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

Prologue

The prelude to ruin resounds ever softly.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

A harsh, grating noise reverberated throughout the oceanfront factory. Cacophonous though it was, the noise did, in fact, originate from an instrument—specifically, a Gibson Les Paul. The guitar’s elegant silhouette was tragically mismatched with the discordant din it was producing.

The instrument itself wasn’t to blame. The problem was how it was being played...or rather, how it wasn’t being played. This wasn’t the tone of a guitar being strummed—it was the crash of a guitar being smashed to pieces against the ground. It was a sound that could not, by any means, be called music.

“Hya ha ha haaa! All right, now we’re cookin’ with gas! That’s what I call music! Rock ’n’ roll, motherfuckers!”

The guitar’s owner, however, cackled wildly, elated by his own performance. He was a young man somewhere in his early twenties. His bleached blond hair was spiked with a gratuitous amount of wax, and he had a pair of sunglasses perched on his face. A thin chain linked the piercings in his ear and his nose, which dangled from his face in the same arc as the guitar strings holding the body of his shattered Les Paul aloft—the instrument’s impact with the ground had snapped its body off its neck, so now the strings were all that was connecting the two halves.

That guitarist’s name: Hanamura Haruto. His dream: to make it big.

“Hya ha ha! Come ooon, my dude, enough with all the dodging! I can’t get into a groove slamming the goddamn ground! I won’t hit the right note unless I smash my axe into that deadpan mug of yours!” Haruto shouted, grinning ecstatically as he stared down the man before him.

That man clicked his tongue. “You never shut’cher damn trap, do you?” he muttered irritably. He wore a black tank top, military-style slacks, and a pair of steel-toed boots. His bare shoulders sported sinister flame-shaped tattoos, and he held a heavily weathered knife in his hand—a jackknife, specifically, whose blade was jagged and worn down, a misshapen zigzag that would never fold into its handle again. Just a glance at him would tell you he was ill-tempered and violent, but Haruto seemed downright delighted to talk to the man anyway.

“Please, my dude, stop harshing the groove! What, your group got some sorta policy ’bout acting all chill? Is that why you’re Fallen Black’s assault leader, Toki Shuugo?”

“Wouldn’t have to harsh your groove if it weren’t so obnoxious. That screeching why they let you into Hearts, Hanamura Haruto?” Shuugo countered.

“Uh-uh,” said Haruto with a wave of his finger. “No calling me that name, thank you very much. Nah, you can call me HARDO!”

“You really piss me off, y’know that?” Shuugo sighed. Haruto’s ever hyper persona and Shuugo’s simmering, restrained disposition mixed about as well as oil and water. “Never met a blabbermouth that didn’t turn out to be a piece of shit.”

“Huh? That so?” said Haruto. “Then I guess that makes good ol’ HARDO the first blabbermouth who’s worth a damn you’ve ever met!”

Shuugo rolled his eyes, ignoring Haruto’s nonsense and glancing at his broken instrument. “A guitar,” he said. “I’ve been through my fair share of fights, but I gotta admit...taking on a guy who uses a guitar as a weapon’s a first for me.”

“Hya ha ha! This Les Paul’s not my weapon, my dude, it’s my partner! If I don’t fight with it, then what the hell am I supposed to fight with?!”

“If that thing’s your partner, then try taking better care of it.”

“Eh, whatevs. It’ll go back to normal anyway,” Haruto said. No sooner had the words left his mouth than his Les Paul began to shift. Its ruined body and the parts that had snapped off it drifted toward the guitar neck in Haruto’s hand, slotting themselves together once more. It was like time was being rewound, and in the span of just three seconds, the guitar had regained its original elegant silhouette.

Shuugo’s eyes widened ever so slightly, and he let out a sigh. “So that’s your power, huh?”

“You know it!” said Haruto. “As long as I’ve got this power, then no matter how rough I get with my Gibson Les Paul, it and the thirty-six payment loan I took out to buy it’ll be safe and sound!”

“...”

“I get to remake anything that gets broken. That’s my power: Encore!”

The very instant Haruto proudly declared his power’s name, Shuugo scowled. “So, you named your power.” He made no attempt to hide the scorn he felt as he replied, his voice dripping with contempt.

“Yeah,” said Haruto. “One of our folks is into that sorta stuff.”

“Can’t believe there’s another dumbass like our boss out there somewhere...”

“Huh?”

“Forget it. Not your problem,” Shuugo said, then he dashed forward without warning. He leaped at Haruto, slashing forward with his knife in an underhanded grip.

Haruto raised his newly restored guitar and intercepted the attack. The jagged wreck of a knife bit into the guitar’s neck, producing another grating screech. “Aww, hell yeah, I like it! That’s good ol’ HARDO’s Les Paul for ya—making music no matter what it’s doing!” Haruto shouted.

The clash between knife and guitar lasted a matter of seconds, after which the two men broke apart, distancing themselves from each other...only to dash forward and clash again mere moments later.

