Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 2 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Time——Sin

When we were in middle school, Juu lent me a book from a particular...genre, I guess? Books like it are called ‘light novels,’ anyway.

He’d been lending me manga and magazines for quite a while before that point. Juu had always loved explaining the things he was interested in to me, and he tried as hard as he possibly could to get me to understand them. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t really get it a lot of the time. Most of the time. Pretty much all of the time, actually.

I know this might sound self-deprecating, but I’m not the sort of person who likes thinking super deeply about stuff like that. When I read manga, I tend to just breeze through it. After I finish, I usually think “oh, that was good” and then forget what the story was even about before long.

Doing that with a manga Juu lent me meant trouble, though. He’d always ask me why I thought it was good, and I never had an answer because the story had gone in one ear and out the other. And I don’t see a problem with that, personally! For me, those stories are just a way to kill time. He got super upset when I tried to explain that to him, though.

We’ve always had totally different tastes in manga, really. I liked reading girly, bittersweet romances, and Juu loved battle manga above all else. It was no surprise that the light novel he more or less forced on me wasn’t to my taste either.

It was full of made-up technical terms, its plot was convoluted, and forcing myself to work through it was a chore. I’d read pages on end before realizing that I hadn’t actually absorbed any of the stuff I’d been reading. My eyes were just gliding over the words, and none of them had actually registered. He lent it to me near the beginning of spring break, and I still hadn’t managed to bring myself to finish it by the end. It would be the first time I’d ever returned a book to him without reading the whole thing first.

I gave it back to him on the first morning of our second year of middle school, while we were walking to school together. I was so nervous. I thought he might get mad at me again, but that time, I was prepared to talk back. I was all set to tell him that some people just like different things! Not everyone values the same stuff that he does, for crying out loud!

In the end, though, all the arguments I’d prepared went unsaid. The way he smiled at me when I gave him the book back blew them all right out of my mind.

“Oh. Gotcha...” he said. There was something almost tragic to his expression, and at the same time, it felt like he was giving up on something, or like he was accepting something. It was a smile of resignation. He didn’t blame me or try to make me understand what made him like the book so much. He just quietly let it go.

“I sorta figured you wouldn’t understand... Meh, that’s just how it goes.” A moment later, his smile was as cheerful as ever, and he’d moved on to the next topic.

The matter was closed in his mind, but I was still preoccupied. He “sorta figured” I wouldn’t get it? “That’s just how it goes?” What did that mean?

It didn’t take me long to figure it out: Juu had given up on me ever understanding him. He’d resigned himself to that idea, abandoned hope, and accepted things as they were. He’d determined that I would never understand him, and he decided to abandon me—though, of course, that’s a pretty nasty way of putting it on my part.

Honestly, it was probably a sign that he’d managed to grow up a little. He’d realized that his preferences weren’t everything, and that some people wouldn’t enjoy the things he loved. It’s common sense, sure, but it takes some people longer than others to get to that point, and him reaching it was probably a good thing.

But that didn’t change the fact that I felt abandoned. I couldn’t help but feel that way.

We had that conversation on the first day of our second year in middle school, and ever since then, he hasn’t loaned me a single book. I wasn’t about to offer him any of mine, of course, so our little book exchange came to an informal but permanent end.

Our friendship didn’t end up fading away along with it, but from that day onward, Juu stopped trying to force me into trying things like he’d done with that novel. You’d think that would be a welcome change, but for some reason, I’ve never been even the slightest bit happy about it.

☆

“A foolish vagrant on an endless journey, footfalls resounding unto eternity!”

“A miserable criminal, burning all to ash with the fearsome flames of madness!”

Two souls, man and woman, stood side by side, their voices entwining, resonating, and resounding in tone and meaning alike.

“Garb stained scarlet by open wounds innumerable!”

“Bound by a web of chains; shackled by sin!”

The chosen ones of time and flame wagered their very existences upon a singular prayer: a fervent wish to meld two shapeless, formless powers...into one!

“With each passing second...”

“...a new transgression!”

“Closed Clock x Dark and Dark: Time is Sin!”

“Why the hell am I playing along with this crap?!”

