Kiryuu’s self-deprecation felt like it pierced me right through the heart. Oh, I get it now, I thought. Sagami isn’t the only reader that he’s been thinking about this whole time. He was thinking about me too. Knowingly or not, I’ve been one of his readers as well.
The first time I met Kiryuu, I was elated by the encounter. Not only did it feel like I’d finally met someone who was cut from the same cloth as me, but it also felt like I’d met someone who stood far above me in my chosen sphere. I’d felt something in him—some limitless well of potential—and I’d put him up on a massive pedestal, treating him as some sort of ideal that I could expect the world of. I’d looked upon him with eyes full of admiration and envy. I’d believed wholeheartedly that there was something that made him different from everyone else I knew—and he’d been all too delighted to be the subject of my innocent expectations.
At the same time, however, those expectations may well have placed a burden upon him. I might have been the equivalent of someone who loved the work of a particular author a little too much tweeting “I’m a huge fan of your series! When’s the next volume coming out?!” at them. That sort of excessively pure enthusiasm, in a backward sort of way, can actually pressure an author rather than supporting them, and that’s likely just what I’d done to him.
On the one hand, you had my pure and innocent enthusiasm, and on the other, Sagami’s shrewd and discerning analysis. Kiryuu had faced two very different flavors of pressure from two very different readers, and as a result, his story had begun to drift off the course he’d tried to set for it.
“Talk about pathetic... This was my story. I’d started it for myself, but now I can’t even give it a half-decent ending,” Kiryuu spat as he flopped listlessly to the ground.
The way I saw it, Kiryuu Hajime was, without question, an author. There are all sorts of authors, though, and he was the sort who’d just set out to write his very first novel—in other words, an amateur. He’d probably been brimming with enthusiasm when he’d kicked his story off...but then his poorly developed setup dragged him down, the characters he’d thrown in on a whim piled up, he’d mistaken self-importance for originality, and he’d focused so single-mindedly on his readers’ opinions that he’d ended up veering off course and losing sight of where he wanted things to end entirely. His story was left in limbo, and all signs pointed to it remaining on eternal hiatus.
“So...you know how Shizumu’s power showed us visions of our future?” Kiryuu muttered as he leaned back, gazing up at the night sky.
Innocent Onlooker had allowed Sagami to force people to witness premonitions of their potential future—and the moment he’d used it on me and Kiryuu, Kiryuu had snapped and crushed Sagami in the blink of an eye. It seemed like he’d panicked—like he was rejecting the vision he’d received with everything he had. He himself had described the future he’d seen as “sickening.”
“Y’know what I saw back then...? I saw myself well into my forties, still with the same silver hair, sunglasses, and coat as ever, still telling people my name was Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First, and still not able to hold down a job to save my life.”
I took in a sharp breath. It almost felt like I’d break down in tears if I didn’t hold myself together.
Y-Yiiikes. Yeah, that’s...that’s rough.
It was pretty different from what I’d been imagining he’d seen...but I certainly couldn’t deny that it was the worst, most sickening possible future for him. No wonder he’d lost his cool. Anyone would want to lash out against a future like that.
“It was a real shock, y’know? I mean, it was depressing on its own, sure, but the fact that I was shocked about a future like that was also shocking in its own right. The fact that I was shaken by that vision felt like...like it meant some part of me was admitting that everything I was doing was nothing more than a childish game,” Kiryuu said. His words came out in a nonstop, profoundly lamenting deluge. “I always knew. Deep down, it was never, ever in doubt. I...am not Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First. I’m just...just Kiryuu Hajime.”
I didn’t say a word.
“It wasn’t like this back in the day. I didn’t worry about what other people thought about me...didn’t hesitate to stick to what I thought was cool, come hell or high water. But now...I can’t keep it up anymore. It got especially bad around the time I hit my twenties. No matter how hard I tried to stay strong...it kept slipping away from me. It kept fading. The chuuni power within me’s diminishing by the second.”
“Kiryuu...” I muttered.
I got it now. It all made sense. He was the same as I was. Kiryuu...was on the verge of getting over his chuunibyou too.
When a chuuni made an effort to keep their affliction around, fending off its eventual departure...the act of making that effort, in and of itself, was contrary to the nature of chuunibyou. Kiryuu understood that all too well, and the knowledge had brought him to far, far greater and longer-lasting depths of conflict and anguish than I’d experienced.
There’s no specific source or trigger to chuunibyou’s end. It’s more of an inevitability than anything else. Just like we lose the ability to hear high-frequency noises, and just like boys lose their ability to sing in soprano, so too does chuunibyou fade as we make our way into adulthood. People just change. The act of living, in fact, is all but synonymous with the act of changing. Of course our dispositions and personalities shift over the course of time. It’d be stranger if they were perfectly consistent. I don’t think there’s a single person out there whose personality remained completely unaltered from childhood to adulthood.
Suddenly, my own potential futures from Sagami’s visions flashed into my mind. He’d shown me four vastly different routes in which I’d ended up dating four different people, but there was one aspect of my future that had remained consistent throughout all of them: Regardless of all other circumstances, I was no longer a chuuni.
None of the future versions of myself had engaged in any pretentious posing. They hadn’t forced themselves to enunciate a perfect “mwa ha ha” every time they laughed. They’d all been perfectly ordinary, unremarkable teenagers in their last year of high school. Those visions had only been set a year in advance from now, but the me in them had seemed strikingly different from the me in the present day.
Perhaps, surprisingly enough, that was just how it went with chuunibyou. Maybe finding a girlfriend was all it took for someone to get over it in the blink of an eye. Maybe it was just one of countless phases that one’s personality might go through over the course of a lifetime—a blip on an ever-shifting radar of perspectives.
“Just when I realized that there was nothing I could do about my chuunibyou fading away...I met Leatia and learned about the Spirit War. I literally trembled with joy. I couldn’t even find the words to describe how happy I was. The world that I’d always wanted to be a part of had finally showed up at my doorstep.”
What would I have done if I’d been in his position? What if I hadn’t been isolated from the War, met my Spirit handler, and learned exactly what was going on? How would I have reacted? What choices would I have made?
“If I could just stay in the War—just keep fighting battles straight out of a manga—I could keep my chuunibyou alive. I could keep viewing the world through the same lens I always had. I could be a version of myself who was proud to be a chuuni...or so I’d thought.”
That was why Kiryuu had drawn out the war. That was why he’d made the outlandish choice of wishing to fight in another one.
“But in the end...it was all pointless. Deep down, some part of me was always thinking ‘Seriously, aren’t you too old for this?’ Once that thought took root, there was no getting rid of it. The more I wished I could stay the same forever, the more I could tell that I really was changing.”
Kiryuu had gone to incredible lengths to reject the force of change. He’d done his damnedest to keep liking the same things he always had. He’d wanted to remain addicted to the exact same media he’d always consumed...but it wasn’t possible. Everyone’s tastes change as they grow up and leave their childhood behind. Sometimes you’ll just stop buying the new volumes of a manga you’re hooked on without even realizing it. Sometimes you’ll watch every episode of an anime with fervent interest while it’s airing, only to then lose interest entirely once the anime ends, its sales dry up, a second season is all but ruled out, and the author seems to have lost all motivation and stopped putting out the original work it was adapted from.