Chapter 7: Andou Jurai’s Eighth-Grade Winter—Enter the Silver Knight: Friend, or Foe?!
“Heave, Hurl!”
Allow me to explain! The Heave Hurl is a special move known for its tendency to accidentally activate when its user exerts themself by, say, picking up a heavy object or standing up from a chair. Other moves of its type include the Heave Hack and the Heave Harangue. The box I’d just picked up was stuffed to the brim with books and heavy as hell, so the special move was an absolute necessity if I wanted to have any hope of carrying the thing.
“Man, my room looks so much bigger now,” I said to myself as I looked over my handiwork. It’d taken a full day of cleaning and sorting, but my room now looked downright organized compared to the pigsty I’d woken up in that morning. With most of the stuff that had been cluttering up the place packed away, it felt like the room was a full fifty percent larger than it used to be.
“Quit banging around like that, Jurai!” my older sister Machi shouted up the stairs at me. “What’re you doing up there, anyway?”
“Cleaning!” I shouted back. “Figured I’d get a head start on my New Year’s cleanup.”
“You’re cleaning?” Machi repeated incredulously. “I was wondering why you’ve been making such a racket all day, but I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that. What sorta mood swing would make a slob like you decide to tidy your place up?”
“You’re way more of a slob than I am! But anyway, I’d say it’s more me turning over a new leaf than me having a mood swing,” I said as I surveyed the pile of cardboard boxes I’d stacked up in the hallway. “Figured it was about time for me to get rid of all my manga and games and stuff.”
To be more specific, the boxes contained volumes from the twenty or so manga series that I was actively following, plus some that I’d completed and others that I’d stopped buying partway through. They also contained manga magazines that I’d kept because they’d included color pages for a series I liked or one-shots that I enjoyed, a ton of light novels, a few strategy guides, and a number of video games as well. By the time I’d packed up all the books and games that had occupied at least half of my room for so long, I was left with an extraordinary number of cardboard boxes I’d now have to deal with.
“Huh?” said Machi. “You mean, like, you’re throwing them out?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I already talked with dad about it. He said he’d drop them off at a trash incinerator tomorrow.”
“Man, talk about a waste! Why not sell ’em off to a used book store or whatever?”
“I just kinda feel like putting them all to the torch, that’s all,” I said. I wanted to throw them all into a raging inferno and watch as they were reduced to ashes, really.
“Seriously...?” said Machi. She sounded bewildered, like she couldn’t believe I’d ever get rid of all my books and games this abruptly. “What the hell happened, Jurai? Isn’t all that crap super important to you? You always used to freak out when I touched your game stuff after eating chips and not washing my hands!”
“That’s a totally normal thing to freak out about,” I countered.
“And you’d freak out whenever I borrowed your books and left them lying open and page-down to save my place.”
“A solid percentage of people would consider that a normal thing to freak out about too.” Though when I look back on it, the only thing freaking out at her ever accomplished was earning myself a beating.
“For real, though, what’s wrong with you?” Machi asked. “First you get all weirdly quiet and docile, and now this? Did something happen to you, or what?”
“Nah, nothing in particular,” I said. “I’m gonna be studying for my entrance exams starting next year, though, right? Figured I might as well get a head start on cutting out all the distractions from my life. Really force myself to focus, y’know?”
Needless to say, my decision to burn away my most prized possessions had nothing to do with my exams. The truth was that, plain and simply, they’d lost their power over me. My heart could no longer be moved by fabrications of their kind.
Ever since that rainy day, no matter what I would read, watch, or play, it just left me feeling empty. I knew that I’d loved all of those stories in the past, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember why. Looking at my collection felt like looking at a prize from a gacha machine or a crane game that you just knew you’d sunk way too much money into obtaining.
Although I’d been cured of my chuunibyou when I’d gotten into the eighth grade, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to give up my geeky hobbies. Now, though, I was ready to wash my hands of all of it. I’d have been lying if I said I had no doubts, but I guess you could say that this was my way of drawing a clear line in the sand.
“Why not help me carry these if you don’t have anything better to do?” I shouted. “You seriously wouldn’t believe how heavy a cardboard box’s worth of books are! Getting these down the stairs on my own is gonna be really rough!”
“But I refuse!”
Ugh, here we go with the low-hanging JoJo reference fruit. You could at least pick one that actually meshes with the flow of the conversation! You can’t just assume that saying “but I refuse” will always be funny, no matter what context you say it in! Cheap shots like that are downright disrespectful to the source material, I swear.
“Anyway, you’ve got a lot of nerve to throw out all that stuff without asking me first!” said Machi. “After all, what’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine too!”
“Wow, way to be a Gian!”
“And what’s ours was bought by our parents—in other words, the people who work day in and day out to support our lifestyles.”
“Wow, way to be actually pretty reasonable!”
“You see where I’m going with this? You can’t just throw out your crap unilaterally, just ’cause it’s yours! I’ll be the judge of what can and can’t get trashed, so you’d better unpack all those boxes again.”
“What? Are you kidding me?!” I wailed in exaggerated despair.
To be fair, my sister did borrow manga from me all the time, and we’d played a ton of video games together as well. My media was sort of communal property between the two of us, in a sense. It would be kind of crappy of me to throw it all away without giving her a chance to object...but, like, cut me some slack! I’d felt really conflicted while I’d packed all those books up, y’know? I shed a tear or two as I thought “Well, this is goodbye” and taped those boxes up, for your information! Opening them up again after all that would’ve been a waste on so many levels!
“Come on, Machi, give me a break! I used up pretty much all the tape we had left to get these boxes all packed! I can’t just open them back up again!”
“Shaddup! That was an order, not a request!” snapped Machi. “Wait up a sec—I’m gonna brew some tea and grab some chips.”
And just like that, she’s going right into manga reading mode! What, is she planning on rereading all of them under the pretext of picking which ones I’m allowed to throw out? I know how this sort of thing goes, and it’s definitely not going to end with me getting all my stuff packed and ready today!
“Hey, Machi!” I shouted, but this time, she didn’t answer. I leaned out and peered down the stairwell, but she was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, she really had gone off to grab tea and chips.
“Machi! For crying out loud—Machi!”
Still no response. She was probably already in the kitchen.
“...Uggo. Baldie. Fatass.”
“Say what?”
That got a response out of her. A response, and an aura of bloodlust strong enough to make it all the way up the stairs and send a chill racing down my spine.
“Who’s an uggo? And what was that about me being bald?”
“O-Oh. So you really could hear me,” I stammered.
“Who’s got a fat ass, huh?!”
“A fat— Wait, no! I didn’t mean it like that! I meant it in, like, the slang sense!”
“What difference does it make?!”
“Whether or not I was talking about your ass, which is a huge difference!” I shouted.
At the same moment, I heard the floor downstairs creak ominously. Faced with a fear as potent as the terror of having a titan loom over you, I made a snap decision to choose flight and get the heck outta there.
“O-Okay, gotta go buy some more tape! Have fun with your manga!” I shouted, then dashed into my room, threw on my scarf and gloves, flew down to the first floor three steps at a time, and sped out the front door at full speed without a backward glance.
