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Chapter 5: Kiryuu Hajime—Tome the Third of the Twenty-First Year

We are as the bat.

Bearing fangs that pierce and wings that soar,

We stalk the dark and cower in fear of the light.

We are as the mantis.

Though our hands know naught but violence,

We clasp them together and pray to the heavens.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

Have you ever been reading a battle manga, or a sports manga, or whatever, and stopped to think, “Man, that plot twist was such an asspull”?

“It looks like I might have to start taking this seriously!”

“Just so you know, I’ve only been using X percent of my true power!”

“The real X is Y times more powerful than this!”

“I was planning on holding this power in reserve...”

“Using my secret weapon means putting my life at risk, but it looks like I have no choice.”

“Thwump! The truth is, I’ve been wearing weights this whole fight!”

“I’ve been wearing this to seal my true power away. Now that I’ve taken it off, I can go all out!”

“The truth is, while nobody was watching, I went through a ton of secret training!”

“I’ve never managed to make this move work in training, but now’s my only chance!”

“This whole time, you’ve been fighting one of my shadow clones!”

“We’re in dire straits, so it’s time to awaken the secret power that’s been slumbering within me!”

“Not even I knew that the power of the X bloodline flowed through my veins.”

Etcetera, etcetera. If you consume an even slightly appreciable amount of media, it’s very unlikely that you haven’t seen that sort of twist come up at least once. A character will say something like “I never wanted to use this power,” then suddenly they pull some sort of preposterous plot twist right out of their ass without the slightest bit of setup or foreshadowing. When a protagonist is up against an opponent whose power is overwhelmingly superior to theirs, instead of winning with a brilliant strategy or with some clever trick, they pull out a secret weapon, or a trump card, or an ultimate technique, or go through an awakening, and come out on top without breaking a sweat. An overwhelming victory enabled solely through deus ex machina: that is what we call an asspull.

Now, to be clear, I don’t want to make it sound like I’m criticizing that sort of plot development on the whole, per se. When all is said and done, it’s just another storytelling technique. Having a character suddenly reveal that their true power is whatever times mightier than what they’ve shown off so far’s exciting, and having your protagonist awaken to a hidden power is as hype as it gets. I mean, we’re talking about entertainment here—it’s totally natural to use that sort of device on occasion! Writing every last one of those plot twists off as stupid asspulls feels like it’s missing the point, in my opinion.

All that being said, the whole concept could actually be pretty terrifying when viewed from a different perspective. As far as supernatural battles are concerned, an asspull is pretty much the ultimate shortcut. No matter how desperate of a corner a character gets written into, they’re always just one deus ex machina away from pulling out all the stops and going into full OP AF mode. If somebody with that sort of plot armor backing them up were to really exist...there’d very simply be no winning against them.

“That’s right. It’s hopeless. No Player could ever possibly hope to beat System.”

To run through what happened after our glimpse into F’s main building, in brief: we somehow managed to escape from the enemy base and make our way back to our own hideout. All the members of Fallen Black were now gathered up in the dart bar, and Leatia had shown up as well for good measure. Apparently, she was there to deliver a message from the War Management Committee to us—from what I could gather, the Committee had decided to use her as their primary means of conveying information to us as a group.

To start, Aki had taken center stage to explain F’s ultimate trump card, System, to the rest of our members. “I guess if I were putting it simply, I’d say that System has the ultimate counter ability,” she said. “No matter how strong her opponent is, no matter how close of a fight it turns out to be, at the last second, she’ll pull some new, ridiculous power out of nowhere and win.”

One of the things that Aki had clarified in her explanation was that System was both the name of the girl’s power and the name of the girl herself. F’s people didn’t bother giving her a real name and just called her by her power’s name instead.

“So, for example, like...just pulling something random out of a hat here... Okay, imagine she’s fighting a pyrokinetic. At first, the pyro’s got the upper hand, and it looks like they’re dominating the battle, right? But then, as soon as they have System backed into a corner and it looks like the fight’s over, her power activates.”

To awaken to a new power the moment your back is up against the wall—just like how it would happen in a shonen manga written to keep its readers flipping page after page from the sheer, nail-biting excitement of it all.

“So all of a sudden, it turns out that System’s actually been hiding away the power to manipulate water this whole time! The second she’s done for, the most convenient possible power gets deus ex machina’d in to save her.”

If I were to put it in other words, I’d say that her power took awakenings, the classic cliché of any supernatural battle series, and embodied their very concept in a superpower.

“So friggin’ what?” growled Toki, who was leaning up against the wall. “I don’t get this ‘asspull’ and ‘deus’ garbage, but if she’s all about counterattacks, then all you have to do is kill her ass with your first move, right?”

