Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 13 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace

I think it’s high time that I provided an actual answer. I don’t mean some muddled, vague explanation that doesn’t really resolve anything either—I think it would be for the best for me to give, in my own words, a clear, direct, succinct answer regarding what I believe to be the true nature of chuunibyou.

This would be so much easier if I only had to provide a dictionary-style definition. I could talk for hours about that. The thing is, though, that language is ever-changing. People have started using “eleventh-grade sickness” and “image-obsessive” as pseudo-synonyms for the term these days, and the meaning of “chuunibyou” itself has gradually shifted with the times as well.

And, of course, if I’m being completely honest, the word chuunibyou is, well...it kinda feels like it’s on the verge of becoming obsolete. I’m not saying that people are going to stop saying it entirely—just that it feels like it’s a lot less prevalent in society at large now than it was just a little while ago. The word’s popularity has peaked, and now that the boom’s over, it feels like it’s a relic of a bygone era. Who knows? Maybe a few years from now, people really will stop using it altogether. Maybe a new word will be born to take its place, and “chuunibyou” will be relegated to occasional listicles with titles like “The Top Ten Nerdy Words of Yesteryear” at most.

That’s where my feeling of urgency—my feeling that now is the moment for me to give my answer—is coming from. This is the moment for me to explain what chuunibyou is to me as best as I can. And, well, I figure I might as well cut to the chase and open with my conclusion: To me, the true identity of chuunibyou is an imitation.

Yes, an imitation. A fake, a counterfeit, a faulty copy, a flawed derivative, a half-baked forgery. That’s what I see as the true nature of chuunibyou and the true nature of its sufferers. No matter how I try to pretty it up, no matter how positive of a spin I try to put on it, that core reality is something that I simply can’t deny. It’s a truth from which there can be no escape.

This is so obvious it really doesn’t even bear saying, but I’ll say it anyway: My name is not Guiltia Sin Jurai. Deep down, I’ve always known that. I knew it...but I couldn’t stop myself from perpetuating my own lie. I thought that the name was cool, and I wanted to be as cool as I thought it was. Whatever society at large thought about it, the fact that I thought it was cool was something I could never be mistaken about. My feelings—the feelings of someone who had looked up to countless fictional characters over the course of his life—were, without question, genuine.

And yet...I couldn’t help but wonder. Like it or not, a certain thought was never far from my mind: Was the fact that I longed to be like those fictional characters not, in and of itself, irrefutable proof that all I was doing was spuriously imitating them?

I don’t think any of the characters I was so obsessed with looked up to anyone in the way I looked up to them. They didn’t put on airs and pay careful attention to what people thought of them. Sure, they had evil eyes, wrapped their right arms with bandages, chanted incantations, and went by titles and aliases, but they weren’t doing any of it to look cool. They weren’t doing it because they were imitating someone they looked up to.

At the point where I looked up to them—at the point where I thought they were cool—I had already made it painfully clear that all I was doing was making myself into a sad, hopeless imitation of them. Maybe it’s possible for an imitation to devote themself so thoroughly to the bit that they become the genuine article in their own right...but not me. I couldn’t handle it.

I can’t do it anymore. It’s time for me to own up and face facts. It’s time for me, at long last, to admit the obvious.

Right now, I’m on the verge of getting over my chuunibyou.

I’m not really sure when it started. Somewhere along the way, almost entirely unconsciously, I started feeling from time to time like I was just playing the role of the one chuuni in my social circle. I’d find myself thinking “Oh, I should have some overblown chuuni reaction to this! It’d be weird if I didn’t,” acting out a chuuni persona due to some strange, self-imposed sense of obligation. As time passed by, I started feeling that way more and more frequently. Some part of me was keeping my chuunibyou going solely for the sake of preserving the status quo.

“To be a chuuni is to never lie to yourself, even as you lie to the world.”

Those were my words—though I can’t exactly remember when from—and if I may say so myself, I think I did a pretty good job of hitting the core of the matter with them. That said, if you look at them from another perspective, you can extend that conclusion to reveal another truth: Once you’ve started lying to yourself, you can no longer remain a chuuni. If you’re forcing yourself to act out a case of chuunibyou, then you’re not really suffering from chuunibyou at all, or anything like it. At that point, you’re just making up your own personal fiction—just putting on a persona. The more you become conscious of your own behavior, the more your chuuni potential diminishes.

I’m not saying that I’ve stopped loving all the ultra-chuuni works of fiction that I’ve always been into, of course. I still adore manga, light novels, anime, and video games that cater to the chuuni crowd’s particular tastes from the bottom of my heart. But...it’s different. Something about it’s not the same anymore. The sense of uniqueness and omnipotence that led me to the misguided belief that I was special in some profound way; the rebellious spirit that drove me to critique society first and think about what I was actually saying later; the aesthetic preference for lone-wolfism and being in the minority; the drive and grit to tell myself that I wasn’t like everyone else and that that made me awesome, portraying myself as a cynic in every way I possibly could; the glee I took in my use of the word “cynic” despite the fact that I didn’t really understand what it meant on anything but a surface level... All the things that actually well and truly make someone a chuuni have begun to fade away within me.

They haven’t completely vanished yet. If anything, I still have a surplus of them sticking around. But still—I can tell that their peak has come and gone. From now on, I’ll drift further and further away from my chuunibyou. The illness will lapse, and I’ll make a full recovery. I’ll grow up. I’ll become one of the perfectly ordinary adults whom the old me held in such utter disdain.

When all’s said and done, I’m nothing but an imitation. I could never hope to become the real deal, and I also lack the resolve to stick with my deception. I’m pretty darn half-baked all around. But...I can’t help but think: Could that very half-baked nature, in and of itself, be the true essence of chuunibyou?

I said something a while ago about an imitation being able to become the real deal if it sticks to its bit, but the truth is, if a chuuni stuck to the chuuni bit with that sort of dedication, they’d become something else entirely. They’d become something sublime—something precious and lofty that nobody could ever criticize—but still something different.

I believe that chuunibyou is only chuunibyou because its sufferers will eventually get over it. Someday, we’ll all move on from our illness. An end will inevitably come. Everyone, without exception, will eventually grow up—we don’t have a choice in the matter.

Chuunibyou is chuunibyou because it ends. Just like the cherry blossoms fall year after year, and just like every human will someday go to their death, so too a day will come when every chuuni is forced to give it all up and move on.

I’m no exception. Someday, I’ll move on from my chuunibyou as well. I’ll reach my twenties, then my thirties, then my forties, and as I move along into adulthood, there’s every chance that I’ll look back on the current me and feel such a soul-wrenching sense of shame I’ll want to drop dead on the spot. Or maybe I’ll manage to get over that as well. Maybe I’ll end up telling my friends stories about what a crazy cringelord I was back in high school, using my dark past as conversation fodder over drinks. Maybe I’ll go online somewhere and write a thread titled “When I was in highschool, I insisted that my classmates refer to me as Guiltia Sin Jurai. AMA.”

I am an imitation—I’m not authentic by any means, nor am I resolved enough to see my mimicry through. I’ve been operating on a distinctly youthful set of values that I’m sure to view as a cringey blot on my history when I grow up—a blot that will only last for the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, and one that will depart in a split second as I mature and move on.

That is the identity of chuunibyou...and yet, I’ve chosen to embrace that identity. I’ll accept it. I’ll accept the full reality of being a chuuni, warts and all. I’ll accept that split second and its painful ephemerality.

