Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 3 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Super-Tennis Is Super Fun, Right?

I twisted my upper body, pulling my racket back into a ready position, then uncurled, using the rotation of my hips to swing it with all my might. The ball impacted right in the middle of the racket’s strings, streaking away in a drive shot. I felt a faint tingle in my hand—the characteristic sensation you got when you hit the ball right in the racket’s sweet spot. Needless to say, I didn’t skimp on the shot’s follow-through either.

The ball’s trajectory was sharp, and it was heading straight for the corner of my foe’s court. I pumped an internal fist. My shot had been perfect! So perfect, it was almost too good to be true! Absolutely no points deducted in terms of its speed or its course! And to top it all off, my opponent was currently off-balance on the exact opposite side of the court. No human being could possibly make it to the ball from her position in time, no matter how talented a sprinter they were. I’d won!

“Think again!”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, directly in the path of my unbeatable shot, stood the same girl who’d been across the court an infinitesimal fraction of a second earlier, smirking provocatively at me. She’d caught up to the ball that could not be caught—no, it was something even more astonishing than that! It was like she’d been standing there from the very beginning, racket calmly raised into a ready position! Whatever move she’d just pulled, it had been all results, no action!

Curses! How could I forget? I’m not facing just any opponent—I’m up against the sovereign ruler of time herself, Kanzaki Tomoyo! With Closed Clock, the power to stop time, on her side, there’s no such thing as an uncatchable ball! In other words, the entire court is her absolute dominion!

“But...but then, how...how the hell am I supposed to put up a decent fight?!” I wailed with rage and horror.

“Too bad for you, Andou! It’s over!”

I was facing the sort of despair you’d only feel after encountering an enemy with the power to steal your Bankai, but Tomoyo was grinning triumphantly as she brought her racket to bear! She slammed the ball right back into my court...or so I thought. Instead, the ball slammed right into the net with a pathetic little pft, then dropped to the ground. Point: me.

We stared at the ball. The silence was unbearable.

“Tomoyo. Please. You just...you just don’t hit the net in that sort of moment! What’s the point of stopping time to catch the ball if you’re just gonna whiff the shot?!” Think about all the effort I just wasted on that despairing reaction! Also, don’t try to pull off a cool finishing line if you’re about to make the most basic error in the rule book!

“G-Get off my back, okay?! Tennis is a lot harder than it looks!” shouted Tomoyo, who was blushing fiercely.

“And ‘it’s over’? Really...?”

“Ugggh! Wh-Whatever, who cares?! It was just an impulse! Lay off!”

“You could’ve tried harder than that! It’s so unoriginal!”

“That’s the part that bothers you?! Not the fact that I tried to pull off a finishing line?!”

“You gotta put your own spin on it, y’know? Like, say...‘Game, set, and you’re finished!’ or something.”

“Nobody cares about your taste when it comes to these things!” jabbed Tomoyo, ever fast on the callouts.

Anyway, you’ve probably already put this together, but we of the literary club had decided to play tennis on that particular day. We weren’t going through some summertime training arc, and we weren’t preparing for our school’s sports day or anything like that. We just sorta felt like playing tennis and ended up using our club time to do so, because why not?

A normal club would’ve had to go out into town, find a court to borrow, and rent a set of gear, but happily enough, we had a member with the ultimate power of Genesis on our side! World Create could make us rackets and balls aplenty, of course, but Chifuyu had gone above and beyond and even manifested uniforms and an entire pocket-dimension tennis court for us to play in.

Gotta say, it’s really nice having somebody with a power like that in the group! It’s like she’s walking around with a whole ROUND1 in her back pocket. That settles it—I’m adding “Boxed Elysium: The Pocket-Sized ROUND1” to Chifuyu’s list of titles!

“I gotta admit, though,” I sighed, looking down at my racket, “tennis really is pretty tough.”

Sayumi was familiar with the game and had given us a rundown of its rules and fundamentals, but for every one of those fundamentals we’d figured out, there was a mountain of them that weren’t working out at all. Neither of us were capable of hitting an overhand serve in-bounds, for one thing, and when we tried to hit a heavy return in a rally, it inevitably turned into a home run instead. It took us almost an hour just to get our rallies even remotely consistent.

“We might’ve jumped into a real match too early,” admitted Tomoyo. “Neither of us are good enough at this yet. We sure as hell don’t measure up to that, anyway,” she said, glancing over at the neighboring court where Sayumi and Hatoko were engaged in a seemingly never-ending rally. The ball sailed back and forth, bouncing off their rackets with a light pinging noise.

Dang, those two are good! They’ve got a proper rally going and everything!

“I’m not surprised about Sayumi,” Tomoyo added, “but I wasn’t expecting Hatoko to be that good at this game.”

“Oh, yeah, she was on the soft tennis club back in middle school,” I explained. Hatoko had always been astonishingly athletic. You’d think she’d be as clumsy as could be, but no, she had great reflexes and was way more coordinated than she looked. Normal tennis and soft tennis have plenty of differences, of course, but it looked like the skills she’d picked up playing one still applied pretty well to the other.

As for why Sayumi was so good at tennis...honestly, I didn’t even think to question it. I would’ve been significantly more surprised to find out that she was bad at it, really.

Eventually, the ball got caught on the net, ending the rally. Sayumi pulled out a new ball from the pocket of her skort and hit a serve.

Yes, you read that right: her skort. We were all dressed to the nines in proper tennis fashion, and that meant polo shirts and skorts for the girls. Sayumi was even wearing a visor, which made the whole ensemble look incredibly authentic. We had Chifuyu to thank for our choice of clothing, of course. The sheer number of applications for her power was seriously out of this world.

Though, all that said...I do have to wonder why people wear skorts when they play tennis. They get all, y’know, fluttery and stuff when you move, and, like...how to put it? Honestly, seeing that doesn’t excite me or turn me on or anything so much as it makes me feel uneasy. It’s like, I can’t tell if it’s all right for me to look or not!

“And just what’re you looking at?” said Tomoyo, giving me a death glare. She must’ve noticed where my eyes were glued. “Lecher.”

“Wha—why, you—n-no, I wasn’t looking! And I definitely wasn’t thinking about how great it is that they totally cover you up but make it seem like you just might be able to catch a glimpse of something!”

Then she jabbed me with her racket. Ouch. A moment later, Tomoyo seemed to realize something and grabbed the hem of her skort, glaring at me with an even sharper intensity than before and blushing all over again.

Suddenly, I felt the need to defend myself. “C-Come on, isn’t the whole point of a skort that it covers your undies even if it gets flipped?! It’s not like you’re flashing people or anything, so why bother getting embarrassed about it?!”

