Chapter 4: Fiction and Reality
The instant I had a chance after sprinting away from Sagami, I invoked the Mandatory Assembly Protocol.
What, you may ask, was the Mandatory Assembly Protocol? Simply put, it was one of the many protocols circulated among the members of the literary club. Its invocation would cause all of the club’s members to drop whatever they were doing, no matter what that might be, and gather at a predetermined location with all due haste. It was an emergency protocol that clocked in at an SSS rating on the urgency scale. We of the literary club—largely under my direction—had established a set of emergency plans broad and varied enough to cover any disaster you could imagine, and the Mandatory Assembly Protocol was just one of the many countermeasures in our arsenal.
I opened up the group LINE chat that the five of us shared, typed out the words “Mandatory Assembly Protocol,” and followed them up with “Point G: 1078,” informing everyone in code exactly where we would be gathering. Everyone had called me a chuuni for spending day after day ironing out these plans, but in that moment, I was truly glad that I’d gone to so much trouble to sow the seeds of emergency preparedness.
If this means that we’ll be able to come together just a little sooner, then it was all worth—
Tomoyo: “Uh-huh. Get a grip, chuuni-boy”
Hatoko: “Oh, Juu! Thank goodness. We’ve been trying to call you for ages!”
Sayumi: “Where have you been? We were all worried about you.”
Chifuyu: (Sticker featuring a surreal character making an equally surreal expression)
Not even one of them took the order seriously.
Oh, okay, I get it. Looking back with a clear head, I’d been abducted out of nowhere by Tamaki the moment the world had returned to normal from Sayumi’s power making everything topsy-turvy. From everyone else’s perspective, I’d vanished into thin air and had been mysteriously out of contact since.
Jurai: “No, for real! I’m 100% serious this time! This is an actual emergency situation!”
Jurai: “Just meet up at Point G: 1078, ASAP!”
Tomoyo: “lol; lmao”
Hatoko: “Sorry, point what? Where is that?”
Sayumi: “Are you familiar with the story of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’?”
Chifuyu: (Sticker featuring a surreal character making an equally surreal expression)
Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions! I sure did sow these seeds, and I sure am reaping them!
Tomoyo brushed me off, Hatoko had forgotten the location codes, Sayumi went straight for the jugular, and who even knew what Chifuyu was trying to communicate. The system of protocols I’d taken so much care to set up for any given situation had totally broken down, so in the end I just texted them a simple “Meet me at the karaoke place by the station, stat,” followed by a series of increasingly desperate attempts to get them to believe that this really was an emergency.
Everyone still seemed less than convinced that this wasn’t just a prank, but my panic seemed to finally get through to them, and I ultimately managed to get them to agree to gather up where I wanted them to. I wanted that to happen as quickly as possible, so we fell back on an old tactic we’d used before: combining Closed Clock and World Create to get us all together at the karaoke place in the blink of an eye. Night had already fallen, and I didn’t feel great about calling an elementary schooler like Chifuyu out at that time of day, but this just wasn’t the sort of situation in which I could afford to worry about that sort of nicety.
“All right, Andou, you’ve got some explaining to do. Why’d you have to bring us here without even bothering to explain yourself?” Tomoyo grumbled with a scowl the moment we were all safely in our karaoke room. “If this turns out to be another of your stupid chuuni stunts, I’m seriously gonna give you hell over it!”
I didn’t say a word. Tomoyo gulped.
“Huh...? Wh-What...? Why’re you staring at me like that...?”
“Ah! S-Sorry,” I stammered.
Hmm. She’s the same Tomoyo as ever, all right. For some reason—by which I mean, because of Sagami’s stupid power—having to look Dereyo, the living embodiment of clingy cringe, in the eye felt...I dunno, kind of awkward, I guess. I had to look away from her in the end, but that just meant I was looking at Hatoko, Sayumi, and Chifuyu instead...and suddenly, all the future memories I’d experienced of them flashed into my mind as well. The shame was overwhelming.
For crying out loud... You just had to go and give me those stupid visions, didn’t you? Do you realize how much harm this is going to do to my relationships with all of them from now on?
This, however, wasn’t the time. I had to swallow my embarrassment and dive into the very serious topic at hand. This was the moment for us to stand our ground, lest we lose our futures altogether.
“Listen up, everyone. Earlier today...”
I stood before the group and began my explanation. I told them about the supernatural battle with Tamaki that I’d been pulled into, about everything that Future Sagami had taught me...and about the truth of Kiryuu Hajime and the Spirit War. I only had a scattered understanding of the story that had been playing out behind our backs this whole time, but I told them every bit of it that I could, leaving nothing hidden or unsaid.
I knew that the story I was telling them was completely insane. Anyone who wasn’t off their rocker would dismiss it out of hand. But, that said...we were exceptions. All the time we’d spent together in our clubroom—all the trials we’d overcome and all the unbreakable bonds we’d forged—would, I knew, allow my feelings to get through to them, even when my words faltered.
“Okay...you really went all out on the elaborate backstory this time. Seriously, though, did you really have to pull my cringelord brother into it? Don’t do that. Like, really.”
“Did you really meet Tamaki, Juu? That part was true, right?”
“...”
“Andou... You are familiar with ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ yes?”
“...Dammit all!”
At the very least, it was nice to know that everyone was way saner than I’d given them credit for. Nobody took my word for it. Chifuyu was so checked out, she was on the verge of nodding off altogether.
I guess I can’t blame them, though. I didn’t think that the boy-who-cried-wolf comparison Sayumi kept making was totally fair, but I had to admit that my usual behavior probably made it hard to accept an explanation like this from me, especially so abruptly. Even I had to admit that this sounded exactly like the sort of story that I’d come up with on the fly.