“Hah! Not happening. Any old schmuck could think up a plan like that, and if it were that easy, I wouldn’t be freaking out like this!” said Aki in a tone that made it clear she meant every bit of the offense her phrasing implied. “Even if you did somehow manage to instakill System, she’d suddenly have a power that only activates the moment she dies, or the power to be reborn instantaneously in a new, more powerful form, or something.”

Toki looked like he wanted to say something in protest for a moment, but Aki had shut down his point pretty brutally, and all he could do was click his tongue in irritation.

“O-Okay, but, umm...what about after she comes back to life?” asked Fan. “What if somebody beats her after her power’s already activated to rewrite things once? Like, if she awakened to a water power to beat somebody who used fire, couldn’t somebody who uses electricity beat her really easily right afterward?”

“Nope, that’s out too,” said Aki, curtly dismissing the idea offhand.

As a side note, I was pretty positive that Fan was pulling the idea that electricity is super effective against water straight out of Pokémon, but I decided that this wasn’t the right moment to derail things by pointing out that it didn’t really work like that in real life. Absolutely pure water isn’t even conductive at all, actually, and water with other stuff mixed into it—like seawater—can conduct and disperse electricity super easily. Basically, everything I knew about electricity made me think that it wasn’t necessarily always at an advantage against water.

In the meantime, of course, Aki kept picking Fan’s idea to pieces from a totally different direction. “If you had a guy who could use electricity attack her, she’d just awaken again to a power that just so happened to perfectly nullify his. That’s the scariest part about System—her power’s limitless. She can awaken over and over and over again. She’s a one-trick pony, sure, but it’s such a good trick that it just makes her more unbeatable.”

So it’s not a onetime deal? That meant that no matter how many times you went after her, no matter how many people you set on her, she’d just come back each and every time you beat her, getting a little more powerful with each iteration. The awakenings, dei ex machina, and convenient plot twists would never end.

“We just can’t beat System. It’s impossible. Ryuu’s gravity, Tomi’s eyes, Gawanagi’s gaps, Toks’s knife, Fanfan’s personalities—none of them would work on her,” Aki said, biting her lip with frustration. Strictly speaking, it didn’t seem to me that they wouldn’t work on her—it was just that System would then proceed to adapt and overwrite whatever it was we’d done to her.

“You done now? In that case, I’ve got some news for you as well,” said Leatia, who’d been floating about cross-legged in the air this whole time. She sounded like our conversation had been boring her to tears. “So, I’m just gonna ignore the fact that you people—well, just Hajime, really—blew off my orders and went out to cause trouble on your own. You humans are supposed to have the freedom to choose how you’ll participate in the War, so not much I can do about it,” she said. For someone who’d just said she’d ignore our transgression, she sure sounded like she was still upset with us.

“Anyway, the Committee’s done some more digging into F, and we’ve figured out what they’re after and who their ringleader is. We’ll start with the ringleader—they’re being led by a spirit named Zeon. Zeon’s the one who’s been empowering all these Rogue Players, and they also founded the whole organization. The Rogues themselves, meanwhile, are most likely just a means to buy time. They were supposed to catch the Committee’s attention and keep us distracted, from the look of it.”

“To buy time for what?” I asked reflexively.

Leatia sighed. “Uh, isn’t it obvious? It’s to buy time for them to get System up and running.” I fell silent, and a moment later, Leatia continued. “We knew they were making something, but I never would’ve guessed they were creating a Player from the ground up. Hate to say it, but I’ve actually gotta be grateful for Hajime’s little overstep, in that sense. We know all about System’s power now thanks to Aki, and that’s made F’s ultimate objective obvious.”

Leatia paused for a moment to look around at all of us, then dropped the bombshell. “F’s objective—in other words, Zeon’s objective—is to bring the Fifth Spirit War to an end. To do that, they’re creating the ultimate living weapon, which they’ll use to wipe out every last remaining Player.”

So they really are trying to end the War. It seemed Toki’s shot in the dark had actually hit its mark.

“Huuuh. Yeah, that scans,” Aki muttered with a rather self-satisfied look on her face. “So, that’s why they set up System’s power to work like that. It all makes sense now.”

“H-Huh? What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You don’t get it? Her whole thing is that every time she gets beaten, she awakens and gets stronger and stronger, right? And her power doesn’t have a limit, right? So what would happen if she keeps fighting for long enough?”

Every time she’s in trouble, she awakens. If that pattern keeps repeating, then eventually...

“Power creep. Duh,” said Aki. “She’ll end up as stupidly OP as the main character of a battle manga that’s been serialized for decades. The more System fights, the more of a monster she’ll turn into.”

An ever-escalating power curve was a problem that any battle series that went on for long enough would eventually have to address. The difference between characters’ power levels at the beginning of a manga compared to its later stages can be positively absurd. If System had the potential to manifest that phenomenon in the real world, then all the ordinary Players who went up against her would inevitably get massacred. Suddenly, we’d all be demoted to the level of early-arc bit villains.

