Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 12 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Path of Over Element

The lord of five aspects, Over Element—this was the title that had been bestowed upon Kushikawa Hatoko and, by extension, the name of the power she’d awakened to, which granted her command of nature’s essences. The one who had bestowed it, needless to say, was none other than me. Between “the lord of five aspects” serving as its introductory appellation and the English words “Over Element” providing a foreign flair, it was a truly eccentric and fantastic name for a power to have, if I do say so myself.

Hatoko’s power gave her the ability to control five elements as she saw fit. Nay—not control. That word was far too half-hearted to do her power justice. From fractured earth to roiling rapids, from crimson hellfire to savage gales, all the way up to and including the most purifying luminescences, Hatoko held the elements in the palm of her hand, reigning over them with the incontestable authority of a goddess. Her power over the elements was absolute, and she wielded it with the greatest of ease. As if that weren’t enough, she was also capable of fusing opposing elements into amalgamations that were greater than the sum of their parts, elevating them to unthinkable heights and making her power truly daunting to contend with.

Allow me to rephrase my earlier statement—Hatoko didn’t control or manipulate the elements. She ruled them. No other word could do her capabilities justice. All the powers of nature were hers to bend as she saw fit, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that she dwelled within a realm of her own, untouchable by the mere mortals beneath her.

Well, I mean...yes, I did say that Chifuyu’s power could be considered an objective upgrade of Hatoko’s in the bonus story before last, but let’s just not worry about that detail, okay? Hatoko could Aspect Splice, for one thing, and if she and Chifuyu both tried facing off in a match of literal, fire-based firepower, I was pretty positive that Hatoko would win.

Indeed, Hatoko had the power to rule over five separate elements, and the first time she displayed her abilities to us, I’d been struck by an immediate thought: That’s just downright cheating! Surely five elements was overdoing it? It was way too all-purpose—like the sort of ultimate ability an elementary schooler would dream up. By my personal standards—or, well, my preferences—it just made sense to limit yourself to an absolute maximum of two elements, in the unlikely event you went for more than one. Like, it worked for Flazzard and Todoroki Shoto because they were all about having the opposing elements of fire and ice packed into one person. Five, though? No way.

To be totally frank, it really did come across as cheating. Of course, all of the literary club’s members except me had powers that could potentially be seen as cheating, but personally speaking—and this really is just my opinion—Hatoko’s was the most cheat-tastic of all of them. If I had to explain why, I guess the best way to put it would be that hers felt the most off.

It’s gotten more and more common lately for the word “cheat” to be used as a way to say something is so powerful as to seem unfair, specifically in the context of media. The moment a character with an even vaguely strong ability shows up in a manga or an anime, people start shouting about that power being cheating before you know it.

That struck me as odd, in the sense that it didn’t quite match up with the literal meaning of “cheating.” The word traced back to game jargon, in theory—like, when players in an online game managed to abuse the game’s systems in ways that the developers didn’t intend. In other words, per its original usage, it referred to acts that were unfair and dishonest. In my book, that didn’t quite apply when the only problem was that your opponent’s power was so strong you didn’t stand a chance against them.

Now, the meaning of words is a fluid thing, of course. Language is constantly evolving, and it was totally possible that the meaning of “cheating” had simply started to shift a little, just like “awesome” and “nonplussed” had in the past. Still, the popular modern usage of cheating just felt wrong to me more often than not...and yet, in the case of Hatoko’s power, even I found myself thinking that it kinda felt like cheating.

I’m not just saying that. If you want proof, take a look at the first episode of the anime, right after the eyecatch, where—thanks to the timeline getting shuffled around a little in production—we jumped straight into our monthly superpower checkup, which didn’t happen until volume two in the novels. I explained the names and effects of all the literary club girls’ powers in that scene, and out of all four of them, the only one that I described as a cheat...was Hatoko’s power. I kept my cool with the other three, describing their capabilities without making a huge deal out of it, but in Over Element’s case and Over Element’s alone, I had a little freak-out and ended up shouting about how it was cheating.

In retrospect, that was kind of weird. Why would I only scream about cheating in the case of Hatoko’s power? It’d be easy enough to say “Oh, that’s just because the original author wasn’t the one who wrote that line” and call it a day, but I’m of the opinion that the best way to enjoy fiction is to read meaning into those little details, regardless of the circumstances of how they might’ve ended up in the story. And, when I tried calmly and carefully analyzing my own reasoning behind that tirade, I realized that it might’ve been a sign that I’d unconsciously felt something was slightly amiss about her power.

Something about it was out of whack with our world. It didn’t mesh with my world view. It was off—ever so slightly askew with the tropes and conventions of the supernatural battle genre. That’s why it felt like it was breaking the rules to me. There were no clear and concrete rules binding our powers in the first place, of course, but it did fly in the face of an unspoken rule of supernatural battle stories that had applied across all corners of the genre since time immemorial: one person, one power.

This is another of those intuitive things that’s hard to put into words, so the best way I can describe it is through example: it was why any one given person could only eat a single Devil Fruit or have a single Stand. There would always be exceptions to that rule, of course, and the style and world-building of a series could seriously shake it up as well, but I still think it’s reasonable to say that “each character gets one power” was a very common stance for works in the genre to take.

From that perspective in particular, Over Element was off. It was understandable when magic-wielding characters could use every element, but Hatoko had the power to rule over all of them. That just wasn’t the same thing. I couldn’t explain why, but it wasn’t. It felt like...like if someone had somehow gotten hold of all three of the starter Pokémon in the first generation games, even though they’d never done any trading at all. It existed in a dimension of its own in the power scale. It felt like cheating in the true, original meaning of the word.

Alternatively, maybe what I was feeling was anxiety. After all, the fact that a character who could use all five elements was present in our story meant that we couldn’t ever introduce characters who only had one element each. I couldn’t help but worry that the range of potential powers had been narrowed dramatically...

...Oh. No, I mean— It’s not what you think, for the record! I’m not griping because I think that Hatoko’s power was an unambiguous upgrade of mine at all! I’m not that petty, honestly. The day I learned the nature of the powers the two of us had been given, I went home, bawled my eyes out, and that was the end of it—no more resentment from then on out. It didn’t bother me at all anymore. Sure, I might’ve made like the mothers of the protagonists in a certain basketball manga and a certain other sumo manga, apologizing to my flame for not having been able to make it hotter, but that didn’t mean it’d bothered me at all!

