Volume 1
My Parallel-World Self and the Forbidden Grounds We Roamed
"It's famous. It's famous, right? Everyone read 'The Return of Matsunosuke' as a kid, didn't they?" Nanaha-senpai said, earning zero agreement from anyone, and yet she went on to explain the whole thing in detail.
Before the New Town was built, the area around Himurogioka had reportedly been almost entirely blanketed in forest — everything but the old quarter that held the shrine and Nanaha-senpai's house, meaning present-day Himurogioka-Motomachi. Then a rail line was laid through it, the forest was cleared, the New Town went up, and it became the Himurogioka of today.
Back then, Nanaha-senpai said, part of the forest had been designated forbidden ground, and any number of spirited-away legends still lingered in the surrounding area.
*
Partly because Nanaha-senpai told it with so much feeling, the sun had all but set by the time we left school on the day of the novel battle.
We still had no idea how the flow of time differed between our world and Tsukino's, which left me anxious, but looking into the spirited-away incidents and the forbidden ground would have to wait until tomorrow.
And so, the next day. After school let out, Tsukino and I paid a visit to the Himurogioka Library.
The library, near the station, was an unadorned building that looked every bit the public facility.
As we stepped through the entrance, a smell drifted over, something like the school library's. The smell of books, I supposed.
In a library like that, Tsukino and I were the ones out of place today.
The white blouse Tsukino wore beside me was lavishly trimmed with frills. The gray-and-black pattern around its collar suggested a school uniform without being anything of the sort. The skirt that swayed with each step had black ribbons woven through it, layer upon layer. And against that dainty impression, studs with a sharp, dangerous air to them gave off a dull glint. The silver accessories peeking from her cuffs and the rugged-looking boots suited the outfit's clashing impressions uncannily well, too. The balance of it all was, you could say, Tsukino herself. It was of a piece with the black-and-silver rose set in her black hair.
It was that outfit, the one she'd bought the day we toured the town.
I, for my part, was wearing the black outfit from that same day. Standing next to Tsukino, though, I figured I just looked plain and nothing more.
"I'm glad I got a chance to wear it. It makes me happy."
Tsukino's eyes narrowed and her lips curved. Maybe she'd redone her hair when she changed, because it looked even glossier than usual, and I thought I caught a faint scent, different from her shampoo.
In other words, she'd deliberately brought a change of clothes and put it on after school. It had been Tsukino's own insistent request. Thanks to that, my load today was awfully heavy.
Tsukino's profile was as cool as ever, but every little movement of hers looked like it had a bounce to it. As for me… well, I was just wearing black like normal, so it was business as usual. It did fit my tastes, mind you.
"The male-female thing, huh. Guess even the same existence differs in spots like this."
"It suits you, Asahi."
No one had ever said that to me before, and it was embarrassing. I couldn't look at her face anymore.
"Better than it not suiting me, I guess."
"You look like you're in a bit of a good mood yourself."
"If anyone here is, it's you."
Maybe I was just unaware of it and getting carried away myself. Either way, there was no denying I'd shown up at the library a touch giddy.
Tsukino just let a little "fufu" spill out and left it at that. Same existence, honestly…
"Do you come here often, Asahi?"
Tsukino was looking at an event-announcement poster stuck to the bulletin board.
"No, it's been ages. I remember coming here with Jun over summer break back in middle school, that sort of thing."
"I get it. There are books, and it's cool inside. It did me a lot of good."
The inside hadn't changed much from what I remembered. Bookshelves lined a floor far more spacious than the school library's.
Passing the front desk, we walked between the shelves.
"Is the inside of the library the same in your world too, Tsukino?"
"Hmm," she said, glancing around. The selection, the posters, the staff. Was there a difference somewhere?
"I'm going on middle-school memory, but it's about the same. No trouble if you're borrowing a mainstream book. For something a bit more niche, or an old book, looks like you'd need to have it ordered in."
"That's pretty specific, but I have the same impression."
"Just being somewhere easy to get to earns it the gratitude of thirty bad ends."
"I get that comparison, too."
Tsukino stopped walking. We were in the general-entertainment fiction corner. She pulled a single volume from the shelf. On the cover, a dainty girl was drawn in pale colors.
"Have you read this?"
"'Childhood Friend Rin-chan.' The story where Rin-chan, the childhood friend, just gets put through the absolute wringer, right? Every single thing that happens is a real-world social issue, and the protagonist works himself to the bone and it looks like he might just barely solve it, but at the very last moment nothing works out. Nothing worked out… If just a little, if just one thing had been different. If it had been different… It was a good-bad that stuck with me for a week."
"I know that rapid-fire of yours."
I pulled a volume off a different shelf myself. The illustration of an astronaut gazing up at a sky full of stars was striking.
"Have you read this one?"
"'The Milky Way in Bloom.' Such an easy read for sci-fi, right? The prose is gentle, and the characters are all on friendly terms. Even after it becomes clear midway that the protagonist has no choice but to die, it plays like a brave, moving little tale where he keeps trying his hardest, but… At the very, very end, the protagonist tries to run, and all at once it leaves a bad aftertaste. That drop-off is the good-bad."