Two months had passed since that fateful rainy day. I’d somehow managed to keep myself going in the aftermath, but only in the strictest sense of the phrase. I hadn’t really done anything—I’d just existed, whiling away day after day of my all too limited lifetime in static inaction.
From an outside perspective, I probably looked like a dull, apathetic bore. At some point back in elementary school, I’d gotten it into my head that apathy was “hella cool” and had made a point of pretending to not give a crap about anything, but this was different. Now, I genuinely couldn’t work up the willpower to do much of anything at all. I was an empty vessel, occupied solely by the daily round trip to and from school. I guess I hung out with Hatoko every once in a while, but that aside, nothing. Eventually, I decided that I couldn’t go on like that, and that brings us back to my attempt to give my room a really thorough cleaning. I was determined to say goodbye to all sorts of baggage, literally and figuratively.
I hadn’t met up with Sagami so much as once since that day. We hadn’t had any contact at all, in fact. Since we went to different schools, there weren’t all that many chances for us to bump into each other, after all. That said, I had happened to spot him in town once, by pure coincidence. I’d frantically ducked for cover, and I’m pretty sure he hadn’t noticed me at all.
He’d been walking around with a girl at the time. Not Tamaki or Kokoro, though—it was yet another cute girl who I’d never seen before in my life. It was none of my business at that point, I know, but when I saw how he was smiling at her—how he was giving her the exact same smile he’d always shown to us—I felt sick to my stomach.
Tamaki, meanwhile, was gone. She’d transferred schools and left town entirely, from the sound of it. I’d gotten that bit of info from Aragaki Zenya, albeit indirectly. I’d just happened to overhear him talking about her with his friends at school. The particulars of his conversation were, well...let’s just say I’d rather not think about them. What matters is that it became quite clear to me that he and Tamaki really had been in a full-on romantic relationship.
The day I’d learned about Tamaki’s transfer, I’d ended up getting so restlessly frantic I’d actually paid her house a visit. She’d been living in her grandparents’ place—a big traditional Japanese house—and needless to say, she wasn’t there when I showed up. Her grandfather, on the other hand, was.
“Hmm? Are you one of Tamaki’s pals?” he’d asked in that distinctly flat tone I’d grown so used to. It wasn’t my dialect by a long shot, but the second I’d heard him speak, I’d felt a burst of intense nostalgia. Anyway, I’d said yes, he’d told me to come inside, and I readily took him up on the offer.
Tamaki’s grandparents both struck me as kind, gentle people. They had me sit down at their kotatsu table, brewed me tea, and even treated me to some homemade pickles. It was the sort of hospitality that you ended up feeling a little ashamed to accept. They were also just like Tamaki had described in the sense that they talked and talked and talked at an incredible pace, jumping from one topic to the next with wild abandon.
“Tamaki’s gone to roost with her mother these days,” her grandfather explained to me. It seemed the divorce proceedings had all finished up, and her mom was now working a new job that a friend of hers had hooked her up with. Tamaki had gone to live with her in her new home.
“It’s for the best. A child like her belongs with her parents,” said her grandmother.
“You’ve got that right,” agreed her grandfather with a nod. I couldn’t help but notice that in spite of their approval for the arrangement, they both sounded a little lonely.
They kept talking for a good long while, and eventually, they even pulled out one of their photo albums for me to see. I tried to refuse—it felt like looking through it would’ve been a violation of her privacy—but the two of them insisted, and I eventually caved to the pressure, agreed to take a look...and caught a glimpse of hell itself.
“H-Huh...?” I muttered as I flipped through the album’s pages. There were pictures of Tamaki everywhere, taken at all sorts of times throughout her life. There was one of her at her kindergarten entrance ceremony, at the pool, at a school event, and at her graduation ceremony. Then one of her elementary school entrance ceremony, at the pool again, at her school’s field day, at an arts festival, in a school choir, at a parent teacher conference, cooking with her classmates, and on and on.
All throughout the album—everywhere—were photos of Tamaki with her arms and legs bare, exposing her completely unblemished, scarless skin.
“Umm... Didn’t Tamaki have, um...scars, or something? On her arms...? She, umm, said something about wearing long sleeves because of that?” I asked, unable to stop myself.
“Scars...?” said her grandfather. “Does she?”
“Oh, must be that one,” said her grandfather. “Remember? When she scalded herself?”
“She...scalded herself...?” I repeated, unable to believe what I was hearing.
“Ahh, that’s the ticket,” said her grandfather with a nod. “Must’ve been about a year back. She tipped a pot over and poured it all over her arm.”
“We took her to see the doctor, and they said they’d try to fix it up so it wouldn’t stand out... The poor thing.”
Speechless, I looked back down at the album and flipped through it once more, starting from the beginning. It felt like they’d put it together to keep a record of her growth and most of the pictures were centered on Tamaki, but the rest of her family still showed up with her every once in a while. I compared a family photo from just after she was born with a family photo from somewhere in her later elementary school years. Even at a glance, it was obvious that the father pictured in both photos was the same man.
“Thank you for everything, but I should be going home soon,” I said as I returned the album to Tamaki’s grandparents, then left their house as fast as my legs could carry me.
“Friggin’ cold out,” I grumbled, then took a sip of the (sweetened) coffee I’d bought at the convenience store I’d gone to for tape. My breath came out in big, billowing clouds of steam.
There was a thick enough layer of snow on the ground for me to leave footprints on the sidewalk as I strolled along. The sun had just about finished setting, and the town was dim, bordering on dark. It wasn’t actively snowing at the moment, to be clear—the dusting I was walking through had fallen the night before, and enough of it had remained throughout the day to keep me from biking to the convenience store.
I walked along, taking my time and being careful not to slip as I made my way not to my house, but to a park. Specifically, I was headed for the park where I’d met Sagami and Tamaki for the first time. I didn’t have any particular objective to accomplish there. I just knew that my sister would probably still be reading at that point, and if I was going to have to wait for her to finish anyway, I figured I might as well wander around a bit before going home.
I arrived at the park to find it abandoned. Judging by the footprints and marks in the snow, kids had been playing around in it earlier on in the day, though considering the time, it made sense that they’d all gone home already. For all I knew, the four of us might’ve met up in this very park to play in the snow as well if everything hadn’t fallen apart.
Hatoko was sensitive to the cold, so she probably would’ve arrived bundled up in several thick layers of clothes. Sagami would’ve made some sort of vulgar snow sculpture, and I’d have pulverized it before the girls’d had a chance to catch a glimpse of it. Of course, if he’d made a Neo Armstrong Cyclone Jet Armstrong Cannon, I would’ve taken a moment to comment on how it was weirdly well crafted beforehand. Then we’d get into a snowball fight or something, and Tamaki would take advantage of her inexplicable strength to nearly take my head off with a fastball to the face...and the longer I spent playing out this whole impossible fantasy in my mind, the dumber I felt for wasting time on it.
“Tamaki...” I sighed.