The Fifth Spirit War was nearing its climax, even in the face of the machinations of Zeon, a spirit who had chosen to rebel against the War’s organizers and had plotted to bring it to an early end. Zeon had founded an organization called F and had engineered the creation of System, an ultimate Player who could bring the whole War to a close single-handedly. Zeon’s rebellion had ended in failure, however—Kiryuu Hajime and the organization he led, Fallen Black, had wiped F off the playing field with ease and had stolen the ultimate Player away to join them.

In no time at all, the story of that disturbance had sent waves throughout the bulk of the War’s remaining Players.

F’s destruction had been no secret. The War Management Committee had sent out a request to all active Players to aid in an all-out attack on the organization only shortly beforehand, and as a result, it hadn’t taken long at all for the tale of Fallen Black’s achievement to make the rounds. Kiryuu Hajime had already earned a reputation for being incomprehensible while also powerful and extremely dangerous, and now he had the officially proclaimed ultimate Player on his side to boot. It was only natural that he and his allies would draw more attention and demand more caution than ever.

With System added to their roster, Fallen Black now found itself in the eye of the storm. The Spirit War seemed to be centering upon them, as not a Player was left who didn’t know the name Kiryuu Hajime—or rather, Ancient Lucifer. Most of them chose to keep a safe distance from him and System...however, Hanamura Haruto and the organization he belonged to, Hearts, were an exception. They chose to walk straight up to Fallen Black’s doorstep and pick a fight.

“C’mon, my dude, c’mon! Show me whatcha got, Shuugo!”

The sun was beginning to set, and Toki Shuugo was struggling. I really can’t stand this asshole, he thought bitterly as he dodged the guitar that Haruto was swinging about like a sledgehammer. The worst part’s that even though he fights like a dipshit, he’s actually tough!

Anyone with sense would say that in a battle between a knife and a guitar, whoever had the knife had the upper hand. Haruto, however, was an exceptionally skilled guitarist—not in the sense that he could play the instrument well, but rather, in the sense that he could wield it as an irrationally effective weapon. Its reach was impressive, for one thing. Compared to the twenty centimeters or so that Shuugo’s knife gave him, Haruto’s Les Paul was over a meter long. That, needless to say, meant that as long as Haruto stood at the edge of his guitar’s effective range, Shuugo’s knife would never so much as touch him...and that was only the beginning.

“Hya ha ha! I can tell you’re pretty used to fighting, my dude, but I’mma bet you’ve never taken on a guy who fights with a guitar before, huh?!” Haruto shouted.

Shuugo clicked his tongue with irritation. He’d rolled with a biker gang back in the day, and he had been through more than his fair share of full-blown, no-holds-barred throwdowns. As a natural result, he’d fought toe to toe against all sorts of opponents wielding all sorts of improvised weaponry. He’d dealt with baseball bats—both metal and wooden with nails driven through them—pipes, combat knives, cooking knives, batons, souped-up air guns, modified stun guns...the list went on and on, yet Haruto was right. He’d never gone up against anyone with the gall to bring a guitar to a brawl before.

“C’mon, my dude! Let’s make some music!” Haruto bellowed as he swung his Les Paul with all his might in an overhead arc. Shuugo just barely dodged the blow, and once again, the guitar shattered against the concrete floor.

“Think you could just shut up and fight for a bit, you phony-ass guitarist?” Shuugo growled. He’d been waiting for that moment, and as soon as Haruto’s weapon was broken again, Shuugo rushed forward. Haruto’s power could mend his guitar as soon as it broke, but the process wasn’t instantaneous, and in the moment it took to restore his weapon, he was defenseless...in theory.

“Nooope!” Haruto shouted. He’d seen Shuugo’s attack coming—in fact, he’d been counting on it. The moment Shuugo stepped forward, Haruto swung his guitar’s neck once more with a heavy whoosh.

The neck on its own couldn’t do much damage, no matter how hard he swung it. It’d be like swinging the handle of a sledgehammer that was missing its head. Unlike a sledgehammer, however, his guitar wasn’t a bludgeoning instrument—it was a stringed instrument. In other words, even after the body broke away from the neck, it was still connected by six steel cords.

Shuugo let out a grunt of shock. He hadn’t anticipated this avenue of attack at all, and his eyes widened as Haruto’s bizarre, irregular movements sent the body of his guitar crashing into Shuugo’s side. Haruto had essentially used his guitar as an improvised flail, and the force its body had built up over the course of the swing was great enough to send Shuugo to his knees.

“Hyaaa ha ha ha! God, you’re boring! A hit like that, and you couldn’t even give me a scream or two?!” Haruto cackled triumphantly as he flourished his guitar, swinging it in circles through the air.

“Peh... If you wanna hear a scream, why not listen to your guitar?” Shuugo spat, pressing a hand to his side as he staggered to his feet. “You’re abusing the damn thing. Makes me feel sorry for it.”

“Huh? Like hell I am!” said Haruto. “I’m playing music with it—HARDO-style music! If my Les Paul’s screaming, it’s screaming with joy!”

“Trying to talk with you was a waste of time.”

“You know it! Why use words when we can speak with music?”

Shuugo didn’t bother replying, though he did nearly burst a blood vessel. The look on his face as he readied his knife and charged in once more spoke of pure and unbridled irritation. Haruto, in contrast, wore a delighted smirk as he swung his guitar about like it was a sickle on a chain. His control was appalling, and the guitar’s body flew with an almost entirely random trajectory—making it all the harder to predict where his next blow would land.