System’s purpose was to wipe the board—to bring the War to a full stop by taking out every single other Player. Of course they would give her an ultimate power that could win against any other ability in the book. The more she’d fight, the stronger she would become, and the faster that the process would repeat itself. Even on the off chance she were ever defeated, that would just provide her another chance to awaken and start all over. Her power was godlike, pure and simple.

“H-Hey, Leatia? Can’t you just disqualify her from the war...?” I asked, clinging to my one last shred of hope. “She has to count as an irregular element, right? That seems like totally valid grounds for disqualification!” Judging by how she’d described the process, I reasoned that the Committee would surely be up for giving her the boot.

Leatia, however, shook her head. “System’s not like you people. When all’s said and done, your powers are basically just on loan from us spirits. Meanwhile, System’s power was a part of her from the moment she was created. She’s a natural-born Player, I guess you could say. Strictly speaking, she’s not even human—’course, she’s not exactly a spirit either...”

She’s not a human or a spirit? Then what is she?! Gaaah, I don’t understand any of this!

“So? What happens now?” asked Akutagawa from over on the couch. I got the sense he was trying to get us to hurry up and get to the point. Things were looking about as bad as they’d ever been, but his eyes had still been glued to a handheld game console throughout the whole conversation. “I get that System’s bad news, but isn’t the Committee working out a plan to take that monster down?”

“Nothing’s been decided yet,” said Leatia. “The Committee’s pretty split on what we should do. Some of us even think that System bringing the war to an end would be a valid way for it to wrap up.”

“So it’s still in the air,” Akutagawa sighed. “You’re always noncommittal like that, Leatia. No wonder you’re just a gofer to them.”

“What?! You wanna try saying that to my face, you gloomy little asshole?!”

“Not particularly,” said Akutagawa, brushing off Leatia’s rage like it was nothing.

The atmosphere in the room was starting to feel uncomfortably tense. It goes without saying that none of us had a clear idea of what we would do next. Just then, amid all that tension, the sound of a phone vibrating suddenly rang out. We all looked over into the corner, where Hajime was sitting on the couch he’d claimed as his own. He hadn’t said a word since we got back, but now he pulled out his phone and answered it.

“Hello? Yeah, it’s me... Oh, that. My bad. Slipped my mind,” he said. He looked remarkably serious and kept talking for a little while longer, but before long, his mood seemed to sour. “Yeah, I get the picture. Smell you later, shithead,” he spat, then hung up, paused, and heaved a sigh. “Feels like it’s always one bad thing after another, huh?” he commented.

“W-Wait, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Who were you talking to just now? Wh-What happened...?” And how could things possibly get any worse than they already are?

Hajime’s shoulders slumped, and he cradled his head in his hands. He looked downright despondent as he glanced up, just barely enough to look at us, and spoke in a voice so quiet it was practically a whisper.

“I just got fired.”

“...”

In that instant, I could’ve sworn my consciousness had departed from my body. I was completely gobsmacked. I think my spirit made it most of the way to Brazil or so before finally turning around and coming back to me. It was only then that I had the presence of mind to give Hajime’s words actual, careful consideration, and when I’d finally finished thinking them through, I let out the sigh of a lifetime, then shouted with all my might.

“Read the goddamn room, Hajime!”

“Look, what do you want from me?” Hajime snapped back. “Am I supposed to not pick up when I get a call from my boss?”

“That was your boss?! You said ‘smell you later, shithead’ to your boss?!”

“He just wouldn’t shut up! He was all, ‘you’re fired, you’re fired,’ and I just lost it! Ugggh,” Hajime sighed, “I totally forgot I had a shift today.”

“Then it’s your fault for ditching work!” I yelled. Now that I think about it, he did say something about having work tonight right after we got to F’s base. It was well past dark, which meant that he’d unquestionably missed a shift without even calling in. I had the impression that he’d already been on thin ice with his manager, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back—or rather, got the camel canned.

“Man, what now?” Hajime mused. “I was all ready to quit, but it just had to go and turn into some sorta fight. It’s gonna be way too awkward to go to that convenience store from now on... Dammit, I shouldn’t have gotten a job at the closest one to my place! Where am I supposed to buy Jump and smokes from now on?”

“I don’t care!” I shouted, then stormed right up to Hajime and leaned in as close as I could bring myself to get to him. “That’s enough, Hajime! We’re talking about something really serious right now! Were you even listening?!”

“Sure I was,” said Hajime. “You were going on about how amazing System is, right?”

“I—I mean, yeah,” I said, a little taken aback. “But...do you really get what’s going on with her?”

