Chapter 2: The Evening Sun, the Rainy Night, and the Morning
##
With a heavy heart, Yuji stepped into his classroom – Misaki Municipal High School, freshman year, class two.
The morning bell was about to ring, and the students there were hurried, noisy, but also bright and cheerful. It was a normal morning.
Just like always – scenery from his daily life.
Yuji looked around the room for Ike Hayato, a mature person who’d been his friend since middle school, but couldn’t find him. He was the class representative, and people relied on him for a lot of things, so he might have been out somewhere….
Obviously, Yuji was just looking from force of habit, like he did every morning. He didn’t plan on talking with Ike about what was going on right now. However he tried to explain, he doubted anyone would believe him….
(Actually, if someone could convince me that all of this is just in my head, that’d be better. I wouldn’t have to be so afraid….)
Feeling pessimistic, Yuji slowly made his way toward his seat. When he sat down,
(Come to think of it, first period is Japanese History. There’s a quiz in that today, right? I forget what it was covering….)
he remembered something he’d need for school. So, just like always, he turned to Yukari Hirai, the girl in the next seat over, to ask what the test was on.
And then, he saw it there.
“Wha……!”
Something that completely proved he was sane.
The destroyer of his normal life.
Where Yukari Hirai should have been sitting, she was there.
“Running late today, huh?” she said.
The Flame Haze girl was there.
With her valiant face under control, pretty, glossy hair that fell down below her hips, sitting up confidently, even wearing the school’s sailor uniform… the Flame Haze girl was sitting there.
“What are you doing here?!” Yuji said.
“We want to catch the Comrade that’s coming after you, so Alastor and I decided to stay nearby for now. Well, I don’t come to these kinds of places often, so I also get to do some sight-seeing….”
The girl had even crossed her legs in the chair. She had taken over it as if it were obviously hers. Even though, until yesterday, Yukari Hirai had been sitting there….
“Wh-what happened to Hirai-san?”
“If you’re talking about the Torch who was here, I took over her role, so she’s gone now. Her seat’s right next to you, so it worked out perfectly.”
“…A Torch… Hirai-san was…?”
The worst-case scenario that he’d imagined had come true, all too quickly….
Yuji was forced to know it – that his normal life was crumbling, no, had already been destroyed.
The girl who’d forced him to know that wasn’t any different from yesterday. She spoke calmly and cold-heartedly. “Yeah. The real her had already died a while ago. I put my own existence in place of her ‘leftovers,’ so now I’ve become ‘Yukari Hirai.'”
“B-but, your face and everything, they’re completely different!” Without thinking about it, Yuji raised his voice.
The others in the room were surprised, and suddenly people were staring at him.
Yuji panicked, lowered it again. “…Why isn’t anyone noticing?”
“Taking over her role doesn’t mean I disguised myself as her,” the girl said. “I just replaced the existence that everyone acknowledges as Yukari Hirai with myself. Since Alastor and I interfered with you before, you can tell that things have changed. That’s all it is. Don’t worry about it.”
“Of course I’m going to worry about it! What happened to Hirai-san?!”
As if to say, Oh, give me a break, the girl shook her head, gave him a stunned expression. “That’s what I’m telling you. I am Yukari Hirai.”
Just like the girl said, none of Yuji’s classmates realized that an impostor had joined them. They were acting like she’d been a member of this class the whole time.
There were parts of the explanation Yuji didn’t understand, but overall, he got it. What the girl had done, and what that meant… But, even so, he had to say it. “That’s not what I’m talking about! The original Hirai-san, the real ‘Yukari Hirai’ who was sitting here until this morning – what happened to her?!”
Yuji had raised his voice again. The students in the room were looking suspiciously, not at the girl who’d switched in as Yukari Hirai, but at him.
Seeing the looks on their faces, Yuji understood.
From their point of view, he was the strange one.
But if that was true, then the girl he’d known, her existence, it was….
“I explained this yesterday, right?” the girl said. “The ‘Yukari Hirai’ who was sitting here before was dead from the beginning. Also, her light had nearly gone out. After that you would’ve forgotten about her too. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“…….”
It wasn’t that Yuji had been especially close with her. She hadn’t stood out, she’d been quiet. For their first semester of high school, since the beginning of April, they’d just happened to sit next to each other.
That was the only ‘relationship’ they’d had. He didn’t have any important memories with her, either.
(But, she was, Yukari Hirai was, definitely here….)
He didn’t know if she herself would have wanted him to remember that. She had probably been like other Torches, not knowing enough to even think about those things, losing everything, little by little….
Even so, Yuji wanted to remember her.
The girl who was ‘Yukari Hirai’ now, sitting in the same seat.
That wasn’t her.
He knew that….
And that was probably the only thing that proved she’d ever existed.
“…What’s your name?” Yuji said.
“Name?”
“‘Flame Haze’ is just the name for all of you who hunt down monsters, right? What’s your personal name?”
“…Eh?”
It looked like the question had surprised the girl. Suddenly, her face clouded over.
The willpower that made her look valiant wavered for a second, and a hint of loneliness, seeming like a hallucination, peeked out….
Playing with her pendant with one hand, she answered quietly. “I’m the Flame Haze who’s made a contract with Alastor. That’s all there is. I don’t have any name other than that.”
The loneliness had disappeared from her face, but she didn’t look as calm as she had up until now. Just a little different….
She was forcing herself to be expressionless.
“To differentiate myself from other Flame Hazes, I’ve been called ‘the one with Nietono no Shana’ before, though.”
“Nietono no Sha……?”
“‘Nietono no Shana.’ It’s the name of the ōdachi I carry.”
“Okay. Then… yeah, I’ll call you ‘Shana’ from now on.”
She was a different person from Yukari Hirai.
Because of that, he needed a different name to call her.
To Yuji, that’d been an important action to take, but, maybe it was obvious… the girl he’d decided to call Shana didn’t seem to care about it.
She tilted her head, answered lightly. “Do whatever you want, I guess? I don’t care what I’m called. I just want to do my duty.”
“That’s, to protect me?”
“Protect……?” Not even bothering to hide it, Shana looked at him dubiously. “Well, as long as there’s a Comrade trying to hunt you down, I guess it might turn out like that….”
It seemed like this girl seriously couldn’t be anything but blunt.
Yuji sighed, but secretly felt something else. As if what she’d said had helped blow aside some of the dark, heavy things he’d been thinking about… he felt an irrational sense of relief.
Feeling that hollow-seeming emotion, which he didn’t quite understand, Yuji said what he was worried about at the moment. “More importantly, Shana… are you going to be okay with classes and stuff?”
Shana wrinkled her forehead for a different reason from earlier. “You just randomly gave me a name, and you’re already leaving off the ‘san?’ Well, I guess it’s fine, but… also, ‘class’ is just playing around like this, so there’s no problem.”
Yuji took a textbook out of his bag and waved it in front of her.
Shana, who looked a little young even for a middle-schooler, seemed offended. She frowned at the book as if he was making fun of her. Yuji sensed a disaster coming and braced himself.
The bell that started class sounded a little bit like a symbol of misfortune.
#
Fourth period, English, was also about to enter the endgame.
The classroom was submerged in silence and nervousness.
Students propped up textbooks on their desks and hid their faces behind them. The English teacher, who’d started class just like normal, had now gone silent. He just kept writing things on the board, trying to work up the courage to turn around.
The small girl who’d created this strange atmosphere was encamped at a desk in the middle of the room. It wasn’t just the teacher, everyone could feel her overwhelming presence. Though in reality, all she was doing was sitting there….
She had her textbook closed. She didn’t take notes. She just crossed her arms and looked at the teacher.
It shouldn’t have even been that out of the ordinary, but somehow, her attitude had made the teacher’s confidence start to waver.
It was because he’d realized – her gaze, as if she were looking at an animal in the zoo, didn’t hold back at all. She didn’t show even a molecule of respect for him.
From morning until fourth period, Shana had taken that attitude in every class so far today. Speaking of which, there had already been incidents in the first three classes in a row.
It wasn’t like she was attacking or flaring up, so it would’ve been fine for them to leave her alone. But in general, teachers are a life form that are adamant about getting respect. Many of them hope for (sometimes depend on) students to blindly accept whatever they say. So this kind of attitude, thinking of them like any person off the street, was something they couldn’t stand.
And so, in the end, the English teacher also wound up, like the three before him, unable to ignore the girl’s impolite attitude.
Tragically.