“You’re not exactly wrong—it does come with an underskirt and all—but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like getting leered at!”

Ugh. Girls are such a pain about this sort of thing. They wear risqué outfits then chew you out for having the gall to look at them. Seriously, what’s a guy supposed to do?

“Okay, then why not just wear a tracksuit?” I countered.

“Because... Well, I mean, I just sorta wanted to try wearing a real tennis outfit at least once...”

Hmm. Come to think of it, Hatoko told me that she only joined the soft tennis club because their uniforms were cute. Maybe there’s just something about tennis outfits that makes them universally appealing to girls?

“Anyway,” Tomoyo continued, “more than anything else, I don’t wanna hear you of all people judging my sense of fashion! What the hell possessed you to dress like that?”

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? What’s wrong with my outfit?”

Said outfit consisted of a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and a long-sleeved tracksuit top. I hadn’t even bothered wrapping my arm with bandages or putting on a pair of fingerless gloves! There was nothing about the way I was dressed that should’ve made Tomoyo get on my case like that!

“How about the fact that you’re wearing your jacket like a cape?” Tomoyo replied, identifying the problem with incredible specificity.

“Huh? What’s wrong with that? It looks cooler like this, right?” I asked, taking a quick look at myself. Yup, definitely cool. Draping a jacket over your shoulders like a cape: hella cool, for sure. It has, like, a certain vibe, I guess? Whatever you call it, it absolutely exudes that certain something!

“That’s a look that only the captain of a powerhouse tennis club can pull off. And only in manga.”

“What? You’re kidding, right...? Do you have any idea how much effort I’ve been putting into keeping this look up?! I can barely lift my arms at all without knocking the jacket off my shoulders!”

“I was wondering why you haven’t tried to hit a single smash this whole time...”

“I thought I’d done a perfect job of putting together mundane, everyday items into a super stylish outfit too...”

“Gotta admit, it’s pretty amazing how you can draw out the chuuni potential of even the most insignificant things. You’ve gone so far past the point of reason here, I’m actually kind of impressed,” sighed Tomoyo, shaking her head. “Anyway, playing tennis while wearing your jacket like a cape’s way beyond you. Unless you’re literally Yukimura from Prince of Tennis, there’s no way you could pull that—”

“Stop,” I snapped, holding out a hand and cutting Tomoyo off.

“Wh-What...?”

“Careful about name-dropping other series like that. You can’t be that casual about jumping into a parody.”

A lengthy moment of silence ensued...

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?! Are! You! Kidding me?!”

...and then Tomoyo shrieked, her face painted over with an expression of pure betrayal.

“A-Are you seriously saying that?! After everything you’ve done up till now?! You?! You, of all people?!”

“I know, I know, just calm down and listen,” I said, doing my best to soothe Tomoyo’s indignant fury. I’d had this on my mind throughout the whole exercise, and it seemed like the perfect chance to explain myself. “Basically, I’m thinking we should put out a blanket ban on Prince of Tennis riffs today.”

“Why?! What could possibly justify that?!”

“Mostly, it’s that the moment we decided to do tennis, I could just tell that you were all thinking ‘Man, Andou’s totally gonna make a ton of Prince of Tennis jokes.’”

“Oh my god, have you ever considered visiting the real world every once in a while?! Nobody was thinking that!”

Hmm...or so she claims, but I know better. They were totally expecting me to call one of my shots the 108th level something-or-other, or structure a gag around the Andou Kingdom, or whatever. They have to have been expecting me to go all out on the Prince of Tennis parodies. I mean, come on, this is the long-awaited tennis chapter, for crying out loud!

But they thought wrong! Oh, how they’ve underestimated me! I knew perfectly well that they knew I’d go in that direction, so I deliberately chose not to do so! I don’t wanna do something that anyone could come up with! A life spent playing by the rules is a life wasted, and you can count me out of that! I’m all about betraying expectations, and if somebody anticipates me doing something, I always strive to rise above whatever they think they see coming!

“Always taking the road untraveled and never going with the flow—that’s me!”

“The way you get so weirdly obsessed with not letting people predict what you’re going to do is just so, so disgustingly chuuni of you, I swear...”

“So, yeah, that was kinda roundabout, but the point is if you’re gonna do a tennis manga parody, I’d say go with something other than Prince of—oh, dang, did you see how intense that shot Sayumi just hit was?! She’s the spitting image of the Red Bullet himself! Ooh, but Hatoko’s shot bounced off the net and just barely made it in! What was that move, the Royal Phoenix #1?!”

“Sorry, but I’m not keeping up with this at all!”

At around the time Tomoyo tapped out of the conversation, Sayumi and Hatoko had concluded their rally and walked over in our direction.

“Shall we change opponents?” suggested Sayumi. The rest of us quickly agreed, with the exception of Chifuyu, who had been napping in a sunny patch of the court ever since she’d used her power to make it. As such, we’d ended up with a perfect group of four for tennis. We played rock-paper-scissors to make new pairings, and I ended up squaring off against Hatoko.

“Okay, here goes, Juu!” she shouted.

“Mwa ha ha! I’ll give you a peek into the darkest nightmares of my infernal soul! Oh, and no overhand serves, okay? They’re too fast; I can’t hit ’em back.”

“Okey dokey!”

I’d whispered that last request, and Hatoko cheerfully agreed without a second thought. She could be really nice like that, sometimes. Hatoko tossed the ball into the air and thwacked it toward me with an underhand serve.

“Here goes! Firebaaall!”

Huh? “Fireball”? I had a terrible feeling, but as the ball sailed toward me, I reflexively took up a stance, prepared to return it.

And then the ball literally caught fire. I’m talking one second tennis ball, next second, fwumph, raging inferno orb. That’d be one of Over Element’s aspects: the power to control flame!

“G-Gaaaaaahhh!” I shrieked, dodging out of the way at the last second by pure instinct. Holy crap! Hoooly crap, fireballs are friggin’ scary! I mean, of course they are, they’re straight up balls of fire!

“Ah-ah! You’re not supposed to dodge, Juu, you have to hit the ball back!” scolded Hatoko.

“As if I could!” I shouted. A tennis ball that catches fire midair was the sort of special move I’d expect to come up in a manga aimed at elementary schoolers. It wasn’t bad, as far as special moves went, but it definitely felt a little, I dunno, uninspired? That is, it did until I saw one up close and personal in real life and realized that they were downright terrifying. Real-world fireballs: hella scary!

“You can’t? Oh, okay... I thought that since you use fire too, you’d be able to return a flaming ball,” explained Hatoko. She almost certainly didn’t mean anything bad by it, but somehow, her words came across as weirdly provocative to me. As if I could just sit down and take a statement like that!

