Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 5 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Kiryuu Hajime—Tome the Sixth of the Twenty-First Year

All that separates strength and weakness is a veneer of falsehood.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

System: a power of unlimited asspulls. A power that can prevail over any other, without exception. No matter how mighty its wielder’s foe may be—no matter how vicious they may be—System copes. It adapts. It acclimates. It exceeds. It rises to meet every challenge...and awakens in response. Like the powers of a true protagonist. Like a real-life deus ex machina.

The powers that we Players wielded had been granted to us by the spirits, and I’d been told that they had—to some extent, anyway—been tuned and adjusted relative to each other. The Spirit War, after all, had been set up for the purpose of gambling, and throwing a balance-breaking power into the game would totally defeat that purpose. To put it simply: it shouldn’t have been possible for one Player to reign dominant by nature above all the others. Gambling is only gambling if there’s a chance to win or lose it all. It’s all about the risk, and if the outcome’s already been decided, you can’t really call it a gamble in the first place.

System, however, had been created by F for the express purpose of drawing a line in the sand between her and the other Players. Zeon had brought System into being as an act of treason—to voice his (or her, I suppose—I wasn’t actually totally sure) objections to the Spirit War, and ultimately, to bring it to an end. System was intended to overcome each and every ability that could be thrown at her. Her power had been made to be absolute and undefeatable.

So, the big question: how could we defeat her in spite of that? And the answer: we couldn’t. Victory was simply not on the table. Well, it was far beyond me, at the very least. All that being said, we didn’t necessarily have to beat her. After all, our goal was to stop her.

“Hitomi! Duck!” shouted Toki.

I moved completely on reflex, hitting the deck in an instant, my hands pressed to the parking lot’s asphalt. A moment later, something shot through the air at an incredible speed, directly over my head. It looked like a metal pipe of some sort, twisted into a bizarre shape. By the time I’d stood up again, it was already over. I turned my eye back to Toki just in time to see him deliver a savage kick to the abdomen of the man he was fighting, who flew backward, tumbled for several meters across the ground, then emptied his stomach. He writhed for a moment, unable to stand, and finally came to a stop. He probably wasn’t dead, but he was unmistakably out of the fight.

“Let’s keep moving,” said Toki, his voice gruff and businesslike. Blood dripped down his cheek. The man he was fighting had transformed the pipe into a sort of sickle that he’d swung about on a chain at one point in their fight, and he’d just barely managed to scratch Toki’s face. His power, apparently, had allowed him to change the shape and structure of metal, State-Alchemist-style. He’d shifted his weapon’s form several times over the course of the fight, and I had to admit, it was a scarily effective power in combat...but unfortunately for him, Aki had already analyzed his power the last time we were here. She’d shared all the information she’d gathered back then with the rest of us, and a power like that was nothing to Toki if he knew its innermost workings in advance.

“Sounds good,” I said. “I think it’s time for us to really get their attention.”

Toki led the way, and the two of us rushed into the factory proper. We didn’t bother checking if the enemies we brought down were alive, and we didn’t take the time to finish them off either. They weren’t our highest priority.

Fallen Black had split up into three teams, each of which had infiltrated F’s secret base, the Yuzuhara food processing plant, independently. Toki and I were Team A, Akutagawa and Aki were Team B, and Fan was on her own. Teams A and B were primarily tasked with distracting and misleading the enemy. We’d go in, raise hell, and get F’s attention. Akutagawa and Aki had started their assault from the other side of the compound, and I had a feeling that they were most likely on a rampage at that precise moment. While the enemy’s eyes were firmly upon us, Fan would slip in, taking advantage of the chaos to make her way deep into the center of their operation. She had to go in alone, unfortunately, but she was effectively several people in and of herself, so I figured she’d be fine.

“Do you think Team B’s doing okay?” I asked as we sped through the factory, tracking dirt all over the blueish-white linoleum floors.

“Yeah, they’ll be fine,” said Toki. “Natsu can pick out any enemy’s weakness, and assuming Akutagawa is actually lifting a finger for once, there aren’t many folks out there who could take him on.”

“Oh? You’ve got a pretty high opinion of him, huh?”

“I’m just being honest,” Toki spat. “I can’t stand the little shit, but he’s a cut above most Players.”

Dead Space gave Akutagawa the power to manipulate gaps. To be clear, I don’t mean he had the ability to alter gaps that were already there—no, he had the power to bring them into being. Akutagawa Yanagi could create any sort of gap conceivable, at will. He could generate a room in the space between two other rooms, open a new path between two roads, and even create space itself within space that already existed. Be it a joint, a crack, a tear, a seam, a chasm, or a crease, he could use his power to generate a gap within anything even esoterically line-like, forcing it open and building a world of his choosing in between.

The true essence of his power could be seen when he used it for the sake of defense. He could conjure up a fantastical, mind-bending equivalent of a shield that would prevent any and all attacks from touching him. Even Lucifer’s Strike, a power that Hajime regularly boasted was the most destructive ability around, would find it next to impossible to penetrate Akutagawa’s defenses (though Hajime, of course, claimed that he could do so easily).

“By the way, Hitomi—has Fantasia checked in yet?” Toki asked.

“No, not yet... Wait, never mind, that’s probably her,” I replied, then stopped to pull out my phone and check the text I’d just received.

“Any luck?”

“None,” I sighed. “She said she couldn’t find anything that would let us control System. I wonder if they already destroyed all the data and documents about her?”

“Guess that means we’ll just have to tie someone up and get the info straight from the horse’s mouth,” said Toki.

“Looks like it,” I agreed.

Specifically, Fan’s mission had been to slip inside the enemy base while we wrecked the place up and look for anything that could let us control System ourselves. That long-haired girl we’d seen floating in a test tube had the power to defeat any and all comers, and we knew perfectly well that we couldn’t beat her...so our goal was to ensure we’d never have to. If you can’t beat them, then don’t fight them at all! The last time we saw her, she was fast asleep, and we figured we could just make sure she stayed that way.

