“Siding with Hajime would have made most of us look like we’d completely lost our minds, but I figured that Akutagawa and Hinoemata could manage to make it look convincing enough, considering what they’re like. Akutagawa’s always decided whom to ally himself with based on who looks more likely to win, plain and simple, and Hinoemata... Well, Hinoemata has that whole obsession with Andou Jurai going on, and she never seemed to pay any attention to the actual Spirit War at all.”
“...Really, I think he would’ve believed it even if someone other than me or Hinoemata had joined him. He never questioned me at all. That guy’s totally convinced that he has a leader’s charisma,” said Akutagawa. He almost sounded like he pitied Kiryuu for a moment.
“I get it now... So Tamaki—Hinoemata getting Akutagawa to help with her plans, Kiryuu showing up here, and you arriving on the scene with suspiciously perfect timing were all part of a long-term espionage operation,” I observed. “Gotta say, though...I’m surprised, Akutagawa. When I heard you’d sided with Kiryuu I was a little confused at first...but I barely had to think about it at all to make sense of it. It felt like the decision that you’d make.”
Yanagi had always sided with whoever was strongest—whoever seemed to have the best chances of winning. He viewed the world through a calm, logical, and steadfastly pragmatic lens. In that sense, him allying himself with Kiryuu felt natural.
“But now you’ve jumped ship. You’re going for the long shot, lending a hand to a team that the odds are stacked against.”
“...So?” Akutagawa curtly replied. “The way I see it, nothing’s logical about obsessively calculating what will profit you the most and what everyone’s chances of coming out ahead are. Sometimes it’s not so bad to throw all that away and make a stand against the side that disgusts you.”
“Is that so...? Well, well. I guess I’ve been had, then.”
They’d fooled me from start to finish. Akutagawa and Saitou had both told me the bald-faced lie that Akutagawa was on Kiryuu’s side, knowing that I was connected to Kiryuu and would likely bring that false information up with him. In doing so, I’d made him that much less likely to suspect that there was a spy in his camp. They’d exploited my determination to stay an ever-neutral onlooker, taking advantage of the fact that I was willing to share confidential information with anyone and everyone if my whims drove me to do so.
“Honestly...first Kiryuu, and now you too? It seems everyone’s willing to lie to their readers these days.” Feels like you’re laying on the narrative trickery a little thick at this point.
While I was muttering to myself, Akutagawa stepped forward. He raised his hand once more, invoking his power to wrench open another barrage of powerful gravity waves, neutralizing them right before they made impact. He even opened up gaps in the air itself to generate powerful gusts of wind, impairing Kiryuu’s movements while aiding his ally’s.
As Toki fought on the front lines, Yanagi supported him with everything he had. A gloomy shut-in and a violent delinquent, two individuals you’d think would never see eye to eye, were taking on their former leader as a shockingly coordinated team.
“Ugh...” Kiryuu grunted as his back thudded against the concrete wall behind him. A combination of Toki’s knifework and Yanagi’s blasts of wind had overwhelmed him, literally forcing his back up against a wall—specifically, against one of the towering supports that held up the bridge over the river.
Kiryuu was cornered. There was nowhere for him to run. If ever there had been a moment when he was at his weakest, it was now. Toki, however, didn’t take advantage of that opening. Instead of piling on the pressure, he laid off, backstepping away from his opponent. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why.
“See you in hell, you dipshit of a boss,” Toki triumphantly declared—and an instant later, a thunderous crack rang out as a fissure raced its way up the concrete wall behind Kiryuu’s back. The cracks spread throughout the support before anyone could react, and at the same time, the horrible, screeching creak of metal straining to its absolute limit sounded from the bridge above. In the blink of an eye, the whole structure began to collapse.
Zigzag Jigsaw allowed Toki to leave a fragment of his knife behind in anyone or anything that he cut. That fragment would move with a will of its own, traveling to the core of its target and destroying it from the inside. For a person, that meant the fragment would travel to their heart and tear it to pieces—and for a building, it would target and bring down whatever structural supports it could access. Just as the smallest of leaks can sink the greatest of ships, even a slight graze from Toki’s knife would develop into a fatal injury.
Most likely, Toki had made a few cuts on the bridge in advance, leaving pieces of his knife inside. Then he’d waited until those fragments were just about to finish destroying the structure’s core before luring Kiryuu underneath it just as the collapse would begin. From the very beginning, the combination of shut-in and delinquent had all been for the sake of this one, single attack.
A roaring clamor filled the air as the massive bridge began to collapse into the river beneath it. The wreckage covered Kiryuu in an instant, blocking him from sight. Considering how quickly it had happened, there was no conceivable way he could’ve escaped. He’d entered the scene by standing atop the bridge’s highest point for maximum impact, and now he found himself buried beneath it. You could hardly have asked for a more ironic conclusion.
“D-Don’t you think you might have overdone it a little...?” I asked apprehensively. “I mean, are we sure that there weren’t any civilians on that bridge? We Players come back to life if we die, but if some random person who happened to be nearby got killed—”
“There is no cause for concern, onlooker.”
Just like that, a girl wearing the sort of bright pink nurse’s outfit that you don’t even see in eroge anymore stepped seemingly out of nowhere to answer my question. There was a mirthless archaic smile on her face that gave her a mysterious, almost inhuman presence. That told me that her core personality, Yusano Genre, was currently in control.
“Militaria’s power has driven any passersby away from the vicinity,” said Genre. “No innocents were harmed in the bridge’s collapse.”
Genre’s multitude of personalities predated her participation in the Spirit War. The power that the War gave her, Sex Eclipse, allowed her to transplant those personalities into other individuals, essentially acting as a form of possession. That wasn’t the only power she’d been given, though: Every single personality within her had each been given their own individual power as well. The basic rule of the Spirit War was that each Player got precisely one power, but Genre was an exception among exceptions. She was the War’s greatest renegade—or perhaps its most blessed participant. Anyway, I hadn’t met Militaria myself, but apparently, her power gave her the ability to drive people away from a chosen area.
“Genre...” I muttered. “Don’t tell me—you too?”
“Yes. I, too, have collaborated with Saitou Hitomi to oppose Kiryuu Hajime,” Genre indifferently confirmed. “I departed from Fallen Black in order to defeat him, but I was never concerned with the idea of doing so one-on-one. It would be strange for me to suffer from such a preoccupation, considering there was never just one of me from the outset,” she added. I got the sense that she was trying to be witty, but even then, her expression never budged. “If Saitou Hitomi and her fellows were willing to join me in opposing Kiryuu Hajime, then I saw no reason to refuse their assistance.”