At this rate, we wouldn’t be getting anywhere...which meant that I had to pull out my last resort. It was time for me to use the secret stratagem Sagami had entrusted me with to make everyone believe me in one fell swoop.
“I get how you all feel,” I said. “This is all coming out of nowhere, so of course you wouldn’t believe me. That’s why I’m about to show you undeniable proof that I’m telling the truth.”
“How long are you gonna keep this up...?” sighed Tomoyo. “Look, tomorrow’s a school day, so hurry up and—”
“Allow me to introduce you. Everyone, this is Leatia the spirit.”
“Oh, am I up? Hey. Good to meet you all.”
“...Gyaaaaaaaaaaaah?!”
Now that worked the way I was hoping it would!
The subject of my perfunctory introduction was a palm-sized girl who’d appeared out of nowhere. She had a tiny pair of wings sprouting from her back, and she was casually floating in midair. It couldn’t have been more obvious that she wasn’t human—or, for that matter, a species native to this Earth. The members of the literary club, meanwhile, reacted in exactly as over-the-top of a manner as you’d expect someone to when they’d had an undeniably extraordinary life-form appear before their eyes. Even Chifuyu seemed pretty shaken up, despite still being half asleep.
“Honestly, I don’t think anyone will believe this story coming from you. They’ll think it’s just another chuunibyou flare-up—I see the punch line coming a mile away—so I’ll teach you a trick that’ll let you sort that problem out in no time.”
The technique that Future Sagami had taught me: shoving a transparently supernatural entity in everyone’s faces. I’d done exactly what he’d told me to back then, saying Leatia’s name out loud, and she’d shown up like he’d said she would, even though I’d half doubted it would work myself. For the record, I’d reacted with just as much shock and astonishment as the others the first time I’d met her.
Ayup. Guess spirits are a real thing, then. Cool, cool.
“So...it’s friggin’ finally time for Virgin Child to step up,” Leatia listlessly droned as she pointedly ignored the girls’ collective freak-out. “Would you please get out there and shut down that dipshit’s stupid game, already?”
“Well then—allow me to summarize the current state of affairs, if I may,” said Sayumi. The chaos prompted by Leatia’s appearance hadn’t fully subsided yet, but Sayumi was doing her best to bring us back to some semblance of coherence.
One way or another, everyone at least seemed to believe me now. My story couldn’t have been easy to accept on a moment’s notice—assuming that I’d just dreamed it all up really was the only reasonable conclusion—but having an openly bizarre entity like a spirit get shoved in their faces had left them with no option but to have faith in it anyway.
“Beings called spirits live in a world other than our own...and those spirits periodically enlist humans to participate in a combat sport known as the Spirit War. All of the participants in the Spirit War awaken to a supernatural power and are made to fight until only one competitor remains. That victor is then allowed to have a single wish granted, with no restrictions as to what that wish may be... This may be somewhat gauche of me to point out, but it certainly is the sort of setup you’d find in your typical death game manga or anime. However,” Sayumi said, pausing for a moment before finishing her thought, “the current Spirit War—that being the Fifth—is unlike those that came before it. Unlike prior Wars, this one was initiated and has been officiated by a single human being. That individual, Kiryuu Hajime, is the victor of the Fourth Spirit War, Tomoyo’s elder brother...and the man responsible for both the awakening of our powers and our isolation from the Spirit War at large. Is all of that correct, umm...Leatia?”
“Yup. That’s basically the gist of it,” Leatia replied, meeting Sayumi’s nervous inquiry with casual indifference. “Hajime prohibited all of us from saying anything about him being the mastermind behind the Fifth Spirit War, by the way, but there’s not really much point in staying quiet about it anymore since Zeon already leaked it to the Fallen Black folks. Looks like you—Andou, right?—heard about all of it from Sagami Shizumu too, didn’t you?”
I gave Leatia a nod. Future Sagami had already told me everything that he’d managed to learn.
“This is all very difficult to believe...but considering the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in, I suppose we have no choice,” Sayumi gravely admitted.
That’s when Hatoko nervously spoke up. “So...I don’t think I really understand all of this yet...but does this mean you’re the one who gave us our powers a year ago, Leatia?”
“That’s right. Wasn’t my choice, though—all of this was on Hajime’s orders. Actually, answering question after question with the same speech is gonna be a pain, so let me just put this on the record: Literally nothing about the current Spirit War wasn’t ordered by him. No matter what you ask me, the only answer I can give you is gonna be ‘because Hajime said so,’” Leatia explained with a roll of her eyes.
In short: the whole War had played out under Kiryuu Hajime’s direct supervision. He was the source of all its evils, its ruler, and its ringleader. Or, to borrow a phrase that Future Sagami had used...he was its author.
“What the hell is that dumbass even doing...?” Tomoyo muttered with a scowl. She was obviously enraged with her brother, and probably mortified by the thought of what he’d put us all through as well.
Leatia gave Tomoyo a long, hard look. “You’re Hajime’s little sister, right?” she asked.
“Huh?” Tomoyo grunted. “U-Uh, yeah. Technically.”
“Well... My condolences.”
Even the spirits sympathized with Tomoyo on this one. Leatia had apparently been Kiryuu’s Spirit Handler, and I couldn’t even begin to guess how much crap he’d put her through over the course of their relationship. Just how much suffering must it have taken to make her look upon his little sister with a face so full of pure, unadulterated pity?