One minute, I was standing back to back with Tomoyo, our hands entwined and thrust out before us, intoxicated with the sheer, unmitigated awesomeness of our combined powers, and the next, I was caught off guard by her high-pitched shout.

Our hands, incidentally, would’ve been pointed towards our sworn enemy...if we’d actually had one of those, which we didn’t, so instead, we’d gone with the big mirror that we kept off to the side of our club room. Thanks to that excellent decision, we got to witness every moment of our combo move, and for the record, we’d absolutely killed it. Combo moves: hella cool.

“What sort of pathetic turn has my life taken to force me to stay after school and play make-believe with you, of all people?! And what the hell is ‘Time is Sin’ supposed to mean, anyway?!” Tomoyo yelled indignantly.

“It’s the name of our Unison Skill!” I explained. “When two individuals with profound faith in each other’s abilities work together in perfect synchrony, they can combine the traits of their supernatural powers and give birth to a new, unified ability! The most important part’s recognizing your partner’s potential—the rest comes naturally.”

“Feels like you pulled that straight out of a manga, and one aimed at little kids, to top it off... And besides, what would our powers even do together? I can’t picture it at all.”

I know, right? Hatoko and Chifuyu’s combined powersets were as straightforward as could be, but the rest of our powers were esoteric enough that they really didn’t lend themselves to Unison Skills easily. I’d come up with plenty of names, at least, so that was something.

“Time is Sin—a mysterious power indeed. And if you want to know how it works...you’ll have to watch the spin-off film, coming soon to theaters near you!”

“Way to put profits above narrative!” jabbed Tomoyo. We’d sort of missed the natural opportunity to let go of each other’s hands, but she finally released me at that point. “And anyway, my hand...” she muttered.

“Huh? What about your hand? Oh, was mine sweaty? Man, don’t just tell people that sorta thing straight up! You could be a little more casual about it, at least.”

“No, never mind! It’s nothing. Stupid chuuni loser!” She scowled and shook her head with the sort of exasperation that shows that you’re really done with someone’s crap.

“Hey, who’re you calling a chuuni loser?! You weren’t exactly complaining about it when we were actually doing the pose!”

Tomoyo jumped with shock. She’d waited until after we’d totally finished our little performance to give me crap about the whole Unison Skill thing. You could claim that she was just playing along to make her inevitable retort land harder, but I had a more compelling theory.

“Tell the truth. You wanted to give it a try, didn’t you?”

“Wha... N-No, I...”

“You recited the lines I gave you word for word, you nailed the pose without a hitch, and splitting the last line between the two of us was your idea!”

“Ugggh...”

“This’ll be a lot easier on you if you just fess up, you know?” I said, lowering my tone of voice and speaking in as calm and gentle a manner as I could manage. I was in the mood to play the villain and try out a deceptive smooth-talking routine.

Tomoyo glanced nervously down at the floor, then slowly began to speak. “Well...I might’ve sorta, just a little—and I mean just a little—wanted to try it out... I mean, like, fusion skills and ability combos are just so exciting, somehow...”

“I know, right! I had faith, Tomoyo! I just knew you’d understand!”

“B-But, that doesn’t mean I wanted to do it that badly! You were just acting so obsessed, and I didn’t want to let you down, so I played along, that’s all!” she screamed, blushing vividly. “D-Don’t get the wrong idea, here! This was all for you, got it?!”

Wait, was that a tsundere line or not? Feels like it fell into a weird middle-ground.

“Gaaah, screw this! I’m going home!”

“Your planet needs you?”

“I’m going home, to my house, like a normal person!” Tomoyo snatched her bag off the table and stormed off toward the door.

“Hey, wait! I still have something to talk about!”

“Oh, for the... What, another Unison Skill?”

“Nah, that was just an impulse. That’s not what I asked you to stay for at all, actually.” I shrugged. Probably should’ve started with the important part. “Do I really seem like the sort of jerk who’d keep you behind after club for something like that?”

Tomoyo paused to think for a moment. “Sorry. You totally do.”

Yeah, okay, I guess that would be totally in character for me. Fair point. “Nah, the actual reason I asked you to stay has to do with the activity we did today.”

