“Asahi…Fujinaka…!”
“Yeah, yeah,” the man said disinterestedly. “That’s me. It’s nice to meet you.”
“I’m Third! Nice to meet you!” the girl chirped, beaming with pure and innocent joy that felt completely out of place given the situation.
Karamori went on high alert. He noticed the embroidery on the breast of Asahi Fujinaka’s suit—an emblem depicting a black tombstone with a bird’s nest sitting atop it.
“Grave Nest…!” he said, gripping Tyrfing’s handle. “How did you escape Untitled?! Were you in there the whole time?!”
“The whole time? Heavens no. I’m much too busy for that,” the man said calmly. “I’ve been in the book since yesterday.”
“Since yesterday?”
The man put a hand to his chest. In his grip was Untitled.
“That’s right. Yesterday. I assume you remember when the book suddenly opened and consumed all the writing around it?”
Karamori’s eyes went wide. He must have been talking about when they’d lost control of Untitled at the yakiniku restaurant in Aichi Prefecture. Were these two there at the time, hiding not far from where they were eating? What was worse, the reason the book had come open and started indiscriminately eating the writing around them was…
Karamori glanced at Archive, but she looked just as bewildered as him.
“If that is true, then…you must know the actions I am fated to perform… How is that possible?” Archive’s voice quivered as she spoke. She already knew the answer.
“Why, that should be obvious: I wrote them myself. I am the author of Second, the book you call The Archive.”
Karamori’s vision went red, boiling blood rushing to his head faster than he could think. Asahi Fujinaka was the very person who had turned Oka Sakura into Archive. He began to draw Tyrfing, consequences be damned, but before he could, a net made of words exploded toward Asahi Fujinaka. One of Third’s pigtails reached out toward it with astonishing speed, expanded into the shape of a large palm, and caught it.
The source of the attack was Archive. Her face was twisted with rage and hatred greater than Karamori had ever seen from her, and tears glistened on her cheeks.
“Give me my life back!” she screamed. The words came from her very soul.
Archive quickly twisted her red string into another formation, causing text to spring up from beneath her feet. The words combined to form a giant that clawed its way up from the ground with Archive riding on its shoulder. She had used her string to project a concept into reality.
The giant raced forward in total mockery of common sense and raised a fist as large as a car. Its wild movements seemed to embody Archive’s turbulent emotions.
Asahi Fujinaka simply watched with a faint smile.
“That’s all wrong, Second. You’re going off script.”
The giant froze. It tried to move, but its body just trembled, then began to blur and destabilize. The same thing happened to Archive on its shoulder. Within seconds, they both vanished, and Archive reappeared where she’d been standing earlier, as if she’d never moved. She glared at Asahi Fujinaka, the pain written across her face.
“D-Dad…?” Hitsugi Fujinaka said weakly, her voice shaking.
“Hey, Hitsugi. You look well.” Asahi Fujinaka’s voice was so calm, it was actually incredibly intimidating.
Sweat beaded Karamori’s face. He’d finally calmed down after the initial shock of the situation. That Asahi Fujinaka had created both Untitled and The Archive was an important revelation, but it wasn’t the biggest priority right now.
“Why are you here? What’s your goal?” Karamori asked.
“Slow down, son,” the older man replied. “I’m not here to pick a fight.”
“Answer me!”
“I’m just here to help. You need someone to cut down this forest, don’t you? Third, go ahead.”
“You got it!” the girl named Third responded energetically. She moved her pigtails as freely as limbs, slamming them into the ground and propelling herself into the air. “You’re up, Pironay!”
She touched her hair bands. They glowed green, and her pigtails grew dozens of times in size.
“You’re kidding…!” Karamori said.
“Watch and be amazed!” Third exclaimed, spinning in the air as her hair swept across the entire forest.
Deafening cracks sounded all around them as her white hair swung at the Duplicator Trees and easily cut them down. Strangely, the trees didn’t fall to the ground but disappeared as soon as they were severed.
The explosive noise soon died down. It hadn’t even been ten seconds. That was all the time it took for the white forest Karamori and the others were standing in to be reduced to a graveyard of roughly hewn stumps.
Third touched back down to the ground, followed by her infinitely long hair, which caused a tremor when it landed.
“I did it, Papa! I gathered them all up for you!” she said, beaming at Asahi Fujinaka.
“Yes. You did well.”
The girl’s hair bands shattered noisily, causing her hair—which had grown to hundreds of meters long—to shrink back to its original length as if time was being rewound.
“Aw, I figured they wouldn’t be able to handle all that,” Third said.
“It’s okay. You only had to use them today.” Asahi Fujinaka patted her head, and Third smiled and leaned into him like a cat.
Karamori watched them, taut as a bowstring. “Did you want these trees that badly? Your plan required using Archive and Untitled, which means it must have been years in the making.”