In the end, Sagami had been right. Tamaki’s stories of being abused and cycling through father figure after father figure had been a bunch of lies. She didn’t have a tragic backstory after all. That being said, they hadn’t been completely baseless lies. She hadn’t been abused, but she did have a burn scar on one of her arms. She’d only had one father, but he and her mother had really gotten divorced. She hadn’t been pulling stories out of thin air—she’d just been exaggerating her real life story to a hyperbolic degree. I guess the most blunt way to put it would be that she’d spiced her story up until she’d bent the truth beyond recognition.
It goes without saying that everyone experiences misfortune in their own way and evaluates it by their own standards. To a girl like her, having a nasty scar on her arm was probably a major issue. I had no perspective on how stressful and emotionally painful it’d be for a kid to have their parents get divorced, but I imagined that could be pretty awful too. The thing was, though...
“She could’ve just told me the truth about it,” I muttered.
Why did she have to embellish her story so much? Was it really because she was trolling for sympathy? Did she want to play the tragic heroine and convince someone to swoop in and save her? By this point, I knew that I didn’t understand where she’d been coming from...and I no longer wanted to understand either.
“Guess I’ll just head home.” It was getting too cold to loiter around outside for much longer, and I’d killed enough time that my sister would’ve probably made at least a little progress on sorting my manga. Even if she wasn’t finished, I could still start packing up the ones she’d read first.
And so, I turned my back on the park I’d made so many memories in, prepared to leave it for good...only to stop in my tracks.
“Huh?”
I’d seen something. A sort of white blur had slipped through the very corner of my peripheral vision. It was dark enough out that I hadn’t been able to grasp what it was in that split second, but I knew I’d seen it: a white something flitting through the air, then vanishing from my line of sight in the blink of an eye.
I drew in a sharp, alarmed breath. Oh, no. Oh, no no no. You cannot be serious... Did I seriously just see a ghost? I remember a bunch of rumors about a ghost showing up in this park floating around back in summer...but I mean, it’s winter now! Winter’s not ghost season by any stretch of the imagination! Nope! Nope nope nope nope nope! There is no way I just saw what I think I saw!
I frantically told myself I was imagining things as I scanned my surroundings, my eyes as wide as dinner plates. If there was a ghost on the haunt, I’d want to get the heck out of there without wasting another second, but I knew that if I ran away with the matter still ambiguous, I’d have no hope of getting any sleep that night. I had to get a solid grasp on the situation, then figure out what my move would be.
A chill that had nothing to do with how cold it was outside ran down my spine as I scanned the park from end to end. Finally, my eyes fell upon the explanation I was looking for.
“Oh...what, is that all?” I said to myself. It was almost a letdown how simple the explanation was: the mysterious white blur was just a person with white hair.
Some little old man or little old lady—couldn’t quite tell which—was pedaling their way past the park on a bicycle. The bike instantly explained the way the shape had slid in and out of my peripheral vision so smoothly. I’d been, as they say, jumping at shadows.
“Can’t believe anyone’s riding a bike in this weather, though,” I added under my breath.
It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but the roads were still slippery as all get out. Even Onoda Sakamichi himself would give up and take the train to Akihabara under these conditions! Whoever the mysterious bicyclist was, they had some serious guts for an old-timer.
“Huh?” I grunted as I somewhat nervously watched the bicyclist pedal into the very park I was standing in. They’d entered from the opposite side as I had, and they were making their way to the park’s bike rack. No sooner had they crossed the park’s threshold, though, than an ear-piercing screech rang out. I grimaced—it seemed the bicyclist had slammed on their brakes, and moments later, the bike’s tires lost their grip on the road, sending it and its rider crashing to the ground in an ungainly heap. If I had to come up with a sound effect to represent the spectacle, I’d probably go with “ka-smash!” or something to that effect.
“Ooof,” I said with a wince. “See? What’d I tell you?” I mean, not that I actually told them anything. Make that “What’d I think about you,” I guess.
He or she—I still couldn’t tell—was left sprawled out on the ground after their spectacular wipeout. They were writhing around a little, but they were making no attempt to stand up. It must’ve hurt like hell, and speaking as a firsthand witness to the accident, I couldn’t just ignore it and walk away. Instead, I hurried over to help them out, driven more by a sense of sympathy than a desire to do a good deed.
“H-Hey,” I said nervously as I approached the bicyclist. “Are you okay?”
Seeing them up close, the figure was a little...actually, make that very peculiarly dressed. I’d thought they’d had white hair from a distance, but seeing them up close, I realized that it was more of a shiny, iridescent sort of coloration. It was almost silver, even, and it was obviously not a natural color. It wasn’t even natural hair at all, actually. From this distance, I could tell it was a wig in an instant.
Then there was the matter of their glasses, which turned out to be sunglasses—specifically, the round variety that only a very particular sort of hot guy could ever hope to pull off. They were wearing a white scarf wrapped several times around their neck and pulled up to conceal the lower half of their face, and they had a black trench coat on below it that was plainly a few sizes too big for them. Its bottom hem hung well below their knees, and the sleeves were baggy and loose. From top to bottom, they were dressed in white, black, white, and black again.
“Ah,” said the bicyclist, slowly raising their head off the ground to turn their sunglasses not to me, but rather to the tragic wreck that was their bicycle.
“Dame Dolor! My kinsman’s beloved steed! Nooooooooo!”
They shrieked to the high heavens. Shrieked in a very high-pitched voice, incidentally, and though the wig, glasses, and scarf made it impossible to make out their face, between their build and voice I was now pretty convinced that they were, in fact, a she. I could also hazard a guess that she was around my age. Her voice was a little nasally in a way that made me wonder if she had a cold, and that plus the way her scarf was covering her mouth made it pretty hard to make out what she was actually saying.
So, yeah—outfitwise, she was such a piece of work I didn’t even know where to start with her, but surprisingly, her outfit wasn’t even the part I felt the most pressing need to question. That dubious honor went to what she’d just screamed. “My kinsman’s”? She definitely said “kinsman” just now, right?
“Dame Dolor! Stay with me, Dame Dolor! No, this cannot be—how shall I ever beg my kinsman’s pardon should you perish here, O most plaintive of maidens?!” the girl wailed as she scrambled over to her fallen bicycle.
Uh. Did she just say...shall? Does she just talk like that all the time? And wait—is “Dame Dolor” supposed to be the bike’s name?
I felt a flash of alarm as a warmth spread across my face. I was racked with an intense sensation of déjà vu and an equally intense onset of shame. Part of me thought that the girl before me was just unimaginably cringe, but the rest of me could imagine her perspective all too well. Her deliberately monochromatic fashion, her pseudo-Shakespearean vocabulary, her nonsensical proper nouns—I knew what she was, much as I wanted to deny it.
“Huh? Identify yourself, scoundrel!” shouted the girl, who’d apparently finally noticed me. She turned to glare in my direction...or so I’d assumed, though of course, her weird glasses made it impossible to tell if she was actually glaring or not.
“If either of us deserves the ‘Who the heck are you?’ treatment, I think it’s you,” I replied.
“Heh! You need not concern yourself with my name,” said the girl.