“Mwa ha ha! Interesting... In that case, it’s a contest! Let us see which of us can truly claim greater mastery over our flames!” I thrust my right arm out before me, racket and all, and prepared to release the accursed power that dwelled in it. To do that, of course, I would first need to recite the Malediction of Unleashing! “I am he who conquers chaos! O purgatorial flame that sways upon the brink of the Abyss, O twisted blaze of—”

“Ahh! Sorry, Juu! I already served!”

“—sable...huh? Oh god aaaaaaugh!”

I canceled the Malediction midsentence and frantically took up a stance to return the shot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough, and my racket whiffed pathetically through the air.

“Dang it, Hatoko! How many times have I told you not to attack when I’m mid-Malediction?!”

“But, but, it wasn’t my fault! You’re the one who just started chanting it out of nowhere! You have to say ‘I’m gonna chant now’ first!”

“I don’t wanna! That’s not how these things work; power incantations always come out of nowhere! Nobody ever stops to say they’re about to start chanting mid-supernatural battle, and bad guys always have the decency to sit around and wait until they’re finished!”

“Booo!”

“Sheesh, you’re impossible...” I sighed deeply. Restarting the whole process after all that would feel even less dramatically appropriate than just going for it, so I decided to omit the Malediction and bring out my power then and there. The Tartarean flames of Dark and Dark sprung to life, dancing about my right arm in a roiling sea of pitch-blackness.

My flames were as stupidly cool as ever that day, of course, but I wasn’t planning on stopping there. My plan was to extend the blaze from my arm onto my racket, coating it in a fiery veil! That’s right: I was going for a form change, the same skill I’d trained a while back for the sake of using my power to create a black dragon!

I closed my eyes and sharpened my focus to a knife’s edge, envisioning my power taking on a new form. If I had to compare it with something... Ah, that’s it! It was just like Shu, the technique Nen ability wielders use to extend their Ten to strengthen weapons and stuff!

“Grrraaaaaahhhhhh!” I shouted, pouring every ounce of my body and soul into inciting a form change in Dark and Dark! I coaxed my flames toward the racket, step by step! Closer, closer, closer!

And...I failed.

Nope. Can’t pull it off. Form changes really are way harder than you’d think they’d be. I knew when to accept that I was attempting the impossible, so I quickly gave up and resolved to play tennis the normal way.

“Okay, Hatoko, here I come!”

“Kaaay!”

“You gave up on that way too quickly! What the hell was all that buildup fhhngh!” jabbed Tomoyo from the next court over. Not really sure what happened, but the last bit of her sentence sounded less like a word and more like a muffled groan.

“Ah, Tomoyo! You shouldn’t try to call him out mid-rally, it’s dangerous!” shouted Sayumi, sounding a little concerned. I glanced over to find Tomoyo hunched over, clutching her side. Best I could tell, she’d taken one of Sayumi’s shots right in the flank.

“O-Oh, I’ll get you for this one, Andou,” growled Tomoyo.

Oh, come on! How was that my fault? If you’re gonna blame anyone for this, blame yourself and your own irresistible impulse to pick holes in everything I say.

I turned my attention back to my own court. “Okay, Hatoko, hit another fireball at me! I’ll hit it back this time for sure!”

“Okay! Here goes!”

Once again, a raging orb of flame sailed into my side of the court. And oh, jeez, it really was scary, but I knew it was coming and wasn’t nearly as freaked out as I had been the first time. C-Calm down. It’ll be fine! Remember what Kenshin said when he fought Shishio: “Don’t let the flames deceive you! The fire itself is hardly lethal at all!” I fixed my gaze on the ball and prepared to return it!

“Haaahhhhhh!” I shouted once more, overcoming my fear and pouring my whole body into swinging my racket with all my might! And what did I get for my trouble?

“I-It punched right through it?!”

Well, more like it burned through it, really. The second the ball impacted my racket’s strings, I heard a quick sizzle. By the time I realized that I could smell something burning, the ball had already scorched a sizable hole in the racket’s center.

Right. I guess that would happen. Considering that tennis racket strings are, well, strings, of course they’d be weak to heat.

“Heh heh heh! How was that, Juu?” asked Hatoko with a proud smile.

“What do you mean, ‘how was that’?! No way in hell anyone could ever return that shot!”

“Huh? But Sayumi returned it just a minute ago.”

“Seriously?!”

“Yeah. She repaired the racket’s strings the moment they hit the ball and sent it back just fine.”

“Ooh, so she used Route of Origin?” That was certainly one hell of a countermeasure. Apparently, an astonishingly high-level super-tennis match had been taking place right next to me, and I’d never even noticed.

In any case, hitting back a fireball was clearly beyond my capabilities, so Hatoko and I decided to play a perfectly normal game of tennis instead. I swapped out my half-incinerated racket no problem, by the way. Chifuyu had made a ton of them back when we started this whole activity, so we had a literal pile of spares off on the side.

“Oh, whoops! Sorry, my bad!” I shouted partway through a rally. I’d skimmed the ball with my racket’s frame, and it had sailed off in totally the wrong direction. It was on track to land way out of bounds.

“It’s okay!” replied Hatoko in a perfectly carefree tone. The next instant, a powerful gale blew. She’d used another of Over Element’s aspects, the power of wind, to create a precisely localized burst of air that corrected the ball’s course and delivered it directly to her. She hit it back to me, and our rally resumed without a hitch.

Oh, I see now. No matter where a shot’s supposed to go, if you can manipulate the wind, you can just blow the ball right to you. She could hit every shot without taking a single step! It’s almost like the Tezuka Zo—oh, whoops! Almost forgot Prince of Tennis references are banned today.

“Mwa ha ha! You hear it, don’t you, Over Element? Yes—you hear the voice of the wind!”

“Huh? Does the wind have a voice?”

“It does indeed, and only we who are truly beloved by the winds can hear it!”

“Oh, wow! What sorta voice is it? Does it sound nice?” asked Hatoko, apparently in complete earnestness.

No, that’s not... Look, the voice of the wind is, like, one of those things you just sorta say! It’s a metaphor, you know? You’re not supposed to ask what specifically it sounds like, it’s just a thing!

“U-Umm,” I floundered, “It sounds...s-sorta winded, I guess?”

“The voice of the wind sounds winded?!”

“Yeah, that’s it! The wind doesn’t work out enough, and gets out of breath super easily. Weird, considering it’s always blowing all over the place.”

“I didn’t know! Okay, then how does it sound when it’s not out of breath?”

“I-It sounds...like, uhh...like an anime character.”

“An anime character?!”

“Yeah, and the wind’s actually super sensitive about it! That’s why it barely ever talks.”

