“Are you really okay with this, Kiryuu?!” I shouted. I desperately, earnestly made my case to him. “You said it yourself a moment ago, didn’t you? You said you wanted to go out with the biggest bang you possibly could! You wanted to use your story to leave a lasting mark on yourself and the world—to carve the chuuni version of you in so deep, it could never fade away! Are you really okay with letting that ambition go in a sad little anticlimax like this?!”
“...The hell I am!” Kiryuu growled with a bitter scowl. “But...what else am I supposed to do? I’m out of ideas! It’s my own damn story...but I don’t have a clue how I could possibly close the book on it. I’ve spent so much time mulling it over, and it hasn’t helped at all. I’m lost...”
“In that case...we’ll think it through together!” I declared. I made the proposal totally off the cuff, driven by instinct alone. “Right, that’s it! That’s the solution... If you can’t come up with an ending on your own, we just have to put our heads together and think it through as a group! We might just come up with something great if we pool our ideas, right?!”
“Think it through...with you...?”
“I mean, I know. There’s always a chance that even with both of us working together, we won’t come up with anything. Maybe we still won’t have a worthwhile final arc after it’s all done. But even so...let’s do what we can to settle the score!”
Let’s settle our score. Let’s find our ending. Let’s bring this story—our story—to a full and definitive conclusion.
“No matter how pathetic or laughable it ends up turning out, we should give this story a real ending. If your story gets canceled, then you should give it the best we-got-canceled-style ending you can manage! Why would you keep the truth from your audience? Why would you just stop putting out volumes, never even announcing that your series got canned...? That might just be how the modern light novel industry works, but it’s still wrong! If you write a story, you need to finish it too!”
Just like how chuunibyou can only be what it is because it will someday come to an end, so too can stories only be stories because they eventually conclude. Not all endings are perfect and beautiful, of course. Sometimes stories’ endings spring from perfunctory cancellations, sometimes they’re hopelessly half-assed, sometimes they go on hiatus, sometimes their next volume is listed as “pending” forever, and sometimes they simply drop off the face of the earth unfinished. An incredible number of stories have ended in ways that are hard to swallow...but that doesn’t mean that it’s fine for you to leave your own story by the wayside. Struggle. Fight back. Even if you have nothing to write, even if you’re totally out of ideas, do everything in your power to resist the nonending that looms before you. Even if the perfect finale is beyond your reach, you should still do something, whatever you can, to produce a conclusion that’s just a little better than no ending at all...
...and so, I stepped back from Tomoyo and Kiryuu and held my right hand aloft.
“I am he...who conquers chaos.”
I spoke the words of a malediction—the coolest incantation I’d ever come up with. It felt like it’d been quite a while since I’d last said them aloud.
“O purgatorial flame that sways upon the brink of the Abyss, O twisted blaze of sable darkness, blighted crimson of deepest night! O howling, maddening inferno that paves the road to oblivion! Fetter sin with sin, pierce my being with thine onyx sigil, and bare thine fangs at the arrogance of providence!”
I was worried for a moment that I might have forgotten the words, but the moment I started reciting them, they flowed from my lips with ease. I’d put so much time and care into making them up that it seemed I’d carved them deeply into my very soul.
Still, I knew there might come a day when I forgot those words—just like I’d forgotten the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai transformation poses that I’d been able to copy perfectly back when I was a kid. Someday, all of the titles and spells that I’d poured my everything into inventing would be lost to the oblivion of forgetfulness. Someday, I’d dig up the Bloody Bible from way in the back of my closet where I’d sealed it, give it a read, and chuckle over how ridiculous it was that I’d thought all of that nonsense was cool when I was a teen.
But that was fine. That’s just what it meant to live in this world. And so—for now, while there was still time...
“Dark and Dark!”
A flame emerged. A black flame, still clear to see in the dimly lit schoolyard, darker even than the black night itself, blazed within my hand. Not a fire—a flame. That was the one point that I would never, ever be willing to compromise on.
“Come, Kiryuu Hajime! Nay—Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First!” I called, shouting from the depths of my soul as I extended my flame-wreathed arm toward him. “If this world is to fall to ruin, then let us destroy it ourselves, here and now! You and I shall spin the ultimate tale of world’s end together!”
Let’s bring this to an end. A true, proper end. If it has to end someday, then let’s not drag it out in a dreary, plodding sequence of nonevents until it’s brought to a close by a cancellation so unceremonious you can hardly tell if it ended or not. No, far better to end it now. Far better to let this story’s ending mark one final, dazzling display with which to send your chuunibyou off with a bang. If it has to be a farce one way or another, the least we can do is make it the grandest farce you’ll ever see.
For a moment, Kiryuu was silent. He looked stunned and simply gaped at me. But then, a moment later...he began to move. He reached into one of his coat’s pockets, producing a spare color contact that he placed in his right eye. He stooped down, picking up his rounded sunglasses from the patch of ground he’d thrown them to and returning them to his face. He ran a hand through his silver hair, flicked his jet-black coat with a satisfying snap...
“Bwa ha ha!”
...and he laughed. A dry, peculiar laugh.
“Well said, Andou Jurai—or rather, Guiltia Sin Jurai!” Kiryuu declared. His voice, his expression, his eyes—all of them seemed to be quivering with delight. “You get it, right? You know that you’ve just set forth into the deepest reaches of darkness this world has to offer...? Are you sure you’re not gonna regret it? Are you sure you have what it takes to walk the sin-paved roads of Hell itself?”
“Bring it on,” I said. “No matter how deep the darkness you envelop the world in—no matter what extremes of chaos you lead our story into—I’ll bring it all to an end with my own fist!”
“Bwa ha ha!”
“Mwa ha ha!”
And so, we laughed. We both let out the most stupidly cool, no-holds-barred laughs we could muster. Our story had stood on the brink of eternal hiatus, but we’d pushed back its untimely cancellation. Now, the protagonist and the final boss would come together to think up its continuation as a team. Author and reader would join hands to bring our tale to a true ending. This was, undoubtedly, an unprecedented development...but surely the world had room for at least one story that played out like this?
Of course, all that said...I didn’t know who was the protagonist and who was the final boss anymore. I couldn’t say who was the author and who was the reader anymore. The one thing that I could say with certainty was that both of us, Kiryuu and I alike, had chosen to throw ourselves into our lives with wild abandon. We could only live as the characters we were now in this one, single moment, and so we’d live with everything we had. We knew that someday our quirks and idiosyncrasies would fade away, and so we chose to celebrate them to the fullest now, while we still could.
We were like shooting stars in the night sky, knowing perfectly well that we were doomed to burn ourselves out but nevertheless struggling to shine as brightly as we could until that moment arrived. We did it because we wanted someone to witness our brilliance. We wanted them to witness the characters that were us—to witness the story that was ours—that could only play out during this fleeting interval. We wanted to carve this time deeply into ourselves and into the world—to make sure that someday, when this was all just a memory for us to look back upon, we’d see ourselves going at full power.
“Huh...? O-Okay, seriously, how did we get here...?” Tomoyo muttered in fed-up bewilderment as she watched Kiryuu and me sink deeply into chuuni character. Her cold, indifferent attitude would almost make you think that she couldn’t keep up with us at all, but the look in her eyes was so obviously excited, I half expected her to scream “I want in on this!” at any moment.
Caught between common sense, curiosity, and the welling surge of chuuni potential within her, Tomoyo spent about ten seconds very thoroughly mulling the situation over. Finally, she let out a very long, very deep sigh, then cracked a slight smile as she muttered a few words.
“Go off, chuuni-boys.”
And, somehow, that felt like the most fitting possible note to wrap our story up on.