He finished writing on the board and turned around. The middle-aged man, who was unpopular with his students for being bad at teaching and giving too much homework, opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, and then finally, in a voice that almost quavered, said, “Hi-Hirai, you’re slacking off today. What, you’re too good to take notes?”
Yukari Hirai… the girl who Yuji had named Shana, didn’t answer so much as she just said something. “You.”
Suddenly, it was this.
The girl, with a commanding, valiant face out of balance with how young she looked, said it with a quiet force, and the English teacher was paralyzed.
“Look at that fill-in-the-blanks problem,” Shana said. “You’re just taking out completely meaningless words. This isn’t a quiz, so you should try making the blank parts things that we can guess from the context, okay?”
She didn’t even uncross her arms.
“Huh…?!” the teacher said.
“The right answer is ‘That which we call a rose // By any other name would smell as sweet.’ But unless you know the original passage, it’s impossible to answer.”
Her pronunciation was perfect. From the way she answered it, anyone could tell she was correct.
Merciless as usual, she continued on. “What you wrote on the board, too. The last paragraph is missing two lines. That’s what happens if you just copy everything out of your teacher’s manual one page at a time.”
At the scathingly accurate attack that left no room for argument, the English teacher unconsciously backed away a step.
He’d gotten used to drawing courage from his degree and his position, even if they had nothing to do with his real abilities. But he was forced to realize that, before this girl, who’d suddenly gotten impertinent for no reason he could see, all of that carried no weight.
The dignity of a strong person forced weak people to admit that they were weak. Maybe that was what you could call it….
And once you’d lit her fuse, this ‘strong person’ would crush you without any mercy.
“Even though you’re a teacher, you’re clueless about your subject, so you can’t do anything that’s not in the manual. Your explanations are terrible, and you’re just talking like molasses about things that don’t help at all…… are you sure you’re cut out for this?”
The English teacher’s face twisted up in a pained expression.
“If you seriously want to teach me, come back after you’ve studied a bit more.”
The students watched with a little pity for the English teacher, as he became the fourth victim of the day.
#
That pattern had continued for four hours that felt like an eternity. So when it was finally lunch break, Yuji’s classmates sighed with relief… or, rather than that, looking for a chance to calm down, they left the room one by one.
In the end, Yuji wound up eating with Shana, the two of them alone in the room.
The ‘disaster’ Yuji had predicted before the start of class hadn’t been nearly as violent as he’d imagined, but in terms of psychological damage, it was much worse.
Even compared to having someone get violent with you, having your identity shattered to pieces caused much more real damage. Because of that, he thought it wouldn’t be too wrong to call today a tragic event.
(I wonder how many of them will be able to recover….)
Even under normal circumstances, teachers these days were losing the respect and faith they got from their students for having a degree and a teaching position, a lot of the time due to their own actions (Yuji thought, imagining he was doing social criticism). He started to eat his convenience-store onigiri.
When he looked over at the next seat, the culprit who’d caused that tragic situation was stuffing her cheeks with melon bread.
It seemed like she thought it was good. Her face had softened, and she looked cute. For once, her expression matched with her apparent age.
Yuji did have some doubts about the unreasonable size of the bulging supermarket bag resting on top of her desk, though….
“Hey,” he said.
“What?”
The halls sounded lively, but they were alone in the classroom. For some reason, that made him feel a little uneasy, but Yuji said it anyway. “You didn’t have to go that far, right?”
Shana looked completely, honestly confused. “With what?”
“……No, never mind.”
Shana tilted her head at him, bit off another piece of melon bread.
From the profile of her face, she looked happy and cute. As if what he’d seen yesterday, her overwhelming giant monsters, had been a lie.
Looking at her like this, Yuji could feel his sense of seriousness fading. He couldn’t stay worked up. “You ate taiyaki yesterday, too,” he said. “…So you get hungry just like us?”
“Yes. That’s obvious, right?” Shana said, puffing out her cheeks to hold more melon bread in her mouth.
Since he had the chance, Yuji asked about something that’d been bothering him since yesterday.“By the way… that pendant with the voice coming out of it, is it some kind of transmission device?”
“It’s just a look-alike.” From the pendant that dangled down to the chest of her sailor outfit, the voice that had been silent all morning answered. Probably because the two of them were alone now…. “I am the ‘Comrade of Guze’ contained within this child. The pendant is the sacred treasure ‘Cocytos,’ an expedient only used for making my will manifest.”
“Contained within… uh, Cocytos…?”
Shana glared sideways at Yuji, but still added to the explanation. “Alastor himself is inside me, his contractor. This pendant is just a tool to let him express what he wants.”
Yuji decided to stop trying to understand this intellectually. He just swallowed the explanation and asked his next question.
“Contractor… now that you mention it, you said something like that in the morning too, right? You contracted with him (?) and became a Flame Haze. So were you a human to start with?”
“Yup,” Shana said.
“Why did you become a Flame Haze?”
“That’s none of your business.”
Unlike when he’d asked her her name, her mood had made a complete, sudden change. It was a clear refusal.
Honestly, the way she just said things bluntly felt a little refreshing to Yuji. …Of course, that didn’t change the fact that it was a rejection.
“…Then, you know….” Suddenly, he looked around the classroom. They were alone, so it was a perfect time to hear what Alastor had to say, too. “It’s fine if it’s something else. But do you mind if we talk a little more about all this…?”
From Yuji’s perspective, it wasn’t as if he had hidden intentions or anything like that. It was just, if he couldn’t clear up the mountain of questions he had, he wouldn’t be able to relax.
As for Shana, although it probably goes without saying, she didn’t really care. “I feel like we’ve already been talking about it, but sure. ……So? What do you want to know?”
“In the first place, what does ‘Guze’ mean?”
With a face that said ‘That’s what you want to know?,’ Shana tossed the last piece of melon bread in her mouth.
“Hm… ‘Guze’. It’s ‘the Crimson World.’ The world unreachably next door to this one. They say a long time ago, a poet from somewhere gave it a pretentious name like ‘the Whirlpool Sangharama’. The people who live there are called ‘Comrades of Guze’.”
“So they’re, what… people from an alternate dimension?”
This time, Alastor responded. “If we were to express it in your people’s terms, then yes. But the ones who attacked you were not ‘Comrades’ themselves, but servants called ‘Rinne’ that real Comrades created on this side.”
“And they’re here to conquer this world, or something like that?”
“They all have their own different goals,” Alastor said. “I can’t say anything unconditionally. But, we ‘Comrades of Guze’ have the ability to manipulate the ‘power of existence’ in this world to materialize ‘freely’ here, and to control the phenomena around us. Because of that, an incredible number of ‘Comrades’ have come here.”
“…What’s that?” Seriously, Alastor’s explanations were hard to follow. Yuji felt like he didn’t even understand half of it….
Shana gave him an additional explanation, again. This time, with a resigned sigh first. “There’s a fundamental energy in this world called the ‘power of existence.’ Nothing can exist without it. The ‘Comrades’ are from a different world, so they shouldn’t normally exist in this one. But by gaining that power, they can do it. …Understand?”
“K… kind of.”
Shana nodded at Yuji, who was pressing his fingers to his temples, desperately trying to understand, and she continued. “And obviously, in order to keep existing in this world, you have to keep using the ‘power of existence.’ So they’re gathering that power from humans.”
“Gathering the power of existence… you’re saying that’s what happened yesterday…?”
The image from yesterday, the monsters sucking in the people who’d turned to fire, came back into Yuji’s head, made him feel a little sick.
Shana nodded calmly. “Yeah. And, to reach their various goals, the Comrades use that power freely to cause supernatural events, create servants in this world, things like that….”
“They cause phenomena that should be impossible according to this world’s reasoning, create existences that never should have been, and more than anything else, steal excessive amounts of power. Despite the fact that it might destroy the balance of existence in both of our two worlds… what else can you call it but fools playing with fire?”
Alastor summarized it in a surprisingly dangerous-sounding way….
Ignoring that, Shana pulled a pack of three skewers of mitarashi dango out of her shopping bag and started stuffing her cheeks again. Happily, and it looked like she thought they were delicious.
“The ones who try to protect the balance, and take down those overeaters… those are Flame Hazes, huh…?” While he said it, Yuji also started chewing on one of his onigiri.
The dread he’d felt before still whispered down his spine, but Shana, right in front of him, seemed way too relaxed. She was even grinning and eating.
Maybe because he was annoyed at her lack of seriousness, or maybe because he just wanted to resist somehow, he felt like he had to eat too.
