Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 13 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Reality and Fiction

Despair. The room was buried in a palpable aura of pure, overwhelming despair, blotting out all else.

It seemed that time had started back up again when Kiryuu and Leatia left. The muffled singing and music from the next room over had started to filter into our room again, but the poppy, up-tempo tunes were powerless to overcome the hopelessness consuming us. Not one of us so much as attempted to speak.

It had all been fictional. All hollow and vacant. It was like everything I’d valued—everything that had seemed so purposeful and brilliant to me before—had slipped through my fingers as it’d rusted, rotted, and crumbled away to nothingness.

What was I supposed to believe anymore? There was no way of knowing how much of the reality I lived in was truly real and how much was a fabrication. Could the path I’d walked up to this point truly have been manufactured, from beginning to end, by a third party? Could decisions I thought I’d made with my own free will have been nothing more than me dancing to an author’s tune? Could everything I’d felt—all the joy and excitement, all the rage and sorrow, all the hope and despair, all the pride and jealousy, every last emotion that had budded within me—have been nothing more than artifice?

And was it really not just me? Were we really all fictional? Did that mean that everything was a lie? That everything was fiction?

Were Tomoyo, Hatoko, Chifuyu, and Sayumi simply antagonists designed to play a role in the final battle? Were Tomoyo’s latent chuunibyou, Hatoko’s long-standing friendship with me, Chifuyu’s indefinable eccentricity, and Sayumi’s wisdom unbefitting a high schooler all simply parts of their backstories? Were they nothing more than the sorts of character traits you’d read about on a Wikipedia page?

Was the only reason I cared about all of them so much in the first place because that was how I was written? Was the only reason we had those bonds because the author decided that the villain squad genuinely caring for each other would make us more compelling characters than if we were self-serving monsters who’d stab each other in the back on a whim?

And, if it was all true, and we really were no more than fictional characters, were the commonplace lives we’d led up until now utterly pointless and valueless...?

I shook my head. No. That’s not it. That can’t be right. Even if we are just fictional characters...well, so friggin’ what?!

I already had the answer I needed. I was a chuuni—someone who longed for the fictional world more than anyone else—and that meant that I understood the true value of fiction all too well.

“Fiction lies within your heart!”

Tomoyo’s words rang out from deep within me, reverberating throughout my entire body.

Of course. This is nothing to despair over. There’s nothing for us to be anxious about at all.

Even if everything that had happened up to this point was nothing more than a storyline that had been laid out for us, that would do nothing to change the fact that everything we were in that moment was unmistakably and undeniably real. Saying that everything was fictional wasn’t the same as saying that none of it mattered. The distinction between a replica and an original was meaningless. We were us, and that meant that we were, and could only be, real.

So it didn’t matter. Even if what I was doing right now was just an aspect of a fiction—even if my defiance were just another aspect of my character profile—it still didn’t matter. I was me, and the feelings and emotions that were welling up within my heart were neither meaningless nor purposeless. Even if I was fictional, I was not a lie.

And so, I rose from the depths of despair, ready to shout out words of encouragement to my friends and urge us along on the path we had to take...but before I could, a thought struck me: Wasn’t I bouncing back from all of this, like, a little too quickly?

And before I could follow that train of thought to its conclusion...

“H-Hey...Juu?” Hatoko said as she tugged at the hem of my shirt. I looked over, expecting to see an expression of deepest despair...and was surprised to find one of abashed awkwardness instead. “So, umm...can you explain what exactly’s going on right now?”

“I... Huh?”

“Tomoyo’s brother said a bunch of weird stuff, and then you looked really shocked and got all gloomy, so I was trying to play along and act depressed too...but to be honest, I don’t actually understand what any of that was about,” Hatoko explained, concluding with a sort of embarrassed giggle.

M-My god. Could it be...? She didn’t get it?! Kiryuu dropped our biggest plot twist to date, but it sailed right over her head? But she acted like she understood, just so she wouldn’t ruin the moment?

“Oh, come on... You’re kidding, right?” I moaned.

“W-Well, what did you expect?! It didn’t make sense! He just started babbling all this gobbledygook about authors this and fiction that out of nowhere! What about you, Chifuyu? Did you understand anything Kiryuu said?”

“Not at all,” Chifuyu replied. She sounded sort of proud about it, confusingly enough. “I didn’t understand even a little bit of it. I was thinking ‘What’s this guy talking about?’ the whole time.”

“Right? It was total nonsense, wasn’t it?” Hatoko agreed.

“Oh... Okay, then,” I sighed.

This was, perhaps, to be expected. Memory alteration, time manipulation, and world modification were all sci-fi-riffic concepts that I dove into with glee on a daily basis, so Kiryuu’s speech had made complete sense to me right away, but since Hatoko and Chifuyu weren’t deeply familiar with all those concepts, it was probably just too complicated for them to grasp all at once.

