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

Epilogue

Now—let us conclude the beginning of the end.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

Don’t ask me to explain how, but apparently, at some point while I wasn’t looking, Fallen Black had triumphed in our war against Hearts.

When Leatia had told me about our victory, I’d thought, Oh, that’s nice! Toki and Akutagawa must’ve pulled it off for us. Guess they dug their heels in, manned up, and did what they do best. Heh heh heh—seems my little pep talk was just what they needed! I’d felt pretty good about myself for a moment, but once I asked for a little more in the way of details, I’d learned that Aki and Fan had apparently participated too.

Seriously, what on earth happened? Hmm... Well, whatever. A victory’s a victory, I guess.

In any case, that’s how a conflict that’d started without my knowledge ended before I’d even realized it.

A few days later, I found myself driving my car—which, by the way, a certain someone had unilaterally named the White Crow—on a local highway. The sun had already set, and what I could see of the summer sky through the streetlights above was riddled with stars. Hajime was riding shotgun, and Umeko was sitting in the back seat. Our destination: the local water park. That said, the three of us weren’t going there to ride the water slides. No, we were picking someone up: the thirteenth wing of Fallen Black.

He was our organization’s secret member and sole nonparticipant in the War, the bearer of the title Innocent Onlooker (no power included): Sagami Shizumu. He’d missed the last bus home from the water park, so we’d come running to pick him up. From what I’d heard, Sagami had spent the whole day tailing and surveilling a high school girl who’d gone to the park on a date with her unrequited crush...and, well, all I could think was that he was clearly just as much of a revolting creeper as he’d been the last time I’d met him.

To be completely honest, I was so deeply, viscerally repulsed by Sagami that I didn’t want to get anywhere near him, but Hajime didn’t have a driver’s license, so taking the car out meant that my presence was a necessity. I would’ve felt bad about leaving Umeko behind at the apartment on her own, so she’d ended up coming with us. I’d figured that we could take the chance to stop somewhere for dinner on our way home—after we dropped Sagami off, of course.

“Thank you very much, Miss Saitou! Boy, was I ever in trouble—this is a huge help, honestly,” Sagami said as he climbed into my car’s back seat. His smile was as friendly as ever, and his tone was just as ingratiating as always. Judging by looks alone, you’d think he was a perfectly normal high schooler, considering he was pretty handsome in a cute sort of way...until he’d ruin it by opening his mouth.

“Ah. Would you happen to be Umeko? Very nice to meet you—I’ve heard all about you! As for me, I’m Shizumu of the Sagamis, but you can go ahead and call me ‘big brother’ if you’d like. I know I certainly would! Oh, or ‘big bro’—that’d be even better! Really, though, I have to say...a little girl like you sitting in the back seat seems awfully dangerous, don’t you think? All right, Umeko, go ahead and climb up on my lap! I’ll be your personal booster seat!”

I ordered an immediate change of seats. Sagami got to move up to the front, while Hajime took his place in the back.

“Why do I have to sit in back, Hitomi?! There’s no ashtray back here!”

“Excuse me, you old ha— Miss Saitou! That was the perfect chance for me to talk with a little gi— With Umeko, you know?”

The boys on board lodged their complaints, which I proceeded to summarily discard. I’ll protect Umeko come hell or high water!

Anyway, with our seats decided, I shifted the White Crow into drive and steered us out of the water park’s parking lot and back onto the highway.

“So, Sagami,” I said, “where’s your house? Somewhere near your high school?”

“Actually, Miss Saitou,” said Sagami in a rather serious tone, “I’d prefer if you would drop me off somewhere other than my house, if that’s all right with you.”

The destination Sagami gave me was a shock, to say the least. After all—it was a place I’d been to just the other day.

The four of us chatted about all the recent supernatural battles that had gone down until we finally reached our destination. Incidentally, Sagami’s reaction after he’d finished hearing about the Fallen Black vs. Hearts arc boiled down to “Aki and Fantasia didn’t get nearly enough screen time, did they? And why would you even bother digging that deep into the characters of a couple random guys? Absolute trash-tier waste of time, in my book.”