“Okay. In that case, I won’t even bother to—”
“That being said, the denizens of this realm have bequeathed upon me a title!”
I winced internally. She was chomping at the bit to tell me her name, and I hadn’t even asked.
“Yo: the one without name, kept captive within darkness deepest, and Tomo: she who shineth with golden resplendence, breaking day upon that prison of night and paving the way for its captive to follow! Kye ki ki!” said the girl. The way she laughed was so conspicuously unnatural I had to assume she was doing it on purpose. It reminded me a lot of my old “mwa ha ha,” in fact.
There really was no mistaking it anymore. I was standing in the presence of my past self. The girl before me, clad in a wig that shone whiter than the snow around her, was suffering from perhaps the most astonishingly high-level, categorically undeniable case of chuunibyou I’d ever seen.
Naming your bike was pretty fundamental chuuni material, if I had to be honest. Same with the silver wig, really. I think most Asian people go through a phase at some point in their lives where they wish they had blonde or silvery hair. The archaic word choice too—that had a certain something that really struck a chord with me, and picking out clothing that covered up her mouth and eyes was a classic trick to give yourself a mysterious air. I’d made use of it all the time, back in the day. Then there was the black coat—that was just packed with an air of catastrophic catharsis.
Yes, I could understand every aspect of her whole shtick at a glance, and boy, did I ever feel mortified by that ability. I understood her on a profound, instinctual level that I couldn’t really put into words.
“Son of man,” said the girl.
Oh, god, here we go. Word choice like that’s a classic way to subtly imply that you’re something other and greater than the petty humans that surround you. Talking about humans as a broad category’s the perfect way to make it look like you don’t fall into the category yourself.
“If you value your life, you’d do well to keep your distance,” she continued with a threatening glance in my direction. Well, I assumed it was threatening, again—the sunglasses and scarf totally covered up whatever presumably intimidating face she was trying to make at me.
Goes to show that covering up your face has its drawbacks, even if it does look cool. To make matters worse, I was of the opinion that round sunglasses were cool specifically because of how you could let them slip down the bridge of your nose, giving the slightest glimpse of your eyes behind them. The girl, however, had a small enough face that her eyes were completely hidden behind the glasses’ lenses. She looked less like a mysterious badass and more like one of those stock caricatures of shady Chinese salesmen you see in manga sometimes.
“Th-That so? I like being alive, so I guess I’d better just head along, then,” I said. I didn’t feel like getting any more involved with her than I already had, so I decided to play along just enough to justify a swift exit.
“Hmph. That the likes of a common human would bear witness to my affairs is a blunder unbecoming of my station. However will I look my kinsman in the eye after bearing this shame...? Kye ki ki—but with this, my yearlong ritual has come to a close! Kye ki ki! The promised moment bears down upon me!”
She’d gone so far off into her own little world, I wasn’t sure if she was paying any attention to me at all anymore. She sounded like she was having a blast, but man, the way she laughed was really weirding me out. Was she looking to set up a broomstick-enabled delivery service, or what? On the other hand, it struck me that my “mwa ha ha” had probably been just as off-putting from an outsider’s perspective. This was all a lot for me to deal with, basically, and while I did my best to cope, the girl turned back to her fallen bicycle.
“Kye ki ki! O Plaintive Dame Dolor—ever has your wild demeanor brought peril upon those who would mount you! So great is your lust for power, you would lay low even your own master, should you be given the opportunity...and I could ask for nothing more from my closest compatriot!”
Apparently, this was her way of internally justifying the fact that she’d gone head-over-handlebars. She had a knack for clever explanations, I had to admit. You could really tell she was in the thick of her infection. I wanted to tell her that getting back on her bike in these conditions would be an awful idea, but I also knew that she didn’t have any reason to listen to advice from a stranger like me, so I decided not to butt in. She’d have to take responsibility for her own decisions. I turned away from her, ready to head home.
“Now then, let us be off, Dame— W-Wait, huh?!”
I heard a wild yelp, and at the same moment, I heard a sort of grating, creaking noise. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the girl sitting astride her bike, trying to press down on a pedal that was clearly going nowhere. As best as I could tell, the impact when she’d fallen had knocked its chain out of place, and when she tried to ride off again, it had gotten tangled up with the gears, jamming up the whole shebang.
“Ah! O-Oh, crap, the chain,” the girl muttered as she realized what the issue was and got off her bike. “Peh—so the drive system’s failed, has it? Those accursed magitechnicians ought to learn to do their jobs properly... How fareth thee, Dame Dolor? Have your wounds from the campaign in Vershella reopened, perchance?!”
And there she went, improvising a whole backstory off the cuff. Not that it really mattered, but I had to question whether her so-called “Dame Dolor” was supposed to be a machine or some sort of summoned creature. Would’ve been nice if she’d made that bit of exposition a little more clear cut—the lore she was building up was getting messier by the second.
“Kye ki ki! Rest easy! The ways of healing may not be my expertise, but long ago, I served in an underground medical unit, and I have not forgotten their methods!”
Ooh, two more classics! She just combo’d the “[Insert skill here] isn’t my specialty, but,” and the “I actually used to be part of [insert organization here]” together, instantly forcing you to question why a former member of a medical unit wouldn’t have medicine as one of their areas of expertise!
“O light that pierces and purifies the dark, answer my call and dwell in my grasp! One-winged birds belong not to the sky, and fangless hounds belong not to the land. By compass of corruption and chains of defilement, the dead are guided through pandemonium...”
And now she’s chanting some sort of incantation. She muttered it quietly enough that I couldn’t pick out most of it, much less decipher her cryptic word choice, and at the same time, she started doing her best to untangle the chain with her bare hands. Well, not quite bare—that was around when I noticed that she was wearing fingerless gloves. Running around in those on a day as cold as this one was an awful idea, but they actually seemed pretty well suited for the sort of intricate work she was currently attempting.
“...How they flock like moths to the flame, lured to elysium in water’s darkest depths. How the shadowed sinners break free of their bonds, forsake their duty, and flock to that blackest paradise... Like moths to a black flame, umm...in deepest, darkest waters...”
Okay, I think you’re leaning a bit too far into the darkness there. Trying to keep up her incantation while also focusing on her hands was resulting in both tasks turning into a bit of a mess.
“...What is it you see, O sinners, in those darkest depths? Umm...err... Meruda de gottoro val jinn tenoga’ga zuugiteen yi nyarldorugo...”
Ah! She got tired of making crap up and swapped over to an incantation in some made-up language! Now that’s a power move! Making things nice and easy for herself, isn’t she?!
“...delpa meira iyonabegi to do no te... U-Ugh, what the heck am I doing wrong? Why isn’t this working...?”
And finally, the incantation’s been abandoned altogether.
“O-Oh, crap, what am I gonna do? This is my brother’s bike! He’s gonna kill me...”
Hey, no breaking character! You’re supposed to call him your kinsman! And don’t admit that it’s a bike!
“Ouch! U-Ugggh... How did it even get like this...? This part goes here, right...? And the bit in back, umm...gah! Agh, my hands are freezing...”
