Chapter 96: Why Aren’t You Being Swallowed by My Darkness?
“Welcome, Kuwajima.”
“Why are you acting so confident inside my world!?”
I greeted Kuwajima’s true self, who appeared in her mental world’s faculty room, with a confident smile.
She wore a school uniform, an appearance I never saw during university life, but this Kuwajima was slightly different.
She had probably put on the school-designated black cardigan and wrapped her favorite black bandages around her hands.
She’d also scattered elaborate accessories over herself to the maximum extent that wouldn’t earn her excessive scolding, as though prepared to deploy them at the slightest opportunity.
She overflowed with the spirit of a second-year middle-school student, caught between self-expression, the expectations of those around her, and the restraints of school rules.
This supposed true self of Kuwajima’s snapped at me. Exactly as expected.
After what I’d done, I hadn’t imagined she would welcome me.
Apparently, having her handmade notebook read aloud remained effective even at the height of her charismatic era.
However…
“What’s wrong, Kuwajima? Why are you speaking standard Japanese inside your own mind?”
“!!! Heh-heh-heh. An uninvited visitor, are you? How dare you tread with muddy shoes into my domain!”
“I’m impressed you can perform that character even inside the faculty room. Well done. I’ll praise you myself.”
“Are you claiming supremacy over heaven and earth!? Terrible things will happen if you displease me!”
Kuwajima answered energetically.
I’d probed a little, but her true self didn’t differ much from the personality she showed outside.
She seemed slightly more spirited, but that could simply be the confidence that came from being on her own field.
Or perhaps it was the immaturity suggested by her appearance—the restlessness of a child.
As I analyzed her beneath our conversation, the male teacher who appeared to be Kuwajima’s homeroom teacher and had helped me make the announcement admonished her.
“Listen, Kuwajima. If you keep addressing your elders like that, later in life…”
Those words would’ve affected the usual Kuwajima.
Despite her words, she was kind and vulnerable to lectures.
But Kuwajima was different from that point onward.
Probably because this was her mental world.
“Kuk! Fuhahahaha! I am tired of such complaints! Old fools who have repeatedly obstructed my path to supremacy… Watch your tongues inside my world!”
“Wh-What!?”
With her words, the faculty room’s atmosphere changed completely.
The room had enjoyed a peaceful after-school atmosphere, but suddenly transformed into a world of midnight darkness.
No—the scenery outside remained unchanged. Only the faculty room was dyed in darkness.
The teacher, an “enemy” who would criticize her, sank from his feet into the “darkness” that suddenly appeared with Kuwajima’s grandiose gesture.
And it didn’t stop with the teacher who’d addressed her.
The effect spread through the faculty room and swallowed every member of staff in moments.
The teachers cried out like they were screaming, but couldn’t meaningfully resist and steadily disappeared beneath it.
From what I could see, the darkness behaved like a liquid.
Its surface rippled, and their struggles sent up splashes.
It was probably connected to the Sea God’s sacred orb’s power Kuwajima had occupied without permission.
The same darkness spread beneath my feet.
“Fuhahahaha! I am now invincible! Supreme! Adorable! Elegant! I am the great ruler who commands all who lurk within every shadow in this world!”
“Did you kill that teacher?”
“K-Kill—!? N-No, I merely rendered him unconscious in the ordinary fashion… A-An absolute ruler never kills without purpose! Once things have cooled down, I shall quietly release him! Onto a bed or something!”
That sounded like Kuwajima’s true feelings.
I knew little about her Kumamoto dialect, but she’d been the sort of woman who blamed herself rather than the world for her curse, to the point of contemplating suicide.
I understood that she was fundamentally kind and didn’t approve of harming others.
She even planned to put the person she’d knocked unconscious into a bed.
“Now, Minion Number One.”
“I’m Kirishiro Gouto.”
“Kirishiro-kun… Urgh, my head. A-Anyway, right now, you’re Minion Number One!”
For a moment, hearing my name gave middle-school Kuwajima what looked like a headache, but she quickly recovered.
“Why aren’t you being swallowed by my darkness?”
“Hmm?”
I prompted her with my gaze while stamping lightly on the darkness beneath my feet.
It made splashing sounds like striking shallow water, but showed no sign of swallowing me.
“I’m asking why Minion Number One remains completely calm while being attacked inside the mental world I control!”
“Were you trying to sink me into the darkness too?”
“Of course! You barged in and made a school-wide announcement, you insolent intruder!”
That was fair.
Honestly, part of the reason I’d entered was to create the excuse that I’d tried but failed. I’d consciously chosen the shortest path while accepting an immediate failure as unavoidable.
Half according to plan, Kuwajima had attempted to expel me, but it hadn’t worked.