Anyway, moving along! This probably goes without saying, but just in case, I should clarify that I didn’t mean any of this as criticism of Hatoko or Over Element itself. All I’m saying is that the power kinda felt like cheating. It felt off—like it was slightly askew of the usual standards—and try as I might, I couldn’t rid myself of that odd sense of wrongness. Her power existed ever so slightly outside of the usual supernatural battle framework, like it or not.

It was like something was slightly wrong. Like there’d been a slight but fundamental mistake. I could never quite describe the anxiety I felt in a satisfactory way, but Over Element certainly made me feel it.

“All right! Sorry for the wait, Hatoko. It’s finally your turn now!”

“Great! I’ll do my best, Juu!”

School was out for the day, and I found myself in the club room with Hatoko. We’d reached the fourth of our one-on-one interviews in what felt like no time at all. Tomoyo’s Closed Clock, Chifuyu’s World Create, and Sayumi’s Route of Origin had all received their names, and now it was Hatoko’s turn. I’d figured that she’d be going second at one point in time, but then we skipped right past her to do Chifuyu’s instead, for some weird reason. Now, at long last, Hatoko would finally have her turn in the spotlight.

“Hey, Juu. You already thought up names for Tomoyo’s, Chifuyu’s, and Sayumi’s powers, right?” asked Hatoko.

“That’s right,” I replied. “The two of us are the only ones left now.”

“I thought so! I guess you must be used to this by now, then. It sounds like we might wrap this up pretty quickly!”

“You...utter imbecile!” I bellowed.

I was just joking around, of course—I wasn’t actually angry with her. Hatoko was the one person who I could make this sort of joke with and know it wouldn’t be taken the wrong way.

“Listen up, Hatoko: the path of naming is never-ending! The moment you tell yourself that you’ve gotten used to it is the moment your skills start to atrophy! The moment you grow complacent and let yourself believe you’ve perfected your craft is the moment you start to decay! You must always strive to greater and greater heights, or your sense for names will inevitably abandon you! And also...what do you mean, ‘We might wrap this up pretty quickly’?!”

“U-Umm... Is making up names really that intense...?”

“Yes, it is. It’s incredibly intense, and you, Hatoko, lack the resolve to take it on!”

“Th-The resolve?”

“Indeed. The resolve! The resolve to strive for the ultimate name for your power, no matter how long you have to spend thinking and no matter how much effort you must expend in the process!”

Hatoko gave me a look.

“I found my resolve long ago. It’s as firm and unshakable as could be. I, for one, will never waver, never compromise on completing a name that satisfies me, even if it takes an eternity! After all,” I added, “this, well...it’s your power’s name, Hatoko.”

This time, Hatoko let out a gasp. “J-Juu... You really care that much...?”

“Heh! That’s a given. It’s what anyone would do for their comrade in arms.”

Hatoko hesitated for just a moment longer, then nodded. “Okay, then. You were right, Juu,” she said, her expression full of emotion. “I...really wasn’t resolved enough, it looks like. But I’m okay now, though! I’m just as resolved as you are, even! We’ll think up a name for my power, no matter how long it takes!”

“All right! Now that’s the spirit, Hatoko!”

“Okay! First things first, I’ll go back home to grab some bedding and a change of clothes. I’ll be back soon! Oh, and I’ll get something for us to have for dinner too!”

“Hooold up! Wait, wait, wait!” I shouted, leaping up to frantically hold Hatoko back before she dashed out of the club room in a fit of enthusiasm. “Just how many nights are you planning on staying here?!”

“Umm... About a week’s worth or so?”

“As friggin’ if! And even if we could, I don’t wanna!”

“Huuuh? But you’re the one who just said that we’d keep trying no matter how long it took, weren’t you?”

“W-Well, yeah, but...that’s different, you know? Like, we’ll take as much time as we have to, but we still have to go home before the school locks up for the night.”

“Really...? But you said you’d never, ever waver...”

“Yeah, well...it’s important to know how to waver unwaveringly, sometimes. Right, yeah—in short, I’m not wavering on wavering!”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Hatoko wailed.

Oh, don’t worry, Hatoko. It doesn’t make any sense to me either.

“So was your resolve not unwavering after all, Juu?”

“I mean, y’know...it’s one of those things. Like, you know how making buildings out of hard, stiff materials actually makes it easier for them to collapse? You need to include a certain amount of softer, more flexible materials to make them sturdy enough to withstand natural disasters. Toughness and flexibility are two sides of the same coin, so it’s fine for your resolve to be a little flexible from time to time too.”

“The one thing that’s flexible here is your explanation for all this,” Hatoko said with an exasperated sigh. “Aww. And here I thought we’d get to have a sleepover.”

“Why do you sound disappointed about that...? That gets a big no thank you from me. No way I’d ever want to sleep over at school,” I replied.

“Why not? Isn’t there something exciting about the thought of being in school at nighttime?”

“Not for me, there isn’t. Not even a little...”

“Huh? Why do you look so gloomy, Juu?”

“No reason.”

“You wouldn’t be scared of being at school at night, right...? You’ve always seemed just fine with ghost stories and places that are supposed to be haunted, so— Oh. Are you thinking about that one time?”

“Ugh!”

My words caught in my throat. I was thinking about that one time—a time I could never forget, from back in my first year of middle school. I’d decided to sneak into our middle school at nighttime, all on my own. My only reasoning for pulling that stunt? “Because the school at night was there.”

Midnight. A deserted school. At the time, that image was all it took to hype me the heck up. I was convinced that I’d run into something, like a warrior who fought the otherworldly forces of evil in secret, or evidence of a large-scale magical ritual being carried out in the building, or something.

Driven by curiosity and elevated expectations, I’d surreptitiously unlocked one of the schoolhouse’s windows before going home for the day. Then, in the dead of night, I’d sneaked out of my house and into the abandoned school. And there, lying in wait for me...had been a painful initiation in the ways of the world, courtesy of Japan’s cutting-edge security technology.

