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

Prologue: Kiryuu Hajime—Tome the First of the Twenty-First Year

This world is beautiful.

Thus, I am driven to destroy it.

Ours is a realm devoid of distortion,

and a day will come when I wipe it clean.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

Yukawa Touhei stood in the decrepit remains of a long-shuttered bowling alley. It was an old building, and when its owner had failed to find anyone to sell it off to following the business’s closure, they didn’t even bother getting it demolished; they simply left it there to slowly deteriorate. It seemed like the sort of place that the local youth would sneak into for kicks when summer rolled around, but summer it was not, and nobody had any reason to go anywhere near it—all the more so given the witching hour had only just passed.

The building was silent as the grave. Moonlight beamed through the shattered windows, illuminating fragments of glass and empty cans that lay scattered across the floor, as well as cracked pins and ancient balls strewn about the lanes.

“Hmph... What a dump. Damn lights don’t even work,” Yukawa sullenly muttered, kicking a nearby can across the room. He reached into the pocket of the Hawaiian shirt he was wearing, pulled out a handful of rough, irregularly shaped rings, then began sliding them onto his fingers, one by one. They weren’t the sort of rings one wore for fashion’s sake—no, they were the closest approximation to knuckle dusters he could get his hands on, and he knew he’d need them for the battle to come.

“Yeah, we’re supposed to fight somewhere people won’t see us. Rules of the War, yadda yadda—but did we really have to haul all the way out to this craphole? Not like it even matters if we get caught, right? The spirits’ll work something out either way,” Yukawa grumbled belligerently as he glared down lane one toward the back of the building.

There, deep in the darkness, glowed a single speck of orange light. It was the smoldering tip of a cigarette, held in the mouth of the man standing there, tall and alone amid the pins and shards of glass. The cigarette wavered, and a cloud of smoke spilled forth from the man’s mouth as his lips twisted into a mocking grin. “Didn’t want to bother the locals, that’s all,” he said.

“The locals?” repeated Touhei, raising his eyebrow.

“You look like the sort of man who’ll scream like a banshee when he dies. Now, it’d be one thing if you were a cute little lady—that’d be a scream people could tolerate—but nobody wants to hear a guy wail it up, right?”

Yukawa snarled at the provocation, glaring daggers into the darkness as the man grinned back at him. The man was clad in a long, jet-black coat that blended in with his surroundings, while his strikingly brilliant silver hair stood out like a spotlight. He had a pair of round-lensed sunglasses on, slid ever so slightly down the bridge of his nose to reveal the pièce de résistance of his whole ensemble: his bloodred right eye, bright and vivid enough to stand out unsettlingly in the shadows.

“Ancient Lucifer, Kiryuu Hajime,” scoffed Yukawa. “I’ve heard the rumors about you. Heh—that’s one crazy-ass name you’ve got people calling you these days, huh?”

Kiryuu shrugged. “Not like I came up with it. I just kept fighting and fighting, and before I knew it, people’d started calling me that on their own,” he droned disinterestedly, then took a drag on his cigarette. A cloud of smoke trailed from his mouth, dancing through the air and disappearing into the shadows above. A moment passed. “You got that? I didn’t come up with it myself. People started calling me it on their own,” he repeated emphatically for...some reason.

Coulda figured that out on my own, Yukawa thought. What sorta dumbass would come up with a title like that for himself? “That so? Then you’ve got it pretty rough, pal. I’d hate to get saddled with a lame-ass name like that,” he flippantly replied, matching Kiryuu’s insult with one of his own.

In truth, Yukawa didn’t think that Kiryuu’s title was lame. He didn’t think anything of it at all, in fact—he couldn’t have cared less. Kiryuu, however, inhaled sharply at Yukawa’s words, his eyes widening. Kiryuu clenched his teeth, and the front end of his newly bisected cigarette dropped to the ground. Then he spoke once more, sounding ever so slightly like he was forcing himself to stay calm.