Son of a bitch! Shuugo thought. Try as he might to seize the initiative, he found himself constantly on the defensive. Haruto had already had a leg up in terms of range, and his improvised flail technique had only exacerbated that problem.

That was not, however, to say that Shuugo had no way of fighting back. Haruto’s newly increased reach carried with it a fatal flaw: it left him entirely incapable of defending himself up close. If Shuugo could find a way to slip past the guitar body and close the gap, a knife-wielder like him would have the upper hand and then some.

“Hraaah!” Haruto shouted as he swung his guitar in an especially wide, crushing arc. Its body flew toward Shuugo from the side, but he nimbly ducked beneath it, avoiding the strike and giving himself the chance to rush forward, still stooped over. He bore down on Haruto like a wild beast charging its prey, and in the blink of an eye, he’d closed within reach of his foe.

Now that I’m in close—

“Lemme guess: you’re thinking, ‘Now that I’m in close, I have this in the bag,’ right?” Haruto taunted. A wet, sickening thud rang out, and Shuugo grimaced as pain shot through his abdomen. “Hee hee, hyaaa ha ha ha! I told you, my dude! You shoulda kept your guard up! You’re up against a guitar, remember?!” He’d been holding his broken guitar by the neck, swinging its body about by its strings. That neck was made out of wood, and the end that had broken away from the body was splintered and jagged—in other words, a rather dangerous weapon in its own right. Shuugo had charged in at full speed, leaving himself open to a guitar neck to the gut, and a crimson stain from the stab wound was already starting to spread across his tank top.

“Heh... Figured that’s what you were going for,” Shuugo grunted, smirking even as his blood dripped down the guitar’s neck. “Didn’t bother dodging ’cause it’d be a pain in the ass, though.”

It was true. Shuugo really had anticipated that Haruto would go for a stab with the broken end of the neck. Not only that, he had allowed the attack to land intentionally. In his mind, a piece of jagged wood to the gut just wasn’t that big of a deal. It was dangerous, yes, but not dangerous enough to be particularly lethal. No matter how much strength you put into the stab, a weapon like that wouldn’t be able to pass cleanly through the human body and would be totally incapable of inflicting an instantly fatal wound. Thus, Shuugo had taken the blow on purpose—all for the sake of sending his own, far more lethal weapon streaking toward his foe’s breast.

“See you in hell, you phony-ass guitarist,” Shuugo spat, a cold determination glinting in his eyes as he delivered the killing blow. He’d flipped his knife into an overhanded grip and stabbed it directly toward Haruto’s heart—but then, an instant before the attack landed...

“Y’know the thing about declaring victory early, my dude?”

Schkruhghk!

A tremendous impact rocked Shuugo to the core.

“It makes you look real goddamn stupid when you screw the pooch.”

“Ugh... Aaaaaagh!” Shuugo screamed as blindingly intense pain shot through his back. The knife he’d intended to skewer Haruto’s heart with froze midair as the strength drained from his arm.

“Hya ha ha! Now there’s the scream I was looking for! Kinda weak, though—you could’ve put a bit more emotion into it, y’know? Hyaaa ha ha ha ha ha!”

Shuugo tuned out Haruto’s ear-piercingly shrill laughter and desperately attempted to figure out what had just happened. God dammit—he had backup? he thought for an instant, but when he pushed through the agony in his back to look over his shoulder, his eyes shot wide open. The object that had struck him from behind was none other than the guitar’s body.

“Son of a...did you—”

“I sure did. I fixed it...or, really, I’m fixing it.”

Encore was the power to repair physical objects, and... This asshole used his power on his guitar while its neck was still stuck inside me?!

When Haruto had activated his power, the guitar’s body traveled back to the neck it had snapped off from. If that neck happened to be embedded in Shugo’s gut at the time, there was only one thing the body could do: pierce through him from the other side, taking the shortest path available to restore itself. The neck and body’s drive to come together drove each half further into Shuugo like a pair of incredibly powerful, splintered magnets.

“Agh! Gahhh...”

“Bet you thought a broken guitar neck couldn’t do that much damage when you charged in, eh? You set yourself up for this real nicely, y’know?”

Slowly, excruciatingly, the two halves of the guitar ground their way into Shuugo’s back and abdomen, gradually digging into his flesh. They twisted like a pair of screws, tearing him apart in their effort to put themselves back together. The pain was almost unbearable.

“You...son of a...bitch!” Shuugo roared.

“Whoa, there!” Haruto yelped. Shuugo had gritted his teeth and thrown out a single slash, but Haruto released the guitar’s neck just in time, stepping backward and dodging the knife with only a slight graze on the upper arm to show for it. “Yeesh, close one! Ha ha—one last try for the road, eh? Too bad it didn’t work out,” he said as he glanced at the trickle of blood running down his arm. “Oh, and just so you know, just ’cause I let go doesn’t mean my power’s gonna stop working!”

That fact was already abundantly clear. The two pieces of the guitar were still actively attempting to run Shuugo through, and while the power that drew them together wasn’t strong enough to do the job instantly, it was only a matter of time.

“Hyaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Too bad, so sad, my dude! You just weren’t man enough to take down good ol’ HARDO! Hya ha ha!” Haruto bellowed, letting out his loudest cackle yet. It was the laugh of a man who was absolutely confident that he’d already won.

Toki Shuugo: assault leader of Fallen Black. His weapon of choice: a knife.

The second most dangerous direct combatant in his organization, bested only by Kiryuu Hajime himself, Shuugo had taken down countless Players, yet he made only extremely sparing use of his own power. Most of his fights were won through pure brute strength and overwhelming knifework, leaving the details of his power a mystery...or so Hearts’s boss had claimed when he’d given Haruto the rundown on Shuugo’s capabilities.

Guess he wasn’t that tough after all, Haruto thought as he basked in his victory. The fact that the battle had ended before his opponent could show off his power was a slight fly in the ointment, but it wasn’t a large enough concern to really bother him much. In a few seconds, his Les Paul would pierce Shuugo clean through, and it wouldn’t matter anymore.

Hya ha ha! Wonder how much I’ll get for this guy? Bet he’s worth a pretty penny, Haruto considered as he looked down at Shuugo, who had fallen to his knees. In any case, it was time for the curtain to fall on the battle, which meant it was time for him to deliver his signature line.

“Sorry to say it, but good ol’ HARDO’s solo concert’s wrapping up! If you want an encore—”

“My bad,” Shugo grunted, quietly cutting off Haruto’s triumphant declaration.

“Huh?” Haruto growled, less than amused to have his big moment interrupted. “Oh, for the— You seriously trying to beg for your life now, dickweed?”

Shuugo, however, carried on with his apology. “Yeah, this is on me. I underestimated you. Figured if it talks like a dipshit and fights like a dipshit, it’s probably, well, you know...and honestly, I let my guard down.”

“Hya ha ha! Well, isn’t someone being nice and honest all of a sudden? Seriously, are you begging for your life here, or what? Not gonna do you any good, just so you know—good ol’ HARDO’s power’s gonna make you a Les Paul sandwich one way or another!”

The viselike pressure on Shuugo’s midsection was indeed continuing to escalate. His breathing had grown rough and ragged, but there was a coldness to his gaze that seemed rather mismatched with the dire straits he was in.

“Oh, c’mon,” Haruto grumbled. “The hell’s that look supposed to mean? You lost, my dude! Losers are supposed to crawl and grovel and shit!”

“Then you’d better start groveling,” Shuugo said with a bitter smirk. “I don’t use my power much...but that’s not because I have some sorta policy against it. I just don’t use it ’cause it’s not useful most of the time. Doesn’t suit my style,” he added as he glanced at the knife in his hand—the jagged, worn-down, misshapen jackknife that looked so dull, it probably couldn’t cut through paper. “But just now? I used it.”

A dangerous bestial glint began to shine in Shuugo’s eyes as he raised his knife, pointing it at his foe—specifically, at Haruto’s upper right arm. The arm that Shuugo had inflicted the tiniest of cuts on moments beforehand.

“When I cut someone with this knife...it leaves a piece of its blade behind.”

“It...huh?” Haruto grunted. A shiver shot down his spine, and he reflexively clasped a hand to the cut on his arm.

“No nerves in your veins, so it’s probably not gonna hurt...but I bet you can feel that something’s in there, eh?”

Haruto didn’t say a word. He could feel something. He’d been too worked up to notice before—something about the adrenaline from the battle, most likely—but now that he could stand still and focus, something felt distinctly off about his injury. Did he really...? thought Haruto. Did he seriously leave a piece of his knife in me after that last attack?

“So, what do you think that piece is gonna do?” Shuugo asked with a slight but wicked smile.

Haruto broke out in a cold sweat. He shifted his hand away from the cut to take a closer look at it—then gasped as he felt something move. Something small and sharp was inside his arm, wriggling its way through his blood vessels, and the sensation was instantly repulsive.

“It’s gonna take you apart from the inside, that’s what,” said Shuugo. “Long story short, it’ll ride your blood vessels all the way to your heart, then tear it to shreds. Doesn’t matter where I hit you—it’ll make its way there eventually.”

In other words, even the slightest flesh wound could prove fatal. Just as the mightiest of walls could be brought down by the tiniest of cracks in just the right place, so too could Shuugo’s power trace his opponent’s life back to its roots and sever them. Zigzag Jigsaw was a power that brought certain death in a single hit.

“G-God dammit! Y-You son of a bitch!” Haruto shrieked in a panic. All traces of the joy and confidence he’d displayed just moments before had vanished from his face, replaced with pure frustration.

A single minuscule scratch had just evened the odds—or, really, had tipped the scales entirely. Haruto’s Les Paul needed time to finish Shuugo off, while the fragment of Shuugo’s knife traveling through Haruto’s veins would probably only take a few seconds to reach his heart, at most. He’d been cut in the worst place possible, in that sense. If the fragment had entered him through one of his extremities, it would’ve taken longer to make the trip, but his upper arm was dangerously close to its ultimate destination. The thought of a foreign object slipping through his veins, making its way closer and closer to his heart, was horrifying beyond measure. Second by second, an invisible blade was closing in to claim his life.