An alarm blared. I panicked. A bunch of big, muscle-bound adults came running. I really panicked. The teachers arrived. I desperately apologized. My parents were called in. I started bawling. It was a thoroughly traumatizing experience all around, and ever since then, I’d hated the idea of being in school after dark. It took ages before I stopped wincing at all the battle scenes set in schools at nighttime that you see in manga and anime.

“Boy, that kind of takes me back! You were depressed for a whole week after all that happened, Juu!”

“Don’t remind me... And look, the point is that sleepovers at school are out of the question. That’s just common sense. We have to work out a name for your power before they lock this place up for the night.”

“That would be in...about two hours, I think? Is that gonna be long enough?”

“Yeah, it’ll be fine. Spending a ton of time on a name doesn’t necessarily make it better, anyway,” I said. I really wanted to ask which moron it was who’d given that speech a moment ago about how we’d keep going no matter how long it took, even though I knew that would mean roasting myself, but I held back the urge and just kept things moving along. “Sometimes having restrictions or a deadline or something can actually make these things turn out better than if you let yourself take forever on them.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. I mean, probably.”

I wasn’t a creator myself, so this was all speculation on my part, but I got the impression that all the manga authors, writers, illustrators, composers, songwriters, and on and on—all the creatives of this world, basically—were constantly hounded and harried by the specter of looming deadlines. To them, a deadline was probably something like a terrible monster that constantly stalked you, doing its best to drive you into a corner, and thus, to your doom.

That said, I had to wonder: would a world without deadlines really be all that much better? If someone told those creatives “take all the time you want—just let us know when it’s done,” would they be able to work at the same level of performance they usually displayed? There’s a certain well-known anime quote turned internet meme that goes “Even an idiot can write a masterpiece novel if they spend twenty years working on it,” but was that really true?

Imagine if someone told you that you had twenty years to write a novel. I think the majority of people, given that task, would spend the first fifteen years or so goofing off and not writing at all. The idiots, meanwhile, would goof off for closer to nineteen and a half years before finally buckling down. You see novels and movies advertising themselves with phrases like “a masterpiece a decade in the making!” all the time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their creator actually spent that decade hard at work on their piece of fiction. They probably had tons of other stories and other work to worry about for a huge chunk of that time.

What I’m trying to say here is this: there’s no guarantee that spending a bunch of time on something will result in that something turning out as a masterpiece. Maybe it’s the restrictions imposed by deadlines—the limited amount of time to finish a piece of fiction driving its author to work their hardest on it—that causes masterpieces to be born. People always say that making something good takes time, sure, and there was certainly an element of truth to that, but on the flip side, I figured that some things could only be created because there was a limited amount of time within which they could be worked on.

“No point dragging this out, right? Let’s make our goal to have a name for your power ready by the time we have to leave and do our best to make it happen,” I said.

“Sure. Sounds good,” said Hatoko. “I guess it’s the same as studying. Spending a whole day not paying much attention and studying bit by bit has always felt a lot less effective to me than picking out a specific, shorter amount of time to really focus in.”

“Yeah. And I mean, honestly, I’m pretty used to this whole interview-based naming process by this point. I think we might wrap this up pretty quickly.”

“I sure hope so— Wait! That’s the exact same thing you chewed me out for saying just a minute ago, isn’t it?!”

Looks like I’m speaking with Delayed Comeback Hatoko, then.

We had a goal now: to finish naming Hatoko’s power by the time we had to leave for the evening! With that objective established, it was time to kick off the interview proper.

“All right, Hatoko. To start, do you have any particular requests for your power’s name?”

“Hmm. Not really, no! To be honest, I don’t understand any of this.”

“Ahh, yeah. Figures,” I said. I don’t mean this as criticism at all, but coming up with power names just wasn’t a thing people did in the reality that Hatoko lived in.

“But, I mean, it’d be boring if I just said I don’t get it and let that be the end of it! I wanna try thinking it through, but...” She sank into gloom partway through her explanation. “No matter how hard I think about it, I still don’t know where to start. My power’s really complicated, after all. It can do so many things, so I have no idea what I could even pick...”

“No need to feel bad about it. I think your power’s a tough one too.”

Frankly, Hatoko’s power really was tricky. She’d hit the nail on the head: it could do so many things that narrowing our options down to come up with a single name was rough. I’d complained in the last story about how Route of Origin was such a formless, ambiguous power that it was hard to put a name on it, and this time I found myself facing rather similar circumstances.

Five distinct elements. Five individual powers. When I tried to think up a name that would express all five of them as an all-encompassing whole, I found myself at a loss. I didn’t know where to start.

“It’s basically five powers in one, after all... And having to pack all of that into two words makes it even harder,” I sighed.

Two English words that had to be nine characters long when written in Japanese. Such was the pattern that I’d settled on for our powers’ names (though I hadn’t actually told anyone about the second requirement).

“You’re right about that, Juu. Only having two words to work with is really hard. How are you supposed to express all five things I can do with only two words? We have less than half the space we need!”

“I’m...not sure the math works out quite that cleanly, but yeah, that’s the basic issue. Two words is a nasty limit.”

“If it weren’t for the word limit, I would’ve said that Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Light would be a good name for it.”

“Absolutely not!”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because it’s way too direct! That’s just listing off everything your power can do!”

“Oh, and that’s bad? I thought it’d be easy to understand. And easy to remember too!”

“Being easy to understand isn’t always a good thing, for your information.”

A power’s name couldn’t be too straightforward...but at the same time, it also couldn’t be totally unrelated to its function either. The space between a name that was too direct and a name that wasn’t direct enough was tightrope-thin, and you had to walk that tightrope with the greatest of care, striking an exquisite balance between the two.

“Do you really think so? Wouldn’t it be better for powers to have names that let you understand what they do the moment you hear them?” asked Hatoko.

“Absolutely not. If you can understand what a power does the second you hear its name, that means you’ve failed,” I replied. “Just think about it—that would mean that the moment your enemies found out your power’s name, they’d know everything that it can do, right? You can’t afford to give a power a name that’s that simple, from a security perspective alone.”

“Huh? But wait—if that’s the problem, then wouldn’t it make more sense to not give your power a name at all?”