“System,” Hajime repeated. “A simple name...but not a bad one. Feels a little sloppy, though. Like the sorta name you’d churn out in your free time, y’know? Real rush job. I give it a six out of ten.”

“Nobody asked you about her name!”

“Well, what else is there to talk about?”

“Her power! How it actually works! You get it, right?! It’s completely unbeatable!” I wailed.

“Bwa ha ha!” Hajime cackled, a smirk spreading across his face. “Unbeatable? What a joke. She just powers up every time she’s in a tough spot, right? That’s nothing. So she goes through an awakening in moments of mortal peril? Big whoop—I can do that too,” Hajime declared, leaning back into the couch in a pose that spoke of pure, leisurely arrogance as he gestured at himself with his thumb. He was acting perfectly cool, perfectly uninterested, as if he were just stating the obvious.

“I’m just so friggin’ awesome I haven’t had the chance yet, but someday, some big, scary-ass enemy’s gonna appear, and I’ll have to awaken to take ’em down. It’s a given. After all—I’m Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First, reincarnation of the highest-ranking of all the fallen angels: the primeval progenitor!”

Words failed me. It felt like I was losing my mind. What the actual hell is he talking about? I can’t keep up with this nonsense! I just can’t! I have no idea if he’s kidding or not!


“How long do you think we’re gonna just sit here and listen to this, huh?!” A dull, heavy thud rang out from the back of the bar, and I spun around just in time to see Toki pull his fist back from the wall he’d just punched. He was shooting Hajime a look so sharp, it was practically bladed. “It’s just one goddamn pile of stupid, pointless crap after another with you!” Toki shouted. “Well, I’ve had it! I’m not putting up with this asshole and his chuuni bullshit for another second!”

Toki stomped across the bar toward us, shoved me aside, then grabbed Hajime by the lapel. “Just thinking about working under a dipshit like you makes me wanna hurl,” Toki growled.

“I’d let go if I were you,” Hajime blithely replied. “This coat’s got anti-corporeal and anti-magical defensive enhancements worked into its design. Touching it for long’s bad news for an ordinary human.”

He said the most profoundly absurd things in the most profoundly serious of tones, and Toki wasn’t having it. The scowl he directed at Hajime took on an even sharper, more dangerous air. “Looks like I picked the wrong guy to team up with,” he said.

“Bwa ha ha! I’m still better than your last boss, though, aren’t I? Now that was a riot! The leader of Cruise—sorry, former leader—bowing and scraping, head pressed to the concrete, begging me to spare his pathetic life!”

Suddenly, Toki’s expression shifted dramatically. He’d been angry before, yes, but now his eyes were full of clear and undisguised malice. He released Kiryuu’s coat, only to reach into his own pocket and pull out his knife—his beat-up, jagged, serrated, unfoldable jackknife.

Wait—no way, right? He’s not seriously planning on fighting, is he? Here? Against Hajime? Is this about to turn into an actual supernatural battle?! But then, just as I was trying to figure out how to stop the two of them...

“Hyahaaah!”

...a shrill, piercing laugh rang out, tearing my attention away from the imminent disaster.

“Hya ha ha ha ha haaa! I like it! Do it! Go to town on each other, you smelly little manwhores! Hell, let me in on the action! You’ve been caught in the act, so why not make it a threesome?! Hya ha haaa, let’s battle! Let’s get it on! Careful, though—you might just end up getting your ass beat by a girl!”

Her voice was as harsh and grating as nails on a chalkboard. She was as hyper as she was vulgar. Her tone was upbeat in the least appropriate way possible.

Oh, crap. Oh, crap, crap, crap! I found myself shivering as I turned my head to look at her. There she was—Fan, sitting cross-legged atop the bar, her nurse outfit’s buttons partially undone to expose an ample portion of her chest, and her skirt just barely managing to cover what lay beneath it. Her mouth was twisted into a sadistic smile, and the expectant way she licked her lips only added to that impression. Technically speaking, though, the first thing I said wasn’t actually correct. I wasn’t looking at Yusano Fantasia at all.

Why would one of her other personalities have to take the driver’s seat now?! And to make matters worse, it just had to be Grotesqua: the most belligerent and least reasonable personality of them all!

“Hya ha ha ha! Anyway, y’know something? Fantasia was about to snap before I took over! ‘I can’t take having this asshat as my boss for another second! It’s supposed to be the boss’s job to bring us together at a time like this, not tear us apart,’ she said! Soooo, that’s how I ended up in the driver’s seat! Get! The! Picture, pal?! Hya ha ha haaa, what a goddamn loser you are! Seriously, Kiryuu, you’ve got a middle schooler giving you shit for being a crap leader!”