Tomoyo’s expression very obviously stiffened up. “Wh-What about it...? Yeah, I know, being the only one in the group to not write anything was kinda crappy, but you definitely don’t have the right to criticize me.”

“I wasn’t gonna criticize you, okay? I just wanted to know why.”

“Why...? I already told you. I couldn’t come up with—”

“I mean, I think I can guess most of it. Sayumi went and picked light novels as the theme, and you’re trying to be a light novelist—in theory, anyway—so you were probably thinking that you had to come up with something better than the rest of us and wow the whole club. Then that put a ton of pressure on you, and thanks to that, you ended up not being able to write as well as you wanted to. Or, y’know, something along those lines. Right?”

“Ugh!” Tomoyo’s eyes widened for a moment before she clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. It wasn’t very hard to guess what she was thinking.

In short, the reason why she hadn’t managed to write anything was her own sense of obstinate pride. It’s the same sort of state of mind that a not particularly passionate member of the soccer club would get into after their gym teacher called them out to show off some dribbling tricks to the class...I assume. You’d have to nail it and show off to everyone, and you couldn’t make a fool of yourself, no matter what. That sort of mindset can really mess with you, psychologically speaking, and in Tomoyo’s case, it definitely held her back.

“H-How’d you know...?” she timidly asked.

“It’s obvious. I mean, in a manner of speaking, it’s my fault to begin with.”

There was, after all, one major difference between our hypothetical soccer player and Tomoyo’s circumstances: everyone in the soccer player’s class would know that they were in the soccer club. Not so for Tomoyo, though. She hadn’t told any of her clubmates about her ambitions so far. Only one of us—me—had caught a glimpse of them.

“Sheesh,” I sighed. “You’re such a show-off, you know that? Or what, did you think I’d be all ‘Ooh, the wannabe novelist is writing a light novel for us? She’d better come up with somethin’ real good, then, gweh heh heh’?”

“I didn’t think you’d be that much of a dick about it... But, well, when I thought about how you’d be reading whatever I wrote, I just couldn’t bring myself to get anything down,” Tomoyo admitted, glancing away awkwardly.

She’d effectively set up a series of tall hurdles for herself, then charged right into them without even trying to jump. Even more so, since—and I know this might sound bad—I hadn’t actually had any real expectations for her work to begin with. Hell, considering the time limit was only an hour long, I don’t think any author could’ve churned out a masterpiece under the same conditions.

“Plus, my writing just hasn’t been going well lately,” Tomoyo continued. “It’s like I’ve hit a wall with the story I’ve been working on...”

“Huh. So you’re in a slump?”

“No. It’s not a slump. I’m just not a good enough writer yet,” she asserted. I could tell she wasn’t going to budge on that particular point. “I really hate the idea of deciding that I’m in a slump. It feels like that’d be putting my own lack of ability up on a pedestal, and I don’t wanna use that sort of thing as an excuse. If other people say it about me, then whatever, I guess, but I won’t do it for myself.”

“Hmm? But aren’t there plenty of people who really do get into slumps for all sorts of things? Nobody can be totally on point all the time.”

“I still think it’s different when you say it about yourself. Being in a slump isn’t something you can just brush off as being a given. It’s humiliating.”

Hmmm. I couldn’t quite disagree. I’d seen people use “being in a slump” as a transparently obvious excuse plenty of times, and it was always sorta obnoxious to watch. It makes you want to ask if they really think they’re good enough at whatever they’re doing to call it a slump. If you can talk about it that lightly, then in the end, it’s probably not a real slump at all.

All that said, though, I couldn’t help but think that she was going way too far out of her way to get in the pro mindset. Even ignoring the part where she was too self-conscious to write anything that I might read, she was taking her responsibilities as an aspiring author way too seriously. She wasn’t even a pro yet, so wasn’t forcing herself into the pro mentality like that majorly jumping the gun? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think she was being sort of ridiculous, but on the other hand, and to a much greater extent, I found myself thinking that it was really cool of her.

