Chapter 118

Of course, looking at how out of breath he was right now, he must’ve used and abused that ability a lot. “Oh, Seto…” Kisaragi bowed her head in apology. “Sorry I went so far ahead. I didn’t realize you were so, you know, slow, so…” “Sorry,” Seto replied with a weak smile, eyes turned downward. I figure Kisaragi could’ve put it in any number of better ways, but she had a point. Seto was brawny, but not exactly quick on his feet. And so here was Kisaragi, of course, leaving her bodyguard in the dust. What a tour de force. Of course, her ability was pretty decently strong, so if she decided to really bust it out, I doubt she’d have much trouble taking out one or two enemies at a time. “So, Kano, um…” She swiveled her head around and gave me another confused look. “What am I looking at here?” Hmm. She must’ve noticed that Shintaro and Kido were missing. The realization made me feel like ice-cold water was being pumped into my stomach. I had tasted real despair a moment ago, and now it was Kisaragi’s turn. While I failed to find it in myself to answer Kisaragi’s question, Azami suddenly began tugging at my shirt. “Is this your friend, boy?” There was a fair amount of distance between us and Kisaragi still. “Yeah,” I whispered into her ear, making sure the newcomer couldn’t hear me. “She’s part of our team. The younger sister of the guy the Kagerou Daze just took in.” Azami groaned. I remembered how vividly she’d responded to my earlier confession. With everything I’d told her, I’m sure she could understand why I was hemming and hawing right now. But that’s how things were. We couldn’t hide the fates of those two, or Konoha, from her forever. If “clearing” started wreaking havoc with us again, it was game over for sure. Everyone living and breathing in this room would be reduced to a pile of lifeless flesh in the blink of an eye. But how should I put it to her? What if I mess this up and they both lose all will to keep fighting? Or, for that matter, what if they’re too frozen in place to run, if the circumstances call for it? Before I could even begin to think about it, Azami pushed on ahead of me. “Your brother…has been swallowed into the Kagerou Daze. So was Tsubomi. They fought courageously here, and then they died.” My heart skipped a beat at the all-too-sudden announcement. “Y-you stupid…!” There had to have been a better way to report the news. But Azami just stood there, firm, and her presence was enough to silence me. Kisaragi’s face tensed up. She uttered a few syllables, like “huh” or “ah” or whatever. Seto looked pretty shell-shocked, too, shivering a little before easing up and lowering his eyes again. The reactions pained me so much that I averted my own. Now they knew. All about this new reality that we were all helpless to do anything about. I began to wonder how much time they’d need to fully face up to it. Or was there any point in even trying? Would they be able to stand it? Despite my worrying, however, the silence didn’t last long. “Oh…right. I see, I see…” She pushed out the syllables, doing what she could to hold back the onrush of emotion. “I know this must be beyond your strength to handle,” Azami replied, now carefully choosing her words. “But if we do nothing here, their sacrifices will all go to waste. We have yet to solve anything here. So…” Before she could finish, another voice spoke over her. “…I understand. Is there anything I can do?” I looked up. Ahead of me, Kisaragi wasn’t betraying a single iota of hesitation. Her mind was numb, but she was baring it for the world to see, as if the sun itself were illuminating it. As far as I could remember, I had seen two other people make that face. One was on that unforgettable day when my big sister made her resolve clear, up on the roof in the evening. The other was when this girl’s own brother made that face as he went in ahead of us. Kisaragi was trying to take on her brother’s mission—and witnessing that, Seto gave a silent nod of his own, although his eyes were a little watery. After looking at one, then the other, Azami turned back to my own face, all but asking what I wanted to do… I felt like I was going crazy. Tortured by all these unfair events, faced with utter despair time and time again…but none of us were willing to give up. I suppose the resolve from every team member was stronger than I gave them credit for. I only wished our boss were here to see it. Suddenly, my mind recalled the “final objective” of the plan that Shintaro had laid out for us. That was kind of a silly, childish way of phrasing it. His face had been deadly serious when he came out with it to us, so we had all busted out laughing. But we all had understood. We had known, after all the abuse we faced, that it was something worth risking our necks to reach out for. “…There’s just no outdoing him.” I had to