Chuunibyou is bound to end. One day, it will, without question, become an unfortunate mistake to look back upon...and that’s fine. That’s how it should be. Like how flowers are truly beautiful because they’ll eventually wilt—like how life is truly precious because it will inevitably come to an end—the transitory nature of chuunibyou, a split-second existence, allows it to shine brighter than anything.

If an end is sure to come, then all we can do is resolve ourselves to enjoy it to the fullest. The path forward would be to enjoy the ending of chuunibyou—to enjoy the advent of our adulthood. Refusing to allow your values to change and evolve would be a terrible mistake—they can only stretch so far before the stagnancy becomes untenable—therefore it’s much better to let nature take its course and guide your chuunibyou toward its conclusion.

Growth is inevitable. Change is inevitable. Endings are inevitable. Final volumes are inevitable.

Of course, you already understand all of this. Isn’t that right, Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First?

No— Isn’t that right, Kiryuu Hajime?

☆

It was midnight, and the school grounds of Senkou High were deserted.

The man we were waiting for appeared exactly when he’d promised, on the dot, stepping through the gates with a slow, self-assured stride. All of us knew that he could have moved around by any number of extraordinary means if he’d so chosen, but he walked with his own two legs anyway. It was like he was savoring the moment—like he didn’t want to let it go. He walked up to us, moment by moment, step by step...

“So...where are the others?”

...until he stopped dead center in the middle of the courtyard, opening our exchange with an understandable question. The only people here to meet him, after all—the only actors onstage for the final showdown—were me and Tomoyo. Hatoko, Chifuyu, and Sayumi were nowhere to be seen.

“The other three aren’t coming,” I said. “We talked to Leatia and had her help them drop out of the War.”

They’d done so at my request, specifically. I’d asked them to let me and Tomoyo be the only ones who’d participate in the final battle.

“Bwa ha ha! Did you, now?” Kiryuu asked with a confident grin. “Can’t say I didn’t see that coming. I knew it would turn out this way from the very start. The three of us were always going to be the ones who’d be around to mark the end of this story.”

He was grinning. Kiryuu Hajime was smiling the same way he’d always smiled, acting like the same person I’d always known him to be...but for some reason, it seemed different to me now. There was a terrible emptiness to his smile that I’d come to recognize.

“Kiryuu...” I said. “Everything you told us about inventing the literary club—about how we were all just characters in a fictional story that you were writing...that was all a lie, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, you figured it out? Way to make this boring,” said Kiryuu.

I didn’t reply.

“I figured that it would make for a pretty compelling hook if you took the bait...but it’s not a huge issue that you didn’t. Truth is, it was actually supposed to be a joke at first. You took it so much more seriously than I’d expected though. You were actually freaking out, and I just couldn’t resist pivoting. Rest assured: The only part of you and your friends that I tweaked was your powers. I didn’t alter your personalities or backstories at all,” Kiryuu said with a calm, composed chuckle. It almost felt like he was saying that even us realizing he’d been lying had been part of his plan from the beginning.

“You can stop now, Kiryuu,” I said. “You don’t have to keep forcing yourself to smile like that. You don’t have to keep pretending that each and every little twist that turns up was all part of your master plan.”

I hadn’t meant to say that so directly. The words had flowed from my lips unbidden...and Kiryuu fell silent.

“I’ve figured it all out,” I continued.

The pieces had all fit together...or so I’d like to say, but really, that wasn’t true at all. In fact, it was the exact opposite of the truth. The truth was that the pieces had been so scattered—so hopelessly, outlandishly mismatched—that they’d seemed like they could never possibly fit together at all...which, in a roundabout sort of way, was exactly what had led me to the truth.

“W-Wait a minute, Andou,” said Tomoyo. “Why’re you acting like you have all the answers? Would you please explain yourself already? You haven’t explained anything since you had your little revelation, so I’m still totally clueless...”

I hadn’t told Tomoyo about the truth I’d come to understand yet, and I hadn’t told the other three either. I couldn’t tell them. How could I? How could I possibly explain a twist as terrible as this one? How could I possibly reveal an ending this embarrassing? In truth, Tomoyo was the last person I ever wanted to disclose it to...but unfortunately, she was also the one person whom I had a clear and unambiguous responsibility to tell. She was his sister, after all. She was a member of Kiryuu Hajime’s family—someone of irreplaceable importance to him.

“Kiryuu...I can say it now, right?”

“Guiltia...what are you—”

“I can explain everything now, can’t I? Everything you’ve done up to now, and what you’ll be trying to do from here on out... I can pull back the curtain and expose it all, right?”

I knew that this was something I had to say, one way or another. Kiryuu would never be able to say it himself. If I didn’t put an end to all of this, then nothing could possibly stop him.

“Wh-Why’re you dancing around whatever it is you’re trying to say, Andou...? Stop dropping hints and explain yourself! What did you figure out? What has Hajime been trying to do all this time?!” shouted Tomoyo.

I turned to look Kiryuu in the eye. He returned my gaze, his deeply, irregularly colored eyes meeting mine. “Kiryuu. The truth is...”

“The truth is...you didn’t have anything in mind at all, did you?”

“...Huh?” Tomoyo grunted. She blinked, several times. “Wait...Huh? Wh-What? What do you mean, Andou?”

“I mean what I said. Kiryuu...doesn’t have anything in mind that he’s working toward. He wasn’t thinking about that at all.”

Tomoyo stared at me in blank, dumbfounded silence. I couldn’t blame her for that. Who knew how much of a shock the revelation must have been for her? Who could have guessed that the man who’d been pulling all the strings behind the curtain—that Kiryuu Hajime, a man of unfathomable motives and intentions who was practically dripping with an aura of mystery—had not, in truth, been thinking about what he was doing at all?

Of course none of the pieces seemed to fit together. After all—none of them had ever been meaningful in any real way.

“Though, actually, it’s probably not strictly true that he wasn’t thinking about it,” I continued. “If anything, I’d bet he’s been thinking about it harder than anyone else ever could.”

He’s probably taken this more seriously than anyone. He’s mulled it over, pondered the possibilities, and racked his mind for solutions more desperately than any of us.

“He’s thought, and thought, and thought...but in the end, he just hasn’t been able to come up with anything,” I said. “He hasn’t thought up an ending to this story.”

“An...ending...?” Tomoyo repeated.

“I mean, just look at the situation we’re in now. Isn’t it kind of obvious that everything’s jumped the rails? Why’s the final battle happening between three people? Like, did we just forget about the whole Final Eight thing, or what? Wasn’t there supposed to be some big, grand significance to there being eight people here? And while I’m at it, wasn’t everyone in the Final Eight supposed to get a wish granted? When did that stop being a thing?”

The whole idea was that the War would move on to its next stage once only eight Players remained, but Kiryuu had brought the numbers down to six in one fell swoop by taking out all of his former allies at once, and ultimately we’d ended up pushing them down further to three before anything could begin. What was happening here? It was a mess. It was such a mess, I could barely even believe it. The longer the story carried on, the more it tore its own internal logic to shreds.

“W-Wait, Andou... What do you mean, an ending to the story? What was he trying to do this whole time, then?” asked Tomoyo.

“Basically...Kiryuu’s chuunibyou led him to try to be an author,” I explained.

