Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 6 - Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Guiltia Sin Jurai

After I finished recounting the tale of the darkest point in my history, Sayumi spent a moment just sitting there with a pensive look on her face. Before long, though, that expression faded away into a faint smile.

“Oh...I see now,” she said. “So, you really were telling the truth back when you said that this was the story of how you became Guiltia Sin Jurai.”

I nodded. “I’ve never run into that girl again, in the end—well, not yet, anyway. I went back to the park a bunch of times, but I never managed to find her there. Guess that was the last session of the monthly ritual she mentioned. It was December, so it sorta makes sense.”

Sayumi sank into silent thought, so I kept talking.

“Sometimes I wonder... Maybe that girl was some sort of god or whatever. Maybe she was the God of Chuunibyou, and she came to show me the error of my ways and steer me back along the right path.”

“Andou...” Sayumi began.

“Ah, I’m not being serious, of course! Just a joke, really. I’m not quite that far gone with my fantasies.”

“No, that isn’t what I meant,” Sayumi said, then paused for a moment, seeming to consider her words. “He he he... Yes, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps she was a god. After all, it’s difficult to believe that an ordinary human girl would ride a bike in an outlandish outfit like that in the middle of winter. But besides that, Andou, I...” she said, then hesitated again. “I remember hearing that you encountered Futaba Tamaki recently, didn’t you...?”

“I did,” I said. “She seemed like she was doing well, I guess? Same as ever, really.”

Tamaki told me that I’d sprung up—that is to say, grown up—since the last time she saw me, but personally, the moment I saw her, I thought that she hadn’t changed at all. She’d had the same bright smile as ever, she’d talked on and on in the same thick accent...and she’d kept her arms and legs totally covered, just like always.

“Anyway, though, that’s the end of my backstory,” I said. “Thanks for being such a good audience.”

“Thank you for being so forthcoming,” said Sayumi.

“And about Sagami...do you get the picture now?” I asked, a slight sense of unease passing through my mind. “I’m in no position to tell you what to do, but personally, I’d recommend you try to keep your distance from him. It’s not like he’d let you in if you tried to get close to him, anyway.”

There’s no getting close to a guy who lives in a totally different dimension. I’d learned that from firsthand experience, and judging by the nod Sayumi gave me, she was prepared to learn from my mistakes. She started getting her things together after that and was prepared to leave in short order. I figured she was trying to be polite, considering it was coming up on dinnertime.

“My apologies for imposing on you for so long,” Sayumi said with a bow before leaving my house. I walked her out and stood by my front door to watch as she went on her way. After she was gone, I casually glanced upward to find countless brilliant stars shining in the summer sky above.

“Whoa, that’s pretty,” I muttered to myself. I knew that there were tens of thousands of light-years separating each and every one of them—a distance too impossibly vast for me to even conceptualize. People, however, have looked up at those stars, connected them together conceptually as constellations, and come up with stories and narratives to attribute to them. We’ve used fiction as a means to bring together stars that would otherwise never cross paths in any capacity.

Constellations aren’t real, and stars glow because of scientific phenomena rather than some mystical power—yet the feelings and desires of people have bridged those tens of thousands of light-years to bind the stars together. In my eyes, that was something incredible. It was something indispensable for the sake of living as ourselves.

And so, I loved fiction. I gave it the affirmation it deserved. Even if it didn’t exist in real life, the fiction within my heart was unmistakably genuine, irreplaceable, and real. I believed that with all my heart and soul.

☆

After parting with Andou, I pulled my cell phone out from my pocket, then took a look behind me to make sure he’d already returned inside, just for safety’s sake. I’d walked far enough to feel confident that he wouldn’t hear my voice regardless, but it was important enough to me that he did not hear the conversation I was about to have that the extra dose of caution felt necessary. I picked out a number I’d only recently saved to my phone’s memory, and the boy I was calling answered immediately.

“Hello! You’ve reached Shizumu of the Sagami family,” he said.

“Takanashi speaking,” I replied. “Is now a good time, Sagami?”

I heard him chuckle. “Please, feel free to call me Sagamin! We’ve had this conversation several times now, haven’t we?”

By now, of course, I knew that nickname’s origin. I hadn’t intended to use it before, and I certainly wasn’t going to now. “I will not,” I said. “I’ll continue to call you Sagami, just like always, thank you very much.”

“Will you now? That’s a shame.”

“I’ve just left Andou’s house,” I continued, “and I’ve heard all about his past—just like you told me to.”

A few days after summer vacation began, I was abruptly contacted by Sagami, and he took me to Andou’s home.

“I want you to go in there and ask Andou about his time in the eighth grade. Call me when you’re all finished,” he’d instructed me with no preamble whatsoever. “He likes to act like that period’s some nasty stain on his history, and he definitely won’t want to talk about it, but if you name-drop me, he should spill the beans no problem. You could say that you want to know more about me or something to that effect—he’ll tell you everything, I’m sure. He is pretty on-guard when it comes to me, though, so I bet he’ll want to warn you away.”