“Oh, huh... Ah, I get it now! That must be why it only talks to the people it loves!”

“Th-That’s exactly right!”

“Oh, wow! That’s sorta romantic, isn’t it?”

“R-Right? Anyway, that’s enough talking, Hatoko. Focus on the rally, okay?”

“Okaaay!”

With the conversation brought to a sudden, forced conclusion, we went back to thwacking the ball around.

A short while later, Chifuyu sat up from her impromptu nap zone in the corner. She climbed to her feet and slowly wandered over to our court. “I’ll play too,” she droned.

“Oh? You’re up for some tennis, Chifuyu?”

Apparently, it was time for another lineup swap! This time, Chifuyu and I ended up squaring off against each other.

“Mwa ha ha!” I cackled. “Do you truly believe, Himeki Chifuyu, that the likes of you has the power to stand against my might?” It finally felt like I was up against an opponent I held the upper hand against, and I was maybe getting just a little bit full of myself as a result. Meanwhile, the high school girls’ division started whispering off to the side.

“For somebody who begs for mercy when he’s up against an opponent who’s better than him, that guy sure has a way of talking himself up the second he thinks he’s on top,” muttered Tomoyo.

“He does vividly bring to mind the sort of self-important bit character who gets humiliated by the protagonist in the first chapter of a manga,” noted Sayumi.

“Honestly,” whispered Hatoko, “Juu’s just not very good at tennis at all!”

Three blades pierced my heart from different directions. Dammit, guys, can’t you just let me have this?! Am I never allowed to talk myself up just a little?!

“Don’t underestimate me, Andou,” boasted my opponent in her usual monotone. “I’ve never played tennis...but I have World Create to help me!”

“Ack!” That’s right! She does! It’s still way too early to assume I have an advantage!

World Create gave Chifuyu the ultimate power of creation, and its versatility couldn’t be underestimated in a pinch. It goes without saying that making any form of matter she pleased at any moment was useful beyond measure, but the ability to even create space took her power to a whole new level. There was no situation it couldn’t prove useful in. She could even make fire and water if she wanted, though we agreed way back whenever that using World Create for that sort of thing was off the table. Couldn’t have her power set overlapping with Hatoko’s, after all! The power to create anything, in short, was unfathomably fearsome.

“Ah, I made a mistake,” said Chifuyu, just as I was gulping in fear of the match to come. “I meant ‘but I have Sweet and Sour Pineapple to help me!’”

“Nope, nope, nooope! We agreed that name was off the table, didn’t we?!” We’d been through that conversation before, I swear, but apparently Chifuyu still hadn’t given up on it yet.

“But I like Sweet and Sour Pineapple better than World Create.”

“No way, no how! World Create is a billion times cooler!”

“My power lets me bring things that shouldn’t exist into the world...just like the pineapple in sweet and sour pork.”

“Stop trying to justify this!” Please, at this rate, it’s gonna stick! It’s starting to feel like that’s actually the power’s name!

“Hmmph!” grunted Chifuyu, her lips pursed poutily. “It’s my power, so I can call it whatever I want.”

“Ugh!”

She’d played the ultimate trump card. There was nothing I could say to argue against that one. But I couldn’t give up! Giving up would mean game over for real! The name-change crisis had me in a corner, for sure, but I still had one last desperate means of fighting back: pigheaded stubbornness!

“B-But ‘World Create’ is really cool, right? I mean, how can any word be cooler than ‘world’? It’s the world, for crying out loud! Putting the world itself in your power name practically guarantees that you’ll end up being the final boss!”

“Okay, then I’ll call it World Pineapple.”

“Don’t just mix them together! That’s a recipe for disaster!” What would World Pineapple even do?! Turn the world into a pineapple?! Turn pineapples into worlds?!

“It’s a compromise.”

“A compromise has to satisfy both sides! It’s not a compromise if it doesn’t!” I sighed heavily, and Chifuyu sighed right along with me. In her case, it seemed more like a sigh of exasperation than despair, though.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m a good girl, so I’ll put up with World Create.”

“R-Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Hurray! Woohoo!” Stubbornness wins the day! I’ve protected my name to the end! 

Chifuyu was giving me the sort of look that a kindly sister would give to her obnoxious brat of a little brother, and getting that sort of look from an elementary schooler was a little, well, y’know, but I was too ecstatic to let it bother me much. I may have won an argument with a fourth-grader through pure persistence, but let the record show that I don’t think that was immature of me at all!

“Okay, Andou,” Chifuyu muttered with a fearless look in her eyes, “time to get a taste of World Create.” Barely a moment later, she activated her ability and made her move.

“What...the...?” I gasped, speechless.

I mean, okay, I said “what the,” so I wasn’t technically speechless at all. Calling that speechless meant I was making about as much sense as the sort of random mook who’d say something like “Ha ha ha! That’s so funny, I forgot to laugh!” The point is, I was just that flabbergasted!

Chifuyu had used her power to give herself the upper hand in a way that totally could’ve rendered me speechless, in a certain sense of the word. World Create truly was the ultimate all-purpose power, but how, exactly, did our fair Lady of Genesis choose to give herself an edge in a game like tennis?

“Dual-wielding,” Chifuyu declared, her tone just dripping with confidence. In her right hand, she held a racket. In her left hand, she held another racket.

And I...was overcome with a sense of indescribable exhaustion. Really? Chifuyu, you had the ultimate power of creation backing you up, and your master plan was to use it to let you dual-wield?

“Andou.”

“Y-Yeah?”

“One plus one...equals two.” She really did her best to sell that line. The look on her face was so hilariously smug, you’d think she’d just laid out the fundamental truth of the universe itself. “And that means that just now...my power level doubled.”

I feel like I’m learning a lot about how math works in Chifuyuland. She wasn’t kidding, that much was clear, so I decided to just leave well enough alone and move things forward. Come to think of it, is it against the rules to use two rackets in tennis? I know that using two swords in kendo falls into a sorta gray zone where it’s technically allowed but nobody really ever does it, right? And even if it is technically legal to use two rackets in tennis, surely it can’t actually make it any easier to play, right?

As far as that last point went, anyway, there was only one way to find out. I kicked off a rally against Chifuyu without questioning her dual-wielding tactic. And, the result?

“Ahh... Awaah!”

Chifuyu was totally incapable of managing the racket in her offhand. Not only that, she was off-balance enough that she couldn’t use her first racket properly either. Man, it’s not every day that I see a punchline coming that far in advance!

But, y’know, when all was said and done, I couldn’t fault her for it. After all, I did basically the same thing back when I was in elementary school. I totally tried to dual-wield in baseball and ping-pong. Dual-wielding: hella cool.

