He’d wanted to tell a good story. He’d wanted to write the sort of story that would make people say “That was incredible!” or “I knew Kiryuu Hajime had it in him!”
“Here’s a question. You could tell what made Kiryuu’s power so incredibly dangerous the second he described it, right?”
“Y-Yeah,” Tomoyo hesitantly replied.
“The Reverse Crux Errata—the power to freely create and alter skills and characters as he sees fit. It’s an outrageously mighty ability with the potential to let him turn the very world that we humans live in into his own fictional reality. In a sense, it’s a power that makes him this world’s author.”
An author could rewrite their story as they pleased. They could make everything turn out exactly the way they wanted it to. They could make their setting and characters behave in whatever ways they saw fit.
“But tell me, Tomoyo...can authors really do whatever they want to in their stories?”
“Can they... Huh?” Tomoyo grunted.
“Like, think about the light novels you write. Does being their author really mean that you have complete and total control over every aspect of them? Are you free to do whatever you want, without any restraints or exceptions? Is writing a story that’ll entertain people really that easy?”
“O-Of course it isn’t! Writing a story’s really friggin’ hard! Like, sure, you can technically do whatever you want, but in a roundabout sort of way that’s actually what makes it so hard... Like, sometimes the story just won’t progress in the way you want it to, or elements of the world-building will start tripping you up, or the characters will start acting with a will of their own in ways that don’t work with what you had planned at all... Point is, it’s really hard! Writing’s basically just a process of nonstop trial and error from the very— Oh!”
It seemed Tomoyo had finally caught on as well. She had to eventually—after all, she was the one who’d taught me this lesson back in the eighth grade, when I’d given up my chuunibyou and hers was still blazing forward at full throttle.
Back then, I’d started perceiving a sense of “Yeah, you people will eat this garbage up, won’t you?” in all the works of fiction I encountered, and I’d ended up preoccupied by the misconception that everyone who consumed a work of entertainment was just dancing in the palm of its creator’s hand. I’d ended up going off on a pretentious ramble about how the sort of fiction that kids like us obsessed over had been designed to make kids obsess over them by a bunch of adults...and Tomoyo had taken my whole argument down with direct and brutal efficiency.
“Cartoonists and novelists and scriptwriters all work themselves ragged to make their stories!”
“And anyway, writing novels is... It’s really hard, you know? Sometimes you can imagine things perfectly but just can’t write them right, and sometimes you just can’t think up dialogue that’s fun to read at all... Sometimes not even you know if your characters are standing up or sitting down... Sometimes your world-building just falls apart, and sometimes you make stupid continuity errors without even realizing it... Sometimes your story ends up going in a totally random direction you never planned on... But someone like you wouldn’t know a thing about any of that, and you think the people who make media are trying to play you like a fiddle?”
“It’s not that easy, okay?!”
It all seemed so obvious, when she put it that way. Creating a work of fiction isn’t that easy. It’s hard. Writing something that your readers will actually enjoy and appreciate is as hard as it gets.
“Kiryuu won the Fourth Spirit War...and asked for another one as his reward. He was given full administrative authority over it, and he tried to use that power to become its author.”
With the power of authorship at his disposal, he’d sought to write the greatest story ever told. A no-holds-barred battle royale where the last surviving participant would be granted a wish had been, in his mind, a little too played out—so he’d decided to tweak the setup here and there, penning a story that he’d hoped would be brimming with stylish originality, one set right here in the real world.
“This time, we awakened to abilities of our own—and Tomoyo’s and the other girls’ were god-tier superpowers. You founded Fallen Black as well, and the Final Eight rule was added to the setup. You threw all sorts of new elements and ideas at the wall, peppering the story with foreshadowing wherever you possibly could.”
The result of his efforts, at this point, went without saying. The tragically messy situation we’d found ourselves in made it abundantly clear: His own world-building had tripped him up. His characters had started acting with wills of their own. The story hadn’t progressed in the way he’d wanted it to.
“In the end, you didn’t manage to make any of the foreshadowing you’d set up pay off in any real way. You tried to force the story to an ending anyway...but keeping us in your back pocket to serve as its final boss backfired. We’ve been isolated from the rest of the story for so long that we just couldn’t keep up with the last-second supernatural battle plot twist you threw at us. After all, we just don’t have any good reason to fight you, when all’s said and done.”
“S-So, basically...you’re saying he didn’t do a good enough job of giving his characters clear motivations?” asked Tomoyo.
“Right. He ran smack-dab into the classic ‘It doesn’t make any sense for the characters to actually do any of this’ problem. I’m sure he was hoping that he’d be able to pull us into the supernatural battle side of his story without much trouble, but would we really jump into combat headfirst? That’d be super weird, right? It’d be totally out of character for us. That’s why he had to rack his mind and come up with something that would give us a half-decent motivation to get involved in the fight.”
“Wait... Y-You don’t mean...?!”
“Exactly. That’s why he pulled the ‘You’re all just a work of fiction’ twist out of thin air.”
Kiryuu had needed a motive for us to do battle with him...and that was the best one he’d been able to come up with. He’d gone with it because it was a twist that was impossible to entirely discount, no matter how out of nowhere it seemed...or maybe he’d just been indulging in the exact same feeling of omnipotence that Tomoyo had fallen victim to when she was writing her very first story. Maybe he’d been caught up in the idea that writing a twist nobody could ever possibly see coming would make him look super awesome, so he’d decided to go with exactly the sort of story-upending revelation that you’d expect from a first-time author who was just a little too caught up in their own self-importance.
The plot he’d been hoping to follow, I figured, went something like this: After learning that we were nothing more than fictional characters, we would fall into despair. Before long, however, we’d have an “Even if we are just fictional, the feelings and passion in our hearts are as real as it gets!” sort of moment, get back on our feet, and strive to free ourselves from the shackles of fiction by standing up against the root of all the evils that’d plagued us...or something along those lines, anyway. In the end, however, his outrageous plot twist just hadn’t landed. It hadn’t worked on us at all.
I mean...okay, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker, but still.
“In the end, your whole plan crashed and burned,” I said. “There aren’t any endings left that could wrap up the story that you set into motion.”
The final twist...was that there was no final twist. What sort of pathetic joke of an ending was this? How could I possibly have told everyone that a farce like that was the reality we had to live with?
“Right now, you’re smiling as confidently and dauntlessly as ever...but deep down, you’re at a total loss. You can’t think up a decent twist, and it’s driving you crazy. You have no idea where to take the story next. You’re like a weekly manga artist staring down their deadline with no manuscript in sight, or like a light novel author whose series has been selling just fine but who can’t seem to put out a new volume no matter how long they spend trying to write it. Isn’t that right, Kiryuu?”
“Bwa ha ha...”
Kiryuu laughed. It was the same laugh he’d always done—the same dry, peculiar, unnatural laugh.
“Bwa ha ha, bwa ha ha ha ha ha! You think I’m at a loss? Me? You think I don’t have an actual plan...? Bwa ha ha ha, bwaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
It was like something had broken in him. His laughter grew more and more unhinged, echoing up into the night sky above. Then, when he was finally finished, he ran a hand through his silver hair and turned his gaze upon me once more.
“Well...you’re right, god dammit all.”
A moment after Kiryuu spat those words...he took off his rounded sunglasses, removed the red colored contact in his right eye, and hurled them both to the ground. It was the first time I’d ever seen his true face.