“Mrrrghgh?”
“Wait a minute.”
The doctor then turned and began rummaging through her room for something. As she did, L lectured her about cleaning up again, but about five minutes later...
“Here it is!” she exclaimed, pulling out something that looked like half a set of wireless earphones. “Here, Rekka. Put this in your ear.”
“Sure. What is it? A transmitter?”
“Nope. It’s a type of noise canceller that can block out certain information.”
“Noise canceller?”
That seemed rather restrictive... Not to mention the “certain information” part. But for now I listened to her and put the device in my ear. It fit perfectly, making it rather comfortable to wear.
“This device will automatically block out any audio data that mentions the year, whether by the Earth calendar or the Galactic one, as well as any other information pertaining to the current date.”
“I can’t know anything about that?”
All I’d asked was how far in the future we were...
“What gives?”
“Hmm, it’s kind of hard to explain...”
“Well, for my sake, please make it as simple as possible.”
“Let’s see...” The doctor pensively tapped her finger against her chin. “I know it’s weird to say this after bringing you here yourself, but the future is indeterminate to you, right?”
“Indeterminate? You mean, like... in the sense that we don’t know what’s going to happen?”
“Exactly. The future is always changing. And we here at the agency were attempting to change the future by changing the past—your past—based on that logic.”
“Hmm, I see.”
I could only just barely get my head around that, but I sort of got the idea.
“But that can only be done on the condition that the future remains indeterminate for you, Rekka.”
“Huh?”
“In other words, if this future—specifically this one where the War of All is taking place—is rendered in definite terms, then the future would no longer be indeterminate for you. It would go from an abstract idea to concrete knowledge.”
“Huh? But I already know that the War of All occurs.”
I had just come to the future where it was happening, after all.
“You only know that a war will occur in the future, not specifically when or where or what have you.”
“Is that how this works?”
“Yes. ‘The future’ could mean a year, ten years, or several hundred to you as long as you don’t know exactly when.”
Apparently, the War of All could remain indeterminate other than “possibly happening at some point in time” if we played things this way.
“O-Okay?”
I didn’t really get it, though...
“So what this means for me is that I’m not allowed to know what year it is right now, right?”
“Right.”
Even if I didn’t understand what was going on or why, I figured I could probably manage that much.
“Oh, and for the record, that canceller affects the electric signals of your brain, so any visual or tactile information that’s date-sensitive will also be imperceptible to you.”
“It can do that too? This device is incredible.”
“Hardly. But you need to watch yourself, Rekka. Make sure you don’t go asking how old Satsuki is or anything like that.”
“Wha?!”
Satsuki fell into a fluster when her name suddenly came up, her face reddening by the second.
“Don’t bring up my age in front of Rekka!” she yelled in rather genuine anger.
“What does it matter? It’s not like I said the number or anything. And what do you have to be worried about? I was several hundred years old when I first met him, remember?”
“You might not care about things like that, Doctor, but I do! And this Rekka is still a high school student, you know?! He absolutely doesn’t need to know!”
“Ah, by the way, Rekka... Satsuki can look up all kinds of magic with her Magic of Omniscience, so her appearance might not reflect her actual age. Sort of like me.”
“KYAAAAAH!” Satsuki grabbed the doctor, her face now as red as a tomato. “Y-Y-You...!”
“Wait, my neck! You’re strangling me... I’m just doing my job, you know? We can’t have Rekka guessing your age and then fixating on that knowledge. It’s date sensitive,” the doctor explained as she tapped at Satsuki’s arm.
The thought did kind of cross my mind...
She appeared to be roughly university age, or maybe in the “young working adult” bracket. Anyway, Satsuki continued to glare and fume at the doctor for a while before finally letting her go.
“A-Ahem, just for the record,” the doctor said after coughing a little. “There’s a plethora of anti-aging technologies in outer space, not to mention things like elixirs of life created from the sacred beasts of other worlds, as well as personality transfers involving clones—like what I did. With so many tricks out there, make sure you don’t try and guess the age of any heroine, okay?”
“G-Got it.”
Despite being rather overwhelmed by this conversation, I nodded readily. It was a scene I’d seen plenty of times in manga, but I guess asking a woman her age really was a bad idea... If R was here, she’d probably have some smart aleck comment right about now.
“...”
But instead, I had L, who was currently glaring at the three of us with an exasperated expression.
“Now, what were we talking about?” the doctor asked, rubbing the back of her neck.
“Something about the current situation of this time period, I think?”
“Ah, that’s right. I was briefing you on this time period.”
And so the conversation finally got back on track.
“If I’m to explain the current situation, after all, then I have to tell you a little bit about the start of the war.”
“The start of the War of All...”
“Yes, although it’s not like there was some large-scale event or single trigger that incited it.”