“This might just be the first time I’ve ever felt genuine respect for another person,” I declared with an intrepid grin. Talk about an awesome line, right? That’s the sort of statement you’d expect from the captain of the prefectural champions’ team in a sports manga! Tomoyo rolled her eyes and made a “here we go again” face, but I decided to ignore that.

“So, then—want some advice on how to get out of your slump?” I asked. Tomoyo’s eyes widened with surprise again, and my grin followed suit. “It’s not a problem if you’re not the one saying it, right? And anyway, I’m just curious about what you’re writing at this point. What’s it about? Where are you stuck?”

I wasn’t just being nice. I was asking out of genuine curiosity. If Tomoyo was working that hard on her story, I wanted to know what it was like. She hesitated for a moment longer, then finally reached into her bag.

It turned out that the source of Tomoyo’s writer’s block was her inability to decide on names for her main characters.

Yeah. The characters’ names. Seriously. From an author’s perspective, that’s the sort of detail it’s really easy to get hung up on, but from the reader’s perspective, it’s honestly pretty whatever. Or maybe that’s just me?

On the other hand, there were authors out there who’d made their uniquely eccentric methods of naming their characters into an actual selling point for their works, so maybe fussing over those details wasn’t such a bad idea after all. It just felt like she was putting the cart before the horse, I guess.

“I’m writing, like, a high school drama sorta deal right now, but I just can’t find something to name the protagonist that feels quite right, somehow... I’ve got a bunch of ideas, though.”

Tomoyo somewhat reluctantly showed me a list of character profiles. They were really rough—just names for the two main characters and a couple lines of description for each of them.

“W-Well, what do you think?” she asked, her voice laden with nervous tension. I, on the other hand, was breaking out in a cold sweat. I could feel the color drain from my face as I read.

-Amaterasu Yamato

The protagonist. Male. A second-year high schooler, and a perfectly ordinary student in every possible way.

Sort of a fancy name for a perfectly ordinary high schooler, don’t you think?! That’s how many mythological allusions, exactly?! That name is way too much for the main character of a youth drama! Hell, it might even be too much for a supernatural battle story! I can cope with some pretty over-the-top names, don’t get me wrong, but this is a step too far even by my standards!

“W-Well? Don’t just stand there, say something,” said Tomoyo. She had the most painfully earnest look on her face, and I had no clue what to do.

Oh, jeez, she’s serious, isn’t she? This isn’t a bit—she actually wants my opinion on that nightmare of a name! “I-I mean, let’s not be hasty here! Give me a sec to check out the heroine’s name.”

I looked down below our hero Amaterasu Yamato’s block, where the next main character’s profile was written.

-Tsukuyomi Ayami

The main heroine. Female. A second-year high schooler, and a mysterious beauty who transfers into the protagonist’s class out of nowhere.

Oof, now this one’s conflicting. Her name sounds pretty cool, sure, but is Tomoyo really planning on naming the main heroine of a high school drama Tsukuyomi, of all things? If I saw that on the back cover of a book, I wouldn’t exactly be rushing to the cash registers with it. And wait a second—the protagonist’s Amaterasu and the heroine’s Tsukuyomi?

“Hey, Tomoyo, are you planning on introducing a character named Susanoo at some point? Probably an old man, or something?”

“H-How’d you know?!”

Oh, I know. Do I ever know. I mean, this is me we’re talking about! How could I not be aware that Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susanoo are the three supremes upon which Japanese mythology is founded? (That’s how you count supreme deities, incidentally—one supreme, two supremes, etc.) How could I not understand that their cool-factor is very literally godly?

Those three names together were enough to spark awe in any reader, no matter how jaded. Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susanoo: hella cool. Hella cool indeed...but even the most masterfully crafted of blades is nothing more than a blunt instrument if its wielder isn’t up to snuff, if you take my meaning.

“H-Hey, Tomoyo? These two aren’t, like, related or anything, right? They’re total strangers, not from different branch families of a secretive clan that controls the nation from behind the scenes? So, isn’t it sort of weird for their surnames to all be part of the same overarching theme?” I asked, doing my utmost to present my criticism in as gentle and roundabout a method as possible.

