Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 12 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: The Path of Dark and Dark

The stygian flames of purgatory, Dark and Dark—this was the title that had been bestowed upon Andou Jurai—me—and, by extension, the name of the power I’d awakened to, which granted me the ability to call upon the raging inferno of the abyss. The one who had bestowed it, needless to say, was none other than me. Between “the stygian flames of purgatory” serving as its introductory appellation and the English words “Dark and Dark” providing a foreign flair, it was a truly veristic and finalitic name for a power to have, if I do say so myself.

...Not that I actually know what “veristic” means. Or, for that matter, whether “finalitic” is even a real word. Look, I’m gonna level with you: coming up with new, fitting adjectives for this bit every single time’s been really hard, okay? I decided to call Tomoyo’s power “dramatic and terrific” back in the first story on a whim, and I figured that meant I should pick out two different adjectives with similar feels for everyone else’s powers as well...but to be totally honest, I never meant for any of them to actually mean much of anything!

In any case, all those formats and patterns that we established for these Blu-ray bonus stories—which is to say, for the process by which we named our powers—will be coming to an end after this. This will be the final, decisive, ultimate, and conclusive session: the closing ceremony in which my own power, Dark and Dark, will be granted its name and end the whole shebang on a triumphant note.

Looking back, these bonus stories felt like they lasted an eternity, but they also passed by in the blink of an eye. There were plenty of good times accompanied by no small amount of hardship. I learned about sides of my friends’ personalities that I’d never noticed before, and I witnessed reveals so seemingly significant that they made me want to shout “Are you seriously dropping that info in a Blu-ray bonus story, of all places?!”

Oh, and since I opened the meta content floodgates in the first session, each story that followed became more and more distressingly meta until we’d gone far past the point of reason. I was all “Oh, you want me to write a forty-page story each month to pack in as a bonus with the Blu-ray releases? Easy-peasy! I can just make them about power names—that’ll give me enough content to keep writing for ages. Actually, I want to do this now! You couldn’t stop me if you tried!” at first, not considering for a moment how friggin’ hard sticking to a schedule like that would actually—

Whoops! I think I got possessed by some sort of unknown entity for a second there.

So. Uh... Hmm.

Well, I guess this is just one of those things, y’know? The meta gags have been getting wilder and wilder ever since the first story, so part of me thinks that we may as well go all out and finish things off with a “Major plot twist: the series’ author steps into the story! It’s time for a power naming symposium starring Kota Nozomi and Andou Jurai!” sort of deal...but, nah. That’d be too much, even for me.

The odds of a move like that going terribly, disastrously wrong are way too high. Even metafiction has certain lines that you just can’t step across, and when an author inserts themself into their own work of fiction...well, let’s just say that the slightest misstep can result in an almost unbelievably chilly reception from readers. “Laughing at you, not with you” is the best-case scenario—it can go from that to goose-bump-raising levels of disgust in no time at all. It’s the sort of move that risks getting pieces of your story passed around as bad writing copypastas for the rest of eternity.

Now, look—I’m not saying that stories that feature their author as a character are always bad or anything! It was consistently hilarious when Seikimatsu Leader den Takeshi! had its author step into the story, and plenty of other manga have pulled off similar stunts. Heck, the author of that one actually placed first in a character popularity poll once! It doesn’t get much funnier than that! A first-rate meta-user’s capable of tailoring things in just the right sort of way to make a gag like that come across as funny rather than excruciating.

Of course, I have a feeling that all that might only apply in the case of manga. After all, having the author of a gag manga show up in the story has been a trope for ages. Even when the author doesn’t show up as an actual character, it’s super common for characters to break the fourth wall by referencing them—like, by talking about how a looming deadline impacted the story, or poking fun at their artistic skills. I could keep throwing out examples all day, if I wanted to. When you look at light novels, however, the examples dry up in an instant. There are plenty of light novels that strike a similar tone as gag manga, but even among them, I can’t think of a single one that has the author step onto the stage as a character. It’s possible that there’s a story like that out there somewhere and I just don’t know about it, I guess, but I think it’s safe to say that at the very least, they’re extremely rare. It’s by no means mainstream, or even a common trope.

You could make the argument that it’s just a difference in mediums—that the amount of meta content that’s permissible in manga is different from that of light novels—but all it takes is one look at mystery novels to complicate the equation all over again. Meta-mysteries, after all, are a whole subgenre of mystery novel in and of themselves. Mystery is a genre that has played nicely with meta content from the very beginning, and plenty of works have leaned rather heavily on it over the course of time.

That, presumably, is why some works—albeit not very many—have actually gone so far as to have their final twist be that the author themself was the killer. I’d give examples, but they would be pretty big spoilers in this case, so I’ll spare you the specific titles. There are quite a number of works in the mystery genre that feature their author as a character, as well. A famous mystery author named Ellery Queen, for instance, wrote a lengthy series starring a main character who was just straight up named Ellery Queen.

So, yeah—as you can see, it’s not rare for authors to turn up as characters in manga or novels by any means...but for some reason, it just doesn’t seem to happen in light novels specifically. Why is that? I mean...this might be too obvious of an answer, but I have a feeling “because nobody wants it” explains everything pretty handily on its own.

If you actually tried putting yourself into a light novel you were writing, the readers would probably reject the development. You’d lose your audience at a breakneck pace. Just thinking about a story’s protagonist or heroine talking with its author... I mean, it feels wrong. Same for referencing the author in the narration—like, imagine if a series’ ultimate foe unleashes their most stupendously powerful attack, but the narration doesn’t really seem to be selling how incredible it is, and then all of a sudden it goes “Oh no! Tragically, the author just isn’t good enough at writing to depict how powerful the attack was!” That’d be... Well, you get it, right?

I really do think that an author putting themself into their own light novel is a move that wouldn’t make anyone happy. All it would accomplish is grievously wounding the readership and the author themself. Better to just not do it at all. Like, seriously, just don’t.

So, yeah. If, by any chance, there are any extremely eccentric readers out there who were hoping that this final bonus story would feature the long-awaited debut of the series’ author in the story proper—and I’m positive that there weren’t, but again, just in case—I offer them this advance warning: Kota Nozomi will not be appearing in this bonus story.

...As if that weren’t obvious.

School was out for the day, and I was in the club room. I’d grown thoroughly used to our one-on-one interview structure...but today, I was the only person present.

I was alone. Solitary and isolated. This goes without saying, but when both of the people involved in a one-on-one interview are the same person, you’re left without any sort of interview at all.

Though, then again...in a certain sense, maybe this really was an interview too. I was, after all, engaged in a deep, heated conversation with myself as my own interlocutor. I was conducting a self-interview, debating furiously with my subconscious in the world of my mind’s eye. The one-man battle transpiring in the after-school club room that day was as fierce and ferocious as a conflict could be.

“Argh... Dammit! Trash! Trash, every one of them!” I shouted as I dropped my pen, crumpled up the sheet of paper I’d been writing on, and pitched it over my shoulder. Similarly crumpled wads of paper littered the floor around the table I was sitting at. “Nobody would be satisfied with run-of-the-mill names like these! Nobody at all... And most importantly, I sure as hell never would!”