I froze. That...was an exceptionally difficult question for me to answer.

I mean, sure, that’s technically true. All that thinking up names for your power and attacks accomplishes is putting yourself at risk. Shouting them out mid-battle telegraphs your next attack like nothing else, and it’s not unheard-of for characters to deduce how someone’s power works by seeing through the hints left in its name, or in the names of the attacks that use it.

There were any number of meta justifications you could make for the practice of power naming, sure, but when you tried to look at the issue from the perspective of the characters themselves, you’d inevitably hit a dead end. I had to wonder: just what did all the characters I loved so much think about the names of their own powers and attacks?

“Anyway, Hatoko, we’ve already decided that we’re giving all of our powers names. This isn’t the time to be raising that fundamental of an objection!” I said, forcing the conversation back onto its rails.

“Oh, that’s right!” Hatoko exclaimed with a clap of her hands. It seemed she’d remembered something. “Speaking of giving things names, you gave me one back in the day, didn’t you? Why don’t we use that as inspiration?”

“Wait, what? I did? Really?”

“Yeah! Back in elementary school, remember? It was a nickname—Flaming Phoenix!”

“Oooh, that.”

Those words took me on a trip straight down memory lane. I’m pretty sure it happened during the first few years of elementary school. Since Hatoko’s last name, Kushikawa, sounded like the word for chicken skin yakitori, and her first name included the word “hato,” meaning pigeon—another bird—the kids in our class had started calling her “Yakitori” as a nickname.

It wasn’t nearly bad enough to be classified as bullying, in my opinion. The kids who called her that weren’t trying to be mean or make her feel bad at all—they just wanted to be closer friends with her, so they’d decided to call her by a nickname to make that happen. Hatoko, however, had hated it. She’d taken great care to never let it show, perhaps out of concern for how it would make her friends feel if they found out...but I could tell right away.

And so, I’d decided to give Hatoko a new nickname. I’d thought that if I bequeathed her an original, malevolent title, her old, loathsome one would be purified in the process. And the title I’d thought up to play the central role in that scheme...was Flaming Phoenix.

As for how it turned out...well, let’s just say that I did, at the very least, accomplish my objective. Everyone stopped calling Hatoko Yakitori, though the fact that their reasoning was “If we have to call you a stupid name like Flaming Phoenix, we’d rather call you Hatoko like normal” made it kinda hard to feel like I’d really won. Still, Hatoko was happy, and that’s what really mattered in the end.

“I can’t believe you still remember that,” I said.

“Of course I do!” said Hatoko. “You worked so hard to think that name up for me, after all. Actually, you know what? Why don’t we just use that for my power’s name?”

“What, you mean Flaming Phoenix?”

“Yeah!”

“Nah, that wouldn’t work. It’s too unrelated to your actual power,” I explained. Honestly, even if she did have a purely fire-based power, I would’ve been opposed to her using that name.

Man. Flaming Phoenix, really...?

All I can say is yup, I sure was young back then. It was a simple, uncreative name that lacked the slightest hint of chuuni edge. It felt less like the product of eighth-grade syndrome and more like the product of second-grade syndrome. It was a relic of an era in which I didn’t know the first thing about thematic complexity. Having it repeated back to me after all this time was actually making me feel a little embarrassed. Like, the fact that I’d used “flaming” and “phoenix” despite the fact that being on fire was phoenixes’ whole thing was almost perfectly mortifying...

“Okay, then how about we use one of the other versions of Flaming Phoenix?” Hatoko suggested.

“What do you mean, one of the other versions?” I asked.

“You don’t remember? When Flaming Phoenix didn’t stick with my friends, you came up with a bunch of different versions of the name to try to convince them to use it.”

“Oh...okay, yeah, I might remember that just a little. Only vaguely, though.” The only part that I remembered clearly was the tragic conclusion of the story, that being that the name had never stuck in any form. The process by which we got there was more or less a blur. “Why, what’d I come up with?”

“Umm, well, first, you tried writing it in the English alphabet instead of Japanese. You said that ‘The alphabet’s hella cool, so they’ll use it for sure this way!’”

I winced. Ayup, that’s a grade schooler for you. At that age, the alphabet might as well be the coolest thing humanity’s ever invented.

“Then you tried abbreviating it to FF, next.”

“Oh?”

Actually, that does sort of ring a bell. FF, huh? Not bad at all.

The best thing about words written in the English alphabet is that they can end up looking super friggin’ cool when you turn them into acronyms. Take D4C, for instance, or IWGP. Of course, nowadays I’d know better than to go with an acronym like FF that calls an already famous franchise to mind.

There’s just one thing—one tiny little nitpick that I’d like to communicate to my past self. Listen up, elementary-school me. Flaming is fine. No issues there at all. The thing is, though...Phoenix...starts with a P. As in, not an F. The acronym you were looking for was FP. Way to make the actual oldest mistake in the book, past me...

“But in the end, FF didn’t catch on either, so you decided to add another F and see what would happen. You renamed it Phantom Flaming Phoenix...so, FFF.”

Oh, did I? The idea of taking a name that didn’t work and slapping another letter onto it was so simpleminded, it was almost cute. There was a real sense of childish innocence there, and even though we were talking about things that I myself had done, I couldn’t help but feel a little charmed by my old antics.

That said: there’s one bit of that that’s not charming at all. It’s Phantom, past me. Phantom, with a P. It’s the tragedy of P all over again. I know exactly how this happened—you saw the Dragoon Phantom in Beyblade’s F Series and assumed they got it right, didn’t you? That was a Beyblade-original spelling, not real English.

“Then after FFF, you said ‘It looks like I’ll have to bring out my ultimate weapon’ and gave it another new name.”

“D-Did I actually say it in those words...?”

O-Oh, no. I have a terrible feeling about this. I can see the punch line coming a mile away.

“You came up with Ultimate Phantom Flaming Phoenix, or AFFF.”

Yup! A mile away! It’s Ultimate, past me! Not “alltimate”! I understand exactly how you feel, but it’s a U, I swear!

“Then, when your ultimate weapon didn’t work out, you said ‘In that case, I’ll just have to surpass my limits’ and came up with yet another name: Unlimited Ultimate Phantom Flaming Phoenix...or OAFFF.”