“Huh? But theme names like that show up all the time in fiction, don’t they? It’s just a writing convenience, it’s totally normal,” fired back Tomoyo, calm and rational to a fault. “The bit that I’m not sure about’s whether to call him ‘Amaterasu Yamato’ or ‘Yamato Amaterasu.’”

She’s been stressing about that, of all things?!

“Like, Yamato just feels like such a surname, right? But having Amaterasu as his given name just feels, I dunno, a little much?”

You’re on totally the wrong track, Tomoyo! The problem is much, much more fundamental than you’re giving it credit for! Look at this name from a more macro perspective, please! Your protagonist’s name is like the current state of the Japanese political system: it needs wide, sweeping, and drastic reform if there’s to be any hope of the situation improving!

I wanted to point all of that stuff out so badly, but one look at Tomoyo’s face was enough to shut me up. It was an expression of single-mindedness, embarrassment, anxiety, and the desperate desire to be praised, all rolled up into one big bundle of elevated expectations.

“Hey, Andou? Which do you think would be better?”

“G-Good question... Personally, I’d say Yamato Amaterasu’s the way to go.” It struck me as the ever so slightly less terrible option, anyway. Better to break that theme up, if at all possible.

“You think...? Ah, but doesn’t Yamato just feel more, I dunno, interesting as a given name? Like, more original, I guess? Plus...”

She just kept talking. Oh, god, I see what’s going on here. This is one of those situations where she secretly already has her answer in mind, and was only asking me for the sake of validation. In other words, the single most obnoxious sort of question to answer!

What should I do?! Tomoyo’s never been this much of a pain in the rear to deal with before! She’s supposed to be the one who actually has common sense, and picks all of our stupidity apart!

I paused to take a few deep breaths, working up the resolve to do what had to be done. “Tomoyo,” I began, repeating an internal mantra of I mustn’t run away, I mustn’t run away, I mustn’t run away! “I hate to say it...but this name’s just way too chuuni.”

Tomoyo let out a strangled gasp and recoiled in shock. She staggered backwards, tottered on her feet like she was about to swoon, then actually did crumple to the ground in a heap.

“Y-You okay?” I nervously asked.

“This must be what it feels like to have a literal pile of human waste tell you that you stink...”

And just what exactly is that supposed to mean?

“I can’t believe that you, you, of all people, actually told me that I was being ‘too chuuni’...”

“Believe me, I didn’t see this coming either.” My comment had been a double-edged sword. I’d damaged myself just as much as I had Tomoyo.

I finally understood how she’d felt whenever I went overboard in her presence. As a former chuuni, she could understand my motives perfectly, and that probably just made it all the more unpleasant to watch me do my thing. Man, humans really do have a way of getting set on how amazing their own perspective is and never considering other people’s viewpoints, don’t they?

“So, y’know... I get that I’m in no position to say this, but you really haven’t gotten over your chuuni phase after all, have you?” I asked.

“Y-Yes, I have! I’m totally over it! Made a complete recovery! Don’t lump me in with you!” shouted Tomoyo. She was not in a joking mood. “Unlike you, I’m through with that crap! It doesn’t feel excruciating to have people look at me when I’m out in public at all anymore! It’s just that, writing’s sort of its own special thing...and, like, in the end, I really do like that sorta chuuni aesthetic...”

“Huh. You couldn’t stand having people look at you when you were in middle school?”

“St-Stop nitpicking!” Tomoyo glared at me, tears of frustration pooling in the corners of her eyes. “And anyway, like you can talk! I bet people cringed you half to death when you were a middle schooler!”

She was probably just bluffing, and her theory was a shot in the dark, but I still found myself at a loss for words.

“When I was in middle school, I... I’d rather not talk about it,” I finally muttered. More specifically, I didn’t want to talk about my experience in the eighth grade. That was a story that didn’t bear telling. “I guess you could call that a low point in my life. I don’t even wanna think about it.”

“It was bad enough to make you look back on it and cringe? Just what the hell happened?” For a moment, Tomoyo looked horrified, her face pale and her voice trembling. A second later, though, she furrowed her brow. “Huh? Wait a second... When you were in middle school, didn’t you...?”