I grabbed another sheet of paper and started writing anew. I spent a few moments scribbling in silence, but before long, I crumpled the page up once more and discarded it like all the others. I was acting like a desperate author who’d found himself cornered by his deadlines...and honestly, that wasn’t all that far from the truth. I didn’t know the first thing about how it felt to be an author, but as of that moment, I understood how it felt to be the victim of an unbreakable writer’s block very well.

The subject I was thinking so frantically about, of course, was the name of my power. Indeed—the name of the jet-black hellfire that dwelled within my right arm. I’d written down countless concepts and candidates so far, but none of them had felt right at all, and the longer I mulled it over, the more it felt like my thought process was getting bogged down.

Initially, the plan had been for all five of our club’s members to come together and think up a name for my power today. We’d attempted it, even, but we hadn’t been able to come to a consensus, and in the end, I’d told the others that I needed some time alone. They’d gone home ahead of me, and I was left to work myself into the overtime situation I was now stuck in.

The others had all agreed to play along with this whole naming process out of sympathy—or, let’s be honest, pity—for me, and I felt pretty bad for driving them away considering that...but it had to be done. I couldn’t let them witness my disgraceful display for even a moment longer. I didn’t want them to see me suffering from my critical, pathetic lack of ideas.

You might be thinking “Okay, so then why didn’t you just think something up in advance?” but for the record: I’d tried. I’d thought about it as hard as I possibly could in advance, right down to the wire. I’d put so much time into thinking about my power’s name, I’d ended up losing out on sleep as a result...but it didn’t work. I was in a total slump. In athletic terms, I had the yips. In Prince of Tennis terms, I felt like I’d just gone up against Ibu Shinji and Captain Yukimura, one after the other. When all was said and done, I was done and dusted.

“Gaaah! Damnations! This isn’t working at all! First, all my ideas seemed too simplistic, and now they seem too convoluted instead! Being rare and weird doesn’t make a name good, and I know it! There’s no point trotting out words from foreign languages if nobody who hears the name will ever have any clue what they actually mean!”

Just like that, yet another sheet of paper was added to the waste pile. My burning rage, however—the rage I felt toward myself—was not so easily suppressed.

“Graaahhhhhh!”

I shot to my feet, sending my folding chair clattering to the floor as I grabbed onto the table...and sorta just gently lifted it up before setting it back down again. Actually flipping it would’ve risked damaging the floor, so I held back on that.

“Hraaaaaah!”

I set my sights on the nearby trash can and wound up a kick...before realizing what a pain cleaning all that garbage up would be and satisfying myself by giving its revolving lid a really nice slap.

“Fhrraghaaaugh!”

I lifted my toppled folding chair above my head, ready to hurl it straight through the window...but then common sense took over and I just set it back down by the table instead.

“Hah, hah, hah... Phew! Guess I got a little heated there.”

Having gone on my little rampage—the best rampage that I could muster, in fact—I paused to take a breather. I’ll admit that I hadn’t been so crazed that I’d completely lost all sense of reason or anything, but the fact that I was at the end of my rope was completely true.

I let out a long, deep sigh, then knelt down on the floor listlessly. I pushed the crumpled-up papers out of my way, clearing a space in front of me, then flopped prone onto the ground, one leg bent while I stared up at the ceiling. Then I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead and spat a single word.

“Dammit!”

That’s right. I’m lying on the ground, so frustrated I can only swear...and that’s hella cool.

I mean it—hella cool. Few things are as cool as a protagonist who’s been driven to the brink by the frustration of major setback after major setback. The hand on the forehead in particular was a seriously vital point for capturing the “protagonist lying on the ground after a huge setback” image. There were a few ways of handling it—the palm-facing-upward version that I’d chosen communicated a sense of frustration and aloof solitude, for instance, while going palm-in to cover my eyes would’ve communicated that I was desperately trying to conceal my irrepressible tears, which would’ve been cool in its own right.

“Okay...but seriously, what am I even doing?” I grunted, calling myself out on my own stupidity as I sat up. It was at times like these—which is to say, times when I was both already depressed and alone—that I had to curse my wholehearted dedication to being a poser.

That sort of behavior made it really easy to assume that I was just saying I was at my wit’s end and that I really had tons of material in my back pocket that I was just waiting to pull out, but no, really, I had nothing. I was completely, genuinely stumped. The name I was trying to think up just wasn’t working out, and I was in a major fix.

“Man...I really screwed this up from the very beginning, didn’t I?”

It was very, very late for this, but I still had to acknowledge the major error that I committed way back in the beginning of this process. These one-on-one naming interviews? They were a mistake, plain and simple.

Now of course, I’m not saying that agreeing to do these bonus stories was a mistake, nor that it would’ve been a better idea to theme them around something slightly more conventional. The thing is, the whole reason I decided to do these interviews in the first place was because I myself had hit a roadblock in the naming process. I’m pretty sure I already talked about that in the first of these stories, actually.

Specifically, I’d hit a dead end when it came to naming my own black flame power. My tendency to fantasize about supernatural powers had, counterintuitively, ended up holding me back. I’d worked myself into a mindset where I couldn’t accept anything I saw as a half-baked name, piling oodles of completely unnecessary pressure onto myself, and I had ultimately wound up at a total loss.

My best idea to get out of that gridlock: coming up with names for everyone else’s powers first. I’d name all the literary club girls’ powers, use them to settle on a general format and flow for the process, and then come back to thinking about my power’s name. That was the origin of the one-on-one interviews and, by extension, the origin of these stories on the whole. We’re pretending that story five didn’t happen, by the way.

Anyway, I’d named all the girls’ powers, just as planned, and I had gotten the style and format for them nailed down nicely. All that was left was my own power’s name, but...

“In the end, all I’ve accomplished is raising the bar way higher than it was to begin with!”

What I’d thought was a genius idea had suffered from a serious structural defect—a tragic and fatal flaw. When I actually took the time to think about it, it was obvious. My power would be the last up to bat. It’d be the grand finale, as they say. For better or for worse, that meant that the bar for its name would inevitably be raised. My whole problem was that my expectations for the name were unreasonably high, so why the hell had I gone out of my way to set them even higher than they were before?

“God, I screwed this up so badly. Unless it turns out that the five stories up to this point were all building toward some big revelation in this one, I’m totally doomed.”

Unfortunately, however, no such twist was to come. All five of the previous names had been wildly off the cuff—ahem, they’d been concepts that I’d poured every bit of effort into that I possibly could. I’d used up all the material that I could come up with, not thinking for a moment about saving ideas for the final round.

“Of course, I’m the one who raised the bar, so I’ve got no one to blame for this but myself. It’s my problem, and I have to deal with it. Not like the others care about my names to begin with...”

But wait—is that really true? Tomoyo was always taking jabs at me, but deep down, she enjoyed my names as much as I did...or at least, that was the feeling I got. I certainly didn’t want to let her down.

Hatoko... Ah, wait, I should probably do this in Blu-ray bonus story order, so scratch her for now.

Chifuyu, honestly, didn’t seem to care about power names at all. As long as I gave my power some sort of name, she probably wouldn’t ask for anything more...but speaking as her elder, I didn’t want her to end up watching me give up on my aspirations.

