Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 9 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Saitou Hitomi

You who wish to change, have already begun to do so.

You who wish to remain the same, have already begun to change.

Nothing in this world is unchanging—not a thing.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

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Look. I get it. It’s really not a good look to be padding out the character count by playing “How many ellipses can we fit on a page?” when we’ve literally only just gotten started...but that’s honestly the only way I could ever get the idea of what’s going on here across. If I, Saitou Hitomi, were to attempt to explain the current state of affairs in my apartment, it would by necessity turn out like, well...that.

It was an early afternoon in August, a time of the year when the bulk of students were on summer vacation. The weather outside was so sunny and cloudless it was honestly a bit much—the blue sky so perfectly clear that it felt a little irritating stretched overhead, and the chirping of the cicadas that was so indicative of the season was becoming a major racket.

In sharp contrast to the height-of-summer environment that dominated the outside world, the climate within my room was silent and frigid. If I wanted to draw an easy comparison to characterize the current atmosphere, “the Cold War” would fit the bill nicely. The apartment’s current inhabitants had their backs turned to each other in a display of “I don’t even want to look at your stupid face” energy, lending the overall mood a sense of incredible tension.

One of them—needless to say—was me, the fourth-year college student whose student-tier apartment we were sitting in. I was only renting the place, so it wasn’t technically mine-mine, but I was, nevertheless, its current occupant. This is important, so I’m going to say it one more time just to be on the safe side: this was my room, my name was on the lease, and I paid the rent, making me the one who held indisputable power over it.

Then there was him, the other person in the room: Kiryuu Hajime, aka Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First. About a year beforehand, he’d barged his way into my apartment for an extended stay, over the course of which he’d never helped with the chores, never chipped in for rent or food, and generally acted like he owned the place, spending each and every day lazing around like a self-indulgent slob. In other words: he was a total freeloader.

To make matters worse, he wasn’t even doing anything, in a broad sense. He didn’t have a career, and he wasn’t looking for one either. He’d dropped out of college partway through, and he’d gotten fired from his job at a convenience store a little while back. He wasn’t studying for any sort of professional qualifications, and he hadn’t even bothered visiting an employment office. He was, in other words, not in education, employment, or training: a genuine NEET, as the expression goes. Possibly a name change was in order—Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-NEET had a certain ring to it.

“Hey,” a frightfully low voice grunted from behind me as I gazed out the window. It was, of course, Kiryuu (etc.)-NEET himself. “Food?” he continued, without even looking at me. His irritation and anger were very clear to hear in his curt one-word request, which just pissed me off even more than ever.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll have food soon, but I’m afraid that none of it will be available to you,” I said, channeling all the passive-aggression I could into an excessively polite reply. I was just as upset as he was, and there was no way I’d be backing down that easily.

“Huh?” Hajime grunted indignantly.

“I sent Umeko out with some money to buy a meal for me—just me. She won’t be getting anything for you. If you’d like to eat today, then please feel free to go buy something for yourself!”

“Oh, you little...” Hajime growled as he turned to face me. The ever-present glint in his eyes took on an even sharper, more dangerous edge than usual, and his color-contact-enabled heterochromia tripled the effect.

I, however, was not going to let him get the better of me today. I was mad. To use a bit of slightly dated slang, I pitied the fool.

“What’s up with the petty harassment crap?” asked Hajime.

“What’s up with it? Maybe you should press your chest to your hand, gaze deep into your heart, and ask yourself that!” I sarcastically shot back, then I turned away again with a huff. I was usually way too much of a chicken to be that openly incendiary, but today was an exception. I’d be as snide and petty as I had to be until that stupid NEET finally got it through his thick skull that the world did not, in fact, revolve around him!

“Yeah, uh, Hitomi?” said Hajime. “It’s ‘press a hand to your chest,’ not ‘chest to your hand,’ isn’t it?”

“...”

C-C-Craaaaaap! Of all the stupid screw-ups! The tension had been so thick you could cut it with a knife, and then I just had to go and screw up an idiom in the dumbest way imaginable. God, the shame! And the fact that things were feeling pretty serious for a second there makes it so much worse too!