Eating something like this, is this what it feels like to be alive, I wonder – he also tried, uselessly, to think about things like that… then he asked another question. “Mph, and so, when they gather that ‘power of existence…’ well, from what you said, it seems like it would still be bad even if it was from other things. But, do they really have to take it from humans?”
It looked like Alastor didn’t mind when people talked with their mouths full. He answered like before, in a heavy, thin voice. “Obviously. It’s only because you’re close to us, existences with powerful wills, that there’s a point to gathering power. If Comrades just ate riff-raff, they might wind up losing power instead.”
“Close…? So you’re saying ‘Comrades of Guze’ are humans like us?”
“It’s hard to explain it in your terms. If I were to make the attempt, you would need more poetic sentiment than rational understanding, I think….”
Yuji opened a canned sports drink and sighed. “Hmm……. But, from what I’ve seen since yesterday, it won’t be long before the entire human race is sucked dry….”
“That’s not true,” Alastor said. “We’ve been entering this world for a very long time, but the human population has continued to increase. The world was moving like this even before you were born, and there haven’t been large changes. …Even if there are Comrades who go on rampages, there are Flame Hazes like us who stop them, too.”
“Can I really count on that…?”
In front of Yuji, Shana, who’d just finished the last skewer of dango, had started licking the sauce from her fingers. “Mm, that’s what I’ve been saying, right? You’re a storehouse for a treasure, called a ‘Mistes.’ Until you burn out, or until I eliminate the ‘Comrade’ who’s coming after you, it’ll turn out that I’ll be protecting you.”
Honestly, this girl had a ‘direct’ style of conversation….
But somehow, Yuji had started getting used to her. It wasn’t like she wanted to hurt him – she was just completely honest, and only focused on reality. Rather than getting annoyed, he was more likely to smile wryly back at her.
“That sounds reassuring, but…… are you saying you plan to stay with me twenty-four seven?”
“For now, let’s just be careful this evening.”
The ’cause-and-effect isolation barrier’ that separates an area from the outside world, the Fūzetsu, normally takes advantage of the transitions between daytime, when people are clearly aware of their existence, and night, when they act out different ‘selves’ in the dark. In other words, at dawn and during the sunset, using the momentum of things starting to change.
Because of that, the earliest they expected an attack to come was in the evening. (Apparently, the ‘Comrades of Guze’ didn’t normally try things like surprise attacks).
“A Fūzetsu… you were telling me about that yesterday, right? It’s like those ‘barriers’ that show up in games and stuff, huh… wait, the evening?!” Yuji had already half-accepted her idea when he realized. “We have class until late today! They might even attack the school!”
Shana rested her cheek in her hand, made a surprised-looking face. “Thanks for stating the obvious,” she said. “Why exactly do you think I’m here?”
For an instant, Yuji felt relieved… but then, he remembered her personality and asked. “You’ll protect everyone else, too, right…?”
“What for?”
Yuji stood up, leaving his chair clattering.
“Where are you going?”
“The bathroom!”
He threw the words over his shoulder and left.
While he walked, he wondered if she was just here to eat. Among other thoughts that were probably unfair, but….
In front of the restroom, someone stopped him.
“Hey, Sakai…!”
When Yuji turned to look, he saw three of his friends waving him over.
Come to think of it, he’d been dealing with Shana all day and hadn’t even said hello to them yet. Yuji hurried over. “You guys got cafeteria food today?”
One of them, Ike Hayato, shook his head and answered. “We didn’t. More importantly, Sakai… after what happened this morning, I’m surprised you could eat together with the culprit herself.”
Ike had been Yuji’s friend since middle school. He was smart, and a mature person. His nickname was ‘four-eyes’ since he wore glasses.
Next to him, a handsome, strangely frivolous-looking boy, Satou Keisaku, continued. “Seriously, you’ve got some guts. If you’re not lucky, the teachers might blame you for all this too….”
“I mean, since when are the two of you that close? Didn’t know you were ‘getting a head start’ on her, Yuji,” said Eita Tanaka. He had a large build, but he was charming, so he didn’t seem intimidating.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Yuji said. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything…….”
All he could do was try to confuse the issue. It wasn’t like he could tell them the truth, and honestly, he didn’t even want to.
(…………Mph.)
All of a sudden, Yuji looked at his close friends… the ‘normal life’ that was right in front of him, again… and checked if they were the real thing.
Even though he’d already done it once that morning. He felt a bit disgusted with himself for looking again, but…
There wasn’t any change. The only one who’d changed was him. So it made sense that they kept asking him questions….
“Come on. Eating lunch together with no one else around, talking about who knows what… you two are totally ‘like that,’ right?”
“I guess Hirai-chan is cute, if you think about it, but, I mean…. You’re in for a rough time, Yuji….”
“He was actually a lolicon all along! Man, you can’t take this guy lightly….”
After all, Yuji’s blood pressure rose. “Wait a minute! I—”
He started to argue back, but suddenly his voice cut off.
The evening. ‘Comrades of Guze.’ An attack….
Maybe it was because he hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind since yesterday, no matter what was going on, or maybe it was because he’d just confirmed again they weren’t Torches, but he remembered. The truth about the ‘separate world….’
Maybe he should leave school early and run away. If he did that, at least this place wouldn’t become a battleground.
His friends misunderstood his pause, though.
“See, Yuji? You’ve got a guilty conscience after all!” Ike said, pressing up his glasses so they shone in the light.
Something precious to him, that he’d realized now of all times.
“If you really are into girls like that, let’s talk. Seriously, introduce me to anyone else you know,” Satou said with a serious look on his face.
A pointless, stupid give and take.
His normal life. Everyday things….
Things he didn’t want to lose. He didn’t want them to change.
(Maybe the monsters won’t attack two days in a row, right…?)
He clung to hope for a second, because of his lingering attachment….
(Maybe I’m worried over nothing. They won’t necessarily come today. Today, at least give me one day….)
Even though he understood what he was doing, he wanted to cling to that hope.
“Nothing to say for yourself, Yuji?! I never thought you had it in you! What kind of tricks did you use, let me kno—”
For now, Yuji hit Tanaka to shut him up.
#
And then, in the end, the monsters came.
#
The sun sank behind the thin, scattered clouds, washing everything with lonely red light.
Homeroom had just finished. The students had started to leave the classroom, and as it fell on them, that red light….
Overflowed like flooding water, and filled the air.
“Wh—?!”
Yuji had let his guard down. He’d been in the middle of feeling relieved that class had ended safely… so, he lost his composure. He leapt out of his seat and looked around.
The wall of heat haze surrounded them. Partly outside the window, containing the classroom and a slice of the hallway.
Lines of flame ran across the floor, drawing a crest-like, strange string of letters.
The students were all frozen still, stuck in the middle of whatever movements they’d been making.
Yuji knew what this was.
(…It’s a Fūzetsu…… the world will, change……)
A sense of wrongness echoed through his entire body, or it was like he could feel an irregularity in the flow of the world. Yuji shivered.
Like he’d expected, even though the other students were frozen, he could still move.
He was standing on this side, in the other world.
Because of the ‘thing’ that was stored inside him.
Shana slowly rose up from the seat next to him. Her lips drew a strong line across her face, but their corners turned up. “They came,” she said.
“A-are they really here? Right now?”
Thanks to Yuji’s attachment to his normal life, he’d stayed here. And caused the worst possible situation….
Shana delivered judgment on him without even realizing it. She slammed it home. The verdict:
“Here we go.”
She kicked the floor lightly and jumped on top of a desk, where she stood between Yuji and the outer wall.
Her legs spread to shoulder width, and she faced the windows head on. Her glossy black hair, which fell down below her hips, fluttered just slightly,
and then started to trail sparks, and shone with a scorching red light.
Along with the sparks blossoming in the air, at some point her faded black coat had fallen back onto her shoulders, and she’d taken the ōdachi with its terrible beauty, ‘Nietono no Shana,’ in her right hand. In front of Yuji, there was a Flame Haze.
For an instant, he was frozen in fascination at the sight of her. Then he remembered, and came back to himself. “E, everyone’s still here! Can’t you fight them somewhere else?!”
This time, the people trapped in the Fūzetsu were his classmates. Ike was one of them. For some reason, he was putting a workbook that didn’t match up with any of their textbooks away in his bag. He was frozen in that pose.
“The enemy are the ones who made the Fūzetsu. Try complaining to them.” Just like always, Shana’s words were heartless, but left no room for argument.
“Ghh!!”
Yuji had already gotten used to her. Arguing back would just be a waste of breath. Instead, he moved into action. For the moment, he had to move his mannequin-stiff classmates as far away from the fight as he could.