“Andou,” said Sayumi, “you said that Sagami and Kiryuu’s former companions—that is to say, Sagami and Fallen Black—were engaged in combat with Kiryuu himself, didn’t you? What do you know about the current state of that situation?”
“About that...it’s all over,” I replied. “They were wiped out. Every member of Fallen Black was defeated and dropped out of the Spirit War.”
I’d already stopped hearing Future Sagami in my mind. The instant that Present Sagami was defeated, he’d lost his power and its effect had been undone. Up until the very moment of his demise, however, he’d kept using Future Sagami to feed me a constant stream of information. That was why I knew everything, from how Fallen Black had confronted Kiryuu to how he’d turned the tables on them.
“I see... So Kudou was caught up in the encounter as well. I’d thought it was strange when I couldn’t get in contact with her, but I never imagined it was because she had already gotten involved,” Sayumi said after I finished recounting Future Sagami’s final message to me. A sorrowful pall had fallen over her expression as I spoke.
“H-Hey, Juu...? Is Kudou okay?” asked Hatoko.
“Yeah, I think she’s probably fine,” I replied. “Apparently, she’ll have come back to life without any memories of our powers and the Spirit War... That’s how it works, right, Leatia?”
“Right. She’ll be alive and back to business as usual by now, actually. Why not give her a call and check, if you’re curious?”
Sayumi took Leatia’s suggestion right away. She called Kudou’s cell phone, and Kudou answered right away. I heaved a sigh of relief. It was incredibly reassuring to know that she was still alive...or, well, alive again, really.
I guess that probably means that Sagami and the others are already alive again too—just without any of their knowledge about supernatural powers or the War.
Tomoyo gulped. “You spirits have total free rein over our lives and memories, huh?” she said, a note of fear creeping into her voice. “Your powers let you do anything you want with us and our world. They make you completely superior in every way...and you’re telling me my dumbass of an older brother has complete control over them right now...?”
“Yeah... That’s right,” said Leatia.
The Reverse Crux Errata granted Kiryuu the power to alter the parameters of the supernatural battle we’d been pulled into at will. His authority surpassed that of a mere ruler—he’d entered a domain in which only authors dwelled. It was the ultimate administrative privilege, granted only to the Fifth Spirit War’s mastermind.
“For god’s sake... What the hell are you doing, Hajime? You set this whole stupid game up just so that you could cheat to win it? You wanted to be the only one who got a perfectly broken power...? That’s just so damn pathetic,” Tomoyo spat before shooting me a chilly, pointed glance. “Andou...you get it, right? You understand just how crazy his power is?”
“Yeah,” I agreed with a solemn nod. “The Reverse Crux Errata... Now that is one hell of a name. Who knew that when he showed me the Reverse Crux Record way back when we’d first met it was all just a setup for this? And the new word, Errata... Oh, it’s good. It’s so good. I should’ve known Kiryuu was the sort of guy who’d wrap card game jargon into one of his names—he’s got such a knack for this!”
“I know, right? ‘Errata’ is seriously such a good word. It fits his power perfectly, and it doesn’t make him look like a tryhard in the way that some super over-the-top words do. It matches the aesthetics of all the other names he’s come up with really nicely, and pulling in the name of the cringe compilation he carries absolutely friggin’ everywhere with him helps drive home the idea that to him, power names are the be-all and end-all. It’s probably one of the best names he’s come up with to date, and I’m not afraid to admit it. This is the one area where my brother never fails to impress— Not!” Tomoyo shouted. She’d definitely dragged out that fake-out way harder than she’d strictly needed to. “Nobody gives a crap about its name! Surely even you realize that this is not the time?!”
“I mean, I actually thought this was the perfect time to get silly and help everyone calm down a bit...”
“Nobody asked for that!”
“Yeah...and I know. You weren’t talking about the power’s name. You were talking about the power itself.”
Honestly, “crazy” didn’t even begin to do the Reverse Crux Errata justice. No other power could ever possibly work on Kiryuu as long as he had it in his control, and even if a power did get through to him in a one-in-a-million miracle, he could just revise it on the spot to make sure it never worked again. Even the god-tier abilities that the other four members of our club possessed might as well have been powerless in the face of his. After all—if he wanted to, he really could tweak them until they were useless.
Kiryuu could write up a new erratum for his own battles whenever he pleased. No matter how set in stone a rule seemed to be, its creator held the privilege to decide that it wasn’t a great idea after all and shamelessly strike it down.
He was operating on a completely different level than we were; he was standing on a profoundly different sort of stage. Just as a human could never stand up to a god—just like a character in a story could never stand up to its author—so too could none of the participants in this supernatural battle royale ever stand up to Kiryuu Hajime.
We couldn’t win. He’d given himself a power that could never be beaten, and a power that never should have existed at all.
“I-Isn’t there something you can do, Juu...?” Hatoko asked, giving me a look that seemed somehow full of expectations.
“Huh...? Me?” I replied incredulously.
“Well, you’re the one who’s been running simulations this whole time to make sure you’d be ready if something like this happened, right? You’ve told me over and over again that you weren’t just playing make-believe and that they were serious simulations for real potential disasters, right?”
“Mwa ha ha... Well, yeah,” I admitted, matching her imploring gaze with a fearless smile. It was the only move I could possibly make. “I’ve fantasized... I mean, simulated battles with every possible supernatural power that could be used against us. Even the Reverse Crux Errata... I’ve thought about powers very much like it—powers that turn the rules of battle on their head and fundamentally alter how the game is played in a way that gives their user a cheat-like level of advantage—and carefully simulated how I’d go about dealing with them.”