Great! Didn’t ask, don’t care, thank you very much!

“Thank you again, Miss Saitou,” Sagami said with a polite bow as he climbed out of my car. For a guy who was fundamentally a filterless degenerate, he struck me as being weirdly careful about maintaining decorum when it came to stuff like greetings and thank-yous. Ever since we’d first met, he’d been consistently polite when he’d say hello and goodbye, and literally never any other time. I sort of assumed his parents had brought him up to be conscientious about that stuff.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right here, Sagami?” I asked.

“All right how?” he replied.

“Well, it’s awfully late, so...”

“Oh, no, that’s not an issue. I mean, it would be for most people, but I can just ask an acquaintance of mine to let me inside. This place is practically my home away from home,” Sagami said, then he set off down the tree-lined path that led to his destination: the big white general hospital.

I had to wonder whether this was fate. That was the only explanation I could think of for why Sagami would ask to be dropped off at the very same hospital we’d tailed Hajime to just a few days beforehand—the exact one where Hajime’s mother was hospitalized...

“I wonder what Sagami’s doing here?” I muttered.

“Paying someone a visit, probably,” said Hajime, puffing out a cloud of smoke. He’d gotten out of the car to have a cigarette before we drove off again. “His mom’s hospitalized here, see.”

“Wha— Sagami’s is too?” I blurted out reflexively...then I instantly realized that I’d screwed up.

“Too?” Hajime repeated incredulously.

“Ah...”

“What do you mean too, Hitomi? Who else is hospitalized here?”

“Err... Well, umm... I mean, uhh...”

I was, in a phrase, freaking the hell out. As I racked my mind for an escape route, however...

“Oh? Is that you, Hajime?”

...a woman strolled up to the car. It was the same elegant nurse with the remarkably quiet laugh whom I’d met when we ended up at the hospital the first time. She must have just gotten off work, since she wasn’t wearing her uniform this time, but rather a plain white shirt with a cardigan thrown over it.

It wasn’t long before the woman noticed me too. “Oh? Aren’t you...?” she began.

“Hello! It’s nice to see you again,” I replied. For a moment I found myself thinking that really, it was late enough that I probably should’ve gone for a “good evening” instead...but then I realized that I’d made yet another, much larger error.

“‘Nice to see you again’? What’s going on here, Hitomi?”

“...”

Aaaaaaugh! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Just how deep do I have to dig myself into this hole before I’m satisfied?! And after the nurse was nice enough to not finish her thought and blow my cover too!

It was very clear at that point that I was both a terrible liar and terrible at selling other people’s lies. I really couldn’t have been more disappointed in myself.

“Why do you know her?” asked Hajime, jabbing a finger toward the nurse as he questioned me. I couldn’t even bring myself to look him in the eye, but before I had the chance to try to explain, the nurse spoke up again.

“Now just one minute, Hajime,” she said, sounding a little angry with him...before carrying on with a statement that took me from a state of blind, frenzied panic to a state of complete mental emptiness in a single sentence.

“Is that any way to talk about your own mother?”

My mind went blank. I was so stunned, my eyes were probably as wide as dinner plates. I’d lost my vision in one of my eyes after an illness, and I’d made a point of keeping it constantly closed since I didn’t like letting other people see it ever since, but in that moment I completely forgot that whole aspect of my personality and opened up both of them as wide as could be in a stare of pure wonderment.

“H-H-His mother...? Huh? Huuuuuuuuuh?!” I blathered, turning my gaze from Hajime to the nurse and back again. “W-Wait, so...you’re Hajime’s mother?!”

“Well, yeah,” said the nurse. “Didn’t I tell you when we met the other day?”

“N-No, you didn’t... You definitely didn’t!”

“Hmm... You know, now that you mention it, maybe it slipped my mind. I only talked to you because you seemed to be his friend, so I guess I must have assumed you already knew! But, I mean...wasn’t it sort of obvious from context? You remember the part where I said that I’d known him since he was thiiis little, right?” she said, holding up her thumb and index finger about three centimeters apart again.