"That thing where you're thinking, 'nice story, but a tearjerker's kind of underwhelming as a bad end,' and then it goes and pulls a good-bad turn. Yeah, I get it."
My hand and Tsukino's collided. We'd both been reaching for the same book. The cover illustration showed a bone, from some part of a body, just lying there. Was it cracked because it was rotting away?
"'The Tapping Sound.'"
"Horror has a lot of bad ends, but the way the fallout from what the protagonist did keeps spreading to the people around him, one after another, is just brutal."
"Right. The protagonist borrows the strength of the people around him and somehow resolves the incident, but in the end he's the only one left alive. That's the thing. And the ending, without over-explaining, conveys the despair through nothing but his actions and the surrounding scenery. That's the good-bad."
Tsukino and I both burst out laughing at the same moment.
"That's me for you. We overlap way too much."
"That's me for you. Of course I'd think the same thing."
"If there's a book I haven't read but you have, Asahi, then it's surely a bad end that'd click with me."
"I could probably say the same. No, more than that… Being able to recommend a bad-end novel without a second thought. That makes me happy."
"Jun gets mad, after all."
Back when Jun and I had come to the library together, I'd recommended "Childhood Friend Rin-chan" and gotten chewed out pretty hard for it. That he praised the novel itself all the same was very Jun.
I know bad ends aren't a mainstream taste. It's no surprise that Jun, a hardcore happy-end junkie, is put off by them, but the other literature-club members don't go out of their way to read them either. Only Nanaha-senpai reads them gladly, but she's an omnivorous reader, so it's not as if she especially favors bad ends.
Tsukino was the first whose bad-end tastes matched this closely. Which stands to reason, of course.
"If we had the time, maybe we could each make a list of the bad ends we've already cleared and swap them. That way we'd know which books the other hasn't read."
"I like it. Trading off each other's unread books. Ah, but… that might have its own problem, actually."
"How so?"
"With a bad end, if you read it already knowing it's a BE, you lose the fun of discovering the BE, right? It's not a spoiler exactly, but you kind of end up knowing which direction the payoff's headed."
"An out-of-nowhere BE like the one in 'Infinity Heaven' is just irresistible, after all."
"But if I recommend you anything, Asahi, it's basically a BE spoiler, isn't it…"
"The two of us are basically walking BE spoilers ourselves, so we can't recommend books built around a Catastrophe Strike…"
I never imagined our matching tastes came with a pitfall like this.
"Ah, we're drifting off the main topic."
"Now that you mention it, we are. Though I'd honestly be fine just making bad-end lists today."
"You're the one it's happening to! We made zero progress yesterday, so we can't exactly do that."
Tsukino has a somewhat easygoing side to her. If I ever wandered into a parallel world, would I be like that too?
In any case, we decided to get back to our original purpose.
We headed for the back of the library. Scattered here and there were other students who'd come after school like us. Elementary and middle schoolers, too.
There was even a boy-girl pair sitting across from each other at the same desk, running pens across their notebooks. Now and then they'd talk in low voices and laugh together.
"A date, maybe?"
Tsukino murmured under her breath.
"…Were you thinking the same thing?"
"Yeah, more or less."
And if a pair who'd come in their uniforms counted as a date, then what did we look like, dressed up in matching sensibilities? I thought it, but didn't say it.
"How do we… end up looking, I wonder."
Tsukino said it out loud.
"Appearance-wise. On appearance alone, maybe it does look like a date."
"True. To someone who doesn't know our relationship, maybe so. It's not a bad thing, though."
Was she turning her face away because she was searching for the materials we needed, or for the same reason I felt strangely hot?
Anyway, we set our bags on a desk toward the back and brought over the oversized reference materials from a far corner of the library.
They were old maps of Himurogioka. There was everything from aged atlases to maps filed in binders.
We spread them out on the desk. From here we had to get serious.
Not being used to it, we had quite a bit of trouble finding the information we actually needed.
Still, we managed to find several maps predating the New Town's construction and a few things that mentioned the forbidden ground.
"Just like Nanaha-senpai said, it was almost all forest."
"It's practically 'everything but Motomachi in the old quarter is forest.' And besides…"
Tsukino leaned across the desk toward me. The faint scent of a perfume different from this morning's reached me.
Her long, supple white fingers traced along the map.
"The lookout park, Himurogioka High, Green Mall… every last one lands squarely outside the forbidden ground."
The extent of the forbidden ground shifted a little from source to source. Still, it was clearly large enough to swallow the whole downtown strip by the station.
"Himurogioka Shrine, which seemed like it might have something, is in Motomachi, so it's outside the forbidden ground too."
"So the forbidden ground falls on the east side of the New Town, Himurogioka-Higashimachi. But that's the one place you never stopped by, Tsukino."
Which would mean the forbidden ground and the parallel-world connection had nothing to do with each other in the first place.
"I thought it might be some kind of clue, but… Guess we're back to square one."
"Um, well…"
Tsukino had timidly raised her hand.