“Oooh! I knew you’d have a plan, Juu! So, what should we do?!”
“Yeah, umm... The thing about absolutely unbeatable cheat powers like that one is that they’re really hard to write around. Once the author realizes they’ve written themself into a corner, they’ll usually come up with reasons not to let it get used...and our only hope’s to pray that happens in our case.”
“Seriously...?” Hatoko moaned in disappointment.
Well, what did you expect? I’m not a miracle worker!
The thing about my fantasies—ahem, my simulations—is that when all’s said and done, coming up with the powers was the part I’d put the bulk of my energy into, more or less. I’d always been great at coming up with outrageously mighty powers, but being able to figure out how to overcome those powers was one of those skills that separated pro creators from the masses.
Anyway, the only strategy I’d been able to suggest was so pathetic, it left the room in a state of heavy, oppressive silence.
“B-But, umm...it’s too early to give up, guys! I’m sure we’ll find a way somehow!” I frantically insisted. I was spouting empty, irresponsible platitudes, and I knew it, but it was all I could think of to ward away the cloud of despair that was settling upon us. “It’ll be fine... I know there’s something we can do. No matter how broken Kiryuu’s power may be, if we put all of our powers together, I’m sure we can find a way to beat him!”
“To beat him?” Chifuyu chimed in, sounding almost mystified by my words. She’d been silent throughout the entire conversation, but now, at long last, she decided to make herself heard. “Andou, you want to beat him...? Why?”
“Huh...?”
“Are we going to fight Kiryuu?”
“I-I mean...I guess...probably?”
“Why?” Chifuyu repeated, still looking as blankly confused as could be.
When she put it that way...I didn’t know what to say. Why did we have to beat him? Why did we have to fight him?
That’s...actually a great question.
I’d been operating under the assumption that we’d have to fight him just because it felt like the natural thing for us to do. I’d let that preconception inform all my plans...but when I sat back and thought things through from a more calm, detached perspective, I couldn’t think of a single reason we’d actually want to fight him.
Huh? What are we even fighting for? Actually...were we ever even fighting in the first place?
“Wh-What do you think, Tomoyo?” I asked.
“Huh? Wh-Why’re you making this my problem?”
“Well, like...you’re his sister, right? Isn’t that, y’know, a sign? Did the two of you promise that someday you’d settle your score once and for all when you were little or whatever?”
“Hell no we didn’t.”
Huh. No major sibling conflict foreshadowing, I guess. Hmm...
Future Sagami had seemed pretty convinced that Kiryuu had been dead set on having his final showdown with Tomoyo, at least at first...but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the two of them didn’t have anything in particular to fight over. They didn’t even seem to be on especially bad terms. Sure, there was that whole thing about them being half-siblings, but from everything I’d heard, it seemed they got along pretty well anyway.
“I’m kinda with Chifuyu on this. Like, why should we have to fight?” said Tomoyo. “I know there was all that stuff about us getting a wish granted if we manage to last until the Final Eight...but, like, what am I even supposed to make of that at this point? It’s not like anyone’s going to beat my stupid brother regardless. Who’d get excited about bashing their head against an unbreakable wall?”
“I don’t really like the idea of fighting either,” said Hatoko. “It’s not that I don’t have any wishes it’d be nice to have granted...but I don’t want them granted badly enough to feel like asking the spirit to do it for me, and I definitely wouldn’t want to fight anyone to make it happen.”
“I am in full agreement. Fighting for the sake of self-defense would be one thing, but proactively seeking out a fight for the sake of self-interest holds no appeal for me,” Sayumi chimed in as well.
Everyone was speaking up in favor of the pacifist approach, and when I really thought about it, I wasn’t surprised. God-tier supernatural powers aside, we were just a bunch of ordinary high schoolers. You couldn’t just say “Okay, now fight!” and expect us to actually go and do it. Maybe things would have been different if we’d gotten a detailed explanation of the War and what it would entail way back in the beginning, like all the other Players had...but we’d been kept isolated from all of that up until just moments ago. We were getting thrown into the thick of it at the eleventh hour—the climax of the whole event—and, like, who would take that well? Of course we’d balk at jumping in headfirst.
“O-Okay, I get all that...but do we really have a choice?” I asked. “Kiryuu’s going to be coming after us regardless of what we want. We might not have any good option other than fighting him, y’know?”
I still remembered what Sagami had told me: Protect the literary club. Nobody had any clue what Kiryuu’s goal was, but it also didn’t matter. One way or another, he was most definitely trying to pull us into the Spirit War. There was every chance we would have to fight, regardless of our own wishes.
“Hmm. Okay, but Juu,” Hatoko began, a look of concern on her face. “Kiryuu’s power—the Reverse, umm, something or other...? It’s all really complicated, and I don’t understand how it works at all...but it’s supposed to be really ridiculously strong, right? Strong enough that our powers can’t do anything against it?”
“R-Right,” I replied.
“So even if we do fight him, we’ll just lose, right? What’s even the point, then?”
I stood there for a moment.
Really?
I mean, like...really? She’s not wrong, sure, but where are we even supposed to go now that that’s on the table?
The way I saw it, a character with a power so over-the-top you’re left wondering “How are you even supposed to beat that?” appearing in a story just meant that the protagonists would keep fighting, never giving up until a path to victory revealed itself. It was such a classic pattern it was practically obligatory...and the point Hatoko had just made had brutally and ruthlessly torn it to shreds.
“So, what, Hatoko...? Do we just give up? Do we sit back and wait for him to come take us out?” I asked.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” said Hatoko. “I was thinking we should just talk it out with him.”