“Wow, loooser! You were totally proud of that one before you realized you’d screwed it up, weren’t you? Talk about lame! God, I’m embarrassed just looking at you!” Hajime jeered with a sneering smirk, salting the wound with brutal efficiency.

My inner shame meter jumped straight up to eleven, and I felt my cheeks flush. “I-I did not screw up anything!” I shouted. I couldn’t back down, which meant the only option left was to double down. “I said what I said, and I meant it! You wouldn’t believe how much I didn’t screw that up!”

“You did, and you know it.”

“That’s just how people say it back where I grew up!”

“We grew up in the same place, numbnuts!”

“And anyway, they mean the same thing! Hand to chest, chest to hand—what difference does it make?! You’re still touching the same spot with the same appendage!”

“Feels pretty damn different to me. ‘Press your chest to your hand’ makes it sound like your hand’s sitting still in space and you’re thrusting your chest into it. Whole other nuance.”

“Wh-What’s so weird about thrusting your chest into your hand?!”

“Like. Everything? Are you seriously asking that? It’s stupid unnatural.”

“It is not! See?!” I shouted, then I thrust my chest into my hands. I really do mean I thrust it too, full force, sticking it as far out and as smooshed into my palms as I could manage. Well, I was just thrusting at first, but then I got sort of fired up and it turned into more of a rubbing that eventually ended up as something closer to full-blown groping.

Hajime cringed, hard. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Gah!” I yelped as I snapped back to reality. Wh-What the hell was I doing just now? Did I really just grope my own b-b-boobs in front of Hajime...? Oh god, what should I do?! If I just accidentally turned him on, I’d...be pretty okay with that, actually... No! No, no, no! Get it together, Hitomi!

“If you wanna pull off that sorta fanservice, try growing an actual rack first.”

“Bwah?!”

“Sheesh—it’s already stifling in here, so think you could try not making it even more uncomfortable with whatever the hell that was supposed to be?”

“...Graaah!” I roared. My rage and shame levels had both surpassed their limits, and I actually went “Grah,” straight-up. It turns out that you really can lose the capacity for speech if you get angry enough.

“I— You— Agggh! A-Anyway!” I shouted, then I pointed dramatically at the floor—which was, by the way, the reason I was so irate in the first place. “Absolutely all of this, from start to finish, is your fault for turning my room into your personal pigsty!”

The floor was almost entirely covered by a tremendous quantity of manga, in both volume and magazine form. The situation was so bad you literally couldn’t walk across the room without stepping on one. I could barely even see the carpet I kept on my floor beneath them all.

“I told you to get them cleaned up by the time I got home, no matter what it took, and you didn’t even try... Actually, I think it’s even worse than it was before I left!”

“Well, what do you expect?” asked Hajime. “I started cleaning up, but then I took a break to read a volume, got hooked, and I had totally swapped over to reading mode before I knew it.”

“Why do you think that gives you the moral high ground?! That’s the most played-out cleaning mistake you could possibly make!”

Hajime was an avid weekly manga magazine reader. He’d been buying one in particular on a weekly basis ever since we were in high school, and he still hadn’t kicked the habit. And, I mean, that wasn’t a problem in and of itself. He bought them with his own money, and I wasn’t about to call him out for reading a magazine named Weekly Shonen Whatever even though he wasn’t part of its clearly stated age demographic anymore. As such, I hadn’t complained at all about him buying Jump every week after we started living together. If anything, it was kind of charming how little he’d changed since we’d parted ways after high school.

When his magazines started dominating my living space, though? That was a different question entirely. Even the smallest things add up over time. If you put enough grains of sand together, you’ll have a beach, and if you put enough copies of Jump together, you’ll have a mountain...and if that mountain collapses, you’ll have a disaster.

That’s precisely the situation I found my room in about a year after Hajime’s freeloading began. The towering pile of magazines in the corner of my apartment had been growing more and more mountainous week by week, and last night, the slightest touch had knocked the whole thing over. My place wasn’t big to begin with, and needless to say, the tower’s collapse had left the room buried in magazines. To make matters worse, Hajime had been buying magazines other than Jump recently as well—in his words, “Young Jump and Bessatsu have been killing it lately”—making the sheer volume of magazines just plain overwhelming. I had a small sea’s worth of books covering my floor.