"In situations like this, there's usually something at a landmark-type spot, right? So I'd just convinced myself from the start that it had nothing to do with anything…"
"Which means there's a place you forgot to mention."
"That's me for you. Exactly right."
Tsukino, still looking thoroughly sheepish, set a finger on Himurogioka-Higashimachi. It overlapped with the forbidden ground, but there really wasn't any landmark to speak of there.
"This is around my uncle's place. That, and a Book Of."
"Book Of! So it exists across worlds too. That regional used-bookshop chain with a name that's right on the edge and yet somehow still missing a word. …Which really, truly doesn't matter."
Tsukino shook her head.
"That day, the first place I stopped was my uncle's house."
Relatives on my father's side. My parents get along well with their siblings, so the families see a lot of each other, cousins included.
"So I did enter the forbidden ground. Except… seeing as I met my uncle, I shouldn't have crossed into your world yet at that point, Asahi."
"For instance… could the world's adjustment have made this world's uncle already acquainted with you, Tsukino?"
"No. Over here I'm set up as the daughter of a family that's close with the Masumis. Which means I shouldn't be related to my uncle at all. But the uncle I met was talking to me as his niece."
It really would be strange for the uncle alone to react differently.
"After going to my uncle's, I moved on to the lookout park, Himurogioka Shrine, Green Mall."
"You wandered around quite a bit."
"I was just following my whims."
That said, Tsukino's a strong walker; even that wouldn't have been hard for her.
We stood up from our seats. Finding the materials had taken a while, but the sun wasn't due to set just yet.
"Let's trace the route you took through the forbidden ground, starting from your uncle's house. There might be some change."
Of course, there might not be, but it beat doing nothing.
*
First we walked from the library toward Motomachi. From the streetscape, where older houses mingled with recently rebuilt ones, came a thick smell of wood. The rustle of leaves in the wind wasn't from roadside trees but from the trees standing inside the old-style walls.
Beneath leaves dyed the color of dusk, Tsukino and I pressed on. She was with me whenever I went out, so her footsteps should have been familiar by now, but today they'd become the sound of brand-new boots, and it felt fresh.
Since leaving the library, Tsukino had been sparing with her words, and the sight of her clad in that white-and-black, almost dress-like outfit, sweeping her gaze over the old-quarter scenery, called to mind the cold, dark beauty of when I'd first seen her.
The trees in view grew denser. Along this road cutting from Motomachi through to Higashimachi stood Himurogioka Shrine. Its torii gate came into view.
We had no business at the shrine today and meant to pass it by, but the moment we glanced into the precincts, both Tsukino and I stopped in our tracks.
On a bench in the corner of the precincts sat a shrine maiden. With her broom propped against it and a book in her hands, she was, without a doubt, slacking off from her work. I was certain of it. Because that shrine maiden was Hananokorizuki Nanaha-senpai.
Dressed in her scarlet hakama and white robe, Nanaha-senpai perched on the bench with oddly perfect posture, reading on without noticing us. Her elegantly braided silver hair suited the miko attire strangely well. The composed eyes beneath her glasses tracked the text with single-minded focus. And on top of that, it was a hefty hardcover.
The emotions she took from the book showed in tiny gestures and the movements of her mouth. Her lips would loosen, then tighten, then let slip a sigh. The toes of her tabi and zori tapped at the gravel.
For someone slacking off, she made a remarkably picturesque figure.
I thought I might be interrupting her reading, but I bowed once before the torii and stepped into the precincts.
Since Nanaha-senpai still didn't notice, I called out to her.
"Oh my. Hello."
Perfectly naturally, Nanaha-senpai set the hardcover she'd been holding down beside her. As if nothing had happened, she stood and took up her broom. It was a flawless sequence, staged to say she'd been cleaning the whole time and was only now taking a short break. Even though we'd watched her reading pretty intently.
"Senpai, you're not at the literature club today?"
"The novel battle's over, after all. Jun-kun said he was going to go buy some new releases too. So today, home comes first. If I don't clean, the place gets messy. It's such a bother, isn't it."
She was casually hiding the book on the bench with her own body. Nanaha-senpai has that side to her.
Then, as if something had just dawned on her, she looked at us. Beneath her round glasses, her gentle eyes blinked.
"Could it be… are the two of you going out?"
A strange sound escaped both our throats at once.
"How come?"
It's the same situation as when we visited the literature club, so why now? I wondered, and understood in the same breath.
Dressed-up Tsukino and black-clad me had, broadly speaking, a matching-outfits thing going on.
"Ah, um… our kink… I mean, our tastes just happen to be similar, that's all."
"We're together a lot due to family circumstances. That's all. That's all it is."
"So you are denying it, at least. I'm sorry."
Nanaha-senpai gave a wry smile, clearly not believing it in the slightest. Of course she'd react that way.
"I… figured I'd go see the actual places from the spirited-away legends you told me about yesterday."
"Right, right. And I'm tagging along for his story-material hunt."
"Ah, on-site research, then. I get it, I get it! Once you look a place up in a book, you start wanting to actually go there, don't you. I do it a lot myself."
Senpai clapped her hands with a pop and nodded eagerly, again and again.