“Wh-Why isn’t it working...?” asked Chifuyu, crestfallen at her inability to return so much as a single ball.

“You’ll probably have more luck if you just use one racket, Chif—”

“Oh, I know!” Midway through my attempt at advice, Chifuyu’s expression lit up. Apparently, she’d had a flash of inspiration. “How about this?” she said, spinning the rackets around in her hands. She ended up holding them upside-down compared to how one would normally wield a tennis racket. In other words...

“Underhand-grip dual-wielding?!” Is she planning on unleashing the Kaiten Kenbu Rokuren or something?! Has she been training herself in the legendary dual-shortsword techniques of the Oniwabanshu?!

“This means that just now...my power level quadrupled.”

“How do those numbers check out at all?! The logic just barely squeaked by when you said it had doubled, but nobody’s going to buy it this time!”

Counterpoint, though: she kinda looks super awesome? Her backhanded dual-wielding stance gave Chifuyu the aura of a savage warrior striding out onto the battlefield. “Little girl” and “savage warrior” weren’t exactly terms that matched up naturally with each other, but in a weird sort of way, that actually gave it an air of wrongness that just helped the overall image.

Dammit, I can’t deny it! She really does look super cool! I can’t let her outdo me like this! Deep down inside me, a strange sort of competitiveness was beginning to burn bright. If I wanted to stand up against Chifuyu’s aura, I was gonna have to do it with style.

So what did I do? I chucked my racket over my shoulder, that’s what! It clattered to the ground outside the court’s boundaries, leaving me weaponless and defenseless. That was the only way I could possibly think to outdo her: taking on two weapons with zero! If she was gonna dual-wield, I’d just have to null-wield!

“I’m not gonna hit the ball with my racket,” I declared. “I’ll hit it with my soul!”

I let my hands fall loosely to my side and took up a perfectly relaxed stance as all the tension drained away from my body. It was an abstract, bladeless stance, specialized entirely in delivering the ultimate counterattack! My heart was at perfect peace, still and silent as the mirrorlike surface of an undisturbed lake. I had achieved true emptiness, the very state of vacancy that Buddhist monks aspire to. My body and soul were as one, melting away into the wind, each mighty gust carrying me leagues across the surface of the Earth.

Now, more than ever, I hear it. I hear the voice of the wind. The anime-esque voice of the wind.

“Interesting,” said Chifuyu, taking up her stance once more. “Come at me, Andou.”

Null-wielding vs. dual-wielding. Sparks flew between us as an air of tension descended over the court. It was as if we were two samurai, facing each other down with live blades and the steadfast dedication to claim our rival’s head. The air was thick, suffocatingly so, and a bead of cold sweat rolled down my cheek. Neither of us budged from our stance. Neither of us broke eye contact. Neither of us blinked.

The silence...was absolute. I almost felt like I could hear both of our heartbeats. This was a battlefield, and the slightest moment of complacency could very well prove fatal. That’s when a thought struck me.

So, uhh... What are we supposed to do now?

We’d gotten into this situation easily enough, but how exactly were we supposed to resolve it? Chifuyu’s hands were both full, so she couldn’t pull out a ball, much less serve it. So, what, was I supposed to just throw a ball into her side of the court? That had to be against the rules, right?

So then, would I have to abandon the stance I’d been holding? No way, right? Not after going that far to sell the scene! We were very obviously building up to a “the first one to move loses” sort of climax, and I wasn’t going to give up on my chance at victory that easily!

Crap! At this rate, the battle’s never going to start! We just stood there, glaring at each other in complete silence for lack of anything more sensible we could accomplish. The only way we could’ve possibly justified this nonsense would be if we’d had somebody filling in the commentator role on the sidelines to explain that “Actually, they’re already fighting in an intense battle of visualization!”

I still had the same villainous grin plastered over my face, but inside, I was rapidly falling into a blind panic. Chifuyu, meanwhile, let out an intrepid chuckle.

“Andou,” she said, “I still have a secret weapon.”

“Y-You what?!” She hadn’t even used her first weapon, and she was already bringing out the secret one! Talk about extravagant! Chifuyu invoked World Create once again to deploy her so-called secret weapon.

“That makes four.”

“Four rackets, all wielded independently of each other?! Who are you, that one guy with the boomerang swords in the Trick Tower?!”

“And now six.”

“Six rackets, held in the gaps between your fingers?! What are you, a Sengoku-era samurai who shouts ‘Let’s party!’ all the time?!”

“And now ten.”

“Special gloves that let you wear a racket on each finger?! What are those, Captain Kuro’s Cat Claws?!”

“And now infinite.”

“A countless number of rackets raining down from the sky?! What is that, Gate of Babylon?!”

“And now from below.”

“A mountain of blades—I mean rackets—rising up from the ground?! What is that, Sword Mirage?!”

“And now...just one, after all.”

“Condensing all those rackets down into a single ultimate racket capable of shaking the very Earth with a single swing?! What is that, the White Emperor Sword?!”

And okay, wait a second! You have the ultimate power of Genesis on your side, so why’re you only using it to make more and more rackets?!

I paused for a moment to catch my breath, winded by the callout combo I’d just pulled off. Chifuyu, meanwhile, dematerialized her racket, mumbled “’M tired,” and trotted off the court.

“Huh? You’re done already, Chifuyu?” I asked, bewildered.

“Yeah. That was fun.”

“B-But, you haven’t even hit a ball yet!”

“Tennis can be fun even if you don’t hit anything,” she countered.

Was that deep of her? Or shallow? Probably shallow, right? Hmm... Well, whatever. If she says she had fun, then that’s all that matters. In any case, those scant few minutes of banter were apparently enough to exhaust her stamina reserves. Chifuyu returned to the corner of the court and lay down again. The exchange had taken a lot out of me as well, to be fair, or at the very least, it had left me in a state of frozen incomprehension.

“It looks like that wasn’t enough to satisfy you, Andou,” said Sayumi as she strolled over to me. She must have picked up on my internal monologue or something. “I imagine you’ll find me a much more worthwhile opponent. Let’s play.”

Sayumi’s power, Route of Origin, was unique within our group in the sense that it was the only power that lacked any sort of direct offensive potential.

Yes, you heard me. The only one. I’m not budging on this point, no matter what anyone says. Dark and Dark has offensive potential, dammit! It’s got crazy firepower when it has to, I swear!

But anyway, the point that I’m getting at here is that because Route of Origin didn’t have anything to show for itself in terms of real offensive ability, I was hoping that it wouldn’t prove all that useful on the tennis court. At the absolute least, I figured I wouldn’t be subjected to the sort of out-there absurdist attacks that the other three were capable of.