At the moment, System was under F’s control, and she had yet to be unleashed upon the world. Her power—the ultimate power—hadn’t been activated so much as once yet. We weren’t totally sure if she was still in development or if she was undergoing maintenance, but the point was that as things stood, she was in a dormant state. That led to the logical conclusion that F had the capability to put her in such a state, and that meant that all we had to do was steal that capability from them.

It had taken a lot of thought, but the plan really did seem like it would allow us to take her out of the picture. She had a shonen manga protagonist’s power to come out ahead in any battle, but if you didn’t want to deal with a cheater like her, all you had to do was make sure her series got canceled at the first serialization meeting it was brought to. She’d never see the light of day to begin with, and her plot arc would be shelved for all eternity.

“I’m sure Hajime would veto a plan like this without a second thought,” I muttered. I sounded almost ashamed of myself, and really, I knew that what we were trying to do—to beat her without ever even fighting her—was as cowardly as could be. The RPG equivalent would be beating the game by making sure the final boss had never been awakened in the first place. There’d be nothing fun about an ending like that at all—it’d be a story without a climax. A guy like Hajime, who prioritized the fun of supernatural battles above all else, would never approve.

“I dunno how to put this, but, y’know...it’s like you’re always thinking about Kiryuu—and I mean, like, twenty-four seven,” said Toki with a roll of his eyes. “But anyway, isn’t that a good thing? The fact that he’d never go for a plan like this is what makes it meaningful for you to choose it, right?”

“You know what...? Yeah. You’re right. Thanks,” I replied.

“Don’t mention it. Seriously,” Toki grunted gruffly.

“I’ve always known that you’re actually a really nice guy deep down, Toki.”

“And that just goes to show that you’re naive as all get-out,” said Toki. I wasn’t totally sure if he was just being bashful or if he was actually fed up with me. His expression looked more uninterested than anything else.

“There they are!”

A shout rang out from down the hall. I turned to look and found a cluster of F’s goons charging toward us. There were eight of them, and even though we didn’t have Aki’s analytical prowess on our side, it was pretty easy to conclude that they were all Players, given the situation. They wouldn’t have been sent out to track down intruders if they weren’t combat-ready, after all.

“I recognize the lady in the suit,” said one of them. “She’s one of the ones who snuck in the other day!”

“Seriously?” said another. “That means they’re Kiryuu Hajime’s teammates!”

“Looks like he’s as dangerous as we’ve heard. Must’ve decided to move in and take us out himself,” said a third. The whole group came to a stop, glaring at us as they discussed their next move. Or, really, as they discussed Hajime and not much else. He’d gained himself a fair deal of notoriety throughout the Spirit War—a fact that he took no small amount of delight in—and that notoriety had apparently earned him F’s attention as well. To them, we were nothing more than Kiryuu Hajime’s teammates. We were an accessory—an afterthought.

“Hey!” shouted one of the men—a fairly young one wearing a baseball cap. “Where’s Kiryuu hiding?! I’m gonna murder his ass, so bring him out already!”

“Hah...ha ha ha ha ha!” I cracked up. After a line like that, I just couldn’t help myself. “Who knew? Looks like I have something in common with all of you after all!” I declared, matching their group stare for stare. “See, I’m pissed with Kiryuu Hajime too. And thanks to that, if you walk away now, I might just let you go.”

The men exchanged glances with each other, then burst into scornful laughter. I could tell what they were thinking: What’s this lady even talking about?

“Oh, for the—quit spouting bullshit, you mouthy bitch!” yelled the foulmouthed man with the baseball cap as he manifested a ball of fire in the palm of his hand. Apparently, he was a pyrokinetic. He pulled back his arm, winding up for a pitch, then hurled the fireball through the air, scoring a direct hit on his target. The moment the fireball landed home, it flared up, swelling to a conflagration large enough to entirely engulf its unfortunate victim, who let out a horrific screech as they were burned to ash.

“Hya ha ha ha! So much for you! Looks like you were just a couple mooks, eh?!” cackled the man with the hat. It didn’t take him long to realize that something was wrong, though. He was gleefully proud of his overwhelming victory, but not one of his companions was so much as smiling. The opposite, actually. Their faces were pale, and they stared at the man with the hat with expressions of shock and horror.

“Wh-What the hell?! What’re you doing?!” one of them—a guy with a crew cut—eventually managed to spit out. “Why’re you attacking us?! The enemy’s over there!”

The man with the hat gaped at his friend in astonishment. It was understandable, really. After all, to him, the man he’d just burned had looked exactly like me.

“Hey, crew cut! I’d be careful if I were you,” I said in a cheerful and highly amused tone, my hand clasped over my right eye. “You’ve become my Evil Eye.”

Eternal Wink: the power of visual violation. A power that allowed me to grant anyone within my field of vision the power of the Evil Eye, whether they wanted it or not. In terms of direct, practical combat capability, my power was all but worthless. I couldn’t use the Evil Eye’s power myself, and whoever I gave it to couldn’t use it effectively on anyone who was even a little wary of them. If I’d given Toki the Evil Eye and he’d tried to use it on the Players we were facing, it would’ve proven completely ineffective.

All that being said—what if I gave the Evil Eye to my enemy themself? This kind of goes without saying, but most people aren’t wary of their allies. If you’re willing to fight by their side, you probably trust them, more or less. Making eye contact and sending nonverbal signals to your allies is a given, as well...and that means the Evil Eye activates as a matter of course.

The moment the group of Players had burst into laughter, I’d used my power to grant the man with the crew cut an Evil Eye. Immediately afterward, he’d made eye contact with the man with the baseball cap, who’d fallen under the Evil Eye’s spell as a result. The spell’s effect? Tricking him into believing that his friend was his enemy—that is to say, me—and goading him into attacking them.

Sheesh. This really is one fiddly pain in the neck of a power. What sort of ability only works in your favor when you’re taking on a ton of enemies at once?

“Your Evil Eye...? The hell did you do to me?!” shouted the man with the baseball cap, glaring at me with a look of fury in his eyes. He wasn’t happy about having accidentally incinerated his ally, apparently, and since the Evil Eye’s effect had already faded, he was looking at the real me this time. You’d think he’d have attacked me right away, but in fact, he’d done nothing of the sort. None of them had. Instead, they were glancing at each other with expressions of doubt and paranoia.