"There was a time I got quite interested in Himurogioka's spirited-away incidents and looked into them a lot. The actual events, the rituals performed when someone was spirited away."
"A ritual? What kind is that?"
It might be a hint toward getting Tsukino home. Naturally she seemed to think so too; her eyes said she wanted to hear a little more.
Nanaha-senpai put a finger to her chin and looked up at the evening sky with a "hmm."
"It's been quite a while since I read the book. When someone was spirited away, there was a ritual to bring the person back, and it was actually carried out any number of times… That much I remember, at least."
She shook her head, her silver hair swaying.
"I'll look into it again a bit."
"No, you don't have to go that far. Thank you, though."
"I'm sorry. If only I'd made it into a novel back then."
"So that's Nanaha-senpai's method of remembering things…"
"Oh, that reminds me. Speaking of that sort of thing, I've actually seen a ghost, too."
"A ghost?"
That was news to me. Nanaha-senpai was holding both hands out limp in the classic vengeful-spirit pose.
"That's right. Ghost stories are fairly common in the forbidden-ground lore. And the one I saw was in Higashimachi, the former forbidden ground."
Nanaha-senpai then started some baffling gesture, wriggling both hands.
"I'd think someone was there, and then they'd just slip away and vanish. It happened a few times, but nobody will believe me."
Her brows drooped as she said it.
"…Honestly, even I think it was probably just my eyes playing tricks on me. But it's more fun to call it a ghost."
I found myself exchanging looks with Tsukino.
What she'd witnessed might have been a connection to a parallel world: someone crossing back and forth. It was an awfully convenient reading, but I couldn't shake the possibility.
"Asahi-kun?"
We'd fallen silent, and Nanaha-senpai turned a puzzled look on us.
"Ah, no. It's just, it was the first I'd heard of it. And considering the forbidden ground, I can't say it's flat-out impossible."
Nanaha-senpai's eyes went round, then she smiled happily.
"Is that so. Back when I looked into it, nobody would believe me, but that's Asahi-kun and Tsukino-chan for you. You understand that it's more fun to treat something that isn't real as though it exists."
Nanaha-senpai clenched both fists tight, setting her scarlet hakama swaying.
"I really am getting the urge to look into it all over again. Asahi-kun, you're going to write a novel using the spirited-away incidents as material, right? I can't wait. No, actually, I want to do battle. May I write on the same subject? And then, on top of that, won't you and I have a novel battle? Let's do it! Fight me!"
Beneath her glasses, her round eyes were already those of a berserker.
"I haven't even decided whether I'll write it, so calm down."
"It doesn't have to be the spirited-away incidents. Read and be read, wash blood with blood, and slaughter one another! That's how it should be!"
"There's no stopping Senpai's berserker mode."
"I'm perfectly self-aware and rational, you know. I always want to read fun novels and do battle with fun novels."
Breathing hard, Nanaha-senpai smiled sweetly. Her pupils seemed a touch dilated.
"If you get the chance, please. Absolutely, absolutely make the chance."
All I could do was answer, "Sure."
That said, Nanaha-senpai's novels are unbelievably good, so I did look forward to it.
"Oh, right."
Berserker Nanaha-senpai seemed to have noticed something again and clapped her hands.
"Tsukino-chan, you write novels too, don't you."
"Yes. Reasonably so."
Under the world's adjustment, that was apparently the setup.
"Then, since we're at it. Asahi-kun's here too, so why not join the literature club?"
Tsukino's brows drew down. The confusion behind it was plain as day to me.
Right now she was a live-in member of the Masumi household and a novel-loving student who half-hung around the literature club. In her own world she'd been in the literature club, doing club activities with Nanaha-senpai and Jun, so there'd be nothing strange about her joining here as well. But Tsukino had her own world's literature club.
That had to be the source of her hesitation.
"I'll pass for now."
Contrary to her reserved smile, she said it firmly.
"Then, whenever you feel like it. Or honestly, you don't even have to be a member. Won't you have a novel battle with me? Let's do battle, right now!"
"Enough, just go do your shrine work."
Tsukino declared it without mercy. She was probably like this over there, too.
*
Escaping from novel-battle-monster Nanaha-senpai, we hurried to our real destination.
"Nanaha-senpai never compromises on her own idea of fun."
"She's locked onto you about as hard as she has me and Jun. Guess that's the same-existence thing too?"
"That's Senpai for you. It figures she'd pull off her against-the-rules silver hair as naturally as humanly possible."
"…Huh? It's not her natural hair?"
I'd genuinely had no idea, and it shocked me.
"No way. You didn't know? Senpai's just pretending it's natural. Around the time she's due to re-dye it, you can sometimes tell her natural black is showing."
"I've never seen a teacher call her out on it, though."
"The wording of the school rules is subtly loose, and she acts so completely natural about it that everyone just assumes that's how it is. Both of Senpai's parents have black hair. She keeps up the silver look through sheer vibe alone, just because being silver-haired is fun for her."
"You're kidding. That's the single biggest parallel-world difference I've felt so far."