“For crying out loud... What am I even supposed to do about this? Magazines pile up so quickly when you read them week by week,” I muttered.

“Yeah, that’s the one big downside to those things,” said Hajime.

“Actually, wait a second—the online edition of Jump goes on sale at the same time as the physical one these days! Can’t you just start buying it digitally? If you got it as an ebook, it wouldn’t have to clutter up the place!”

I thought that was a great idea to keep my apartment clean and junk-free, but Hajime had other ideas. “Hitomi... You just don’t get it,” he sighed with a disgusted, condescending scowl. It was like he was simultaneously looking down on me and pitying me.

Huh? What? Was that really that out-there of a suggestion?

“You don’t buy weekly manga magazines just to read the series you like. You buy them for the feel of their paper, for their heft, for all the other random series that’re serialized in them, for the ads... All of that crap comes together to make them what they are, and the experience is made complete by the act of going out to a store to buy them. It’s a ritual. When you follow a weekly magazine, you actualize the connection between your personal identity and the world around you. Going out to a store to buy the book at the same time every week or month allows you to simultaneously appreciate both the fluidity and the immutable nature of reality in one fell swoop. It’s a cyclical routine and a source of incredibly varied psychological stimuli all in one—truly, the spice of life! How could I even describe the sense of elation that going to the convenience store on Monday and setting my sights on a pile of brand-new Jump magazines brings? How could I explain the skill needed to slip your hand between the legs of the layabouts who’re loitering around the store to read them just to snag your own copy? Where do you vent the rage you feel when you end up making it to the store too late and have to settle for the one remaining copy that’s all beaten up after being read cover to cover by who knows how many unpaying customers? And what else... Oh, then there are those moments when you casually walk into a convenience store on a Saturday, only to catch sight of a new double issue of Jump. How do you characterize the complicated mixture of joy from knowing you’ll get to read an issue you thought you’d have to wait until Monday for and irritation with yourself for having forgotten that it’d be going on sale on Saturday? That’s a truly special feeling—one you can’t get in any other way! And, really, what’s the point of digital copies, anyway? I know they have their merits, of course, but are they worth losing out on the feeling of turning the pages? Not to mention the impact of opening up a two-page spread! I really do think physical media’s the superior format here. Oh, and not to change the topic, but nothing pisses me off quite like clerks who decide to put your magazine and the meat bun you bought with it in the same—”

“How are you still talking?!” I shouted. I couldn’t take it anymore. His response was just too long, no matter how you sliced it! And he hadn’t even said anything of any real substance!

Hajime sighed wearily. “Okay, fine, have it your way,” he droned as he slowly heaved himself to his feet. “If I bring in any more books, this puny-ass room’ll be totally out of space, so fair enough. So it goes. If one is to open up a new door of destiny, one must first cut away the ancient bonds that hold them back.”

“Yes! Well said!” I replied, genuinely a little proud of him. Just for that, I’d let him get away with calling my room puny even though he was a freeloader, and I’d even refrain from calling out his cringe-inducingly chuuni choice of wording. On the rare occasion he found his motivation, it was of the utmost importance that I not say anything that could damage it...so, basically, I just had to treat him like I’d treat a literal child. “Okay, then let’s get cleaning! Tomorrow’s paper-recycling day, so we’ll have to get all of these gathered up before then.”

“Great. Gimme a sec first, though. Gotta cut out all the color pages and one-shots first.”

“You can’t possibly be serious!”

“Hey, some of those one-shots literally never get reprinted! You gotta cut ’em out and save them or you might never get to read them again. That’s just common sense. I’ve got a whole stock of masterpiece one-shots filed away back at my place—Hoshino’s Continue, Fukushima’s Swimming’s on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, you name it!”

“Common sense my foot! Quit wasting time on that nonsense and clean up your mess!”

“Nonsense...? Look, Hitomi, I’m making a pretty big concession by cleaning this up for you! Is that really the attitude you wanna take with me right now?”

“That’s my line!” Agggh, this stupid, self-centered jackass, I swear! Everything about this situation is his fault from start to finish, and he has the gall to act like I’m imposing on him?