My power wasn’t all that impressive in and of itself, but when used in just the right way, it could prove a lot more potent than the sum of its parts. It was a cheap trick, of course, and more or less a bluff to boot—a one-off tactic that wouldn’t work a second time. If they’d just calmed down and coordinated with each other, they could’ve coped with it easily. Unfortunately for them, though, all I had to do was throw them off guard for the most sparing of moments. That was all the time that our resident blitzkrieg specialist needed to cut us a path to safety.

A sharp fwish rang out as Toki’s jagged, beat-up jackknife sliced through the air. He held it in an underhanded grip, bolting forward with the momentum of a raging gale and plunging into the enemy’s formation before erupting into a storm of violence. He sliced, kicked, punched, threw, and sliced again. His stupendously dull knife flashed through the air, through clothes, through weapons, and through flesh with equal inefficiency, tearing as much as it cut. One by one his foes fell, letting out bloodcurdling screams of agony as Toki mowed them down.

“Hey, did you know?” said Toki disinterestedly as he slammed his final enemy up against a wall, holding his knife to the man’s throat. “Getting cut hurts a lot more when the knife’s mostly blunt than it does when it’s razor-sharp.”

The blade of the knife, still wet with blood, pressed up against the man’s throat. Its jagged, crooked, sawlike edge scraped against his skin. It was plain to see that a blade like that wouldn’t leave a clean wound. It would shred through flesh and muscle inch by excruciating inch, tearing through its victim by virtue of force alone. Just imagining the damage it would inflict left the man pallid and terrified, literally trembling with fear.

“Okay, Toki, that’s enough!” I shouted, jumping in to stop him from actually slicing the man’s throat. “Come on, you know we shouldn’t kill him!”

“Hitomi...” said Toki, glancing over at me.

“You really let them have it, though, didn’t you?” I said, glancing at the motionless bodies of our erstwhile enemies. “I still can’t believe how you manage to overwhelm them like that without even using your power.”

“Using my power would just make it take longer,” Toki grunted.

Hmm. Yeah, I guess his power is a little...roundabout, you could say? Hajime’s and Akutagawa’s combat styles were heavily centered around and reliant upon their powers, but Toki was more or less the opposite. He relied on anything and everything but his power, and he could take down the majority of Players by means of his physical strength and skill with a knife alone.

“Anyway, what’s this about not killing him? Why not? He’ll just come back to life again anyway,” said Toki.

“I know, but still,” I sighed. Personally, I’d never been a fan of that sort of “It’s okay—we can just use the Dragon Balls to bring him back!” logic, but this really wasn’t the time or the place to dig into that sort of discussion.

I took a long, hard look at the man’s face. He looked a little bit relieved—it seemed he was grateful to me for holding the violent madman who’d been threatening him in check. If I’m right about that, then, well, sorry. I’m not exactly feeling nice today.

“Lemme borrow your knife for a second,” I said. Toki looked confused for a moment, then passed his knife over without a word. I accepted it, held it in an underhanded grip...then swung it down with all my might, burying it into the wall just an inch or so to the side of the man’s right eye. He let out a short, high-pitched squeal of terror.

“The next one’s going right into your eye,” I said in a cold, uncaring tone.

That’s a lie. I don’t actually have the guts to go through with it.

“Oh, but I won’t kill you, just so you know. If a Player kills another Player, they just come back to life. Makes the whole thing pointless, you know? I’ll be sure to stop at just the eyeball.”

Another lie. I’m not good enough with a knife to pull that off.

“I’ll be very careful to make sure you don’t die...but believe me, I’m going to make you hurt.”

Still lying. If I ever tried to torture someone, I’d probably crack before my victim did.

“If you don’t like the sound of that, then you can always answer a couple questions instead. I’m sure you can tell me all about System, right?”

“Wha—?!” gasped the man. “H-How do you know about her?!”

“I know because my Evil Eye can see right through you. That means you can’t lie to me either—I’ll know right away, and I bet you can imagine what’ll happen if you try.”

Lying again. My Evil Eye can’t see through squat. It’s useless for this sort of thing. I didn’t let that show, though, instead putting on a vicious, villainous smirk as I looked down at him. I made a show of the power I held over his life, and I tried to make myself look perilously unstable while I was at it. I conducted myself like the terrifying, dangerous man who’d wormed his way into my heart.

“I think it’s about time I got some answers out of you,” I said with a sneer, slowly and deliberately wrenching the knife out of the wall and brandishing it in front of him. And carefully, of course—I’d borrowed the thing, so I wasn’t about to damage it.

“Yeesh... Women scare the hell outta me sometimes,” Toki muttered behind me.

Yeah. That’s right. Women are scary as hell when you make them mad, and I think it’s about time for a certain jackass to learn that lesson.

Our interrogation bore fruit in the form of a few pieces of useful information. We didn’t have any means of verifying said information, unfortunately, so we decided to track down and apprehend a few more members of F to question, gathering as much info as possible and noting which pieces turned up often enough to seem believable.

Thankfully, none of the Players we’d run into had been particularly tough. I couldn’t say for sure if they’d lacked combat experience or if knowing they’d had an ultimate trump card in the form of System on their side had caused them to let their guard down, but in any case, nobody we’d encountered was capable of giving Toki and me an even half-decent run for our money. It seemed the same was true for the others as well—Akutagawa, Aki, and Fan had all been working to gather information in parallel with us, and none of them had had any particularly visible injuries when we’d finally met back up again.

“So, let me see if I have this straight,” I said. “If we can get to the controls for the tube that System’s floating in, we should be able to work things out, right?”

We were on the second floor of one of the Yuzuhara food processing plant’s central buildings, in a gap between its third and fourth meeting rooms. Akutagawa had created the space for us, and it had turned out looking sort of like an office. Only people he’d designated would be able to so much as perceive the space’s existence, so we were in no danger of being attacked as long as we remained inside. It was a private space just for us, smack-dab in the middle of the enemy’s fortress, and we’d all gathered up inside it to exchange information and figure out our next move.