Then again, thinking about it, there was never any way I'd get close enough to Nanaha-senpai to make out the color of her roots.
So this is a gender difference between the same existence…
"If I'd closed the distance the way Jun does, would I have noticed?"
"The Jun in my world knew. That guy notices every little detail, no matter what."
Aside from his messed-up sense of personal space, he's a capable guy.
"Still, so that's how it is with Nanaha-senpai. Figures, coming from someone who talks politely herself but flat-out refuses to have it used on her."
"She just looks soft. She's the most selfish one in the club."
While I was still dumbfounded, we'd come out of a tunnel. Like on the school route, there were several tunnels on this side too. Since the New Town was built on hilly, undulating terrain, in a lot of places it had been faster to bore a tunnel than to shave down the hill.
It would have been unnerving to pass through at night, but the short tunnel had no particular urban legend attached to it, and beyond it Himurogioka-Higashimachi spread out. Not that it was anything unusual to look at; just like the south side where the Masumi house was, similarly shaped houses and apartment blocks stood in rows, with the original greenery left in the gaps between them.
The first place we headed was the relatives' house.
Sure enough, it was a house much like ours, tucked into a corner of an unremarkable residential district. There was nothing odd about the way it stood beneath the setting sun. We were relatives in and out of each other's houses all the time, so it didn't even have novelty going for it.
"Seeing it from your side, Tsukino, does anything stand out?"
"There might be small differences, but I can't tell what they'd be."
"Want to go say hello?"
"We don't really have any business here, so wouldn't it end up being literally just a hello?"
No matter how I pictured it, we'd just be relatives dropping by out of nowhere in the evening. Normally we'd contact a cousin, or an uncle or aunt, before coming, so it might even look a little suspicious.
For the time being we left the spot and made a loop around the whole stretch that had been the forbidden ground.
We passed students and office workers heading home, but they were sparse. Now and then the smell of dinner drifted over and stirred my hunger.
This place that had once been forbidden ground, though, had nothing you could call an obvious anomaly. No portal to another world opened up, and the ghost Nanaha-senpai had mentioned didn't appear either.
The upshot of walking the whole circuit —
"I'm beat."
We stopped by a park and I looked up. Across the sunset sky, clouds torn into small wisps drifted along. The wind passing over my body, flushed hot from walking, felt good.
"Nice work," Tsukino said, sitting down beside me. The edge of her skirt, spread out on the bench, brushed just barely against my leg.
Tsukino, right there next to me, showed no sign of being tired. She really did have far more stamina than I did.
For a park in the middle of town, it was surprisingly large and well stocked with playground gear. There was a slide, swings, a seesaw, and a sandbox fenced off to keep animals from getting in. It seemed properly maintained, with no litter to speak of.
The bench we were sitting on was part of a roofed rest area. There was even a vending machine nearby. It probably served as a spot for the whole neighborhood to unwind.
"Here you go."
Tsukino held out a plastic bottle of cola she'd bought from that vending machine.
"Sorry. I'll pay you back."
"It's fine. You're looking for a way to get me home, so let me at least do this much."
Tsukino opened her own cola and put it to her lips. At the frill-trimmed collar of her blouse, her white throat moved with a gulp. She hadn't looked tired at all, but a bead of sweat traced the line of a vein down her neck.
"I'll take it, then. Thanks."
I drank next. The carbonation running from my parched throat down to my stomach felt good. It was as if the sugar were seeping into my tired body, though that was just my imagination.
By the time I noticed, Tsukino had recapped her cola and was looking at me. Her narrow-eyed expression was the sadistic smile of someone who'd caught another in the act of mischief.
"Were you watching my throat?"
"…I've started to think the phrase 'the hollow of the throat' has a rather nice ring to it."
"Fufu. Personally, I sensed infinite potential in the word 'Adam's apple.'"
Before I knew it my hand was over my throat, and Tsukino burst out laughing despite herself. She pressed a hand to her mouth, her back shaking.
"It goes both ways, you know, so you don't get to laugh that hard."
Turning my face away naturally meant looking out over the park. A few kids were still running around and clambering up the playground gear. In their make-believe, the Demon Slayer Corps was playing Minecraft. …Come again?
"Did you play here too, Tsukino?"
"Which means you did too, Asahi. Yes. Whenever I came over to my uncle's, of course I'd end up playing here."
The sight of the elementary schoolers running around overlapped with my own past self. Maybe there'd been times when Tsukino and I had each been right here, in our respective worlds, at the same moment.
"By the way. What are you going to do about your next novel, Asahi?"
Playing with the cola bottle, Tsukino asked.
"The next one, huh…"
I took out the laptop I'd stashed in my bag. Earlier, while we'd been talking with Nanaha-senpai, her sheer berserker energy had sparked an idea in me. Nothing was pulled together yet, but I started jotting it into a memo on the PC.
"I did think the bag you were carrying was awfully big."
Sounding exasperated, Tsukino set her own laptop down beside her. It was the one I'd lent her back when we revised "The End of a Certain Adventurer."
"I was thinking your bag was awfully big too, Tsukino."