Maybe, I reflected, that was a blessing in disguise. Maybe ignorance was bliss when it came to a truth this horrific. Running away from the truth wouldn’t change it, though. I steeled myself, preparing to impart upon them the desperate reality of our circumstances...

...and several very long and painful explanations later, they were no closer to understanding than they’d been in the beginning. They were just not getting it.

“Look, like I’ve said a bunch of times already, the long and short of it’s that Kiryuu is the one who made all of us. He wrote us as characters in a story. He established everything about us. Even us being childhood friends is just something that he made up out of nowhere.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. We met in kindergarten, didn’t we? Kiryuu would’ve still been in elementary school then. How could a little kid make stuff up like that?”

“No, see, that’s where the time manipulation comes in! I’m sure his power lets him ignore time paradoxes and stuff, or whatever. Probably.”

“Okay, so where did it start? Since when and up to when did Kiryuu set everything up? Since we were born? Did Kiryuu make up how our moms and dads got married too?”

“I mean... Okay, so I don’t know for sure, but he probably found a way to make it all work out.”

“How many ‘probablys’ does that make, Juu? Hmm... So then, how much of everything is real and how much of it’s fiction in the end?”

“Look, again, there’s no way of knowing that! That’s the point—we can’t know, so we end up worrying over it, and it drives us into despair...”

“Oh, come on! What does that even mean? I don’t understand this at all!” Hatoko pouted. No matter how carefully and clearly I tried to explain, I just couldn’t get through to her.

“I’m me. What else would I be?” Chifuyu asserted. Her attitude had remained completely steadfast throughout my whole explanation...which was kinda badass of her, if I’m being honest. You’d think it would’ve taken us a ton of conflict, debate, and turmoil before we ultimately reached that answer, but she jumped to it pretty much instantly.

I paused, at a loss for what to try next...

“Indeed...there are a number of elements of this scenario that strike me as inexplicable.”

...when Sayumi spoke up instead.

“Perhaps,” she continued, “Hatoko’s and Chifuyu’s responses really are the appropriate ones.”

“Huh...?”

“Andou, you understood Kiryuu’s explanation immediately and seemed to accept the so-called truth he presented to us as logical...but by any rational standard, his whole story was utterly absurd. The typical reaction to a speech like his wouldn’t be choosing to accept or reject it—it would be not understanding it at all. Or, rather... How to put this...? His story felt terribly contrived, I suppose.”

“Contrived...?”

“Andou, are you familiar with the simulation hypothesis?”

“Y-Yeah,” I replied.

To very roughly summarize the concept: The simulation hypothesis is the idea that the world humanity lives in is, in fact, a simulation that was constructed by some external entity. In other words, our world—our very reality and everything we experience within it—is nothing more than a form of virtual reality, with we, its inhabitants, remaining none the wiser to its artificial nature. Or, to frame the matter slightly differently: It’s the theory that the world we live in is a work of fiction.

So the world would be nothing more than a stage some third party made, and its inhabitants nothing more than virtual actors who play out their roles with no clue they were never real to begin with...is about as far as my train of thought managed to travel before it struck me how familiar all of this sounded. It was, in fact, strikingly similar to the situation we’d found ourselves in.

“Outrageous and outlandish though the simulation hypothesis may be, so long as we remain human, our inherent limitations prevent us from ever definitively disproving it,” said Sayumi. “It’s quite similar to the five-minute hypothesis and The Butterfly Dream, in that respect. Because it can’t be proven one way or the other, once it’s on the table, there’s little you can do to argue against it. In other words, whoever proposes it first controls the narrative.”

“They control the narrative...”

“Now then, Andou,” Sayumi said, seeming to shift conversational gears. “Returning to the subject of Kiryuu’s claims: I must now reveal that Kiryuu Hajime is, in fact, nothing more than a character I wrote. I personally devised and laid out every word he just spoke to us. This may come as a surprise, and I’d never intended to reveal it to you, but the truth is that I am the actual mastermind behind everything that has happened up to this point.”

Wh-Whaaat?! Are we seriously following one world-upending twist with another world-upending twist?! Having a member of the main cast turn out to have been the evil mastermind all along is a classic development in a sense, sure...but Sayumi? Really? I can’t believe she’s the true, secret final boss who was manipulating even Kiryuu from the shadows this whole time...

...is not what I thought. Give me some credit.

“So...you just made that up,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” Sayumi agreed with a nod. “And what Kiryuu did earlier was no different from what I did just now.”

It was like suddenly insisting, without any foreshadowing to back you up, that everything that had happened in the story so far was, in fact, all part of your master plan. Any plan can go off without a hitch, as long as you wait until after the fact to make it up and work the story’s actual events into it retroactively. As long as you make the claim before anything can contradict it, you control the narrative.