As for Sayumi—frankly, I was just terrified that if I slacked off on my name in the slightest, she’d see through it and call me out in an instant. Like, seriously, at this point it felt like she’d be able to tell from just my handwriting or the tone of voice that I said the power’s name in. Whether or not the name I came up with was good, if there were any signs that I’d decided to call it a day and go with what I had on hand because the deadline was looming, there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that she would roast me over an open fire for it.

Hatoko, on the other hand, would probably say “Wow, that’s amazing!” no matter what sort of slipshod name I presented her with...but then again, maybe she wouldn’t. She’d seen through my attempt at deception during her interview, after all, figuring out that I’d finished her power’s name before we’d even started based on my attitude alone. I couldn’t underestimate the observational powers of a childhood friend. Considering all that, if I showed her a power name that I myself wasn’t satisfied with, there was every chance that she’d realize it right away and be disappointed as a result.

“Guess I just have to go for it, huh...?”

I steeled myself, stood back up, and took a seat at the table, facing a blank sheet of paper all over again. If you’re curious about why I was going out of my way to write out my ideas on individual sheets of loose-leaf paper, by the way...well, it sorta just helped keep me motivated, I guess. It was absolutely not because I thought that crumpling up all my failed attempts made me look like a hella cool twentieth-century author in a slump, for the record.

“Guess I should start by putting together a list of everything I’ve already settled on,” I muttered.

As hard of a time as I was having coming up with a name, I wasn’t starting from a completely blank slate. To start with, I already had a format for my power’s name that I had to abide by, no matter what. The other four members’ powers had already set that in stone. Whatever my power’s name ended up being, it would consist of two major English words that could be written out using nine Japanese characters, accompanied by a title to precede it.

That format was the one absolute restriction that my power’s name would have to stick with. If I didn’t, after all, it would feel like I was betraying the other members of my club, and it would render the interviews I’d conducted with them meaningless as well. I wasn’t about to throw out all that hard work for no good reason.

There was, however, one other aspect of my power’s name that’d come predetermined. I’d decided a long, long time ago that one of the words in my power’s preceding title would have to be “flame.” Not “fire,” not “flare,” and not anything else—“flame,” for sure. That had been settled for just about as long as I’d been pondering my power’s name.

I’m sure that for some people, the reasons “flame” is better than “fire” will be more or less self-evident. There’s just a certain something to it—a slight but significant distinction that gives it the edge in terms of chuuni goodness. Fire is fine, sure, but flame is hella cool.

A very fundamental principle of naming theory is that you should use uncommon words in your names as often as humanly possible. It’s the principle that leads us to say “crimson” instead of “red,” “azure” instead of “blue,” “emerald” instead of “green,” and so on and so forth. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but it’s still a safe rule of thumb to say that if a word has a less-used or archaic equivalent that you can sub in, doing so will probably make your name cooler.

To throw out a random example, take mercury, the element. It’s kind of a cool word on its own, sure, but using the archaic “quicksilver” instantly makes it a thousand times cooler. I guess swords are also a good example—“blade” is cool, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the archaic “brand.” You have to be kind of careful with that one, though, depending on what part of the sword’s name you want to emphasize. If you’re going with a “Blade of X” sort of structure and you want the X part to stand out, then keeping it as “Blade of X” rather than “X Brand” is the way to go. It’s important to keep in mind the fact that archaic words like that will always stand out, for better or for worse.

Making up a good name isn’t as simple as stringing together a series of individually cool words. The art of naming is an art of balance, and it’s only by achieving total balance that a name is perfected. What is it that you want to communicate through the names you make up? How do you want your readers or viewers to perceive them? It’s vitally necessary to consider each and every feeling, each and every piece of information that you pack into the names you invent.

“Of course, I wouldn’t be dealing with such ridiculously high expectations if I didn’t ramble about naming theory day in and day out like this...”

It was the strangest feeling. If I had to compare it to something, I’d say it was like being a language arts teacher who made their students compose poems for an assignment despite not bothering to write even a single poem himself. I could really understand where teachers like that were coming from all of a sudden. The more judgmental about creative works you were on a day-to-day basis, the harder it was to produce one of your own.

Anyway, that was a digression. The point is that since I’d been lucky enough to be granted a fire-based power, I wanted to use the word “flame” somewhere in its name or title. That was set in stone, in my mind. Or, really, it had to be, because if I didn’t put something in stone sometime soon, I was never going to get anywhere.

A two-word English name, and the word “flame.” Those two points were the name’s sole foundation, and they had been for quite a long time now. No matter how much I racked my brain, I just wasn’t able to progress any further than that. My plan was to write down anything and everything I came up with today, prioritizing quantity over quality (okay, that’s not exactly the nuance I was going for, but you get the point). As you’ve seen, it didn’t exactly work out as I’d hoped it would.

For now, though, I didn’t have any other options. Thus, I hardened my resolve and stared down a fresh sheet of paper—no, stared down myself—once more.

I didn’t have a clear conception of how much time had passed. The world outside the club room was...dark, probably? I wasn’t totally sure of that either.

The seemingly endless hours of silent, internal dialogue I’d subjected myself to had worn away at my mental state, leaving me in a somewhat unbalanced situation before I knew it. Granted, the fact that I was capable of assessing my own mental state and saying that I was unbalanced was probably a sign that I was, in fact, actually still balanced as could be...but on the other hand, assessing yourself as being unbalanced also seemed like an inherently unbalanced thing to do. This was one of those rabbit holes—like debating whether someone who has good intentions while ignorant is more or less dangerous than someone who’s actively malicious—that would go on forever if I let it.

In any case, it was pretty clear that thinking about stuff like that for as long as I had was definitely not a balanced thing to do.

Okay. Yeah. Something feels wrong here for sure. My mind felt foggy, and my consciousness dim and far away. My footing was uncertain, as well, to so great an extent that I couldn’t tell whether I was standing or sitting. I wasn’t even totally sure I was in the club room anymore. In focusing so intently on my dialogue with myself, I’d neglected my dialogue with the world around me, and the world had gotten so sick of being ignored that it had apparently given up and gone along on its way.

I saw nothing. I felt nothing. The world was pitch black—or maybe pure white? It was like I was all alone in the world, or like the world itself had vanished, leaving me on my lonesome. It was an inexplicable, weightless sense of solitude.

Man, this sure is something. I guess I should’ve expected this from myself. Apparently, I’ve pushed the boundaries of my inner dialogue so far I accidentally destroyed the world. I’m as sinful as ever, it seems. That’s right—I’m sinful as hell, and that’s hella cool.

“So...I guess this must mean that I was this world’s god all along, or something like that.”

“As friggin’ if!”

Suddenly, a voice rang out from nowhere. It was a familiar voice, shutting me down in a familiar manner.

“You, a god? Get real. There’s nothing more excruciating than a chuuni who’s started taking his delusions of grandeur in that stupid direction.”

“Tomoyo...”

There she was: Kanzaki Tomoyo, in the flesh. She was all alone, standing on nothing in the featureless white void I’d found myself in.

“Wh-What’re you doing here...? And actually, where is this place?” I asked.

“What, here? It’s your mindscape,” said Tomoyo.

“My mindscape?! Oh, of course! I get it—it all makes sense now!”

“Does it, really?! You picked up on that way too quickly! I was all ready to explain what I was talking about and stuff!”

