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Brave was utterly defeated.
Up until the 25th time, he’d been counting. But after the 25th time he killed Akuto, he stopped. Nothing had changed.
Nothing had changed.
At some point, Boichiro had stopped trying to hide his pity. Brave could tell he was sympathizing with the boy who was doing the same thing he’d once done.
“You should give it up. You understand now, right?”
“I definitely understand that somebody is trying to stop history from changing.”
Brave had totally lost his composure by now.
“That’s right. For some reason, they refuse to allow the flow of history to change.”
“But I’m part of history, too, aren’t I?”
“Yeah. I guess your role in the historical record is to struggle, and to fail,” Boichiro said with a sigh. “I realized after I died, that my death had been decided from the start.”
“Then am I going to keep suffering? Just like you? Am I going to keep doing this until I just break? Am I just going to keep murdering, for nothing?”
Brave already knew the answer. Boichiro nodded.
“That’s your role, yes.”
“MY role? Then am I playing a part in someone else’s script? Why?”
“In this world... No, that’s not the right way to say it. In any world, free will is an illusion. You’re doing what you’re doing because you have a result that you want to achieve. But that’s because you’re thinking along the lines of a story. If you want happiness, all you need is a full stomach and a member of the opposite sex by your side. Even if they die, your sense of loss won’t last too long. There’s no need you have that someone else can’t fulfill. If they’re hungry, even the most discriminating diner will eat what’s in front of them. There’s no difference between biological satisfaction and happiness. Or at least there wouldn’t be, if it weren’t for stories. Love. Bloodlines. Success. Life paths. All values of these are religions in their own right, distinct from biological value. Stories are what make sentience possible. But they also infect it. Like a virus.”
“But we were able to resist! We realized that, and we’re already trying to destroy natural stories. We know that the history that lead us here is an unnatural one. The fact that the characters in the story know it’s a story is destabilizing it!”
Brave’s eyes were shining with this new discovery. But Boichiro’s expression remained unchanged.
“That’s the kind of story this was.”
“What?”
“A story that’s revealed to be a story. The deus ex machina that appears at just the right moment isn’t there for the sake of catharsis. It has appeared to tell us what it is that we were thinking is a story, and tell us that is fictional. What that god tells us is the pleasure of a story, and its limits. And now, we’ve become the deus ex machina. We ourselves have become the god.” Boichiro pointed to himself, and then back to Brave.
“We ourselves are the deus ex machina?”
“Changing history can fix any problem. Even the most horrible deaths, or the biggest failures.”
“In other words, deus ex machina aren’t forbidden. They just fail?”
“That’s right. Which leads to only one answer.”
“I get it. We’re not the main characters.” The last light of hope faded from Brave’s eyes.
“That’s right.” Boichiro kicked the ground, annoyed. “And your role isn’t over yet, either. You can tell because your name is now just ‘Brave’. And you haven’t lost the title of Brave, either. All you’re going to be allowed to do now, probably, is display the courage that exists after all is lost.”
“And even then, I’m still just a side character. So who’s the main character?” Brave asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Of course, the man who’s revealed that the story is nothing but layer upon layer of fiction will be the one to end the story about stories. The Demon King destroys the world, right? Whenever there’s a story that won’t let the prince marry the princess and live happily ever after... It always ends with the end of the world.”
✦ ✦ ✦
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“So I’m important, then?” Akuto asked. He still couldn’t believe it.
“I think so, at least,” Yoshie said with a serious expression.
“You’re going to end the world. That’s how this works. As for what exactly that means... it’s complicated.”
“But I’m the one who has to end it?” Akuto asked. Yoshie nodded.
“Keana disappeared because she was satisfied. You need to be satisfied, too.”
“I understand that. But what would satisfy me?”
“You hated fiction, while living inside a fiction. You had a fetish for revealing that which was fictional, and kept doing it again and again. You would destroy what seemed to be a closed system, only to activate the system that lay beyond it. A multilayered fiction. An infinite regression. It’s a hell that continues forever. Which makes this... difficult.”
She’d sat Akuto down in a chair, and was leaning forward against his back.
“By the way...”
“What? We’re talking about something important.”
“It is important. That’s why I’m asking. Why are you pressing up against me like that?”
“I’m enjoying my reward for being a side character, for playing the role of one of the three goddesses.”
“We’re not talking about anything romantic or sexy at all.”
“Doesn’t it seem like something a villain would do? Stroking a girl while having a normal conversation.”
“Am I still a villain?” He tickled her cheek with his finger, and she smiled happily.
“Hehe... If you’re not going to be a villain during what comes next, what are you going to be?”
“But what, exactly, am I going to do? Satisfy myself?”
“You’re going to end the world... But like I said, that’s complicated. First, I need to explain what this world is. The afterlife acts as if it was made just for us. It responds to our will, or your will, mostly. Which means that this world can take any form you want it to.”
“That, I understand.”
“No, you don’t, really. You don’t know what that really means. There’s a concept called ‘possible worlds’.”
“Possible worlds?” Akuto “remembered” a word that he’d never known by scanning the data loaded into his mind.
“I see. A thought experiment that says in a world where anything can happen, given enough time, any given thing will happen.”
“Correct. Anything that can be put into writing can happen here. Which means that nothing will happen that can’t be expressed in words.”
Yoshie began to explain the concept of possible worlds, which was difficult to understand just from the database.
For example, “An elephant flies” or “Hitler appears in Paris in the year 2000” are both physically impossible, but perfectly grammatical sentences. If an elephant had wings, or if Hitler was still alive, they could quite easily happen. If you accept that these worlds are possible, you realize that the world is filled with endless possibilities, which can be thought of as simultaneously existing parallel worlds.
“You’re going to make every possible theoretical world,” Yoshie said, as if ordering him.
“Every one of them, huh?”
It was a staggering concept to think about.
“Whatever is left at the end is what you want. View every possible world, and then choose the one you want.”
“You’re right... In a world where I can do anything I want... I can look for a possibility that will save the world. It may be the only way out of here.”
“I think you should get to work right away, then.” Yoshie pulled up a mana screen and displayed the entirety of history so far as a model.
“The data you have access to is a copy of the world at the moment of its destruction. As long as that copy exists, you can use it to go back and calculate out any possibility you like.”
“But it feels like a world which was created that way would be pretty sloppy and inaccurate,” Akuto complained.
“That’s fine. Even a sloppy and inaccurate possibility is still a possibility,” Yoshie replied.
And so Akuto resolved to find the possibilities within himself.