Once again, the two of us sank into silent rage, and the room returned to its former state of dangerous turbulence—and that’s when the door opened.

“I have returned,” a childlike voice rang out in a distinctly not childlike and kind of archaic register. Umeko, it seemed, was back from her lunch run. “I see your chambers are still in disarray,” she muttered as she stepped inside and took in my room’s pathetically uncleanly state. She almost always wore the same surly, unreadable expression, but in that moment, I felt like I could see the slightest trace of exasperation on her face as well.

“Welcome back, Umeko,” I said. “And it’s not what you think! Hajime—”

“Hey, don’t go throwing me under the bus,” Hajime cut in.

“Oh, that’s rich coming from you of all—”

“Will you not cease this quarrel?” Umeko asked in a tone that came across as indifferent and admonishing at the same time. She took off her shoes, stepped into the room, hopped through the sea of magazines from empty spot to empty spot, and set the convenience store bag she was carrying down on the table. “I bring your midday meal.”

“Oh, thanks... Wait, huh?” I said. “You got three of them...?”

“Of course. Enough for you, for me, and for First.”

“B-But... I told you to buy enough for two people...and I only gave you enough money to get two lunches too, didn’t I? Y-You didn’t—”

“Fear not. I purchased them legitimately. I keep a modest purse in reserve for such occasions,” Umeko calmly reassured me. Apparently, I’d been worried for nothing.

Tanaka Umeko was once known as System, and she currently bore the title White Rulebook. She was the ultimate Player, having been created for the specific purpose of bringing down every other participant in the Spirit War, and she’d joined up with our group just recently. At first everyone had been downright terrified of her on account of her power, but surprisingly, I found her fitting in with the group dynamic before I knew it. Her adorable appearance and docile, honest personality had led to us—the girls in particular—treating her as our group’s mascot, more or less. We’d even started giving her spending money whenever we had an excuse, though I certainly never imagined that she’d been saving it all up instead of using it.

“You don’t mean... You’ve been saving up this whole time, and you used it for this?” I said, horrified. “Look at him—he’s a good-for-nothing deadbeat who can’t even clean up after himself! He doesn’t deserve lunch!”

“Who’re you calling a deadbeat?” Hajime piped up. “Though actually, one of my many titles is the Heartbeat of Death’s Domain. I’ll just go ahead and assume you misspoke.”

“Hitomi,” Umeko said, entirely ignoring Mister Literally Zero Remorse and looking me in the eye. “I know well how First’s insolence must vex you, but should you respond in kind, your quarrel will continue unabated when it need not persist. It is simply his nature to redouble his rebellion the more you strive to quash it. Like a coiled spring, the sole result of restraining him more rigorously will be that he lashes back more intensely in turn. You must instead treat him with lenience. When faced with one who refuses to grow up, one must act the adult in their place.”

I kinda just...gaped at her. While I was stunned silent, Umeko turned her gaze to Hajime.

“As for you, First,” she said.

“Yeah?” Hajime grunted.

“While I understand your willingness to avail yourself of Hitomi’s tendency to indulge you, your intemperance is becoming exploitative. You must not forget to express your thankfulness for the benevolence you have been shown. You have utmost faith in Hitomi, so perhaps you believe it safe to act the arrogant boor in her presence as a result...but you must bear in mind that she is neither your mother nor a saint. It is often said that familiarity breeds contempt, and you would do well to bear that concept in mind and ensure you do not effectuate her resentment.”

Now it was Hajime’s turn to gape at her in shock. She had both of us dead to rights, and there wasn’t a thing we could say in our defense. A girl who looked like she couldn’t possibly be older than five or six had just looked a couple of twenty-somethings in the eye and admonished them so thoroughly, they were left chastised and speechless.

“Now then, let us partake of our meal,” said Umeko. “A full stomach will make such petty irritations irk less, I should think, and once we have finished, I shall aid in your cleaning. Between the three of us, the work should take but a moment.”

Somehow, the little girl was far and away the most mature person in the room. All Hajime and I could do was nod, agree, and go along with her suggestion.

In the end, our cleanup did go by remarkably quickly once we’d actually started applying ourselves to it. It turns out that “less talking, more working” really is an efficient way to go about these things sometimes.