"Being me, I figured this kind of thing might come up, you know."
It's true: even out and about, I tend to work whenever there's an opening. Tsukino probably does too.
Tsukino leaned in toward me and peered at my display.
"Looks like you thought of something. What kind of story are you making this time?"
"I'm thinking of making it a story about fighting with no regard for appearances, just like Nanaha-senpai. I haven't decided the details yet, but a revenge drama, maybe."
I typed what I'd said straight into the PC as notes.
"Oh, right. There's free Wi-Fi here."
Now that she mentioned it, both PCs were picking up a Wi-Fi signal. It was probably installed a little while back when the park was renovated. Maybe there was far more demand from residents than we'd assumed.
"This makes brainstorming easier."
Tsukino pointed at the memo, now updated in the shared file.
"I'm the one who pulled out the PC, so this is rich coming from me, but is it okay to spend time here? I'd meant to get moving again right after a break."
"We've already been around everywhere that seems forbidden-ground-like. There's not really anything left we can do today, I figure."
"True. If we asked Nanaha-senpai for a bit more detail, would we learn something? Ghosts, rituals… I hope something ties together."
"That said, we can't do that until tomorrow either. Senpai said she'd look into it again, too."
Sure enough, there was no way to act until tomorrow.
"So… helping brainstorm your revenge story is the more constructive thing right now."
"I'd appreciate it, but…"
"I want to do it."
Tsukino said it flatly, a strong will in her eyes.
If I'm being honest, I wanted to go all-in on More Bad, More Hell with her too.
We nodded to each other and both faced the display.
"With 'The End of a Certain Adventurer,' by working in an Ultimate Causality, I was able to make the ending's persuasiveness pretty solid. I think I handled the description fairly well, too. But I fussed too much over the story's cause-and-effect, so the midgame developments got heavy, and it also became easy to see where things were going. That's where I need to improve."
With Tsukino chiming in, I felt like I could analyze things better than usual. The two of us jotted it all down.
"That aside, I also can't help wanting to make it an even more painful story. A More Bad development that doesn't make it harder for readers to read… Is that even possible?"
"I understand the feeling so much it hurts. A troublesome contradiction."
I folded my arms, and Tsukino stared hard at the memo on the display.
If brilliant ideas came that easily, there'd be no struggle to begin with; instead we just ended up gazing out at the park under the setting sun.
"That reminds me."
It wasn't a new thought so much as something I'd been forgetting to ask.
"What kind of bad ends do you write, Tsukino? Some are probably the same as mine, I'd think."
"The End of a Certain Adventurer" was a work Tsukino had never written.
"My novels. Let's see."
Tsukino's fingertips tapped the keyboard. Strings of meaningless characters went into the memo, then got deleted, over and over. Her nails made a dry clicking sound. It felt like she was drawing it out to tease me.
"An Eternal Hell, I'd say."
"Meaning, developments that stay hellish the whole way through."
"Right. A bad end that never ends."
"Ooh, Hell."
Just what kind of developments were they? Could it be used together with a Catastrophe Strike or an Ultimate Causality? And beyond that, I simply wanted to read the world Tsukino wrote, her bad ends.
"You don't have to make such a hungry face. I'll let you read them eventually."
"That's a very Jun way of putting it… Am I making that kind of face? No, I'm aware that I am."
Either way, unless we found a way to return Tsukino to her own world, I wouldn't get to read them.
There was the option of having her write them again, or write something new, but…
"Still, an Eternal Hell, huh. Delivering that bad-end jolt nonstop might be a way to keep the midgame from sagging. No, but if painful developments just keep coming, does it get too tough to read after all?"
"True. 'The End of a Certain Adventurer' was, in a sense, a painful story the whole way through, too."
The two of us groaned. From the park came the voices of kids getting worked up. Their make-believe had entered its climax, and the Ender Kibutsuji-Muzan Dragon had appeared.
"That's way too sudden a development."
"It's been a pretty intense plot up to now, too. That kid's apparently a Cure Gavan Rider."
"It's turning into more of a parallel-world story than 'Infinity Heaven.'"
Even "Infinity Heaven," with its constant flashy, sudden developments, was no match for the freewheeling imagination of elementary schoolers.
"No, that's it!"
"That's me for you. We came up with the same thing."
"Right. What was missing was the fun of each individual scene. It's an obvious thing, but…"
"Yes. Whether it's an Ultimate Causality or an Eternal Hell, if it's entertainment, it's meaningless without the pull to draw readers in. 'Infinity Heaven' was bold in its storytelling, but it kept up appealing developments the whole way."
"Then what we should be aiming for is"
""An Ultimate Calamity!""
"A bad-end novel with a highlight the whole way through. Or rather, a story where the bad end accelerates at every break in the narrative."
The moment our direction was set, Tsukino and I began pounding our keyboards with a vengeance. It was all still concept-level, but we typed every character, development, and setting that came to mind into the shared memo.
"A revenge drama set in the present day. We escalate this revenge, step by step."
"The first target is the ringleader of some bullying, and next is that guy's senior in a semi-gang. Say it then becomes a fight against a whole semi-gang crew. The protagonist's an ordinary civilian, so right about there it starts being too much for him."