Kiryuu was a high-level chuuni, and he had a highly developed inclination toward authorship as well. He was just as much of a chuuni as me...or, well, if I’m being honest, he was such a high-level chuuni he put me to shame. There was only one thing he could’ve been trying to do, considering that.

“In the end, all he was trying to do was tell a good story.”

He’d wanted to tell a good story. He’d wanted to write the sort of story that would make people say “That was incredible!” or “I knew Kiryuu Hajime had it in him!”

“Here’s a question. You could tell what made Kiryuu’s power so incredibly dangerous the second he described it, right?”

“Y-Yeah,” Tomoyo hesitantly replied.

“The Reverse Crux Errata—the power to freely create and alter skills and characters as he sees fit. It’s an outrageously mighty ability with the potential to let him turn the very world that we humans live in into his own fictional reality. In a sense, it’s a power that makes him this world’s author.”

An author could rewrite their story as they pleased. They could make everything turn out exactly the way they wanted it to. They could make their setting and characters behave in whatever ways they saw fit.

“But tell me, Tomoyo...can authors really do whatever they want to in their stories?”

“Can they... Huh?” Tomoyo grunted.

“Like, think about the light novels you write. Does being their author really mean that you have complete and total control over every aspect of them? Are you free to do whatever you want, without any restraints or exceptions? Is writing a story that’ll entertain people really that easy?”

“O-Of course it isn’t! Writing a story’s really friggin’ hard! Like, sure, you can technically do whatever you want, but in a roundabout sort of way that’s actually what makes it so hard... Like, sometimes the story just won’t progress in the way you want it to, or elements of the world-building will start tripping you up, or the characters will start acting with a will of their own in ways that don’t work with what you had planned at all... Point is, it’s really hard! Writing’s basically just a process of nonstop trial and error from the very— Oh!”

It seemed Tomoyo had finally caught on as well. She had to eventually—after all, she was the one who’d taught me this lesson back in the eighth grade, when I’d given up my chuunibyou and hers was still blazing forward at full throttle.

Back then, I’d started perceiving a sense of “Yeah, you people will eat this garbage up, won’t you?” in all the works of fiction I encountered, and I’d ended up preoccupied by the misconception that everyone who consumed a work of entertainment was just dancing in the palm of its creator’s hand. I’d ended up going off on a pretentious ramble about how the sort of fiction that kids like us obsessed over had been designed to make kids obsess over them by a bunch of adults...and Tomoyo had taken my whole argument down with direct and brutal efficiency.

“Cartoonists and novelists and scriptwriters all work themselves ragged to make their stories!”

“And anyway, writing novels is... It’s really hard, you know? Sometimes you can imagine things perfectly but just can’t write them right, and sometimes you just can’t think up dialogue that’s fun to read at all... Sometimes not even you know if your characters are standing up or sitting down... Sometimes your world-building just falls apart, and sometimes you make stupid continuity errors without even realizing it... Sometimes your story ends up going in a totally random direction you never planned on... But someone like you wouldn’t know a thing about any of that, and you think the people who make media are trying to play you like a fiddle?”

“It’s not that easy, okay?!”

It all seemed so obvious, when she put it that way. Creating a work of fiction isn’t that easy. It’s hard. Writing something that your readers will actually enjoy and appreciate is as hard as it gets.

“Kiryuu won the Fourth Spirit War...and asked for another one as his reward. He was given full administrative authority over it, and he tried to use that power to become its author.”

With the power of authorship at his disposal, he’d sought to write the greatest story ever told. A no-holds-barred battle royale where the last surviving participant would be granted a wish had been, in his mind, a little too played out—so he’d decided to tweak the setup here and there, penning a story that he’d hoped would be brimming with stylish originality, one set right here in the real world.

“This time, we awakened to abilities of our own—and Tomoyo’s and the other girls’ were god-tier superpowers. You founded Fallen Black as well, and the Final Eight rule was added to the setup. You threw all sorts of new elements and ideas at the wall, peppering the story with foreshadowing wherever you possibly could.”

The result of his efforts, at this point, went without saying. The tragically messy situation we’d found ourselves in made it abundantly clear: His own world-building had tripped him up. His characters had started acting with wills of their own. The story hadn’t progressed in the way he’d wanted it to.

“In the end, you didn’t manage to make any of the foreshadowing you’d set up pay off in any real way. You tried to force the story to an ending anyway...but keeping us in your back pocket to serve as its final boss backfired. We’ve been isolated from the rest of the story for so long that we just couldn’t keep up with the last-second supernatural battle plot twist you threw at us. After all, we just don’t have any good reason to fight you, when all’s said and done.”

“S-So, basically...you’re saying he didn’t do a good enough job of giving his characters clear motivations?” asked Tomoyo.

“Right. He ran smack-dab into the classic ‘It doesn’t make any sense for the characters to actually do any of this’ problem. I’m sure he was hoping that he’d be able to pull us into the supernatural battle side of his story without much trouble, but would we really jump into combat headfirst? That’d be super weird, right? It’d be totally out of character for us. That’s why he had to rack his mind and come up with something that would give us a half-decent motivation to get involved in the fight.”

“Wait... Y-You don’t mean...?!”

“Exactly. That’s why he pulled the ‘You’re all just a work of fiction’ twist out of thin air.”

Kiryuu had needed a motive for us to do battle with him...and that was the best one he’d been able to come up with. He’d gone with it because it was a twist that was impossible to entirely discount, no matter how out of nowhere it seemed...or maybe he’d just been indulging in the exact same feeling of omnipotence that Tomoyo had fallen victim to when she was writing her very first story. Maybe he’d been caught up in the idea that writing a twist nobody could ever possibly see coming would make him look super awesome, so he’d decided to go with exactly the sort of story-upending revelation that you’d expect from a first-time author who was just a little too caught up in their own self-importance.

The plot he’d been hoping to follow, I figured, went something like this: After learning that we were nothing more than fictional characters, we would fall into despair. Before long, however, we’d have an “Even if we are just fictional, the feelings and passion in our hearts are as real as it gets!” sort of moment, get back on our feet, and strive to free ourselves from the shackles of fiction by standing up against the root of all the evils that’d plagued us...or something along those lines, anyway. In the end, however, his outrageous plot twist just hadn’t landed. It hadn’t worked on us at all.

I mean...okay, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker, but still.

“In the end, your whole plan crashed and burned,” I said. “There aren’t any endings left that could wrap up the story that you set into motion.”

The final twist...was that there was no final twist. What sort of pathetic joke of an ending was this? How could I possibly have told everyone that a farce like that was the reality we had to live with?

“Right now, you’re smiling as confidently and dauntlessly as ever...but deep down, you’re at a total loss. You can’t think up a decent twist, and it’s driving you crazy. You have no idea where to take the story next. You’re like a weekly manga artist staring down their deadline with no manuscript in sight, or like a light novel author whose series has been selling just fine but who can’t seem to put out a new volume no matter how long they spend trying to write it. Isn’t that right, Kiryuu?”

“Bwa ha ha...”

Kiryuu laughed. It was the same laugh he’d always done—the same dry, peculiar, unnatural laugh.

“Bwa ha ha, bwa ha ha ha ha ha! You think I’m at a loss? Me? You think I don’t have an actual plan...? Bwa ha ha ha, bwaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

It was like something had broken in him. His laughter grew more and more unhinged, echoing up into the night sky above. Then, when he was finally finished, he ran a hand through his silver hair and turned his gaze upon me once more.

“Well...you’re right, god dammit all.”