Hmph! As if I’d need an explanation!

The mindscape: in simple terms, it’s...well, like...it’s one of those things that shows up all the time in battle manga, basically. When a protagonist or major character ends up in a space like this, it’s a surefire sign that they’re about to go through some sort of major awakening. It’s where they shed the binding chains of their past traumas, reflect upon their bonds with their companions, and obtain a brand new superpower!

“Oh man, holy crap! I finally made it into my mindscape! I knew it was only a matter of time!”

“Do you really have to be this hyped-up about it...?”

“And man, it really is as featureless as they always make it look! It’s just all white, all the way! We’re basically standing in a blank canvas! It’s like we’re in BLEACH!”

“You mean, like, liquid bleach, right?! You’re just talking about how it makes stuff white, right?! Right?!”

“Okay, so wait. If this is my mindscape...then who’re you?”

“Hmm. Well, the easy way to put it would be that I’m an illusory version of myself that was generated by your mind, or whatever.”

“Yeah, okay. That checks out. Ugh, that sorta sucks, though! Doesn’t that mean I’ve been talking to myself this whole time?”

“As opposed to what? Look, if you’re gonna start going down that road, then it’s only a matter of time before you decide that all protagonists who go into their mindscapes are freaky lunatics who have full-blown conversations with themselves. Is that the conclusion you wanna reach?”

“Hmm. Yeah...you’ve got a point. I guess it’s kinda silly to question that part too deeply. And besides, even when we talk with other people, humans are always talking with ourselves. Some part of us is always in a dialogue with an imaginary version of the person we’re speaking to in our minds, predicting how they’ll respond to whatever we’ll say next.”

“Could you not say stuff that actually sounds sort of deep out of nowhere...? It’s really hard to react to.”

“Okay then, Tomoyo,” I said, drawing a line in the conversational sand. “It’s time. C’mon, give me something.”

“Huh? What do you mean, something?”

“A hint for what to name my power!”

“Why me?”

“Well, this is my mindscape, right? That must mean you’ve shown up here to give me a lecture or encourage me or something, then you’ll give me a hint to help me along on my way. That’s basically always how it works when an acquaintance shows up in a character’s mental world.”

“And you’re just, like...saying that? Out loud? Anyway, nah, I don’t have anything like that. I’m not interested in sticking my nose into your naming business.”

“Huh? What’d you even bother coming here for, then?”

“Well, the plan was to have this whole bonus story be forty pages straight of you talking to yourself, but that ended up being just way too much, so they scrapped it and sent me in as an emergency measure.”

“Oh, so it’s a meta reason!”

“Honestly, they kinda just threw me in here to prop the story up.”

“Don’t be honest about that!”

“Anyway, I’m here now, so we may as well make the most of it. I’ll play along with your whole naming thing, if you want.”

“Oh, nice! I knew you had it in you, Tomoyo—thanks! Okay then, let’s get started! Naming card battle number two, go!”

“Oh, hell no!”

“Why not?”

“That’s...something that I can only manage when I’m really worked up. I can’t maintain that sort of energy level otherwise. I really don’t think I’d be able to pull off that sort of high-energy scene right now.”

Hmm. That’s a shame. That card battle was super fun—I’d love to have another one.

“But anyway, back to your power’s name. Speaking of last time, why not just go with the one you came up with back then, Flame of Darkness?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Well, why?”

“Why?! Because... Because it’s just wrong, that’s why. It’s got major this-isn’t-it vibes, y’know?”

“Hmm. Well, I’ll admit that it feels maybe a little too simple, but I don’t think that’s really that bad of a thing. Some series make a point of having their final boss-tier powers have simple, straightforward names, right?”

“Well, one way or another, it’s out because it doesn’t match up with the format I settled on during your session!”

“Oh. Right, yeah.”

“And even if it did fit the format, I’d still be against it. I dunno how to put this, but, like...I’d just rather not use words like ‘darkness’ and ‘dark’ at all, if I can.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too played out. It’d cheapen the name, the way I see it. Like, if you had some random person look at my power and come up with a name for it, odds are good the first thing they’d suggest would be Dark Something-or-Other, right?”

Now, don’t get me wrong...“darkness” and “dark” are perfectly cool words. I’m absolutely not debating that! The problem is that they’re cool in a way that an elementary schooler could easily come up with. The word “chuunibyou” has grown so far apart from its roots nowadays that the actual eighth grade has basically nothing to do with it anymore, so it might be silly for me to act like a stickler about this, but I just can’t help but think that for something to have a ton of chuuni appeal, it has to be something that an elementary schooler wouldn’t be able to get yet. A cool factor that a kid in the early years of elementary school could understand just wasn’t the sort of chuuni aesthetic that I was going for.

“Okay then,” Tomoyo said with an understanding nod. I was very aware that the concept I was trying to explain would be pretty tough for most people to pick up on, but Tomoyo had grasped and accepted it in an instant. That’s a former chuuni for you, I guess. “But you know, Andou—isn’t that basically just you chickening out, in the end?”

“Wh-What was that...?”

“You heard me. It is, isn’t it? You know the words are cool, but you’re giving up on them just because ‘anyone could come up with them.’”

I fell silent.

“I get it, you know? The fundamental principle of chuunibyou is thinking that not being like everyone else makes you cool. Of course you’d want to avoid using a name that anyone could come up with. You can’t help but feel that way, and it’s making you raise your own standards. But...if you’re at this point where you’re sticking so strictly to chuunibyou’s fundamental principles, doesn’t it mean that you’re using them as a crutch?”

“Huh?!”

Tomoyo had just slapped me with a truly profound statement—profound, yet also incredibly obnoxious. Wanting to be unlike everyone else was the very nature of chuunibyou. It was a philosophy that made being part of a minority group its prime aesthetic. The thing is, though, that minority groups are still groups. They’re still part of something—not individuals. Though chuunis wish to be unlike everyone else, when all’s said and done, they also wish to be part of a group of people who wish to be unlike everyone else.

I could deal with having countless people laugh at the names I came up with...but I still wanted some small percentage of them to understand me as well. I wanted some number of people to identify with me. I wanted people with my sensibilities to praise me for my creations. I never wanted those people, at the absolute least, to laugh at me. And, in letting myself indulge in those desires...

“Before I knew it...I’ve ended up pandering to the chuuni crowd?”

In not pandering to the majority, I’d wound up pandering to a minority. I had put on a pretense of being solitary and aloof, but in truth, I was as far from it as a person could be.

“I really do understand how embarrassing it is to use an obvious name. But you know what, Andou? Thinking up a name for your own supernatural power is already plenty embarrassing on its own.”

“...”

“So why care? Who gives a crap about a little extra embarrassment on top of it?”

“Tomoyo...”

“It takes guts to go with something played out on purpose. That’s a sort of courage that creators need.”

“Oof. Way to talk like a published author, Miss Hasn’t-even-had-her-debut-yet.”

“Oh, screw you!” Tomoyo shouted, blushing as bright red as a tomato—only to suddenly start fading away a moment later. “Oh... Looks like time’s up.”

“Huh? Wh-What do you mean?”

“Just that my turn’s over, that’s all. There’s a pretty big line behind me, and I can’t keep eating up screen time forever.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but one way or another, Tomoyo’s body was fading at a rapid pace. She grew gradually more and more transparent, until finally she began disappearing altogether, starting from her feet.

