“Hmm... So that’s the line you’re going with, huh? Interesting... Guess I might’ve gone a little too hard on the ‘cares about his friends’ part of the profile...?” Kiryuu muttered, much to my confusion. He stood up from the couch and stepped forward, drawing closer to loom over me, taking full advantage of his unusual height. “Bwa ha ha! It looks to me like you’re under two misconceptions right now.”
“Misconceptions...?” I repeated.
“First: Are you seriously telling me that you think you can just talk this out with me?”
In a split second, a chill ran down my spine, racing through my extremities. I couldn’t describe the feeling that Kiryuu was projecting—maybe it was fighting spirit, maybe it was bloodlust—but one way or another, it radiated forth with such intensity it felt like it was piercing right through me. It made it clear to me that we really were operating on totally different levels—or rather, in totally different dimensions. He’d been living a life of supernatural battles, and we’d been living ordinary, commonplace existences. We inhabited two vastly, terribly different worlds.
“There’s no turning back—not anymore. Not for me, and not for you either,” said Kiryuu.
I clenched my teeth, unable to say a word.
“And, second: You seem to think you don’t have any reason to fight me...and you couldn’t possibly be more wrong,” Kiryuu continued, the corners of his mouth curling into a twisted sneer. A smile of a sort, yes, but an unstable, unsettling one. “You should resent me—every one of you. You should think of me as your sworn, mortal enemy. You would...if you had even the slightest idea of what exactly it is I’ve done to you.”
“Do you mean...how you made us awaken to our powers?” I asked.
I knew that Kiryuu’s plotting had led to our awakenings. And, yes—his actions had certainly caused us plenty of strife and hardship. There had been times when the fear and anxiety brought about by suddenly being forced to bear such extraordinary, overwhelmingly vast powers had seemed like it would crush us.
Looking back now, however, I didn’t wish that we’d never been given our powers. I had come to believe that our powers played a major role in making us who we were. I wasn’t about to thank him for setting us up like that, but I also wasn’t going to erupt in a fit of rage or resentment. Whatever feelings I had about our awakening were in a completely different subset of emotion than those.
“Bwa ha ha! Bwa ha ha ha ha! That settles it—you really haven’t figured it out yet!”
And yet...Kiryuu laughed. He cackled wildly, as if to rub in my face just how wrong I was.
“Honestly, I thought I’d dropped enough hints for you to put the pieces together by now,” said Kiryuu.
“The pieces...of what? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Tell me, Guiltia. Haven’t you ever thought that this was all just a little too perfect?”
Too perfect? What’s too perfect? What on earth is he talking about?
“Look at us. We’re two sides of the same coin. Opposite yet identical, like reflections in a mirror...and now, we’ve come together to face each other down at the end of everything.”
I didn’t say a word.
“A guy who just happens to be in the same club as my little sister just happens to be the exact same sort of terminal chuuni as I am... That’s one hell of a perfect coincidence, wouldn’t you say? Kinda strains the ol’ suspension of disbelief, don’t you think?”
“Are you trying to say it’s destiny?” I asked.
“Destiny...? Bwa ha ha! Nah—nothing that cheap,” Kiryuu chuckled. He swept his gaze across our group, eyeing up each of us in turn. “Closed Clock, Over Element, World Create, Route of Origin, and Dark and Dark... Those are some good names, all right. They match my aesthetic perfectly. But of course they do. After all...”
Kiryuu paused. He smiled.
“...I’m the one who made them up.”
I didn’t understand what he’d just told me.
“You... Huh? But... Wha...?”
What was that? What was he saying? I couldn’t understand. I wasn’t following him at all.
Kiryuu thought them up? But, no. No, no, that’s not right. Of course he didn’t. I came up with those names. I thought up all of them. I racked my mind, scoured every corner of my creative spirit, and even pushed myself so hard I retreated into my mindscape to come up with names for everyone’s powers. They’re mine, and mine alone—names that only I could’ve thought up.
“What...are you talking about?” I asked. “I thought up those names. I thought up Closed Clock, Over Element, World Create, Route of Origin, and Dark and Dark. They were all—”
“Right. Of course you think you came up with them. After all...I wrote you to believe that you did.”
In a split second—the hairs all across my body stood on end. It felt like the words he’d just spoken were something I never should’ve allowed myself to hear.
He wrote it? He wrote...me?
My mind was racing, and I couldn’t stop it. I wanted to—I had to. Don’t think about it, I told myself. If you think this through...you’ll never be able to go back. Stop. Stop! My heart and instincts desperately shouted at me, but they couldn’t contain the logical process I’d already kicked off. The final, terrible, inevitable conclusion was already nearing its completion.
Oh. Right. He could have. He absolutely could have.
If Kiryuu had the power to exercise absolute authority over the human world—if he had the power to do whatever he wanted, however he wanted to...
...he could create a human from the ground up with ease.
“Looks like you finally got the picture, huh? Bwa ha ha... Bwaaa ha ha ha ha! That’s right, Guiltia. I am your creator—the author who gave you life,” Kiryuu cackled. He shoved the worst possible truth in my face, and the look on his face told me that he found every second of it so utterly hilarious, he couldn’t hold back his mirth. “All the powers you named, your Guiltia Sin Jurai true name, every page of the Bloody Bible, your personality, your interests, your height, your weight, your blood type, your birthday...every last little detail that makes up your character is something that I invented.”
The Reverse Crux Errata allowed Kiryuu to freely grant and revise supernatural powers as he saw fit. He had used that power to become the author of a world of supernatural battles...but what if that wasn’t the only world he’d tried his hand at writing? What if he’d dabbled in a more commonplace genre as well, dipping into the sphere of slice of life? What if powers weren’t all he could make...and characters were just as firmly in his purview?