I just watched as she paused for a second to blow on her fingers.
“This sucks... Ahh, now it’s even more tangled up than before... I can’t take this... Ugh... I just wanna go hooome...”
“Graaaaaaaaah! I can’t take it anymore!” I shouted, then spun back around and dashed over to the girl. “Let me take a look!”
“Huh?!”
“Just tag out with me for a second, okay?”
“B-But... My kinsman told me that Dame Dolor rebukes the touch of any who don’t share a bond of blood with—”
“Please, just put all that crap aside for a minute and get outta the way!” I snapped, more or less forcing my way over to the bike. I stooped down, took off my gloves, and got to work untangling the chain.
Yikes, this really is pretty messed up. Gah, and it’s freezing too! This would’ve been a nightmare to take on with her skinny little girl fingers.
“Here, have this,” I said, pausing my work for a moment to pull a can of hot coffee out from my convenience store bag. I’d bought it for my sister, but this was an emergency. Hopefully she’d find it in her to look past my misappropriation. “It’s probably kinda cold by now, but better than nothing, right?”
“Th-Thanks,” said the girl, dropping character again to accept the coffee. She held it in both hands, her fingers red from the cold. “It’s nice and warm,” she mumbled.
“Glad to hear it. Hey, can you pick the bike up by the luggage rack for a sec?”
“Ah, sure.”
The girl lifted up the bike’s back half, and I tried to turn the pedal in reverse with my hand. It didn’t work out as I’d hoped, so I did a little more tinkering with the chain and tried again. It’d taken some trial and error, but the tangled mess was gradually starting to unravel.
“So, hey,” I said.
“Huh? What?” said the girl.
“Do you come to this park pretty often? You said something about a yearlong ritual, right?”
“Kye ki ki... Verily, I do. Once a moon, on the day my magic reaches its nadir, I alight upon this place—a singularity unique in this human realm—and endeavor to restore my powers!”
“Huh. Cool,” I said. A singularity, huh? Nice. Those are pretty cool. I’d never been totally sure what it was actually supposed to mean, but it just had good wordfeel, somehow.
In any case, it seemed safe to assume I’d uncovered the identity of the silver-haired ghost from the rumors back in summer. I couldn’t say for sure how long she’d been doing this, but she’d definitely been riding out here in that wig once a month, and that was enough to settle the matter for me. I had no idea what specifically she’d been doing, and I really didn’t want to know either, but I could very easily understand why she’d been doing it: to look cool.
I was an old hand in the field, so I understood her motives very well. The things she did looked cryptic and nonsensical to an outsider, but to her, they all had clear and distinct meaning. The wig, the glasses, the coat, the bike—they were a disjointed mess of unrelated components at a glance, but in her mind, they were all clearly bound together by concrete and specific elements, each one serving an indispensable purpose for the sake of the scenario she was constructing.
“H-Hey,” said the girl.
“...”
“Is, umm, is it going okay...?”
“...”
“D-Don’t just ignore me! If it’s really bad, I can always give my brother a call, and he’ll come—”
“Would you please shut up for a second?!”
“Eek!”
She was just trying to help, but I curtly brushed the attempt aside. I get that it was kind of a jerk move, but come on—if I failed to fix the bike after all that buildup, I’d be finished on so many different levels! I’d cast myself as the helpful but brusque passerby, and if I wanted to live up to that role, I couldn’t just give up and admit that I couldn’t actually fix the issue.
I forced my mostly numb fingers to keep moving, carefully untangling the chain one link at a time. The winter sky above grew darker, and about ten minutes of cold, silent concentration later...
“I-I did it! It wooorks!”
...I finally managed to restore the chain to functionality and let out a long, deep sigh of relief. Oh, thank god, seriously. Now she won’t think of me as some stuck-up weirdo who offered to help even though he had no clue what he was doing. I felt equal parts relief and accomplishment as I wiped my oil-stained hands off in the snow. That made them feel even more frigid than ever, of course, but it was the only way I could think of on the spot to clean them off.
“U-Umm, here,” said the girl, offering me a pocket-sized pack of tissues.
“Oh, thanks,” I replied. I used about five of them to dry and clean off my hands, then held the packet back out to her.
“I-It’s fine! You can keep it,” said the girl.
“Nah, have it back,” I said. “You’ve got a cold, right? You’re gonna need these.”
I was technically just assuming that on account of her nasally voice, but after a moment of hesitation, the girl let me press the packet back into her hands. Maybe this would’ve been some sort of long-term plot point if she’d offered me a handkerchief and I’d ended up keeping it, but a half-used pack of tissues? Not so much potential there. Holding on to one of those to return to someone years later would be downright creepy.
I hauled the bike upright and tried pushing it around the park. The tires spun nice and smoothly, and it seemed that Dame Dolor was back in action, so I pushed her back to the girl. “Okay, here you go,” I said. “No more riding it though, okay? It’s way too dangerous in this weather. You’d better push it home instead.”
“Right... Th-Thanks,” the girl practically whispered, pulling her scarf even farther up her face than it was before. I couldn’t tell if she was feeling shy, or if she was just embarrassed by the whole situation, but either way, it was honestly a kind of cute gesture. If only it had ended there.
“Kye ki ki! I commend thee, son of man! By your efforts, I shall arrive at my destination in adherence to the prophesized time! You’ve done well indeed!” the girl said a moment later, crossing her arms in a show of arrogance and packing her line as full of pointlessly complicated words as possible. She must’ve just remembered that she’d been trying to play a character.
She really is a genuine chuuni through and through. She wasn’t actually crazy by any means, and she most certainly wasn’t really a resident of another world. She just wanted to look cool, and she was doing her best to act out that ideal. She was under the blissful misapprehension that doing things that she thought were cool would make everyone around her think that she was cool as well. It really did feel like I was staring my own past self in the face.
“So, hey,” I said. I didn’t really know what I was doing—the words just popped out of my mouth before I knew it. “You should really lay off on all that stuff.”
“Huh?” said the girl.
“Like, all the weird posing and playacting, I mean. You know what they call people who do that sort of stuff? They call them chuunis, and it’s not a compliment,” I said. Entering the eighth grade had cured me of my eighth grade syndrome, but she was still in the thick of it, and I found myself trying to warn her. “I’m pretty sure you’ll end up regretting all this eventually. You’re gonna look back and wonder how you could’ve ever been that cringey.”
I don’t really know why I felt the need to go off on a condescending rant like that. Maybe I was trying to lecture her in the hopes she’d learn from my past mistakes, or maybe I was just irritated by how it felt like she was rubbing those mistakes in my face with her little act. In any case, I couldn’t stand to just watch her behave that way. It wasn’t an act of kindness or an attempt to do a good deed. I’d just seen myself in her, and I didn’t like what I’d seen. I’d identified with her, and that sense drove me to act.
“Lemme guess—you read a ton of manga and watch a bunch of anime, right?” I continued. “I get that, honestly. I went through the same sorta phase, so I understand what you’re dealing with painfully well.”