“What?! No! Tomoyo?! Tomoyo!” I shouted.

“Andou... Don’t forget about me, okay?” said Tomoyo. For just a moment, there was a faraway look in her eyes—and then she was gone, vanishing entirely.

“Tomoyo! Tomoyooo! N-No... Noooooooooooo!” I wailed, falling to my knees and pounding the pure-white ground with my fists. “Dammit! It happened again... I couldn’t protect her this time either!”

“Protect who?”

“Gwaaaugh?!”

I’d really had a good “crushed by regret and self-condemnation” thing going for a second there, but then an elementary schooler I was very familiar with suddenly appeared right next to me and knocked me completely out of the moment.

“Ch-Chifuyu...?”

“What’re you doing, Andou?”

“U-Umm, well... I’m, uh...”

“You ‘couldn’t protect her this time either’...? Who?”

“...”

“You weren’t really punching the ground either. You stopped right before.”

Chifuyu’s innocent gaze was boring a hole into me. There was nothing I could say to her. The honest answer, after all...was that I was acting out a “main character who’d failed to protect his friends” scene. Watching Tomoyo vanish before my eyes had given me the urge, and I’d been helpless to resist it.

Speaking of which, this is as much your fault as it is mine, Tomoyo! What was that “don’t forget about me” for?! Of course I’d run with it if you give me a setup like that!

“So, you’re here in my mindscape too, huh, Chifuyu?”

“Yeah. To prop up the story,” Chifuyu brazenly declared.

Oh, okay. I think I’m getting the picture now. This is probably one of those things where everyone’s going to show up in order, right? Seeing as this is the last bonus story, they’re pulling out an all-star cast to send us off!

“I didn’t come alone, though,” Chifuyu added.

“Oh?”

“Squirrely’s here too.”

Chifuyu proudly lifted up her stuffed squirrel for me to see. The way she was insisting on counting a plushie as a person struck me as really charming, in a childlike sort of way.

“Oh, that’s great! Nice to have you on the team too, Squirrely,” I said.

“And someone else is here too,” Chifuyu added.

“Oh? You brought another plushie with you this time?”

“I asked Cookie to come.”

“You... Huh?!” I gasped in bug-eyed shock.

Just then, another grade schooler stepped out from behind Chifuyu. “It’s been a while, Andou,” Chifuyu’s best friend, Kuki Madoka, said with a polite bow.

“Wait, wait, no, this can’t be right!” I protested. “We can’t bring out Kuki here! That’d mess up the whole premise here so badly, we’d never recover from it!”

“But why?”

“Why? Well, because...”

It’s just obviously not okay, right? Kuki doesn’t know about our powers! And, like, on a more basic level, these bonus stories are set half a year before the main series starts! Me meeting Kuki now would result in a seriously unresolvable continuity error!

“Are you trying to leave Kuki out, Andou?”

“Ugh!”

“But she’s my best friend.”

“Augh!”

“And she worked so hard to sing the ED for you, every single episode.”

“Gaaah!”

Now that’s a hard point to argue against! Kuki and Kudou sure did sing the ED together, yup.

“It’s all right, Andou. You don’t have to worry about any of those nitpicky details,” Kuki said in a kind, understanding tone. “This is just your mindscape, after all.”

It kinda feels like we’re setting ourselves up for failure by using that excuse...but sure, let’s just say it works.

“Okay, then, Chifuyu, Kuki. Are you two here to give me naming advice too?” I asked.

“Yeah. But not really,” said Chifuyu. “I’m not giving advice. I thought up the best answer.”

“Uh?”

“I thought up a name for your power, Andou.”

“You... Huuuuuuh?! Y-You mean...?”

To be blunt: I appreciated the thought, and only the thought. For one thing, I was very dedicated to the idea of coming up with my power’s name myself. For another...I just didn’t have any faith whatsoever in Chifuyu’s taste.

“Listen up, Andou,” Chifuyu said, sounding a little proud of herself as she talked right over my moment of internal turmoil. “The name I came up with for your power is...Andou.”

I blinked.

“It’s Andou.”

“Uh... Huh? Wait. Are you saying that you want to name my power Andou?”

“Yeah. Andou’s Andou.”

Chifuyu seemed pretty pleased with herself...but, like, come on. Really? No way was I naming my power after myself. I had to come up with a good reason to object—but before I could, a big, beaming smile spread across Kuki’s face as she took Chifuyu by the hand.

“That’s amazing!” Kuki exclaimed. “It’s great, Chii! What a perfect name!”

“Really?” asked Chifuyu.

“Really! I’m sure Andou loves it too!”

“Yeah. I worked really hard to think up something he’d like.”

Okay...we’ve got an emergency on our hands. Who knew that Kuki would give Chifuyu’s name such a rave review? Her habit of being pathologically soft on Chifuyu was manifesting in the worst possible way for me!

“Naming Andou’s power Andou’s such a genius move... I knew you’d come up with something incredible, Chii! You’re always thinking up ideas that an average person would never even consider!”

I mean...I’m not gonna argue with that last part, at least.

“Yeah. I put my all into it. And if his power has the same name that he does, if he ever loses it someday, whoever finds it will know who to give it back to.”

Is she treating my power’s name like a name tag?! I’m not gonna lose it, for crying out loud! It might get stolen or sealed, sure, but it’s not the sort of thing that can accidentally fall out of your pocket when you’re out and about!

“Right? That’s so you, Chii! Naming Andou’s power...Andou... Wh-What an amazing...idea... Pff! Yeah, it’s...pff, hee hee...i-it’s just...just great...”

I see that hysterical laughter you’re holding back, Kuki! You know exactly what sort of crime you’re committing right now! You’re killing two birds with one stone by praising Chifuyu and humiliating me at the same time!

“Okay, Andou. It’s almost time. I’m going home,” Chifuyu said. She’d delivered the news she came here to share, so she was apparently satisfied now. Her form began to fade away, and Kuki started fading right along with her.

“Oh. One last thing, Andou,” Kuki said, a thought seeming to strike her before she vanished completely. “The anime portrayed me as being pretty interested in you as a man, in the end...but honestly, the me in the original novels couldn’t care less about you.”

“Dropping a bit of a bombshell, huh?!”

With that final, incredibly inflammatory remark, the elementary schooler combo popped out of existence.

“Well, why don’t you tell me what you really think of me, Kuki...?” I grumbled. “Though, wait. Actually...I guess there could be a chance that she was just being a really huge tsundere at the end there? Which would mean that the novel version of Kuki actually—”

“What on earth do you think you’re speculating about? She’s an elementary schooler, Andou,” a harsh, judgmental voice rang out from behind me. It was, of course, Sayumi. “So, you genuinely wound up on a trip into your mindscape just because you were having trouble thinking up a name...? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m almost moved by how typical of you that is.”

“Sayumi... I mean, it’s not that impressive or anything, y’know?”

“Please don’t get bashful over what was plainly supposed to be sarcasm. Just how much time and energy will you waste on these power names before you’re satisfied?”

“Well, I mean, look... Things are complicated, okay? I have a lot to deal with.”