Brutal and merciless though her criticism was, I could also hear a certain trace of sadness in Fan’s—or rather, Grotesqua’s—words. It’s not like I couldn’t understand where she was coming from. As kind and innocent as Fan was, even she couldn’t help but feel let down by Hajime, considering the state of things. Heck, I’d been putting up with him since high school and even I was pretty stunned by just how bad of an attitude he was showing us.

“So, yeah, that’s how it’s gonna be!” said Grotesqua. “Time for a real...uprising? Coup d’état? Regime change? Hya ha ha, whatever! Point! Is! It’s high time for you to give up your big ol’ boss hat to li’l miss Grotesqua, Kiryuu Haaajiiimeeeeee! You’re just not cut out for giving people orders—sucks to suck!”

Toki clicked his tongue irritably. “Ugh. Just had to be Grotesqua. Can’t stand this bitch,” he grumbled, his knife held at the ready as he slowly backed toward the bar counter. “But there’s one thing I can agree with her on: you’re not cut out to give orders, all right!”

“Woo hoo! Slay me, Toki-toks! Least somebody here sees it how it is!” shouted Grotesqua as she leaped from the bar top to the floor, stepping over to stand beside Toki. The two of them formed a united front facing off against Hajime, who was still lounging it up on the couch. They stared him down, ready to erupt in violence at the drop of a hat.

Zigzag Jigsaw: a power of laceration and assassination. Sex Eclipse: a power that causes the fragmentation of one’s own identity. The wielders of those two abilities formed the core of Fallen Black’s primary combat unit. Unlike Aki and I, who mostly stuck to the sidelines, those two boasted the absolute strength and genuine lethality needed to dominate the sort of battlefields we found ourselves upon, and however much faith I had in Hajime, I couldn’t imagine that even he could handle both of them at once.

The situation was as critical as it had ever been—a powder keg set to ignite at the slightest of sparks—and yet nobody moved to stop them. All of us were just as disappointed in Hajime, most likely. And me? I didn’t know what I should do. I wanted to stop them, of course. No matter how you look at it, brawling with your own allies would be a terrible mistake, and all the more so considering our most powerful foe to date had just appeared on the scene. Why the hell are we having a falling-out when the situation could hardly get any grimmer, anyway?! But what can I possibly do to turn this around...?

“Hya ha ha! Don’t be getting any ideas ’bout what happens after we murder his ass, though, Toki-toks! I’m gonna be our new boss, you got that?! Don’t you go forgetting it!” chattered Grotesqua. She hadn’t stopped blabbing away the whole time I was agonizing over my predicament, actually. She was a real chatty kid...I mean, if she even counted as a kid. That was sort of unclear.

“And y’know what I’m gonna do first?!” Grotesqua continued. “I’m nixing Fallen Black and giving our team a name that doesn’t totally suck! We get to have a nice, pretty name from now on! Same for the powers—Sex Eclipse? Hya ha haaa, are you for real?! Gross! What the hell’s that even supposed to mean?! I bet he just gets off on the idea of making a middle schooler go around saying sex all the time! What a goddamn creeper! Hey, you listening, Kiryuu Hell-whatever?! Your stupid names friggin’ suck a—”

A black streak flashed through my line of sight.

It happened so fast that it took me a few seconds to even realize that said streak was, in fact, Hajime. A powerful, dull thud rang out through the room as the wall across from the sofa he’d been sitting on warped dramatically, forming a crater in its surface. At the center of that crater was Yusano Fantasia—no, Yusano Grotesqua, who’d been slammed into the wall with tremendous force. Hajime’s slender, bony fingers were buried in her blonde hair as he squeezed her head in a viselike, one-handed claw grip, doing his very best to compress her skull in on itself. She’d ended up splayed out against the wall in a pose that almost made her look like a criminal who’d been bound up and crucified.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” said Hajime, speaking slowly, deliberately, as if trying to drive each and every word into Grotesqua’s skull as he drove said skull physically into the wall. “What, exactly, were you saying about the names I come up with?”

“Ghaah...agggh, ah, aaah,” Grotesqua groaned, but she didn’t say anything. She probably couldn’t say anything, actually. The little moans of pain she was making were probably the only sound she could manage at the moment.

“Go on, tell me. What were you saying about my names? That they’re the coolest you’ve ever heard?”

“That... That hurts! Aaaagh!” Grotesqua finally spit out.

“What, did you think a high-and-mighty fallen angel like me wouldn’t dare lay hands on a little girl? You had your hopes up that I wouldn’t ever hurt my allies? You thought you’d just get away with your little farce of a falling-out ’cause you never dreamed I’d use my full power on you over it? Figured that you couldn’t possibly get killed off yet since you haven’t even shown off half of what your power’s capable of? Or maybe you figured Toki’d get offed first since he’s a guy? Or maybe, just maybe, you believed that when all was said and done, Kiryuu Hajime’s a kindhearted man who cares about his friends?”