Unlimited! Not “onlimited”! It’s the tragedy of U all over again! Yes, “unlimited” is a ridiculously cool piece of vocabulary, but if you screw up writing it, it looks ridiculously lame instead! Imagine if they’d abbreviated Unlimited Blade Works as OBW! That’d be career-endingly humiliating!

“Then, when surpassing your limits didn’t work, you decided to supersize the name, making it Giant Unlimited Ultimate Phantom Flaming Phoenix. ZOAFFF, for short.”

Z?! Seriously, Z?! You could’ve at least gone with J! Nobody would’ve blamed you for making that mistake! Who would ever think that giant was spelled with a friggin’ Z?!

For crying out loud...what was wrong with me back in elementary school?! Had I just memorized the alphabet earlier that week or something?! Was I at that age when you want to use the alphabet for everything, even though you don’t actually understand it at all?! God, was I one of those elementary schoolers who gets cocky and writes their name in English on tests?! If I was, I’d bet that I was bad enough at it that I ended up writing “ONDO ZURI” or something and looked like a total loser in the end!

“Then when going supersized didn’t help, you finally decided to—”

“Enough! Please, just stop, Hatoko! Let my humiliating history stay buried where it belongs!”

My capacity for shame was nearing its limit. Tomoyo and Sayumi made fun of me by calling me “the living embodiment of cringe” and “a man who actively wallows in edgy fantasies” and stuff like that all the time, and while I certainly did bask in the sinful, profoundly immoral allure of the behaviors they were talking about...the stuff that Hatoko was bringing up now brought on a sort of shame that I just couldn’t deal with. This was the cringe that I abhorred. My elementary school self was a dumbass.

“Are you sure, Juu? There’s still so much of the nickname story that I haven’t told yet!” said Hatoko.

“It’s not even close to over yet? Seriously...?” I groaned. Apparently, past me had been convinced that the longer a name got, the cooler it would be. It was like he was telling a stupid joke. Next thing you know, Hatoko would be telling me I nicknamed her Jugemu Jugemu. “Anyway, Hatoko...I can’t believe you actually remembered that whole ridiculous nickname in the first place,” I noted.

“Ha ha ha! I didn’t, actually,” Hatoko admitted. “Here, look at this.”

Hatoko revealed a sheet of paper that she’d apparently been holding just under the table this whole time. It had a frayed edge which hinted that it had been torn out of a notebook.

“I found this in my room just yesterday. You wrote out the whole Flaming Phoenix nickname on here and told me to memorize it.”

I let out a strangled gasp. The burst of shame that welled up from deep within me was so powerful, it felt like my head was actually boiling. Hatoko was holding physical proof of the coolest nickname that elementary-school me could come up with: in other words, a very real sheet taken directly from my very literal cringe compilation. It was proof of youthful mistakes that I could never allow myself to fess up to!

“G-Give it here!” I yelped.

“Huuuh? Nuh-uh!” Hatoko replied.

I reached out to snatch the paper from her, but Hatoko dodged away before I made contact. I stood up right away to try again, but she stood up as well, and before I knew it, Hatoko was smiling gleefully as I chased her in circles around the club room.

“I said hand it over!”

“Don’t wanna! This is mine, and I’m keeping it! It’s a priceless treasure that you gave to me!”

“C-Come on! I’ll give you a way better nickname than that one... I mean, mwa ha ha! Why satisfy yourself with a shallow name from my bumbling past self when you could have one that only the grown and experienced me of the present day could ever hope to create?”

“Nooope, don’t want it! I like this one!”

“Ugh... I-If you don’t hand that over right now, I’m through with you!”

“Huh?! No way! You don’t mean it, do you, Juu?!”

Hatoko had driven me into a corner, and I’d lashed out in a profoundly elementary-schooler-like fashion, which, unexpectedly, she took totally seriously. She pumped the brakes and spun around to face me, but I was still sprinting at full tilt to catch her, and, well, the inevitable happened.

“Augh!”

“Eeek!”

By that, I mean I ran straight into her and the two of us tumbled to the floor. I tried to cushion her fall reflexively, but it all happened so quickly that my attempt didn’t work out super well. It ended up more or less looking like I’d pushed her to the floor.

“A-Are you okay, Hatoko?!” I yelped.

“Y-Yeah... I’m fi—” Hatoko began, only to cut off with a gasp. Around the time her face flushed scarlet, I realized what position we’d landed in as well.

I’d wrapped my left arm around the back of her head in an effort to make sure she didn’t concuss herself against the floor. My right arm, meanwhile—the accursed arm in which a dark, loathsome power was sealed—had landed somewhere else entirely, and I could feel something very soft in the palm of my right hand. So soft, in fact, that its texture came through very distinctly, even through her uniform and the cardigan she wore over it...

“...Gaaaaaahhh?!” I shouted, hurling myself backward on pure reflex. “S-Sorry, Hatoko! Seriously, I’m so sorry!”

“I-It’s fine, Juu! That was my fault for stopping so suddenly... Plus, if you hadn’t grabbed me, I would’ve hit my head against the floor,” Hatoko babbled at a breakneck pace.

Hatoko’s face was still pretty flushed. I, meanwhile, was still in a state of panic, and since her reassurance didn’t make me feel any less guilty, I kept apologizing over and over.

“I’m really sorry, Hatoko!”

“I-It’s fine, honestly! Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“I’m sorry... Like, I’m so sorry to cause an accidental groping like this, even though we’re in a bonus story that won’t get any illustrations! What a waste, right?”

“That’s what you’re apologizing about?!”

“But don’t worry! I’ll talk to the illustrator and make sure that when these stories get compiled into a volume, this scene gets one of the drawings!”

“Why would that make me worry less?!”

Okay...so I was in a major state of panic, actually.

We picked up our fallen chairs, sat back down, and resumed our interview. Things still felt pretty awkward, if I’m being totally honest, but we didn’t have the luxury of letting that get to us. The clock, after all, was ticking.

“This is bad... We’re in big trouble, Hatoko,” I said.

“I know,” Hatoko agreed. “There’s barely any time left before we have to pack up and go home...”