(I-it’s my fault! I have to do this!)
Luckily, homeroom had already ended (and by the way, everyone had wanted to run away from Shana as quickly as possible), so there were only four people left in the room other than them. Near the windows Shana was facing, there was only one – a female student who Yuji thought might be named Nakamura.
She’d been in the middle of putting on makeup, puckering her lips out. Frozen in that pose, she looked a little ridiculous.
Yuji hurried over to her. “S-sorry…”
He put his arms around her hips and lifted. For a second, he worried that she would be stuck to the floor, completely impossible to move, but there’d been no need to worry. She only weighed as much as she would have normally, so he could move her out of her chair.
Obviously, Yuji only had average strength, so the best he could do was drag her along the floor.
He grunted. “K-kinda heavy, huh, dammit…”
Saying things that, if Nakamura heard in reality, she probably wouldn’t have been satisfied with just killing him once, Yuji managed to shove her out into the hallway.
When he stepped back into the classroom, he saw Shana hadn’t moved from the top of the desk. She’d formed a stance, holding the ōdachi in both hands, and she didn’t waver even an atom. The only movement was the sparks drifting down from her fire-red hair.
For a moment, everything was still and quiet enough that it hurt. Then, in the direction Shana was facing, outside the window, a small dot floated up.
When Yuji saw it, he froze up.
Glimmering red in the flickering light from the Fūzetsu’s wall of heat-haze, showing a gleaming-sharp edge, a rectangular shape.
It rotated in a circle and showed the picture on its front. It was an Ace of Spades.
(…a playing card?)
At first there was only one card in the air, but impossibly, a second one drifted down from behind it. then a third, a fourth… in the red light, cards kept on spilling out, floating back up. The number gradually increased.
They floated around randomly, clumped together, and in the end, drew closer and completely blotted out the classroom windows…
And then suddenly, the cards’ courses changed, all at once, all together—
They flew at Yuji.
They came in a surging wave, like a haze shimmering across clouds. They crushed through the window frame, shattered the glass, even blew through the wall, crowding into the classroom.
“……a—”
Before Yuji could get enough air in his lungs to scream, they were right in front of him—
And then, they’d been stopped.
“Aaah! …?!”
By a faded-black wall.
Shana had swung out her left arm, whipped up the hem of her coat, and used it as a shield to protect Yuji. The wave of cards that slammed into it didn’t even press it back, and a second after they’d touched, they burst into flames.
As they did, Shana had already returned her left hand to the hilt of her sword. She wrenched the pommel back past her left armpit. Shifting her right shoulder forward, she prepared for a thrust.
Gleaming red, her two fire eyes saw through the raging mass of cards, to the source of their power.
In an instant,
the top of the desk exploded backward, destroyed. Shana kicked off hard enough that even the metal pipes on the legs snapped like twigs, and she flew.
The point of her ōdachi thrust out into the mass of cards.
“G, guaaaaaaah!!”
A scream rose, and the flow of the cards started to waver.
Feeling the resistance of the thing she’d stabbed through, Shana twisted the ōdachi and ripped it back out. Again, she brandished it sharply overhead. She didn’t need to pause and gather strength. She just slashed downward, from directly in front.
Fire ran along the locus of the blade. The cards caught all at once.
The explosion shocked the classroom, swelling out the walls, churning up the desks and chairs.
Shana took the blast head-on, but didn’t move a single eyelash.
On the other side of the ‘wall’ of her coat, Yuji saw flame bursting over the top and under the bottom of it, and he jumped back without thinking. “Aa, aaah?!”
As the shock wave from the blast faded, though, he could finally see the whole classroom.
The floor had burned black, and almost half the flooring had peeled off, revealing the concrete underneath. The windows had shattered into the room, glass, frames, and all. Broken pieces of desks and chairs were pitifully scattered all over.
Yuji knew this place. Because of that, more than the shopping district yesterday, seeing it like this shocked him…
On the edge of that scene, Shana was there.
Even after the huge explosion, she didn’t seem hurt at all. Like always, small as she was, she stood proudly and made herself tower over the rest of the room.
Dangling off the point of the ōdachi, which she held up lightly in front of her, there was a certain thing, or maybe ‘person….’
The crudely-made doll. Yuji had seen her running away yesterday, just after Shana had sliced him open.
(I think they called her a ‘Rinne,’ right? A servant of a ‘Comrade of Guze….’)
The point of the blade had cut in through the doll’s shoulder all the way to her chest, and it was deeply buried in her body. She looked like some bird’s prey, impaled on a stick and left for later.
In her stomach, something that seemed like the cause of the scream earlier, the result of Shana’s thrust, another huge hole gaped open. The doll’s cotton stuffing poked out of those wounds in places, and white sparks scattered from them, making Yuji think of blood flowing out.
“Ghh, uuu……”
From the doll’s sewed-on mouth of red thread, somehow, small groans of pain were coming out.
Shana started to say something to her, but suddenly looked around.
The white sparks that had fallen leapt up off the ground and surrounded her.
While they rose, they increased in volume and started to whirl around, with Shana at the center.
“Ku, ku, kuku……!”
The doll’s groaning had turned to half-disguised laughter. Suddenly, a huge mass of sparks spouted out of her wounds.
Each little spark changed shape to look like the head of a celluloid doll, and they stuck all over her cloth body. In the blink of an eye, a huge, warped form came together, centered around the doll, made entirely of those heads.
The sparks whirling around Shana were the same – they changed to doll heads and started giggling out loud.
Shana was stuck inside that ghastly net.
Yuji scrambled away and pressed himself against the classroom wall. As his line of sight moved, he saw his classmates, and for a second he couldn’t breathe.
The explosion had thrown the three male students into the far corner of the room. Their bodies were burned all over, and they almost swam in the broken glass. They’d been slammed around, pierced through in places, by broken fragments of desks and chairs.
At that merciless sight, Yuji went into shock.
Just letting Shana protect him had almost been too much for him to handle. He was so weak that he hadn’t had time to think of anything else.
(……Idiot! What was I thinking?! It’s all my fault!!)
Regret, guilt, spurred him forward.
“Ike!”
His friend was one of the three people collapsed over there. Yuji shouted his name and ran toward him.
“Ku, ki ki ki…….”
In the center of the whirling frame of heads, the doll laughed. Both her large hands clenched Shana’s ōdachi tight, holding it in place.
“I’ll be taking this, Flame Haze!!” As the doll called that, the heads making the net around Shana reformed, instantly, into a giant arm. It shot out toward Yuji, who was running to help Ike.
“Taking what?” Shana said.
Using the tips of her toes on both feet as a fulcrum, she freed her legs and turned. Her red eyes drew a line of light through the air, and her hair trailed sparks as it flew up. She twisted her body as far as it would go, facing her back to the doll.
And, she slammed her foot into the ground with terrible force, crumpling the newly-revealed concrete floor, sending out a ripple of flame, and,
“Huh?”
The doll’s field of view was suddenly blurring.
With its entire giant body still clinging to her blade, Shana had leapt into the air.
“Aaaaah!” Shana roared out loud, and used the doll’s body to smash down the arm that was aiming for Yuji.
“Wa, wha?!”
Yuji was standing over Ike (not because he’d planned to protect him, it was just a coincidence), but before he realized what had happened, the shock wave hit him in the back.
Numbness and pain blurred together, and Yuji’s vision started to waver. It lasted for a few seconds, or maybe twenty or thirty, before his head finally cleared.
He turned around. Directly in front of him, the doll, who’d been reduced to little more than a rag, dangled off the point of Shana’s sword.
“A, aaah!”
As if to hide Ike behind his back, Yuji bent his knees.
The doll’s yarn hair had burned down to the roots, and one of her button eyes was shattered to pieces. Forget about her clothes, most of her cotton stuffing had gone flying away, so all that was left was a skin-colored piece of felt with four ‘limbs’ dangling off.
“Th-that’s terrible….” Looking at the miserable state of the doll, Yuji said it without thinking.
“I save your life and that’s all you have to say?” Shana said. She flicked her ōdachi and dumped the doll off on the ground. She spoke to her next, coldly. “What’s your master’s name?”
With her fraying red-thread mouth, the doll answered slowly, like a skipping CD. “You th… ink I’d t-tell you, Fla, me, Ha, ze?”
“Nah, just making sure. Oh well…. He didn’t toss out anything but a worthless piece to fight me, so I guess he’s pretty stupid anyway.”
“…U, gu….” The doll’s voice sounded scornful, but it choked up.
Then.