Just like that, Sagami had gone along on his way. I’d been apprehensive about the situation, but in the end, I’d chosen to follow his instructions and knocked on Andou’s door. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have informed him of my visit well in advance and brought a gift to thank him for his hospitality, but the abrupt nature of the matter meant that I’d lacked the time to do either of those things. The circumstances had been, to say the least, far from ideal.

“So, how was it?” asked Sagami. “I bet you were surprised by how fun his whole backstory was, huh? He was like a totally different person back then! I met him back when he was in his eighth-grade non-chuuni phase, so the way he acts right now feels unnatural to me, but when you met him, he’d already given up on giving chuuni up, so he was in his non-eighth-grade non-non-chuuni... Wow, this all sounds really complicated when I put it that way, huh?”

“Quite. The topic lends itself naturally to confusion,” I said, although frankly, I was sure there could’ve been an easier way to phrase it.

“Well, anyway, the point’s that eighth-grade Andou was like a totally different person. I guess if I wanted to say it like he would, I’d call one of them his normal self and the other his dark side? Not sure which is which, though. Who could even say who the real Andou Jurai actually is?” Sagami said in an almost gleeful tone of voice.

I would certainly never have described the story Andou told me as “fun,” but that being said, I was glad I’d heard it. Andou was a boy with a borderline excessive capacity to care for his friends, and his case of chuunibyou had always struck me as unusually self-aware. Having heard about his past, I now felt that I was starting to understand where those traits had come from.

“I believe it’s high time you explained yourself, Sagami,” I said. “Why, exactly, did you have me ask Andou about his past?” I had been personally interested in the story, to be sure, and I was glad to have heard it, but I had little to no idea why Sagami would have been invested in me learning the particulars of Andou’s history.

“Oh, Takanashi, please!” said Sagami. “You’re smart enough to figure that out on your own, aren’t you? In fact, I’d wager you already have.”

I closed my eyes, sunk into thought for a few moments, then put my best guess into words. “You did so because the story of his time in the eighth grade—the time he calls the darkest point in his history—did not feature me in any capacity.”

“Bingo,” said Sagami. “I knew you had it in you! You’ve hit the nail on the head. You’re the only one of the four girls in the literary club who didn’t make an appearance during that era of his past—an era so important, you might even call it his roots.”

I fell silent, and a moment later, Sagami carried on.

“I’m sure you’ve already guessed who the girl he met at the park was, right?”

“Indeed. That was Tomoyo, I presume.” Andou had yet to realize it himself, but as an uninvolved party listening to his story from an outside perspective, I found it quite easy to guess. That said, this line of inquiry led me to a question of my own. “How did you know that it was her, though?” I asked. It struck me as strange, considering that I could only guess since I’d heard the story from Andou himself. I had a hard time believing he’d told Sagami about it.

“I have a few rather unique channels of information. As it so happens, I’ve known about Kanzaki Tomoyo since quite a long time ago. I don’t think that she knows much of anything about me other than my name, though. You might say I’m an acquaintance of her brother,” said Sagami. “But let’s get back on topic. You, Takanashi, are the only one who didn’t make an appearance during Andou’s time in the eighth grade. Kushikawa Hatoko was closer to him than anyone, Himeki Chifuyu missed meeting him by a hair’s breadth, and Kanzaki Tomoyo tied the whole story together at the very end of it all. In terms of foreshadowing, those three have far more plot threads tying them to him than you do.”

Once again, I fell silent.

“Being able to say ‘Actually, we’ve met before’ is an absurdly powerful weapon in any heroine’s arsenal. Maybe they made a promise together when they were kids or swore that they’d reunite someday—whatever the specifics, it’s a classic rom-com trope that’ll never go out of fashion, and for good reason. Compared to the other three, it’s plain as could be that you’re lacking in the essential qualities that make a successful heroine. You remember when I told you that you were obviously the least popular heroine in the cast? This is why.”

“And that’s why you had me hear his story...?” I said. So that I could grasp the whole situation before the other three manage to do so? Sagami saw things from the detached perspective of a reader, and by sharing that perspective with me, he’d offered me an objective view of Andou’s history sooner than the others had been able to discern one.

“That’s right,” said Sagami. “There’s one other thing I was aiming for too. I wanted to help you figure out who your real enemy is.”

“My real enemy?”

“Let’s put it this way: I think you probably know very well who the main heroine is now, right?”

Kanzaki Tomoyo.

Kushikawa Hatoko.

Himeki Chifuyu.

Takanashi Sayumi.

Who, out of those four, could the main heroine be?

“Not like there’s any need to ask, really. The main heroine’s obviously Kanzaki Tomoyo,” Sagami continued. “She’s the one who dragged Andou back into his chuuni ways long after he’d abandoned them. You could even say that she’s the one who changed him. She drove away the spirit that was possessing him—or brought in another one to possess him again, I guess. Whichever.”

Andou Jurai’s history featured a dark, gaping void into which a lone silver knight had shined a piercing light—and that knight was Tomoyo.