“Okay, no, stop. You really shouldn’t say stuff like that. You know that whoever thought the title up probably put a lot of effort into it, right? You shouldn’t crap on someone’s hard work when they did their best. Yeah, that’s a garbage thing to do. And anyway, I actually like it. Ancient Lucifer—it’s got a really nice ring to it. Whoever thought it up has the soul of a poet. Wasn’t me, though,” he quickly clarified for a third time, his cheek twitching conspicuously.

For a moment, Yukawa found himself baffled by Kiryuu’s inexplicable behavior, but he shut that line of thought down as quickly as it had come and instead focused upon the enemy in front of him. Ancient Lucifer—or rather, Kiryuu Hajime—truly was the subject of all sorts of rumors. That said, rumors beget rumors, and there was no telling how much of what was said about Kiryuu was fact and how much was overblown fantasy.

Some said that he was an excessively belligerent man, while others claimed he very rarely fought at all. Some said his temper dangled on a frayed shoestring, and others swore that he was perpetually composed and showed no hint of emotion. There was just no telling which, if any, of the stories were true—that is, with two notable exceptions. First: the fact that Kiryuu had the supernatural power to manipulate gravity. Second: the fact that the community at large had identified him as exceptionally dangerous. Even the organization that Yukawa himself had recently joined was keeping an eye on Kiryuu Hajime, and they were by no means doing so out of goodwill.

The hell am I freaking out about? thought Yukawa as he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, his mouth curving into a twisted smile. So what, he can manipulate gravity. That’d probably be a real bitch for most folks to deal with, sure. It’s the ultimate power. Too bad for him, though—he picked the wrong opponent this time around!

Yukawa Touhei’s power was more or less a hard counter to Kiryuu Hajime’s gravity manipulation. It was almost stunning how well-suited his ability set was for handling this particular foe—almost enough as to make him wonder if he had been given his power for the specific purpose of taking Kiryuu out. Can’t get cocky, though. My power’s got an edge over his, but if I don’t nail the timing, it’s curtains for me. Underestimating a power like his is a good way to get yourself killed. Yukawa wiped the grin from his face and stood at the ready, focusing intently upon his opponent.

“Bwa ha ha!” Kiryuu laughed. It was a strange way to laugh—dry and distinctive. The uncomfortable tenseness of his expression from a moment before had vanished, replaced by a smile of self-assured confidence. “I don’t know what you’re thinking so hard about right now,” said Kiryuu, “but I can hazard a guess. You’re thinking about how brutally dangerous my power is, right?”

Yukawa twitched with surprise. It was like Kiryuu had peered directly into his innermost thoughts.

Kiryuu grinned mockingly. “Well, you can stop worrying. I’m not planning on using my power today at all.”

“Y-You what?” gasped Yukawa. He really did doubt his own ears for a moment. Surely Kiryuu hadn’t actually just said he wouldn’t use his power?

“What, couldn’t hear me? I’m saying I don’t have to use my power on you. You’re not worth it,” said Kiryuu.

What the hell is wrong with this freak...? He seriously thinks he can take me on without his power? Yukawa was too bewildered to reply.

“Hmm? What, not enough of a handicap for you?” asked Kiryuu after a moment of silence passed by. He crouched down, picked up an old, broken pin, and used its jagged tip to scratch a circle on the floor of the lane. It was centered on him, with a radius of around a meter or so. “I won’t set foot outside this circle,” he continued. “And if you manage to move me out of it somehow, we’ll call that your win. I’ll drop out of the War, then and there.”

“You making fun of me, you son of a bitch?!” Yukawa barked indignantly.

Kiryuu’s smile, however, didn’t budge. “Making fun of you? Not even close! If I were making fun of you, I’d say, hmm...I’d say that I’ll only use my left pinkie finger to kick your ass, on top of everything else. That’s how you make fun of someone.”

“The hell’re you—?”

“Come at me. I’ll make it very clear that we’re on totally different levels,” said Kiryuu in an almost impossibly inflammatory tone. He’d been talking down to Yukawa since the very beginning, and Yukawa was finally nearing the limit of his patience.

“Get the hell off your high horse, you punk-ass bitch!” Yukawa roared, breaking into a sprint and charging directly at Kiryuu.

