Junko said nothing, as if she’d given up. The next morning, when he woke up, Junko was already gone. When he went to the living room, Yoshie was gone too. Only Fujiko was languidly lying on the couch
“Looks like you had a good time last night,” Fujiko said sarcastically.
“Quiet. You’re always more enthusiastic than she is...” Akuto cut her off, but Fujiko’s eyes took on a more serious intensity.
“I know. What were you fighting about?”
Akuto sat down next to her and explained. She leaned her head up against him.
“You’re still worried about saving the world?”
“To be honest, I’ve been kind of forgetting about all that. About Keena, Korone, and Hiroshi.”
He ran his fingers through her hair. Fujiko moved her head closer, like she had a thousand times before.
“It makes sense, if we’re so happy now.”
“My memories of them are fading, actually. As if we’re being trapped here in eternity.”
“Do you not like eternity?”
“I think that’s right. We’re inside eternity, and we need to find eternity’s meaning... and bring an end to the end.”
“It’s a little hard to understand, but I guess you’re right. So, why don’t we get started?”
“What?”
“Why don’t we start by touching each other, to figure out if this is a dream or real?”
Fujiko wrapped her hand around Akuto’s waist.
“Maybe doing that is what’s making us forget...”
Akuto stood up and went to leave. Fujiko was confused, but followed him, as he went up to the roof of their condo. From here, you could see the whole town.
“Is there some reason we’re looking at the town?” Fujiko asked. Akuto just shook his head.
“Nope. But I wanted to look off into the distance. As far as I could, you see,” Akuto said, and called up a mana screen.
It showed exactly what he was seeing.
“Your magical power is as strong as ever.”
“That’s one thing I don’t want to lose. Anyway, as long as there’s mana around, I can see forever.”
“But when we were alive, mana only existed inside imperial territory. And since the Earth was round, you couldn’t see beyond the horizon, or any further into space than a normal person.”
Akuto nodded and pointed into the distance.
“But here, the world is filled with mana. The whole world, not just the Empire.”
Akuto extended his view into the horizon, the same way you might zoom in a camera. What he saw was displayed on the screen so that Fujiko could see it too.
“Huh? This is pretty amazing.” Fujiko’s eyes went wide. The zoomed footage passed through the town, all the way to the horizon and beyond. It went beyond the horizon, in other words, into the sky. The sky filled the screen, turned into a pure blue. It turned white for a moment as it went through the clouds, and then got darker and darker. His vision passed into space before finally disappearing.
“It disappeared?” Fujiko whispered. But in the next moment, the footage showed darkness again. This time, she saw what she’d seen before, but in reverse. The earth came into view and grew in size, and then...
“Our backs?!”
Just as she said, the screen was showing Akuto and Fujiko’s backs. If it was showing what Akuto was seeing, then...
“This is us, right now, isn’t it?”
Fujiko waved her right hand. She could see her arm move in the video as well.
“Yup. You’re seeing what I’m seeing right now. I noticed this a while ago.” Akuto moved his left arm.
“What does this mean?”
“If the world we lived on in life was fictional, so is this one. So I was thinking, what’s the difference?” he said. ”And the difference is whether there’s a wall between us and the outside. When we were alive, we lived in a world with a wall. And now, there’s no wall here. No matter what direction you go in three dimensional space, you come back to where you started. You can go forever, but it’s finite.”
“I understand that. But what does that mean?” Fujiko asked.
“I don’t know,” Akuto said, shaking his head. “But what I can say right now is that even if this is fictional, there are fictions with an outside and fictions with only an inside. And the latter has a main character, and background characters. Whatever we do will succeed, as long as we do it here.” He winked at her.
Fujiko blushed, and raised the corner of her lips into a smile.
“You noticed, didn’t you? That I’m still planning on conquering the world.”
“You and I are a better pair than other people think. Even if the other two don’t know what you’re thinking, I do. And you’re very close to creating a political structure with me at its center, aren’t you?”
“That’s correct. So, what will you do? Sit on a throne, or live a life of luxury forever? Do whatever pleases you.”
“And you know that I’m not going to do anything. I was just being silly. The most fun thing you can do with money is completely waste it.” Akuto laughed.
“Oh my. I’m happy that you understand me so well, but it frustrates me that you’ve already thought so far ahead.” Fujiko laughed, as well.
“I’ll do something even bigger, then. Why don’t I crush the entire world in the palm of my hand?”
“Huh?”
Akuto spoke in a completely calm voice. Fujiko wasn’t sure if he was joking.
“This finite world is filled with mana. That’s how it’s set up. Which means...”
Akuto casually reached out a hand, and began to clench it into a fist.
The world began to shake.
“Aaah!” Fujiko let out a gasp of surprise. The whole city was shaking. The air vibrated and roared from the pressure. The earth was shaking, as well. There wasn’t supposed to be any mana in the ground, but if this whole world was filled with mana, it would be present there as well. The whole of space itself was practically within the palm of Akuto’s hand.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
Fujiko realized that he was about to crush the planet.
“Akuto...” She called his name softly, fearfully.
This was suicide. If you destroyed space itself in a world where you couldn’t die, would everything turn to nothing? The look on Akuto’s face seemed to say to her that he was ready to find out. He was just quietly and calmly closing his fist.
Fujiko grabbed his open hand. The ground swelled up like it was being sucked up into the air. The seas surged into the city like a tidal wave. Buildings shattered and people began to float up to the sky. The whole Earth was under tremendous pressure, like it had suddenly been submerged miles below the sea. It was an end to the world that no one had ever anticipated.
Fujiko clung to Akuto, and just as he pulled her close, there was static on the mana screen. The buzz of a TV tuned to static. And then words followed.
“Nope! I’m not lettin’ you end the world like that!”
The voice had a strange accent. It was a voice she recognized. She looked down at the mana screen. It was Keana, the girl with blonde hair.
“Keana,” Akuto whispered.
She was the other Keena, the one who had appeared when the Law of Identity had reset the world. Akuto and his friends had called her Keana, and spent a lot of time trying to erase her from existence. She wasn’t even supposed to exist.
“Why?”
Akuto stopped what he was doing, surprised at this turn of events.
“I won’t let you end the world like this!” Keana said again. “I disappeared because I was satisfied! But you guys aren’t really satisfied!”
Akuto stopped moving entirely. He moved to answer Keana. But then the mana screen disappeared.
“A hallucination? No, that’s impossible...” Fujiko said. When she saw Akuto’s reaction, she knew it was no hallucination. He’d relaxed his hand. The world stopped shaking, and began to return to normal. No one around them seemed to have noticed the astonishing thing that had just happened. They were all walking about the city, as if the worldwide destruction had never happened.
“We’re not really satisfied...?” Fujiko looked at Akuto. He glanced back at her, and then looked down.
“I guess so. We knew that from the start. But we’d thought that maybe, just maybe, we were wrong, and you were satisfied.”
Fujiko gave him a kiss, and left the rooftop and headed down the stairs. He looked into the sky, before heading to the door. As he did, Yoshie came up, and looked at him with disappointed eyes.
“I’m a girl too, you know. It’s frustrating. I detected what you were doing and came to see, and then I found this.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Apologizing just... I don’t know. Makes it worse. But there’s something you want me to think about, right?” She sighed and shrugged.
“Yeah. I want you to think of a way for us to get out.” Akuto looked straight into her eyes.
“It’s going to take time. Let’s go to my room and talk.” She motioned for him to come back inside.