“System was created from the ground up by a spirit named Zeon,” said Akutagawa, “and Zeon designed her to be maintained and used by other humans. I guess that was important since spirits’ ability to interact with our world is limited...? Anyway, it looks like the goal was to have the humans in F control her after she was done...”

System was, as it turned out, just about finished already. The only step still incomplete was more or less a period of final adjustments—the final stage of her development. In other words, we’d just barely made it in time.

“That means that if we can get you to that gizmo and you work your magic on it, we’ll be able to seal System away for good. Right?” I asked Akutagawa.

“It sounds stupid when you call it a gizmo. You should stop that.”

“Sh-Shut up!”

“But, anyway...yeah, I can probably do that,” Akutagawa continued. “I figure everything that’s hooked up to System is kept off the internet, so I doubt they’ve bothered setting up any particularly good security.”

If they’d been using some sort of supernatural power to keep System in check, then we would’ve been officially screwed. The fact that they were using state-of-the-art technology, however, meant that Akutagawa was almost certainly capable of seizing control. Apparently, he had some sort of hacking tool ready and waiting to get the job done.

Aki flashed Akutagawa a grin. “Nice one, Gawanagi! Guess all that gaming wasn’t a total waste of time after all!”

“Sounds like the sorta skill I’d expect a gloomy little shut-in like him to have,” Toki snorted derisively.

Akutagawa grimaced. “It’s the sort of skill a brainless punk could never even dream of acquiring,” he muttered.

“Whazzat?!”

“What’s what?”

“Okay, okay, break it up,” I said, cutting between the two of them before their spat could escalate. “We’re in the middle of the enemy’s base! This isn’t the time or place for infighting.” Toki let out an irritated snort, Akutagawa grunted and rolled his eyes, and both of them turned their backs to each other. It seemed that hoping for a punk and a shut-in to see eye to eye was expecting the impossible.

“So, like, we’ve got this, right, Tomi? We’re totally gonna wreck System’s—” Aki began, then paused, her smile stiffening up in an instant. “I mean, uhh... We can definitely make this, umm, work, right, uh...Miss Tomi?”

“Oh! You don’t have to worry about talking politely, Aki. I don’t know what was wrong with me yesterday,” I said with a slightly bitter smile. A night’s rest had helped calm me down again considerably, and looking back on it, I’d realized that I’d really gone overboard. Pretty much everything I’d said back then was just me lashing out for no good reason.

“Huh? L-Like, seriously?” asked Aki.

“Yeah,” I said. “It feels a little too late to change how we talk to each other, right? And actually, I don’t mind how friendly your tone with me is at all.”

“Woo-hoo!” Aki shouted. “Right, exactly! Now that’s the Tomi we know and love!”

“So...can I keep my headphones on too?” Akutagawa casually asked.

“No,” I snapped, shooting him a glare. He scowled back at me, but he left his headphones right where they were around his neck, so apparently he wasn’t planning on disobeying me.

“Ha ha ha! Tough luck, Gawanagi!” laughed Aki.

Considering we were in enemy territory and about to try to seal away a truly preposterous foe, it was rather remarkable how not tense all of my companions seemed. They were acting as cheerful and casual as ever. To be fair, I was in a similar boat—all things considered, I wasn’t feeling that much pressure at all, and I was collected enough to stay calm and rational. I had to imagine our relaxed attitude was thanks to the Spirit War’s rules. The knowledge that even if we did die we’d come right back was a relief. It was a pleasant little bit of insurance that in turn ensured we never had to stress out too much about any of this.

“We just come right back if we die, huh?” Hajime had once grumbled to me. “Bwa ha ha! Those spirits really are a twisted bunch. They know exactly what makes us humans tick.”

At first, it didn’t make sense to me. I’d thought that it would make a much more brutal and attention-grabbing show for the spirits if we really were in a life-or-death battle royale. After actually participating in the Spirit War myself, though, I realized that the truth was the exact opposite. If we really were risking our lives in these battles, most people would go completely on the defensive, prioritizing their well-being over any sort of proactive attempt at winning the War. Most people would be so scared of getting hurt—and even so scared of hurting other people—they’d be too busy shivering with fear to put on a proper show. Battles like that wouldn’t be worth watching at all.

Humans are, at their core, cowardly and self-interested creatures. There aren’t all that many of us out there who have wishes they consider so important that they’d really put their lives on the line for them. That’s why the Spirit War needed to bring people back to life—it needed a built-in reset mechanic. It let us Players know that even if we did get knocked out of the running before the War was over, we could just load up our old save and go back to our ordinary lives. The lack of risk is what let us go on the offensive, and it’s what let us do so with the utmost of savagery. It made us think that it didn’t matter if we died, since we’d just come back, and that it didn’t matter if we killed, since our victims would just come back as well. When I thought about it in those terms, I had to agree: the Spirit War really was pretty twisted.

“Most of the lookouts have left, everyone! There’s only two of them now!” shouted Fan. She was stationed at one of the windows in our room, keeping watch over the entryway to a nearby building—specifically, the building that System was being kept inside.

“Just two of them? All right, then. Everything’s going just as expected so far—time to move into the final stage of our plan,” I said, then looked around at everyone. It seemed like the right moment to give them a few words of encouragement. “Let’s get in there and wrap this up nice and quickly! The more time we waste, the more likely it becomes that Kiryuu Hajime’ll wander his way in to mess things up!”

Toki and Fan took down the guards in the blink of an eye, then took their place to keep watch while the remaining three of us slipped inside. Before long, we reached a set of pure white, heavy-looking doors—the sort that slid open to the sides.

“System must be right through here,” I muttered, then tried to open the doors up. They were locked, surprise surprise. “Think you can handle this, Akutagawa?” I said, glancing over at him.

Akutagawa stepped up to the doors and extended a hand out in front of him. He raised his pointer and middle fingers, pressing them together and pointing them at the door. Then he simply opened his fingers up, like he was zooming in on a picture on a smartphone. That motion activated his power, Dead Space, and in the space between the doors, a new gap was born. A sharp, metallic crack rang out as they were forced open.