Okay, no, wait a second. Are you telling me that when you said “since he was this little”...that wasn’t humorous hyperbole?! You actually meant it?! You were saying that you’d known him since he was small enough that you’d have to take an ultrasound to see him?! That was all completely literal?!

“I guess I didn’t get the point across last time, so let me introduce myself,” the nurse said, perfectly calm in the face of my bug-eyed panic attack. She let out a very quiet chuckle, then said, “I’m Hajime’s mother, Kiryuu Rei. Thank you for being such a good friend to my son.”

That was probably my cue to reintroduce myself as well...but I was just plain speechless.

Kiryuu Rei. Rei, written as “zero”—the predecessor to Hajime, written as “one.” The number from which one is born. The source of the surname Kiryuu, which Hajime stubbornly clung to instead of taking on his father’s surname Kanzaki. It was her. The slim, elegant-looking nurse with the quiet laugh...was her.

“Wh-Wh-Wha... W-W-W-Wait, wait, wait just a second, hold on.” I stammered, reining in a truly unprecedented level of panic and confusion just enough to squeeze out the incredibly pressing question that was now eating away at me. “If you’re Hajime’s mother...then who was the woman we talked about who he came here to visit back then? The one who’s been hospitalized here for years...?” I asked, spitting the question out so quickly I totally forgot to cover up the fact that I’d stalked him to the hospital.

“I guess even a kid like him feels like paying his mother a visit every once in a while,” she’d said. Thanks to one unimaginably misleading comment on Rei’s part, I’d gotten completely the wrong idea about the whole situation, and evidently, Hajime hadn’t been there to visit his mother after all. But in that case, just who on earth had he been visiting?

At that point, Hajime himself spoke up to answer my question. “She’s—”

☆

In a room on the third floor of the hospital’s second ward, within an undecorated chamber, a woman lay sleeping. She slumbered peacefully, tucked into white covers atop a white bed.

The woman was beautiful. Although her face and the hand that peeked out from under the covers were emaciated, there was nevertheless something mystically, ephemerally lovely about her features, like she was a fairy or a goddess. A nameplate near her pillow identified her as one Sagami Shizuka.

“Wait a minute... These are the steamed buns they sell at the stall downstairs, aren’t they?” said a boy—Sagami Shizumu—as he inspected the box of sweets that had been left by Shizuka’s pillow. “No doubt about it—only Kiryuu would be thoughtless enough to leave a get-well gift that’s this awful. Hmm. I guess that means he dropped by for a visit recently too.”

Sagami gazed intently at the box as he sat down on a stool by the bed.

“Or maybe...it wasn’t a get-well gift after all? Maybe he meant them for me. We used to eat those things all the time, after all. Rei would buy them for us, and we’d share the box,” he muttered to himself, his eyes drifting half closed in a moment of nostalgia as he opened the box of sweets up. “You know, now that I think of it, this is probably the closest thing I have to my mother’s home cooking,” he said in a jocular tone, then he popped one of the buns into his mouth, eating it in a single bite. He chewed, swallowed, then looked back to the bed.

“Listen to this, mom,” Sagami said, taking hold of Shizuka’s hand—the one that didn’t have an IV drip attached to it—and looking at her with a gentle fondness in his eyes. “I went to the pool today with Andou and Takanashi. Well, not with them, really—I was spying on them, technically. Ha ha...it sort of feels like I’ve been telling you about Andou every time I stop by, now that I think about it. He’s just such a funny guy, I can’t help but pay attention to him. So right, we were at the pool, and Takanashi—”

Sagami went on to spin his story like a master minstrel, singing the tale of his day at the pool—of the story he’d experienced from a reader’s perspective...

☆

“I’m the Thirteenth Wing of Fallen Black: Innocent Onlooker, or Sagami Shizumu.”

“Kiryuu and I are, well...I guess most people would call us childhood friends.”

“His mother helped me out way back whenever, anyway.”

