural powers. When the Fourth Spirit War had concluded and the Fifth Spirit War started immediately afterward, Kiryuu had ordered his Spirit Handler, Leatia, to forcibly awaken them. And why did he go to the trouble?

“You’re trying to make the literary club’s members into a group-based final boss fight, aren’t you?”

I’d always thought it was strange. Why had the girls in the literary club ended up with such outrageously powerful abilities? If you compared their powers to those of the other participants in the Spirit War, you’d quickly find that they didn’t even bear comparison. They were in such a class of their own that the whole exercise of comparing them felt downright silly. Their powers were in a whole different dimension, and taking them on in a fight would bring you nothing but despair. They were, in short, the sort of powers that a battle manga’s final foe would be given.

“The Fifth Spirit War came about because you wished for it. In other words, this whole War’s dancing to your tune. You added in the rule about the Final Eight, and it would be just as easy for you to insert other new rules if you felt like it—as many as you wanted. Say, for instance, you decided that certain people would be given intentionally overpowered abilities. You could make that happen for sure, right?”

Maybe he’d amped up the capabilities of the powers that they would have awakened to naturally, or maybe he’d specifically dictated that they would get the power to stop time, the power to dominate the elements, and on and on, spelling out the particulars of their god-tier abilities in fine detail. I didn’t know precisely how it had gone down, but considering the administrative authority that Kiryuu had over the War, either was believable.

“As to why you’ve been keeping them at a distance, making sure they stayed isolated from the War... Heh! Well, of course you would. That’s how it goes with final bosses, isn’t it? They don’t show up whatsoever in the early stages of the story. They step in out of absolutely nowhere to steal the stage at the end of it all.”

A final boss not appearing in the beginning is a given. They’re called final bosses for a reason. When a story’s serialization has been extended time after time, its popularity has long since peaked, the mixed media blitz has ended, and it finally seems ready to start packing up and moving toward the finish line, a character who turns out to have been pulling the puppet strings of the whole scenario from the very start will be retconned into the picture—and that is what we call a final boss.

“I’ve been supporting Andou quite a lot lately...or, really, I’ve been empathizing with him. That must be why it took me so long to notice,” I said.

I hadn’t even realized that, subconsciously, I’d started viewing Andou Jurai as the protagonist of the story I was reading. When I looked at it from a new perspective, though—when I thought of Kiryuu Hajime as the main character—the answer became clear as day. There’s no such thing in this world as a distinction between the main story and the spinoffs. Kiryuu Hajime had his own, individual main story, and if he was the protagonist, then the only person who could be suitable to play the part of his final boss would be...

“...Kanzaki Tomoyo,” I said.

I spoke the name of the half sister of the man before me. What could be more conventional than having the final boss be a relative of the protagonist?

“I’d bet that if things had followed your original plan, Fallen Black and the literary club’s members would be kicking off an all-out war with each other right about now. That’s what you wanted—why else would you have shaken up the War’s rules to encourage a team-based competition? I guess that plan’s already fallen most of the way apart at this point, but if things had worked out the way you were hoping they would, both teams would’ve put up a hard fight and gradually whittled down each other’s numbers...until, at the end of it all, the Fifth Spirit War would conclude with a battle between siblings: Kiryuu Hajime and Kanzaki Tomoyo. Isn’t that right?”

That would explain why Kanzaki Tomoyo had been given the power she’d received. There could hardly be a more final-boss-like ability than the power to stop time. Final boss powers were generally almighty and sometimes downright unbeatable. It just made sense—after all, the more powerful the foe they take on, the brighter the protagonist shines when they win in the end.

“I’m no expert, but if memory serves, Einstein’s theory of relativity states that there’s a very close relationship between time and the force of gravity. Time isn’t as almighty as we think it is because gravity exerts a constant and inextricable influence over it, or something to that effect.”

The power to rule over time, paired with the power to desecrate gravity. Having the protagonist’s power match that of the final boss was yet another conventional storytelling device.

“At the end of his life-and-death struggle, Kiryuu Hajime faces down Kanzaki Tomoyo’s supremely broken ability and somehow manages to defeat her. That’s the storyline that you had in mind—isn’t it, Kiryuu?”

“Bwa ha ha!” Kiryuu laughed. It wasn’t a laugh that told me I had him dead to rights and he was trying to play it off, though. It was the same dry, peculiar laugh he always favored. “Finished fantasizing, Shizumu? Or, what, were you hoping I’d say ‘That’s right—you figured it all out!’ or something?”

“Perish the thought! Even if I was completely right, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell me. I’m firmly disinterested in spoilers,” I said with a smirk and a shake of my head. “This is all pure theorycrafting on my part. I’m just airing my wild, delusional speculation. It’s a reader’s nature to guess what’s going to happen next, after all.”