I was underestimating her. I’d completely forgotten one simple fact: Route of Origin was far, far less scary than its wielder, Takanashi Sayumi herself.

“Oh my, Andou, are you finished already?”

There I was, on my knees in the middle of the court as Sayumi loomed over me, looking down upon me with the cruel, domineering smile of a tyrant-queen.

“C-Curses...” My chest heaved. I could barely breathe. My legs were made of pain. I couldn’t even lift my arms anymore. The jacket I’d been wearing on my shoulders had fallen off at some point, and I didn’t even know where it was.

Over the course of our roughly twenty-minute rally, I came to appreciate two things. First: Sayumi was stupidly good at tennis. Second: tennis is the sort of sport where a skilled player can inflict outright physical abuse upon a less-practiced opponent.

She sent me running from one end of the court to the other so many times I could barely tell left from right anymore, then she feinted a drop shot to the front of the court only to send me sprinting to the back again by turning it into a lob at the last second. The more I got a read on her movements, the more she used that fact to trick me. I legitimately lost count of how many times she made me trip over my own feet.

“Ugh... Give me a break, Sayumi!” I moaned. “Couldn’t you, I don’t know, be a little more gentle about it, at least? Like, maybe coach me instead of destroying me?”

“Whatever could you be talking about? I have been coaching you. I’ve hit every shot to a place you can return it from, haven’t I?”

She had a point, but on the other hand, that’s exactly what made it so excruciating. Every one of her shots was perfectly placed right at a distance I could just barely make it to at a full-on sprint. It wore me out in minutes, and then we didn’t stop. It was probably fantastic practice, in a certain sense of the word, but still! Come on, I’m not even in the tennis club! I didn’t sign up to get put through some sort of twisted boot camp!

“All right, it’s time. Please stand up, Andou. I’m not finished toying with—ahem, practicing with you,” said Sayumi with a positively joyful smile. She was in full-on sadist mode. However, as I staggered to my feet, trembling from fear just as much as exhaustion, the cruelty faded from her expression, replaced with a gentle, almost kindly air.

“Pull yourself together! You’re Guiltia Sin Jurai, aren’t you?”

“...Mwa ha ha!”

I laughed. All I could do was laugh—nay, cachinnate—with all the might I could muster! She had picked the most encouraging line she could’ve possibly come up with. There was nary a phrase in this world that could have lifted my spirits more!

“Then allow me to demonstrate my power,” I growled. “The power that’s earned me the title Berserk of the Court!”

So that ended predictably.

“Come on, Andou! I know you can run faster than that!”

“Bugwaugh!”

“All right, now the other side!”

“Mnaaah!”

“And now over here...or so you thought, but it was a feint!”

“Wha?! Agaaaugh!”

“He he he he he!”

Less than three minutes later, I found myself facedown on the court again.

“Oh my, oh my! Is that all the ‘Berserk of the Court’ has to offer?”

“Ugggh...”

This was hazing, plain and simple. Non-athletic clubs weren’t supposed to have these problems, but there I was, getting flagrantly bullied by an upperclassman anyway.

“Incidentally, not that it matters,” added Sayumi, “‘Berserk’ is only usable as a noun in Norwegian. If you were going for English—which I assume you were, given the use of the word ‘court’—you probably should have used ‘berserker’ instead. As in, Berserker of the Court. I believe it would come across as much more consistent that way.”

“Huh? Wait, you mean ‘berserk’ and ‘berserker’ mean the same thing in different languages?”

“Quite. ‘Berserk’ in Norwegian refers to a legendary group of warriors that feature prominently in Scandinavian mythology. ‘Berserker’ is the correct English rendition thereof, whereas ‘berserk’ is used as an adjective.”

Oh, huh! That was all news to me. I’d seen the word “berserk” get thrown around often enough that I sort of just assumed it was English for a warrior-barbarian, or whatever, but I had no idea that the roots and intricacies ran that deep.

“Are you telling me, Andou, that you put the word in one of your titles without even understanding its basic meaning?” asked Sayumi in an openly contemptuous tone.

Hellfire! First I get beaten to a pulp in tennis, and now she’s making a fool of me in my own field of obscure but cool vocabulary trivia?! This defeat couldn’t get any more absolute!

“Andou?” said Sayumi, smiling down upon me with the warmth of the sun itself as I lay prone on the ground, debilitated by pure humiliation.

“Pull yourself together. You’re Guiltia Sin Jurai, aren’t you?”

“Mwa ha...ha...haaah.”

I laughed. Well, I started to, but nope, couldn’t pull it off this time.

“Pull yourself together. You’re Guiltia Sin Jurai, aren’t you?”

“Umm...Sayumi? I think we’ve sorta gotten all the mileage out of the ‘somebody says that line and I find the strength to stand again’ pattern there is to get at this point.” I was up for it the first time, sure, but I have my limits, as does the principle of comedic repetition. A gag like that tends to wear real thin real quick if you abuse it.

“Oh, is that so? A shame. And here I thought that I’d discovered the secret codeword that let me work you like a plow horse whenever I felt like it.”

“Come to think of it, you were there when Tomoyo dropped that line, weren’t you?”

The time: a few days prior. The place: a path by the riverbed, bathed in the golden glow of the sunset. Tomoyo, smiling mischievously and giving my chest an encouraging tap with her fist. My heart had been on the verge of breaking, but she’d given me the support I needed to carry on.

“Yes, indeed. I was right there, directly next to you, and yet you and Tomoyo were off in your own little world, entirely oblivious to your surroundings. I’ll admit, it may have been ever so slightly irritating.”

“Irritating?! You mean the whole time that scene was playing out, you were standing right off to the side, fuming at us?!”

“So I thought that by invoking those words over and over for the sake of a cheap joke, I might be able to devalue the impact of that scene retroactively.”

“Wow! That’s simultaneously incredibly roundabout and incredibly petty of you!”

“I suppose you could say I was going for a bit of self-parody,” she added.

Self-parody, to put it simply, is the act of parodying your own work within your own work. Consider the movie Enchanted, for instance, in which Disney went out of their way to subvert all the tropes and genre-standard plot points of their own films. I guess Sayumi ripping off Tomoyo’s words could be considered self-parody in a really broad sense of the term?

“I must admit, though, self-parody has proven to be considerably harder than I anticipated,” Sayumi continued. “Frankly, it was much less funny than I was hoping it would be.”

“If you’re going to turn somebody’s heartfelt words into a parody, you could at least have the decency to make sure the joke lands!”

“Considering you were the subject of the material I was parodying, Andou, I’m afraid that’s your responsibility, not mine.”