“T-Talk it out...?”
“Yeah. He’s Tomoyo’s big brother, so I’m sure he’ll understand if we just talk to him!” Hatoko said with a big, confident smile.
I wanted to dismiss her proposal as nothing more than the naively pacifistic complacency of someone who had no clue how much danger we were really in...but found that, when confronted with the idea of just talking it out, I couldn’t actually come up with any objections. All I could think was “Actually, that does make sense.”
While I just sat there in stunned silence, Chifuyu chimed in again. “Hatoko’s right,” she said. “Fighting’s bad. Peace is the best.”
“Isn’t it, Chifuyu? There’s no way we’d ever get in a fight like that,” Hatoko agreed. The literary club’s resident airhead combination was in complete agreement when it came to their total lack of fighting spirit.
“When all’s said and done, so long as we remain unaware of Kiryuu Hajime’s motives, we lack the means to plan countermeasures against him,” Sayumi said after a moment of thought. “We haven’t the foggiest idea what he intends to make us do, or what he intends to do himself.”
At that point, Sayumi paused to give Leatia a look. The spirit, however, just shook her head. “Not even us spirits have any clue what Hajime’s going for. All we do is follow the jackass’s orders. Even if you ask him what his deal is, he just spouts off some cryptic gibberish to dodge the question. It’s exhausting, so I stopped trying.”
Tomoyo rested her chin in her hand and seemed to lapse into deep thought. “The more I think about it...the less sense it makes for us to fight anyone at all,” she said. “We don’t have any good motivation to fight, and we definitely don’t want to. And even if we did and we tried to work out a plan, Hajime could just use the Reverse Crux Errata to Mary Sue his way into winning anyway. As long as he has that power on hand, it’s totally hopeless from the start.”
There was a prevailing mood of hesitation in the air of the karaoke room. We’d come to a standstill. A threat was looming, and yet we could only muster a vague, hard-to-grasp sense of imminent danger.
What is this weird, messy feeling of exhaustion? We finally figured out the source of the powers we’ve been wondering about for so, so very long, and we’ve unveiled the mastermind behind all the weirdness we’ve been pulled into. Now all that’s left is the final showdown!
Or...you’d think that, anyway, but I just couldn’t get into the mood for it. I—and, for that matter, everyone else—was at a loss for how to even react. The pivot into for-real supernatural battles had been too abrupt, and we didn’t really have any connection to the enemy we were supposed to fight over the course of the climax—not to mention no idea what his goals were, what the conditions for our victory would be, or what would happen if we lost. And that’s not even starting on his brutally unfair power... In the end, all of the elements of our situation came together to make it seemingly impossible to work up the motivation to go into battle.
The end result? We were left with only a half-baked sense of danger and hostility toward our apparent enemy. The air in the room was stagnant—totally lacking in energy. I guess if I had to put it into words...it felt like our story was just plodding onward, killing time without any clear ending in sight.
What are we even supposed to do now?
“Wait... H-Huh?” Hatoko suddenly exclaimed, her voice cutting through the gloomy shroud of silence. “H-Hey, Juu...? Isn’t this kind of strange?”
“Wh-What is?” I asked.
“Why’s it so quiet?”
“Why is it quiet...? Because we turned the karaoke machine’s volume down to zero, obviou— Ah?!” I gasped as, partway through my sentence, I realized what the problem was.
We’d muted the karaoke machine the moment we’d stepped into the room. This sort of karaoke joint played ads and announcements through the machines whenever a song wasn’t playing, so we’d shut the volume off so it wouldn’t interrupt our conversation. The thing is, muting our machine wouldn’t do anything about the sound filtering in from the rooms next to ours. The fact that our room was so quiet made it very easy to faintly hear the music and singing from them, even through the soundproofing...and somewhere along the way, those noises had ceased.
It was silent. Completely, deathly silent. Almost as if the world itself had come to a stop...
“Oh, so you finally noticed?” said Leatia. The rest of us were flabbergasted, but she barely seemed to care. “I didn’t say anything because, I mean, I don’t owe you guys squat, so why would I? But, yeah—this world’s time is stopped right now. You five are the only humans who’re actually up and moving.”
That was a tremendous bombshell of a statement to drop in a perfectly calm, casual tone on its own, but Leatia wasn’t done just yet.
“Ah, wait—scratch that,” she said. “Strictly speaking, it’s not just the five of you. One other person’s still moving around. I seriously doubt that this is actually important in any real way, but I guess he stopped time to give his entrance a little more impact, or some stupid—”
“Nobody asked for your color commentary, Leatia.”
All of a sudden...there he was. A dry, distinctive voice, mocking and cynical in tone, rang out from right beside me. I whipped my head around reflexively...and found myself face-to-face with a white-haired man wearing round sunglasses and a black coat. Kiryuu Hajime was sitting next to me.
It was like time had skipped a few steps. One moment we were the only ones in the room, and the next, he was sitting there as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“G-Gaaah!” I yelped—pretty late, if I’m being honest—and hurled myself out of my seat. The others leaped up from the couches they were sitting on as well, and all of us ended up clustered into the opposite corner of the room from Kiryuu, petrified with shock and fear.
“Made you wait, didn’t I, Guiltia?” Kiryuu said as he leaned back on the couch, a cocky grin on his face. His sunglasses were slightly askew, letting me just barely make out the gaze that he was shooting directly at me.
“Kiryuu...” I muttered.
“Oh, come on. You know better than that,” Kiryuu said with a disappointed shake of his head. A hint of anger crept into his heterochromatic glare.