The school’s gates would indeed be closed soon, but that was not, in fact, what I was worried about. We’d talked about finishing this up before we had to leave, but if the naming discussion ended up dragging into tomorrow, that wouldn’t be a disaster or anything. No, the real problem was...

“We’re running seriously low on pages here...”

We were down to about a quarter of our allotted page count, and we’d barely even mentioned Hatoko’s power so far. We were moving even slower than we had back in the Route of Origin story. Plus, my banter with Sayumi had at least included discussion of her power and its name, to some extent, whereas this time we’d basically just been chatting like a couple of totally normal childhood friends. We’d reminisced about the old days, dredged up memories about my shameful past that were better left forgotten, and said basically nothing about power names whatsoever.

“All right, Hatoko—we’re picking up the pace! We have to take this seriously, or there’s a very real chance we actually won’t finish in time,” I said.

“Okay, Juu, but the thing is...I don’t know what taking this seriously would even mean,” said Hatoko.

“To start, let’s try a tactic I used on Sayumi: why don’t you tell me about the things you like? Like, what are your hobbies?”

“Watching comedy shows, I guess.”

“Yup. Figures.”

I don’t even know why I asked, in retrospect. Hatoko loved comedy, to the point that she could be kind of obnoxiously picky about it. Like, she was a fan of this one show that had comedians try to make a particular member of a live audience laugh, and she got super upset whenever the audience member who got picked stubbornly refused to do so, even when the joke was funny.

“It’s not like I’m a comedy expert, though,” Hatoko continued. “I like watching comedians on TV and online, but it’s not like I go to live shows all that often. If someone like me said that they were a comedy fan, then all the real comedy fans would probably laugh at them.”

“I mean, sure, but who cares? If you like comedy, then it’s fine to say so.”

“Yeah, I know, but still,” Hatoko half-heartedly replied.

I could actually really understand where she was coming from. “Yeah, it’s just one of those things, right? Sometimes it’s hard to say you like something when you don’t know the subject from top to bottom, or whatever.”

“Right! That’s exactly it,” said Hatoko. “There was this one time in middle school when I heard a song in a commercial that I really liked, so I rented the CD it was on to listen to it. Then I ended up talking about it with a classmate...and she turned out to be such a big fan of that band, she owned all their singles and albums. When I said that I really liked that one song, she was all ‘Don’t even talk to me about it until you’ve listened to this one, this one, and this one too’...”

“God, right? People always end up going on about how you’re not a real fan if you didn’t buy the CD, or how you’re not a real fan if you’re not in the fan club.”

I’d always thought that sort of thing was stupid. I sure as heck didn’t want to live in a world where you had to know something from top to bottom if you wanted to say that you liked it.

Who even cares, seriously? Say you’ve only ever seen a particular musician’s stuff on YouTube and haven’t bought even a single one of their CDs. That doesn’t mean that you can’t call yourself their fan! So what if you only start watching an anime because it’s super popular and then get hooked on its source material? What difference does it make?

The way I saw it, the sort of people who would gatekeep like that, calling people “fake fans” or whatever, were really just trying to make themselves feel like they were somehow special. Of course, that being said, if I were in their position, I’d probably end up saying the exact same sort of stuff. Hearing someone talk with an air of authority about a work in a genre they clearly don’t know the first thing about could be really frustrating, and the impulse to brand them a fake fan would be tough to resist. Perhaps, I reflected, the true fans vs. fake fans conflict was simply unresolvable.

“Anyway, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that you like the things you like,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince Hatoko.

I wanted to make my stance on that issue as unambiguous as possible. I was doing my best to fulfill a promise that I’d made to myself back in the eighth grade—that is, in the year I’d abandoned my chuunibyou. I’d sworn back then to learn from the terrible example set by a certain young man who’d never hesitated to bash the things he hated. I’d be his opposite: a person who would always extol the virtues of the things he loved.

“Sure, some people might make fun of you for it, but even if they do, life’s still way more fun when you’re open about the things you like. If you’re into comedy, then you should stand tall and proud and tell it to the world!” I declared.

“Yeah... You’re right,” said Hatoko.

“Right...? Actually, wait. We wrapped that tangent up on a really nice note, but we’re super off topic again! We’ve gotta focus on that name, or we’ll—”

“Hey, Juu?” Hatoko said, totally ignoring my appeal for focus. “I don’t really know that much about comedy...but do you really think it’s still okay for me to say that I’m a fan of it?”

“Y-Yeah, I do.”

“So then, would it also be okay for an amateur like me to play at being a comedian?”

“Uh...huh?”

“To tell the truth,” Hatoko said as she gingerly laid a notebook on the table in front of me, “when I found that piece of paper with the whole Flaming Phoenix name on it, I found this too.”

The notebook that Hatoko seemed so apprehensive about had a single-line title written upon it: “Hatoko’s Super-Duper Funny Comedy Scripts!!!”

“Wait...isn’t this that old notebook you used to write all your comedy sketch ideas down in?” I asked.

“Y-Yeah...” Hatoko muttered.

“Or, well, you said they were your ideas, but most of them were just total ripoffs of comedians who were popular at the time.”

“Y-You didn’t have to say that part!” Hatoko wailed, tears already pooling in the corners of her eyes.

“So, what about it? I mean, I get that you found it in your room, but why’d you bring it here with you?” I asked. I would’ve thought that to Hatoko, that notebook would be a compilation of her past misdeeds that was best left sealed away forever.

“Well, umm... When I found it yesterday, I decided to give it a read again and got really nostalgic about it. A lot of the jokes and sketches were really awful...but there was one two-person sketch that I thought might actually be pretty funny after all.”

“Oh?”

“So I...umm...” Hatoko began, only to pause and hesitate for several seconds. Finally, she seemed to resolve herself and spoke up once more. “I was thinking it’d be fun to try doing a readthrough of the sketch with you, Juu...”

“You... Huh? W-With me?”

“Yeah.”

“So... You want to try doing a comedy sketch with me?”

“Yeah,” Hatoko said again with a bashful nod.

Now that suggestion was out of left field. I was completely taken aback.

“I-It’s fine if you don’t want to!” Hatoko shouted. “I don’t want you to force yourself or anything.”

