As I listened to Kiryuu, the strangest sense of elation came over me. It felt like a door deep within my heart—a door that I kept locked at all times—had been wrenched open by force. In a strange sort of way, I felt liberated.
“What the hell, Hajime?! What are you trying to pull here?!” Tomoyo shouted. Kiryuu’s grin didn’t budge. “I have so many things I want to say to you I don’t even know where to start, but the long and short of it’s that you’re a grown-ass, twenty-year-old man, and you need to start acting like—”
Suddenly—without warning—Tomoyo’s voice cut out. Her mouth was still moving, but I couldn’t hear a single word she was trying to say.
“?! ? !”
Tomoyo looked bewildered. She gestured at her mouth, then seemed to try to say something else, to no avail. Her voice remained muted.
“Silence, Endless Paradox. If you can’t hold back comments better left unsaid, I’ll have to do it for you.”
“?! ! !”
Tomoyo was frantically shouting something—a retort, most likely—but I didn’t get to hear any of it. Kiryuu had probably used some sort of power. Considering what all he was capable of, there wasn’t much he could do at that point that would’ve surprised me. If he could freeze time for everyone except us and suddenly appear in our room without warning, then why couldn’t he do basically anything else? As things stood, he could make whatever supernatural powers he wanted and grant them to anyone, himself included.
“First things first—some congratulations are in order. Well done, Virgin Child. All five of you have managed to survive long enough to make it into the Final Eight,” said Kiryuu. “’Course, we’re actually down to fewer than eight at this point. Between the five of you and the one of me...the six people here are all the Players left in the War.”
Just six. Six people total. There had been nearly a thousand Players at the onset of the War...and the overwhelming majority of them had already been defeated. Kiryuu had praised us for lasting this long, but truth be told, I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment. After all, we’d never even touched the War, much less fought in it in any real way. We hadn’t so much survived it as we’d been saved from it—kept for last by Kiryuu, the man who reigned over the War at large.
“A few things went off the rails, and the eight people who were supposed to be around for this got cut back a bit...but it’s not a big deal, in the grand scheme of things. The plan’s still moving forward just fine. As of this moment...the Fifth Spirit War is entering its next stage,” said Kiryuu.
“Its next stage...?” I repeated.
“The time shall be midnight, this evening. The place: our own Senkou High. There, we shall lay to rest the bonds of fate that bind us together. It’s the perfect stage, don’t you think?”
Tonight at midnight...in our high school. The school we’re going to now, and the school Kiryuu used to attend.
None of us had anticipated the setting he named, but at the same time, it was profoundly predictable. All of us gulped in unison. Well, okay—Chifuyu gulped and muttered “M-Midnight...” in a way that made it clear she was just upset about the idea of staying up that late, but this was a serious moment, so I tried not to focus on that.
“At long, long last...our battle is finally about to begin, Guiltia,” said Kiryuu. He gazed at me like you’d gaze at your fated rival...or, perhaps, as you’d gaze at your comrade in arms. “It’s time for us to put everything on the line...and to the survivor go the spoils.”
My heart was pounding. His words—his smile—had been so perfectly stylish, they’d set it aflutter. I wanted to rise to the occasion. I wanted to give him the most purely, perfectly me answer I could dream up. And yet...
“W-Wait a second, Kiryuu!”
...I just spoke to him. No fancy verbal flourishes, no titles—I talked to him in a perfectly normal voice, calling him his perfectly normal name.
“I don’t... We don’t want to fight you,” I said.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I was filled with a deep sense of guilt as I spoke those words. It was the right thing to say, no question about it, but I felt guilty all the same. If I was in the right, then why did it feel like I was stabbing him in the back?
“We got dragged into all this out of nowhere, and none of us understand it, and now we’re supposed to just...fight you? How are we supposed to react to that? It’d be one thing if it were just me, but...I wish you hadn’t pulled the others in too, and I want you to stop trying to get them even more involved.”
At that point, I paused to look over my shoulder at the others, who all gave me a nod. They were all in full support of my attempt to declare our uninvolvement.
If—hypothetically, just if—I had been thrust into this situation before I’d started high school, I might not have hesitated to rise to the challenge. I might have been filled with boundless delight and anticipation at the thought of launching myself headfirst into the world of supernatural battles...but the current me couldn’t be that selfish anymore. I’d found far too many things that were far too important to me to prioritize my chuunibyou above them, and so...
“Sagami told me all about your power. He told me about the Reverse Crux Errata...and there’s no way we can beat it. We could all come at you at once with everything we have, and we still wouldn’t stand a chance. We don’t have any good reason to fight you either. And so...we’ve decided...that we’ll be dropping out of this War.”
As I spoke, I gave Kiryuu a slight bow. It was a bow of surrender—a bow of unconditional capitulation. He was far too powerful for us to handle, so I begged for our lives. That was a choice that Guiltia Sin Jurai could never have possibly taken...but it was the choice that Andou Jurai had resolved himself to make. No matter how lame it made me look—no matter how pathetic—I refused to choose a path that would put my friends in danger. If this fight could be avoided, I’d do everything I could to steer us away from it.
Slowly, fearfully, I raised my head once more and gazed up at Kiryuu. I’d imagined him looking upon me with a gaze of boundless scorn and disappointment...but, surprisingly, that wasn’t the case. If anything, he seemed thoughtful, though I couldn’t even begin to guess why.