The losers of the Spirit War were stripped of their memories and returned to their daily lives. In other words, the spirits had the power to freely alter humans’ memories...and what were we without our memories? They played an essential, foundational factor in our identities. The ability to freely manipulate a person’s memories, then, was no more or less than the ability to freely manipulate that person themself.
Taking the same premise a step further, the existence of powers like Tomoyo’s proved that the flow of time was well within the spirits’ capacity to control as well. Imagine if you could ignore the constraints of time, freely altering an individual’s memories as you pleased. Now imagine if it wasn’t just one person—imagine tens, hundreds, or, in the wildest extreme, an entire world’s worth of people, all having their memories and perceptions rewritten however you wanted to. Imagine you could tweak them with absolute control, like an author tweaking the backgrounds of the characters in the story they told.
There was no way of telling when it might have started. I had no memory of my memories or personality being altered...but if he’d simply written me to have no memory of it, then, well, not remembering hardly proved a thing, right?
“Bwa ha ha! Y’know how you prefer your names short? Didn’t you ever think there was a certain something there? That’d be because I made you that way on purpose, as a way of distinguishing you and your names from me and the longer ones I prefer. I wanted to drive in our two-sides-of-the-same-coin shtick, that’s all.”
I had seen the resemblance. Ever since the moment we’d first met, I’d been drawn to him in the strangest way. I’d gotten worked up about that, thinking it might have been the hand of fate at work...but it was nothing of the sort. The situation had been made to make me feel that way. I had been made to feel that way...it was how I’d been written to feel.
All of it was to make me into a character worthy of being defeated by Kiryuu Hajime; everything was designed to turn me into a final boss with whom the protagonist could clash. After all—what could be more classically exciting than the protagonist and his final foe being uncannily similar to one another?
I fell silent. There was nothing left for me to say. It felt like my mind had gone blank. I didn’t think that any revelation could possibly be more shocking than the one I’d just experienced...and then I immediately learned I was wrong.
“And it goes without saying that it’s not just you. Kushikawa Hatoko, Himeki Chifuyu, Takanashi Sayumi, and Kanzaki Tomoyo...all four of the girls are characters I made from scratch as well.”
Another shock—another revelation—crashed down on me. Or rather, us.
Them too? It wasn’t just me—it was all five of us?
“Guiltia... A moment ago, you turned me down for the sake of your friends, didn’t you? That was a pretty loyal decision, I’ve gotta say, but you know... Bwa ha ha! I mean, of course you know by now—you only did it because that’s the character I designed you to be. That’s who I wrote you to develop into over the course of the story that I plotted out from start to finish.”
He wouldn’t stop. Each and every word that came out of his mouth plunged us deeper into hopeless despair. He laid out the truth without mercy, letting it crush us with its terrible weight.
“Virgin Child... The five of you are the final boss squad meant to send the Spirit War off with a bang. You had to be powerful. You had to be appealing. And so...I made you from scratch, with my own two hands! I gave you powers so mighty that no one could ever compete with them, engineered event after event for you to experience, and ensured that powerful bonds would be forged between you! And I did it all because the more powerful you were, the more appealing you were, the more I would shine when I laid you to waste!”
He was the author. There was no other word that would fit anymore. Kiryuu Hajime was the author of our world. The supernatural and the commonplace alike were nothing more than ink on the pages of his manuscript. I was no different. The me I thought was me had been created by him, solely for the sake of serving as a character in the story he was writing.
“You get it now, right? Your whole past is just a backstory I invented. The time you spent cowering in fear of your powers, the time you spent goofing off with them, the time you spent forgetting they even existed and having a blast without them, your youthful story of fellowship and camaraderie, your charming and heartwarming rom-com antics—every aspect of your silly, commonplace lives and the insane, out-of-left-field supernatural battle twist that upended them... All of it—every last little goddamn bit of it—was a story that I came up with.”
Scenes of everything we’d been through, all the time we’d spent together, flashed through my mind. I remembered learning about Tomoyo’s ambitions and battling with Kudou. I remembered coming to understand the misbuttoned shirt that was my relationship with Hatoko and intentionally buttoning it up the same way again. I remembered getting caught up in the clash that’d unfolded between Chifuyu and Kuki and learning what their friendship truly meant to them. I remembered fighting with Sayumi and finding out why she’d given up on running for student council president; I remembered when I’d given up my chuunibyou in the eighth grade and the time I’d spent with Sagami and Tamaki. I remembered my first meeting with Tomoyo; all our trips to the pool and the beach; when we put on our rendition of Lolio and Juliet, starring Chifuyu; when Sayumi accidentally wrought all those changes upon our world; my hard-fought battle with Tamaki, and the ensuing reconciliation between her and Sagami; the time we’d awakened to our powers, and the days I’d spent racking my mind to come up with names for them...
All of it—every bit of it—had just been turned on its head so easily that all I could do was laugh.
Who asked for this? Who wanted this twist? We certainly didn’t. We wanted to know why we’d awakened to our powers, sure...but not like this. This isn’t an explanation that anyone would be happy with. What we wanted was nothing like this hopeless excuse for an ultimate truth.
“In short,” said Kiryuu—no, said the author of our story—“your very lives are nothing more than a work of fiction...created by me.”