Soldiers die in battle, and tacticians die in confusion.
And weavers get caught in their own webs.
Ultimately.
Hime-chan wasn’t a stand-in for “her.” That alone seems clear to me. It would’ve taken more than that─to break Tomo Kunagisa.
“Well, with this many hypotheses, one of ’em has to be right,” Aikawa said. For a time my hospital room fell silent. She finished the apple, core and all, and reached out her hand towards the basket again. “Hm─this the kind of thing you eat?”
She plucked a 5x5x5 Rubik’s Cube, exactly the same size as an apple, from the basket.
“No, that’s something Kunagisa left when she came to visit me. It was supposed to help pass the time, but I can’t solve those no matter how hard I try, so I just left it in there.”
“She came to see you? I thought she couldn’t manage stairs on her own, except at home?”
“She said an old friend named ‘Hiichan’ or something brought her.”
“Oh, so that’s why you’re in such a bad mood, Iitan…” Aikawa solved the cube while she was saying this, never once looking down at her hands, then returned it to the basket of fruit. “Anyway.”
From her seemingly apathetic attitude, I knew we were finally getting to the real reason for her visit, and I readied myself.
“This time around I plumbed the depths of your peculiar nature, and I’ve got you all figured out.”
“My nature, is it? Well, Shiogi called me a ‘non-actor’ or something.”
“Yeah…that sounds about right. Fact is, I’m regretting it just a little bit. Getting you mixed up in this, I mean. I think it might’ve been a mistake. Don’t you? If you hadn’t been there, at least Shiogi Hagihara and Tamamo Saijo would still be alive. Ichihime wanted to kill as few of the ‘students’ as possible, since they were in the same boat as her. The ‘faculty’ were there because they wanted to be─but the ‘students’ had no choice.”
Shiogi had said something about how there was “no place better suited to me than here,” but─I think I can safely say. That there was. Shiogi and Tamamo just didn’t know it. They just couldn’t find other objectives or motivations. And I just wasn’t able to provide them, that’s all.
“But blaming me for their deaths is over the line. It’s got nothing to do with me, does it?”
“You’re constantly surrounded by calamity, and people are constantly dying around you. You─how can I put this, you make people feel like they can’t settle down. You make them anxious. So the people around you are forced out of their comfort zones─and as a result they let their guard down. That’s exactly why I used you for this assignment─but that aspect of your nature doesn’t discriminate between friend and foe. Ichihime got caught up in it too. She killed Tamamo for the sake of your safety, and she didn’t kill Shiogi because she’d ‘found out the truth,’ she killed her to save you; you’d let yourself be captured so Hime-chan could escape, and Shiogi had you trapped like a rat─doesn’t that sound more plausible? Ichihime only wanted to hide her crime from me, her friend. And, locked room or no locked room, once the corpses were discovered she was going to come under suspicion no matter what.”
“I see. I guess that’s another way of looking at it.”
“Someone who shakes people up just by being there, who makes others lose sight of themselves just by being there… Individuals like you aren’t all that rare. When they’re around you can’t settle down, you get irritated, things don’t go like they usually do… Psychology has a way of explaining such people: in terms of ‘defects.’ The people observing you have similar deficiencies, so they start to feel like theirs are being pointed out to them, and it shakes them up. Some people decide that that feeling is love, and some decide it’s hostility. The former want to commiserate with you, while the latter hate you for being similar to them. And you’re the top of the line in that department. You have no personality, so you’re not similar to anyone─but you lack so much that you’re similar to everyone. Which acts on their non-conscious minds; your conscious non-action undermines them. And on top of that, you exploit it cleverly. You ward things off without putting up any kind of ward, you ingratiate yourself without any ingrained defenses. You let others pass, deflect, avoid, evade. You use nonsense to run away, flee, escape. Even though they can’t settle down when you’re around─no one can touch you. It’s pretty much like being around a ghost or a devil. That’s why the machinery goes crazy around you, and people’s switches end up getting flipped. Same was true back in April, and back in May.”
“I said this to Shiogi as well, but…you’re overestimating me.” I shook my head slowly. “I’m nothing special. I just wander around without ever knowing what’s going on.”
“If there’s any silver lining…” Aikawa continued undaunted, totally ignoring my attempt to vindicate myself, “it’s that you have no goals. To be perfectly honest, you freak me out a little. If you develop any kind of intentionality… If you start heading somewhere, who the hell knows what you’ll be capable of? When that happens, the only ones who’ll be able to avoid your influence are people like Zerozaki, who’re absolutely identical to you. Everyone who’s even the slightest bit different…will go off the rails, every last one of them. It’ll be so much worse than it is now, you’ll drag the people around you into your orbit and the accidents’ll spiral out of control.”