“Do you, truly? You’re going to name it Dark and Dark in the end, regardless of what happens here, so I fail to see what makes this so difficult.”

“I definitely already told you to stop saying stuff like that!”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You’re planning on using your conversations with the five of us as inspiration that will ultimately lead to you coming up with Dark and Dark, aren’t you? I suppose that means I should start thinking up some sort of clever hint to drop myself...”

“Stop! Please, just stop!”

You’re gonna ruin everything! Yes, things kinda felt like they were moving in that direction, but saying it in advance spoils the whole deal!

“Have mercy, Sayumi, I’m begging you... I’m already at my wit’s end, and I just can’t deal with this right now. Having to cope with the name that Chifuyu shoved onto me is hard enough as is.”

“Andou, you mean? You could always just use it.”

“Hell no!”

“Oh? Isn’t sharing a name with your power an established trope in its own right?”

“Only when the power name ends up getting used as a code name for someone, like Weather Report or Accelerator! It’s really, really weird for someone’s real name to get used as their power name! Especially when the character in question is Japanese!”

“How very demanding of you.”

“It’s not about me being demanding, it’s just... Look, I just don’t wanna use it, okay? I’m not some raging narcissist like Ellery Queen, who likes throwing his name around everywhere.”

“Speaking of whom... I should say, for the record, Andou, that while the works of Ellery Queen do sometimes feature a protagonist who shares a name with their author, the real-world Ellery Queen was, in fact, a pen name shared by two authors who wrote together.”

“Huh?! For real?!”

“Quite—a pen name of much the same kind as Ashirogi Muto. Though their medium of choice was the written word rather than manga, and supposedly, one was in charge of coming up with their stories’ overall plots while the other handled the nitty-gritty prose.”

“Oh, wow! I guess that’s why they were totally okay with naming their protagonist that, huh? Way easier to name him after a pen name when it’s shared between two people.”

“That is, of course, the most basic of the basics when it comes to having an understanding of Ellery Queen, and I’d thank you for not throwing their name around so freely when you lack that sort of fundamental knowledge. Not unless you want to earn the ire of mystery fans everywhere, at least,” Sayumi said with an exasperated sigh that made me bury my face in my hands from the shame of it all. “By the way, Andou,” she continued, “regarding your power’s name—have you settled on any of its smaller details, at least?”

“Oh, yeah, I have. I know for sure that the main name will be made up of two major English words and that I’ll be using the word ‘flame’ in the title associated with it.”

“‘Flambé’? It sounds like you have quite the tasty title in the works, then.”

“Flame! Not flambé! Flame!”

“Oh, my apologies. They’re such similar words, I must have misheard you.”

“No, you didn’t! That was totally on purpose! Sure, they’re technically only one letter and an accent off from each other when you write them out, but there’s no way you could ever mishear one for the other! I don’t want my power to sound like it’s about to be served for dinner!”

Flame.

Flambé.

Crap, they do kinda look alike! The left side’s totally identical!

“Although flambé is associated with a wide variety of dishes in modern times, and although its origins are somewhat unclear in a historical sense, when one examines early examples of recipes that call for the technique, it’s hard not to notice that a vast majority seem to be sweet dishes rather than savory. As such, strictly speaking, using ‘flambé’ in your power’s name would make it sound like it’s about to be served for dessert, not dinner.”

“I wasn’t asking for a crash course in the historical context of flambé! We’re not accomplishing anything helpful with this tangent!”

“Of course, I favor Japanese sweets over flambé desserts regardless—the sort that use red bean paste as a filling, for instance. Speaking of which, do you prefer your bean paste smooth or only partially processed, Andou?”

“Oh, so we’re sticking with the tangent whether or not it’s pointless, huh...? Well, I’m a smooth paste person. I don’t really like having chunks of whole beans in my desserts, so I basically only eat sweets that use the smooth stuff. What about you?”

“I’m partial to the chunks, as it happens. Bean paste is defined by beans, after all.”

“Oh? Well, y’know, I like uguisu-an bean paste! Do you know what that is, Andou?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s a lot like red bean paste, but it’s green because they actually make it out of peas instead of— Wait, Maiya?! What’re you doing here?!”

“Ha ha, been a while!” said Maiya. “I was just kinda bored and all, so I came over to hang out!”

“She seemed bored, so I brought her along with me,” Sayumi confirmed.

The Takanashi sisters seemed not to make very much at all of Maiya’s presence, but... Like, this can’t be okay, can it? She doesn’t know about our powers either, and me meeting her now would totally break continuity!

“Oh, Andou, there’s no need to fuss about this kind of thing! Kuki already made an appearance, so why shouldn’t I show up too?” said Maiya.

“Well, I mean... Kuki sang the ED and all, right? She did a ton of good work for the anime.”

“Hey, I did great work for the anime too! They’re saying that I’m its rising star, y’know? People are talking all about how that one mole I have on my collarbone is super sexy and stuff!”

“Yeah, uh... Sorry. If people are talking about that, I sure haven’t heard it. Pretty sure not even most of the people who read the novels noticed your mole at all.”

“Huh? Well, that’s weird! My boyfriend said it’s super eye-catching!”

“Your boyfriend must be a really nice guy, huh...?”

“Okay, but, like, I’m the only girl in the whole series who actually has a boyfriend, right? Doesn’t that earn me a buncha points? I bet the viewers all think I’ve got some major girl power going, right?”

“Uh, about that... Sorry, but considering the sensibilities of the usual late-night anime viewer demographic, I’m pretty positive that having a boyfriend definitely isn’t working in your favor there.”

Hmm. Yeah, I’m really not great at dealing with this girl. She has no clue about all the rules and theories that we geeks abide by. She’s a full-fledged, all-out normie if I’ve ever seen one, and I just don’t know how to talk with people like that.

“If we may return to the topic at hand, Maiya, uguisu-an bean paste is improper,” said Sayumi, steering us back onto entirely the wrong topic.

“Aw, what? But it’s so tasty!” Maiya protested.

“That, I will freely admit. The fact that it’s tasty, however, does nothing to lessen the fact that it’s self-evidently wrong. The only sweetened paste that ought to be used in Japanese sweets is objectively anko—red bean paste made from adzuki beans in particular.”

“Okay, but Sayu—”

“Yes, people have made pastes from tubers, pumpkins, sesame seeds, soybeans—the list goes on and on, but I consider all of them to be equally improper. Daifuku are filled with anko. Manju are filled with anko. Ohagi are covered with anko. That’s simply the proper way of making them—the way they’re meant to be,” Sayumi firmly stated.

She seemed way more fired up about this than she usually got over just about anything else. Who knew that Sayumi would have such deep-seated and passionate opinions about bean paste? I was starting to think that if she used Route of Origin on a manju, whatever it was stuffed with would end up turning into anko instead.

“Just to reiterate, the fact that I consider alternate pastes improper doesn’t mean that I consider them bad. I’ve eaten them on numerous occasions myself. However...when all is said and done, I simply cannot help but be drawn to red bean paste above all others. The sky is blue, rice is white, and bean paste is red. It has to be red, or else—”

“Hey, uh, Sayu?”

“Oh honestly... What is it, Maiya? I was in the middle of something,” Sayumi grumbled, clearly upset about having her little soapbox moment interrupted.