Sakura had been transformed into Archive four years ago, meaning this man had been planning on stealing the Duplicator Trees for at least that long.
“I won’t deny it. I need them to make another book.”
“…!”
A lightbulb went off in Karamori’s mind.
“So the paper in The Archive and Untitled was made from Duplicator Trees. How the hell did you think to do that?”
“Call it intellectual curiosity. Items made with strange materials tend to yield strange results. And within the innumerable sands of failure, gold dust can shine through.”
“And the books made from these trees are that gold dust?”
“Naturally. It truly is the grace of God. This more than justifies abandoning my family and coming out of retirement to rejoin Grave Nest.”
“‘The grace of God’? You’re sure you don’t mean ‘whispers of the Devil’?” Karamori said, upset by the man’s heartless words in front of his daughter.
“Come now, son. Don’t be rude,” Asahi Fujinaka scolded him. “I’d rather you describe this event in a more positive light.”
“Shut up. Either way, I’ll never let you make another one of those evil books!”
Karamori angrily ran at him, the sight of Hitsugi and Archive’s tear-streaked faces burned into his mind. The desire to prevent this man from making other people cry like them spurred him on.
He didn’t make it far before Third got in his way. The girl’s head only came up to his chest, but she made up for that with her hair, which she swung at him. The tip of her hair moved as if it were alive, transforming into the shape of a human hand.
Karamori drew Tyrfing halfway and swung it at the arm of hair, intending to savagely cut through everything in its path. However, to his complete shock, the azure blade clanged loudly against Third’s hair.
“What the—?!”
“Whoo-hoo! Are you amazed by my powerful presence?” the girl said proudly after blocking Karamori’s full-strength blow. She followed that up by curling her hair that wasn’t holding off Tyrfing into a fist and swinging it at him.
Karamori dodged by jumping backward. He watched her, frustration etched into his face.
Tyrfing was supposed to be able to slice through anything—even reason itself—but there were an infinite number of exceptions to that. This girl was clearly one of them. The strength of her existence likely surpassed Tyrfing’s distorted nature.
Third swung another fist of hair at him, which he only barely managed to avoid. The fist pounded the ground instead, causing a violent tremor that made it hard to believe it was actually made of hair. The girl used that same arm to push herself into the air and fling herself at Karamori for a drop kick. Karamori swung Tyrfing at her, intending to cut her body in half, but she blocked it with her other arm of hair and crashed her tiny legs into his chest.
Despite her petite size, Karamori felt like he’d been hit by a truck.
“Gah!” The impact penetrated the defense of his bodysuit, and pain coursed from his ribs throughout his entire body. He’d managed to twist to dampen the impact a little, but he was still blown backward like a leaf, crashing backward into a Duplicator Tree stump.
“I won’t let you hurt Papa,” Third said.
“Ngh…,” Karamori groaned.
“Impressive, isn’t she? Even if she is another failure. I made Second to be more easily controlled after the lessons I learned with First, but I went a bit too far and robbed her of any free will. Though her ability to Compile concepts turned out all right, at least,” Asahi Fujinaka said, looking at Archive.
The blond girl glared back at him with pain on her face.
“Third was my next project, and I imbued her with greater freedom after the lessons I learned from Second. She has to devote an excessive amount of strength to anchoring her existence because I made her without an original human body, but that drawback ended up serving her well. She’s an easy-to-use book with quite a powerful presence. Her ability to Compile existences didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted, but it’s serviceable.”
“How can you say that about a young girl right to her face?” Karamori argued.
Asahi Fujinaka burst out laughing, and Third joined him.
“I’m just telling the truth. I still cherish her, despite her flaws.”
“Oh, well, in that case—take this!” Karamori yelled, rushing at Third again with Tyrfing held aloft. Before he reached her, however, a black net made of text flew in front of him from the side, blocking his path. Caught off guard, Karamori crashed into it. The netting cut deep into his body. He hurriedly forced Tyrfing between himself and the net, barely preventing himself from being but in half.
Blood trickled down his sliced-up right side.
“Archive…? Why…?”
The black net of text had come from Archive. She held out her red string, laced between her fingers, and looked at Karamori with such pain you would have thought she was the one who’d been cut by the net.
“…This is also my fate.”
“Huh…?!”
“This is the moment I betray Noary. There was no avoiding this.” She seemed to be speaking to herself more than anyone else. “I told you, I can’t resist… No matter how much I want to.”
Archive closed her eyes, tears streaming down her face.
Those tears kindled a burning rage within Karamori.
“Asahi Fujinaka! You bastard!” He let out a savage roar, but his anger wasn’t enough to overcome their numerical disadvantage.
Just then, a pillar of blue flame as tall as a person shot up next to Asahi Fujinaka. A man stepped out of it, and Karamori stared at him in complete shock.
“Yo. I’m here.”