One could hardly overstate the importance of supernatural powers in the Spirit War, but that being said, they weren’t the one and only factor that determined who came out on top of any given battle. A combatant’s physical strength played a vital role as well, and Yukawa happened to have great confidence in his abilities in hand-to-hand combat. At the very least, he knew that he wouldn’t lose in a brawl against someone like Kiryuu, who looked like he barely had a muscle to speak of. If that skinny little sissy isn’t gonna use his power, then I’ve got this in the bag!

“Say goodbye to your pretty face, asshole!” he shouted as he closed the gap between him and Kiryuu at a remarkable pace. Yukawa was quite the runner, and it barely took him a second to barrel down the bowling lane. But then, just a step before he entered Kiryuu’s circle, he let out a grunt of surprise, his eyes widening with disbelief. He literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Kiryuu Hajime...had stepped out of the circle. Yukawa hadn’t done anything to him at all. He’d just walked right on out, abandoning the territory he himself had designated as his.

Wh-What the hell is he doing? Huh? Is he...giving up? Did he just admit defeat before we even started? thought Yukawa, who was as befuddled as he’d ever been. Unfortunately for him, the fight continued carrying on in the meantime.

Yukawa had been running at a full sprint, and it goes without saying that he couldn’t come to a stop in the blink of an eye. He’d been one step away from his opponent, who in turn had taken a single step forward. This, of course, meant that the distance between the two of them was now a flat zero, and before Yukawa could even process what was happening, he was greeted by the sight of Kiryuu’s raised fist—then by the sight of said fist swinging through the air, directly toward him.

His right hand? But he said he wouldn’t use that one! M-Maybe he meant my right? But wait, he said he’d only use one fing—

If this had been an ordinary fistfight, or if Kiryuu really had stayed within his circle, Yukawa could have almost certainly dodged his punch. That one step had changed everything. Yukawa was fighting one step too far ahead, in a physical and temporal sense, and caught off guard as he was, he could do nothing to stop himself from colliding face-first with Kiryuu’s fist.

A dull thud echoed throughout the bowling hall. Landing a solid counter involves using your enemy’s movements against them, and Kiryuu had done so to exceptional effect—the power behind Kiryuu’s punch was supplemented by the momentum from Yukawa’s charge, and together, they’d resulted in a devastating blow.

“Gah, uuuggghhh!” Yukawa wailed, crashing to the floor and curling into a ball. “You, agh, son of a... You left the circle... Your right hand,” he groaned, clutching at his fractured cheek bone and busted molars.

“Bwa ha ha! Bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha!” Kiryuu cackled, sneering derisively at his fallen foe. It was a sneer of utmost enjoyment. “Supernatural battle playbook, rule twenty-one: never believe anything your enemy tells you!”

Yukawa let out a grunt-like growl. His blood boiled, and his mind was racked with conflicting emotions—fury toward the foe who had deceived him, and regret that he’d been stupid enough to fall for it.

“Go to hell...! Screw you, you little shit!” Yukawa bellowed. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you dead!”

“Bwa ha ha! You’ll kill me?” Kiryuu mockingly repeated. “That’s a pretty dangerous word to be throwing around so carelessly! Prosciutto and Aizen would be laughing their asses off if they were here, y’know?”

“Quit spouting bullshit! It’s my turn now, and as soon as I use my power, you’re history! I’ll never lose to you, because my power’s—”

“You don’t get a turn,” said Kiryuu, cutting Yukawa off midsentence. “My turn never ends.”

“What’re you talking—?!” Yukawa yelled, moving to stand, then stiffened up and fell silent. An incredibly potent chill rushed through him, like he’d just had a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. He’d noticed something—something right next to him that shouldn’t have been there, and that had him petrified.

It was a black orb, floating in the air. It was only around the size of a ping-pong ball, but in spite of its size and color, it didn’t blend in with the dimly lit background. No, it stood out, its blackness a shade darker than anything else around it. The word “hole” sprung immediately into Yukawa’s mind. It was a hole that not even light itself could escape from, and thus, a hole blacker than anything else in this world. A hole in space itself—the ultimate hole.