"Making the protagonist a former agent of some organization would be too out-of-nowhere this time; no good. So how about he awakens to a talent for killing?"
"I like it. He starts from a point where his body can't quite keep up yet against the next enemy: a professional hitman."
"The battles themselves go smoothly and the protagonist keeps getting stronger, but all the while the people around him suffer worse and worse. His revenge improves things for a moment, but that becomes the trigger for the next tragedy. That's the idea."
We hadn't nailed down the fine details at all, but the ideas wouldn't stop.
A story cycling through tragedy, crisis, and reversal. The protagonist's psyche gets driven further into a corner, and it escalates from there.
""More bad! More hell!""
Riding the momentum, we kept talking and kept typing into the memo, and by the end we'd traded three fist-bumps in all.
Facing a laptop with nothing but awful things written on it, Tsukino and I let out a breath.
When I looked up at the sky, spent but satisfied, the sun had long since gone down. In the darkened park, the kids who'd been playing their dream-crossover make-believe were gone, and only the playground gear, lit by the streetlights, stood there dimly.
The roofed rest area we were in was wrapped in faint darkness too. The light of the laptop displays stood out sharply.
"We overdid it a little."
"We ended up as late as the day we saw the movie."
It was nearly nine p.m. A scolding from Mom was now guaranteed. The laptop batteries were pretty drained, too. Honestly, if the older PC's battery hadn't been about to die, I think we'd have kept going.
Brainstorming ideas nonstop with a different person who had the same thoughts and the same tastes was just plain fun.
"Looks like all that's left now is to head home for today."
Tsukino stepped out toward the playground gear.
Precisely because she stood in the faint glow of the streetlights, her hair, blacker than the night, made its presence felt. The silver studs and accessories, so ill-suited to her dainty blouse, glittered here and there. As if dancing, she swept her gaze in a circle around the nostalgic park.
My eyes were caught, and I couldn't move. Her black skirt with its frills and ribbons swayed, and the hard footfalls of her boots rang out.
Before I realized it, she was atop the slide. As if the fantastical figure of moments ago had been a lie, she was innocently waving at me.
Leaving my things on the bench, I walked up to her.
"It brought back memories, so I climbed up. You've slid down this before too, right, Asahi?"
"That's another thing that's the same, huh. Well, with how many times I've come to this park, never sliding down it once would be the stranger thing."
When I looked up at Tsukino atop the slide, she stretched a hand out to me.
"How about you too, Asahi? It's a big slide, so I think we'd be fine climbing up together."
"That's just plain embarrassing."
"Even though I'm you…"
"You climbing up first probably cooled my head a little."
"That makes it look like I'm the only one getting carried away."
She actually had been getting carried away, I think, but so had I.
With her brows raised and her cheeks slightly puffed, Tsukino looked younger than usual.
Atop the slide, she stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at me. She wasn't sliding down anytime soon.
"…Shouldn't we head home soon?"
But she didn't slide. The furrow in her brow was even deeper than before.
"Wait, are you angry—"
"Actually…"
Cutting me off, she crouched down while holding her skirt in place. She opened her mouth with a thoughtful look, as if unsure of her next words. But nothing came out. After a few rounds of that, at last her voice emerged.
"I climbed up, and it's higher than I expected, and now I can't move."
"I kind of get that."
It's not a slide, but take the monument at the lookout park, the one I used to climb no problem in elementary school. I couldn't bring myself to climb that now, either.
"…I want you to lend me a hand."
"That's fine, but…"
Still crouched, Tsukino reached out her hand. In the faint darkness, her white fingertips were right before my eyes. The fingers of my same existence, far more supple and lovely than my own. At her wrist, an accessory made a faint sound.
I hesitated for a moment over whether it was okay to take it, but I was being asked to.
When I gently touched it, it gave a little twitch. Finger overlapped finger, folding together into a clasp.
"Okay. I'm coming down."
Her voice cracking a little, Tsukino, still crouched, leaned out onto the slide's slope.
Rather than sliding, she planted her feet firmly on the slope, pressed her skirt down with her free hand, and, hand still in mine, came down slowly, ever so slowly. Shoe soles on the slide were a no-no, I figured, but she'd already done something so unbecoming of her age; this once, it couldn't be helped.
After taking an awfully long time, Tsukino finally reached the bottom of the slope.
Letting out a relieved breath, she rose to her feet, leaning on our joined hands.
"Eep," a small sound slipped out.
Her body wavered. She should have had a stronger core than me, but maybe she'd let her guard down, or maybe it was from crouching in that odd posture.
Still holding my hand, she toppled toward me.
Reflexively I caught her. I held her steady in my arms.
Tsukino's face was right there. She always keeps her back so straight that I forget, but she's about half a head shorter than me.
In her hair, adorned with the black-and-silver rose, the bangs were neatly arranged. Through their gaps, upturned eyes looked at me. Wide and round with surprise, they held none of the usual coldness or grown-up air. Her lashes were long, beautifully curled, and now trembling minutely.
