While I just sat there in stunned silence, Chifuyu chimed in again. “Hatoko’s right,” she said. “Fighting’s bad. Peace is the best.”
“Isn’t it, Chifuyu? There’s no way we’d ever get in a fight like that,” Hatoko agreed. The literary club’s resident airhead combination was in complete agreement when it came to their total lack of fighting spirit.
“When all’s said and done, so long as we remain unaware of Kiryuu Hajime’s motives, we lack the means to plan countermeasures against him,” Sayumi said after a moment of thought. “We haven’t the foggiest idea what he intends to make us do, or what he intends to do himself.”
At that point, Sayumi paused to give Leatia a look. The spirit, however, just shook her head. “Not even us spirits have any clue what Hajime’s going for. All we do is follow the jackass’s orders. Even if you ask him what his deal is, he just spouts off some cryptic gibberish to dodge the question. It’s exhausting, so I stopped trying.”
Tomoyo rested her chin in her hand and seemed to lapse into deep thought. “The more I think about it...the less sense it makes for us to fight anyone at all,” she said. “We don’t have any good motivation to fight, and we definitely don’t want to. And even if we did and we tried to work out a plan, Hajime could just use the Reverse Crux Errata to Mary Sue his way into winning anyway. As long as he has that power on hand, it’s totally hopeless from the start.”
There was a prevailing mood of hesitation in the air of the karaoke room. We’d come to a standstill. A threat was looming, and yet we could only muster a vague, hard-to-grasp sense of imminent danger.
What is this weird, messy feeling of exhaustion? We finally figured out the source of the powers we’ve been wondering about for so, so very long, and we’ve unveiled the mastermind behind all the weirdness we’ve been pulled into. Now all that’s left is the final showdown!
Or...you’d think that, anyway, but I just couldn’t get into the mood for it. I—and, for that matter, everyone else—was at a loss for how to even react. The pivot into for-real supernatural battles had been too abrupt, and we didn’t really have any connection to the enemy we were supposed to fight over the course of the climax—not to mention no idea what his goals were, what the conditions for our victory would be, or what would happen if we lost. And that’s not even starting on his brutally unfair power... In the end, all of the elements of our situation came together to make it seemingly impossible to work up the motivation to go into battle.
The end result? We were left with only a half-baked sense of danger and hostility toward our apparent enemy. The air in the room was stagnant—totally lacking in energy. I guess if I had to put it into words...it felt like our story was just plodding onward, killing time without any clear ending in sight.
What are we even supposed to do now?
“Wait... H-Huh?” Hatoko suddenly exclaimed, her voice cutting through the gloomy shroud of silence. “H-Hey, Juu...? Isn’t this kind of strange?”
“Wh-What is?” I asked.
“Why’s it so quiet?”
“Why is it quiet...? Because we turned the karaoke machine’s volume down to zero, obviou— Ah?!” I gasped as, partway through my sentence, I realized what the problem was.
We’d muted the karaoke machine the moment we’d stepped into the room. This sort of karaoke joint played ads and announcements through the machines whenever a song wasn’t playing, so we’d shut the volume off so it wouldn’t interrupt our conversation. The thing is, muting our machine wouldn’t do anything about the sound filtering in from the rooms next to ours. The fact that our room was so quiet made it very easy to faintly hear the music and singing from them, even through the soundproofing...and somewhere along the way, those noises had ceased.
It was silent. Completely, deathly silent. Almost as if the world itself had come to a stop...
“Oh, so you finally noticed?” said Leatia. The rest of us were flabbergasted, but she barely seemed to care. “I didn’t say anything because, I mean, I don’t owe you guys squat, so why would I? But, yeah—this world’s time is stopped right now. You five are the only humans who’re actually up and moving.”
That was a tremendous bombshell of a statement to drop in a perfectly calm, casual tone on its own, but Leatia wasn’t done just yet.
“Ah, wait—scratch that,” she said. “Strictly speaking, it’s not just the five of you. One other person’s still moving around. I seriously doubt that this is actually important in any real way, but I guess he stopped time to give his entrance a little more impact, or some stupid—”
“Nobody asked for your color commentary, Leatia.”
All of a sudden...there he was. A dry, distinctive voice, mocking and cynical in tone, rang out from right beside me. I whipped my head around reflexively...and found myself face-to-face with a white-haired man wearing round sunglasses and a black coat. Kiryuu Hajime was sitting next to me.
It was like time had skipped a few steps. One moment we were the only ones in the room, and the next, he was sitting there as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“G-Gaaah!” I yelped—pretty late, if I’m being honest—and hurled myself out of my seat. The others leaped up from the couches they were sitting on as well, and all of us ended up clustered into the opposite corner of the room from Kiryuu, petrified with shock and fear.
“Made you wait, didn’t I, Guiltia?” Kiryuu said as he leaned back on the couch, a cocky grin on his face. His sunglasses were slightly askew, letting me just barely make out the gaze that he was shooting directly at me.
“Kiryuu...” I muttered.
“Oh, come on. You know better than that,” Kiryuu said with a disappointed shake of his head. A hint of anger crept into his heterochromatic glare.
I knew exactly what I was supposed to say. I gulped, steeled myself...and spoke.
“Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First...!”
Kiryuu flashed me a savage grin. “That’s right. This is how it should be, Guiltia Sin Jurai. No need to hesitate anymore—no need to worry who may be watching you. It’s time for us to be ourselves, unshackled by shame,” he said with a tone of pure satisfaction.