“L-Like hell I’m going down that easy, god dammit!”

In a split second, Haruto made his call and gouged into his upper arm with his left hand. He pushed his fingernails into his own flesh with all his strength, clawing at the place where he felt the intruding object traveling through him. Pain racked his arm, but he couldn’t let that stop him and kept digging, a ghastly look of agony coming across his face as he tore into himself.

“Agh! Gaaahhhhhh!” Haruto wailed, jamming his fingers into his arm as he desperately searched for the fragment of Shuugo’s knife. The pain grew stronger with each movement—strong enough to nearly make him pass out on the spot—but it wasn’t enough to stop him. “I’m not dying here!”

And then, barely a second later...

“Hraaahhhhhhhhh!”

...with a spray of blood, Haruto pulled his left hand free, a tiny fragment of metal clutched between his fingers.

“H-Heh... Ha ha... Hyaaa ha ha ha ha ha! How’d you like that?! I did it, god dammit!” Haruto cackled. Blood was pouring down his arm, but he was grinning anyway—a grin of victory and, at the same time, of relief. He’d averted certain death, and in just a few seconds more, he knew his guitar would make short work of his foe. Shuugo would die like a comically morbid piece of modern art. I win! Haruto thought—prematurely.

“So, my power lets me leave a piece of my knife in anyone I cut that travels to their heart and tears it to shreds,” Shuugo’s voice rang out, breaking through Haruto’s moment of celebration. Said voice sounded almost bored...and very close by.

“And y’know, I had a thought when I first got that power...”

Not just close by. It was right next to him. While Haruto had been distracted, occupied entirely by his desperate race to extract the knife fragment from his arm, Shuugo had closed the gap between the two of them.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be faster to just stab ’em?’”

A look of confusion passed across Haruto’s face as he looked up—and then, with a heavy thud, Shuugo thrust his dull, jagged knife directly into Haruto’s chest. He punched right through Haruto’s ribs, jamming the blade through his heart, then wrenching his wrist to the side like he was turning a doorknob.

Haruto didn’t even have the time to scream. He fell still in an instant, and at the same moment, the guitar pieces that had been boring into Shuugo’s body lost their attraction to each other and dropped to the ground with a pathetic clatter. It was an empty sound—one that could not, by any means, be called music.

“Listen up, Toki. If there’s one guy in Hearts you should watch out for, it’s Hanamura Haruto.”

A few days earlier, Toki Shuugo had received a personal lecture about his soon-to-be opponent from Kiryuu Hajime. The goal had been to ensure he was prepared to cope with Haruto’s abilities, if they ever ended up clashing.

“Trust me on this—that guy’s wack.”

“Wack how?” asked Shuugo.

Kiryuu, of course, was all too ready to explain. “There’s a very high probability that that man—Hanamura Haruto—is a Martial Maestro.”

Shuugo said nothing. He just grimaced.

“He always carries a guitar case around, see,” Kiryuu continued in a deadpan that told Shuugo he was, in fact, completely serious. “That’s some ideal Martial Maestro stuff there, no doubt about it! Bwa ha ha! Can’t believe I get to see one of those guys in real life!”

“What the hell is a Martial Maestro?” Shuugo asked with an air of intense unenthusiasm.

“It’s right there on the tin, man, keep up. Martial Maestros are fighters who use music to manipulate their opponents’ minds and send ultrapowerful vibrations through the air and junk. And that, Toki, is why I’m about to give you a crash course in how to deal with fighters like them. Hope you’re ready for this!”

Then Kiryuu went off on an extended tirade based entirely on his own self-indulgent fantasies. He explained how you could wet your clothes with your own saliva and stuff them in your ears to block out noise, how deep into your ears you had to pierce if you needed to rupture your own eardrums, and even what to do if it turned out that the guitar case contained an assault rifle instead of an actual instrument. He went over the subject in exhaustive detail.

Not a single goddamn bit of that ended up being worth jack, Shuugo thought to himself as he used a boxer’s hand wrap as an improvised bandage to patch up his bleeding midsection. He tied off the wrap, then he heaved a heavy sigh.

Hanamura Haruto’s corpse was nowhere to be seen—the Spirit War’s system had already taken effect and vanished it away from the factory. He was already alive and well somewhere else, lacking both the injuries he’d sustained and all memory that any of it had ever happened.

So the guy who lost gets to come back untouched, and the winner—me—just has to deal with being torn to pieces... Makes you wonder who’s the real victor here, Shuugo thought as he cringed down at his midsection. He stood up, only to find that each step he took brought with it a fresh burst of pain. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t deal with, at least. He could drive a motorcycle just fine—all that was left to do was make the short trek to his beloved VMAX, which was parked out behind the factory.

However, as Shuugo neared the building’s exit, a new noise rang out. It was the sound of clapping—someone giving him a polite round of applause.

“Well done! That was quite the display,” someone with a clear, refined voice said, followed by the slender man the voice belonged to stepping into view. His bleached hair was carefully styled and waxed, and he was wearing a very expensive-looking suit that almost certainly came from some big-name brand. At a glance, you’d think he was the sort of man you’d see working at a host club, but perhaps thanks to the softness of his gaze and the dignity of his features, he didn’t give the impression that he was a cheap womanizer like so many of that type did.