At first I was so shocked I could hardly even cope, but when I finally managed to calm down and think the revelation through, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to stomach. It felt like I’d been given quite a few hints, even, at least in retrospect. In any case, it was now clear that the woman who had been put into critical condition by a traffic accident and had been hospitalized ever since was none other than Sagami’s mother, and evidently the nurse in charge of her was Hajime’s birth mother.

As soon as I understood those two facts, everything seemed to fit into place. Kiryuu Hajime and Sagami Shizumu were, according to Sagami, something akin to childhood friends (which, also according to Sagami, was a status “worth less than garbage” if they were the same sex as you). Their relationship had been something of an enigma, but now, it finally made sense. The truth was that we’d maybe, ever so slightly—

“We leaped to a conclusion and missed the mark, when all is said and done. It would seem that First’s motive to engage in this War was not to awaken his unconscious mother after all.”

“Yeah...looks like it.”

Umeko and I ended up driving home on our own, in the end. Hajime had told us to go back without him, and that’s exactly what we’d done. Maybe he had something to talk about with Rei, or maybe with Sagami, or maybe he just wanted to take a moment to feel the night air.

Oh, and incidentally, the fact that we’d tailed him the other day had been entirely exposed. Hajime hadn’t been even a little bit amused at first, but when I’d said, “B-But, wait, you noticed we were following you, didn’t you? You just decided to let us get away with it, right? There’s no way you could’ve missed out on the fact that we were tailing you, is there?” he’d replied, “Bwa ha ha... Well, y’know,” and didn’t get all that upset after all. Hajime was kind of a sucker, in his own particular sort of way.

Anyway, I had come to the conclusion that the hospital and Rei probably weren’t as delicate of a matter for Hajime as I’d initially suspected. In fact, pretty much all of my expectations had turned out to be dead wrong. Kiryuu wasn’t fighting to bring his unconscious mother back after all...which begged the question of what exactly he was—

“Cherry blossoms,” Umeko muttered, snapping me out of the daze I’d thought my way into.

“Huh?” I grunted. “Wait, what? What about cherry blossoms?”

“Changing the topic at hand,” said Umeko, “Hitomi. Are you absolutely certain that the trees lining the path to the hospital were, indeed, cherry blossoms?”

“Yeah, they were...but why do you ask? Come to think of it, you were really staring at them a minute ago. Something about them catch your eye?”

“No, I simply found them intriguing. I possess the knowledge that cherry blossoms bloom in spring, yet I have never observed the phenomenon myself. The thought of trees so green having once been covered in pink flowers, gradually shifting to their current visage... I find it most wondrous.”

Umeko had been born just a month before, at the beginning of summer. In other words, she’d come into being after the cherry blossoms had fallen.

“I’m certain that cherry blossoms must be a beautiful sight to behold,” said Umeko.

“They’re really pretty, yeah,” I agreed. “Oh, I know! We should go flower viewing together next year! There’s a shrine near my apartment that holds a whole cherry blossom festival every spring around the time they bloom. It’d be perfect!”

Before I knew it, I found myself grinning. Umeko was so consistently passive, but at long last she’d finally found something she wanted to do, and she’d opened up to me on top of it. I couldn’t have been happier, until...

“Next year, is it? I fear...that will not be possible.”

...just moments later, when I was plunged into the deepest depths of despair.

“I haven’t much time left.”

My mind went blank.

“I have three months remaining... In other words, I will not last beyond the winter,” said Umeko. I was too stunned to speak, and a moment later, she added, “I know well that I should have informed you of this sooner, and I’d truly intended to do so. Forgive me, Hitomi. It was not my intention to hide this from you. I...simply could not bring myself to say it.”

Forgive me, she’d said, but it felt like her apology had passed in one of my ears and out the other. My arms and legs moved mechanically, just barely keeping my car traveling in a straight line down the highway. I couldn’t accept the reality of what I was hearing. She doesn’t have much time left?

“But... But why? Why, Umeko?!” I finally shouted.

“It is not a matter of why—there is no reason,” said Umeko. “It is simply a matter of my life span.”