“B-But, I mean...his whole story sounded so convincing, didn’t it?” I protested. “Like, what about how he and I are both chuunis, but with subtle differences in how we make up names and stuff working to differentiate us? That really is exactly the sort of thing that you see all the time in manga, isn’t it? It’s super fiction-coded!”

“That’s simply a matter of phrasing and interpretation, I believe,” Sayumi countered. “For instance, you just claimed that your taste in names being subtly different makes it feel more like something out of a manga...but imagine if you did have perfectly identical tastes. Wouldn’t you think that was manga-like and fiction-coded in its own right?”

I fell silent. When she put it that way...I couldn’t deny how much the possibility rang true. It felt like everything had, once again, wrapped around to something Barnum effect-adjacent. If you stacked enough tiny, insignificant coincidences that occurred in your daily life together, treated them as one big thing, and asked if the real world could ever be that conveniently plotted out, it really would start feeling like it was all too much to truly be the work of random chance—in spite of the fact that it could be, and was, just that and nothing more.

“Okay...so are you saying he just made it all up?” I asked.

Did this mean that Kiryuu Hajime was not the author of our story? That he hadn’t written our character profiles? That his claim that we were fictional was, itself, a work of fiction? That we were the same perfectly normal people we’d always thought we were?

“That...is what I would prefer to believe. Unfortunately, however, I lack the means to prove it at this moment. Just like the simulation hypothesis can’t be definitively disproven, so too is it difficult to refute Kiryuu’s claims. After all, we have every reason to believe that he did, in fact, have the practical means to write all of our characters as he claims to have. I believe the claim that he intervened to make our powers unnaturally potent was likely true as well. However,” Sayumi continued, “I choose to believe that his overall claim was, indeed, a lie. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking on my part, but I simply don’t like to think that the bonds between the five of us were brought about artificially.”

“Sayumi...” I muttered.

“But of course...that does raise a new question we’ll need to consider: Why would he choose to tell such a lie? It’s unclear to me in what way doing so would benefit him. And, more so than anything...I’m curious as to why the lie he chose was such a haphazard one. It feels...rushed, I suppose you could say, or lacking in explanation? It certainly wasn’t adequately foreshadowed. Frankly, it’s hardly a surprise that Hatoko and Chifuyu didn’t understand his attempted reveal, considering how poorly constructed it was.”

“You have a point...”

I probably didn’t have any right to criticize, considering I’d been taken in by his story hook, line, and sinker...but when I reexamined it with Sayumi’s ideas in mind, it did strike me as sloppy in a number of ways. If his goal had been to fool all of us, there were a thousand different ways he could’ve done so more convincingly—and yet he’d chosen to give us a simple, verbal explanation and leave it at that. Hatoko and Chifuyu hadn’t managed to keep up with the concept as a result, and Sayumi had caught on to how unnatural it was and seen through the lie with ease. As far as sudden plot twists went, it just seemed a bit shoddy. It was a contrived, haphazard development indeed.

“What do you think, Tomoyo?” I asked. She’d been silent for quite some time, so I prompted her to put her two cents in.

“Huh? O-Oh, right,” Tomoyo stammered.

“Do you have an idea about what’s going on? Feels like you’ve been mulling something over for a pretty long time now.”

“I... Yeah,” Tomoyo said with a nod. “The truth is...this whole situation’s giving me a serious case of déjà vu.”

Déjà vu? Huh?

“Wh-What do you mean, Tomoyo?” I asked. “Have you been through something like this before?”

“No, not like that! I just...well...” Tomoyo muttered. Whatever she was trying to say, she was having a really hard time spitting it out. “I don’t mean I’ve seen something like this in the real world. I was talking about a story...”

“A story? How’s that?”

“The very first novel I ever wrote was...well, it was sorta like this, more or less.”

“Oh! You mean the one that didn’t make it through the first round of judging in that one contest?”

“You could’ve described it any other way, you know?!” Tomoyo bellowed indignantly before clearing her throat and carrying on. “A-Anyway... My first ever novel was basically this same story.”

“This same story, as in...?”

Tomoyo hesitated. “It was more or less your typical supernatural battle school story. The main character was chosen to wield a special power, and he used it to go ham on jerkwad classmates and evil terrorists and stuff. All the heroines fell in love with him too, so just a full-blown harem power fantasy all around... And the more I describe it, the more I realize it’s just exactly what you picture when you hear the words ‘generic light novel,’” she explained, fighting through her very conspicuous shame to finish her description. “Anyway, the big twist was that in the end, it turns out that all of the protagonist’s badass curbstomp battles and all the girls who fell for him were all just a work of fiction that the final boss made up. The villain’s all ‘Everything you’ve done, every battle you’ve fought, was all just a story that I wrote. You think that you had a harem? That you were unbeatable? That you were OP AF? Dumbass. You can’t seriously have thought that a light novel plot like that would ever play out in the real world, right?’ So, the protagonist falls into despair. It turns out that he was just a totally average, ordinary person after all, but at the very end, he resolves himself to get back on his feet and live his life to the fullest anyway in an inspiring denouement...”