“You’re kinda disappearing, y’know?” Maiya blithely pointed out.

She really was. Sayumi’s body had started fading away, and Maiya was in much the same state. It seemed their time was up.

“What...? But— No! This isn’t over, Anko Jurai!”

“Who’re you calling Anko?!”

“Ha ha ha ha! Bye-bye, Anko! See you ’round!”

And so, the Takanashi sisters vanished, leaving one final stupid gag in their wake.

“Seriously...? We spent almost that entire conversation talking about bean paste, for crying out loud!”

It seemed that something about these bonus stories made Sayumi feel the urge to go almost completely out of character. It was really weird for her to have made this many dumb jokes and derail our conversations on a whim, not to mention how she’d brought Maiya along with her, of all things. Like, seriously, I really hadn’t expected her to make an appearance. I know I said we’d have an all-star cast this time, but it feels like we’re taking that a little too far!

“All right! Judging by the established order, Hatoko’s probably up next. Me being surprised every time a new person shows up is getting pretty old, so I may as well take a moment to calm down and prepare myself.”

I paused to take a few deep breaths, calming my nerves and steadying my mind.

“Hatoko loves comedy and variety shows, which means there’s an extremely real chance that she’s going to make some sort of completely over-the-top, utterly hilarious entrance that I could never see coming in a million years. She knows that grabbing the audience with your entrance is the most important part of an act, after all. Whatever she does, it’s sure to be wild.”

“S-Stop hyping me up like that, Juu! You’re making it so much harder to make my entrance!” Hatoko pleaded, nearly in tears as she appeared in a perfectly normal and unexciting fashion.

“Oh, what, that’s it?” I said. “I thought you were gonna do something special or whatever.”

“I wouldn’t do that! I’ve told you a bunch of times that I like watching variety TV shows, not acting like I’m in one! I’ll let you handle all the funny slapstick gags, Juu.”

“I don’t want any part in all that stuff either! I’m no more of a variety TV performer than you are!”

“Oh, really? I think you’d be pretty good at it! I mean, when we did that comedy sketch just the other day, you—”

“We are not talking about that!”

God, the dread...or, well, more like the gut-churning shame! Just remembering that incident was enough to make a waterfall of cold sweat pour down my back. It felt like I was going to break out in hives. The comedy sketch that the two of us did in the third of these bonus stories would, without a doubt, go down as the single most genuinely cringe-inducing moment in my personal history. I would never, ever allow it to be brought into the light again.

“Aww, why not?” Hatoko whined.

“Because!” I snapped. “And for the record...I am not doing that again. We promised that it’d be a onetime thing, and I’m not budging on that.”

“Hmph! As if I didn’t know that already,” Hatoko grumbled with a petulant pout. She did drop the subject, at least. “Ah! In that case, you know what?”

“What?”

“When we did the comedy sketch the other day—”

“Were you listening to me at all?!”

Okay, that one caught me off guard! Like, majorly off guard! Was she trying to rehash that line as a gag, or what?! What depths isn’t she willing to sink to for the sake of a joke?!

Or so I thought in my moment of astonishment, but it quickly became clear that she was actually being sincere.

“No, no, not like that!” Hatoko said before moving on to explain herself. “I won’t talk about the actual sketch at all anymore, but I was just thinking that there’s one thing that we forgot to decide on back when we did it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We never picked out a stage name for our group!”

“Oooh... Right. I guess we didn’t.”

“I keep thinking about how since we put on a whole act together, we should’ve come up with a group name while we were at it.”

“Okay, but why would we need one of those, anyway? Our group lasted for one performance, and it was pretty much something we threw together on the spot.”

“Aww, but I want a group name!”

“Well... If you really insist, I guess we can give it one, sure. Have any ideas in mind?”

“So, umm, I was thinking it’d be nice to make it a name that doubles up on something!”

“Huh? ‘Doubles up’?”

“Yeah! Apparently there’s a superstition in comedian circles that using two words with similar rhythms in your group’s name will make you more popular. You’ll start noticing groups like that all over the place if you know to look for them!”

“Huuuh. You know, now that you mention it, I guess that might be true, yeah.”

“So, I was thinking it’d be nice to have our name be like that too! If you want to get ahead in a cutthroat world like the entertainment industry, you need every edge you can get, so you may as well pay attention to charms and superstitions, right?”

“Hatoko...” I sighed. “I know I’m repeating myself here, but our group’s never getting back together. That was our first and last gig. Our debut performance was also our breakup performance.”

“I-I know, I know!” Hatoko said with a frantic shake of her hands. However much she protested, though, I could see a slight flicker of ambition in her eyes.

Yup, I’m officially terrified. I have a feeling I might wake up one of these days to find that she’s put our names down as an act for next year’s cultural festival or something like that.

“Don’t worry, Juu,” said Hatoko. “I’d never sign you up for a comedy trade school without getting your permission first!”

“Your fantasies have already hit the turning-it-into-a-career stage?!”

“It’ll be fine! Even if I get way more popular than you doing solo stand-up, we’ll still keep the profit split at fifty-fifty for our performances!”

“Your fantasies are racing along at an unheard-of pace! You’re skipping so many steps!”

“Hmm. So, what do you think, Juu? What’s a group name we could use that doubles up on something?”

“How am I supposed to know? You sprung this on me out of nowhere! The standards for this name feel nothing like the ones for the names I normally make up.”

“I guess we’ll have to think it through together then, huh?”

“Looks like.”

Hatoko and I fell silent, taking a moment to seriously consider what name to give our comedy unit.

“...Wait, what are we doing?! This whole mindscape exists to help me think up a name for my power! Why is this all about our comedy duo all of a sudden?!”

“Ooh, nice callout!” Hatoko said with a satisfied smile as her form began to gradually vanish. “Thanks, Juu. I don’t have any regrets left anymore.”

“Why’re you acting like you’re moving on to the afterlife?!”

“With that last gag, I’ve entrusted all the gags I’ve ever set up to you, Juu. You can feel free to call yourself Delayed Comeback Jurai from now on.”

“Wait, was all that supposed to be some sort of ceremony?! You were handing off the Delayed Comeback Hatoko title?! Do your delayed comebacks get passed down through the generations like the Spirit Wave Style or One For All?!”

My comebacks rang out in vain as Hatoko vanished with a blissful smile on her face.

“Okay, seriously...what even was that?” I sighed.

Delayed Comeback Jurai, huh? Nope. Definitely don’t wanna let that be the direction my character develops in. Characters who are all about calling out other characters’ nonsense are a big thing, sure, but the only time I’ve ever seen a character who’s specifically known for playing along before firing off a delayed comeback was in Psycho Logical.

“Well, anyway, I guess that’s everyone covered,” I said to myself.

All of the literary club girls—Tomoyo, Chifuyu, Sayumi, and Hatoko—had made appearances, in the order they’d been depicted on the covers of the anime’s Blu-ray and DVD releases rather than that of the original novels. I’d chatted with all four of them, and now...well, what was supposed to happen? How was I supposed to return from my mindscape to the real world?

“This is weird. I was so sure that once everyone was finished, I’d get put back in the real world auto—”

“It’s a little early for you to decide that everyone’s finished, Andou Jurai!”

A powerful, confident voice arose from nowhere at all. The next thing I knew, there she was, walking straight toward me with a calm, leisurely stride.