“Your...life span?”

“I am an anomaly, brought about by a twisting of this world’s fundamental principles, made by a spirit named Zeon for the sole purpose of bringing this War to an end. I was never intended to last beyond the fulfillment of that purpose.”

Umeko had come into the world as System: the ultimate Player who would carve through all others like a farmer reaps grain. The longer she fought, the stronger she would become, and if she’d been unleashed upon the world, it probably wouldn’t have taken her a month to bring the War to its conclusion. That was the only reason she’d been brought into being...and so, her creator hadn’t bothered to give her the capability to carry on after her objective had been achieved.

I took in a sharp breath. It was almost stunning how much Umeko had changed over the course of the past month. She’d gone from seeming more like a puppet than a girl to coming across as a full-fledged person. She’d changed—she’d grown—and I’d taken her rapid maturation as a good sign.

I hadn’t thought it through at all. I was truly, terribly shallow. I’d forgotten something important—failed to fully consider what I knew. The incredibly obvious fact that growing and aging were two sides of the same coin had never crossed my mind.

“Perhaps my power is too mighty to dwell within a vessel such as mine for long, or perhaps the gods saw fit to grant me such power in light of how little time I was to be allowed. I know not the details...but whatever the case may be, such is simply the nature of my being,” said Umeko, speaking so casually and indifferently it was almost as if she were talking about a stranger. In sharp contrast to my inability to swallow the truth, she seemed to have accepted it in full. She’d looked at reality, at her life span, at her fate, at the whole hand she’d been dealt, and calmly taken it all as a matter of course.

“D-Does...Does Hajime know about this...?” I asked.

“He does indeed,” said Umeko. “First knew from the start. He learned of it the day we met.”

“He did...?”

“One month ago, when I had only just come into being, First and I battled. I did my duty as System and brought everything I had to bear in confronting him,” she began, her eyes narrowing slightly as she reminisced about their first encounter. “First is a fearsome man indeed. My power grants me the ability to overcome any foe, no matter how strong, yet he fought me on even footing. As I grew stronger and stronger infinitely, he met me with boundless strength of his own. He matched me awakening for awakening, and as the ferocity of our clash entered the realm of the gods above, I said this—”

“Amusing! You are amusing indeed, Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First! To think a man lives who could trade blows with one such as I, whose victory is assured from the outset! Now, come at me! Give me more! Let our duel grow stronger, faster, and farther beyond the realm of man! Let us battle to the death, and let us reach ever greater heights in doing so!”

“W-Wait a second.”

“Yes?”

“You’re saying you actually said all that, Umeko? Like, out loud?”

“Quite. I shall confess that I was in a rather excited state at the time—and moreover, having just been born, I had yet to grasp the particulars of my own personality.”

“I-Is that really how it works...?”

“Pay no heed to the petty details. What matters most is what comes next.”

“Ha ha...ha ha ha ha ha! Such delight! Such rapturous ecstasy! I see now—in battling you, I have finally found something of worth in this meaningless defect of a life I’ve been granted!”

“I suppose I ought to call it a slip of the tongue. Regardless, the instant I uttered those words, First lowered his fists. He questioned my meaning, and I responded with the truth: that my life would last less than half a year longer. He, in turn, declared that he had lost interest and called our battle to a close...then asked me to join him.”

“...”

“Furthermore, he told me that if I did so, he would grant me the miraculous confectionary known as ‘Hi-Chew.’ And so, I accepted his offer.”

“...So he didn’t just make that part up after all,” I commented. That moment suddenly sprang back into my mind—the moment when our boss had declared that System would be joining our team, and the shock I’d felt as a result. I never would’ve imagined that that was how the battle he’d never bothered to tell us about had unfolded. “So then, Hajime hasn’t been having you participate in battles because—”

“He fears the effect that doing so would have upon me, I presume. To use my power places a terrible burden upon my flesh. The more I engage in battle, the more my already limited life span is carved away.”