It’s finally time, I thought to myself. The doorway to this mission’s final stage has just been opened. From here on out, we’d be moving on to the real meat of our plan. Step one was for Aki to take a look at everyone inside the room. If they weren’t Players, then Akutagawa would be able to put them down with ease. If there were Players among them, I’d buy time with my Evil Eye while we called in Toki and Fan to take care of them. Finally, once we’d dealt with all the opposition, Akutagawa would hack into the program that was controlling System and take it over. We’d put a lot of thought into our plan, and I’d run over it time and time again...but the moment I saw what lay beyond the double doors, my mind went blank. My eye widened, and I was struck speechless.

“Devastation” was the only word that did the sight justice. Something had left the room completely and utterly devastated. The place was massive—the size of a school gym—and absolutely everything within had been destroyed. All the machinery that was cluttering up the room had been pulverized far beyond the point of recognition, and the walls and ceiling looked like they were moments away from collapsing entirely.

Above all else, though, my gaze was drawn toward the room’s center—to the decimated remains of the column-like tank. The fluid within had spilled out onto the floor, and most of the tubes that had been connected to it seemed to have been pulled out. As for her—she was simply gone. The most powerful Player of all was simply nowhere to be seen.

“Wh-What on earth...?” I stammered in disbelief. Had somebody unleashed System on the world? Had they decided that taking the intruders out of the picture was worth the risk of deploying her while she was still incomplete, uncontrollable, and dangerous? Had she gone on a rampage? Or self-destructed? I couldn’t make sense of the situation at all, but there was one thing I understood painfully well: the plan that we’d put together had been rendered completely meaningless.

“T-Tomi, look!” Aki shouted. Her words brought me back to my senses, and I looked in the direction she was pointing. There, atop a mountain of scrap and rubble, I could just barely make out a figure as it stepped into view.

I drew in a sharp breath as I felt myself break out in a cold sweat. It was a girl. She was short, scrawny, and wearing a few scraps of dingy white cloth in lieu of real clothing. Her hair was glossy, black, and so off-puttingly long that it dragged across the ground behind her. Her face was so perfectly featured you’d think she was a doll, yet somehow, she came across as even more expressionless than a doll would’ve. Her eyes were like marbles, staring vacantly at us without expressing so much as a hint of emotion. Hers was a face I could never forget: the face of the very same girl I’d seen a few days beforehand, floating in the now ruined tank.

“System,” Aki whispered as she trembled with horror. That settled it—all hope that she was a look-alike or a twin had just gone out the window. Head Hunting couldn’t be fooled. The little girl before us really was System: the ultimate Player.

System didn’t say a word. She just stared at us expressionlessly, like a puppet or a child who was still too young to speak. I, meanwhile, was paralyzed. The foe we couldn’t allow to be released, no matter what it took, was right in front of me. All the effort and thought we’d put into our last-ditch plan to seal her away had come to nothing. And now that System was free, the War was effectively already over.

I gritted my teeth as hard as I could. I could feel my train of thought steering toward an attempt to escape from reality, and I couldn’t let that happen—I had to stay grounded. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet, and the moment I stopped thinking, it would all be over. I’d betrayed Hajime, and that made me the team’s current leader. What sort of leader starts flailing around in a panic just because the situation took an unexpected turn? I had to calm down and analyze things with a clear mind. Come on, think! Think! It’s too soon to lose your head over—

“Huh?” I grunted as I looked up, finally having regained a semblance of composure. There, directly in front of me, was the expressionless little girl. She must’ve been over ten meters away from me barely a moment ago, but she’d closed that distance in a single bound and was now midair, her face still betraying not even a hint of emotion as she swung her little fist toward me. Her freakishly long hair flowed through the air behind her like a dragon in flight, tracing along the path she’d traveled.

Oh. I guess I’m screwed, I thought. It turned out it really was the right moment to panic after all—or rather, a moment when whether or not I’d panicked wouldn’t have made even the slightest bit of difference. This, it seemed, was as far as I could go. I’d be taken down like any other faceless grunt, having failed to accomplish so much as a single thing.

But, I mean, it’s not like this wasn’t easy to see coming. Plotting to seal away an ultimate life-form like her was basically declaring to the audience that you were about to die tragically. When characters like her showed up in fiction, it was absolutely guaranteed that they’d be unleashed in one way or another. After all, it’d make for a pretty weak story if they really were just sealed away in the end.

I would’ve liked to have said something clever in the instant before I died, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the time for that. System’s fist was already right before my eye and closing in fast. In that final moment, I made my peace, gave up on it all, and closed my left eye without a word, sealing it shut—just like its counterpart.

Well, that’s that. I couldn’t cut it. Sorry, Hajime.

“Supernatural battle playbook, rule one.”

The next thing I knew, a terrible shock wave felt like it nearly blew me away. It took me a moment to realize, however, that I hadn’t actually been hurt in the least. I fearfully opened my eye to find someone in front of me, his broad, black-clad back looming before me, his coat flapping away in spite of the total lack of wind.

“No matter what happens, never close your eyes,” he said, his all too familiar voice soothing my eardrums. “Whether your fortunes are for better or for worse, don’t let them slip past you. Whether you find yourself in a comedy or a tragedy, don’t let it play out without you. Never avert your gaze when victory and defeat hang in the balance. Never turn your back when the stakes are a matter of life and death. The story of your life is the best tale you’ll ever find, and you can only read it once. Whether the ending that awaits you is happy or sad...you have a duty to witness every moment of it.”

I couldn’t even begin to guess where he’d come from, but before I knew it, he was standing between me and System, her fist caught in his hand. “Come on, you’re Eternal Wink! Closing both your eyes completely ruins the image. Your job’s to keep winking away while you witness all my exploits—got it?” he said, his voice infused with such fearlessness and arrogance you could tell in an instant he thought the world revolved around him. He twisted his hand off to the side, deflecting System’s strike and sending her flying across the room. System, however, didn’t launch a counterattack, simply sailing lightly through the air and touching down silently on a pile of rubble.

The man’s silver hair swayed in the air as he turned to face me. His eyes, one black, one red, and both shining with a keen light of insight, bored into me from behind his pointlessly tiny, round sunglasses.

“H-H-Hajime...?” I stammered.