It starts with an attraction to a fictional character or world. Soon, that attraction develops into an irresistible yearning, and before you know it, you find yourself thinking about what powers you’d fight with if you were that sort of person or lived in that sort of place. At that point, it’s only a matter of time before just thinking about it isn’t enough, and you start writing all your ideas down. Then, when writing them down isn’t good enough either, you start acting them out. The cycle plays out over and over, and your ego swells as you bask in the sensation that everything you’re doing makes you special, somehow. But in the end...
“You have to understand that it’s all fake. Every bit of it. The scenarios you dream up, the stories you’re obsessed with—everything,” I said. They’re all fantasies, all fiction, and that will never change. “Honestly, it’s kind of a given that we’d be into that sorta stuff. I mean, all the media that people like us are into was designed for us to obsess over it. A bunch of adults somewhere tailor-made those stories to appeal to kids like us. We’re all just dancing in the palms of creators’ hands.”
I distinctly remembered finding an online listing of the judges’ comments about works that were submitted to a light novel contest once. One particular comment said that a story read “like it was written by a chuuni, not for chuunis.”
I assumed that the novel in question was pretty dire. It was probably one of those books that stars a truly flagrant self-insert protagonist who’s despised by the whole world for no real reason, or maybe one who’s reached some sort of weird understanding that life is futile and has given up on it all, but who ends up being forced to fight enemy after enemy, or fight his own raging homicidal impulses, et cetera, all while preaching relentlessly about whatever the author’s idea of deep, philosophical contemplations on life and death might be. In short, I figured it was the sort of narcissistic, masturbatory fantasy fiction that would never have any commercial viability whatsoever.
That’s when I was struck by a question: What sort of novel would be considered commercially viable? The answer I settled upon was that commercially viable novels are novels that were written not for the sake of the author, but for the sake of the readers. They’re novels that were intended to be entertainment, to amuse and delight the consumers who would purchase them—that is to say, us.
It was only natural that I aspired to be like the heroes from my favorite stories. After all, those heroes were written specifically to appeal to stupid little kids like I was. People can only get hyped up by a hero’s exploits because the story’s writer went out of their way to make said exploits hype-worthy, and people can only get won over by a heroine’s actions because the writer made sure that she’d be as universally appealing as possible.
“You have a right to get super invested in fiction if you want to, but you should know that if you’re ever in trouble and really need help, fiction’s never going to be there to save you. You’ll never awaken to an incredible ability that solves the issue in an instant, and you’ll never go through a sudden plot-induced power up. No matter how deep and intricate all the lore and plot points you think up are, they’ll never be more than make-believe.”
Fiction is packed full of all the artificial colors and flavorings you can imagine. It’s sweet as could be, and it’s powerfully addictive. If you let yourself subsist on a diet of fiction alone, though, you’ll soon find yourself forgetting how bitter reality can be.
“Someday, all those worlds you wish you could live in are going to stab you in the back.”
Take, for instance, how I came to understand that fiction is just fiction without even realizing it. I never even registered that betrayal, so I missed my chance to despair at it. And take, for instance, how the couple I looked up to was nothing more than a superficial fabrication. Their relationship broke down in cataclysmic fashion, and I’ve savored every last drop of the despair it brought me. I’ve given up on my unrealistic aspirations, forsaken fiction, and settled on reality. That, I have to imagine, is what it means to grow up.
“We can’t stay kids forever. You and me both.”
The girl hung her head. She didn’t say a word, and thanks to her scarf and sunglasses, I couldn’t tell what sort of face she was making. I fell silent as well, and I just turned around and walked away. For all I knew, she might’ve been crying, but still, I believed it was for the best. Someday, she too will change her ways. Someday, she too will succumb to despair. And if that’s the case, then in my book, it’s better to get it over with early. Having a stranger like me lecture some sense into her is at least a little better than having her parents or her friends be the ones to force her to face reality. This way she can decide that I was a dick, hate me, and be done with it.
I strolled away, taking care not to turn around for so much as a glance. As I walked, I faintly heard her voice. She spoke in a dark, gloomy tone, and it almost sounded like she was reciting a spell or a curse.
“First limit—passed. Second limit—passed. Final limit—passed.”
I heard the clatter of a bike’s kickstand, followed by the creaking of its gears shifting.
“Dame Dolor: Cacophonous Waltz mode, full power...and beyond! Second Stage Curse Keyword: Unlimited Crisis...Road to Eden—Sainted Princess Honor!”
To me, it sounded like a nonsensical string of unrelated words. I couldn’t tell which parts were supposed to be part of the spell and which were supposed to be proper nouns. I also heard a weird sort of whirring noise along with her mutterings, and couldn’t stop myself from turning around to take a look.
“Superterminal Climax: Winged Blades of Brightest White!”
“Aaaaaaugh!”
The very instant I turned around, the girl and her bike barreled directly into me. She had shouted out some sort of over-the-top attack name, but really, it was more of a mounted tackle. Actually, make that a mounted Double-Edge, considering that mere moments after she sent me flying, her bike slipped on the ice, and she wiped out in pretty much the same way she had back in the beginning.
“Agh... What the hell was that for?!” I shouted as I heaved myself up to a sitting position.
The girl was already on her feet and stomping her way over to me. She planted herself right in front of me, taking up an imposing stance and looming over me. She was actually pretty tiny, but the fact that I couldn’t see her expression or tell exactly where she was looking made her seem way more imposing. She was exerting some major pressure on me.
“I stayed quiet... I let you talk... And you just went on and on and on from your stupid soapbox,” said the girl, emitting an almost visible aura of wrathful outrage. “Shut! The hell! Uuuuuuuuup, you stupid jerkass!”
Her scream was as pure and simple as verbal abuse could be. She wasn’t done yet, though.
“‘We can’t stay kids forever’? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?! How old even are you?! You can’t be much older than me, right? Well then, how’re you supposed to be anything other than a kid?! I’m a kid, so what’s that make you?! You can put on some sad little show of being the big, cool, mature guy, but that doesn’t make you any less of an annoying little brat at heart! Why do I have to sit here and take this crap from you?!”
“I-I was just saying it for your own good,” I stammered.
“My own good? Hah! You liar! You were saying all that crap for yourself! I bet it felt real good to go off on your condescending tirade, huh? Got a real kick of superiority by looking down on me, huh? Fall off your high horse and go to hell!”
The shift in her attitude had been so sudden and dramatic that it left me gobsmacked. I could only assume I’d inadvertently touched one hell of a nerve with her and that she was one of those girls who went all out on you the moment you set them off.
“And what the hell’s your point, anyway? Fictional worlds are all made up by a bunch of adults, so we’re all just dancing in the palms of their hands? As if! What, do you think that all adults are just perfect superhumans or something? You think people suddenly figure everything out the second they turn twenty? Get real! You’re the only one who’s acting delusional here!” she shouted, intent on taking apart everything I’d said from start to finish.