snicker a little. Right up to the end, he was always himself. Thus, we all reaffirmed with one another that we were in this for keeps, come what may. But before we could talk things over, there was one thing left to do. I took a short breath and offered some advice to the Medusa next to me. “Well, how ’bout we start with introducing you?” She pouted at me, as if I were talking nonsense. That innocent face of Marie’s, but with a sternness I had never seen before. The other two both nodded at me, clearly ready to ask for themselves if I hadn’t butted in. …I mean, given how her whole character had changed, this was definitely more than just “a new look.” The air that prevailed in the lab, smelling thickly of pharmaceuticals, was as tense as always. There, under the garishly bright light from the LCD screens that lined the walls as far as I could see, we put our heads together and brainstormed. I’m not sure if Azami’s awkward self-introduction had fully come across to my two friends, but we had at least shared what we knew with each other. The situation wasn’t looking great. As Azami put it, attempting to control and neutralize “clearing” was dead in the water—but even as we tried to come up with some alternate plan, nothing came to mind. We couldn’t see anything like a clock in the lab, and that made things all the more uneasy for us. Some invisible time limit was looming over us, chipping away at our mental outlooks. In the midst of this, I decided to ask Azami about one of the root issues bothering me. “Like, Azami, didn’t all these eye abilities originally belong to you? You definitely use ‘concealing’ a hell of a lot better than she did, even. Why’s ‘clearing’ the only one you can’t control like that?” Azami shrugged and rolled her eyes, as if this were the dumbest question in the world. I wanted to bop her on the arm for it. “Look,” she muttered, “if you’re hungry, you eat, right? And if you’re tired, you sleep. There’s no need to explain that. And in much the same way, each of these abilities have certain ‘desires’ that take priority with them.” She gave Kisaragi a poke on the chest. Kisaragi didn’t bother trying to dodge it. I couldn’t help but notice Seto averting his eyes from the scene. This isn’t the time to act all prudish, man. “For example, your ‘drawing eyes’ skill has a natural desire to attract attention from other people. It loves doing that. And each one of those abilities has desires like that, which serve as the ‘food’ that allows them to keep existing. If they are kept away from their desires, they hate that.” I thought I might have been told something like that when I obtained my own ability, come to think of it. Azami made it sound like a physiological desire, but it seemed natural in my mind to picture it like a hungry snake. They say that snakes can be tenacious, vengeful, and maybe that’s why these “abilities” were so easy to imagine as snakes—creatures that lived off their day-to-day desires. “But it’s not just a matter of these abilities blindly consuming what they want like that. People have the ability to handle and restrain their desires with reason, yes? And ‘combining eyes’ serves that role with all the other abilities. Right here.” Azami took the finger jabbed into Kisaragi’s chest and brought it up to her own temple. “Oh, okay,” Kisaragi murmured, nodding briskly, although it didn’t look like she understood too much of it. “Most abilities fully submit to ‘combining’ without question. Collect all of the abilities, and you could even create an entirely separate world, like the Kagerou Daze. But ‘clearing’ isn’t submitting to ‘combining,’ because it’s likely following a terribly strong desire that takes priority over that. I don’t know what that desire is, but if I can’t control it, there’s nothing to be done.” She hung her head, defeated. All those crazily strong and versatile abilities she’d created, and she seemed pretty helpless, herself. It gave me a lot of doubts. But hang on. Maybe that’s why the abilities were born in the first place—created to help fulfill the assorted desires of the weak, helpless Azami herself. And when these abilities wound up creating the Kagerou Daze—in whatever way they did, I don’t know—the abilities jumped over to us, because we had desires like Azami used to. Following that logic, all these snakes were attracted to us for the unique dilemmas all of us in the gang faced. If Kisaragi’s “drawing” skill craved attention, then Seto’s “stealing” must have been reacting to the desire to know what other people were feeling, or something. Consuming those desires, making them come true, allowed these ten abilities to continue existing. We could harness these abilities only under certain restrictions, but Azami, with her “combining” skill, could harness “hiding” with the full force of “clearing” backing it up—and it’d be