“I mean, I’m not that against it... But we’re the only ones here, right? Isn’t the whole point of comedy to perform to an audience?”

“Th-Th-There’s no way I could do it if anyone else was here! That’d be so embarrassing!”

“Hmm. Fair enough, I guess.”

“I’m not planning on making this into an actual show or anything like that! It’s just that I happened to find it at exactly the right time, so I thought it’d be fun to do a run-through of it with you to mark the occasion, that’s all...” Hatoko explained, her voice growing quieter and quieter with every passing word.

There was no way I could turn her down after she’d made such an obvious effort to work up the courage to ask me. “All right, sure. I’m in,” I replied.

“Really?!” Suddenly, Hatoko was beaming like the sun itself. That look on her face alone made me feel like giving her the okay was worth it...that is, until her ebullient next suggestion completely destroyed the heartwarming atmosphere.

“Okay, then I’ll be the straight man, and you can be the silly one!”

“...”

I had a terrible feeling about where this was going.

It’s-a-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go!

Whoa-whoa! Whoa-whoa!

“Hello, hello, everyone!”

“Hey, there!”

“Boy, just look at us, Juu! We’re finally here!”

“We sure are, Hatoko!”

“We’ve always dreamed of performing in the M-1 Grand Prix finals, and we finally made it!”

“...Y-Yeah. Yup. We sure did.”

“...”

“...Wait, is it my line? O-Okay, Hatoko! I think it’s time for us to show off our super-duper funny comedy act, just like usual!”

“You know it! Our super-duper funny... Wait, stop raising the bar for us!” Thwap. “Come on, Juu! The higher you set their expectations, the harder it’ll be to live up to them!”

“Yeah...seriously. Anyway, wow! This sure is the finals, all right—just look at that crowd! A whole hall packed full of people, and a bunch of them are real beauties too! Look, there’s one beauty, and another beauty to her right...and another to her left, and—”

“Whaddya mean, her left?!” Thwap. “Come on, Juu, you can’t just turn partway through the row! If you’ve got one beauty sitting to the right of another beauty, then of course the second beauty’s gonna have another to her left!”

“Yeah. Yeah, she...she sure is.”

“By the way, Juu, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about!”

“Oh? What is it, Hatoko?”

“So, I went to a restaurant the other day, and they brought me the wrong food! I would’ve felt bad about pointing out their mistake, though, so I didn’t say anything and just ate the dish they gave me instead.”

“Ahh, yeah, I know that feeling. You really should tell them when stuff like that happens, though.”

“I know! But it’s so hard sometimes!”

“Okay, then I’ll show you how it’s done! I’ll get that order sorted out lickety-split!”

“You don’t mind?”

“It’s all ju-right, because I’m Ju-rai!”

“Hmm. You’re in really good form today, huh? Okay, then, I’ll be the waitress, and you can be the customer... Wait, Juu, what’s wrong? I don’t think I’ve seen you scowl and blush at the same time like that before!”

“Yeah, it’s...it’s fine. I’m fine. Just a couple new emotional wounds I’ll have to work through someday...”

“Huh? Well, if you say so. Okay, let’s get started! So, umm... Did you need something, sir?”

“Yeah, sorry—this isn’t my order. I wanted the ‘mystery chef’s mystery omelet rice, topped with mystery demi-glace.’”

“That’s too many mysteries!” Thwap. “Way too many mysteries, Juu! How could you even tell if they served you the right dish at that point? It’s a mystery why anyone would even eat there! One more time, from the top! Did you need something, sir?”

“Yeah, sorry—this isn’t my order. I wanted the ‘stewed substances we found lying by the road.’”

“Oh, don’t you dare eat that!” Thwap. “You’re way too open to new culinary experiences, Juu! Why would you order something that nasty?! Is someone blackmailing you into it? Take three! Did you need something, sir?”

“Yeah, this isn’t my order. I wanted the ‘European-Japanese-American-Korean-Chinese-fusion curry.’”

“Now that’s a global dish!” Thwap. “You can’t fuse that many countries, Juu! It’d feel like a trip around the world in a single meal! And the fact that you didn’t have India on the list really says something about how the chef feels about curry!”

“...”

“Come on, Juu, take this seriously! No more weird orders—I need a real example. Did you need something, sir?”

“Ah, no, umm... Th-This isn’t...”

“And now you’re all shy?!” Thwap. “You have to be more decisive, Juu! Get it done lickety-split! Did you need something, sir?”

“I’d like to speak with the chef!”

“Not what I’m looking for!” Thwap. “That was decisive, but in the wrong direction! You call the chef out to compliment their food, not to complain! You’re doing even worse than I did now!”

“Oh, whatever, it’s fine! I can do whatever I want, and no one gets to complain!”

“And now you’re acting super high and mighty?!”

“Well, I am high and mighty. Don’t you know what they say? The customer...is always right!”

“Oh, give it a rest!”

“Thanks for watching, everyone!”

“...”

I was dead. My body was still functioning fine, but my spirit was firmly deceased. The instant our performance ended, I’d lost the will to stand and crumpled on the spot, coming to rest on the floor of the club room. My face was so burning hot, I could hardly believe it. It was way hotter than the black fire my power let me create.

That performance was rough. It was really rough. I’d never felt so disgraced and humiliated throughout all sixteen years of my life up to that point, and I was confident that as long as I lived, I’d never go through a more soul-shattering event. Even in my previous lives—even in whatever was to come after this life ended—I was confident that no trauma would ever gouge its way into my psyche more violently than that sketch had.

What was rough about it? Everything. Hatoko’s comedy sketch...just hadn’t been very funny at all. To be blunt: it was just plain boring. The fact that it had nailed the format of a two-person comedy sketch perfectly in spite of being boring as sin just made it worse. At least if it had been a complete failure across the board, there might’ve been some ironic entertainment to be found in it. Being forced to take part in a bottom-tier average comedy skit—and worse still, being forced to play the comedian who says all the stupid stuff in it—was more excruciating than I ever could’ve believed before experiencing it for myself. I felt like I might literally gag on the shame of it all.