I never knew. I had no idea that System, now known as White Rulebook, a power so perfectly unbalanced it could only be described as cheating, required such a tragic price be paid for its use.

“Of course, not using my power does nothing to extend my life span. Three months remain for me, or thereabouts. That is a truth that shall not change.”

“There’s...nothing at all we can do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Umeko.

“But...why?! This doesn’t make sense! It’s wrong!”

“In what manner?”

“I mean...knowing you only had a few months to live from the moment you’re born? That’s... It’s just so...”

“Sad, perhaps?” said Umeko, as if she could see right through me. “Hitomi. To feel pity for the seven-day life span of a locust is nothing more than the arrogance of humanity.”

I fell silent.

“This is the nature of my being. My life has always been a limited one. The fact that I am to live for no more than half a year is, fundamentally, no different from the fact that you are to live for no more than a hundred years. And so, I would ask...that you not show me pity.”

Stop, Umeko. Please...stop making it sound like you understand everything so clearly. Don’t just accept this—don’t act like it doesn’t bother you at all! When you look at me like that, I...I can’t...

“Though I may not let it show, I assure you, I am enjoying this so-called ordinary life I have been granted,” said Umeko, repeating what she’d told me just a few days earlier. “I assure you, Hitomi—I am most content. Though I was born to be a weapon, an agent of slaughter, it is thanks to you and First that I have been able to lead a life more akin to that of a human. I could ask for nothing more...and I consider myself fortunate indeed.”

With that, Umeko smiled at me. She’d never been expressive, and this was the very first time I’d seen her with a big, full-faced grin. Her smile was so perfectly beautiful...I couldn’t stop myself from breaking down in tears. I drove on, doing the best I could to keep my car on course as the world dissolved into a blurry mess.

After we arrived at my apartment building’s parking lot, I stayed in my car and bawled my eyes out. I threw a screaming, sobbing fit, not sparing the slightest hint of attention to how much of a nuisance I was probably being to our neighbors.

Umeko, meanwhile, had quietly climbed out of the car and returned to the apartment the moment we had gotten back. It was so very mature and considerate of her, it just made me all the more distraught. She’d grown up at an unnatural speed, become a full-fledged adult on a mental level, and accepted her fate without protest. It was just so tragic, no matter how I looked at it. I couldn’t help but pity her in spite of myself.

“I guess that’s the arrogance of humanity coming out in me, huh...?” I muttered after I’d finally cried my eyes out. I grabbed a tissue, dabbed away my tears, blew my nose, then leaned back heavily in my seat. I was in a daze. I’d been subjected to one earth-shattering shock after another, and I just couldn’t manifest the strength to move anymore.

“What should I do?” I wondered out loud.

Maybe I should talk to Hajime about it? I wondered, but then decided that no, he would’ve already done something if he was planning to. The fact that he hadn’t, I figured, could mean that he’d decided to respect Umeko’s decision when it came to her life. Maybe he’d decided that the life that had been granted to System was far from defective—that Tanaka Umeko was not, by any means, a girl deserving of pity—and so, he had chosen not to try to save her. After all, if he did, it would effectively prove that she had been cursed with misfortune.

“But those are all just words. It’s so stupid... I just... I just want to—”

Right around the time it felt like my mind would rupture under the pressure and deflate like a popped balloon, I heard a click. My car’s passenger side door opened, and somebody climbed inside without even asking permission.

“Huh? What are— Oh, Fan,” I said as I realized who it was—Yusano Fantasia, a girl with dazzlingly bright blonde hair wearing a very pink nurse’s outfit with a tracksuit’s jacket draped over it. “Wh-What’s going on, Fan...? Ah, s-sorry—I’m probably a mess right now, aren’t I? I, umm, the thing is,” I stammered, turning away in the hopes she wouldn’t notice how bloodshot my eyes were...but she ignored me entirely.

“This War is wrong,” she said. She just...just threw that out there so abruptly, the sentence practically bashed me over the head. “I cannot, under any circumstances, allow this War—the Fifth Spirit War—to be carried through to its conclusion. It is a farce. I refuse to so much as accept it as a Spirit War.”