A faint voice slipped from her lips, and her breath grazed my neck. The scent of perfume and shampoo coming off her was thicker than usual.
Even through my long-sleeved shirt and her blouse, the softness and gentle warmth of her body came through where it pressed against mine. The rustle of cloth and the sound of heartbeats were awfully loud. Whether they were mine or Tsukino's, or the two mixed together, I couldn't tell. I even had the illusion that we'd become one.
I couldn't move, and Tsukino didn't move either.
Beneath the light of the streetlamps illuminating the night park, we stayed just like that. The exhaust of cars, the footsteps of people, the sounds of daily life carrying from the residential district. All of it was far away.
There was no trigger to pull apart, no signal either. Not knowing whether time was moving or stopped, whether hours had passed or only seconds, at last I gently drew back.
Chest parted from chest, arm from arm, and we stood at our usual distance.
"…Sorry. And thank you."
"No, it happens all the time."
It doesn't happen all the time. It had never happened once.
But Tsukino said nothing more, and I couldn't go on either.
I picked up the bag I'd left on the bench, and we set off home without so much as discussing it. The way she unhesitatingly picked a shortcut, a different road from the one we'd come by that trimmed the walk a little, was so very same-existence of her.
Passing people now and then through the Higashimachi residential district, Tsukino and I walked on without saying a word.
Our fingertips touched. Tsukino's nails grazed the back of my hand. For an instant, our eyes met, but we soon turned to face forward again.
Between the evening we'd set out for the forbidden ground and now, heading home, I couldn't help noticing that the distance between us had changed. We weren't pressed together, but the gap as we walked side by side had closed by nearly half a step. Reach out just a little, and hand would meet hand.
I wanted to hold hands, and I felt she wouldn't refuse.
I could no longer look away from the feeling I'd come to hold. Even when I turned my face from it, it welled up from the depths of my heart.
I love Tsukino.
She's my same existence, and her looks, her fashion sense, right down to her kinkier proclivities, are all my type, and we share the bad-end kink that everyone calls weird. Of course I'd fall for her. The fact that she's my same existence had somehow been a sticking point, but our sexes, and even our smallest reactions, are different. So I end up seeing Tsukino not so much as Masumi Asahi's same existence, but as Masumi Tsukino. No, it's not about logic anymore.
I love her.
If I put this feeling into words, Tsukino would surely return it. It feels like a certainty precisely because we're the same existence, but maybe it isn't one.
Again, finger and finger touched.
On impulse I opened my mouth. The feelings came surging out.
"I'll get you back to your world, Tsukino. No matter what."
But what I put into words was a promise.
Behind Tsukino, the moon had risen without my noticing. In a night sky nearly bare of clouds, the near-full moon shone bright, lighting her more strongly than the streetlights did.
Tsukino, looking at me, had her usual cold gaze, but she lowered her brows and smiled faintly.
"I wouldn't mind even if I couldn't go home, though."
It was a whisper, but I heard it clearly.
Part of me felt that couldn't be allowed. Tsukino had come to this world all alone, and there were people waiting for her in the parallel world.
There was also the part of me saying "don't go." I want Tsukino to stay, just like this. But I couldn't say it out loud.
Yesterday, when we'd gone to Himurogioka Shrine, I'd wished for Tsukino to be able to go home. Which of these feelings does my true heart wish for now? Can I face up to the promise?
Tsukino looked ahead as if she'd said nothing, and I gave no reply as if I hadn't heard.
Past the station, up the long, rather steep slope, through the tunnel, we reached the house, same as always.
"Huh?"
It was then that Tsukino murmured.
She'd stopped in front of the house, looking at her phone. The swipes pushing the screen along were oddly impulsive.
"…I've got a LINE message."
Until now, the accounts of everyone from Tsukino's world had shown as deleted; she couldn't so much as send a message, let alone make a call. Naturally, there should have been no way for new messages to come in from the other side, either.
"I didn't notice. I was bad-ending the whole time."
"We forgot our real purpose… No, I never even considered that just the phone might connect."
I shook my head. I had to calm down and think somehow.
"Can you tell when the LINE came in? From the time it arrived, we might be able to pin down where in the forbidden ground the two worlds connect."
"That's… not possible. What's shown is the time the other side sent it. Though it's true a huge number came in over these past few days."
"Maybe the phone's able to connect now, too."
There was no point standing around here. For now we'd go back inside and think about what we should do.
"Hm?"
For a moment I couldn't tell what felt off.
I went to let us into the house as always. I put the key in and turned it. It caught partway, so I tried a few more times. But it wouldn't budge.
I checked the key, inserted it again, and then I noticed.
The house lights were off. It was the hour when everyone's home, and the hour when Mom gets mad because she can't clear away dinner. And yet the inside of the windows was dark. No sound, either. No sound of running water, no sound of gas, no sound of the TV. Nothing.
As I stood there frozen, key in hand, Tsukino slid a different key into the door.
It turned smoothly, and a familiar click sounded.
The door opened. Beyond it was a pitch-black, empty darkness like a gaping hole, with no one there.
"My house… Here, this is my world."