“Uhuhuhu. I wish you’d say ‘he shrewdly tested my abilities…,'” someone said, in a voice with a strangely high, floating echo.
As soon as Shana heard the voice, she turned around. Yuji realized what it meant, and he turned to look too.
In front of them, outside the wall that had shattered into the room, a tall man floated in midair.
Somehow, the red heat haze didn’t seem to touch his pure white suit and cape. But floating there, all in white, he almost looked like a ghost made of bed sheets.
He left Yuji with an uncertain impression. Compared to Shana’s overwhelming presence, he was the dead opposite – almost like a being from a dream.
“Good day, Miss Tiny,” he said. “This is a fitting meeting for the twilight hour….”
He was thin, and handsome, but somehow looked as if if you touched him, his outline would blur. The voice he spoke in rang like an out-of-tune instrument.
Yuji could tell instinctively.
(This is a ‘Comrade of Guze.’)
Seeing him felt strange. It was wrong for him to be here. He shouldn’t be. He was like a clump of that kind of energy….
In her cold, dignified voice, Shana answered. “You’re the master?”
“Yes. ‘Friagne’ is my name.”
Alastor spoke in a low voice. “Friagne…? I see. Flame Haze Killer Friagne, is it?”
The man who’d called himself Friagne bent his thin lips in a smile. “I don’t like being called that by the real killers,” he said. “All I want to do is search for the treasures from Comrades of Guze that are scattered throughout this world. My real title is ‘Hunter’ Friagne, all right?”
His gaze pierced the ‘Cocytos’ pendant Shana wore.
“And the one saying that,” he said. “It’s the famous ‘Flame of Heaven’ Alastor, right? Is the first time we’ve met…? I did hear that you’d come to this world. And this is your Flame Haze, hmm?”
Next, he looked at Shana.
“I see, this is your contractor, the ‘Flame-Haired, Fire-Eyed Warrior.’ She’s as lovely as the rumors. But don’t you think she shines a bit too brightly?”
Ignoring Friagne’s impressions, Alastor whispered to Shana to be careful. “Don’t be deceived just because he looks weak. He controls a great number of treasures, and he’s killed several Flame Hazes before. He’s a powerful ‘King.'”
“I can feel it….” Shana rubbed at the back of her legs for a second, then bent her knees to pounce.
“Uhu, you don’t have to glare at me like that,” Friagne said. Then his eyes fell on the doll that Shana had casually thrown to the floor.
At that instant.
“Marianne!!” Suddenly, his face choked with sadness, and he gave an out-of-tune cry. “Aaah! I’m sorry, my Marianne! I’m sorry I made you fight a scary girl like this…!”
With a dramatic action as if he were on a stage, he swept back his cape, and in his (after all) pure-white-gloved hand, he held a single card. He flicked his fingers, and it rose into the air,
“Mm?”
“Ah?!”
Around Shana and Yuji, the cards that had been lying burned on the ground flew up all at once. They whirled as if in a tornado, and were absorbed into the card floating above Friagne’s hand.
Once they’d unified again, the card left behind was three-fourths burned and flaking off.
When he saw that, Frigane easily switched his expression back to amazement. “Oh my! To think that you reduced my pride and joy, the ‘Regular Sharp,’ to this state with nothing but physical strength….”
He took the crumbling card back in his fingers, and with expert sleight of hand, disappeared it up his sleeve.
In the other hand, Yuji had no idea when he’d picked her up, but he was gently cradling the doll, Marianne, to his side.
Again with a sudden change, Friagne was back on the verge of tears. He stared at his beloved doll. “Aah, my goodness… Flame Hazes are always doing these horrible things….”
Marianne wriggled her fraying red mouth and apologized. “I, am, s-orry, mas, ter….”
“Please don’t apologize, Marianne…. It’s my fault too for forcing you to fight. I never thought she could do anything this terrible with just a sword….” This time, Friagne smiled very kindly, and blew a soft breath on Marianne.
When he did, just like with Yuji yesterday, Marianne was enveloped in white sparks for a moment…… and then, she’d returned to normal, the old, ragged doll from before.
“There you are. Now you’re good as new. I’m sorry I made you use a treasure you weren’t used to….” Friagne made a voice like he was talking to a pet kitten. Hugging Marianne tight, he rubbed her cheek against his.
Marianne answered in a slightly teary voice. “Your words are too good for me, master… but, now….”
Friagne nodded indulgently at Marianne, then finally turned back to Shana. This time, his expression didn’t change. He was smiling. “Uhuhu… after yesterday and today, I can tell. It seems that even though you’re a Flame Haze, you can’t create fire properly. Your fighting style is unbelievably small-minded….”
One of Shana’s eyebrows twitched up. “…What’s that?”
“At any rate, she’s contracted with ‘the Flame of Heaven,’ I thought. I worried about how much power you might have…. I never expected you’d have to use that sharp-looking sword of yours to call out even a little bit of the flame inside. …Am I wrong? I take great pride in my ability to analyze ‘treasures of Guze,’ you know.”
“……”
At Shana’s cold, silent affirmation, Friagne’s smile grew bigger.
Once more, Alastor answered in a thin voice. “So you sent the Rinne first to see the extent of our power. Just like the rumors, an underhanded way of hunting.”
The insult didn’t disturb Friagne’s smile. “Not at all, not at all,” he said. “After I heard the details of the fight yesterday, I could already tell there wouldn’t be much danger, you see? The only reason I probed again today was to be careful. My Marianne also requested this job, by the way.”
“To make up for my failure yesterday…… In the end, I showed an even more disgraceful performance tonight… I’m sorry, Master….”
“Uhuhu, come on… I already told you it’s okay, didn’t I?” As the doll hung her head, Friagne lightly kissed her on the top of it, maybe to show her everything was fine. “I didn’t think the Flame Haze would be able to do this much with just a sword, but, well. It is what it is. Even under normal circumstances, it’s a cramped fit to dwell inside a human. But if your contractor is a weakling who can’t even bring out a King of Guze’s power, you’re wasted on her, Alastor. Uhu, huhuhu….”
“……I’ll show you if I’m a weakling or not, okay?” Shana said.
The light in her red eyes grew stronger and she lowered into a stance. But this time, when Friagne’s face suddenly changed, he looked troubled. As if he were looking at a spoiled child, he shook his head and sighed.
“You’re trying to pick a fight? What an inelegant child……. I’ve seen it a million times. Flame Hazes who get too angry, let their power go roaring around, then die in an explosion. If that happens now, the contents of the Mistes over there could break too! As ‘Hunter’ Friagne, I can’t abide that kind of result….” Friagne made a thin smile again, let his gaze move to Yuji. “No need to rush, I suppose…. I’ll come back later, in a situation where it’ll be easier to take the treasure.”
Friagne stared hungrily. Not at Yuji the ‘existence.’ At Yuji, the Mistes who contained a treasure. At the treasure inside of him.
It felt like those eyes would drill holes through him…
At the heartlessness of the stare, Yuji shuddered.
“What’s inside there, I wonder…? Uhuhu, I can’t wait to see….”
Friagne’s faint white form, and his high, floating voice, both faded back into the heat-haze wall. He mixed into it and seemed to dissolve. For a second, the red haze was too bright for Yuji’s eyes – when he looked up again, Friagne was gone.
“It wasn’t just a normal Comrade after all,” Alastor said. “A King, and ‘Hunter’ Friagne at that….”
“Hmph.” Shana just answered him with a snort.
While Yuji tried to sit up a burned, wounded Ike, he asked. “So that guy was a Comrade…?”
Shana was still sullen, so Alastor answered instead. “Indeed. Even among ‘Comrades of Guze,’ he’s one of the very powerful ‘Kings’. He hasn’t sealed himself inside a human body like me. And so, he’s one of the overeaters who continue stealing people’s ‘power of existence’ to remain here. Breaking the balance between our two worlds. ……A Flame Haze’s enemy.”
“A ‘King……’ Since he’s the leader of those monsters, I thought he’d be an even larger monster or something.”
“You can’t judge him by his appearance. We can manifest ourselves however we choose.”
Shana butted in on their conversation. “I’m going to repair the inside of the Fūzetsu now. Let me use that one.”
“Huh?”
Shana pointed with her chin. At the beat-up Ike, who Yuji was still holding in his arms.
“Use? What do you mean?”
“I’ll use his ‘power of existence’ to fix the damage we did inside the Fūzetsu.”
“!!” Yuji remembered what’d happened yesterday.
Shana had turned some of the Torches into sparks, and used those to repair the inside of the Fūzetsu.
