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

Epilogue

About half a year had passed since we’d fought our final battle. It was the decisive clash between me and Kiryuu—the ultimate showdown between Guiltia Sin Jurai and Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First. That battle was truly the culmination of everything that had happened in our story up to that point...and it was a climax that defied description, no matter how hard I tried.

Words could not do it justice. Prose could never depict it. It was such an outlandishly over-the-top battle that your only choice would be to describe it in a brief, vague summary form, or otherwise to cut the scene entirely and only discuss it in retrospect. It was a battle the likes of which had never been seen before and would likely never be seen again. The chances of another conflict even remotely living up to it were simply nonexistent.

Seriously, though, what a fight! Looking back now that it was all over, it almost felt like the whole thing—my battle with Kiryuu, the Spirit War’s existence on the whole, the fact that we had ever possessed absurdly potent supernatural powers, all of it—had been a dream.

Anyway, that was all over now, and another half year had come and gone. For the time being, I found myself walking home from school, side by side with Sagami. It was the last day of our third semester—in other words, the day of our school’s closing ceremony.

“Honestly, I’m impressed all over again just remembering that fight! The final battle between the literary club and Fallen Black really was a clash for the ages. Especially your last duel with Kiryuu—words can’t do its sheer emotional impact justice!”

“Heh heh heh! I mean, I can’t deny it. It was a pretty amazing fight, even by my standards!”

“I really did think your power was gonna stay worthless to the bitter end, but then right at the last second you awakened to its final form, the flame of the end: Grand Finale! And to top it off, it ended up being so ridiculously overpowered that part of me wanted to ask if you’d made it up yourself!”

“I-I mean, that was probably just it reflecting my innermost psyche, right?”

“And who could have ever predicted that you and Kiryuu had history dating all the way back to your past lives? It’s crazy to think that your fates have been intertwined since the very formation of the world! In the end, the Fifth Spirit War turned out to be such a massive-scale conflict that reality itself hung in the balance! You met each other because you were fated to meet, and you fought each other because you were fated to fight—rivals bound from lifetime to lifetime by the chains of fate itself! I gotta say, it really justified all that lead-up in the end. It felt like reading the last light novel in a ten-plus volume series and seeing it perfectly stick the landing!”

“Ha ha ha! I couldn’t have said it better myself!”

“...”

“Wh-What?”

“Oh, nothing,” Sagami said, brushing me off with a smile that told me he had more to say but wasn’t about to share it.

In the aftermath of our nighttime schoolyard meeting...Kiryuu and I had redone the Fifth Spirit War together. We’d taken a story that had stalled out, rewound it as far back as we could, and rewritten it from the ground up. We’d excitedly proposed idea after idea to each other—talking them all through in discussions and debates that grew so heated it sometimes felt like we were moments away from devolving into a full-blown fistfight—then used the Reverse Crux Errata to make them a reality.

And, in the end—with occasional help from Tomoyo—we managed to somehow bring our tale to a close. It might not have been a perfect conclusion, and it might not have wrapped up all the loose ends we’d left dangling, but it was still an ending. It was our ending, for our very own story. Only a very small number of people knew the truth. I hadn’t told Sagami...but I got the sense that he’d managed to suss out the whole thing anyway, somehow. Not that I minded or anything.

Anyway, all that aside...

“It really is over, huh, Andou?” said Sagami.

“It sure is,” I agreed.

It was over. Dark and Dark had departed from my right arm. All I had now was the gradually fading reserves of chuuni power within me.

“The confusing, cryptic mystery that was the Spirit War is over; our seemingly endless yet blink-of-an-eye-short second year in high school has passed; and once spring break’s done, we’ll be third-years,” Sagami continued.

“Yup,” I said with a nod. “Not to mention that Sayumi and Kudou graduated.”

The graduation ceremony had already come and gone. Starting this spring, Sayumi and Kudou would both be college students. From what they’d told me, both of them would be leaving their homes and hometown to live on their own.

Meanwhile, those of us who’d been in the second-year crew would be starting our final years in high school, while Chifuyu and Kuki advanced to the fifth grade. We’d all be moving on into a new era, living in new environments as new versions of ourselves. Our old selves would be left behind, morphing into nostalgic memories for us to look back upon.

“Come to think of it, what’s going on with Kiryuu these days, Sagami?” I asked.

“Hmm? You haven’t been in touch with him?”

“Nah... I haven’t seen him at all. Kinda hard to, after our final battle. It’s just awkward, y’know?”