an utterly irresistible force, one that went against all natural laws. If that was the full latent power of these abilities, they all existed in a dimension that went beyond eerie. Far beyond. For example, could you use “hiding” to make it impossible for someone to recognize anything in the world? Or maybe “deceiving” to make them think that everything in the world was actually something else? And did it even have to be targeted on a single person? What if you applied it to the whole world, for example? The abilities would cause the world to lose its own reality, no doubt—they’d turn fantasy into the new reality. And when you made the world mistake that fantasy for reality, those ten abilities would be all you needed to make reality do whatever you wanted. It was a wild story, the kind of thing that’d be laughed off if you wrote it in the margins of your notebook. But if you thought about it, it seemed that our abilities and the Kagerou Daze were connected. If these abilities had the power to rewrite the rules of the world, it made sense that “clearing” went through all this trouble, concocting an incredibly intricate scheme, to strike at our abilities and Marie’s “locking.” And that reminded me of the words “clearing” had told me there, under the sunset on that roof. If it had our abilities, those words could easily become true. But for what? For what? We still didn’t know, but there was no doubting it: It would use those powers to make its desire into reality. It would use the Medusa powers to rewind everything in this world and simply reset everything to zero. The final scenario I had hazily understood in my mind up to now was beginning to look like merciless reality to me. I could tell that my mind, unable to come up with any decent ideas, was being eroded by the despair that was beginning to rear its ugly head. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any brilliant ideas that would banish the despair. Maybe this really was the end for all of us. No matter how you thought about it, there was just no way to fix this wild state of affairs. Clear…clear… Wait a minute. Whose name came up in my mind just now? “Ah…hh…” The weak, feeble groan was like the manifestation of the despair coiling itself up inside my brain. It easily penetrated my eardrums, going right through my skull and burning the word “death” into whatever slight hope my brain clung to. Driven by survival instinct, the three of us immediately put distance between ourselves and him. Azami, on the other hand, promptly went right up to him, stretching her thin arms out as far as she could as she stood strong. “Get out of here! Don’t think about anything! Just run!” The sheer force behind her voice made it hard to imagine it was coming from Marie’s throat. It made my fingertips reach for the exit—but, sadly, I wasn’t so infatuated with myself that my mind was willing to put my own safety first. The other two were the same way. We all stayed there, unwilling to heed her command. “Wh-what are you doing?! Hurry up…” “You know that I’d want to, but our boss taught us that we need to follow through on what we say, to the very end. Besides, even if we run, we’ll still get killed eventually, won’t we?” I was able to sass back at her because my mind was numbed by it all, no doubt. My body was shaky, unstable, but at least my mouth was still listening to what I told it. “He’s right, Marie…um, I mean, Azami! There’s no way we could just leave you here. I mean, really, fighting by yourself? Stop trying to act so cool like that!” Was that really a nice way to speak to a Medusa? I swear, Kisaragi’s a legend in her own time. It made Azami speechless, apparently, but in a few more moments, she gave up, muttering “You stupid fools” at us. She was right. Unable to do anything, no matter what kind of crap we spouted… We were fools. It was just creating more weaknesses for us. There, before us, the darkened version of Konoha slowly kicked into action, brimming with ominous doom for all of us. His eyes remained glassy, and he didn’t turn them toward any of us. His spirit must have still been bobbing for air out in the world of darkness, but it wouldn’t be too long before he regained his original agility and lunged for us all. No more time to conjure up a plan now. But now, of all times, I suddenly had a revelation. It was definitely an amateur’s approach, but given the lack of any other ideas, it was worth bringing up. The light of hope that had flashed in my mind for a moment earlier finally revealed itself fully—and it was the half awakening on Konoha’s part that had finally jarred it into existence. “Hey, Azami…can you call for the Kagerou Daze?” She turned toward me, her eyes splashed with the red of an overripe pomegranate. Those eyes, the “combining” eyes, had called forth the Kagerou Daze a bit ago. If it could