When they’d returned to the real world, all those people had been gone…… disappeared, as if they’d never existed from the beginning.
Yuji got flustered and hugged Ike in his arms. “Y-you mean, like you erased those people who’d become Torches yesterday? You’re going to use him like that?!”
Shana admitted it easily. “Yeah. Unlike yesterday, there’s no Torches that the enemy left behind. I have to use that half-dead boy instead. Humans have more power than torches, though. So even though he’s nearly dead, he’s all I need to fix everything. I can heal the other students’ wounds at the same time, and even turn his remains into a Torch. No problems, see?”
“I have a problem!! That means Ike would die like me, right?!”
“That’s obvious, right? You can’t make a fire without fuel. If they don’t have enough power to go back to before, the room can’t fix itself and the students can’t heal.”
“….Khh….”
Shana always thrust the truth at him.
Yuji didn’t have anything that could turn that truth aside.
“You understand?” she said. “If you’re sad cause he’s your friend, I can use a different one.”
“Th, that’s not what I’m talking about!”
“Then what are you talking about? You want me to dispel the Fūzetsu like this? I think you can tell, but if we go back to the real world now, all the people lying on the floor there are going to die.”
After all, Shana attacked him with the truth.
Yuji, also, understood that what she was saying was logically correct.
Ike, who he had in his arms, was sliced to ribbons, burned black, with deep wounds. You didn’t have to be a doctor to understand. If the world started moving, there was no question he was seriously injured… no, it was like Shana said, he would probably die.
But picking from among his classmates who should become a Torch… Yuji didn’t think he could do something like that….
In the first place, he was the one who’d gotten them all involved in this. It was his fault….
What Shana had said was right. He understood that.
It was right, and he understood, but even so, he couldn’t do it.
“…….”
Finally getting impatient with Yuji, who’d gone silent trying to think of a solution, Shana said, “How about this, then?” From her voice, it sounded like she was making fun of him. “You want me to use you?”
“What?”
Still sounding mean-spirited, Shana proposed it again. “If we shave some light off your embers, I can fix the room and heal everyone. Obviously, by doing that, your power of existence – the time you have left before you burn out – will shrink.”
Yuji understood how heavy the price would be. But he still made up his mind in an instant. “I understand. Let’s do that.”
“?!” Shana seemed surprised…… and even, for some reason, slightly angry. “After all that whining before, how can you decide that so simply?”
Yuji could answer that instantly, too. “You think this is simple?”
“Then why are you throwing away your remaining time?!” Somehow, at some point, her tone had changed. She sounded like she was attacking him now.
A quiet, calm answer came back. “I’m the reason things turned out like this. Also….”
Shana saw Yuji was smiling, and her eyes widened.
“I’m not throwing it away,” he said. “I’m using it.”
#
That night.
After midnight, the clouds hanging low in the sky dropped a curtain of rain, blurring the sparse city lights.
In one corner of the city, there was a normal house with the nameplate Sakai hanging from it.
On the roof of that house, the top of a large black umbrella sprouted up.
“What was he talking about, what the hell, what even is it with that Mistes?!”
Underneath the umbrella, a voice raged.
In the glow of the blurring street lights, made hazy by the rain, it was Shana.
Holding up the umbrella, rudely sitting cross-legged in a school uniform, on top of the roof.
The pouring rain was repelled away from her, and the area around her was dry. By the way, the fact that she was angry and that phenomenon had nothing to do with each other.
“Even though he’s just some burned-out Torch, acting like he’s so smart….”
In the end, the repair of the Fūzetsu had gone exactly like Yuji wanted. She’d used energy from what was left of his flame.
The damage to the classroom, and also his classmates’ wounds, had been almost completely repaired.
The reason it was ‘almost’ was because she’d had to be careful with how much power she took. The classroom would be older and shoddier in places, and Yuji’s friends would have some bruises and other temporary after-effects.
After seeing them healed, Yuji had smiled again, though his face’d been pale.
That smile was still annoying Shana now.
“I mean, seriously, what a strange… no, I mean, weird, no, I mean, stupid, that’s it, stupid idiot….”
The raised voice wasn’t like her. It had a strange tone. It was rare to hear her grumbling or complaining.
Shana had walked Yuji home, but they hadn’t spoken. Yuji had tried to talk with her a few times, but each time he did she just glared at him, so in the end he’d given up. Even when they’d reached his house, when Yuji said goodbye, the one who responded had been Alastor.
Soon after that, Shana had jumped up onto the roof to protect the house from Friagne.
Considering the circumstances, and their enemy’s personality, there probably wasn’t any chance he’d come back tonight. So in a way, it was pointless, but it wasn’t like she and Alastor had anything better to do. They were just being careful.
As soon as Shana had sat down on the roof, though, this had started. As if a dam had burst, she had broken her silence and started complaining at length to Alastor.
She was unusually worked up. She had lost her composure, somehow. After a while, Alastor finally answered back, sounding confused. “In other words, he’s the first human you’ve really had to deal with in a long time.”
At those unexpected words from the pendant, Shana felt surprised, even panicked for a second. To hide that, she spoke very coldly, but like usual – composed, talking about facts. “That’s a Mistes. The left-overs of a real person.”
“Yes,” Alastor said, sounding satisfied with that answer. But even so, as if probing how she’d respond, he continued. “But he, himself, doesn’t feel that way…… or, to a human, or a ‘self’ that exists, it may be that that’s not such an important distinction.”
“But it’s a Torch. No matter what it thinks, it doesn’t matter, no matter what, can’t possibly. ……I mean, it just can’t…….”
Hearing Shana’s stubborn response, Alastor realized that there was a little anger, even frustration, mixed in with it. He answered with something that sounded cold-hearted at first. “It’s just as you’ve said. But, there are many different facets to ‘reality.’ You can’t say that there’s only one phenomenon at play in any one situation. Exceptions and accidents, and outcomes that exceed our imagination, are happening all the time.”
“…….”
“Even so, the reason that that Mistes is so energetic right now is because it still has excess ‘power of existence.’ Eventually, its ability to think, desires, and presence, will all fade and burn out.”
Alastor’s heavy, deep voice had hit harder than she’d expected, and Shana’s response came after a pause. “………………Hm… at least until we take down Friagne, it would be nice if it didn’t burn out….”
Then, something metal clanged against the house.
Shana could see metal fixtures hooked up over the lip of the roof. It was the top of a ladder.
From there, all of a sudden, an umbrella appeared – followed soon after by Yuji’s face. “Thought you might be up here,” he said.
Shana didn’t hide the fact she was in a bad mood. “Got a problem with that?”
At her blunt, surprisingly vindictive tone, Yuji gave a bitter smile. “…Makes it tough to calm down, knowing there’s someone sitting on the roof.”
“Hm. I don’t think it’s any of your…” business, though, she’d wanted to say, but Shana realized something. “…Hey. How’d you figure out that we were up here?”
Only Yuji’s head was poking over the top of the roof. He tilted his neck, had to think before he spoke. “I don’t know. I guess… it’s like, I can feel something flowing through here? I felt it today with the Fūzetsu and all that, too….”
Alastor sounded convinced. “I see. Given that you’ve stood alongside us at times when our powers are manifested, I suppose you would start to understand….”
Normally, his flame should have burned low, or been used up, long before he started to realize any of that. But after all, Alastor wouldn’t say that much.
Yuji, still with only his head showing, asked the next question. “More importantly, you’ve taken the role of ‘Yukari Hirai’, right? Shouldn’t you be over at her house?”
Shana snorted. “Who cares about that? I’m only being Yukari Hirai because it was convenient. Besides, she was probably eaten along with her family. Her parents are probably Torches too. There won’t be any problem fooling them.”
…Maybe Yuji should have let sleeping dogs lie. But the person who’d just said that didn’t seem to realize how sad it was.
“Anyway,” Shana said. “We’re busy up here. If you don’t have anything else to say, just butt out, okay?”
“…Busy?” From the looks of things, she just seemed to be sitting. “Are you really?”
Yuji asked the pendant dangling near Shana’s chest. Though he had a dangerous name like ‘The Flame of Heaven,’ he was more laid-back and easier to talk to.
“That’s a difficult question,” Alastor said.
He wouldn’t lie by saying ‘yes,’ nor would he shirk his duty to Shana by saying ‘no’. It was that kind of answer.
He’d considered Shana’s feelings, but still told Yuji the real answer implicitly. Somehow, Yuji felt like he could learn to like this ‘King’. To show respect for him, Yuji changed his question (though it meant he was ignoring Shana’s request to leave, it didn’t look like Alastor was going to say anything about that). “You’re going to stay out in the rain all night?”