As the doctor began explaining things, Satsuki stood silently next to her, taking it all in with a grave expression. The doctor continued...
“At first, I thought it was just the standard catfight over you. You had a lot of assertive girls around you, so scuffles were something of a daily occurrence.”
I was more than familiar with that myself.
“Usually you—and I mean future you, of course—would intervene and that would be the end of it, but... the heroines started to clash with each other more and more. It was just so gradual that no one realized anything was wrong.”
“...”
When I looked back on my own experiences, like with Satsuki and Iris, for example... They were always arguing. And I’d heard future Rekka had saved hundreds of heroines, so trying to imagine the chaos in my daily life on a much larger scale was kind of mind-blowing. I could see how genuine tension might have fallen under the doctor’s and Satsuki’s radars.
“And while the bickering was increasing, so too were disputes under the table. A present that one of the heroines had prepared for you would go missing and other such nonsense that was clearly someone’s dirty work.”
“...!”
Shocked into silence, I was speechless. I never thought that... Well, there’s no way to mince words. I didn’t think that there were any malicious people around me who would sneakily try and sabotage others like that.
“Er, allow me to clarify that this sort of foul play was unprecedented. It had never happened before,” the doctor quickly added.
She must have seen through my worry.
“Now, at any rate... Such incidents began to increase tensions to the point that the heroines were becoming hostile with each other without you realizing it.”
Future Rekka would always step in on conflicts between the heroines, but it got kind of out of control, huh?
If future Rekka didn’t see what was going on, he wouldn’t have known to step in.
“And so tension continued to mount until two big things happened,” the doctor explained.
“What were those?” I asked.
“First was a terrorist attack on the central council of the Greater Galactic Federation.”
“A terrorist attack?!”
I was shocked to hear something so violent had happened.
“But you said the Galactic Federation... Was Iris okay?”
“Iris herself is safe. But her father...” Satsuki answered in a low voice.
Though she didn’t finish her sentence, I could guess the end of it based on the look on her face. I had met Iris’s father once myself. He represented planet Finerita in the Galactic Federation. I didn’t know much about the central council, but if there was a meeting, I’m sure he would’ve been there. So in the terrorist attack...
“Of course, that was a huge incident in and of itself.” Though I was speechless, the doctor continued, “However, by unfortunate chance—or perhaps by some design—future Rekka was also participating in the council meeting that day.”
“Wha?! Wh-Why would I do that?”
“Iris took you along forcefully so she could show you off to her father and, well... try to get you to make a future commitment to her. Those are her words, mind you. I have no further comment on the matter.”
“Yeah, that does sound like something Iris would do...” I said with a sigh and a nod.
But seriously, how unlucky for me. Or... was it as the doctor suggested? Perhaps it was by some kind of design.
“As for the second incident, you—future Rekka—went missing in the middle of everything.”
“So that’s when my future self disappeared...”
Was I kidnapped? Or was I obliterated without a trace? I didn’t really want to think about the latter.
“This is where things get complicated,” said the doctor.
“I can imagine...”
“After your disappearance, rumors quickly began circulating among the heroines.”
“Rumors?” I parroted.
“Yes. That someone had kidnapped you to keep you all to themselves.”
“!”
Come to think of it, she’d mentioned something like that during the time leap here. Something about the heroines of the future suspecting one of them was hogging me all to themselves, which had caused a lot of infighting.
“It wasn’t like everyone believed it without even questioning it, but it led to the tensions that had been building between the heroines all blowing up at once.”
And so a trivial catfight exploded into an all-out war. They each suspected one another, multiplying their suspicions exponentially. And, according to the doctor, a good portion of that suspicion fell on the grieving Iris.
“Why Iris?” I asked.
“Because she was there when you disappeared. Moreover, she’s the one who forced you to go to the council meeting that day. If someone had been plotting something, she was in the best position to do so.”
“That can’t be! That terrorist attack...! Her father...!”
“Indeed... And so I’m sure you can imagine Iris’s rage.”
Iris had flown into a fury when the other girls pointed fingers at her. She started to suspect the heroines who were trying to pin the blame on her and grew obsessive about searching for the real culprit. However, the heroines under Iris’s suspicion didn’t take that lying down either. And so the fight between the heroines hit the point that it was no longer any laughing matter. It was deadly serious.
“Wait...”
That was when something dawned on me, and my eyes drifted over to the so-far quiet Satsuki.
“Hold on. If you’re looking for someone, then don’t you have Satsuki and her Magic of Omniscience?”
The Magic of Omniscience was Satsuki’s heirloom magic that could access the Akashic record of this world—a record of everything that had ever happened here, from the dawn of time up until the present day. She should be able to locate me easily.
“About that... Well, you see...”
“Um...”
Both the doctor and Satsuki had strange looks on their faces.
“Huh? Did I say something wrong?”