A moment after Kiryuu spat those words...he took off his rounded sunglasses, removed the red colored contact in his right eye, and hurled them both to the ground. It was the first time I’d ever seen his true face.

Kiryuu flashed a weary, put-upon smile. There wasn’t a hint to be seen of the ominous threat that his usual confident grin had always seemed to pose. Now he looked at me with a pair of black, homochromatic eyes, which he quickly turned up toward the sky. It felt like he was running away from my gaze, maybe, or like he was searching for something. I couldn’t say for sure.

“Hajime...” Tomoyo muttered. Her expression was sympathetic, and it carried a slight hint of nostalgia as well. After all, Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First no longer stood before us. We were now speaking with Kiryuu Hajime, the perfectly ordinary human being.

“Every last little bit of what you just said was right, Andou Jurai,” said Kiryuu. The time for him to call me Guiltia, it seemed, had passed. “Right now...? I’m in a fix like you wouldn’t believe. I spent the whole walk here racking my mind about what the hell I was supposed to do next and how the hell I was supposed to wrap my story up. You hit the nail on the head...I’ve been worrying and freaking out over this for ages. I’m the one who started the whole damn story up in the first place, but somewhere along the way it got out of hand, and I’ve been failing to bring it back in line ever since...”

The story had gotten so out of hand that its author could no longer bring it under control again. I wasn’t a creative by any means, so this was pure speculation on my part...but I had a feeling that the problem Kiryuu had found himself facing was a very common one in the storytelling world—sometimes getting out of hand was exactly what made a story entertaining, so authors would always strive to reach beyond their means.

“I do have one thing I wanna put on the record to defend myself, though,” Kiryuu added. “It’s not like I went into all this without a plan from the start, y’know? I wasn’t taking being an author lightly and jumping in without testing the waters. I knew what I was getting into. I even had a conclusion planned out, all the way back then. But...”

Kiryuu pressed a hand to his forehead. He looked deeply dejected.

“...then fuckin’ Shizumu guessed the whole damn ending.”

“W-Wait a minute...you mean his theory about you trying to make the literary club into your final boss and it all coming down to you job-changing from gravity-wielder to time-manipulator for your ultimate showdown with Tomoyo?”

Kiryuu sighed. “That’s the one.”

O-Oooof... Why are you like this, Sagami? Did you really have to be the worst kind of reader all the way to the bitter end?

“I bet I looked pretty calm back when he guessed it, but inside? I was losing it. I knew I had to do something. An ending that a reader like him could see coming was out of the question. I thought I had to come up with some really crazy, incredible twist that no one would ever predict...and that’s when it all started to fall apart.”

He’d changed his story because a reader had guessed the twist that he had planned. This is, again, pure speculation on my part...but I was pretty positive that that was one thing that an author could never, ever let themself do. It’s not like it was unethical or anything, but I had a feeling that the more you forced yourself to try to buck your readers’ expectations and come up with plot developments that no one could call in advance, the more your story would end up breaking down as a result.

In this day and age, all you had to do was glance at the internet to learn exactly what your readers thought of your stories. Some of them, inevitably, would manage to put the pieces together and guess future plot developments in advance. Readers don’t have to take responsibility for their predictions and can make as many as they want, so they’re free to throw dozens of them at the wall and gloat it up if even one of them turns out to be right. “See? I told you so!” they’ll say. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought would happen,” or “That wasn’t as epic of a moment as I expected it to be,” they’ll condescendingly opine.

Dodging every single one of those irresponsible, limitless reader predictions is, I figure, all but impossible...and if you force yourself to try to dodge them anyway, you’ll end up breaking your story itself as a consequence. That was exactly the trap that Kiryuu had fallen into. As he penned his first ever story, he let himself get preoccupied by his readers’ impressions of it. He tried so hard to subvert their expectations—went so far out of his way to write around them—that he’d lost sight of what his story was actually supposed to be about in the first place.

“Y’know something...? I really get how Oda Eiichirou and Aoyama Goushou must feel right now. Imagine keeping a series going on and on for decades, having all sorts of internet randos spout their theories about how it’ll finally end the whole damn time... Can you even imagine how rough that must be?”

I...didn’t reply to that one. Nope. Back it up. You definitely shouldn’t be comparing yourself to authors who’re on that level.

“So, I tried to buck Shizumu’s prediction...but there’s no way I could course-correct that majorly that late in the game and have it turn out well. Then, while I was busy figuring out what the hell I could even do...Fallen Black’s other members kicked off their epic betrayal. I didn’t see that one coming at all, and it backed me into one hell of a corner. I had no choice but to use the Reverse Crux Errata, in the end. They forced my hand.”

“I thought so,” I said. “You really didn’t plan on using that power at all, did you?”

“No shit. Of course you shouldn’t put a broken-ass cheat skill that nobody could ever possibly beat into a supernatural battle story.”

Thinking up overpowered abilities was easy. I’d come up with plenty of them myself. Making good use of them in a story, however, was hard. If a power you introduce really is the strongest—if literally nobody can beat it—then your only choices are to come up with some arbitrary excuse to take it away or to introduce a character who’s on such a totally different level that you can just say the power straight-up doesn’t work on them or something. In other words, your only choice is to pull out a plot twist that’ll strain credulity even further.

“I know you probably would’ve lost if you hadn’t brought it out...but using the Reverse Crux Errata to wipe out Fallen Black was still a fatal mistake, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You hadn’t finished seeding our motivation to oppose you, after all. There’s just no way you could show us a power that’s that broken, say, ‘Okay, let’s fight now,’ and expect us to play along. Of course we’d back out.”

“Right? Trust me, I know that was a mistake as well as you do. That’s why I tied my brain into knots to think up the ‘you’re all fictional’ story. I thought it’d work as a final twist and give you a decent motive to fight me, all at once...but in the end, that failed too,” Kiryuu said before heaving a long, heavy sigh. “You know, when I think back on it, I think everything might’ve actually gone off the rails the moment I met you.”

“Me? But why...?”

“I really just happened to stop by the literary club on a whim that day. Us meeting was total coincidence, but we were such birds of a feather I figured it had to be fate. I thought I’d been struck with some sorta revelation—that I had to pull it into the story in some big way. So...that’s what I did. I wrote you in. I threw a whole new character into the plot, hoping you’d make everything more exciting.”

He’d outlined his whole story in advance, then thrown a new element into the mix on a whim. He’d let himself go full improv, ad-libbing developments on the fly. He’d probably thought that if he just laid out enough random foreshadowing, he’d be able to tie it all together later down the line, one way or another. He’d thought it would all work out in the long run...

“But in the end, I never managed to figure out how I could actually use that new character. I threw you in off the cuff and never got a handle on you.”

“...”

“I thought I could swap Tomoyo out of the final boss slot and use you instead, wrapping the story up with a fight between the two of us...but that just wasn’t gonna happen. Seriously—what the hell is up with your stupid, useless-ass power? How am I supposed to make a final battle exciting when that’s what I have to work with? Even the awakened version’s worthless!”

“Y-Yeah, uh... Sorry, I guess...”

My Dark and Dark, it seemed, was a force to be reckoned with. It was so profoundly petty it had transcended the fourth wall and stumped the very author of our story. From a certain perspective, I guess you might say that actually made it a tremendously potent power after all.

“You’re sorry? That’s my line,” Kiryuu said with a brief, troubled smile. “I wanted this to work out better, y’know? I wanted to rise way above whatever expectations you had for me.”