A mirthful, mocking smirk spread across Hajime’s face. “Well, too bad. I’m real goddamn easy to provoke, see.” A lethal animosity blazed in his mismatched eyes as he channeled his power into the hand he was holding Grotesqua with.

“Scatter like leaves on the wind: Ruined’s Raking!”

Ruined’s Raking: a five-pronged slashing attack, enabled by Hajime’s power. It operated on the same principle as Sinner’s Sanction ⪧, only instead of concentrating gravitational energy into a single point, here he stretched it out into lines of force. It was an attack that refined the power of gravity into its thinnest and sharpest form possible, honing it to an edge that no knife could ever hope to achieve—an edge that could slice through the human body with the greatest of ease. To put it simply, it was a move that gave Hajime unimaginably powerful claws of gravity.

That, incidentally, was part of where its name came from—it was supposed to be a pun on “to rake,” as in “to rake your opponent with your claws,” and “rake,” the garden implement. Hajime claimed that the imagery worked since the attack made his enemy’s blood scatter into the air like crimson leaves, fallen from a bare and ruined tree, gathered into the cool autumn breeze... Wait, no, that doesn’t matter! This is no time to be explaining the origins of the power’s name, even if he has delivered that speech to me dozens of times!

Hajime still had Grotesqua’s head grasped in his hand. Was he seriously planning to activate Ruined’s Raking while she was in that state, unleashing it on her at point-blank range? Sure, it’d be a cool way to use the power, and it’d be the most chuuni thing he could possibly choose to do, but it would also shred her head into a thousand pieces!

“Gyaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!”

A bloodcurdling scream rang out through the bar. I reflexively clamped my eye shut, wincing away from the spectacle. A moment later, I heard a series of drips and splatters—the sound of some sort of liquid splashing onto the floor.

No way. He didn’t, right? Surely Hajime wouldn’t really do that to Grotesqua—to Fan? Just because she made fun of how he names stuff...?

“Psych! Gotcha.”

A bright, cheerful voice sliced straight through the tension in the air, blowing it all away in an instant.

“Bwa ha ha! C’mon, I was kidding! Just a big joke! Don’t take it so seriously, sheesh. After all, when all’s said and done, I’m just a kindhearted man who cares about his friends, right?”

I was finally able to bring myself to look up just in time to see Hajime let Grotesqua go. Her knees trembled for just a moment before she sank to the ground on the spot.

“Grotesqua,” I began, then paused. “Ah, wait, no—are you back to being Fan now?”

Whichever she was, she didn’t reply. She just sat there, eyes wide open, quietly sobbing.

“Oh, now look! You made her cry!” I sighed. Grotesqua—no, it had to be Fan, judging by her youthful expression and the mild-mannered look in her eyes—must’ve reverted back to her usual self at some point without me noticing. Anyway, Fan’s face was flushed red, and she was crying inconsolably. Said face, however, featured not so much as a single scratch. Hajime hadn’t actually used his power—he’d just shouted its name, that was all.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Oh, thank goodness...but wait. Huh? If she wasn’t decapitated, then what was that splashing noise? I’d been all but certain it was the sound of blood splattering onto the floor.

“U-Ugggh,” Fan groaned between sniffles. The moment I took a closer look at her, the source of the sound hit me. Specifically, it was the way she was sitting, her hands holding the hem of her skirt to the ground, like she was trying to cover something up with it. That something, I assumed, being a puddle. Fan...had most likely wet herself.

To be totally clear, I really couldn’t blame her. The way Hajime had been acting a moment ago was terrifying enough to nearly give me a heart attack, and I’d only been a bystander! Fan, meanwhile, had been in the thick of it, having all that concentrated hostility directed right at her. I honestly couldn’t even imagine how scared she’d been—and rightfully so, considering that, as best as I could tell...he’d been serious. For a moment, he really had planned on murdering her.

“So, Toki,” Hajime casually continued, “did you have something to say to me too?”

Toki hesitated for just a moment, then looked away. “Forget about it.”

“Oh? I’ll do just that, then!” said Hajime with a smirk. “You’re the last person here I’d want to fight, y’know? Zigzag Jigsaw’s one brutal-ass power—even I’d have a little trouble dealing with it.”

“Put a sock in it, asshole,” Toki sullenly muttered as he threw himself onto the couch. His fists were still clenched, and it seemed he was just barely keeping his anger in check, but he didn’t seem inclined to lash out at his leader again. The difference between the two’s capabilities had been made painfully clear to him. I could tell that when Hajime had shown us how fast he could really move when he felt like it, Toki had been just as unable to follow his movements as I had been.