The battle had been just that over-the-top, after all. We’d clashed, power versus power, in an exchange so heated you’d think we were willing to burn out our very lives to take each other down. In the end, we’d been reduced to tearful, tattered wrecks as we’d resolved our differences through the one means of conversation left to us: our fists. Point is, I was hoping to not have to see him again for about another half decade or so.

“From what I hear, he just went back to college,” Sagami explained. “The same college that Takanashi’s going to, if I recall correctly.”

“Seriously?” I said, gaping at Sagami. “Oh, right—I’d actually sorta forgotten that Kiryuu was supposed to be really smart.”

“Yup, yup. He’s been sharp as a tack for ages. That’s part of why he’s so hard to deal with, in all sorts of ways.”

“Those two going to the same college, huh...? That sure is weird to think about.”

“He and Saitou have started dating as well.”

“Huuuh.”

He went back to college and got a girlfriend straightaway? It sounded so...normal, I guess. On the other hand, that was probably for the best. Neither he nor I could keep up our chuuni ways forever, after all.

“Speaking of dating,” Sagami said as he gave me a long, appraising glance, “Andou...have you taken an interest in someone?”

“Bwuh?!” I gasped. More of a full-blown spit take, really. I was not making it hard to tell that he’d taken me by surprise. “Wh-Where’s this coming from?!”

“Oh, come now! Surely you must realize how easy to read you’ve been lately? You’ve been very conspicuously focused on a certain girl in particular. The way you talk when you’re with her is just so clearly different.”

I had no clue what to say, so I just broke eye contact. Sagami let out an exasperated chuckle in response.

“So even Andou ‘Dense as a Rock’ Jurai’s finally fallen in love! Ahh, man, now I’m actually feeling a little jealous of you! If only I could fall in love too! Maybe I should just go ahead and get back together with Tamaki!”

“Dude.”

“Ha ha ha! Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Not funny, I know,” Sagami said with his usual flippant smile. All I could do was sigh.

We walked on for a while longer until we passed by a bus stop, where Sagami came to a halt.

“All right—I’ll be heading to the hospital, so see you later, Andou,” he said.

“Got it,” I replied. “Say hi to your mom for me.”

“Will do. You should come visit again sometime. She’s been saying she’d like to see you.”

“Sure,” I said with a nod.

Right around the time the Fifth Spirit War ended, Sagami’s mother—who’d been in a coma for years—woke up again. She was still hospitalized for the time being, but from what I’d heard, she was due to be discharged in about a month. The spirits hadn’t intervened on her behalf, to be clear—she’d just simply, naturally woken up on her own. Whether that was a convenient plot twist right out of a storybook or just one of the many extraordinary coincidences that happened around the world every single day was all a matter of perspective, I guess.

The Barnum Effect. The Simulation Hypothesis. Schrödinger’s Cat. They were all just a matter of perspective, in the end. It all just came down to how we saw the world around us.

“All right,” I said to myself after saying my goodbyes to Sagami. I set off once more, strolling along the well-worn road that I took to and from school.

“Have I ‘taken an interest in someone,’ he asks...? That guy really is too perceptive for his own good,” I muttered with a slightly strained smile. “Though, then again...I wonder what he’d say if I told him we were actually going out already?”

I guess not even Sagami can see through me quite that deeply.

Slowly but surely, my casual stroll intensified. Before I knew it, I was practically running through the streets—and when I arrived at the park where we’d agreed to meet up, she was already there waiting for me.

“Ah... Well, uhh,” I mumbled. I couldn’t seem to find the right words.

I was trying my hardest to act natural and talk like I always did, but of course, the more I focused on acting natural, the less naturally I actually acted. She was in the same boat, and both of us ended up descending into awkward incoherence. We’d pretty much been like this nonstop since we’d started going out.

“So, umm... Ready?” I finally asked.

My attitude wasn’t showing any sign of improvement, but I at least managed to suppress my embarrassment enough to hold out a hand, which she took with a bashful, red-faced nod. She squeezed my hand tightly, the heat of her palm striking me as far hotter than Dark and Dark had ever been.

Our whole story had been a ridiculous, absurd, over-the-top joke of a fairy tale. It was easy to think that it had all been made up now that it was all over...but even if it had been fiction, it’d still happened. It was a true work of fiction that had led us to our futures.

We couldn’t tell in what precise ways our lives had changed, but the fact that they had changed was something we could be certain of, and that was what allowed us to move forward. We’d put our story firmly to rest, which meant that now we could move on to the next one.

The end of the beginning...was over. It was over, yes—but that’s exactly why we could now begin again. The end of the beginning takes a split second, but it lasts a lifetime.

And so, to let our pasts be the past—to let our futures be the future—we stepped forward side by side, savoring every moment of a present that would never come again.