“Toki Shuugo, right?” the man asked. “Really, that was an impressive battle! You made a real show of it, especially considering that neither of your powers have much to offer in the way of spectacle. I certainly enjoyed myself!”

“Who the hell’re you?” Shuugo asked, shooting the interloper a glare as he reached for the pocket he kept his knife in. “Can’t say I’ve ever liked the sorta guys who peep on other people’s fights.”

“Peeping? No, no, I was spectating,” the man said with an air of utter shamelessness.

Shuugo scowled. It wasn’t hard to guess what his feelings about the new arrival were, and the man clearly picked up on them.

“Whoa now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves! I’m not interested in fighting you,” the man explained. “Why don’t we take a moment to introduce ourselves?” he said, raising his hands in a calming gesture as Shuugo drew his knife. “My name’s Habikino Hatsuhiko, and I’m the leader of Hearts.”

Shuugo furrowed his brow and shot Hatsuhiko a glare of pure hostility. “Hah! I see how it is. I cleared out the opening act, so now the main performer’s taking the stage, eh? Must be rough, bossing around clowns like that asshole,” he scoffed. As aggressive and inflammatory as he was acting, though, Shuugo was barely keeping his cool. I’m in it deep now, he thought to himself. The fight he’d just been through had left him wounded and exhausted. Jumping right into another fight right after would put him at an unmistakable disadvantage.

Whether or not Hatsuhiko saw through Shuugo’s act, he kept up his nonconfrontational demeanor. “Okay, calm down! I can already tell that you’re one prickly guy,” he said, then let out a sigh. “In case you didn’t hear me the first time, I’m not here to fight with you—and in fact, there’s a very real chance that we may never end up fighting at all.”

Shuugo raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Won’t you join me?” Hatsuhiko asked out of the blue. That earned him nothing but stony silence in reply, so he carried on, looking Shuugo straight in the eye as he spoke. “I was watching your battle with Haruto, like I said, and I can already tell you have what it takes. I’d be more than happy to bring you into the fold as a member of Hearts. I guess you could say I’m headhunting you, to put it simply.”

“Are you fucking with me, or what?” asked Shuugo. “Or maybe you’re just plain nuts?”

“It’s a better deal than you think, believe me! You’d be shifting from fighting solo like you did today to fighting as a team. Seeking out stronger allies and a stronger organization to belong to’s a necessity for people like you. Unless,” Hatsuhiko said as he took a step forward, “there’s some reason you’re obligated to follow Kiryuu Hajime’s orders?”

Shuugo paused for just a moment. “Did you set that phony-ass guitarist up to take a fall? Sent him at me as a test, or something?”

Hatsuhiko let out a laugh. “Well reasoned!”

“You’re one sick sack of shit.”

“Not so! If he’d beaten you, I had every intention to pay him the reward I’d promised.”

“Whaddya mean, ‘reward’?”

“That’s how things work in our organization. Each Player defeated earns the victor compensation, paid by me, their leader. It’s a much more straightforward motivation than bonds of trust or teamwork, wouldn’t you say? After all, there’s nothing more trustworthy than cold, hard cash,” Hatsuhiko said as he reached into his pocket, then tossed three small objects at Shuugo’s feet—three bundled-up stacks of banknotes.

“The hell’s this supposed to be?” asked Shuugo.

“It’s cash,” said Hatsuhiko. “Three million yen, in total. I’d like to commission you for a job, you see—your first mission with Hearts. See it through, and I’ll accept you as a full and formal member of our organization, then pay you another three million on top of what you’ve already received.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Hatsuhiko smiled.

“Kill Kiryuu Hajime.”

He said it like it was nothing—like he was talking about the weather—his placid smile never faltering.

“It’s a pretty simple proposal, honestly. He believes that you’re his ally, which means you’re in the perfect position to stab him in the back. All you have to do is take him out, and you’ll be six million yen and an entire organization of allies richer,” said Hatsuhiko.

“...”

“Oh, don’t worry! This is all completely legitimate currency that came from a reputable source. I have a lot going on—stocks, a company, you name it. There’s a whole mountain of cash where this came from.”

Shuugo didn’t say a word. He simply scowled at the three million yen lying at his feet. Eventually, though, he let out a breath, said, “The answer’s no, asshole,” and stepped on the bundles of cash, trampling them underfoot. Then he walked out of the factory, passing right by Hatsuhiko as he left.

“Is Kiryuu Hajime really the sort of boss who inspires that much loyalty?” Hatsuhiko asked.

“That dipshit’s got nothing to do with this,” Shuugo spat without even turning around. “I just can’t stand condescending pricks like you. You act like it’s a given that everyone’s gonna shut up and do what you say, and that attitude pisses me the hell off.”

“Welp, guess you got turned down, Hatsuhiko,” observed a girl with a cheerful feminine voice, stepping out of her hiding place after Shuugo made his exit.

Her sense of style was, simply put, fashionable to the point of excess. She wore a school uniform so loosely it was practically falling off her, making her look simultaneously alluring and like a total slob, and while there was still a hint of youth to her features, the sheer gaudiness of her makeup and accessories made her appear anything but childish. She practically sparkled from head to foot.