I knew exactly what I was supposed to say. I gulped, steeled myself...and spoke.
“Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First...!”
Kiryuu flashed me a savage grin. “That’s right. This is how it should be, Guiltia Sin Jurai. No need to hesitate anymore—no need to worry who may be watching you. It’s time for us to be ourselves, unshackled by shame,” he said with a tone of pure satisfaction.
As I listened to Kiryuu, the strangest sense of elation came over me. It felt like a door deep within my heart—a door that I kept locked at all times—had been wrenched open by force. In a strange sort of way, I felt liberated.
“What the hell, Hajime?! What are you trying to pull here?!” Tomoyo shouted. Kiryuu’s grin didn’t budge. “I have so many things I want to say to you I don’t even know where to start, but the long and short of it’s that you’re a grown-ass, twenty-year-old man, and you need to start acting like—”
Suddenly—without warning—Tomoyo’s voice cut out. Her mouth was still moving, but I couldn’t hear a single word she was trying to say.
“?! ? !”
Tomoyo looked bewildered. She gestured at her mouth, then seemed to try to say something else, to no avail. Her voice remained muted.
“Silence, Endless Paradox. If you can’t hold back comments better left unsaid, I’ll have to do it for you.”
“?! ! !”
Tomoyo was frantically shouting something—a retort, most likely—but I didn’t get to hear any of it. Kiryuu had probably used some sort of power. Considering what all he was capable of, there wasn’t much he could do at that point that would’ve surprised me. If he could freeze time for everyone except us and suddenly appear in our room without warning, then why couldn’t he do basically anything else? As things stood, he could make whatever supernatural powers he wanted and grant them to anyone, himself included.
“First things first—some congratulations are in order. Well done, Virgin Child. All five of you have managed to survive long enough to make it into the Final Eight,” said Kiryuu. “’Course, we’re actually down to fewer than eight at this point. Between the five of you and the one of me...the six people here are all the Players left in the War.”
Just six. Six people total. There had been nearly a thousand Players at the onset of the War...and the overwhelming majority of them had already been defeated. Kiryuu had praised us for lasting this long, but truth be told, I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment. After all, we’d never even touched the War, much less fought in it in any real way. We hadn’t so much survived it as we’d been saved from it—kept for last by Kiryuu, the man who reigned over the War at large.
“A few things went off the rails, and the eight people who were supposed to be around for this got cut back a bit...but it’s not a big deal, in the grand scheme of things. The plan’s still moving forward just fine. As of this moment...the Fifth Spirit War is entering its next stage,” said Kiryuu.
“Its next stage...?” I repeated.
“The time shall be midnight, this evening. The place: our own Senkou High. There, we shall lay to rest the bonds of fate that bind us together. It’s the perfect stage, don’t you think?”
Tonight at midnight...in our high school. The school we’re going to now, and the school Kiryuu used to attend.
None of us had anticipated the setting he named, but at the same time, it was profoundly predictable. All of us gulped in unison. Well, okay—Chifuyu gulped and muttered “M-Midnight...” in a way that made it clear she was just upset about the idea of staying up that late, but this was a serious moment, so I tried not to focus on that.
“At long, long last...our battle is finally about to begin, Guiltia,” said Kiryuu. He gazed at me like you’d gaze at your fated rival...or, perhaps, as you’d gaze at your comrade in arms. “It’s time for us to put everything on the line...and to the survivor go the spoils.”
My heart was pounding. His words—his smile—had been so perfectly stylish, they’d set it aflutter. I wanted to rise to the occasion. I wanted to give him the most purely, perfectly me answer I could dream up. And yet...
“W-Wait a second, Kiryuu!”
...I just spoke to him. No fancy verbal flourishes, no titles—I talked to him in a perfectly normal voice, calling him his perfectly normal name.
“I don’t... We don’t want to fight you,” I said.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I was filled with a deep sense of guilt as I spoke those words. It was the right thing to say, no question about it, but I felt guilty all the same. If I was in the right, then why did it feel like I was stabbing him in the back?
“We got dragged into all this out of nowhere, and none of us understand it, and now we’re supposed to just...fight you? How are we supposed to react to that? It’d be one thing if it were just me, but...I wish you hadn’t pulled the others in too, and I want you to stop trying to get them even more involved.”
At that point, I paused to look over my shoulder at the others, who all gave me a nod. They were all in full support of my attempt to declare our uninvolvement.
If—hypothetically, just if—I had been thrust into this situation before I’d started high school, I might not have hesitated to rise to the challenge. I might have been filled with boundless delight and anticipation at the thought of launching myself headfirst into the world of supernatural battles...but the current me couldn’t be that selfish anymore. I’d found far too many things that were far too important to me to prioritize my chuunibyou above them, and so...
“Sagami told me all about your power. He told me about the Reverse Crux Errata...and there’s no way we can beat it. We could all come at you at once with everything we have, and we still wouldn’t stand a chance. We don’t have any good reason to fight you either. And so...we’ve decided...that we’ll be dropping out of this War.”
As I spoke, I gave Kiryuu a slight bow. It was a bow of surrender—a bow of unconditional capitulation. He was far too powerful for us to handle, so I begged for our lives. That was a choice that Guiltia Sin Jurai could never have possibly taken...but it was the choice that Andou Jurai had resolved himself to make. No matter how lame it made me look—no matter how pathetic—I refused to choose a path that would put my friends in danger. If this fight could be avoided, I’d do everything I could to steer us away from it.