“She’s this story’s main heroine. No question about it,” said Sagami, declaring it as a simple matter of fact that he, a reader, was capable of perceiving effortlessly. “If this were a light novel, she’d definitely be on the cover of the first volume. If the series got an anime, its editor and publisher would insist on slapping her onto the latest volume’s cover again as a gimmick to boost sales, even if it totally broke the sequence and styles of the covers thus far. That’s the sort of weight her character carries.”

A pause ensued.

“Listen to me, Takanashi. If you want to claim the title of main heroine for yourself, you’re going to need to drag Kanzaki Tomoyo down from her position first. You have to destroy her. There’s no other way.”

“‘Destroy her’? That’s a brutal way of putting it,” I said. “It seems rather excessive, considering we’re discussing the love lives of a group of high schoolers.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean it in a physical sense!” said Sagami. “I mean you’ll have to destroy her status as a heroine. If you let things play out naturally, it’s only a matter of time before Andou connects the dots and realizes that the girl from his past is, in fact, none other than Kanzaki Tomoyo. That’s the direction this story’s heading in right now, and the moment he figures it out? Story’s over.”

“The story’s over”—in other words, Andou would come to a decision as to who he’ll choose, presumably.

“You’re going to have to be very careful to make sure that Andou doesn’t arrive at that conclusion, Takanashi,” said Sagami. “She doesn’t seem inclined to reveal the truth to him herself, but you never know when she might have a change of heart. You’ll have to keep her on a tight leash. Fortunately, you’re the president of her club. Considering your station, I figure you’ll have a pretty easy time working things out, huh?”

“So...that’s what you believe I should be doing?” I asked.

“As long as you can shut her down, you’ll be able to reset the whole playing board and start the story over with a blank slate. It’s the only choice that keeps you in the running. Don’t worry—you see sub-heroines supplanting the main heroine in popularity every once in a while, and it’s not like rom-coms never pair the main guy up with a sub-heroine in the end!”

I felt a faint chill run down my spine. The things he was saying to me were cryptic and borderline incomprehensible. I was struggling to make sense of any of it. I couldn’t understand his viewpoint, or his perspective, or even what he was thinking on a basic level. The words “cosmic horror” flashed into my mind—in that moment, I was feeling the very sort of instinctual terror the genre strove to evoke.

“Sagami...what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?”

“I’ve told you before, haven’t I? I’m a reader, and all I want is to read something interesting.”

“And to do that...you’d willingly sacrifice your friends and lovers?”

“Sacrifice them? I wouldn’t dream of it! All I do is watch. I watch, and then I freely hand out my disgustingly condescending opinions about how things played out, despite the fact that I never did anything at all.”

Another short silence fell before Sagami spoke up again.

“Let’s run through a hypothetical, shall we? Imagine that a character in a manga or a novel somehow gained awareness of their readers. Do you know what that character would think of their spectators? They’d despise them. After all, while the characters had been struggling their hardest to live their lives, fighting in epic battles, or playing out dramatic romances, the readers were just watching from on high, judging their lives as being ‘funny,’ or ‘boring, or ‘a masterpiece,’ or ‘garbage.’ The readers would look like a bunch of worthless, arrogant critics, and nothing more.”

Sagami was muttering to himself. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about in the least, but his tone struck me as somewhat self-deprecating. What would a character in a work of fiction think if they learned about their readers? I had no answer—it was a question I would’ve never even thought to consider on my own.

“And Tamaki?” I said.

“Huh?”

“What are your thoughts regarding her?”

“Can’t say I have any,” said Sagami. “I was into heroines like her for a while, but I’m over that phase. That’s about it.”

“So then...your nickname, ‘Sagamin.’ You’re not clinging to it out of a sense of guilt you feel toward her?”

Another pause ensued. This time, for just a moment, Sagami had fallen silent. I had to wonder what the look on his face might’ve told me if we’d been speaking in person, rather than over the phone.

“Oh, please, Takanashi!” Sagami finally said. “Don’t try to foreshadow some sort of big twist that reveals I’m actually a nice guy at heart! I just took a liking to that nickname, that’s all. Nothing deeper to it than that.”

“Is that so?”

“Anyway, I think we can call it a day! I’ll get in touch next time I come up with a fun idea. Nighty-night!”

With that lighthearted farewell, Sagami hung up. I stowed my phone in my pocket and looked up to the sky. “I simply can’t comprehend that boy,” I sighed to myself.

Sagami Shizumu’s thought processes were completely opaque to me. The one thing that I could say for sure was that everything he had said to me had been solely for the sake of his own amusement. It was like how readers of manga tended to doodle manga of their own on a whim every once in a while. He didn’t have any real goal or intent behind his maneuvering—he’d leaped into it on a whim and would give it up the moment he lost interest. He was acting not for someone else’s sake, but rather for his own self-satisfaction, and he seemed to believe the world existed for that purpose. Of course, all that being said...

“...I hardly have a right to criticize him, seeing as we’ve joined forces.”

My apologies, Andou. I’ve taken advantage of your goodwill to drag the story of your past out of you. I may have been guided along this path by someone else, but the decision to walk it was mine and mine alone. I did so knowing perfectly well that it was a horrid means to my ends.

Still, though...in spite of everything, I simply wanted to understand you.