To Shana, Alastor was even more ‘guaranteed to be correct’ than herself. Because of that, she couldn’t complain to him. She just looked sullen. “That’s the plan. Don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but there’s monsters coming for you?”
“Hmm. Even so, being stuck outside is kind of… uwaa, uh-oh—”
With a dangerous movement, Yuji flopped his way up onto the roof. For some reason, he had a knapsack on his back. Holding an umbrella up in one hand, he crawled carefully across the roof tiles. Once he’d made it in front of Shana, he sat down, not caring if he’d get wet.
Shana, who’d been sitting cross-legged, shifted around to close her legs. From the pendant, Alastor spoke again. “There’s no reason for you to worry about it.”
Yuji nodded. “Sure. I understand that, but… there’s kind of some things I want to ask you two, too.”
As he said it, Yuji opened the knapsack he’d brought up and pulled out a thermos.
Shana glared at him silently.
While she did, he unscrewed the lid (which doubled as a cup), and poured some in. It was coffee, still hot. He’d put milk in before he came, too. “Here,” he said, holding the steaming cup out toward her.
She didn’t have any good reason to refuse. There was no choice, so Shana took it.
It was warm.
It wasn’t just the cup. It was the first time in a long while, outside of a fight, or handing over money at a store, that she’d touched someone else’s hand with hers. And it felt faintly warm….
Shana pulled the cup back to her chest and hid her face with the brim of the umbrella. “Fine. What is it? I’ll give you some answers.”
It wasn’t like she’d said ‘thank you,’ but Yuji hadn’t particularly been expecting that, either. He also understood that he was being pushy. “Yeah….”
He said that, though it was meaningless, while he prepared himself to ask.
Eventually, the sound of the rain against their umbrellas calmed down enough that he’d be able to hear more clearly. “You said when I disappear, other people will forget everything about me. Right?” he said.
“Yup,” Shana said, heartlessly as usual.
After all, her overly-severe honesty was refreshing. Yuji had started to understand the reason why he felt that way.
This girl wouldn’t waste time consoling him. She didn’t try to make things sound better than they were. If you asked her what you wanted to know, she would answer clearly, without trying to hide anything. Right now, he found that pleasant.
(Basically, I don’t want people to pity me right now, I guess?)
For some reason… though it seemed a little strange… talking with Shana helped Yuji understand his own emotions. It seemed like he wasn’t the kind of person who could wallow in tragedy.
Obviously, it wasn’t like Shana was talking with him this way because she wanted to make him feel better (Yuji could be a hundred percent sure of that). It was just that she didn’t see the point in being concerned for others’ feelings.
But, as a result of that, the things she said corresponded with what Yuji wanted to hear. Even he thought it was a little funny.
Smiling at that thought, Yuji asked another question. One that he wanted an honest answer to. “Then what about you two? Shana and Alastor? Are you also going to lose awareness of me, little by little, then forget?”
“…….” To Shana, it was a completely pointless, simple question. She should have been able to answer it lightly, just like with what he’d said before. But for some reason, for an instant, her voice wouldn’t come out.
Alastor spoke instead. “No. We’ll see you as you are the whole time, even as you disappear. We’re existences separate from the flow of this world. We can see the amplitude of ‘power of existence,’ and understand exactly what’s occurring, you see.”
“……Is that so.”
Still hidden under the umbrella, Shana said, “Yeah. But in the end, it’s just like normal memories. They’ll just get buried under new experiences as time passes….”
“But I’m glad that you two are watching me now,” Yuji said. “Just doing that’s enough….”
Shana didn’t look at Yuji’s face, but somehow, she could tell he was smiling.
…It felt strangely uncomfortable to be so sure of that. To distract herself, she took a sip of the coffee.
“…….”
It was warm.
But… “No sugar?”
“I brought some, all right?” Yuji said. This time, he couldn’t help laughing. He took out some sugar sticks he’d put in the knapsack just in case, handed them over. “So you’re seriously planning to stay up here all night?”
Shana took three sticks from him forcefully, then put them all in the coffee at once. “Yeah. I’m used to sleeping sitting down. If anything happens, Alastor can wake me up….” There was nothing to mix the sugar in. She asked without hesitating. “Spoon?”
“O-oh….”
Yuji’d forgotten. He thought he’d done a good job preparing, but he’d missed something. Maybe this was why he was ‘strangely’ good at dealing with things….
For a second, Yuji considered going back for it, but somehow that felt stupid. “But, I mean… why do you have to be looking out from the roof? There’s no point hiding from me, right?”
“…You’re saying we should come in?” Shana said. She lifted the brim of the umbrella and glared at Yuji. She wasn’t used to people getting over-familiar with her.
“Knowing there’s a girl sitting on your roof in the rain makes it tougher to get to sleep,” Yuji said. “In my opinion, anyway.”
“It’s none of your business, though,” Shana said. “But… Alastor?”
“Hmm… it’s true that we haven’t had any cases where we had to protect something before.”
“I’d like you to say ‘someone,’ not ‘something,’ if that’s okay,” Yuji said. Even he knew it was a hollow objection, but he had to try.
Of course, the two of them answered in unison.
“Not like it matters….”
“Indeed, that’s not important.”
Yuji sighed. “…Anyway, it’s all right if you want to come in.”
Shana glared daggers at him from underneath the umbrella.
Yuji didn’t understand what that meant. “Hm?”
“If you try anything weird, I’ll send you flying,” she said. “Understand?”
“……I don’t know what you’re imagining, but I’m not perverted enough to be into middle schoolers or – ngaah!”
The cup, contents and all, bonked against Yuji’s forehead, and he nearly tumbled and fell off the roof.
#
“W-wait a minute!” Yuji said.
Actually, he was the one who’d just been told to wait, but at the moment there was no other way he could respond.
He’d brought Shana to his father’s study, which was currently out-of-use, then left to go to his own room. But before he could, Shana and Alastor had told him to wait… or maybe it’d be more accurate to say they’d ordered him to stop.
Yuji lowered his voice, hoping his mother wouldn’t hear them from downstairs. Even so, he did his best to argue back. “I told you I’d let you in. I didn’t say we would sleep in the same room, okay?”
Shana bounced up and down on top of the bed. “We came inside to protect you, so I don’t get why you think we should sleep in different rooms?”
“Just give up and sleep here,” Alastor said. He sounded like a commander giving Yuji an order.
Shana took the pendant his voice came from off and pushed it under one of the pillows.
“…What are you doing?” Yuji said.
“You can’t tell? I’m going to change clothes, so I put him somewhere he can’t see.”
From below the pillow, Alastor’s thickly muffled voice continued. “This is the way we always do it. If you understand, you should get out of the way too.”
Even though he’d said that, Yuji looked around the room, and he couldn’t see a good place to (?) – actually, there was a closet.
“…….”
When he looked back at Shana, she nodded.
“…Normally, in this kind of situation, shouldn’t the guest have to go in there?” Yuji said. But as he complained, he headed toward the closet.
“If you peek, you’re dead,” Shana said to his back. From her voice, she wasn’t joking.
Yuji sighed, but opened the closet’s paper sliding door.
The lower shelf was filled with old manga, unused futons, and other odds and ends, so he climbed onto the upper one. Although, even there there were old toys jostling around, so he had to curl into a ball to fit. The dust he’d kicked up started to settle on his face.
He was nose to nose with a soft plastic action figure of a robot, which they hadn’t thrown out for some reason. “Let me in, buddy, okay, mphh…” His butt squashed the box of a model airplane kit that he’d stuffed in here unopened.
“What are you doing? Hurry up and closer the door.”
“You don’t have to rush me,” Yuji said. “I mean, with your body, it’s not even like it’s a problem for people to see you – ngaah!”
This time, an alarm clock had slammed into the back of his head. Feeling pathetically relieved that it’d only been plastic, Yuji closed the closet door from the inside.
“…….”
From beyond the door, in the direction of the bed, he could hear Shana rustling around. From the sound of it, it seemed like she was taking off her clothes.
“………….”
Although he’d made fun of her earlier, it was true that this situation felt awkward. Yuji coughed, though it felt like it was on purpose, and asked a question to try and distract himself. “…So do you have pajamas or – ah?!”
Again, something hard had thunked against the closet door.
“I told you not to peek!”
“I told you I’m not! You can see the door, right?!” In his head, though, Yuji was trying to figure out how his life had come to this point. Maybe because of that, his voice came out sounding guilty.