“Don’t call me Hajime,” he said, his confident, villainous smirk as broad and unshakable as ever. He stood tall and majestic, declaring his truth as if it were the grandest secret the world had to offer. “The name’s Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First.”

I found myself overcome with emotion—with a powerful sense of relief. I know it’s pathetic of me to admit this, considering all the big talk I’d done the day before, but it was honestly shocking just how reassuring Hajime’s sudden appearance was.

“What’re you people doing here, anyway?” Hajime asked offhandedly. “I said that I’d crush F on my own and that you all should stay out of it, right?”

For a moment, none of us could find the right words to reply with. “Umm,” I finally said, “th-that’s kinda hard to... W-Wait, no, that’s not important! This is terrible, Hajime! System’s loose! We have to run for it!”

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to dodge his question. I just knew that not even Hajime could possibly beat System. Now that my master plan had failed, the only option left to us was to make a break for it. I wasn’t sure how far we’d actually get, but we didn’t have the luxury of choice.

“First,” a voice rang out. It took me a few seconds to realize that the word that voice had spoken was a name—or rather, a portion of Hajime’s “true name.” It took a few seconds further to realize that the source of the voice had been System. “Why have you stayed my hand?” she asked in a quiet, disinterested mutter, looking down on me with a frigid gaze. Her voice was surprisingly low-pitched for a little girl like her, and she sounded more than a little eerie...plus, she sure did say “stay my hand.” Apparently, she was one of those girls whose speech skewed toward the archaic side of things.

“You were the one who told me to eradicate F, were you not?” System continued.

“Okay, calm down. These people aren’t in F. They’re my teammates,” said Hajime, casually conversing with System like it was just the natural thing to do. I was bewildered, and Aki and Akutagawa looked completely dumbfounded.

“H-Hitomi? How’s everything going in here...?” called out Fan. She and Toki had been keeping watch outside, but now they were stepping into the room together, presumably to check in on us.

“Is System—whahuuuuuuh?!” Fan wailed, her eyes widening. “Wh-Why’s Kiryuu here?! And wait, that girl...is she...System...?”

“Just what the hell is going on in here?” asked Toki, who looked just as shocked.

“Oh, hey! Looks like we’ve got the whole team together, huh? All of Fallen Black’s Wings are accounted for! Nice—saves me the trouble of summoning you,” said Hajime, stepping away from me and strolling over to System. I winced, thinking he was in danger, but she simply stood there, not reacting at all as he drew closer. “All right, people, listen up!” Hajime shouted as he plopped a hand down on System’s head, scaring me half to death in the process. It was an incredibly overfamiliar gesture—almost like she was his little sister or something.

“This kid’s on the team, starting today!”

“She’s...what?!” I shouted. Every one of us was left in a state of shock. What the actual hell is that lunatic saying?

“Oh, right. No more calling her System either. That name’s banned. The more I think about it, the less I’m into it,” Hajime continued, mussing up System’s hair as he spoke. She just let it happen without showing the slightest sign of resistance. “I’ll come up with a real name for you and your power before long—one that’ll blow you away. Look forward to it.”

“Very well,” System said, then immediately fell silent again.

“W-Wai... Wait a second, Hajime!” I shouted as my thought process gradually caught up with the state of affairs. “What do you mean, she’s on the team? Didn’t you say you were going to crush F last night? I thought that meant you were going to fight her...?”

“Bwa ha ha!” cackled Hajime, laughing it up like he was having the time of his life. “That was the plan—at first. I was planning on giving the self-proclaimed ‘ultimate Player’ an up close and personal lesson on what it means to really be undefeatable. But y’know,” he continued, glancing down at System, “I couldn’t exactly go all out on a cute li’l brat like her, could I?”

I was, once again, speechless. Whether or not Hajime would do something was governed by one very simple principle: whether or not he thought it would make him cool. In other words, in Hajime’s mind, fighting a foe who looked like a little girl would be a blemish on his pride, no matter how supposedly overpowered she was.

When I took a step back to view the situation objectively, though, it occurred to me that in a certain sense, this was the best possible outcome we could’ve asked for. My method would’ve allowed us to beat her without ever even fighting her. Our ultimate foe would’ve remained sealed away for eternity. I’d thought that not taking on someone as tough as her in a straight-up fight was the best possible strategy, but I realized now that I’d overlooked another option. If your foe is unbearably powerful...you can just bring them over to your side and use them as you please. It was such an optimal solution, I’d never even considered it. It was in a totally different dimension from the plans I’d been agonizing over. In terms of lateral thinking, I’d been outdone in every possible way.

“B-But, Hajime,” I stammered, “how?”

“Oh, right. Well,” said Hajime, pulling something out from his coat’s pocket. “I got lucky. Had some emergency Hi-Chew on hand. I said I’d give it to her if she joined my team, and she did.”

“You bribed her with candy?!”

Hajime completely ignored my astonishment, instead unwrapping the Hi-Chew and chucking it in System’s general direction. System opened her mouth up wide, caught it midair in a remarkable display of agility, and started chewing away. Her expression was as blank as ever, but weirdly enough, she somehow looked incredibly satisfied anyway.

H-He’s feeding her like a pet! He seriously went and tamed our ultimate enemy with a pack of Hi-Chew!

“So, what’re you all doing here, Hitomi?” Hajime asked.

I hesitated for a moment, but after a few seconds of thought, I let out a heavy sigh and laid the truth out on the table. “We came here to crush F,” I admitted.

“Huh?” grunted Hajime. “I thought I told you not to get involved.”

“You did, yeah,” I said, “and we decided to ignore that order. We were all so pissed off with you that we staged a rebellion to get payback.”

The moment the words left my mouth, the rest of our teammates began to stir with obvious unrest. I was an exception, though. I stared Hajime right in the face as I carried on.

“We decided to betray you and take care of F before you had the chance...but it looks like we didn’t pull it off,” I said with a flippant shrug. “Got a problem with that?”

“Bwa ha ha! Not a one,” said Hajime with his trademark sneer. “You almost got me, but I guess you’d better try a bit harder next time.” That was all he had to say about my betrayal. He made no attempt whatsoever to rebuke me for it, and he didn’t seem shocked in the least. “All right,” he continued, “guess it’s time to go hunt down the survivors!”