Kiryuu’s self-deprecation felt like it pierced me right through the heart. Oh, I get it now, I thought. Sagami isn’t the only reader that he’s been thinking about this whole time. He was thinking about me too. Knowingly or not, I’ve been one of his readers as well.

The first time I met Kiryuu, I was elated by the encounter. Not only did it feel like I’d finally met someone who was cut from the same cloth as me, but it also felt like I’d met someone who stood far above me in my chosen sphere. I’d felt something in him—some limitless well of potential—and I’d put him up on a massive pedestal, treating him as some sort of ideal that I could expect the world of. I’d looked upon him with eyes full of admiration and envy. I’d believed wholeheartedly that there was something that made him different from everyone else I knew—and he’d been all too delighted to be the subject of my innocent expectations.

At the same time, however, those expectations may well have placed a burden upon him. I might have been the equivalent of someone who loved the work of a particular author a little too much tweeting “I’m a huge fan of your series! When’s the next volume coming out?!” at them. That sort of excessively pure enthusiasm, in a backward sort of way, can actually pressure an author rather than supporting them, and that’s likely just what I’d done to him.

On the one hand, you had my pure and innocent enthusiasm, and on the other, Sagami’s shrewd and discerning analysis. Kiryuu had faced two very different flavors of pressure from two very different readers, and as a result, his story had begun to drift off the course he’d tried to set for it.

“Talk about pathetic... This was my story. I’d started it for myself, but now I can’t even give it a half-decent ending,” Kiryuu spat as he flopped listlessly to the ground.

The way I saw it, Kiryuu Hajime was, without question, an author. There are all sorts of authors, though, and he was the sort who’d just set out to write his very first novel—in other words, an amateur. He’d probably been brimming with enthusiasm when he’d kicked his story off...but then his poorly developed setup dragged him down, the characters he’d thrown in on a whim piled up, he’d mistaken self-importance for originality, and he’d focused so single-mindedly on his readers’ opinions that he’d ended up veering off course and losing sight of where he wanted things to end entirely. His story was left in limbo, and all signs pointed to it remaining on eternal hiatus.

“So...you know how Shizumu’s power showed us visions of our future?” Kiryuu muttered as he leaned back, gazing up at the night sky.

Innocent Onlooker had allowed Sagami to force people to witness premonitions of their potential future—and the moment he’d used it on me and Kiryuu, Kiryuu had snapped and crushed Sagami in the blink of an eye. It seemed like he’d panicked—like he was rejecting the vision he’d received with everything he had. He himself had described the future he’d seen as “sickening.”

“Y’know what I saw back then...? I saw myself well into my forties, still with the same silver hair, sunglasses, and coat as ever, still telling people my name was Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First, and still not able to hold down a job to save my life.”

I took in a sharp breath. It almost felt like I’d break down in tears if I didn’t hold myself together.

Y-Yiiikes. Yeah, that’s...that’s rough.

It was pretty different from what I’d been imagining he’d seen...but I certainly couldn’t deny that it was the worst, most sickening possible future for him. No wonder he’d lost his cool. Anyone would want to lash out against a future like that.

“It was a real shock, y’know? I mean, it was depressing on its own, sure, but the fact that I was shocked about a future like that was also shocking in its own right. The fact that I was shaken by that vision felt like...like it meant some part of me was admitting that everything I was doing was nothing more than a childish game,” Kiryuu said. His words came out in a nonstop, profoundly lamenting deluge. “I always knew. Deep down, it was never, ever in doubt. I...am not Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First. I’m just...just Kiryuu Hajime.”

I didn’t say a word.

“It wasn’t like this back in the day. I didn’t worry about what other people thought about me...didn’t hesitate to stick to what I thought was cool, come hell or high water. But now...I can’t keep it up anymore. It got especially bad around the time I hit my twenties. No matter how hard I tried to stay strong...it kept slipping away from me. It kept fading. The chuuni power within me’s diminishing by the second.”

“Kiryuu...” I muttered.

I got it now. It all made sense. He was the same as I was. Kiryuu...was on the verge of getting over his chuunibyou too.

When a chuuni made an effort to keep their affliction around, fending off its eventual departure...the act of making that effort, in and of itself, was contrary to the nature of chuunibyou. Kiryuu understood that all too well, and the knowledge had brought him to far, far greater and longer-lasting depths of conflict and anguish than I’d experienced.

There’s no specific source or trigger to chuunibyou’s end. It’s more of an inevitability than anything else. Just like we lose the ability to hear high-frequency noises, and just like boys lose their ability to sing in soprano, so too does chuunibyou fade as we make our way into adulthood. People just change. The act of living, in fact, is all but synonymous with the act of changing. Of course our dispositions and personalities shift over the course of time. It’d be stranger if they were perfectly consistent. I don’t think there’s a single person out there whose personality remained completely unaltered from childhood to adulthood.

Suddenly, my own potential futures from Sagami’s visions flashed into my mind. He’d shown me four vastly different routes in which I’d ended up dating four different people, but there was one aspect of my future that had remained consistent throughout all of them: Regardless of all other circumstances, I was no longer a chuuni.

None of the future versions of myself had engaged in any pretentious posing. They hadn’t forced themselves to enunciate a perfect “mwa ha ha” every time they laughed. They’d all been perfectly ordinary, unremarkable teenagers in their last year of high school. Those visions had only been set a year in advance from now, but the me in them had seemed strikingly different from the me in the present day.

Perhaps, surprisingly enough, that was just how it went with chuunibyou. Maybe finding a girlfriend was all it took for someone to get over it in the blink of an eye. Maybe it was just one of countless phases that one’s personality might go through over the course of a lifetime—a blip on an ever-shifting radar of perspectives.

“Just when I realized that there was nothing I could do about my chuunibyou fading away...I met Leatia and learned about the Spirit War. I literally trembled with joy. I couldn’t even find the words to describe how happy I was. The world that I’d always wanted to be a part of had finally showed up at my doorstep.”

What would I have done if I’d been in his position? What if I hadn’t been isolated from the War, met my Spirit handler, and learned exactly what was going on? How would I have reacted? What choices would I have made?

“If I could just stay in the War—just keep fighting battles straight out of a manga—I could keep my chuunibyou alive. I could keep viewing the world through the same lens I always had. I could be a version of myself who was proud to be a chuuni...or so I’d thought.”

That was why Kiryuu had drawn out the war. That was why he’d made the outlandish choice of wishing to fight in another one.

“But in the end...it was all pointless. Deep down, some part of me was always thinking ‘Seriously, aren’t you too old for this?’ Once that thought took root, there was no getting rid of it. The more I wished I could stay the same forever, the more I could tell that I really was changing.”

Kiryuu had gone to incredible lengths to reject the force of change. He’d done his damnedest to keep liking the same things he always had. He’d wanted to remain addicted to the exact same media he’d always consumed...but it wasn’t possible. Everyone’s tastes change as they grow up and leave their childhood behind. Sometimes you’ll just stop buying the new volumes of a manga you’re hooked on without even realizing it. Sometimes you’ll watch every episode of an anime with fervent interest while it’s airing, only to then lose interest entirely once the anime ends, its sales dry up, a second season is all but ruled out, and the author seems to have lost all motivation and stopped putting out the original work it was adapted from.