In this situation, as the boy, his position was weak. There wasn’t much he could say.
In the dark of the closet, Yuji was immersed in a rare, miserable life experience. “A-anyway, I was asking if you had pajamas, okay?”
“All I have is spare underwear. But Alastor cleans everything off for me, so I only have to change when I feel like it…”
“Hmm, that sounds nice…… oh, I almost forgot. There’s a jersey in that drawer next to the bed, so could you put that on?”
He couldn’t imagine how dangerous it’d be to sleep in the same room with her with just her underwear on, and he didn’t want to find out.
While he thought about that, though, another question came up. “Wait a minute. Did you have luggage…?”
“I have pretty much everything I need.”
“Where?”
He heard a fluttering sound, like cloth or something spreading out. “Inside the black coat that Alastor’s Flame Haze wears.”
Yuji remembered.
That sound seemed like the same one from the classroom. During the attack, when she’d used her coat like a wall to protect him….
“Oh, that coat…? ……Come to think of it, you put your katana in there too.” Yuji decided to be satisfied with the theory that she had a super-convenient pocket somewhere on there.
At that moment, again, he heard the sound of clothes rustling from the bed.
(……Her spare… underwear, I guess……?)
When he thought about that phrase from their conversation earlier, Yuji gulped.
Right now, the scene just past the closet’s sliding door,
he imagined it for a second, and immediately felt guilty. To stop his imagination from working, he said something. “By the way, how long are you going to keep me in here?”
An emotionless voice responded. “The whole night. Duh.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Yuji shifted in the closet. And, rested his weight on the plastic-model box underneath him.
A sharp piece stabbed up out of the box and poked him in the butt. “Oww!”
Reflexively, he jumped up.
“Ah—”
By the time he’d realized, it was already too late. He’d knocked down the sliding door and rolled out onto the ground, outside the closet.
In his upside-down vision, Shana, who seemed like she’d just finished taking everything off, held a small piece of cloth that Yuji didn’t recognize… and, stood looking back at him.
“…….”
Shana, who hadn’t expected this either, looked at Yuji blankly for a moment. “…….”
Framed by her glossy black hair, without a speck of cloudiness, her skin was porcelain white.
From her immaturity, there wasn’t any swell to her chest. Her body was just made of clear, flowing curves…
To the extent that Yuji forgot the fact he was in the most dangerous situation of his life, and just stared.
(……She’s beautiful—)
#
That night, Yuji, who’d miraculously gotten off with just being beaten up, woke from his bruises.
“…….”
From the street lights outside, a dim glow leaked in around the edges of the curtains. Yuji, still lying on the floor, looked over at the bed. He could see Shana as a small lump under the blankets.
By the way…
In front of the bed, the unsheathed ōdachi, “Nietono no Shana,” was stabbed into the floor.
Looking at that obvious sign of Shana’s intentions, Yuji sighed. “…I bet she won’t heal me if I get cut again….”
“Obviously,” said Alastor’s muffled voice.
#
The next morning, the sky was clear.
The curtains were still closed, but bright sunlight pierced into the room. Or maybe the enemy was attacking at dawn, Alastor worried from under the pillow. But in the end, nothing happened, no one dropped in, and Shana stayed sound asleep.
That went for Yuji, too. On the other side of ‘Nietono no Shana,’ near the wall, he lay rolled up in a blanket like a moth in a cocoon.
Next to the sheet he’d bunched up to use as a pillow, all of a sudden, his alarm clock started to ring.
In a short half-second, Yuji understood where the sound was coming from. Without even looking at it, he hammered the snooze button. “……mph…..”
But he forced himself to open his heavy eyelids, and the first thing he saw was a metal bat.
It wasn’t like he normally slept with something like that next to him. He had just wanted to protect himself. Even though he knew that, if something happened, it wouldn’t be much help….
Obviously, the one he wanted to protect himself from wasn’t the girl in the bed.
Yuji sat up. When he tried to stretch out, his joints hurt. “Owww….”
Maybe it was because he’d slept on the wooden floor, but his entire body felt strange. In exchange for that (or was it really an exchange?), the bruises Shana had given him yesterday night didn’t hurt anymore. Had she been nice enough to hold back, or was it just that he was still young and recovered quickly?
…Well, it was almost definitely the latter.
Yuji looked again at the small lump on the bed.
Because he’d turned off the alarm instantly, it didn’t seem like she’d woken up. She was still breathing slowly and regularly. If it weren’t for the ōdachi sticking out of the floor in front of her, it might have looked like a peaceful scene.
As if seeing the ōdachi had made him remember, suddenly, Yuji looked at his chest.
The small light there appeared.
“……Haa….”
A sigh with a different meaning from yesterday.
His despair and fear had faded so much that he barely felt them anymore. …When he realized that, he’d sighed.
(They say people can get used to anything, but it’s surprising that works in this situation too…. Or maybe I’m just attached to the idea of living the same way as usual…?)
Quietly, so he wouldn’t wake Shana up, Yuji stood and opened the glass door to the balcony. It was narrow, but he walked out onto it and looked outside from there.
Refreshing morning air filled his lungs.
On the road in front of his house, there were already bicycles running, people commuting to work or school.
The edges of the street were still wet from last night’s rain.
The sky was wide and blue.
Everything just the same as usual… it was a refreshing morning.
(……The one who changed was me…… the me who’s here, feeling all this, huh…?)
The gradual disappearance of his existence was something he only understood in words, through reason. Compared to that, the things he was seeing and feeling right now made him feel like it had all been a dream.
It was a self-interested way of thinking, of course….
In the bed back inside the house, one of those things around him, the source of his pain, made a sound like she was annoyed.
Yuji looked down and saw where he’d put away the ladder from last night. …He remembered everything that had happened with Shana and Alastor… and, a slightly impure memory came up as well, but that hadn’t been that big of a deal, he tried to convince himself.
(…From talking and laughing a little bit, making a scene… just from something like that?)
Was that enough to make him forget to be sad, and afraid, that he was going to disappear? To make him forget the problem that concerned his entire existence?
(…Forget?)
Somehow, that word seemed a little bit wrong.
He tried to think a little more, but he couldn’t understand why.
(It’s probably not a question you could answer easily, anyway…)
Thinking that, Yuji laughed.
Then, realizing he was laughing, he felt surprised.
He couldn’t tell whether he felt happy or sad, heavy or light. It wouldn’t quite clear up. Stuck between those two, hesitantly, he said something toward the bed. “Hey, Shana… we have to go to school… soon…?”
Suddenly, she was sitting up in the futon.
Remembering what’d happened yesterday, Yuji wrenched his neck to look down. But a second later he realized Shana was wearing the jersey (in other words, he’d seen her anyway).
It seemed like she’d done what he asked. The jersey was loose and baggy, so it covered everything underneath her neck.
Yuji was half relieved, half disappointed, as Shana turned to look at him. She still seemed half-asleep, and in line with her age, she looked cute. Her long hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail.
“…Mmm… You don’t have to say that, I know – wait?!” Shana sounded sleepy at first, but when she saw Yuji’s face, her eyes suddenly widened
“Wh-what?” Yuji said. He looked down at himself, but even including the annoying flame in his chest, nothing had changed from last night.
While he was double-checking himself, Shana burrowed back into the futon.
Yuji waited for a second, but it didn’t feel like she’d come out. Considering how she’d been earlier, it didn’t seem like she was still mad about what’d happened last night, but….
“…I’m gonna get ready to leave, okay?” Yuji said. “Make sure my mom doesn’t catch you on the way out.”
He left the room.
Inside the futon, Shana had a rare look on her face – completely confused. “……Alastor? What the hell was that?”
From under the pillow, Alastor answered, voice serious. “So you noticed as well?”
“Why? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It must be the power of the treasure inside him.” From seeing Yuji this morning, Alastor had recalled a treasure he’d used to know about.
The unusual ‘Mistes,’ Sakai Yuji, who could move inside a Fūzetsu…
Could that be it? If the thing stored inside him was what Alastor thought, then his strangeness, and even what they’d seen this morning, would make sense….
But at the same time, that should have been impossible.
A treasure among the ‘Treasures of Guze.’
The ‘Reiji Maigo.’
If it were that, then it was even more important they didn’t let it fall into Friagne’s hands.
#
And also. When she saw Yuji this morning… inside Shana, a small feeling had sprouted.
Maybe. For an instant, it had drifted through her heart, and she’d only half realized… a small feeling….
Like the coffee she’d taken last night, it had felt just faintly, warm.