swallow Konoha’s body up for us, it’d at least defuse the current situation, if not provide a permanent solution. It meant plunging him into that other dimension; there couldn’t have been a crueler thing to do to him. But Konoha had just had his body taken over, that was all. He wasn’t dead or anything. All of us had come back from the Kagerou Daze once, exchanging our own lives for those abilities. If Konoha was alive, there had to be a way he could come back to this world, didn’t there? Were we going to face the ultimate, unthinkable bad ending of having our minds taken over and being forced to torture each other to death? Or could we bring this to extra innings and get some more time to think things over? Either way, I didn’t want to think that the former was the future we were granting the friends who were already in there. “…When did you notice that?” There was more than a bit of panic between the words of Azami’s question. It wasn’t her way of saying “I didn’t think about that!” or “Deliberately swallowing him up? Amazing!” It had that sort of awkward nuance that indicated she wished I had never picked up on the idea. “Just a second ago,” I reported as I picked up on her discomfort. “If we can have the Kagerou Daze take him in, we can at least keep from all getting killed here. Of course, I’ll want to ask you later if there’s a way to rescue Konoha, but…” “…Well, yes, I can use ‘combining’ to open an entrance. But…that’s all I can do.” My suggestion didn’t surprise her after all. It wasn’t a totally impossible idea, either. The panic I’d caught a glimpse of earlier was now written all over her face. “But the Kagerou Daze only takes in people on the brink of death,” she added. “If I want it to swallow up someone so beyond the concept of death as he is, I would need to change the very nature of the Kagerou Daze itself. But…” She fell silent for a moment, resigning herself to something, before strengthening her voice. “But it takes more than just the ‘combining’ power to change it. I’d need to take in at least half of the ten abilities…and that would come at the exchange of your lives.” “Our lives…?” The snakes lined up in my mind. Marie’s “locking.” Kisaragi’s “drawing.” My “deceiving.” Seto’s “stealing.” And Kido’s “hiding,” already part of Marie. Blithely counting up the number of lives on hand, I realized that this was exactly half of the ten right there. “I already tried it. Right after I froze him…while you were unconscious. ‘Combining’ and ‘hiding’ alone were enough only to let me open the portal. But…I didn’t want to say it. You aren’t running; there isn’t a trace of doubt in your minds. If I said this, I thought you would…” Her crimson eyes grew watery, like those of a child about to cry. In them, I could see no trace of the Medusa she was, the “monster” that people feared and loathed. In the short time we’d known each other, I was starting to get the impression that she empathized with other people a little too much. None of it was happening to her personally, but she cried for it anyway, accepting it as her own. Most people weren’t wired that way at all, but she pulled it off with ease. It almost made me laugh. I mean, really. This insane life I’ve led, and I’ve run into nothing but the kindest, gentlest people out there. Kisaragi walked up to Azami, bending down a bit so they were the same height, then gave her an embrace. “…Thanks for worrying about us. But I think we’re all safe with leaving this to you. You’re related to one of our best friends.” “Nnh…eh…” Azami sobbed pathetically, unable to reply. It didn’t exactly fill me with confidence to see, but I completely agreed with Kisaragi. When I looked up at Seto—checking on him, just in case—he gave me a grin that indicated I should never have doubted him. I’ve been through a lot with all these guys. That freaky haunted house we went through was a nostalgic memory for us now. Those days we spent on the bunk bed, looking at each other, laughing, crying, figuring out whether there was any happiness for us somewhere out there, seemed so vivid in my mind that it might as well have been yesterday. Really, it was a good thing we didn’t have time to spend the whole night waxing nostalgic with each other. If we started talking, after all, we’d start to look forward to what was coming up in the future. …And then it came. All too suddenly, and all too mercilessly. “Graaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!” Twisting the body it occupied, “clearing” let out a beast-like yell. Its dull yellow eyeballs swiveled around, running across the entire room, then stopped once they found us. “Too bad, you little pieces of shit.” The twisted voice was like the sound of a snake licking its lips. It smashed against my eardrums, irritating my very spirit. There was no longer any sign of the friend I used to know. “…!”