Slowly, fearfully, I raised my head once more and gazed up at Kiryuu. I’d imagined him looking upon me with a gaze of boundless scorn and disappointment...but, surprisingly, that wasn’t the case. If anything, he seemed thoughtful, though I couldn’t even begin to guess why.
“Hmm... So that’s the line you’re going with, huh? Interesting... Guess I might’ve gone a little too hard on the ‘cares about his friends’ part of the profile...?” Kiryuu muttered, much to my confusion. He stood up from the couch and stepped forward, drawing closer to loom over me, taking full advantage of his unusual height. “Bwa ha ha! It looks to me like you’re under two misconceptions right now.”
“Misconceptions...?” I repeated.
“First: Are you seriously telling me that you think you can just talk this out with me?”
In a split second, a chill ran down my spine, racing through my extremities. I couldn’t describe the feeling that Kiryuu was projecting—maybe it was fighting spirit, maybe it was bloodlust—but one way or another, it radiated forth with such intensity it felt like it was piercing right through me. It made it clear to me that we really were operating on totally different levels—or rather, in totally different dimensions. He’d been living a life of supernatural battles, and we’d been living ordinary, commonplace existences. We inhabited two vastly, terribly different worlds.
“There’s no turning back—not anymore. Not for me, and not for you either,” said Kiryuu.
I clenched my teeth, unable to say a word.
“And, second: You seem to think you don’t have any reason to fight me...and you couldn’t possibly be more wrong,” Kiryuu continued, the corners of his mouth curling into a twisted sneer. A smile of a sort, yes, but an unstable, unsettling one. “You should resent me—every one of you. You should think of me as your sworn, mortal enemy. You would...if you had even the slightest idea of what exactly it is I’ve done to you.”
“Do you mean...how you made us awaken to our powers?” I asked.
I knew that Kiryuu’s plotting had led to our awakenings. And, yes—his actions had certainly caused us plenty of strife and hardship. There had been times when the fear and anxiety brought about by suddenly being forced to bear such extraordinary, overwhelmingly vast powers had seemed like it would crush us.
Looking back now, however, I didn’t wish that we’d never been given our powers. I had come to believe that our powers played a major role in making us who we were. I wasn’t about to thank him for setting us up like that, but I also wasn’t going to erupt in a fit of rage or resentment. Whatever feelings I had about our awakening were in a completely different subset of emotion than those.
“Bwa ha ha! Bwa ha ha ha ha! That settles it—you really haven’t figured it out yet!”
And yet...Kiryuu laughed. He cackled wildly, as if to rub in my face just how wrong I was.
“Honestly, I thought I’d dropped enough hints for you to put the pieces together by now,” said Kiryuu.
“The pieces...of what? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Tell me, Guiltia. Haven’t you ever thought that this was all just a little too perfect?”
Too perfect? What’s too perfect? What on earth is he talking about?
“Look at us. We’re two sides of the same coin. Opposite yet identical, like reflections in a mirror...and now, we’ve come together to face each other down at the end of everything.”
I didn’t say a word.
“A guy who just happens to be in the same club as my little sister just happens to be the exact same sort of terminal chuuni as I am... That’s one hell of a perfect coincidence, wouldn’t you say? Kinda strains the ol’ suspension of disbelief, don’t you think?”
“Are you trying to say it’s destiny?” I asked.
“Destiny...? Bwa ha ha! Nah—nothing that cheap,” Kiryuu chuckled. He swept his gaze across our group, eyeing up each of us in turn. “Closed Clock, Over Element, World Create, Route of Origin, and Dark and Dark... Those are some good names, all right. They match my aesthetic perfectly. But of course they do. After all...”
Kiryuu paused. He smiled.
“...I’m the one who made them up.”
I didn’t understand what he’d just told me.
“You... Huh? But... Wha...?”
What was that? What was he saying? I couldn’t understand. I wasn’t following him at all.
Kiryuu thought them up? But, no. No, no, that’s not right. Of course he didn’t. I came up with those names. I thought up all of them. I racked my mind, scoured every corner of my creative spirit, and even pushed myself so hard I retreated into my mindscape to come up with names for everyone’s powers. They’re mine, and mine alone—names that only I could’ve thought up.
“What...are you talking about?” I asked. “I thought up those names. I thought up Closed Clock, Over Element, World Create, Route of Origin, and Dark and Dark. They were all—”
“Right. Of course you think you came up with them. After all...I wrote you to believe that you did.”
In a split second—the hairs all across my body stood on end. It felt like the words he’d just spoken were something I never should’ve allowed myself to hear.
He wrote it? He wrote...me?
My mind was racing, and I couldn’t stop it. I wanted to—I had to. Don’t think about it, I told myself. If you think this through...you’ll never be able to go back. Stop. Stop! My heart and instincts desperately shouted at me, but they couldn’t contain the logical process I’d already kicked off. The final, terrible, inevitable conclusion was already nearing its completion.
Oh. Right. He could have. He absolutely could have.
If Kiryuu had the power to exercise absolute authority over the human world—if he had the power to do whatever he wanted, however he wanted to...
...he could create a human from the ground up with ease.
“Looks like you finally got the picture, huh? Bwa ha ha... Bwaaa ha ha ha ha! That’s right, Guiltia. I am your creator—the author who gave you life,” Kiryuu cackled. He shoved the worst possible truth in my face, and the look on his face told me that he found every second of it so utterly hilarious, he couldn’t hold back his mirth. “All the powers you named, your Guiltia Sin Jurai true name, every page of the Bloody Bible, your personality, your interests, your height, your weight, your blood type, your birthday...every last little detail that makes up your character is something that I invented.”
