Kiryuu had very clearly—and loudly—declared that there were only eight Players left after he’d taken out Tamaki. That was the whole reason I’d used the special privilege I’d had tucked into my back pocket for ages to make myself into a Player. I’d thought that bumping the number of active Players back up to nine would spoil his whole plan. I thought that I’d thrown a wrench into his story’s works. But now...there were ten Players left?
“Bwa ha ha! ‘Ten people left’? Yes...of course you’d have questions about that,” Kiryuu said, retreating a safe distance from Toki and glancing over at me. I’d shouted loudly enough for him to make out my words mid-battle, apparently. “Yes, I did indeed say ‘That makes eight.’ But...”
An arrogant smile spread across Kiryuu’s face.
“...I don’t remember ever saying that I was telling the truth.”
“...”
Ugggh.
I just... I don’t even... Ugggggggggh.
An overwhelming sense of exhaustion assailed me. I’d screwed up, plain and simple. I’d known that you could never, ever take anything that Kiryuu Hajime said at face value, but I’d gone and done it anyway. I’d seen so many people make themselves look like total morons by making that exact same mistake, and yet here I was, failing to learn anything at all from their examples.
Most likely, Kiryuu had just been trying to look cool when he’d said that. He’d gotten so worked up by his reunion with Andou Jurai—an event to end all events, in his mind—that he’d made up the “that makes eight” line on the spot, just to add a sense of drama and urgency to the scene. It was like he’d slammed on the story’s accelerator, speeding toward its climax so that he could end a volume on a major cliff-hanger or something. The truth, meanwhile, was that there were still plenty of Players left in the game.
This was not funny. It was misery-inducing. It was exhausting. Even now, this late in the game, he was still as big of a poser as ever. On the other hand, maybe that was just a given. After all—we’re talking about the Kiryuu Hajime. The Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First.
“Wasn’t that much of a lie, though. After all...it’ll be true before you know it,” Kiryuu said. He raised a hand as he spoke—and the next thing I knew, the ground where Toki had been standing sunk into itself.
Toki’s naturally swift reflexes just barely saved him. He threw himself out of the line of fire, but he ended up sprawled on the ground as a result. The attack had been quite mild compared to Road to Abbadon, the one Kiryuu had tried to use on me shortly before, but it had still certainly exerted more than enough force to squash a human flat. In other words, while he wasn’t in perfect shape just yet, Kiryuu seemed to have recovered a reasonable amount of his MP.
Toki clicked his tongue with irritation. “Go to hell!” he spat as he rushed toward Kiryuu once more.
Toki’s onslaught made it clear that he hadn’t earned the title of Fallen Black’s assault leader for nothing. He didn’t bother with feints or trickery—he just charged in head-on, throwing everything he had at his opponent.
Frankly, I thought that made him an idiot. If Kiryuu really had recovered to an even slightly appreciable degree, then Toki was fighting a losing battle. His style had always been to overwhelm enemies who over-relied on their powers with pure physical might, but Kiryuu’s mastery over gravity wasn’t the sort of power you could overcome with hand-to-hand combat skills alone. It was a terrible matchup for Toki. He might as well have been launching a suicide attack.
“Be silent in slumber, ye seasoned warrior.”
What could I even say other than “called it”? As Toki made a beeline for Kiryuu, Kiryuu activated his power. He launched a very simple gravitational wave...probably. I technically couldn’t see it, but I was pretty sure that’s what he’d done.
Once again, the earth sank in on itself. This time, however, it did so in a far wider area than before. No matter how exceptional your reflexes were, dodging an attack like that just wasn’t humanly possible. Toki, however, didn’t hesitate. If anything, he ran with even more vigor than ever—which was possible because the attack hadn’t hit him at all. A gap had opened up in the wave of gravity, splitting it vertically and causing it to rush past him on either side.
A look of astonishment passed across Kiryuu’s face. His attack had been cleaved open like Moses parting the Red Sea. The gravity waves themselves were invisible, but the distortion of the ground that they left in their wake made what had happened plain to see. Amid a swath of devastation, a single, straight line of earth was entirely untouched, connecting Toki to Kiryuu—and Toki was sprinting down that one-way path like his life depended on it. In fact, he was sprinting like he’d known it would be there from the very beginning.
“...You’re wide open,” a dull, gloomy voice rang out as a small-statured boy stepped onto the scene. It was Akutagawa Yanagi, holding a hand outward with two fingers spread apart, like he’d just used them to zoom in on a smartphone’s screen.
Dead Space: the power to put the spaces between to work. It allowed its wielder to find and wrench open any and all gaps that they could perceive. Even a completely invisible gravitational wave, it seemed, was nothing more than a gap in Kiryuu’s defenses to Yanagi. He’d forced the wave open, creating the perfect path for Toki the assault leader to continue his charge.
I understood all that logic. There was just one thing that I didn’t get, though.
“W-Wait, why...?” I asked. “I thought you were on Kiryuu’s side?”
The last I’d heard, Fallen Black had fractured into three factions, each of which had started warring with the others. Kiryuu Hajime, Akutagawa Yanagi, and Hinoemata Tamaki had made up the Kiryuu faction; Saitou Hitomi, Natsu Aki, and Toki Shuugo had formed the Saitou faction; and Yusano Genre and her merry band of alternate personalities had gone solo, becoming a faction of their own.
Tamaki had already been knocked out of the running, but Akutagawa, at least, was still supposed to be part of Kiryuu’s camp. He was cold and calculating to a fault, and he had decided to join up with Kiryuu after logically and dispassionately analyzing the state of the conflict. How, then, had he been able to pull off teamwork on the level of precision he’d just displayed—so precise you’d almost think it had all been planned out in advance—with his supposed enemies?
“...Hmph,” Akutagawa grunted in response to my baffled, disbelieving exclamation. “As if I’d ever side with that moron. It was all an act.”
I was speechless.
“Sorry for tricking you, Sagami. The truth is that we used you,” Saitou said, stepping in to fill the void I’d left in the conversation with an explanation. “Akutagawa’s been pretending to be on Hajime’s side while reporting back to us as a spy the whole time. Hinoemata too, of course. We didn’t know what sort of crazy crap Hajime might decide to pull if the whole team betrayed him right from the start, so we made it seem like he still had allies.”
Saitou had laid her plan out pretty matter-of-factly, but as it sank in, I realized just how terrible its implications were—how terrible, and how tragic. I couldn’t hold back my astonishment or my sympathy.
Oh. I see. So...Kiryuu was betrayed by literally all of his allies. What I’d thought was a split in the faction was actually just him getting excluded from the group. And yet, up until this very moment, he’d thought that he still had friends... It’s hard not to feel a little bad for the guy.