“No, no. You’re not wrong. But...” Satsuki said bashfully.
As it turned out, Satsuki at the time had had the same thought I did and tried to mediate the peace in my place. However...
“Even with my Magic of Omniscience, I couldn’t find your location.”
“What?” I asked, my brow furrowed. “Is that even possible?”
“It shouldn’t be. But that was of no comfort to the distraught heroines.”
If future Rekka had saved hundreds of heroines, that meant he’d been involved in just as many stories. And with that many stories intertwining, I can see how things might get a little complicated. Planets from every corner of the universe, numerous other worlds, underworlds that people on Earth were wholly unaware of, lost civilizations, crazy technologies, ancient magics, and so on... There were all kinds of tremendous powers at play. And it wasn’t hard to imagine that something out of all that had the ability to hide future Rekka from the Magic of Omniscience.
“The Magic of Omniscience is magic, first and foremost. There are plenty of ways to protect yourself against magic, and even more to shield yourself from divination magic specifically—either with technology or other magic. That is to say, if someone had thought about it ahead of time, it shouldn’t have been all that hard to come up with a way to avoid the Magic of Omniscience.”
So basically we had a Devil’s Proof situation on our hands. Satsuki could potentially look up every way she knew how to avoid the Magic of Omniscience and who could use it, but there were too many ways and too many heroines from too many different stories for that to be feasible. Moreover, there could be ways we didn’t know about. And so, with the one thing that could put an end to the conflict missing, the conflict escalated and escalated... Heroine versus heroine became faction versus faction became world versus world.
“I see... I get it now. So that’s how it became the War of All.”
It was a real heavy story... Especially the part about me being the cause.
When R said I caused a war, she must have tried to make it sound like a joke to soften the blow...
I finally understood that, despite sounding like a jerk, she was being considerate. Yanking my chain a bit made it a little easier to take than dumping all the gory details on me. I’m sure it being our first meeting had something to do with it too, but I was sure now that R was being thoughtful in her own way to avoid causing me too much stress.
“Yes. That was the start of the War of All, which brings us to where we are now.”
“The agency was established to stop the War of All, causing conflict between the pacifists and extremists?”
“Yup,” the doctor said with a nod. “So there’s one thing... No, four things I’d like you to take away from this: the four factions that exist in this world.”
“Factions? Like the pacifists and extremists?”
“That’s right. Actually, those are two of the four factions. What I want to brief you on is each faction’s view of you and the War of All.”
“Their view of me?”
It sounded like we were in for another complicated discussion...
“There’s no need to be so tense. It’s not that difficult. First are the pacifists, who, as you know, wish for you to live and resolve the War of All by your own hand.”
I assumed she meant for me to make up my mind and settle down with a heroine.
“Next are the extremists, who you may know refer to themselves as hardliners. They are the radical faction set on preventing the War of All by killing you. They’re a faction that branched off from the agency, which is why they have the means to travel to the past, but they’re not very well known outside of here.”
The extremists ha
d caused me enough grief already, so I wasn’t very fond of them. Not only had they targeted my life, they had tricked L, destroyed my hometown, and on top of that, kidnapped Satsuki and the others (which was a little confusing to say with future Satsuki standing right in front of me). But still... If their real goal was ending the war to achieve world peace, I couldn’t say they were all bad.
“Now come the two factions you don’t know, the first of which is the hawks. As you might guess by their name, they want the War of All to continue until it reaches its natural conclusion.”
“Why would anyone want the war to continue?”
“In a way, you and future Rekka are different people. There are heroines who don’t want the fate of their love to be decided by someone else.”
I see... That did make sense in a way. Future me wasn’t me me, after all. We had different personalities and had lived different lives. If I chose a heroine and settled down in the past, that would keep future me from even meeting a good deal of the heroines he’d saved. There must have been some of them who weren’t too thrilled with that idea. I didn’t think it was right to continue the war, but I wasn’t in much of a position to criticize their way of thinking. I had no idea what it was like to go through what they were.
“Last but not least is the doves. They’re ideologically similar to us pacifists, but they don’t necessarily support the agency’s methods. They do want an end to the conflict, however. You could say they’re rather close to a neutral faction, but even they have pawns in the war.”
Pacifists and extremists. Hawks and doves. With the War of All going on, all sorts of principles, people, and ideologies had come into play. But over time, they’d largely settled into those four factions.
“But there are those who have joined the war without affiliating themselves with a faction. Those who have no idea that the war really started with a struggle over you. With everyone across all worlds embroiled in this conflict, there are surely some who have no idea why they’re fighting.”
“What’s with that? That’s so...”
“It’s a terrible thing, certainly. But as its name suggests, the War of All grew so big it encompassed everyone and everything with no end in sight. Of course it would lead to such tragedy...”
I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse: Volume 15 Page 2