“With that settled,” said Umeko, “although it may be somewhat early for the task, I intend to depart to obtain ingredients for supper.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that!” I said. “You went out to get us lunch and everything, so I’ll handle getting us dinner!”

“No need to be bothered. I enjoy such excursions, and I do not dislike errands.”

“Are you sure...? It sort of feels like everyone’s been using—err, I mean, asking you to do all their errands for them lately.”

“I do not mind,” Umeko replied indifferently. “Although I may not let it show, I assure you, I am enjoying this so-called ordinary life I have been granted.”

All I could do at that point was take her word for it and accept her offer. I put together a list of the stuff I wanted and handed it over to her along with the money she’d need to buy it all. Umeko grabbed her trusty cloth shopping bag and headed out to the neighborhood supermarket without missing a beat.

“Umeko’s really changed, hasn’t she?” I muttered after she left. “She barely talked at all back when we first met her, and when we asked her to do something, she’d just do it without a word of protest. She used to be like a machine, but look at her now...”

Now, she could express herself articulately and showed no hesitation to do so. She made the things she wanted to do clear to us, and if she thought we were screwing up, she would freely admonish us for it, like she’d just demonstrated.

“Oh, but you know...I guess it makes sense,” I continued. “She was only just born about a month ago, after all. Considering that, I guess it’s no real surprise that her personality would go through some big shifts.”

Maybe back when we’d first met, Umeko had been more or less the same as a newborn. She’d known nothing of the world back then, but now, over the course of this past month, she’d learned all sorts of things and grown as a result. I mean...maybe she’s grown just a little bit too much? She kinda comes across as an elder, actually. It feels like her mental age is way, way higher than mine, even.

“Bwa ha ha! She’s changed, huh?” Hajime said with a derisive chuckle as he skillfully sorted the manga he’d finished reading. He had the same cynical, posturing smile on his face as always. “Tell me, Hitomi—do you mean she’s changed for the better, or the worse?”

“Huh?”

“Development and deterioration, evolution and devolution—they’re all types of change, aren’t they? If you chart them out on a number line, one and negative one both come out to the same absolute value. A one’s a one, no matter what direction it travels in. Change and the lack thereof is a concept totally disassociated from the question of good versus bad. Saying somebody’s changed can mean two entirely opposite things, depending solely on the context you say it in. So, let me ask again, Hitomi,” Hajime said, letting his sunglasses slide ever so slightly down the bridge of his nose and shooting a piercing look toward me. “How, exactly, do you mean that Umeko’s changed?”

“F-For the better, of course!” I replied. “I mean, she talks so much more now, and she’s so much more assertive too! She was like a puppet or a machine just a little while ago, but now she acts... Um, I mean...”

“Like she’s human?” Hajime said, blithely finishing the thought I’d hesitated to express.

“Look... What are you trying to say here?”

“Oh, nothing much. Nothing important, anyway.”

Nothing important, he says. When I really thought about it, of course, it was actually pretty rare for Hajime’s ramblings to be important in any real capacity. Generally speaking, he just liked saying stuff that sounded like it was super significant and deep. The actual, practical depth wasn’t really a factor for him.

As I shook my head with half-formed exasperation, though, Hajime continued. “However,” he said, “Umeko isn’t a human, or a spirit for that matter. I have to wonder what sort of effect someone like her becoming more humanlike is going to have on this story going forward.”

I fell silent. Tanaka Umeko, the ultimate Player, had been successfully pulled into Fallen Black’s roster a month ago, and she had been our unbeatable trump card ever since. She wasn’t just an addition to our fighting force—she was powerful enough to be our fighting force all by herself. In truth, however...Umeko had yet to engage in so much as a single battle. She’d chipped in a little while we’d wiped out the remnants of F in their hideout, but that aside, she hadn’t used her power at all.

A Player powerful enough to earn the title of “ultimate” had spent her days contributing nothing in particular to our fight. She’d gone out to handle chores that literally anyone could do, hung out with the girls on our team, and lived a life entirely unassociated with battles on the whole. Why? Simple: it was our boss’s orders.