“Huh...?” I grunted. “Wh-Who are you?”

She was definitely Fan, in terms of her body and her voice, but something about the impression she gave was completely different. It wasn’t hard to guess that I was talking with some personality other than Yusano Fantasia...but whom? Something about her tone made me suspect that she was actually a he, but the only personality that fit the masculine bill offhand was Adventura, and he came across as more of a rambunctious boy, which was way off. It could’ve been Comedia, whose tone was kind of all over the place, but I would’ve expected at least a joke or two by now if that’d been whom I was dealing with.

I didn’t have to mull over the question for long, in any case. Before I could come to a conclusion, the person in my passenger seat provided an answer that I never would have come up with on my own.

“My name is Zeon.”

My mind went blank...again.

Okay, but seriously, how many times can a girl’s mind go blank in a single day? Isn’t this just a bit much? Like...did we really need that many shocking plot twists in a row?! Why would you cram that much into the epilogue, for crying out loud?! I’ve had three mind-blank episodes in this section alone! Dealing with the Umeko issue was more than enough to carry us into the next volume already!

“Z-Zeon...?” I stammered. “You mean, the spirit that—”

“Correct. I take it I won’t have to explain the details to you? Good,” Fan—I mean, Zeon—said in a rather high-handed tone. This was the first time I’d ever spoken with him, but I could already tell that he was a pretty arrogant person.

Some time ago, this rebellious spirit had betrayed the War Management Committee and enacted a plan to force the Spirit War to a premature end. He was the one who had founded the organization F, and it was he who was responsible for the creation of System—of Umeko.

“B-But...why would you be in Fan’s body?” I asked. “Leatia told me that you were locked up in some sort of prison in the Spirit Realm. D-Did you break out?!”

“I did not. Regrettably, the part of me here now is nothing more than a residual, conceptual form of myself. My true self remains imprisoned and is all but entirely incapable of communicating with me,” Zeon explained in a condescending tone, leaving me no room to interject. “I was this girl’s Spirit Handler, and as such, I was aware of her idiosyncratic condition—that is to say, her multiple personalities. One month ago, when you stormed F’s headquarters, I was able to transplant my memories into her shortly before I was apprehended by the War Management Committee’s agents.”

“Your...memories...?”

“Call it an attempt to give myself insurance—or rather, a last resort taken out of pure necessity. Now that my attempt to make use of System has failed, I am forced at long last to take action myself.”

“B-But, wait. This doesn’t make sense... You’re Fan’s Spirit Handler? That’s not what I heard at all! I thought Fan’s was a spirit named Shedrim who looks sort of like a dog...”

“That would be her Spirit Handler for the Fifth Spirit War,” Zeon said bluntly. “I was her Handler in the previous War.”

The previous War? So, the fourth one? “You mean...Fan was in the Fourth Spirit War too?”

“Correct—and she came just a step away from winning. She fought through a battle royal of over a thousand Players, surviving until the field narrowed to just her and one other.”

Now that was just plain shocking. If she had been one of the last two, that more or less made her the runner-up. The Spirit War wasn’t a tournament or league, to be fair, and I couldn’t see a clear ranking structure necessarily applying well to a lawless battle royal, but surviving all the way to the very end was still a remarkable achievement. I’d never imagined that Fan could’ve made it that far in a previous War.

“B-But...Fan’s never said anything about that at all,” I protested.

“Of course she hasn’t. She doesn’t remember it,” said Zeon, disdain for the fact that I hadn’t been able to figure that out for myself practically dripping from his tone.

It was pretty irritating to be talked down to like that, but I had to admit, the explanation made sense. Losers in the Spirit War had their memories of their participation stripped away from them, and they were returned to their daily lives—even if they were the contest’s runner-up.

“That being said,” Zeon continued, “it seems she is dimly aware on some level of what happened. Our manipulation of her memory was incomplete, possibly on account of the peculiarities of her multiple personalities.”