“People who screw up a parody then blame the source material are the worst!” I shouted, clenching my fists. “Performing a parody means staking two fates upon a single gag: yours and that of the source material you’re parodying. Therein lies the comedy of parody, and should your joke fall flat, know too that the source material will fall with it! Thus, those who structure their jokes around parodies can never permit themselves to suffer defeat! This one believes you’d do well to engrave that truth upon your heart.”

I felt somebody lightly karate-chop my head from behind. “You’re not Kenshin, and the Swords that Give Life philosophy has nothing to do with parody ethics!”

I only knew one person capable of identifying a reference that quickly and calling it out that precisely. “Tomoyo!” I shouted, spinning around. She was standing right behind me, face flushed and already moving her gaze over to Sayumi.

“So, uhh,” she stammered, “I’d really prefer it if you didn’t use stuff I say for jokes like that, especially if you’re gonna do it more than once.” She was clearly incredibly embarrassed. Sayumi’s appropriation of the line had apparently been even more humiliating to its original source than it was to its original target.

“He he he!” giggled Sayumi. “My apologies. I simply found myself ever so slightly envious of the deep understanding the two of you clearly shared.”

“Wha?! I-It’s not like I have an understanding with him, or—”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you don’t,” said Sayumi with an obnoxiously mature chuckle as she strolled off the court, leaving me and Tomoyo to stand behind bewildered in her wake.

“Tomoyo?”

“Wh-What...?”

“I figure we should probably wrap this up soon, but how about we play one last round first?” I pressed a hand to my knee and finally managed to push myself to my feet again. I was near the limits of my endurance, but I couldn’t just let it end there. I still had something left that I absolutely had to do.

“Fine by me...but what do you mean ‘a round’? Do you wanna hit the ball back and forth, or play a real match?”

“I want to practice special moves.”

“Hell no!”

“Huh? Why not?”

“Isn’t it obvious?! No way am I gonna play along with your stupid special move rehearsal session!”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not gonna be doing anything too out-there. They’re special moves, sure, but keep in mind they’re only tennis special moves. I’m just talking about hitting a killer serve or two, that’s all.”

“Really...?” said Tomoyo, giving me a skeptical glance. “I mean, if that’s really all you want to do... Just to be safe, though, what exactly is the special move you want to try?”

“It’s called Dark Dreams Dispersed by the Midnight Sun: Retribution.”

“We haven’t even gotten past the name, and it’s already ridiculously out-there!”

“Mwa ha ha! It would seem the thought of my special move has you trembling in your boots!”

“If anything has me trembling, it’s the terrifying depths of your shamelessness... So, what sort of technique is that? The name doesn’t tell me anything about what it actually does.”

“First, I split through the fabric of space with my racket—”

“Stop. Don’t care anymore.”

“Hey, c’mon! I was just getting started!”

“Why would you open with something that’s beyond the realm of human possibility?! I’ve heard of difficult moves, but this is just absurd!”

“It’s fine, it’s fine! The first move’s the only hard part.”

“Y’know what? Fine. Keep talking. Let’s hear it.”

“Okay, so I split the fabric of space with my racket, and next I use it to rend through darkness itself.”

“That’s exactly as stupidly impossible as the first part!”

“Then I go on to shred light itself into oblivion.”

“You’ve destroyed space, darkness, and light at this point! What else is even left for you to attack next?!”

“Next, I cut down my own worries and anxiety.”

“And now we’re going psychological?! Do that part before the match starts!”

“Then I deem my opponent God-damned.”

“Aren’t you just swearing at them?!”

“Then I damn God.”

“You’re damning God? All for the sake of a play on words?!”

“And then, finally, I cut down my opponent.”

“You’re just killing them?! Directly?! With your racket?! Why?! This is supposed to be tennis, for crying out loud! You could hit the ball at least once!”

“And then, while I’m wide open from my last strike...I cut myself down as well!”

“It’s a suicide attack?! You die at the end too?! For your own special move?!”

“That’s all! The end.”

“Yeah, to the move and your existence! What sort of tennis match ends with both players dead on the court?!”

“There’s no such thing as conflict without sacrifice, y’know?”

“Have you even heard of sportsmanship?! And wait, back up. You killed yourself off at the end, there! You’re just okay with that?!”

“Those who kill unwittingly slay themselves with every blow struck. Covered in wounds, bathed in blood, doomed to fall to the depths of Hell and rot in its deepest pits...such is their fate, and such is the fate that this technique of ultimate assassination, Dark Dreams Dispersed by the Midnight Sun: Retribution, was meant to embody!”

“You seriously expect me to believe there’s that deep of a backstory behind it?!”

“Though really, in the end, it all turns out to have been an illusion, and we’re actually still facing each other down with rackets at the ready.”

“You did not just it-was-all-a-dream this!”

“C’mon, techniques that turn out to be illusions are super handy! You can do anything to any character and get away with it just fine that way!”

“That’s...kinda true, I guess. Illusion techniques are sort of cheating, in a sense.”

“All right, then!” I’d spent a satisfactory amount of time extolling the virtues of my special move and paused to stretch. “Now that I’ve explained the details of my most ultimate of secret moves...let’s undo the self-imposed Prince of Tennis ban and practice all the special moves from that series we can think of, shall we?”

“After all that, we’re going back to Prince of Tennis in the end?!”

“Hey, whoa, cut me some slack! I wasn’t kidding around that time. I’m totally serious.”

“What? Like...what? You’re...serious?” Tomoyo babbled, utterly bewildered.

I smirked. “That’s right. Totally serious.”

You know you’ve found a good special move when it makes you want to imitate it. Not only is that a sign the move’s solid, it’s also one of the central appeals of shonen manga. That’s what the genre’s all about: giving hopes and dreams to the children who read it.

I can’t even begin to guess how much time I spent practicing special moves when I was a kid. There was the one time I broke my mom’s umbrella trying to do an Avan Strash and she got super mad at me, and the time I sprained a finger really badly trying to do the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms taijutsu, and the time I actually fractured my hand trying to pull off a Futae no Kiwami, and the time I lost three baby teeth at once trying to imitate the Three-Sword Style... Anyway, they’re all just good memories now. Or, well, painful memories, really.

And that’s not all. Battle manga aren’t the only ones that have special moves in them. Hot-blooded sports manga are absolutely full of the things, and some of those get really wild. I’m talking way beyond the limits of what a middle or high schooler could pull off—the sort of special move that makes you want to shout “Oh, come on, if they can do that when they’re still in school, what sort of moves are they gonna be able to pull off when they’re a pro playing on a world-class level?!” Though of course, that’s the sort of backwards perspective on those moves that only an adult would take.

