Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 7 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue ★ Yes, I Am a Lady in Love!

“Oh. I see, Tomoyo...”

Hatoko took my explanation in stride, replying with a calm, yet somehow fragile, smile.

Our summer vacation had felt long, yet short; like it had lasted an eternity, but was over in an instant; as still as Closed Clock, but as fiery as Dark and Dark. One way or another, though, it had come to an end, and we’d arrived at the first day of our second semester.

After the opening ceremony had wrapped up, I’d asked Hatoko to have a chat with me in the literary club’s room. We’d ended up alone, just like we’d been when we’d met here before summer break, and this time, I gave Hatoko an answer to the question she’d asked me a month ago. I couldn’t answer it back then, and I’d dragged it out for far too long, but this time, I told her the truth, straight up, unambiguously, without any vagueness or apologies and without trying to brush it off. I told her how I really felt, holding nothing back. I looked her in the eye and poured my heart out to her.

“So, you really do... I had a feeling,” said Hatoko.

“Yeah,” I replied.

There was a very particular sort of feeling in the air between us. It was like things were strained, yet at the same time, like they’d relaxed to a state of stability. It was still a fragile state, though, that seemed like it could be shattered by the slightest of impacts. That was just how I saw it, of course, and maybe it was all just in my head.

The one thing I could say for sure was that the desperation I’d felt coming from Hatoko before had vanished. The pointed but fragile attitude she’d shown me before summer break, as unstable as a block of ice, had disappeared entirely, leaving the usual Hatoko in its place. Well, maybe not quite—there was something about her now that felt a little different. A little more adultlike, or womanly. She’d gone to the beach with Andou, apparently, and I figured something must have happened then. She’d had the sort of summer experience that could change a girl into a woman, just like I had.

...Wait, no, not like that! Not in a weird way!

“Hey, Tomoyo,” Hatoko eventually said. “You...know about ruby text, right?”

“Huh? Uh, I mean, yeah.”

Ruby text was, to put it simply, a quirk of written Japanese used to resolve ambiguities when text could be pronounced in more than one way. In those cases, you’d often see small phonetic text written above the main text to clarify its pronunciation. Those phonetic guides were called ruby text. I think pretty much everyone in this day and age had seen it in some form or another, but a surprising number of people didn’t know what it was actually called.

“Then you know how sometimes ruby text can be a little, well...weird, right? They’ll write readings up there that aren’t how the text is usually read at all, or even put in random English words that have nothing to do with the accompanying text whatsoever.”

“Yeah, true,” I said.

In newspapers, textbooks, and the like—formal writing, basically—ruby text was almost always used for clarity. Manga and light novels, however, had a tendency to use it in a rather more unique, and some might say stylish, sort of way. The names that Andou had given our powers are a great example, actually. He’d come up with ways to write them in standard Japanese characters, but the actual names we used for them—Closed Clock, for instance—were all written in English as ruby text.

“Juu’s told me about all that stuff before. He’s told me about it a bunch of times, really...but it’s never really clicked with me. I can’t help but think, why would you tell people to read characters in such weird, wrong ways? What on earth makes that cool?”

I had to imagine that most average people would feel the same way. The inherent appeal of creative ruby text was one of those things that couldn’t be described in words. Either you got it, or you didn’t.

“So, I asked Juu, and he told me that the easiest example to understand would be writing ‘friends’ as normal text and ‘rivals’ as its ruby text.”

Friends, but rivals. It was...well, honestly, it was about as basic and played-out as creative ruby text could get. It’s a bit of wordplay that’s been so well used over the years, you could practically imagine the layers of fingerprinty grime that had built up on it. Of course, when something was that basic and played-out, you could safely assume it was because it was, fundamentally, really good. It was the sort of wordplay that maintained the grammar of the original sentence while at the same time adding on a nuance that ran the meaning of the sentence in the exact opposite direction, the ruby text and the standard text working together in perfect synergy.

A friend, yet at the same time, a rival. Could there be a more fascinating and appealing sort of relationship than that?

“In the end...even that basic example didn’t make much sense to me,” said Hatoko. “But, you know what? I think I might be starting to understand it now. I’m starting to realize what a friend-rival is.”

“...”

“I’m not going to lose, Tomoyo,” Hatoko said with a grin. It was a straightforward, uncomplicated, perfectly satisfied smile.

Up to that point, I’d never really competed or fought with anyone over something specific. I’d never gotten worked up over my club activities, and I’d always been satisfied with getting average scores in my classes. I was trying to pour my everything into my writing, yes, but it wasn’t like I knew the people I was competing with for the new writer awards I was submitting my stuff for, so it’d never really felt like I was competing with them. And so...

“Yeah. I won’t either.”

...this was the first time in my life I’d ever felt this way.

Friend-rivals. Yeah, I get it. That’s some good ruby text for sure.

At that point, the door slid open, and Sayumi stepped into the club room. We didn’t have any actual activities scheduled, but it seemed she’d decided to drop in anyway. Yokoi Elementary had had its opening ceremony today too, so I had a feeling that Chifuyu might be showing up before long. And of course...he might arrive soon as well.

There was no telling what might happen from here on out. No one could say whether he’d end up with one of us, or whether some totally new character would show up out of nowhere and snatch him away. Absolutely nothing whatsoever was guaranteed...but I’d already taken my first step, and there was no taking it back. I couldn’t just turn a blind eye to it all and go with the flow anymore. The beginning...had come to an end. Now all we could do was set off into the dark and dense woodland before us, with neither rails nor rules to guide us, our ultimate goal obscured by foliage, our friends—our rivals—at our sides.

Now—let us begin. Begin the end of the beginning. Our battle—our romance—starts here.