“Adults screw up too! Adults fail sometimes too! They’re not gods! They’re just people like us, but older! Cartoonists and novelists and scriptwriters all work themselves ragged to make their stories! They don’t have the time to think about how their readers are dancing in their hands or whatever! They’re too busy putting everything they have into a desperate effort to get their crap done!” the girl said, then added a quick “Probably!” in after. Apparently, this was all just speculation on her part.
“And anyway,” she continued, “writing novels is... It’s really hard, you know? Sometimes you can imagine things perfectly but just can’t write them right, and sometimes you just can’t think up dialogue that’s fun to read at all... Sometimes not even you know if your characters are standing up or sitting down... Sometimes your worldbuilding just falls apart, and sometimes you make stupid continuity errors without even realizing it... Sometimes your story ends up going in a totally random direction you never planned on... But someone like you wouldn’t know a thing about any of that, and you think the people who make media are trying to play you like a fiddle? It’s not that easy, okay?! Jerks like you are the ones who always post online about how they could totally write a light novel even though they’ve never even tried!”
Somehow, it felt like we were drawing closer to the core of the matter. “Are you, uhh...trying to become a writer?” I asked.
“Wh-What?! N-No way, nuh-uh! Wh-Wh-What’re you even talking about?! Not even a little! Hell no! Never! I’m just speaking for the world at large here!”
Oh, huh. Guess I missed the mark there. I’d drawn the conclusion based on how invested she seemed to be in the issue, but I figured she wouldn’t deny it that emphatically if she really did want to be a writer.
“A-Anyway,” the girl said, “it’s not like fiction always goes the way the adults want it to, does it?! If they were really in total control, then why do so many anime totally bomb with their audiences? Why do so many manga get canceled? Why do so many games get their release dates pushed back? Why do so many light novels that have gotten pushed hard enough to have even gotten promo videos and stuff end up kinda just fizzling out when it comes to their actual sales?”
I gaped as the girl carried on. “Just because people make fiction doesn’t mean they’re always in total control of it! Sometimes stories have more control over their authors than the other way around! Stories are fickle, and demanding, and don’t listen to their authors at all! Fiction exists in a totally different, higher dimension than us, far beyond our ability to influence...and that’s why it’s so good, isn’t it?!”
Fiction exists in a different dimension? Fiction is far beyond is? That’s what makes it so good? “B-But, I mean,” I stammered feebly as I finally rose to my feet, still withering under the girl’s gaze. “At the end of the day, fiction’s not even real, right? That’s literally what makes it fiction, isn’t it? How’s something that’s not even real supposed to help you when you really need it?”
No matter how you try to justify it, fiction will always be fake. It’s a pack of lies, a sham, a backdrop, a convenient illusion. It doesn’t exist. No matter how much you look up to the heroes in your TV shows, you’ll never become one, and one will never appear before you. No matter how badly you fall for an anime’s heroine, no matter how much money you spend on her, you can never even touch her, much less marry her.
But still, the girl had other ideas. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Of course fiction’s real!”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Yes, it is!”
“Is not!”
“Is too!”
“It’s not, and you know it!”
“No I don’t, and yes it is!”
We were talking past each other, and I was just about done with it. “All right, then,” I shouted. “If fiction’s real, then where is it?!”
The girl thrust her hand out in front of her, made a little fist, and pressed it up against my chest—right where my heart was.
“It’s here! Fiction lies within your heart!”
Just like that, it felt like I’d shed something clinging on to me, as though it’d fallen to the ground with a light fwsh. It was like some indefinite presence that had been binding my arms and legs had suddenly been released. Or maybe it was the opposite—like I’d been suddenly lifted up into the air, pulled aloft from the deep pit I’d fallen into. I felt light as could be, like I’d just sprouted wings.
“Manga isn’t just ink on paper. Anime isn’t just a sequence of still images. Novels aren’t just a series of words. Games aren’t just programs. Movies and TV shows aren’t just projections on a screen either!” the girl declared, then thumped her fist against her own chest. “No work is ever complete when its creator finishes making it! Somebody creates, and then somebody else reads. Somebody creates, and then somebody else watches. Somebody creates, and then somebody else plays! The creators create, the consumers consume, and only then does fiction reach its actualization in people’s hearts!”
Manga and novels are only completed after somebody reads them. Anime, TV shows, movies, and plays are only completed after somebody watches them. Games are only completed after somebody plays them. And words are only given meaning when somebody else hears them...
“The fiction I bear within my heart right here, right now, will never betray me!” the girl shouted.
She looked straight at me, and her voice bore a confidence—an earnestness—like nothing else. Her round glasses had shifted down the bridge of her nose as well, just enough to reveal her eyes as she stared into mine. There was a storm of emotion roiling within them, and they dazzled me. It was like a furious flame was blazing away in her gaze, bright and warm, and its light pierced through the dark curtain of night that’d been shrouding my heart, exposing it for the first time in ages to the red glow of dawn.
“Fiction will never betray us! If you feel like it has, that’s on you, not on fiction! You’ve just decided that you’ve been betrayed, that’s all!”
All I could do was stand there, speechless. It felt like my heart had been washed clean—like it had been washed away entirely and delivered to me anew, reformed. Like a tiny flame had been lit deep within my chest, its light rousing something inside me from its slumber.
“Kye ki ki! How imprudent of me, to get so worked up over a mere human,” the girl said as she snapped back to her senses...or rather, as she lost them again, I guess? The point is, she jumped back into the same persona she’d been putting on back at the start of our conversation. “Pitiable son of man: I pray that the cogs of fate shall bestow their blessings upon thine path!”
With that parting comment—her version of a goodbye, I presumed—the girl went on her way. She’d learned from her first two falls, of course, and walked on her own two feet this time.
“W-Wait!” I shouted on impulse. “I, umm... What’s your name?”
The girl paused. “Kye ki ki... The code that members of my clan are bound by honor to follow prohibits me from revealing my name to a human. Of course, it could never be spoken by a human’s tongue to begin with,” she said.
Oh, does it, now? I had a feeling that she’d give me a name if I pressed her, but somehow, I just didn’t feel like it.
“And what shall I call thee?” the girl asked, returning the question to me even though she hadn’t bothered answering it herself.
I hesitated, vacillated, paused to consider, then finally settled upon my answer.
“As of yet, I have no name.” I’m not a cat, though. “And so...I’ll have to think one up. I’ll come up with the most stupidly cool name you’ve ever heard.”
The true name I settle upon will be as stylish of a name as there could ever possibly be. It’s there inside me, etched into my very soul—and I’ll work to reclaim it.
“When next we meet,” I said, “I’ll declare my name to you with pride!”
I got back home and bolted up the stairs at a dangerously fast speed. The cardboard boxes I’d left were scattered about the hallway, the tape that had sealed them torn mercilessly asunder, but my sister was nowhere to be seen. She’d already finished sorting and judging my manga collection, it seemed.
For the moment, I picked out a box at random, grabbed a book from it, and opened it up on the spot. By some twist of fate, it just happened to be the very light novel that I’d loaned to Hatoko during spring break earlier that year—the novel she hadn’t managed to read through, and the one that had prompted me to leave my chuunibyou behind. It was the sort of book that people described as pure chuuni-bait, featuring a complex and intricately detailed story that portrayed a dark, stylish, and deeply appealing setting, chock full of pointlessly cool proper nouns.
