“B-But, I mean...his whole story sounded so convincing, didn’t it?” I protested. “Like, what about how he and I are both chuunis, but with subtle differences in how we make up names and stuff working to differentiate us? That really is exactly the sort of thing that you see all the time in manga, isn’t it? It’s super fiction-coded!”
“That’s simply a matter of phrasing and interpretation, I believe,” Sayumi countered. “For instance, you just claimed that your taste in names being subtly different makes it feel more like something out of a manga...but imagine if you did have perfectly identical tastes. Wouldn’t you think that was manga-like and fiction-coded in its own right?”
I fell silent. When she put it that way...I couldn’t deny how much the possibility rang true. It felt like everything had, once again, wrapped around to something Barnum effect-adjacent. If you stacked enough tiny, insignificant coincidences that occurred in your daily life together, treated them as one big thing, and asked if the real world could ever be that conveniently plotted out, it really would start feeling like it was all too much to truly be the work of random chance—in spite of the fact that it could be, and was, just that and nothing more.
“Okay...so are you saying he just made it all up?” I asked.
Did this mean that Kiryuu Hajime was not the author of our story? That he hadn’t written our character profiles? That his claim that we were fictional was, itself, a work of fiction? That we were the same perfectly normal people we’d always thought we were?
“That...is what I would prefer to believe. Unfortunately, however, I lack the means to prove it at this moment. Just like the simulation hypothesis can’t be definitively disproven, so too is it difficult to refute Kiryuu’s claims. After all, we have every reason to believe that he did, in fact, have the practical means to write all of our characters as he claims to have. I believe the claim that he intervened to make our powers unnaturally potent was likely true as well. However,” Sayumi continued, “I choose to believe that his overall claim was, indeed, a lie. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking on my part, but I simply don’t like to think that the bonds between the five of us were brought about artificially.”
“Sayumi...” I muttered.
“But of course...that does raise a new question we’ll need to consider: Why would he choose to tell such a lie? It’s unclear to me in what way doing so would benefit him. And, more so than anything...I’m curious as to why the lie he chose was such a haphazard one. It feels...rushed, I suppose you could say, or lacking in explanation? It certainly wasn’t adequately foreshadowed. Frankly, it’s hardly a surprise that Hatoko and Chifuyu didn’t understand his attempted reveal, considering how poorly constructed it was.”
“You have a point...”
I probably didn’t have any right to criticize, considering I’d been taken in by his story hook, line, and sinker...but when I reexamined it with Sayumi’s ideas in mind, it did strike me as sloppy in a number of ways. If his goal had been to fool all of us, there were a thousand different ways he could’ve done so more convincingly—and yet he’d chosen to give us a simple, verbal explanation and leave it at that. Hatoko and Chifuyu hadn’t managed to keep up with the concept as a result, and Sayumi had caught on to how unnatural it was and seen through the lie with ease. As far as sudden plot twists went, it just seemed a bit shoddy. It was a contrived, haphazard development indeed.
“What do you think, Tomoyo?” I asked. She’d been silent for quite some time, so I prompted her to put her two cents in.
“Huh? O-Oh, right,” Tomoyo stammered.
“Do you have an idea about what’s going on? Feels like you’ve been mulling something over for a pretty long time now.”
“I... Yeah,” Tomoyo said with a nod. “The truth is...this whole situation’s giving me a serious case of déjà vu.”
Déjà vu? Huh?
“Wh-What do you mean, Tomoyo?” I asked. “Have you been through something like this before?”
“No, not like that! I just...well...” Tomoyo muttered. Whatever she was trying to say, she was having a really hard time spitting it out. “I don’t mean I’ve seen something like this in the real world. I was talking about a story...”
“A story? How’s that?”
“The very first novel I ever wrote was...well, it was sorta like this, more or less.”
“Oh! You mean the one that didn’t make it through the first round of judging in that one contest?”
“You could’ve described it any other way, you know?!” Tomoyo bellowed indignantly before clearing her throat and carrying on. “A-Anyway... My first ever novel was basically this same story.”
“This same story, as in...?”
Tomoyo hesitated. “It was more or less your typical supernatural battle school story. The main character was chosen to wield a special power, and he used it to go ham on jerkwad classmates and evil terrorists and stuff. All the heroines fell in love with him too, so just a full-blown harem power fantasy all around... And the more I describe it, the more I realize it’s just exactly what you picture when you hear the words ‘generic light novel,’” she explained, fighting through her very conspicuous shame to finish her description. “Anyway, the big twist was that in the end, it turns out that all of the protagonist’s badass curbstomp battles and all the girls who fell for him were all just a work of fiction that the final boss made up. The villain’s all ‘Everything you’ve done, every battle you’ve fought, was all just a story that I wrote. You think that you had a harem? That you were unbeatable? That you were OP AF? Dumbass. You can’t seriously have thought that a light novel plot like that would ever play out in the real world, right?’ So, the protagonist falls into despair. It turns out that he was just a totally average, ordinary person after all, but at the very end, he resolves himself to get back on his feet and live his life to the fullest anyway in an inspiring denouement...”
“O-Oof,” I grunted.