“Hmm? What? Didn’t I what?”

“Ah... Umm, n-never mind, it’s nothing.” Tomoyo broke eye contact and dodged the question.

Huh. That was weird. Tomoyo went to a totally different middle school than I did, so by all rights, she shouldn’t have known anything at all about my middle school era. In any case, things had gotten way too awkward on the whole for us to keep the conversation going any further, so we reached a silent but mutual understanding that our respective middle school experiences were off the table from that point on. It was time to move things back to the topic at hand: her writing.

“Okay, Tomoyo, I get the picture. You have a thing for going to excessively fancy extremes, and that means I have the perfect advice for you.”

I got up on the highest horse I could imagine and prepared to dispense my wisdom to a former chuuni who desperately needed it.

“Sometimes leaving things deliberately dull is the best way to sharpen them!”

I delivered it with as much dramatic emphasis as I could manage, making it sound like some real words of wisdom. Now that was sure to get through to her! As to what precisely I meant by “dull” and “sharp”...meh, interpret that as you will. I’m sure you get the picture.

“Huh...? What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Tomoyo.

“It means that if you go too overboard fretting over the little details, your work will suffer on the whole as a result. It’s sorta like how fashion works! Think about it—a person who wears nothing but brand-name clothes looks way less fashionable than someone who has just one brand-name item that’s super on point, right? Well, names and backstories are the same way.”

Tomoy was just silently listening at that point, so I kept going. “Chuuni stuff too. If you go out of your way to hold back just a little, that can make the chuuni appeal of the final product stand out way more than it would’ve if you’d gone all out!”

She was...well, not exactly moved by my theory, that’s for sure. She was definitely taking it into serious consideration, though, so that was something. It wasn’t long before the thoughtful look on her face melted away into something a lot closer to a sulk, though. Guess I’m not someone she wanted to get this sort of lecture from.

“Hmph,” Tomoyo snorted. “And where do you get off talking down to me like that? As if you haven’t been on a nonstop chuuni rampage ever since we first met.”

Yup, very true! Dreaming all that stuff up is just so much fun, I can’t help myself from running wild. That said, Tomoyo’s and my cases were different on a very important level: I only thought up ridiculous names and backstories for fun. They were for my personal enjoyment, and nothing more. Tomoyo, on the other hand, was aiming way higher than I ever had. If she wanted to venture into the world of professional storytelling, she couldn’t write for her own self-satisfaction alone.

“Hey, Tomoyo, don’t you think this would all be easier if you just told everyone, already?” I suggested.

I’d gone on that whole super cool ramble a while back about how anybody can cheer their friends on, but after seeing just how serious she was about her ambitions, I couldn’t help but want to cheer her on anyway. That meant that at the very least, I had to take my role as her cheerleader seriously. I couldn’t just tell her to go for it and call it a day—I had to try and help.

“Getting other people’s perspectives on your work is super useful, don’t you think? And the more people’s opinions you have, the better.”

“I...know, yeah,” she agreed. “But going out of my way to make a whole thing out of telling them’s sort of a different can of worms, right? Imagine if I gathered everyone up just to say, ‘Listen up, everybody! I’m trying to be a light novel author!’ I’d look like a total moron.”

“I guess.”

When she put it that way, it was a surprisingly tough topic to broach. Declaring that you’re trying to become an author puts you one false move away from looking like one of those “Oh, yeah, I’m totally writing a novel, and that makes me awesome” people, or at least an “I can’t handle working at a real company” person.

“I’ll tell them when I get the chance. Though, really, I think the coolest way to do it would be to wait until after I’ve produced some real results,” said Tomoyo with an ever so slightly self-deprecating chuckle.

By the time I’d finished trying to convince Tomoyo that no, Amaterasu Yamato probably wasn’t the way to go after all, it was fairly late in the afternoon. I ended up heading home a lot later than I’d planned on. When I finally arrived, I found Hatoko’s shoes waiting for me in the entryway.

“I’m home!” I called out.

“Oh, Juu! Welcome back!” Hatoko’s voice rang out from the kitchen. I headed in that direction and found her dressed in an apron and cooking up a storm. I recognized the apron—it was her favorite one, which meant that she’d made a stop at her house before coming over to mine.