Clearly, Hajime had already moved on, and clearly, he’d never doubted for a second that eventually, all of us would end up returning to his side. You could say it was a sign that he had faith in us, I suppose, but personally, I thought it’d be more accurate to say that he was just being way too overconfident. Or maybe it wasn’t about us at all—maybe he just didn’t care whether or not we betrayed him, in the end. Maybe calling us his teammates was just lip service. The one thing I could say for sure was that I’d failed to give him the taste of reality I’d wanted to. Quite the contrary—if anyone had ended up getting subjected to a sudden and shocking reversal of fortunes, it was me.

“You sure thought of a good way to liven things up this time, though, Hitomi,” Hajime casually added. Whether or not he’d picked up on my internal conflict was anyone’s guess. “You really are the best girl I could ask for.”

Once again, I fell into silence, unable to muster a reply. Meanwhile, Hajime dramatically flung his arms apart as he turned to face the rest of our teammates.

“It’s massacre time,” he proclaimed. “Listen up, all ye Wings of Fallen Black! Your new job is to hunt down and exterminate every single remaining member of F! Leave no survivors! Hitomi’s in charge of all the logistics, and when you’re finished, we’re throwing a welcome party for our new member!”

It was pure, classic Hajime: a set of orders so broad and rough you could only assume he’d come up with them on the spot. Strangely enough, though, those orders made me feel a powerful sense of relief as my heart began to pound away in my chest. I didn’t know for sure if he trusted me or if he was just using me, but part of me couldn’t help but feel profoundly content when he’d called me a good girl—even if he did mean that I was his doormat, deep down.

Well, that settles it. Looks like I’m just a gigantic masochist when all’s said and done. Nothing made me happier than those precious moments when he jerked me around on one of his whims. I had a serious thing for bad boys.

“Heeey, earth to Tomi? Oof, nope, she’s out—I can see the little hearts in her eyes and everything.”

“Ugh... ‘Course this is how it’d end. What a crock of bullshit.”

“Oh, those two!”

“Can I just go home now...?”

I finally noticed Aki, Toki, Fan, and Akutagawa all giving me looks of disgust and exasperation, and I quickly pulled myself back together.

“Not happening, Akutagawa. You’ve got work to do here,” said Hajime. “The only one who’s going home is me. I’ve been getting stuff done since bright and early this morning, and I need my beauty sleep.” He stifled a yawn, then turned to System. “That goes for you too—help everyone out here. This’ll be your first job as part of the team. If you get confused, just shut your trap and do whatever Hitomi tells you.”

System gave him a silent nod.

Wait, what? Seriously? “W-Wait a second, Hajime!” I shouted. He was already on his way to the door, but I grabbed him by the arm to hold him back. “Y-You can’t just leave her with us! She’s the ultimate Player, remember?! What am I even supposed to—” I said, then suddenly cut off my complaining when I smelled something unusual.

It smells like iron, so...blood? As I grabbed his arm, the motion happened to flip his coat open just enough for me to get a glance at the shirt beneath—and to see that Hajime’s abdomen was soaked with blood. He was hurt, and badly enough that it was painful to look at.

“H-Hajime—” I began, but before I could say anything else, Hajime pressed a finger to my lips, cutting me off.

“The rest is up to you, Hitomi,” he said, then set off once more for the door. His attitude and tone of voice were the same as ever, but looking at him a little more closely, I noticed that the way he was walking was just a little different from usual. He had a very slight limp, so subtle I’d missed it before.

Suddenly, I had more questions than I knew what to do with. I glanced at System, then looked around at the devastation that dominated the room. The longer I looked, the more a seemingly preposterous idea loomed large in my mind: could all that wreckage be the aftermath of a fight? Had Hajime and System engaged in a full-on supernatural battle, totaling the facility in the process? The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed. I mean, rationally speaking, it was totally unthinkable that the enemy’s most powerful combatant would turn traitor for a couple of candies!

The conclusion seemed inescapable: Hajime and System had already fought before we’d even arrived. He’d brought Lucifer’s Strike to bear against the most powerful opponent he could ever hope to face. Suddenly, the state of the room seemed totally unsurprising. If anything, the fact that the building was still standing was kind of a shock, in this context!

Thinking a step further still, I realized something about how System had moved when she’d very nearly murdered me a minute or so earlier. Looking at it with Hajime at the front of my mind, I realized that she’d used the exact same method of approximating the instantaneous movement techniques you’d see in anime that Hajime did: by manipulating gravity to move in a manner her opponent wouldn’t even be able to perceive. In other words, System had used Hajime’s power—or at the very least, she’d had some means of approximating its effects.

That, in turn, meant that System had already awakened at least once. When her ultimate power had proven less ultimate than expected, she’d asspulled her way to greater heights. Her flawless, balance-breaking cheat of a skill was in full effect, and yet Hajime had clashed with her anyway.

I had no idea what had started the fight. Maybe Hajime had instigated it, or maybe somebody in F had unleashed System on him. Maybe System had broken free and gone on a rampage on her own initiative. I also didn’t know how the fight had concluded. Who, exactly, had won? What sort of occurrence had led to the singularly absurd reality that System was one of us now? I didn’t understand anything when all was said and done.

Maybe—just maybe—Hajime had protected us? If worse had come to worst and System really had attacked us, we would’ve been wiped out, no question about it. Maybe Hajime had realized that and slipped ahead of us to take on the enemy’s trump card single-handedly, all in an effort to do his job as our boss? Of course, I realized even as I was thinking it that interpreting the situation like that was dangerously optimistic of me, not to mention naive.

“He really never changes, huh?” I muttered quietly to myself. I could tell that I was probably smiling, though not intentionally. It was downright frustrating how stubbornly Kiryuu Hajime refused to be anyone other than Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First, and laughing it off was the most I could do to deal with it.