“Meh, you win some, you lose some! Buuut anyway, are you, like, doing anything with the three mil over there? Can I, y’know, go ahead and nab it? Hey, you’re cool with that, right?”

“I see you’re as unscrupulous as ever today, Happa,” said Hatsuhiko. The girl—Happa—trotted over to his side and gave him her best puppy dog eyes as she clung to his arm, causing him to let out an exasperated chuckle. “Go ahead, then. You’ve been doing good work lately, so think of it as a bonus.”

“Woo-hoo, thanks! Love ya, Hatsuhiko! I’ll show you an extra good time tonight, just wait!” Happa said as she scooped up the bills and did a happy little dance. “But for reals, though, you sure you wanna let that knife dude walk out alive? Isn’t this, like, the part where he says no and we bump him off for it? I can still blow him to itty-bitty piecies if you want!” she added, a belligerent glint beginning to shine in her eyes.

“No need for that. I’m perfectly all right with letting him roam free for the time being. Bringing him into the fold was a long shot to begin with,” Hatsuhiko replied quietly. “Shuugo didn’t turn down my invitation out of a sense of loyalty or camaraderie, after all. This was a matter of honor, in his eyes.”

“Whaddya mean by that?”

“Call it a masculine sense of pride, if you will. Come to think of it, he got his start in a biker gang, didn’t he? Those types tend to live and die by their pride, so I suppose it’s no surprise. In his mind, betrayal and treachery are probably some of the worst taboos one could violate.”

“Huuuh. Sounds stupid, but okay. Not like honor or manly pride can put food on the table,” Happa grunted disinterestedly. “And, like, way I see it? Doing some guy’s dirty work when you’re not getting paid’s just nuts! That, like, Kiryuu Hajime, or whatever? Their boss? Is he some sorta crazy incredible dude, or what?”

“Not at all,” said Hatsuhiko in a very definitive tone. “He has a strange way of drawing people to his side, but when all’s said and done, he doesn’t have what it takes to bring them together—nor is his reputation much to speak of. All we have to do is throw a wrench in the works like we did today, and his little sham of an organization will fall to pieces on its own.”

“Huh?” Happa blinked. “Hey, do you know this Kiryuu guy, or something?”

“We went to the same college. I’m told he dropped out in his second or third year, though.”

“Huuuh.”

“Now, then,” Hatsuhiko said as he turned to gaze out the factory’s doors. “I wonder how the candidate I do have high hopes for will work out?”

At the precise same moment, in an abandoned stretch of woodland a short way outside of town...

“All right. Sure.”

...a boy with a rather gloomy presence made a clear and instant decision. He was short and conspicuously young, with a pair of headphones perched upon his head and a handheld game console in his hands. His eyes were the color of a stagnant marsh, and he displayed exactly none of the youthful vigor one would expect from someone his age. His name was Akutagawa Yanagi, and his power was called Dead Space.

“I’ll take your job. It looks like this three million yen is real, so...I’ll kill Kiryuu Hajime for you,” Yanagi said with a faint smile as he looked over the bills he’d been given.

“You made that decision rather lightly, didn’t you?” the man he was talking to—who just so happened to also be Habikino Hatsuhiko—said with a look of mild surprise.

“I was getting sick of working for an idiot like him anyway... If he ends up dead and I get paid for it, then honestly, I call that two birds with one stone.”

“And you don’t feel even a little guilty about betraying him?”

“Not really,” Yanagi said, sounding like he couldn’t have possibly cared less. “None of them matter to me. Not our lunatic of a boss, nor the rest of the crew either...”

In some woods far away from the factory where Shuugo had had his fight, Yanagi had found himself in strikingly similar circumstances to his fellow Fallen Black member. The contents of the proposal, the payment that was offered, the date and time it happened, and—of course—the person they’d spoken with were all identical. Both of them had defeated a member of Hearts, only for Habikino Hatsuhiko to appear out of the blue and propose a betrayal that would culminate in the murder of Kiryuu Hajime.

Similar as the circumstances were, the responses that the two men gave were plainly different. Toki Shuugo had turned the proposal down, while Akutagawa Yanagi had accepted it as a matter of course. That, however, only accounted for their responses on a surface level.

Why on earth are all of these people putting so much effort into this, honestly? Yanagi thought to himself after he’d finished exchanging contact information with Hatsuhiko. And come on...kill Kiryuu Hajime? Who would be stupid enough to try that?

Yanagi had never had any intention of betraying Kiryuu. His reply to Hatsuhiko’s proposal had been a shameless lie.

Guess it’s true that I don’t care about those people though, Yanagi reflected. He hadn’t chosen to feign compliance and not follow up out of a sense of loyalty or camaraderie. He’d made his decision by simply considering what he stood to gain and lose. He’d pretended to accept the offer because it’d benefited him, allowing him to make off with the three-million-yen advance. He would take what he could get, then back out of the deal without a second thought. The contact information he’d given Hatsuhiko was fake, and he saw no point in keeping a verbal promise. In his mind, Hatsuhiko was in the wrong for taking an enemy’s word at face value in the first place.