The Reverse Crux Errata allowed Kiryuu to freely grant and revise supernatural powers as he saw fit. He had used that power to become the author of a world of supernatural battles...but what if that wasn’t the only world he’d tried his hand at writing? What if he’d dabbled in a more commonplace genre as well, dipping into the sphere of slice of life? What if powers weren’t all he could make...and characters were just as firmly in his purview?
The losers of the Spirit War were stripped of their memories and returned to their daily lives. In other words, the spirits had the power to freely alter humans’ memories...and what were we without our memories? They played an essential, foundational factor in our identities. The ability to freely manipulate a person’s memories, then, was no more or less than the ability to freely manipulate that person themself.
Taking the same premise a step further, the existence of powers like Tomoyo’s proved that the flow of time was well within the spirits’ capacity to control as well. Imagine if you could ignore the constraints of time, freely altering an individual’s memories as you pleased. Now imagine if it wasn’t just one person—imagine tens, hundreds, or, in the wildest extreme, an entire world’s worth of people, all having their memories and perceptions rewritten however you wanted to. Imagine you could tweak them with absolute control, like an author tweaking the backgrounds of the characters in the story they told.
There was no way of telling when it might have started. I had no memory of my memories or personality being altered...but if he’d simply written me to have no memory of it, then, well, not remembering hardly proved a thing, right?
“Bwa ha ha! Y’know how you prefer your names short? Didn’t you ever think there was a certain something there? That’d be because I made you that way on purpose, as a way of distinguishing you and your names from me and the longer ones I prefer. I wanted to drive in our two-sides-of-the-same-coin shtick, that’s all.”
I had seen the resemblance. Ever since the moment we’d first met, I’d been drawn to him in the strangest way. I’d gotten worked up about that, thinking it might have been the hand of fate at work...but it was nothing of the sort. The situation had been made to make me feel that way. I had been made to feel that way...it was how I’d been written to feel.
All of it was to make me into a character worthy of being defeated by Kiryuu Hajime; everything was designed to turn me into a final boss with whom the protagonist could clash. After all—what could be more classically exciting than the protagonist and his final foe being uncannily similar to one another?
I fell silent. There was nothing left for me to say. It felt like my mind had gone blank. I didn’t think that any revelation could possibly be more shocking than the one I’d just experienced...and then I immediately learned I was wrong.
“And it goes without saying that it’s not just you. Kushikawa Hatoko, Himeki Chifuyu, Takanashi Sayumi, and Kanzaki Tomoyo...all four of the girls are characters I made from scratch as well.”
Another shock—another revelation—crashed down on me. Or rather, us.
Them too? It wasn’t just me—it was all five of us?
“Guiltia... A moment ago, you turned me down for the sake of your friends, didn’t you? That was a pretty loyal decision, I’ve gotta say, but you know... Bwa ha ha! I mean, of course you know by now—you only did it because that’s the character I designed you to be. That’s who I wrote you to develop into over the course of the story that I plotted out from start to finish.”
He wouldn’t stop. Each and every word that came out of his mouth plunged us deeper into hopeless despair. He laid out the truth without mercy, letting it crush us with its terrible weight.
“Virgin Child... The five of you are the final boss squad meant to send the Spirit War off with a bang. You had to be powerful. You had to be appealing. And so...I made you from scratch, with my own two hands! I gave you powers so mighty that no one could ever compete with them, engineered event after event for you to experience, and ensured that powerful bonds would be forged between you! And I did it all because the more powerful you were, the more appealing you were, the more I would shine when I laid you to waste!”
He was the author. There was no other word that would fit anymore. Kiryuu Hajime was the author of our world. The supernatural and the commonplace alike were nothing more than ink on the pages of his manuscript. I was no different. The me I thought was me had been created by him, solely for the sake of serving as a character in the story he was writing.
“You get it now, right? Your whole past is just a backstory I invented. The time you spent cowering in fear of your powers, the time you spent goofing off with them, the time you spent forgetting they even existed and having a blast without them, your youthful story of fellowship and camaraderie, your charming and heartwarming rom-com antics—every aspect of your silly, commonplace lives and the insane, out-of-left-field supernatural battle twist that upended them... All of it—every last little goddamn bit of it—was a story that I came up with.”
Scenes of everything we’d been through, all the time we’d spent together, flashed through my mind. I remembered learning about Tomoyo’s ambitions and battling with Kudou. I remembered coming to understand the misbuttoned shirt that was my relationship with Hatoko and intentionally buttoning it up the same way again. I remembered getting caught up in the clash that’d unfolded between Chifuyu and Kuki and learning what their friendship truly meant to them. I remembered fighting with Sayumi and finding out why she’d given up on running for student council president; I remembered when I’d given up my chuunibyou in the eighth grade and the time I’d spent with Sagami and Tamaki. I remembered my first meeting with Tomoyo; all our trips to the pool and the beach; when we put on our rendition of Lolio and Juliet, starring Chifuyu; when Sayumi accidentally wrought all those changes upon our world; my hard-fought battle with Tamaki, and the ensuing reconciliation between her and Sagami; the time we’d awakened to our powers, and the days I’d spent racking my mind to come up with names for them...
All of it—every bit of it—had just been turned on its head so easily that all I could do was laugh.
Who asked for this? Who wanted this twist? We certainly didn’t. We wanted to know why we’d awakened to our powers, sure...but not like this. This isn’t an explanation that anyone would be happy with. What we wanted was nothing like this hopeless excuse for an ultimate truth.
“In short,” said Kiryuu—no, said the author of our story—“your very lives are nothing more than a work of fiction...created by me.”
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login