“Supernatural battle playbook, rule fifteen: the battle system isn’t turn-based,” said Kiryuu. “And rule eight: never assume your opponent will hold back their strongest abilities.”

Kiryuu’s downright cheerful words didn’t register for Yukawa. He had already succumbed to despair, and there wasn’t room left in his mind for anything else. No, wait, he thought. I haven’t even done anything yet!

Yukawa crawled on his hands and knees, desperate to escape from the black hole, but it dragged him in mercilessly. And not just him: it dragged in the shards of glass, the empty cans, the remains of Kiryuu’s cigarette—anything with form fell into its shapeless clutches, and even the formless, from the air to the light, was sucked in as well, coming together in one singular point.

“Be consumed,” said Kiryuu. “Pinpoint Abyss.”

And then, in the blink of an eye, it was over. The very instant Kiryuu named his technique, the black hole devoured all, sucking in Yukawa’s flesh, bones, hair, nails—his very being itself plunged into the bottomless depths of oblivion, to be crushed into an infinitely small pinprick of space. “Kiryuu...Hajime—” were his last words. In his final moment, Yukawa didn’t even have the time to scream. He was simply swallowed up by the void...and perished. And so, the battle came to an end.

“Wrong. Not Kiryuu Hajime,” Kiryuu Hajime defiantly declared as he turned his back on the gaping hemisphere that his attack had carved out from the floor. “It’s Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First. That is the name of the man who crushed you...not that you can hear me anymore, I guess.”

“But seriously, though,” Kiryuu mumbled a few minutes later. He was standing in a parking lot just across the street from the abandoned bowling alley he’d had his battle in, watching the building...or more specifically, watching Yukawa Touhei, who had just walked outside, cocked his head in confusion—several times—and then wandered off on his way. “Whether the loser gets horribly maimed or straight-up dies, they get fixed right up, forget everything about the War, and go back to their ordinary lives? The Spirit War’s got some pretty dull rules backing it up.”

Kiryuu was leaning against an old, obviously abandoned car that somebody had apparently dumped in the parking lot, talking to a girl who was floating in the air beside him. “Well, yeah,” said the girl. “The War’s set up to make sure that it doesn’t cause problems for humanity on the whole. That’s, like, its whole baseline principle.”

“Bwa ha ha!” cackled Kiryuu. “That’s rich, considering you’re having us humans dance like puppets for your amusement!”

Kiryuu certainly sounded like he was enjoying himself, but the girl scowled. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that the girl herself was only a girl in a somewhat loose sense of the term. She was, after all, not human. You could tell at a glance—her eyes and hair were colorful in ways that a human’s would never be, and she had a pair of semitranslucent wings sprouting from her back. Her name was Leatia, and she was of a race of beings known as spirits that hailed from an entirely different world.

“You really wrapped that one up quick, though,” Leatia idly commented. “Especially considering you toyed around with the last one for so long that they got to put out a hundred percent—actually, make that a hundred twenty percent—of their full power before you took ’em down.”

Kiryuu frowned and clicked his tongue with irritation. “The dickhead said my title was lame. He had it coming. Anyone who makes fun of my aesthetic gets crushed with my full power, right from the start.”

“Yeesh. Of all the topics to get set off by,” Leatia sighed. “So, what, he said your name sucked, and you just blew him away without even bothering to make a show of it? Poor guy.”

“You know what, though? There’s one positive thing I can take away from this: the title Ancient Lucifer has finally started making the rounds,” said Kiryuu, his scowl melting away into an ebullient grin. “It was worth putting all that effort into spreading it around! Sometimes proselytization really does pay off.”

“You did put a stupid amount of effort into it—emphasis on the stupid. Telling people, ‘Some call me Ancient Lucifer,’ spreading rumors around, having your teammates casually drop the name into conversation...”

“That’s what they call stealth marketing. I hope you’re taking notes.”

“I note that you’re changing the subject, jackass,” sighed Leatia with an irritated click of her tongue. Then she put on a more serious expression and looked Hajime in the eye. “What I’m getting at is that you killed the guy so fast, you couldn’t get any useful information out of him.”