“You sure were out late, huh?” said Hatoko.

“Yeah, we ended up talking about a bunch of stuff in the end.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Y’know. A bunch.”

“A bunch, huh? Hmm.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“In her room! She said she’s super busy with a report that’s due tomorrow and that I should call for her when dinner’s ready.”

Oh, that jerkwad! Can’t believe she’s working Hatoko like this. It’s like she thinks Hatoko’s actually her little sister or something!

“Anything I can help with?” I offered.

“Hmm... No, I’m okay! It’s almost ready, so you can just take it easy.”

I couldn’t really argue with that, so I wandered into the living room to lounge around on our couch until she was done. I knew I’d just get in the way if I insisted on helping, so it was better to just sit tight for the moment.

While I waited, I watched Hatoko work her magic in our kitchen. She was humming a happy little cooking song, and she seemed to be really enjoying herself. It was sorta calming to watch.

It’s not like she’d been over to cook at my house all that often—I could probably count the number of times it had happened on my fingers—but somehow, in spite of that, something about the scene felt perfectly natural. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she came over to cook for us on a daily basis. I think part of it might’ve been that to me, Hatoko herself was a constant presence in my daily life.

As I watched my childhood friend cook, I found my mind wandering back to Tomoyo—or, more accurately, to Amaterasu Yamato. No matter how I looked at it, there was just no way an actual person would ever have a name like that...though really, “Yamato” itself was perfectly inoffensive in isolation. It was only when paired with the absurdly extravagant “Amaterasu” that all of the historical and mythological connotations for the name were called to mind, and I had to give her credit for that synergy.

It might be too much for a person’s name, but maybe it would work pretty nicely as a power name? Like, Yamato Amaterasu and Yamato Nadeshiko could be a paired power set? Maybe it’d work for the male and female leads of a story? Hmm... Or maybe not, I dunno. It sorta feels like it’d work, but it also feels sorta lacking. Might as well jot it down, though. I pulled my Bloody Bible out from my bag and began inscribing a new passage into its blasphemous annals.

“Hmm? Hey, Juu, whatcha doing with your Vivre over there?” called Hatoko from the kitchen.

“It’s not a Vivre, it’s the Bloody Bible!” I snapped back. The fact that she abbreviated the name on top of getting it wrong made it so much worse.

“Did you come up with a new idea?”

“Mwa ha ha! You might say that. Really, now, my powers of imagination are fearsome indeed!”

“Oooh? That’s great! What sorta idea was it this time?” Hatoko casually asked. She hadn’t stopped cooking, even as she carried on this little conversation with me.

I, however, wasn’t multitasking nearly as well, and I had already distracted myself by thinking up other power names that would slot nicely into the Yamato series. “Mmh, y’know, buncha stuff,” I replied offhandedly.

Normally, that’s where the conversation would’ve ended. Since Hatoko couldn’t understand my superlative sense of aesthetics, she didn’t tend to dig that deeply when I was in that sort of mood.

That day, however, was different.

“Oh, c’mooon! What’s the harm? Just tell me!” Hatoko obstinately insisted. Okay, maybe calling it obstinate was going a bit far, but at the very least, she was being a lot more persistent than usual. And of all the reactions I could’ve possibly gone with, I just had to get irritated with her.

“No way,” I retorted. “There’s no point telling you about it.”

And then I said it. The worst thing I possibly could have. The most awful, despicable thing imaginable. A line that I would come to regret for the rest of my life.

“You wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

I heard a dull thud from the kitchen. It sounded like something had fallen, and I stopped scribbling in my notebook for long enough to glance over. Hatoko’s ladle was rolling across the floor—she must’ve dropped it.

“Whoa, what’re you doing? You okay in there?” I asked, but she didn’t turn to look at me. She didn’t bend over to pick up the ladle, either. Really, she didn’t react at all. She just stood there stock still, except for an ever so slight tremble, like her soul had departed from her body.

“Hey...Hatoko...?”

“I don’t...”

“Huh?”

“I don’t understand!”

Then Hatoko snapped.