I hadn’t been playing the straight man, and yet the urge to call out the stupidity in every single line had been almost overwhelming. Like, why did it have to be set in the finals of the M-1 Grand Prix, Japan’s single biggest comedy contest? The skit had made a joke of itself before the jokes even started! Oh, and the M-1’s entrance music—that is, the go-go-go, whoa-whoa bit? She’d had me more or less sing that a capella...

There was enough terrible stuff in that skit for me to keep complaining for days, but that would take, well, days, so I’ll go ahead and hold off on it. There’s just one last thing that I absolutely have to call out, though: “It’s all ju-right, because I’m Ju-rai”? Are you friggin’ kidding me?! Was that supposed to be my catchphrase?! It was awful!

“W-Well, what did you think, Juu? Was the sketch I thought up...you know, funny?” Hatoko nervously asked as I lay there on the floor like some sort of giant caterpillar carcass.

I wiped the tears that had started streaming down my cheeks before I’d even realized it and glanced up, only to find Hatoko gazing down at me with a look of nervous anticipation in her eyes. All I could say in the face of that expression was...was...

“...I-I mean, it was pretty good.”

“R-Really?!”

“Y-Yeah. B-But I don’t think it’s the sort of sketch that a mainstream audience would be able to appreciate, y’know...? I mean, I liked it, but who knows, right? I did like it, though.”

“Okay! I’m just glad you thought it was good.”

“Hey, Hatoko...? Just for the record, we’re not doing this skit in front of other people, okay? Not because it’s bad or anything, but, uh...I’d just get too nervous. Stage fright, y’know?”

“Yeah, that’s fine! Don’t worry—this was just a special occasion. I’m totally satisfied now. Thanks, Juu!” Hatoko said, flashing me the smile of an angel.

I guess if it made her that happy, then having my heart shattered into a million pieces was worth it...

“Wait a minute! This is so not the time for this!” I bellowed out of the blue. I’d played along with that gag for way too long before finally calling it out.

“Wh-What’s wrong, Juu?” asked Hatoko.

“What’s wrong?! Everything’s wrong! We still haven’t even started figuring out what to name your power!”

“Oooh. Now that you mention it!”

“Oh, crap... We’re seriously in it deep this time. It’s this late in the process, and we haven’t even nailed down a single word? This is really bad!”

“Ah, you’re right! It’s almost time for the school to lock up. We’d better start getting ready to leave.”

She wasn’t wrong about that—we were in a bad situation in terms of the time of day too—but the real problem was our page count. We’d spent all that space without even alluding to Hatoko’s power, and now we were paying the price! This was the worst possible moment to waste a bunch of pages on a comedy sequence!

“Okay, Juu! Let’s walk home together!”

“No, no, wait a second, Hatoko. We can’t just leave! Or, well, we can’t just end the story like that! We have a system for these things, and we have to actually depict the moment we decide on your power’s name, or else—”

“It’s fine,” said Hatoko with a brilliant, kindly smile. “After all...the truth is, you’ve already thought up a name, haven’t you?”

“Huh...?”

“A name for my power. You’ve already thought one up, right?”

I was taken aback, and for a moment, I didn’t say a word. The shock had left me completely petrified, but eventually, I was able to open my mouth and choke out the words “H-How...How’d you know?”

Hatoko was right. I really did already have an idea for a name. Not even just an idea, in fact—in my mind, it might as well have already been set in stone.

The night before, while I’d been busy doing a bunch of research to prepare for our interview, the idea had come to me in a flash. Sometimes, you can think and think without ever having any good ideas, but sometimes, the opposite happens, and the perfect concept just appears in your mind after barely any thought at all.

The name I’d come up with for Hatoko’s power: The lord of five aspects, Over Element. The “five aspects,” of course, referred to the five elements she controlled, and since her power all but transcended the concept of elements itself, “over” seemed like the perfect word to describe her relation to them. I know I’m singing my own praises here, but it really felt like the title perfectly set up the name in a really cool sort of way, and it satisfied the two words and nine Japanese characters requirements exactly.

It just felt right to me—so much so that I would’ve had a hard time accepting anything else. That said, I couldn’t call off the interview this late in the game, so I’d plotted to act like I was discussing the name with Hatoko for just long enough to plant the seeds for me to act like I’d come up with Over Element on the spot. That plan had failed spectacularly, but now...

“What gave it away, Hatoko?” I asked.

“Hmm. There wasn’t one big thing, really,” Hatoko replied. “I could sort of just tell by the look on your face, that’s all.”

I gaped at her.

“I’m sure you know that I can’t tell what you’re thinking a lot of the time...but what I can tell is what sort of faces you make at times like these. I’ve known you for ages, after all,” Hatoko said, looking a little proud of herself.

I almost had to laugh. I was frustrated, but happy in equal measure. I’d thought that I’d put on a pretty darn good show, but apparently, it hadn’t been enough to pull the wool over my childhood friend’s eyes.

“So c’mon, Juu, tell me! What did you pick for my power’s name?”

“Over Element. The lord of five aspects, Over Element.”

“Hmm. Okay, then!”

“Are you sure you’re okay with that? This was one hundred percent my idea—we didn’t even talk about it!”

“Yeah, that’s fine. If that’s what you picked, then it’s fine with me.”

“Okay, then... Mwa ha ha! I, the man who was granted free rein over the name for your power, have bequeathed it with the title it’s due! Take care not to forget it!”

“Don’t worry, I remember! It’s Oven Element, right?”

“No, it’s not! Over Element! Over!”

And so, Hatoko’s power got its name. The core concept of these stories was to depict the process by which we’d come up with each of our powers’ names, and it felt like we’d strayed pretty far from that this time around...but eh, sometimes it’s fine to decide these things in a slightly off sort of way. Hatoko’s power was a little off in and of itself, after all.

The lord of five aspects, Over Element—a power that seemed to diverge from the foundational rules of the supernatural battle genre and thus seemed kind of cheaty to me as a result. At that point, I hadn’t really analyzed why I felt that way at all yet. It was just a slight, offhanded thought that I didn’t make much of. It wouldn’t be until much later on—until after I’d come to understand the misbuttoned shirt that was our relationship—that I’d finally realize what it was that had been bothering me that whole time.