I didn’t think I was that lonely anymore…
That thought went through his mind as he went through the ticket gate. That was how he realized.
Lonely… Am I lonely? Yeah. I’m lonely…
He’d never hung out with friends after school like that before. And, thinking about it, it might never happen again.
People die… I’m an assassin.
Step by step, Sousei went up the stairs to the surface.
At that very moment, his phone could ring and his sister could give him an order to kill someone else.
I wouldn’t refuse. I couldn’t. I’ll kill again… I might be killed, and that’s all right. I can still be killed another hundred and nineteen times. I have lives to spare. I won’t die even if I’m killed…
He got to the top of the stairs and found himself outside. The cold night air clung to his skin. The streetlights felt so far away, even though the one right next to him was casting its light around his feet.
I don’t believe that at all. I’ve never died after my lives ran out. I might think it’s okay and die, and then that could be the end. I’m ready. I’ve died enough. I’ve died so many times that it’s not normal. If the next time I die is the end, so be it. Even if there’s no tomorrow for me, I’m glad this was the end. We were able to have a potato chip party…
He suddenly remembered that he was waiting at the traffic lights.
The pedestrian light in front of him was green. When had it changed?
Pedestrians were passing him and crossing the road. There weren’t many people coming from the other direction.
However, Sousei wasn’t the only person standing still at the crosswalk.
There was someone behind him.
No way…
An image of the ghost he’d seen flickered across the back of his mind.
Sousei turned around.
He probably would have been less surprised if it had been a ghost. He also wondered if it might have been a hallucination, but when he looked again, she was still there.
“Miss Hitsujimoto…?”
Her gaze was lowered, and the scarf covering her mouth moved slightly. She might have been trying to say something, but he couldn’t hear what.
“Uhh, wh…what’s wrong?
“I didn’t tidy up.”
Considering how difficult her voice was to hear, it was nothing short of a miracle that he’d managed to catch what she’d said.
“…Huh? What do you mean?”
“I was the first to leave. I didn’t tidy up. I have to apologize.”
“Ohhh…”
Sousei and the others had cleaned up the empty potato chip bags and used chopsticks. That was what Kuchina seemed to be talking about.
“Ah, yeah… Well, it didn’t seem like anyone was bothered by it…”
“It’s bothering me.”
“Then…why don’t you talk to them tomorrow? You’ll probably see them at school.”
“Tell them for me.”
“…Sure, I guess.”
“There’s no guarantee,” Kuchina added before pulling her scarf up higher.
There’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to tell them herself…
She could have simply meant that she didn’t have the confidence to talk to Asumi and everyone else directly. She could just say, “Sorry about yesterday” after greeting them in the morning, but even that would be a huge hurdle for her.
Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe she wanted to say it, but there was a possibility she wouldn’t be able to.
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, normal high school students always had tomorrow. Those unforeseen circumstances rarely ever occurred, so most people could ignore them. In fact, most high school students probably never thought about things like the possibility of not being able to see their friends the next day.
But…for us, there’s no guarantee…
The next day, he might not exist anymore. That was a very possible reality for people in Sousei’s line of work.
“Miss Hitsujimoto?”
“What?”
“Did you have fun today?”
Sousei was willing to wait for as long as it took her to respond, but it turned out he didn’t have to wait long.
“I did,” she said without meeting his gaze. Her voice was muffled and low, but she still answered clearly.
“That’s good,” he said, believing it from the bottom of his heart. “I did, too. I had a lot of fun. But even though it was so much fun, I found it hard to leave everyone. It was lonely…and scary.”
She raised her eyes and looked at him. Sousei exhaled a cloud of mist into the night. He looked straight at Kuchina through the wisps of white.
“I get scared when I do something fun. There’s a chance it’ll never happen again, and I convince myself it probably won’t. That there’s no way… But even if it doesn’t happen a second time, I still have those memories. I think that’s better than nothing. Yet sometimes I think it might have been best if those things never happened in the first place… I don’t want to remember, ‘Ah, that was a lot of fun’…because, after all, nothing will be that much fun again. It’s just futile and painful. But…today was fun. I don’t regret it. That might be the only potato chip party we ever have. We might never do it again. But still, it was nice. I was able to have a fun time with you…with everyone. Even though it makes me feel lonely thinking that it’s over, it was still so much fun.”
“They were yummy,” Kuchina said. She was probably smiling. If she lowered her scarf, the corners of her mouth would probably be curled up in a smile. “The potato chips. I won’t forget them.”
Let’s do it again.
We can have a potato chip party anytime.
It would have been so nice if he’d been able to say that.
I know…
That might have been the first and last potato chip party they’d ever have. Sousei had killed too many people to believe that there might be a second time.
There was something else he hadn’t told Kuchina before. Something he couldn’t tell her.
When he was on a job, Sousei’s brain switched to autopilot. His top priorities were killing his target and not letting people find his identity. There were lives that Sousei could have saved, like the woman Riamu Kinoshita had murdered. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have saved her, but that he hadn’t.
Sousei considered himself a deeply sinful person.
He couldn’t say that his heart ached. If it did, then he wouldn’t be able to stand by and watch someone be killed. There was no way Sousei Takarai had a human heart, so he couldn’t feel emotions like enjoyment, loneliness, and sadness in the same way a decent person would. His emotions were fakes. If he didn’t have a human heart, he wasn’t human.
Sousei Takarai wanted to be a normal high school student like everybody else, yet all he was doing was pretending to be a normal high school student.
He was playing make-believe as a human.
What about you, Miss Hitsujimoto…?
She and Sousei had something in common.
Sousei might be able to understand her. And she might be able to understand Sousei, who didn’t have a human heart and was just pretending to be human. She might understand this inhuman person who saw hallucinations or ghosts of people he’d killed with his own hands.
“Ah…!”
The ghost was there, far behind Kuchina.
There was a convenience store near the subway station entrance, and it was just in front of that.
It had a mushroom haircut and was wearing something that looked like an oversized jacket and cargo pants. It was facing their direction. Or actually, it was clearly looking at Sousei.