“O-Oof,” I grunted.

There were no words. Tomoyo’s summary had been rough. Like, really rough. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that her story sounded like one of those books where you could practically see the author smugly smirking at you through the pages. The sense of “Aren’t I awesome for being able to write something like this?” was intense. It felt like it was screaming “Hah, as if I’d write a generic-ass light novel that’s totally indistinguishable from a billion other ones on the shelves! Bet you didn’t see that coming, right? Nobody could ever predict my plot twists!”—or maybe “It’s my job to teach all the readers who’re happy guzzling down generic light novels what real literature looks like!” Basically, it sounded like it’d make its author look like a self-righteous egomaniac in the most aggressive possible way. If I ever found a plot twist like that in a book I’d paid real money for, I was confident I’d chuck the stupid thing straight at the nearest wall.

“Tomoyo, you can’t possibly—”

“D-Don’t say it! I know, okay?! I am extremely aware of how cringey that is, but what the hell do you want from me?! It was my first friggin’ book!” Tomoyo shouted at a breakneck pace, her face a vivid shade of red. “Back then...I thought that kind of stuff was what made books interesting. I thought that if I got all meta about the usual tropes, critiqued the usual generic plotlines, and went straight for the antithesis of what was popular with readers by turning everything on its head in a big, last-second twist...it’d make for a really good story. I was super wrong.”

Tomoyo paused, and I gave her a moment to collect herself.

“But then, when it got dropped from the contest in the first round, one of the judge’s comments told me that I should ‘think more carefully about how my readers will feel’...and I guess that just snapped me right out of it. I’d been totally focused on what I wanted to write, and I hadn’t thought about what the people reading my work would think at all,” Tomoyo said. She paused again to heave a sigh. “Looking back on it now, I think that’s a mistake that a lot of aspiring novelists probably make. They think that if they can just write something that’s unlike anything anyone’s written before, they’ll get popular by virtue of novelty alone.”

“‘They’...? That’s pretty big talk considering you’re still an aspiring novelist yourself, last I checked.”

“O-Oh, stuff it! I’m different now! I’ve grown, okay?! I’m a late-stage wannabe! I’ve gotten through the first round, after all!”

That last part aside, Tomoyo had a point. Her very first story and Kiryuu’s lie really did seem sort of similar. They both featured the same “it was all fiction all along” asspull plot twist that turned the whole story on its head, ruining it utterly in the process.

“Hey, Tomoyo...? Did you ever let Kiryuu read that story?” I asked.

“Hell no,” said Tomoyo. “I’ve never shown it to anyone I know, and I’m never planning on sharing it either.”

“Gotcha...”

Clearly, Kiryuu wasn’t straight-up mimicking her story. Was it just a coincidence, then? Had his falsehood and her fiction just happened to overlap? Had they both just happened to decide to run with the exact sort of plot twist that an aspiring author would put into their very first light novel, prioritizing bucking their readers’ expectations above all else and screwing their whole story up by doing so?

“Wait!”

I gasped. It felt like a bolt of lightning had just flashed through my mind. Inspiration had struck. The pieces all fit. It all connected together.

It couldn’t be...could it? But if not that, what else could it be?

I didn’t want to think that I was right, but it was the only answer that made any sense. It would explain everything—or to be more precise, the fact that nothing could explain everything meant that this was the only explanation left that would work at all.

Seriously? This is awful. Like, this is what-the-hell levels of bad.

Was this really it? Was this a resolution that anyone could possibly be sold on? It was even more sloppy and haphazard than the “it was all a work of fiction” twist. It would tear our whole story up by its roots and ruin it from top to bottom...but it was all I had. It was the only possible way that all of our story’s loose ends could be tied together.

Oh—I get it now. I guess this explains what Sagami told me. But really, though, what the hell? This is the truth we have to deal with? This is our actual final plot twist?

“H-Hey, what’s going on, Andou?”

“Juu...? Are you okay?”

“Andou?”

“Please pull yourself together, Andou.”

The truth that I’d come to understand had paralyzed me. The strength seemed to drain from my limbs and I nearly collapsed on the spot, much to the others’ obvious concern.

“I... I figured it out,” I gasped as I barely held myself upright and returned their gazes. “I finally know what Kiryuu was going for...what Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First was trying to accomplish.”

And then...I told them. I revealed my revelation—the truth that was at the root of this whole story.

“Kiryuu...was being a chuuni.”

Just like I was.