Is it possible to pull those moves off in real life? Do they have a logical, reasonable explanation behind how they work? Those matters play second and third fiddle, respectively, to the real question: does seeing them set your soul aflame? If a special move can pull that off, then that’s all that really matters.

And so, I poured my all into pretending to do special moves. Now, to be clear, I’m usually not pretending at all! Those are simulations. Totally different. But in that moment, for once, I just wanted to play make-believe. The most intense, devoted, fun-as-hell game of make-believe ever played. I knew, somewhere off in a dusty corner of my mind, that all those special moves were impossible, but still...still, I couldn’t help but want to practice some of them anyway.

“Man, that was fun!” I exclaimed. I’d done it. I’d run through every special move I wanted to practice.

Tomoyo rolled her eyes with a strained smile. “Feels like you had way more fun with this than you did playing actual tennis, huh?” she commented sarcastically.

“Hmm, you think? Ha ha, yeah, you might be right about that.” I walked over to her as I spoke and borrowed her racket, holding it and mine in either hand.

“What, you’re dual-wielding now?” she asked.

“That’s right! Like Chifuyu did a while back, y’know? I used to try and dual-wield stuff all the time way back whenever, so seeing her like that took me on a real nostalgia trip.”

“Yeah, there’s one in every class. Somebody always gets it in their head to dual-wield whenever you play a sport with rackets or bats or whatever.”

As we chatted, the other three walked across the court toward us. Hatoko looked down at my rackets, then jumped into the conversation as well.

“Now that you mention it, I remember you dual-wielding stuff all the time back then! Like the time in gym class when you put baseball gloves on both your hands, remember? You walked out into the center of the field and shouted something like ‘Now the area I can defend has doubled!’”

“Oh, I see this punchline coming a mile away,” sighed Tomoyo. “He ended up catching the ball, only to realize that he couldn’t throw it, right?”

“Nope! We were playing soccer that day.”

“I did not see that punchline coming!” shouted Tomoyo, recoiling with shock.

Yeaaah, man, that really was embarrassing. We swapped sports in gym class on a monthly basis, and I’d totally spaced on the fact that it was the first of a new month.

“But why did you always love dual-wielding like that, Juu?” asked Hatoko.

“Why? Well... I mean...” Huh? Why was I so into dual-wielding? When I really think about it, I’m not actually sure! I mean, the obvious answer would be because it’s cool...but that begs the question: why did I think it was so cool? Was I really into a manga with a character who dual-wielded at the time or something?

“I believe the explanation behind Andou’s interest in dual-wielding is simple,” said Sayumi. “He did it because other people weren’t doing it, don’t you think?”

“Huh? What does that mean?” I asked, cocking my head in confusion.

“It means that you wanted to be unique, that’s all. Dual-wielding in and of itself wasn’t especially meaningful for you—the fact that you would be the only person doing it is where the true appeal lay. If, hypothetically, there were a form of tennis where using two rackets was standard practice, I imagine that you wouldn’t have chosen to do so. Am I wrong?”

I couldn’t answer, because honestly, there was a real chance she wasn’t wrong. When Chifuyu decided to dual-wield, she did it because she thought it would make her stronger, but I hadn’t given my power level a second thought when I’d done it. No, I was purely motivated by a desire to be cool.

“So basically, this is another ‘I’m not like everyone else, and that makes me awesome!’ moment?”

“Tomoyooo,” I groaned, “you didn’t have to sum it up that easily!”

“What? I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Ugh...”

Once again, I was left clenching my teeth without a rebuttal. It was only when somebody else pointed it out to me that I finally realized: my lifelong love for dual-wielding might very well have arisen from the fact that dual-wielders were overwhelmingly in the minority in almost all fields.

Doing something that nobody else does...is cool.

Doing something that nobody else can do...is cool.

“Y’know,” I mumbled, “maybe that has something to do with why special moves are so great too.”

“How’s that?” asked Tomoyo.

“I mean, maybe the fact that not just anyone can pull them off is part of what makes special moves so cool.”

I don’t think that’s all there is to them, of course, but I certainly can’t rule it out as being a factor in their ever-present charm. Special moves give you the irrepressible urge to imitate them precisely because they can’t be imitated. Having a move that only you can do, having a move that only the chosen one can pull off, is what makes that move special—and by extension, cool—in the first place.

“Yes, I see. There’s a certain logic to that,” said Sayumi with a nod. She sounded almost impressed. “Adolescence is, after all, a period of intense emotional instability. It’s also a period in which one’s personal identity goes through a considerable degree of development, and the impulse to be aggressively individualistic—the ‘I’m not like everyone else, and that makes me awesome’ chuuni impulse, as it were—likely plays a factor in stoking those flames, in some cases. For social animals like humans, the knowledge that there’s something you can do that nobody else is capable of is of unparalleled value. Ergo, I think it’s very reasonable to conclude that the charm that special moves seem to hold for young boys in particular can be used as a point of reference to estimate one’s degree of emotional development, and...”

I pretty much tuned out at that point. Is she trying to make her argument in the most complicated way possible or is it by accident? I wasn’t following her train of thought at all, in either case, but I could more or less tell that she actually thought I’d made a point for once. It wasn’t every day that the endlessly erudite and wickedly wise Sayumi told me that there was “a certain logic” to one of my ideas, after all. I could think of few things more confidence-inspiring than that.

“Mwa ha ha! It would seem I’ve gone and unveiled yet another fundamental truth of this world. Really, now, my train of thought is so uncontrollable, it even scares me sometimes!”

“But, Andou...” chimed in Tomoyo, “aren’t there a ton of characters that copy people’s special moves? It’s a whole thing in battle manga and sports manga.”

My train of thought ground to a screeching halt. N-Now that she mentions it...

“So, what’s the deal? Doesn’t that sorta throw a wrench in the whole ‘they’re cool because other people can’t use them’ theory?”

“Wh-Who cares?! Characters like that usually can’t use their copied moves to their full potential and end up self-destructing anyway! Besides, most characters with copy abilities end up running into a move they can’t copy no matter what they do eventually!”

“So, does that mean that the moves that can get copied aren’t really that big of a deal?”

I didn’t have an answer to that one either.

“Like, the Kamehameha’s pretty much the most famous special move in Japan, and can’t, like, half the characters in the series use it by the end?”

“I guess...special moves can be cool, even if they’re super easy for other people to use.”

“It would seem the theory has broken down at a basic level,” said Sayumi, her shoulder slumped in defeat. “Though of course, the whole theory was built on nothing but pure speculation in the first place.”

In the end, it turned out my theory was full of holes. Hmm... I guess when all’s said and done, the appeal of special moves isn’t something you can sum up that easily.

Man... Special moves are hella deep.