I’d taken the time to reread it after Hatoko had given it back to me, and for some reason, I’d felt like it just wasn’t as interesting as it’d been the first time I’d read it. The magic was gone, and my passion had faded. I’d fallen off the series and hadn’t bought a single volume since. What I found within it now, though, made me gasp.
Let’s use food as a point of reference. The exact same dish can taste different depending on how you feel at the time you eat it, right? If you’ve just eaten way too many sweets, you might start feeling the urge to have something sour, and if you just ate a plateful of extra hot curry, the normal-level stuff might not taste spicy to you at all. As you age, the vegetables you hated when you were a kid because they tasted bitter might start tasting good instead. When you have a cold, you might lose the ability to taste entirely. My point with all this is that books, it seems, follow the same logic.
“This...is so good...”
It was good. It was really, really, really good. How, I wondered, could a book that interesting even exist? How had I lost the taste for a book that incredible? Had I had a cold or something?
My brain’s juices were flowing. It was pumping out endorphins like crazy, and I was drowning in dopamine. My brain was loading me the hell up with all its happy chemicals. My synapses were bursting, and a pleasant, throbbing tingle spread through my mind, shooting down my spine like a chill and bringing about the most outrageously powerful sense of intoxication I’d ever experienced. My soul was shaken, and my heart was caught in a death grip.
I was totally immersed in the book’s world, more so than I’d ever been before, and before I knew it, I’d read through the whole volume. I grabbed the cardboard box it had come from, hauled it into my room, and dumped it out on the spot. Books scattered all over the place, and I grabbed another and started reading all over again.
I read. And read. And read. And read. And read. And read. And read. And read. And read. And read. I read like a man possessed, with no appreciation for how much time had passed until I happened to pick out a phrase at the beginning of a manga I’d just started reading.
“This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, groups, or events is purely coincidental.”
“Heh... Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
I burst out in a fit of spontaneous laughter. Well, would you look at that! It was written there this whole time, plain as could be!
It was right there on the tin. Fiction had been telling me that it was nothing more than fiction since the very beginning. It had never tried to fool me, and it had never lied to me. Fiction had never betrayed me at all. The girl from before had been absolutely correct—I’d just unilaterally assumed that I’d been betrayed. I’d leaped to all sorts of conclusions and run away without ever really facing my supposed betrayer and seeing it for what it really was. Fiction is nothing more than a forgery, and yet it’s real in and of itself. A genuine forgery.
Way back whenever, Sagami told me that I was fastidious. He was wrong, though. I wasn’t being fastidious back then—I was just being petty, plain and simple. I’d realized that something wasn’t quite what I’d imagined it to be, and then instead of facing that something for what it really was, I’d kicked up a huge screaming fit and rejected it. I’d done everything I could do to act mature and play the adult, and in doing so, I’d turned my gaze away from the issue entirely.
It was the same way with Sagami and Tamaki. All that had really happened was that I’d discovered that they weren’t quite the people I’d thought they were, but I’d decided that meant they’d betrayed me, had fallen into despair, and had thrown an over-the-top tantrum about it. I’d acted as if we hadn’t spent all that time together—as if the bonds that had begun to grow between us had never been real, even though they so clearly were.
“Mwa ha ha.”
Before I knew it, I was laughing. I was cachinnating. I went out of my way to say the words “Mwa ha ha,” laughing in the least natural way possible as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Mwa ha ha! Mwaaa ha ha ha ha ha!”
It ached. It ached, it ached, oh how it ached! My eye ached! My arm ached! My whole body ached! My very soul ached! From deep within my breast, from the farthest reaches of my mind, from the source of my soul itself, a wellspring of chuuni power gushed forth ceaselessly!
“Mwa ha ha! Ahaaa ha ha ha! Haaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
I laughed. I cackled. I laughed like a hero. I cackled like a demon king. I laughed my laugh, the way I always had, the way that suited me best.
Yes, I’d finally remembered. I’d finally reclaimed everything I’d lost. Once again, I felt the ebullient joy that arose from feeling that I was special, that I was unlike the rest of humanity, and I reveled in the sense of superiority it brought me. How joyous it was to stand aloof and independent, knowing the common masses would never understand me! How euphoric it was to immerse myself in my own world! How empowering it was to bask in the feeling that anything and everything would work out just as I wanted it to!
The next thing I knew, I’d flown to my feet and struck a pose. I’d pulled out all the stops and poured my body and soul into posing it up to the highest degree! Why, you might ask? Simple: because it made me cool. Because I wanted to be cool!
“Ahaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Auaugh, gah, pffft, hgwah! Mwa ha ha! MWAAA HA HA HA HA HA! AAAHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
“Shaddup!”
Wham!
My sister slammed her fist against the wall. Oh, wow, that takes me back! When’s the last time I heard one of her wall pounds? I’d kept pretty quiet in my room ever since the start of the school year, so she hadn’t had to indulge in her unfortunate little habit for quite a while, but it seemed she’d still had the knack for it after all this time. Unfortunately for her, though, I was back. I’d reclaimed my true self, and that meant it was time for me to raise an uproar! My room was my world, and I was in total control of it! Like hell I’d quiet down that easily!
“Mwa ha ha! Excellent, O sister of mine! More! Make my wall resound!”
“Say what?”
“Mwa ha ha ha ha ha! Haaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I am unparalleled!”
A moment passed by, and just as I realized the next room over had gone oddly silent, my door swung open. Much to my shock, there she was: my sister, in the flesh. She’d given up on pounding on the wall and come over to personally intervene instead.
“H-Hey, Machi,” I said.
“Who’s unparalleled?”
“Wait... Wait, no, no, no, this isn’t fair! Pounding on the wall’s your whole role! This doesn’t work if you barge in here in person! You’re, like...oh, you know, one of those characters who gets lines sometimes, but never actually shows up on-screen! Right?”
“...”
“Mwa ha ha... Listen carefully, woman! Your overbearing arrogance has gone too far for too long! I recommend you back down and do as you’re told before I choose to unleash my true inner power!”
“...”
“H-Hey! Listen to me! C-Cut that out! Hurt me if you want, but you’re totally gonna unleash the evil alternate personality that’s sealed inside me if you do! My dark side’s gonna—”
“Hrrrah!”
“Gyaaaaaaaaah!”
“Hiyah!”
“Egaaaaaaaaaah! St-Stop it, Machi! The human body’s not supposed to bend like this!”
“One, two!”
“Aaaaaaaaaugh! Hark... It emerges... M-My lunch is about to make another appearance!”
“Hmmmh...”
“You’re storing up power?! What kind of charge attack is that?!”
“Hmnhhhrrraaahhhhhh...!”
“Okay, that’s way too much power! Stop charging! I-I’m sorry, okay?! You’re unparalleled, not me, so please, spare me the gaaaaaaaaauuuggghhh!”
And so, one winter’s day, a solitary hero let loose the first roar of his rebirth and the deathly wail of his demise in immediate succession.
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