That sort of change was inevitable...but Kiryuu had fought it with everything he had anyway. He’d wished with all his heart to stay the same fanciful, idealistic child as ever—and the effort was just as doomed as if he’d tried to keep speaking in the same tone as ever, even after his voice had started to deepen. He’d tried to make the inherently transient perspective that was chuunibyou into something that would last an eternity. He’d done it because letting himself change felt like it would be no different than letting his current self die—like it would mean betraying everything that had made him himself.

But it didn’t work. People change. Time moves on. Even if you have the power to do anything you want to—even if you can stop time or reshape the world itself with total impunity—the one thing you’ll never be able to stop from changing is yourself. Maybe you could brainwash yourself into an unchanging state, sure, but at that point, you wouldn’t be you anymore. No matter how broken and cheat-like of a skill you might have...you yourself will always be the one exception.

“So I thought, hey...if it has to end one way or another, I might as well go out with the biggest bang I possibly can. I decided to carve the name ‘Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First’ as deeply into this world—and more importantly, into myself—as I could. That’s the mindset that I went into coordinating the Fifth Spirit War with...and, well, you already know how that turned out for me. Turns out that when a chuuni writes a novel, all they get is something to look back on and cringe at.”

Such was a novel written with chuunibyou, not for chuunis: a self-centered story that paid no interest in the slightest to its readers, and a work that you could only ever view as a blot on your history when you grew up and looked back upon it.

“Seriously, though—what should I have done?” Kiryuu asked, the words seeming to spring from his mouth unbidden. “And...what am I supposed to do now?”

I couldn’t answer his question. If he hadn’t asked it, I might’ve done so myself. The moment we became aware that we were going to change and wished we could remain the same, that very wish would prove to us that the change had already begun. What’s a person supposed to do when they find themself stuck in that dilemma? What could we do to make sure that we’d keep liking the same things we always had?

“Why not just grow up already?”

Suddenly, Tomoyo spoke up. Her tone was as kind and compassionate as that of a mother gently consoling a lost child... Okay, no, not really. She actually sounded more like a mother whose kid had just asked her “Why does one plus one equal two?” replying “Because it does. You’ll just have to live with it.” Her tone was cold, exasperated, and above all else, blunt as all get out.

“You’re really glorifying the hell out of all this crap, Hajime...but basically, you’re just throwing a tantrum because you don’t wanna grow up and don’t wanna get a job, right? Well, shut up and do it anyway. Get out there and contribute something to society for once. That’s what being an adult means. Deal with it.”

A moment of silence passed as Kiryuu and I gaped at her, completely lost for words. It felt like she’d driven the hefty fist of common sense right into my solar plexus.

“W-Wait, Tomoyo, no,” I said. “Framing it like that ruins everything, doesn’t it? You’re making it sound like Kiryuu’s conflict and mental anguish is exactly the same as what jobless shut-ins go through... Like, it degrades this whole thing into a ridiculous farce, y’know?”

“What do you mean, ‘degrades it’? This whole thing’s been a stupid farce from the start,” Tomoyo quickly and curtly huffed before walking over toward Kiryuu, who was still sitting on the ground. She stopped right in front of him, looking down on him with all the intimidating presence of those guardian statues that loom over the entrances to Buddhist temples. “You’re a total moron, you know that, Hajime? You haven’t changed at all for as long as I’ve known you.”

Kiryuu didn’t reply.

“So, look—there’s basically no way you could’ve missed this, but I used to be a chuuni too,” said Tomoyo. “I came up with all sorts of wild fantasies, gave myself ridiculous titles and aliases, ran around in the park wearing your coat and sunglasses, and basically made a huge, cringey idiot of myself...but in the end, I got over it before I graduated from middle school. By the time I started high school, I was a totally normal girl. I’ve been living the normie life—the total opposite of what chuunis go for.”

“Wait,” I interjected. “You? A normie...?”

“Shut up, Andou!” Tomoyo snapped, shooting me a death glare before turning back to Kiryuu. “Nowadays...I see my chuuni period as a super embarrassing phase that’s better left forgotten. Just thinking about it makes me so embarrassed, I wish I could drop dead and get it over with. Why did I have to act like such a freaky nutjob? I have so many regrets...but on the other hand, it also feels like it was for the best. I went through a chuuni phase in middle school, got all that crap out of my system, went on the mend, and ended up making a total and complete recovery, resulting in who I am today.”

“I mean...it kinda feels like you’ve still got some latent chuunibyou aftereffects lingering in your system, so I’m not sure I’d say you’ve made a complete—”

“I-I said shut the hell up, Andou!” Tomoyo roared again.

Look, it’s not like I want to undermine you here, okay? You just keep saying stuff that makes it totally impossible to resist butting in! Your story’s so dubious, questioning it is literally reflexive for me!

“A-Anyway, what I’m trying to get at here...is that even a stain on your personal history is still part of your personal history. Even the stuff that we’re most embarrassed about and the stuff we wish we could go back and undo are part of what makes us into the people we are today. Putting together all those experiences is what makes us change, mature, and grow into adults,” Tomoyo concluded.

“Hmph... That’s a pretty condescending thing to say, eh? Not to mention pretentious,” said Kiryuu.

“Well, I get to condescend to you. I get to be pretentious when I talk to you. I’m a step ahead of you in life, so I’ve earned that right,” Tomoyo declared, sounding just a little proud about it.

When she put it that way, it struck me that Tomoyo really was a step ahead of everyone else present. Kiryuu and I were still obsessing over an illness that she’d gotten over ages ago. She’d made peace with her chuunibyou in her own way.

“I don’t really know how to put this, but...I guess you’re just being too all-or-nothing about this, Hajime. You and Andou both, actually. You’re acting like doing away with your chuunibyou would basically be the same thing as killing the person you’ve been up until now, right?”

Kiryuu stayed silent.

“I mean, I get it, okay? Letting yourself change really does feel like denying the person you’ve always been. But think about it this way: No matter how much you change, the old you never just disappears, right? This moment’s never going to stop having happened no matter what comes after, right?” said Tomoyo. A somewhat bitter smile came across her face. “I got over my chuunibyou...and I’m super embarrassed about all the crap I did back when I had it. I’d undo every bit of it if I had the chance, but no matter how much I deny that part of my life, I can never actually erase the chuuni me from my past.”

There’s no undoing what’s been done. No matter how much you disavow your past, and no matter how hard you try to erase it, it will never really change.

“A stain on your past is a stain because you can’t just wash it away...so you can rest easy and let yourself change, the way I see it. Just let yourself grow up. Even if the grown-up you ends up rejecting the you from right now, he’ll never be able to erase you. And on the flip side, no matter how hard you try to preserve the current you, it just isn’t possible to keep it going all the way into the future. The only moment you’ll feel exactly the same way that you do right now is right now,” said Tomoyo.

Her words struck me as incredibly idealistic, but at the same time, unwaveringly pragmatic as well. The present moment will never disappear, no matter how you try to deny it down the line...but moreover, the present moment is just the present moment, and it can never be preserved and brought into the future. All we can do is leave our present feelings and perspectives behind, sequestering them in the annals of our memories.

“You’re getting older, Hajime, and so am I. Andou and the others are too. We’ll all be adults someday, and somewhere else out in the world, some other kid will come down with their own case of chuunibyou. I don’t know if I’m making any sense here, but, well...if that’s how the world works, then I don’t really have a problem with it. Why not leave it at that?”