“Hold on, though,” I said, “if Fan was one of the last two Players in the War, then that means she has to have been one of the Final Eight, right? They erased her memories anyway? I thought the whole deal was that if you stay in the War until you’re one of the last eight Players left, you’d get any wish you wanted granted... Do they just erase your memories afterward?”

“The Final Eight?”

In that instant, Zeon’s tone shifted. His voice came out cold, harsh, and trembling with an intense, ferocious rage.

“Do not speak to me of that idiocy,” said Zeon. “No such contrivance has ever existed in any of the Wars up until now.”

“Wha—”

“Did you never find it strange? Why would a no-holds-barred battle royal end when the field narrowed to eight? Why would the fight not continue until just one Player was left standing?”

When he put it that way...I’d never thought it was strange at all. That was just how it had been presented to me, after all. The War’s rules were absolute, dictated by the spirits—beings who inhabited a realm far beyond human understanding. It had never even occurred to me to question their rules or the motives behind them.

“I’m out of time,” Zeon said, ignoring me and my consternation and reaching into his nurse’s outfit, from which he pulled an envelope. “I can’t manipulate this girl’s body any longer. Once her core personality, Yusano Genre, takes action, a lingering concept like me will be erased with ease. Unfortunately...I no longer possess the means to stop this War. And so,” he said, shoving the envelope into my hands, “I leave it all to you.”

“You...huh?”

“I ask you, Saitou Hitomi, to carry out my will and bring this War to an end,” said Zeon. I accepted the envelope—mostly on reflex—and the next thing I knew, he had crumpled over in his seat, unconscious.

“Huh...? Wait, wha— I— Huuuuuuh?! W-Wait a second! This makes no sense! Zeon? Can you hear me, Zeon?!” I shouted as I grabbed Fan’s body and shook her by the shoulders.

“M-Mnhhh... N-No, I’m not... I’m not Nurse Piss... Honest,” she muttered anxiously. Considering the content of said sleep-muttering, I knew she was back to being Fan in an instant. Zeon—or the lingering concept of Zeon, or whatever—was gone. Either he’d retreated deep inside her to hide, or he had been erased entirely.

“Okay, sooo...what just happened, even?” I moaned as I sank into my seat. No matter how you sliced it, he’d just dumped a whole boatload of absurdity onto my head and left me to deal with it. He’d shown up out of nowhere, said his piece, and vanished into the night. “And wait, crap! I should’ve asked him about Umeko’s problem while I had the chance!”

I’d been way too out of sorts to think clearly at the time, but now that it was over, I realized that the spirit who had created her would probably have been able to give me all the details about Umeko’s life span that I could have ever wanted. I’d just had a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity dump itself into my lap, and I’d let it pass me by.

I took a moment to sit there in silence, overwhelmed by a potent mixture of regret and bewilderment...then glanced down at the envelope in my hands.

“Nothing to do but open it, I guess,” I said to myself, overcoming my slight reluctance to do just that.

The envelope contained several sheets of printer paper. The message on them was written in Japanese, presumably since he’d intended me to be the one who’d read it, and it was also handwritten, though in such an indistinctly perfect hand I almost wondered if he’d conjured the letters up with magic. As for its contents...

“...?!”

I read the very first page—and my mind went blank. My fourth mind-blank of the day. The fourth earth-shattering twist to present itself to me...but the first three couldn’t even compare to this one. My whole body went limp, with the sole exception of my hands. Those were tensed up so much, I’d clenched the sheet of paper into a crumpled-up mess before I knew it. I could barely breathe. It felt like I was suffocating. It was like a thick, heavy fog had engulfed me, choking my heart.

“This...can’t... N-No way... It’s not true, right...?”

The first paper had listed the winners of all the previous Spirit Wars. The first name was in English, so I could read it well enough. The names of the second and third Wars’ winners were in languages other than English or Japanese, and I couldn’t decipher them...but none of that mattered.

The problem was the winner of the Fourth Spirit War. Seeing his name on the page was a shock like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It turned my story—my world—entirely on its head.

Winner of the Fourth Spirit War —— Kiryuu Hajime