“Hmm. So, in that case...” said Kiryuu, an unmistakable hint of interest creeping into his tone. His eyes shone with the light of curiosity—like the eyes of a child who’d just been given a brand new plaything. “I guess he really was a Rogue Player, huh?”

“Right,” said Leatia. “I got word from my coworkers on the Committee that there’s no record of a Player named Yukawa Touhei ever being part of this War. No Spirit Handler for him either.”

“We’ve been dealing with a lot of these Rogues lately,” noted Kiryuu.

“And we might know why now. We did some more digging, and it’s starting to look like they have some sort of group they’re all part of. More of an organization, really. I’m pretty sure that guy you just wasted was in it. I mean, he was probably just a grunt, but still.”

“An organization?” Kiryuu repeated, raising an eyebrow.

“The War Management Committee’s taken to calling them F, for convenience’s sake. The investigation’s still ongoing, so I can’t give you any specifics yet.”

“F... Hmm.”

Just then, a car pulled into the parking lot. It was a small, white microcar with a sign on its back that indicated it was being operated by a new driver. It pulled up next to Kiryuu and Leatia, and the driver’s side window rolled down a moment later.

“Hajime, Leatia!” said the driver as she leaned out the window. She was a young woman wearing the sort of suit that soon-to-be college graduates favored for job interviews. Her makeup was tasteful and understated, and she gave off a clean and tidy impression overall. Her bangs were parted and fell down across her face, covering up one of her eyes.

“Hitomi,” said Kiryuu. “You came to pick me up? I thought you had to be up early tomorrow.”

“I do, but it’s fine,” said Hitomi. “I was looking for an excuse to go for a drive, honestly. I did just buy this car and all.”

“Bought it used, yeah. And cheap.”

“Keep talking like that and I might change my mind about having space for you!” Hitomi pouted.

“My bad, my bad,” laughed Kiryuu as he climbed into the passenger’s seat. Leatia gave Hitomi a look and a nod, then vanished on the spot to who knows where.

“Guess I’ll just go and pick up Plaintive Dame Dolor tomorrow,” muttered Kiryuu. “Her light’s broken, so I can’t ride her around at night anyway.”

“Look, Hajime,” said Hitomi, “I’m totally okay with being your chauffeur if I have to. I’ll drive you around whenever I have the time, so please, stop riding your creaky old bicycle around when you’re dressed like that.”

“Do my ears deceive me, Hitomi, or did I just hear you belittle my beloved Dame Dolor? You know that the dissonance of her cursed melody has the power to tear the souls of all who hear it to shreds, don’t you?”

“That’s just the sound of its brakes squealing,” Hitomi sighed.

“Plus,” Kiryuu continued, ignoring Hitomi’s point entirely as he leaned back into his seat. He turned toward her and locked his eyes, one black and one crimson, onto hers. “I can’t have you becoming my chauffeur. I don’t want you to be my legs—I want you to be one of my wings. That’s your role, and everyone else’s too. You’re all my wings, and you’re all vitally important for it. Never forget that.”

Hitomi fell into silence, and Kiryuu spoke up once more. “The twelve wings of sable darkness: Fallen Black. You will be indispensable to me if I’m to have any hope of getting by in this Hell on earth I’ve fallen from grace into.”

“Yes, okay, I get it,” said Hitomi with a slightly strained smile as she started her car up. She looked carefully in front of the car, then behind, even though it was the middle of the night and absolutely nobody else was remotely nearby the abandoned parking lot. Finally, she stepped on the gas, sending the car trundling off into the darkness.

This is the story of a self-proclaimed fallen angel—an angel that descended to Earth and lived his life in this mortal coil.

To tell his story, however, one must also tell the story of a woman who played an indispensable role in his life. Her name was Saitou Hitomi, and at the time our tale is set, she was in her fourth year of college, at the height of her job hunt. Once, though, she belonged to the same club as Kiryuu Hajime—the Senkou High literary club—and ever since he’d run out from the Kanzaki household a year beforehand, she had become closer to him than anyone else could claim to be.