He’d always blather on and on about pointless nonsense, and he would never say a single word about what was actually important. He’d hide all the effort he put in and all the pain he suffered at all costs, and no matter how hard-fought a victory was, he’d come out on the other side insisting it had been a piece of cake. He’d never show others his weaknesses or flaws, and dedicated every ounce of his heart, his soul, and his very being into making himself look like a badass. It was a little frustrating how he obstinately refused to open up to me, for sure—frustrating, and infuriating.

“Sorry, everyone,” I said, turning to face my remaining teammates. “Looks like we lost to our moron of a boss in the end.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at myself. My little revolution had ended in pathetic failure—not with a spectacular self-destruction or a last-ditch sacrifice, but with a sad, unsatisfying whimper. The instigator—that is to say, me—wasn’t punished or penalized, and she would get to go back to her position as the organization’s second-in-command. It was one heck of an anticlimax...but.

“But,” I continued, “this isn’t over! I’ll take another stab at him for sure someday, and when that time comes, I’ll be counting on you all again—and I’ll be putting in even more effort than ever!”

“Ha ha ha, sounds good to me!” said Aki. “We’ll feed Ryuu a big ol’ slice of reality next time for sure!”

“I’m on your side, Hitomi! I promise!” agreed Fan. The two of them accepted me without hesitation, in spite of how pathetically I’d been behaving.

The boys, on the other hand, looked a lot more grim. I was worried that they were mad at me for a second, but then Toki spoke up. “Looks like we’ve got company on the way,” he said.

“Judging by the footsteps...there’s fifteen—no, twenty of them,” said Akutagawa. Apparently, they weren’t so much angry as they were back into combat-ready mode already.

I perked my ears and found that they were right. I could hear footsteps pounding their way toward us. We’d raised quite the commotion throughout our little venture, and it seemed we’d attracted our remaining enemies’ attention in the process. They had no idea that System was on our side now, of course, so they were probably planning on barging right in for a full frontal assault.

“So? What’s the plan, Hitomi?” asked Toki.

“We’ll do what Hajime told us to,” I answered immediately. “We’re going to take out all the surviving members of F.”

“So we’re just doing his bidding in the end, huh...?” Toki grumbled. “You sure you’re okay with that?”

“Yeah. I think I probably am,” I replied. For now, anyway.

“Ugh...” Toki groaned. “Looks like I joined up with a whole organization of dumbasses. The boss was bad enough, but the second-in-command’s a moron in her own right.”

“Seconded,” Akutagawa mumbled.

Just then, the enemy forces finally stormed into the room. There really were around twenty of them, and they were clearly not here to mess around. They flooded into the room, shouting and taunting belligerently.

“You. The woman called Hitomi.”

A voice cut through the clamor, and I felt someone tug at the hem of my suit.

“I await your command.”

It was System, and I was so shocked I actually jumped. O-Oh, right. I’m supposed to be giving her orders, aren’t I?

“U-Umm...okay, then, you’re in charge of...beating the crap out of the enemy, I guess.”

It was about as hilariously sloppy as an order could possibly be, but System gave me an almost robotic nod in response.

“Y-You’re really going to do what I tell you to?” I asked, just to be on the safe side, but this time, System ignored me, instead turning to gaze at our enemies. It seemed she wasn’t planning on talking any more than she absolutely had to. I won’t lie: getting snubbed that blatantly kinda hurt.

“All right, then... Let’s do this, everyone,” I said, making an effort to switch myself into battle mode. I didn’t feel scared in the slightest. I had friends I could rely on with me, the ultimate Player was following my orders for some reason, and a certain chronically incomprehensible pathological chuuni was counting on me. I had nothing to fear. I fixed my eyes upon my foes and stepped forth onto the battlefield, my allies at my side.

“Let’s get this massacre started!”

And so, the curtain closed upon our battle with F. It felt like it had been a long road, though really, the whole conflict had barely taken any time at all. In any case, we had won what I felt safe describing as an overwhelming victory. The enemy organization had been wiped from the face of the earth, and we’d claimed their trump card as our own. It actually felt like things had turned out a little too well, even.

According to Leatia, the ringleader of the whole incident—Zeon the spirit—had been apprehended as well. The spirits, it seemed, had been making moves of their own behind the scenes while we were fighting on the front lines. She explained that Zeon had been imprisoned in whatever the Spirit Realm equivalent of a jail was, though I’m not going to pretend that I understood most—or any, really—of the details of said explanation.

The humans who had made up the bulk of F’s membership all had their powers and memories of the War stripped from them, and they returned to their daily lives. The Yuzuhara food processing plant, meanwhile, was returned to its previous purpose overnight by means of the spirits’ power. With the erasure of their secret base, F’s extermination was complete.

We never learned what its members had really been fighting for. Maybe they’d been hired to do it, or maybe there was some deeper set of circumstances that had drawn them in. Personally, I was fairly certain that everyone had some sort of circumstance that drove them to fight, though the scale might’ve varied quite a bit from person to person. I mean, look at me and how I had betrayed Hajime—that was for just about as petty and personal of a reason as you could’ve possibly found.

System, by the way, really did join our team. She was a quiet, expressionless kid, but she didn’t actually do anything bad, and it wasn’t long before all the girls on the team—me included—had started getting along with her pretty well. We cut her hair, bought her clothes, and generally had fun hanging out with her. Oh, but of course, we weren’t actually calling her System anymore. Her power had a new name: the endlessly altered Decalogue, White Rulebook. We’d taken to describing it as the ability to bend cause and effect to her will.

Hajime had named the power, of course, and, I mean...yeah. We kinda just rolled our eyes and told him to have it his way. Her power’s name aside, Hajime and I had collaborated to come up with a proper name for her: Tanaka Umeko. I’d thought up her family name, while her first name was Hajime’s doing. I’d taken to calling her Umeko, myself.

As for why she’d chosen to stay with our little group—well, that was a mystery. Whatever Umeko was thinking and whatever Hajime’s objective had been when he’d recruited her, the fact that she was the ultimate Player hadn’t changed. She was an irregular element in the Spirit War, and there was absolutely no chance that the other Players would simply stand back and let her fly free. As a result, Tanaka Umeko joining our team had the side effect of sending the War into a new, even more intense period of action than ever before. We of Fallen Black stood at the epicenter of that disaster...but that’s a story for another day.