For whatever reason, Hajime had expressly stated that Umeko was not to participate in any battles until further notice. Umeko never questioned any of our direct orders, as a rule, so she had gone along with this one without so much of a word of complaint as well, but to the rest of us, it was an unfathomable mystery. We had the most powerful ability in the whole War on our side, one that was practically cheating, so why weren’t we using it for all it was worth?

Maybe his goal was to reinforce the idea of her supremacy by conspicuously not making use of her power? It seemed likely that every Player in the War knew that we’d taken down F and recruited the ultimate Player they’d created, but that being said, we were probably the only ones who actually knew specifically what her power did. It seemed plausible that Hajime was going out of his way to keep those particulars secret. After all, nothing was more terrifying than an enemy who wielded a completely unknown power. With no specifics available beyond the simple fact that she was unbeatable, it would be shocking if Umeko didn’t become the subject of our enemies’ dread.

Of course, there was also always the possibility that Hajime was simply holding her in reserve, waiting for the perfect, most effective opportunity to play our trump card...but, I mean...would he really? Hajime? It seemed way more likely that he’d decided that using her would give him less time in the spotlight, or that he couldn’t let anyone other than himself get called the “ultimate” anything.

“Oh, right. Hey, Hitomi, heard anything from Toki and Akutagawa?” Hajime asked, seeming to remember he’d been meaning to inquire about them as he finally finished organizing his manga.

“No, not yet,” I replied. “I’ve tried to get in contact with them, but neither of them have replied so far.”

Toki and Akutagawa had both dropped out of touch over the past several days. Neither of them were the sort to check in on a daily basis to begin with, but both of them going off the radar simultaneously was enough of a coincidence to make me worry that something might have happened.

“Leatia said they were going up against a couple of Hearts’s people, but who even knows what they’re thinking, really,” said Hajime.

“And Leatia hasn’t said anything else since, so I can’t imagine they lost, but still...”

I couldn’t help but worry, especially considering which two members of our team we were talking about. Fallen Black had always been a group that valued not interfering in each others’ business any more than absolutely necessary. Our team spirit was as weak as could be, and those two were the most extreme examples thereof. They always held themselves at a distance from the rest of us, refusing to let anyone into their figurative territory. From my perspective, both of them lived by terribly practical sets of values.

“Maybe they just have personal crap to sort out,” Hajime said with a somewhat faraway look in his eyes. “Those two’re a couple of brats, after all.”

“I don’t think that a guy who’s unemployed, living off the allowance he gets from his parents, and freeloading off a girl he knows has any right to call them brats.”

“Looking back on it, they did sorta just fall into the team by happenstance. They’re not loyal, and they don’t really think of us as a team either. It’s nothing more than an alliance of convenience for them.”

I hesitated to reply.

“But,” Hajime said before I could find the right words, his tone powerful and confident, “even if their intent wasn’t clear, those two still chose me. That’s a fact, and nothing can change it. Even if it was a choice they sleepwalked into on a whim, it’s still a choice they made by their own will.”

“A choice...” I repeated.

“And, hey—if this means they’re learning to look the choices they’ve made before now in the eye, then maybe they’re growing up a little too.”

Growth—in other words, change. Had some form of change come to Toki Shuugo and Akutagawa Yanagi as well? For all I knew, the two of them were beginning to shift, just like Umeko had gone through her own shockingly high-speed transformation.

That being said...whether you were talking in terms of development or deterioration, evolution or devolution—really, no matter what form of change under the sun—Kiryuu Hajime remained ever unchanging. I was no Professor Anzai, but I still had to steal one of his most famous lines when it came to Hajime and say that he hadn’t grown in the least. Hajime had remained stubbornly consistent ever since we were students. He was so unchanging, it was as if time had stopped for him and him alone.

Our world was in a constant state of flux, but Hajime was the one person who could reject that reality and remain as he always had been. If “You’ve changed” can be a compliment or an insult depending on the context it was said in, then the same is true of “You haven’t changed”—and Kiryuu Hajime hadn’t changed a bit, for better or for worse.

“Hm? What?” asked Hajime.

I sighed. “Nothing, really. I’ll try giving them a call again.”

I pulled out my smartphone and looked up our two missing members’ numbers, starting with Toki.