“Heh heh heh! I hope you’re not going to try to say that you forgot me?” said the girl—who, timeline-wise, I definitely shouldn’t have met at this point, but why even bother questioning that anymore—letting out a dauntless laugh as she approached me.

Oh, right. Of course! If Kuki and Maiya got to make appearances, then of course she’d get some screen time too. She’s the rising star who gained a sudden and massive popularity boost thanks to her killing her role in the anime, after all—not to mention one of the ones who sang the ED and made regular appearances all throughout the show. She was our main antagonist in the first and last episode! The anime both began and ended with us defeating her! Without her, our anime would never have come together at all!

“That’s right! All the others were just a warm-up act for me, Kudou—”

“Hey, Andou! Would you just wake up, already?!”

Just then, a voice that seemed to shake the very heavens rang out, and I felt a light impact on the back of my head. Then, before I even knew what was happening, my consciousness was being yanked out of my mindscape and back into the real world.

“...Huh? Wha— W-Wait a second, Andou! What about me?! When’s my turn?! Wait! I...I said wait... Don’t you think you’re kinda treating me like crap heeeeeere?!”

“Oh! Finally awake, huh?”

I opened my eyes and looked up to find Tomoyo standing in front of me and holding a green dictionary in one hand.

“For crying out loud, Andou, what were you even doing in here? The room’s a mess, and you were out like a light!”

“Tomoyo... Huh? What’re you doing here?” I mumbled.

“Well, we were all going to go home, but then everyone got worried and decided to come back and check on you.”

The club room was lit by the warm glow of the sunset, and all of our other members were present as well. It was just like the last cut of the anime’s OP—all five of us were gathered up together.

“Huh...? Wh-Wha? What about my mindscape...? Where’d the endless white expanse go...?”

“Huh? Are you still half asleep, or what?” Tomoyo sighed with an exasperated shrug. The other three were snickering behind her, as well.

As best as I could tell, at some point along the way, I’d fallen asleep. What I’d thought was my mindscape had been a dream, plain and simple...but then again, I guess mindscapes are more or less dreams by default, in a sense?

Anyway, I couldn’t say for sure what all had been real and what all had been a dream, and I couldn’t remember most of the stuff that had happened in my mindscape regardless, but there was one thing I knew for sure: Kudou was definitely still in there, bawling her eyes out.

Man. It really does feel like I can hear her wailing from somewhere deep within my soul. I must be imagining it, right? It was just a dream, right? She’ll stop on her own before too long, surely?

“Hm...? Oh, Andou,” Tomoyo said as she looked down at my hands. “You finally finished your power’s name, huh?”

“I... Huh? What’re you talking about? I still haven’t—” I began, before cutting myself off with a sharp gasp.

An involuntary shudder ran through me. I’d been slumped over on the table, asleep and motionless...yet only now I realized I was clutching a pen firmly in my right hand. That wasn’t all that surprising, considering I’d dozed off while scribbling on a sheet of paper...but. But, that pen wasn’t positioned over loose-leaf now. It was hovering over the Bloody Bible: a truly unique notebook, the only copy of which was in my possession.

I could’ve sworn the Bloody Bible was still stashed in my bag, and yet there it was, right beneath my hand. And, beneath that hand, there it was—a single line, written out on the page that I had been saving specifically for the name of my power.

The stygian flames of purgatory: Dark and Dark

I had no memory of writing those words. Had I scrawled them out while half asleep? No, clearly not—the penmanship was much too stable and confident for that. It was written in the exact same hand that I always wrote out the names I came up with.

I couldn’t even begin to explain what had happened, and for a moment, I was actually terrified...but the other members of my club accepted it without batting an eyelash.

“Hmm. I mean, it’s fine, I guess. I kinda like how you came straight out of the gate with the word ‘dark’ like that. Just kinda, though—like, seriously, only just a little.”

“Oooh, huh! And you doubled up on ‘dark’ too! That seems like a name that could get popular quickly!”

“The ‘and’ in the middle is like ‘Andou.’ I like it.”

“Oh—the flames of purgatory. For just a moment, I thought it said ‘flambé.’”

My clubmates had plenty of impressions to share, and most of them were actually quite positive. It was almost as if they were seeing their own ideas reflected in the final product.

“Okay, seriously, are you still asleep or what?” Tomoyo asked with a quizzical glance toward me. I was still in a daze. “You spent ages fussing over that name, right? I was expecting you to be way more hyped-up when you finally finished it. Normally, you’d be screaming it from the rooftops for the whole world to hear by now.”

“Right? This isn’t like you, Juu!”

“You’re being quiet, Andou.”

“Too quiet, in fact. I must say, Andou, this feels like something of a letdown.”

I listened to each of their words in sequence. And then...

“Mwa ha ha!”

...I laughed. I cachinnated, just like I always had.

My power’s name had been completed out of the blue. Perhaps my subconscious had guided me to write it in my sleep, or I’d written it down before passing out and forgotten about it, or my dark side had awoken to write it for me. The truth was veiled in darkness...but I was ready to accept that. In fact, that was the best possible option. After all: names that seemed to be the work of the inscrutable hand of fate were always, invariably, hella friggin’ cool!

“I am he who conquers chaos!”

I thrust my right hand forward and incanted the first words of the Malediction of Unleashing. I still hadn’t nailed down the particulars of its invocation, but I threw my all into improvising it as best as I could in the heat of the moment. Then—the very moment the Malediction was finished—I activated my power.

A jet-black flame surged forth from my right hand.

“O flame of mine: I shall name thee Dark and Dark!”

As I declared my power’s name for all to hear, my clubmates looked on. They seemed mostly fed up with me—but at the same time, I could tell that they were just a little amused as well.

Dark and Dark: it was the ultimate power name. That may sound like I’m singing my own praises...but no. I knew I never could have reached this name through my power alone. It was only because everyone was there for me that I’d managed to complete it. I had no basis for that theory—it was purely an assumption—but it was one that I felt strangely certain of anyway.

This name was a piece of art that we’d all created together. I suppose, in a sense, you could call it a shared pen name. And so, I felt no reluctance to take a step back and praise it for all I was worth. I would laud it with all the hyperbolic superlatives that came to mind, lavishing it with boundless affection.

Dark and Dark. I knew that from that point onward, I’d be shouting that name out time and time again. And, each time I spoke those words, I would remember what had happened on this day. I would be reminded that no matter what life threw at me, I would never truly be alone.

“Incidentally,” Sayumi muttered just moments after I thought that I’d really wrapped everything up on a nice note, “judging by the timeline established in the main series, Andou and I would have to be having our showdown tomorrow, wouldn’t we? You came up with your power’s name immediately before that conflict was resolved, after all. Should I take this to mean that we’ll be going from this remarkably good-spirited moment of club unity to an all-out battle in just a single day?”

“...”

“And for that matter, you announcing that your power is named Dark and Dark to all of us, here and now, feels like it causes a continuity error so flagrant, it’s entirely indefensible...”

“...”

This bonus story is a work of fiction. Any relation to the original work is purely coincidental— Okay, no, not really, but if you could just write off all the contradictions and inconsistencies found within as the work of some parallel world sorta situation, that’d be great. Thanks.