Japanese martial arts tend to put a heavy emphasis upon how one closes the gap between oneself and one’s opponent, and the ideal form of that movement involves doing so all but instantaneously. Surprisingly, the most important factor that plays into achieving that effect isn’t how quickly you move; it’s your ability to influence your opponent’s perception of how you move. You have to pay close attention to both your and their footwork, center of balance, stance, height, line of sight, etcetera etcetera. Only when you can keep track of all those factors together and understand them well enough to take advantage of them can you achieve the sort of seemingly instantaneous movement that a true master is capable of.

Hajime, of course, was very familiar with the concept. He’d embarked on a secretive training regimen to master the skill back when he was in middle school, and now he’d finally managed to make it his own...thanks entirely to his superpower. With perfect control over the force of gravity, movement so fast it defies explanation became perfectly possible. He could move at impossible speeds from impossible poses in impossible directions with ease. His capacity for movement alone was a truly formidable skill, and that skill was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the abilities his power granted him.

I felt a sense of newfound understanding. It was all coming back to me now—this is why Kiryuu Hajime was our leader. It wasn’t because of his popularity or because he had any sort of innate leadership skills. He was broke, unemployed, homeless, and completely incapable of living independently. He had no common sense and no charisma. He was an utterly hopeless man from top to bottom, but when all was said and done, the reason his allies had stuck with him for so long was exceedingly simple: he was overwhelmingly powerful. Or, in other words, he was dangerous.

Everyone except for me had chosen to join up with Hajime exclusively because they didn’t want to be his enemy. His borderline unfair degree of control over his gravitational powers and the unpredictable nature of his personality put together resulted in an unimaginably dangerous combination. There was no telling what he’d do at any given moment, and as such, there was no telling what he was capable of—and that fact scared our allies into submission. His case of chuunibyou was so terrifyingly terminal that sometimes it really felt like he’d be willing to destroy the whole world on a whim.

“Hah! You guys done putting on your stupid little soap opera?” snorted Leatia. She’d been sitting off on the sidelines watching over the course of our near falling-out. “So? What’s the plan, Hajime? You are supposed to be the boss, right? Isn’t it your job to set your organization’s course?”

“Bwa ha ha!” Hajime cackled. “Whoa there, Leatia, why the rush? You seem like you’re in an awful hurry to move the conversation along! It’s almost like you’re worried about something, huh?”

“Excuse me?” snapped Leatia.

“All I’m saying is that if you want me to crush F for you, why not just come out and ask?”

Leatia hesitated for the briefest of moments. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you not to stick your nose into all this, didn’t I? The Committee hasn’t reached a consensus about our next step yet, so—”

“There—that’s just it,” said Hajime, cutting Leatia off as if he’d been waiting for her to say that. “The War Management Committee hasn’t reached a decision yet, sure. You keep saying that—but why are you telling that to us in the first place?”

Leatia fell silent, and Hajime grinned. “I thought something was strange when you told me where F’s base was yesterday. You tell me to ‘sit tight and not cause trouble,’ then tell me exactly where the base is a second later? Seems really unnatural, huh? If you’d really wanted me to stay out of it, you could’ve just kept quiet, right? So I just couldn’t help but think that really, you were after something else the whole time... ’Course, I took the bait like a chump yesterday regardless. I wanted to check out F’s base for my own reasons, and all.”

Hajime was a born contrarian. He loved defying expectations above all else, and much to my surprise, it seemed that Leatia had seen through that side of his personality after all. If you wanted Hajime to do something, you just had to tell him not to do anything at all. Unfortunately for her, though, Hajime had also seen through her personality. In this instance, he was one step ahead of her.

“‘Sit tight and don’t cause trouble,’ eh? Why not be honest for once? Just go ahead and tell me to stir shit up. And throw in a ‘please,’ while you’re at it,” Hajime said with a defiant smirk. “And while I’m at it, why don’t I take a few wild guesses? I’d bet that ‘Zeon’ spirit you mentioned was actually a member of the War Management Committee at some point, right? But then the Committee did something so messed up that Zeon couldn’t take it anymore and decided to stab them in the back and bring the whole War to a grinding halt. The rebellion’s coming from inside the house, y’know? That’s why the Committee can’t be too blatant about making a move on F—they know that the farther they step out of the shadows, the more their dirty laundry gets exposed as a result. And that’s where I come in.”

Hajime paused, but Leatia still wasn’t saying a word, so he carried on. “They probably thought that if I wipe F off the map, they could all say hurray and pretend it never happened to begin with, right? The tricky part about Zeon’s plan is that if it all goes through, it’ll bring the war to an end without ever actually breaking any rules. Making an unbeatable Player’s one hell of a loophole, after all.”

As Hajime rattled off conjecture after conjecture, I frantically attempted to process them and keep up with his train of logic. If I was understanding him correctly, the whole matter boiled down to the Committee trying to save face. The Spirit War was intended for its viewers to gamble on, and the War Management Committee were basically the bookkeepers. Being a bookie’s profitable, sure, but it also means you have to take on all sorts of risks.