If any of the other members of Fallen Black learned what Yanagi had done, they might have been disappointed in him...but he didn’t care about that either. Maybe the right thing to do in a situation like that was to stand firm and insist that you’d never betray your friends, no matter how much money was thrown at you. Maybe that was the choice that would make you come out looking like a hero. Akutagawa Yanagi, however, did not make that choice. After all, he...

“...was trying to make the most rational choice possible, I imagine,” Habikino Hatsuhiko, who had remained behind in the forest after Yanagi had left, said to the ally who had accompanied him and had just recently stepped out of hiding. She was a rather small girl who kept her bangs brushed down over her glasses, making it difficult to look her in the eye. Her clothes were black and plain, and at a glance, she looked like a rather dull and gloomy person.

“Wh-What do you mean...?” the girl asked anxiously.

“He’s smart, and he knows it,” Hatsuhiko explained. “That means he’s gotten used to looking down on the people around him. He thinks they’re all idiots, and he doesn’t care in the least what a bunch of idiots think of him.”

“That’s...amazing,” said the girl. “I’m not like that at all... I-I’ve always worried so much about what people think of me and tried really hard to not make anyone hate me... But then everyone started calling me creepy... They always did...all of them... I just annoyed them...”

“No, Haneko. He isn’t amazing at all,” Hatsuhiko said, smiling at the girl beside him before she could sink too terribly deeply into the depressive state she was working herself toward. “People like him are the simplest to manipulate. Nobody’s easier to read than a person who’s fallen prey to the conceited belief that they’re smarter and more rational than everyone else.”

“O-Oh, okay... Sorry. I was getting the wrong idea again...”

“No need to apologize.”

“S-Sorry!” the girl yelped reflexively.

Hatsuhiko sighed. “You should try to be a little more confident, Haneko. This plan would never have come together without you. Your power’s a hundred times more helpful than my Hundred and One Wolfies, in this case.”

“Okay...”

“By the way, Haneko,” Hatsuhiko said after a moment of silence. “Has your power already come into effect?”

“No... Not yet. But are you sure he...I mean, Akutagawa...really did lie to you? Is there a chance he really does want to join us after all...?”

“No, there isn’t. You can bet on it. He’s the sort of person who thinks that keeping promises is for idiots.”

The instant those words left Hatsuhiko’s mouth, a perfectly blank look came across Haneko’s face. All emotion drained away from her expression, along with the fearful aura she’d once held, replaced by something...different.

“Then he should drop dead,” she muttered under her breath, her gaze fixed on an indeterminate point in the middle distance. “Die, die, die... All those liars should just die. People who break their promises are trash. Garbage. Stupid, stinking garbage. Die, die, die, just die... Hee hee, hee hee hee... Every last liar should go straight to hell... Hee hee hee hee hee!”

Haneko’s expression spoke of an unsettling mixture of sorrow and delight as she muttered her ominous, grudge-driven ramble of a curse. She was smiling, but it was a twitching, unstable smile that perfectly represented her state of mind.

“Hee hee... Hee hee hee! It’s all right, Habikino. If he lied, then my power won’t let him get away with it. I’ll never let anyone get away with lying in front of me. Promises are meant to be kept, and I’ll make sure that’s exactly what happens to them,” she said, her smile growing still more twisted. “Thanks to my power, Two twool...Two...Too...”

Hatsuhiko broke eye contact. Haneko paused, then started over like nothing had happened.

“Thanks to my power, Twool true too... Too trool two...”

“Haneko?” said Hatsuhiko. Two failures, it seemed, was more than he could bear to let slide without comment. “Far be it from me to cast doubt on the names you came up with for our powers, particularly considering that using your names is our official policy...but don’t you think it might be easier to at least give your own power a name you can say without stumbling over it?”

Haneko’s shoulders drooped. Her unstable, ominous persona had melted away in an instant, overridden by the shame of having flubbed the most important line of her big scene. If, however, Hamai Haneko had been capable of articulating herself clearly in the heat of a dramatic moment, this is what she would have said:

“Thanks to my power, Two Tool to Too True, I can make that happen.”

Haneko despised lies and loathed those who told them with a fervent passion—and so, she had been given the power to turn falsehoods into binding contracts. In short: her power allowed her to force those who made promises to keep them.

Toki Shuugo and Akutagawa Yanagi. A belligerent young man and a gloomy boy. A man who might as well have been a delinquent, and a boy who might as well have been a shut-in. When each of them was offered the same choice at the same moment, each decided to give the opposite answer.

On the one hand, a man who, out of pride and honor, said no.

On the other, a boy who, through a process of logical reasoning, said yes.

This is a story of choices.

In this tale, a man and a boy—these wings of a fallen angel embroiled in an era of strife—will come to face the choices they make. One might say that life itself is nothing more than an extended sequence of choices, but unlike a quiz, there’s no checking your answers, and unlike a visual novel, you can’t save, load, and try again.

For better or for worse, the two of them will be forced to stumble their way forward, never knowing whether the choices they made were for the best and unable to go back and make a different decision. Caught between the regret and responsibility brought on by those choices, they will walk the thorny path that’s been laid out before them...just like everyone the whole world over walks their own.