“Do you seriously think that’s an option for me, after everything I’ve done?” Kiryuu asked with a pained, bitter scowl. “I ran wild. I pulled everyone and everything around me into my whims. I wanted to wrap all of humanity up in a massive War under my direction. Do you really think I can just leave my story unfinished, dropping it on the spot to go off and be a normal adult...?”

“I mean...I don’t know what all you’ve done that you’d feel responsible for, but in terms of your options, I don’t see why leaving the story unfinished wouldn’t be on the table. It’s not like finishing it would free you from all that responsibility anyway. Nobody’s gonna praise you for wrapping up a story that you started purely for your own self-satisfaction, you know?” Tomoyo said with a frigid glare.

O-Oof! Harsh!

“Personally, I think you should go around and apologize to every single person you pulled into your stupid little game...but considering most of them don’t even remember it at this point, probably better not to stir that pot again. I’d say you’re better off just feeling guilty about it for the rest of your life.”

Once again, Kiryuu didn’t say a word.

“Going back to the part about leaving your story unfinished...speaking as an aspiring author myself, I don’t like the idea of any story getting dropped partway through, but there’s not much else to do at this point. It’s not like you’re slacking off on your writing, or got bored, or whatever. You thought it through as hard as you possibly could and worked yourself to the bone to come up with a good ending...but you just couldn’t do it. You couldn’t come up with the right twist, couldn’t put out the next installment, and couldn’t write your final volume. And at that point...what else can you do? It’s a lost cause. What else can you do?” Tomoyo repeated under her breath.

So, so many stories have ended without ever reaching completion. So many stories have ended on unsatisfying, incomprehensible notes. So many have been canceled or quietly abandoned...and Kiryuu Hajime’s first story was about to become one of them. He’d written himself into a corner, and he was about to set down his pen for good without even bothering to put down a final period. A lack of ending would be the ending. A lack of a final twist would be the final twist. That would be how this story concluded.

“What else is there to say...?” Tomoyo pondered. “I mean, there’s a bunch of other stuff I could comment on, but I’m starting to get pretty tired here... So, uh, basically...” She seemed to hesitate for a moment, then held a hand out to Kiryuu. “Let’s go home, Hajime,” Tomoyo said with a slightly bashful look on her face. “Mom and dad are worried about you.”

“Tomoyo...” said Kiryuu.

“If you can’t decide what you want to do next, then just take some time back at our place to think it through. Of course, whether you decide to get a job or go back to college, you’re gonna have to let your hair get black again one way or another.”

“Yeah...guess I will,” Kiryuu agreed. He let out a slight sigh, then took the hand that Tomoyo offered him. “Let’s head home for now, then.”

The look on Kiryuu’s face as he stood up was so calm and placid, it almost felt like he’d just been released from the clutches of a spirit that had possessed him. He looked like he’d accepted everything the world had thrown at him—like he’d compromised, given up, and grown up.

“But, hey...Andou? If this doesn’t work out...”

Suddenly, the words Sagami had spoken to me sprang to the forefront of my mind.

“If this doesn’t work out...”

“I want you to save Kiryuu for me.”

“Please. You’re the only one who can do it.”

That’s right. Sagami had asked me to save Kiryuu—not to defeat him or stop him, but save him. Maybe he’d already figured out, at least to some degree, what Kiryuu was going through. Maybe he’d been dimly aware of the mental anguish that had driven Kiryuu into a corner. Maybe he’d realized how, in his role as a reader, he had tormented the author of the story he was following. I certainly didn’t think Sagami had figured everything out, but it was easy to believe that he’d at least had a hunch, deep down. He and Kiryuu had been friends since they were kids, supposedly, so they probably had all sorts of shared history that I wasn’t aware of.

I looked over at Kiryuu once more. He was smiling, but not the crazed, menacing grin of madness I was used to. Now he was smiling like a calm, good-natured young man. I could tell that he’d accepted it all—he’d embraced the transience of chuunibyou and given up on maintaining his own case forever. He’d come to understand that there’s value to be found in things that only last an instant, and also that lasting an instant is exactly what gives them the power to last an eternity. He’d been freed from the bonds of chuunibyou, and he would go on to set forth into adulthood. He’d go home to the family that was waiting for him, spend some time getting himself together, and then find a place for himself in the grown-up world.

A few years from now, Kiryuu would be the sort of perfectly normal adult who could look back on this moment and admit—with no small amount of embarrassment—that he used to be the cringiest person you could ever meet. That, however, by no means meant that this moment would vanish. It would never come again, but it would stay with him forevermore.

This was right. Surely, this was for the best. This had to have been the sort of ending that Sagami had wanted me to help Kiryuu find. That’s exactly why I had brought Tomoyo along with me for this confrontation. I’d brought her because I’d thought that only she—a member of Kiryuu’s family—had what it took to save him.

One way or another, this was case closed. Everything had ended as well as it could, and with that done, our story was ready to come to its equivalent of an ending as well...

“No.”

...but then, just when it’d seemed that everything had wrapped up, a voice rang out—my voice.

“No...this can’t possibly be right, Kiryuu. Why are you acting like it’s all over? You think you can stroll off into the sunset and become an adult, just like that?”

I knew that I was ruining the mood of our big grand finale, but I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t bear to watch Kiryuu embrace a life of ordinary mediocrity. I’d accepted this ending on an intellectual level, but still, I just couldn’t.

Something was driving me. My heart, maybe, or my instincts. Or maybe...it was the chuuni power within me.

“H-Hey, come on, Andou...what are you talking about?” said Tomoyo. “Are you trying to make us have this whole conversation all over again? I finally got Hajime to try to shape himself up, for crying out loud...”

“Yeah, I know. And don’t worry—I’m not planning on rehashing all of that again,” I replied.

I knew that chuunibyou was something you had to get over. I knew that adulthood was inevitable. There was one thing, however, that I couldn’t accept, no matter how hard I tried.

“Why are you giving up on your story? Why would you abandon it unfinished?”

He’s the one who kicked this tale off. He caused the Fifth Spirit War—so why’s he trying to leave it in a state of eternal limbo?

“Let’s finish it, Kiryuu... You’ve already started the story, so let’s make sure that your readers can experience it all the way to the end. Isn’t that an author’s responsibility?”

“Wh-What do you want from him, Andou?” Tomoyo interjected once more. “It’s not like Hajime wants to drop it either, you know? You get that he doesn’t like the idea of putting his story on ice, right? Sometimes creatives can think and think and just never manage to carry on their story. Even stories written by pros get abandoned without endings all the time! So...there’s nothing he can do. It’s a lost—”

“It is not a lost cause!”

I was no author. I didn’t understand the pain that went into making up a totally new story. For all I knew, every work that’d ended unfinished had done so on account of completely unavoidable circumstances. For all I knew, the world was full of stories that had truly been lost causes...but that wasn’t enough for me.

“Just because there are tons of unfinished stories out there doesn’t mean it’s fine for you to leave your story unfinished too!”

I knew that I was out of line. I was a selfish, arrogant reader, making demands of an author whose suffering I couldn’t begin to understand. But still—how could I stop myself? If there was nothing that could be done about an author’s inability to write a continuation of their story, then there was nothing that could be done about their readers’ desire to keep reading it as well.

“Are you really okay with this, Kiryuu?!” I shouted. I desperately, earnestly made my case to him. “You said it yourself a moment ago, didn’t you? You said you wanted to go out with the biggest bang you possibly could! You wanted to use your story to leave a lasting mark on yourself and the world—to carve the chuuni version of you in so deep, it could never fade away! Are you really okay with letting that ambition go in a sad little anticlimax like this?!”