“I don’t know if this is your plan or the Committee’s,” said Hajime, “but I gotta admit, you’d get a pretty sweet deal out of it! Setting things up so that someone ignoring your orders gives you everything you want on a silver platter? You really do know how I operate, huh?”

“Seriously...” muttered Leatia, “drop dead. Like, literally, go die.” She told Hajime to drop dead so often that I almost thought of it as a sort of catchphrase for her, but for once, the way she said it made it sound like she really meant it. The fact that she wasn’t arguing against anything he’d said, meanwhile, confirmed to me that Hajime was right on the money.

“It’s not like I’m opposed to taking out F, you know? Throwing down with this so-called ‘ultimate Player’ System sounds pretty fun. But y’know what I can’t stand? I can’t stand the way you seem to think you can control me,” said Hajime, raising a hand to his head and tapping his temple with his finger. “The only things that’re allowed to control me are the crazed, destructive impulses that run through my head.”

Hajime spun about on his heel as he delivered the line. I was on the fence about whether it had made him sound cool or just plain demented, but he was obviously under the impression that it made him look like the biggest badass on the planet, and he strode with a spring in his step toward the bar’s front door. “Lemme teach you some human manners, Leatia,” he said as he walked. “When we ask someone for a favor, the polite thing we do is say ‘Please.’”

“You’re the last person I wanna hear getting high-and-mighty about manners, shithead,” said Leatia with a scowl.

“Bwa ha ha! Then I guess these negotiations have broken down! Starting now, everything related to dismantling F is anathema to Fallen Black. You got that, guys?!” he called out across the bar. “’Course, if anyone wants to go pick a fight on their own time, that’s a different story. Getting yourselves killed’s your own prerogative.”

And with that final, unilateral, yet half-hearted order, Hajime left the bar. I stood there gaping for just a second before chasing after him, mostly on reflex. The bar’s door led to a stairwell that connected the fourth and fifth floors of the building. Dead Space had set things up such that the moment you stepped outside, the entrance to the bar would vanish from sight. I didn’t pay that any mind, though, and dashed down the stairs after Hajime.

“Wait! Wait, I said!” I shouted. “Where are you going, Hajime?”

“Where?” Hajime repeated, then let out a chuckle. “Wherever the wind takes me, obviously.”

“Okay, but if the wind’s planning on taking you home, you should know that the door’s locked.”

Hajime, my resident freeloader, froze on the spot. Then he held out his hand in a silent request that I, his de facto landlady, lend him the key. I stepped down onto the landing he was on, handed it over, then looked up at his face. “Hey, Hajime...seriously, what are you planning on doing now?”

“Huh?” Hajime grunted. “Going home and going to bed, that’s all. I got canned, remember? Oh, right—looks like I’ll have a lot of free time tomorrow, so I was thinking of paying a visit to our old school. It’s been ages since I said hi to Miss Satomi, and—”

“Not that!” I said. I hadn’t meant to shout, but it sort of just turned out that way, and I took a second to collect myself before choking out what I really wanted to say. “The War might end, you know?”

This time, I surprised myself with just how torn up I sounded about it. Huh? That’s weird. I’m almost making it sound like I don’t want the War to end. What am I, an arms dealer?

I had never been particularly enthusiastic about the War itself to begin with. I was only even participating as Hajime’s chaperone, basically. I’d never liked violence, and I hated fighting—or at least I said I hated it, despite having never actually been in a proper fight. The sight of blood made me feel sick, and seeing people die made me feel like I was going to hurl.

I’d always felt comfortable in the knowledge that the War would end someday. But that’s just the thing—I thought it would end someday, far off in the future.

If F succeeded in ending the War on their terms, though, it would mean the end for Fallen Black as well. System would defeat us, we’d lose our powers and memories, and we’d all go back to our former, everyday lives. We’d only just come together, and we’d be split apart again, just like that. I couldn’t help but feel a little sad about it.

And then, above all else...there was Hajime. What would he do if the War ended? For all I knew, he might vanish from my life all over again, just like when we’d graduated from high school... Just the thought of it made me feel a painful ache in my chest. It made tears pool in my eyes. It felt like I’d lost something, like a hole had been opened in my heart, and the sensation was overwhelming.

“Don’t worry, Hitomi,” said Hajime, laying a gentle hand upon my head. “I won’t let them end it.”

“Huh...?” I said, looking up at him.

“You don’t seriously think I’d let something this entertaining end just like that, do you?” asked Hajime, his voice filled with an ebullient confidence. “I don’t care if F tries to end it, or System, or anyone else—I’ll stop them. I’ll keep dragging out these good times for as long as they can possibly last. Like a manga that’s just too damn popular to let end.”



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