“Puff out your chest, stand up straight, take pride in yourself, roar at your enemies, don’t hang your head! Never back down, never give up, and don’t think you can just end it whenever you want! You feeling all sympathetic, you little shits?! Don’t cozy up to each other, don’t get attached, it’s gross, what’re you, animals?! Don’t involve someone else in your own narcissism, you wanna worry, go ahead and worry, but don’t come crying to me, you think I can help you with your weird issues?! Look at you, licking each other’s wounds. There’s no place for compromise here! Don’t dismiss it out of hand, and don’t find some abstruse reason to accept it! Forget about everything else and just worry about your own decisions!”
“Shut up!” shouted Hime-chan, clutching her stomach─and glaring back at Aikawa.
The tears were gone. Nowhere to be found. Her eyes were no longer those of a teenage girl─they were zigzag eyes, slashed to pieces somewhere inside, rotten to the core.
It had all been an act.
Her purity, her naïveté. Her good works and her goodwill.
If it had all been an act─then still, even after being saved.
“It’s over, this is the end! The truth’s been revealed… All the killing─the broken promises, the betrayals─”
Betrayal, betrayal, betrayal.
Tricking your friends first, in order to trick your enemies.
Repeated over and over and over.
Hime-chan was so pitiful. Too painful to look at. Too painful to abandon.
“That’s…enough, Hime-chan─”
“Shut up, be quiet, shut your mouth! Stop calling me that! Why don’t you learn some manners!” yelled Hime-chan, glaring at me this time, her eyes bugging out of her head. It was an expression without a shred of purity or loveliness. And yet, no expression could’ve aroused more pity in me. “Don’t be kind to me! Don’t get up on your high horse and think you can do me a favor by being my friend! It’s─it’s disgusting!”
“…Hime-chan.”
“What the hell is that face? Do you feel bad for me? Compassionate, even? And you were so repulsed by murder…how kind of you. But─it’s not just the Director, and Saijo and Hagihara. You know that, right?”
She scrutinized me with something like pity in turn, her eyes filled with a deep-seated malice that didn’t suit her at all.
“Have you still not figured out─why none of the ‘faculty’ or ‘security’ ever showed up?”
How could they, when that was all taken care of before I ever even set foot on the school grounds─
I tried to envision it.
The faculty building. The staff room.
Just beneath the floor of the Director’s office─sealed up tight.
A bloodbath unfolding within─
“Murder” didn’t cover it anymore.
“Serial killer” didn’t quite work either.
That enclosed space.
Obstructed on all four sides by walls, with no way to see inside. To see living people─or dead people. No way to see inside, not until the walls crumbled.
And─
By that time, it’d already be too late.
“Either way, this academy is finished.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Aikawa said. “But you don’t get to decide when it’s over.” She pointed at Hime-chan. “I won’t let you.”
“I keep telling you! Enough already, Ms. Aikawa! Enough, it’s all over!”
Calling Aikawa by her last name─Hime-chan flicked up both arms.
Whum whum whum─that sound, like a child whimpering, like the air being rent into a vacuum, reverberated down the hall, all of it aimed at Jun Aikawa. Because of their thinness and speed, it was impossible to visually track them. Yes, it was an undeniable fact: the moment we’d set foot in this hallway, we were caught in Hime-chan’s spider web. Visibility was poor, and even the world’s strongest had no hope of avoiding every one of the myriad “lines” closing in on her from all directions by way of every bump and hollow of this locked-room hallway.
But the contractor─
Didn’t even try to avoid them at all.
The invisible wires coiled all around Aikawa’s body. Hime-chan herself was so taken aback that she stopped moving, and as she stood there staring in surprise, Aikawa snarled, “What’s the problem? Oh, sorry, did you want me to try and dodge these? Not losing your nerve this late in the game, are ya? Or, hahaha, were you hoping I’d end your life for you?”
“…nh. Guh.”
“Bull’s-eye, huh? Well, sorry to disappoint, but I’m eeeeever so fond of you. I will ostentatiously, thoroughly, and without reservation spare no effort in sparing you. Don’t expect me to be your easy way out. I’m not going to kill you, I’m going to give you all the tepid love I can muster, so we’ll never be apart again. Ha, though I’m pretty sure death might be the only way to cure you of your stupidity.”
“Don’t you, make fun, of me…” Chewing her lower lip, Hime-chan shivered uncontrollably. Not in fear, not anymore. This was rage─rage at Aikawa. Or was it─the battle frenzy of the zigzag berserker?
“You’ve really improved, though, allow me to compliment you on that. Casting your webs so precisely without weighting the ends of the lines… You could find a lifetime gig with an acrobatic troupe if you wanted. Who are you, Takuya Yamashiro? Way to perfect such a pain-in-the-ass skill. Could it be? Do you still feel beholden to her?” Aikawa sneered at Hime-chan, clearly mocking her.
At being openly insulted like this despite holding the overwhelmingly superior position─and the home-field advantage, Hime-chan’s face twisted and she screamed with all her might, “Do you not even realize this is checkmate, Ms. Aikawa?!”
“Look at this jumped-up pawn, prattling on and on. Sorry to say I was born a queen─what do I care if lesser pieces like the king get taken?”
Hime-chan seemed determined─but then, for an instant, she hesitated. An instant is only an instant, though, and she whipped both determined arms into the air at the same time. “This is the end of the line! Your objective─”
And for the final time─
“First, despair. I hit my cutoff with you a long time ago, you little shit.”
And─and I must’ve been seeing things, but Aikawa smiled with a certain tenderness.
“Also, relax. Because the bonds between us can never be cut.”