“...The hell I am!” Kiryuu growled with a bitter scowl. “But...what else am I supposed to do? I’m out of ideas! It’s my own damn story...but I don’t have a clue how I could possibly close the book on it. I’ve spent so much time mulling it over, and it hasn’t helped at all. I’m lost...”

“In that case...we’ll think it through together!” I declared. I made the proposal totally off the cuff, driven by instinct alone. “Right, that’s it! That’s the solution... If you can’t come up with an ending on your own, we just have to put our heads together and think it through as a group! We might just come up with something great if we pool our ideas, right?!”

“Think it through...with you...?”

“I mean, I know. There’s always a chance that even with both of us working together, we won’t come up with anything. Maybe we still won’t have a worthwhile final arc after it’s all done. But even so...let’s do what we can to settle the score!”

Let’s settle our score. Let’s find our ending. Let’s bring this story—our story—to a full and definitive conclusion.

“No matter how pathetic or laughable it ends up turning out, we should give this story a real ending. If your story gets canceled, then you should give it the best we-got-canceled-style ending you can manage! Why would you keep the truth from your audience? Why would you just stop putting out volumes, never even announcing that your series got canned...? That might just be how the modern light novel industry works, but it’s still wrong! If you write a story, you need to finish it too!”

Just like how chuunibyou can only be what it is because it will someday come to an end, so too can stories only be stories because they eventually conclude. Not all endings are perfect and beautiful, of course. Sometimes stories’ endings spring from perfunctory cancellations, sometimes they’re hopelessly half-assed, sometimes they go on hiatus, sometimes their next volume is listed as “pending” forever, and sometimes they simply drop off the face of the earth unfinished. An incredible number of stories have ended in ways that are hard to swallow...but that doesn’t mean that it’s fine for you to leave your own story by the wayside. Struggle. Fight back. Even if you have nothing to write, even if you’re totally out of ideas, do everything in your power to resist the nonending that looms before you. Even if the perfect finale is beyond your reach, you should still do something, whatever you can, to produce a conclusion that’s just a little better than no ending at all...

...and so, I stepped back from Tomoyo and Kiryuu and held my right hand aloft.

“I am he...who conquers chaos.”

I spoke the words of a malediction—the coolest incantation I’d ever come up with. It felt like it’d been quite a while since I’d last said them aloud.

“O purgatorial flame that sways upon the brink of the Abyss, O twisted blaze of sable darkness, blighted crimson of deepest night! O howling, maddening inferno that paves the road to oblivion! Fetter sin with sin, pierce my being with thine onyx sigil, and bare thine fangs at the arrogance of providence!”

I was worried for a moment that I might have forgotten the words, but the moment I started reciting them, they flowed from my lips with ease. I’d put so much time and care into making them up that it seemed I’d carved them deeply into my very soul.

Still, I knew there might come a day when I forgot those words—just like I’d forgotten the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai transformation poses that I’d been able to copy perfectly back when I was a kid. Someday, all of the titles and spells that I’d poured my everything into inventing would be lost to the oblivion of forgetfulness. Someday, I’d dig up the Bloody Bible from way in the back of my closet where I’d sealed it, give it a read, and chuckle over how ridiculous it was that I’d thought all of that nonsense was cool when I was a teen.

But that was fine. That’s just what it meant to live in this world. And so—for now, while there was still time...

“Dark and Dark!”

A flame emerged. A black flame, still clear to see in the dimly lit schoolyard, darker even than the black night itself, blazed within my hand. Not a fire—a flame. That was the one point that I would never, ever be willing to compromise on.

“Come, Kiryuu Hajime! Nay—Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First!” I called, shouting from the depths of my soul as I extended my flame-wreathed arm toward him. “If this world is to fall to ruin, then let us destroy it ourselves, here and now! You and I shall spin the ultimate tale of world’s end together!”

Let’s bring this to an end. A true, proper end. If it has to end someday, then let’s not drag it out in a dreary, plodding sequence of nonevents until it’s brought to a close by a cancellation so unceremonious you can hardly tell if it ended or not. No, far better to end it now. Far better to let this story’s ending mark one final, dazzling display with which to send your chuunibyou off with a bang. If it has to be a farce one way or another, the least we can do is make it the grandest farce you’ll ever see.

For a moment, Kiryuu was silent. He looked stunned and simply gaped at me. But then, a moment later...he began to move. He reached into one of his coat’s pockets, producing a spare color contact that he placed in his right eye. He stooped down, picking up his rounded sunglasses from the patch of ground he’d thrown them to and returning them to his face. He ran a hand through his silver hair, flicked his jet-black coat with a satisfying snap...

“Bwa ha ha!”

...and he laughed. A dry, peculiar laugh.

“Well said, Andou Jurai—or rather, Guiltia Sin Jurai!” Kiryuu declared. His voice, his expression, his eyes—all of them seemed to be quivering with delight. “You get it, right? You know that you’ve just set forth into the deepest reaches of darkness this world has to offer...? Are you sure you’re not gonna regret it? Are you sure you have what it takes to walk the sin-paved roads of Hell itself?”

“Bring it on,” I said. “No matter how deep the darkness you envelop the world in—no matter what extremes of chaos you lead our story into—I’ll bring it all to an end with my own fist!”

“Bwa ha ha!”

“Mwa ha ha!”

And so, we laughed. We both let out the most stupidly cool, no-holds-barred laughs we could muster. Our story had stood on the brink of eternal hiatus, but we’d pushed back its untimely cancellation. Now, the protagonist and the final boss would come together to think up its continuation as a team. Author and reader would join hands to bring our tale to a true ending. This was, undoubtedly, an unprecedented development...but surely the world had room for at least one story that played out like this?

Of course, all that said...I didn’t know who was the protagonist and who was the final boss anymore. I couldn’t say who was the author and who was the reader anymore. The one thing that I could say with certainty was that both of us, Kiryuu and I alike, had chosen to throw ourselves into our lives with wild abandon. We could only live as the characters we were now in this one, single moment, and so we’d live with everything we had. We knew that someday our quirks and idiosyncrasies would fade away, and so we chose to celebrate them to the fullest now, while we still could.

We were like shooting stars in the night sky, knowing perfectly well that we were doomed to burn ourselves out but nevertheless struggling to shine as brightly as we could until that moment arrived. We did it because we wanted someone to witness our brilliance. We wanted them to witness the characters that were us—to witness the story that was ours—that could only play out during this fleeting interval. We wanted to carve this time deeply into ourselves and into the world—to make sure that someday, when this was all just a memory for us to look back upon, we’d see ourselves going at full power.

“Huh...? O-Okay, seriously, how did we get here...?” Tomoyo muttered in fed-up bewilderment as she watched Kiryuu and me sink deeply into chuuni character. Her cold, indifferent attitude would almost make you think that she couldn’t keep up with us at all, but the look in her eyes was so obviously excited, I half expected her to scream “I want in on this!” at any moment.

Caught between common sense, curiosity, and the welling surge of chuuni potential within her, Tomoyo spent about ten seconds very thoroughly mulling the situation over. Finally, she let out a very long, very deep sigh, then cracked a slight smile as she muttered a few words.

“Go off, chuuni-boys.”

And, somehow, that felt like the most fitting possible note to wrap our story up on.