After thinking briefly, I raised three fingers.
“Three possibilities immediately occur to me.”
“There are that many?”
Kuwajima looked shocked, but compared with me, her study of the textbooks—light novels—was probably insufficient.
At my level, the possible causes of an irregularity in a mental world came to mind immediately.
“First, even inside Kuwajima’s mental world, my ego is too strong for you to expel me freely.”
“To begin with the most likely possibility…”
What made you judge that the most likely, Kuwajima?
I wanted to interrogate her true self, but it would derail the discussion, so I refrained.
This was a simple possibility.
Even if Kuwajima’s mental world itself supported her, if my will could resist the force trying to expel me, it was natural that I could remain.
The auditory hallucination had said, “The countermeasure is to hold firm to yourself.” I hadn’t consciously resisted, but my mind might naturally be rejecting Kuwajima’s influence.
“That isn’t what I meant.”
The auditory hallucination said something.
I wanted to interrogate her over what she had meant, but it would derail the discussion, so I refrained.
“Second, because of your impression of me in reality, you sincerely regard me as ‘a being beyond the reach of your powers,’ preventing you from affecting me.”
“Th-That’s impossible! I am the absolute ruler of darkness! I fear nothing!”
“But you dislike dark places and horror, don’t you?”
“…”
Since Kuwajima fell silent, this possibility also existed.
It raised the new question of why she’d formed such an impression of an ordinary university student you could find anywhere, but I set that aside.
In mental worlds like this, it was customary for a symbol of trauma to appear as an unbeatable enemy.
The image of me inside Kuwajima might be such a thing.
However, this world seemed primarily based on her middle-school years, so the likelihood of me existing as one of its residents was nearly zero.
“And the third possibility… Are you emotionally prepared?”
“The first two already fill me with grave concern. I may need to devote my full strength to expelling Minion Number One.”
“You sound ready, so I’ll answer.”
I didn’t think there was much reason to raise this final possibility.
But once something occurred to me, I couldn’t remain silent. Apparently, I too was affected by this mental world that exposed true feelings.
“The third reason is that, whatever you say aloud, deep inside you don’t want to expel me and don’t want to be separated from me. That desire may be reflected here.”
“…Huh?”
The approximately middle-school-aged Kuwajima stopped thinking as usual.
Then she quickly restarted.
“W-Whaaaat!? O-Of course I don’t think that! About Kirishiro-kun! That I don’t want to be separated from you!? M-My ideal is a ‘handsome butler type who puts his girlfriend first and gently accepts every useless part of me,’ not someone like Kirishiro-kun, a ‘forceful, domineering, perfect husband type who seems to offer suggestions but doesn’t actually listen to anything I say,’ whom I’ve recently begun to think might be a little appealing—Gyaaaaa!? That’s wrong! It isn’t true! I would never! I thought I was an S, but lately I’ve wondered if I might actually be a little M—Nyaaaaa!?”
Kuwajima was confused.
At the very least, I believed I now understood how she viewed me.
Why hadn’t the phrase “ordinary university student you could find anywhere” appeared, Kuwajima?
Never mind. Kuwajima seemed unable to successfully deny her true feelings. She blurted out things she hadn’t intended to say, then surprised herself, like a one-woman performance.
It was like watching a puppy endlessly chase its own tail because it mistook it for a toy… Ah!
At that moment, lightning ran through me.
I knew what one should do in this situation.
This was a problem I’d seen in the textbooks—light novels!
This was the scene.
When a woman close to the protagonist became confused and accidentally confessed her true feelings, there was a line he was supposed to say!
“Calm down, Kuwajima. We’re only ‘best friends,’ aren’t we?”
“…Ha-ha.”
Kuwajima’s expression went blank. She appeared to have calmed down.
It worked, Meiko.
To calm a confused female character, one merely had to state their relationship clearly. It was a secret technique ordinary high-school students you could find anywhere had used for generations.
Honestly, I’d previously thought, “It’s painfully obvious she likes you, so why are these people saying such nonsense?” But apparently, the true purpose was to forcibly settle the confusion in the scene.
In other words, it wasn’t a failure of communication or an inability to understand the other person’s feelings.
It was the ordinary style’s “ultimate time-saving technique.”
I realized my own vision had been clouded.
Once again, I remembered Meiko’s overwhelming insight.
I could practically see a vision of Meiko giving me a firm thumbs-up and saying, “Well done. That’s the Gouto-kun I know.”
Besides, whether Kuwajima liked me or not wasn’t particularly relevant to me right now.
If she ever said she wanted to change our relationship from “female best friends,” I could reconsider it then.
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Author’s Note: Education succeeded. (Education failed.)