It was all just speculation—all just fantasy. If I turned out to be wrong, I wouldn’t take any responsibility for my mistake, but if I turned out to be right, I’d be insufferably smug about it. Even if only one in ten of my predictions paid off, I’d still lord that achievement over everyone and act like I was a prophet incarnate.

“I just felt like sharing the theory I’d come up with...and frankly, I’m not particularly confident that I’m right. For one thing, this theory effectively excludes Andou from the scenario entirely.”

Surely, there was no way a character like him could ever be kept out of the loop. There was simply no way Kiryuu would choose to disregard him. Even if he hadn’t known that Andou existed as of the start of the Fifth Spirit War, the two of them had met shortly thereafter. The way they’d crossed paths had been a miraculous feat of fate itself. And so, even if all my speculation had been completely on the money, there was every chance that Kiryuu had already drastically rewritten his storyline. He might have chosen to take the plot’s reins and steer it in an altogether different direction.

There was a mountain’s worth of stories that had wound up progressing in an entirely different manner than their author had initially intended, and many of those stories had gone down in history as masterpieces. That fact raised a new question: was the fragmentation of Fallen Black and the breakdown of the storyline where they’d come to blows with the literary club all part of a new final plot arc that Kiryuu was now bringing to fruition?

“You’d do well to overestimate me,” said Kiryuu. “Then, and only then, will you finally underestimate me.”

I’d heard that line from him before, and hearing it again, I let out a sigh. “You know that nothing good ever comes from raising expectations like that, right? Just look at manga and anime—the lower your expectations are, the more interesting they actually end up seeming. If you go into a series expecting an all-time masterpiece, you’ll be way more disappointed by what you get in the end than you would’ve been if you’d kept a more neutral attitude.”

“Wrong. You’ve got it backward.”

“Backward?”

“Exactly backward. The higher your expectations, the better. Everything’s way more fun that way,” said Kiryuu.

An instant later, I was overcome with a sense of déjà vu. I had the clearest feeling that someone had said something very similar to me before...but who was it?

Oh. I remember now. It was Andou.

He’d said almost the exact same thing to me once, a long time ago. I’d made the trite and played-out argument that lowering expectations made everything seem more interesting, and he’d pushed back against the theory.

“Nothing’s interesting if you don’t keep your expectations up,” he’d said.

“When you set your expectations as high as possible and convince yourself that whatever you’re reading’s gonna be the best thing ever, then you’ll notice all sorts of great stuff about it that might’ve slipped past you otherwise!” he’d said.

“You have to overestimate—to push your expectations to their absolute limits,” said Kiryuu. “Whether you’re looking at a manga, an anime, a novel, or even the very world that you live in, if you don’t set your expectations high, you’ll never be able to understand what makes it really interesting.”

Overestimate on purpose. Set your expectations as high as possible, for yourself and for the world. I could hardly think of a more perfectly chuuni argument to pose. It was because chuunis had such high expectations for the world and themselves that their sense of self-importance grew so overblown. Then they’d seek to make the world match their ideals, and as a direct result, they’d come to be viewed as cringe by society at large. Perhaps that was the true identity of chuunibyou, in the end: a symptom of those who’d failed to lower their expectations for themselves and their world.

I pondered in silence for a moment, and the next thing I knew, Kiryuu had vanished. That same instant, other people returned to the street around me. It was like a switch had suddenly been flipped, and judging by that fact, Kiryuu had been right—the power that had caused my isolation had impacted my perceptions rather than actually physically removing people from my vicinity.

That’s...terrifying, actually, now that I think about it. Surely the odds of me walking face-first into someone moving the opposite direction had been extremely high? It had all worked out, thankfully, probably on account of the area being sparsely populated to begin with. How does that work for everyone else, though? If they couldn’t perceive me before and that effect suddenly lapsed, then from their perspective, wouldn’t it seem like a person had just appeared out of thin air right in—

“Augh! Wh-Where’d you come from?!” a feminine voice screamed from behind me. My fears had been entirely rational—apparently, I’d appeared directly in the path of a woman who was walking along the street.

“Umm, sorry about that. I just had the irresistible urge to practice doing incredibly abrupt side steps, that’s all,” I said, spouting out the first random excuse that came to mind as I turned around...then froze with shock. That only lasted a moment, though—after all, it all made perfect sense when I really thought about it.

Oh, okay. I see what’s happening. I guess it would turn out this way, wouldn’t it? Considering how the day’s gone so far, you might even say this was bound to happen.

“Wait...huh? Sagami...?”

Of course I would have to talk with her too before the day was done.

“Oh, well, what a coincidence,” I said. “I do believe that this is the first time we’ve spoken like this. Isn’t it...Kanzaki Tomoyo?”