Kiryuu flashed a weary, put-upon smile. There wasn’t a hint to be seen of the ominous threat that his usual confident grin had always seemed to pose. Now he looked at me with a pair of black, homochromatic eyes, which he quickly turned up toward the sky. It felt like he was running away from my gaze, maybe, or like he was searching for something. I couldn’t say for sure.
“Hajime...” Tomoyo muttered. Her expression was sympathetic, and it carried a slight hint of nostalgia as well. After all, Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First no longer stood before us. We were now speaking with Kiryuu Hajime, the perfectly ordinary human being.
“Every last little bit of what you just said was right, Andou Jurai,” said Kiryuu. The time for him to call me Guiltia, it seemed, had passed. “Right now...? I’m in a fix like you wouldn’t believe. I spent the whole walk here racking my mind about what the hell I was supposed to do next and how the hell I was supposed to wrap my story up. You hit the nail on the head...I’ve been worrying and freaking out over this for ages. I’m the one who started the whole damn story up in the first place, but somewhere along the way it got out of hand, and I’ve been failing to bring it back in line ever since...”
The story had gotten so out of hand that its author could no longer bring it under control again. I wasn’t a creative by any means, so this was pure speculation on my part...but I had a feeling that the problem Kiryuu had found himself facing was a very common one in the storytelling world—sometimes getting out of hand was exactly what made a story entertaining, so authors would always strive to reach beyond their means.
“I do have one thing I wanna put on the record to defend myself, though,” Kiryuu added. “It’s not like I went into all this without a plan from the start, y’know? I wasn’t taking being an author lightly and jumping in without testing the waters. I knew what I was getting into. I even had a conclusion planned out, all the way back then. But...”
Kiryuu pressed a hand to his forehead. He looked deeply dejected.
“...then fuckin’ Shizumu guessed the whole damn ending.”
“W-Wait a minute...you mean his theory about you trying to make the literary club into your final boss and it all coming down to you job-changing from gravity-wielder to time-manipulator for your ultimate showdown with Tomoyo?”
Kiryuu sighed. “That’s the one.”
O-Oooof... Why are you like this, Sagami? Did you really have to be the worst kind of reader all the way to the bitter end?
“I bet I looked pretty calm back when he guessed it, but inside? I was losing it. I knew I had to do something. An ending that a reader like him could see coming was out of the question. I thought I had to come up with some really crazy, incredible twist that no one would ever predict...and that’s when it all started to fall apart.”
He’d changed his story because a reader had guessed the twist that he had planned. This is, again, pure speculation on my part...but I was pretty positive that that was one thing that an author could never, ever let themself do. It’s not like it was unethical or anything, but I had a feeling that the more you forced yourself to try to buck your readers’ expectations and come up with plot developments that no one could call in advance, the more your story would end up breaking down as a result.
In this day and age, all you had to do was glance at the internet to learn exactly what your readers thought of your stories. Some of them, inevitably, would manage to put the pieces together and guess future plot developments in advance. Readers don’t have to take responsibility for their predictions and can make as many as they want, so they’re free to throw dozens of them at the wall and gloat it up if even one of them turns out to be right. “See? I told you so!” they’ll say. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought would happen,” or “That wasn’t as epic of a moment as I expected it to be,” they’ll condescendingly opine.
Dodging every single one of those irresponsible, limitless reader predictions is, I figure, all but impossible...and if you force yourself to try to dodge them anyway, you’ll end up breaking your story itself as a consequence. That was exactly the trap that Kiryuu had fallen into. As he penned his first ever story, he let himself get preoccupied by his readers’ impressions of it. He tried so hard to subvert their expectations—went so far out of his way to write around them—that he’d lost sight of what his story was actually supposed to be about in the first place.
“Y’know something...? I really get how Oda Eiichirou and Aoyama Goushou must feel right now. Imagine keeping a series going on and on for decades, having all sorts of internet randos spout their theories about how it’ll finally end the whole damn time... Can you even imagine how rough that must be?”
I...didn’t reply to that one. Nope. Back it up. You definitely shouldn’t be comparing yourself to authors who’re on that level.
“So, I tried to buck Shizumu’s prediction...but there’s no way I could course-correct that majorly that late in the game and have it turn out well. Then, while I was busy figuring out what the hell I could even do...Fallen Black’s other members kicked off their epic betrayal. I didn’t see that one coming at all, and it backed me into one hell of a corner. I had no choice but to use the Reverse Crux Errata, in the end. They forced my hand.”
“I thought so,” I said. “You really didn’t plan on using that power at all, did you?”
“No shit. Of course you shouldn’t put a broken-ass cheat skill that nobody could ever possibly beat into a supernatural battle story.”
Thinking up overpowered abilities was easy. I’d come up with plenty of them myself. Making good use of them in a story, however, was hard. If a power you introduce really is the strongest—if literally nobody can beat it—then your only choices are to come up with some arbitrary excuse to take it away or to introduce a character who’s on such a totally different level that you can just say the power straight-up doesn’t work on them or something. In other words, your only choice is to pull out a plot twist that’ll strain credulity even further.
“I know you probably would’ve lost if you hadn’t brought it out...but using the Reverse Crux Errata to wipe out Fallen Black was still a fatal mistake, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You hadn’t finished seeding our motivation to oppose you, after all. There’s just no way you could show us a power that’s that broken, say, ‘Okay, let’s fight now,’ and expect us to play along. Of course we’d back out.”
“Right? Trust me, I know that was a mistake as well as you do. That’s why I tied my brain into knots to think up the ‘you’re all fictional’ story. I thought it’d work as a final twist and give you a decent motive to fight me, all at once...but in the end, that failed too,” Kiryuu said before heaving a long, heavy sigh. “You know, when I think back on it, I think everything might’ve actually gone off the rails the moment I met you.”
“Me? But why...?”
“I really just happened to stop by the literary club on a whim that day. Us meeting was total coincidence, but we were such birds of a feather I figured it had to be fate. I thought I’d been struck with some sorta revelation—that I had to pull it into the story in some big way. So...that’s what I did. I wrote you in. I threw a whole new character into the plot, hoping you’d make everything more exciting.”
He’d outlined his whole story in advance, then thrown a new element into the mix on a whim. He’d let himself go full improv, ad-libbing developments on the fly. He’d probably thought that if he just laid out enough random foreshadowing, he’d be able to tie it all together later down the line, one way or another. He’d thought it would all work out in the long run...
“But in the end, I never managed to figure out how I could actually use that new character. I threw you in off the cuff and never got a handle on you.”
“...”
“I thought I could swap Tomoyo out of the final boss slot and use you instead, wrapping the story up with a fight between the two of us...but that just wasn’t gonna happen. Seriously—what the hell is up with your stupid, useless-ass power? How am I supposed to make a final battle exciting when that’s what I have to work with? Even the awakened version’s worthless!”
“Y-Yeah, uh... Sorry, I guess...”
My Dark and Dark, it seemed, was a force to be reckoned with. It was so profoundly petty it had transcended the fourth wall and stumped the very author of our story. From a certain perspective, I guess you might say that actually made it a tremendously potent power after all.
“You’re sorry? That’s my line,” Kiryuu said with a brief, troubled smile. “I wanted this to work out better, y’know? I wanted to rise way above whatever expectations you had for me.”