“Of course, Yu can also tell what his opponent does want him to do!” Mutsuko added. “If he used that ability during sex, he’d be unstoppable!”
“Hey! That has nothing to do with anything right now!” Yuichi barked back at Mutsuko’s outrageous declaration.
Aiko was blushing, which just made things even more awkward.
“B-But wow, he took it out pretty easily, huh?” she said, perhaps trying to change the subject.
“Well, that’s how fights usually go,” Mutsuko said. “It’s a fundamental rule of combat: take your opponent out before they can muster their full strength!”
“Um, the fundamental rules of combat don’t sound very sporting...” Aiko murmured.
“Ah, but that’s what combat’s all about!” Mutsuko replied. “You’ve gotta take the upper hand, no matter what. Every traditional old fighting style has some techniques that are about fooling the opponent. I mean, of course they do! The point of martial arts is to beat the enemy, so you need ways to win even if you’re less powerful or skilled than them. That means using tricks, bluffs, anything you can bring to the table!”
“Hey, can we talk about that later?” Yuichi asked. “Let’s get out of here before these guys—”
“Big Brother!” Yoriko suddenly caught him in an embrace.
As Yuichi went through his usual ritual of prying her off, he realized that her right arm was injured. “Yori, what happened to your arm? Are you okay?”
“I’m not okay!” she cried. “I need TLC!”
“No, look, we need to get you to a hospital...”
“The boat’s on the way, so that’ll be easy enough,” Mutsuko said. “It’s probably already waiting for us at the harbor! And... hmm? What’s this?”
The spaceship seemed to be rumbling. The vibrations were small, at first, but they were starting to grow in severity.
“I see,” Mutsuko said. “I bet it’s that old cliché, you know? The whole place is about to collapse!”
“Huh? Why should it collapse because I killed the monster?!” Yuichi found the idea a bit ridiculous, but that didn’t change the fact that the ship was shaking.
“Okay! Yu, all of you, get out!” Mutsuko declared.
“What about you, Sis?” he asked. Mutsuko had encouraged them to run, but she didn’t seem about to follow them right away.
“I’ll catch up later! There’s something I’ve gotta do first!”
“Got it!” he agreed.
If Mutsuko said she’d be fine, she’d be fine. Yuichi grabbed Aiko and the others and started to run.
✽✽✽✽✽
Takashi Jonouchi awakened.
Ever since The Head of All had absorbed him, he had felt at peace, as if in a dream.
It had been a pleasant feeling. He had belonged there. It was as if he had become one with the entire world, with no separation between individual and whole.
He had shared thoughts with all kinds of existences, a single part of a larger something that could process great quantities of information at once.
And then, suddenly, that had all been ripped away.
It was disorienting. It took him time to remember that he was an individual named Takashi Jonouchi. But as he became aware of his surroundings, he realized he was in a pile of his fellow anthromorphs. He immediately recognized them as the others who had been absorbed into The Head of All.
And then, he realized that the ground was shaking. At first he thought it was a side effect of his disorientation, but it didn’t go away.
“Ugh... what happened?” He was disgusted with himself. He had regained his anthromorph power, but now that meant nothing. His existence as an individual was small and meaningless, compared to being a part of The Head of All. “Dammit... I’m...”
What would he do now? Nothing at all came to mind. He looked up at the sky.
The full moon seemed to flicker in his vision.
...Come... the voice said. It felt like it was speaking directly into his mind.
Takashi looked in the direction it seemed to be coming from.
There, he saw something lying on the floor. It was a small head, like a baby’s. It was looking at Takashi.
It is not... too late. Eat me...
The head that had fallen from the sky. The Head of All.
This is its true form, Takashi realized.
It was painful to see in this state, split like a pomegranate.
I shall give you power... tremendous power. I am going go to sleep... and while I sleep, my power shall be yours...
Takashi began to crawl towards it. He moved slowly. It was as if he was not yet in full control of his body.
Power...
Yes, power. Power was what he needed. Power even greater than that of an anthromorph.
Yes... yes... come here...
Takashi found himself in front of the little head. He reached for it...
Splat.
And just like that, The Head of All was crushed.
Takashi stared dumbly at the ex-deity, at first uncertain of what he’d just seen.
The Head had been smashed under a sturdy-looking boot.
Takashi began to turn his eyes higher. Above the boot was a smooth, slender leg, and still higher, a girl dressed in a diaphanous white kimono.
“B-horror movie sequel foreshadowing? Not on my watch!” she proclaimed haughtily. “This ends here and now. No continuations, no spinoffs, and no side stories!”
Then she turned her eyes to Takashi.
“Same goes for you,” the girl told him confidently. “You’ve gotta quit serving at the whim of other people all the time! Getting power from someone else doesn’t mean anything. Listen up! You’re a man, right? You’ve gotta earn your own power! Start training! Train and make yourself stronger!”
In that moment, to Takashi, she seemed to be shining.
“Who are you?” he asked, a feeling of reverence rising up inside of him.
“I’m Mutsuko Sakaki, second-year student at Seishin High School, and president of the survival club! Ah, just call me Flag Breaker Mutsuko! I thought that one up just now. Anyway, you ought to come away with the rest of us. You don’t wanna get crushed inside an alien spaceship, right?”
Mutsuko held her hand out to him.
Takashi gripped it tightly.
✽✽✽✽✽
Yuichi and the others escaped the festival site, passed through the mansion, and made it outside.
Mutsuko joined them a little while afterward, with two wolf-like humanoids following after her.
“Who are they?” Yuichi asked.
“They’re anthromorphs unaffiliated with the island, so we’ve gotta take them away,” she explained.
It was like she was saying the island anthromorphs could die, for all she cared. Mutsuko could be cold-hearted when it came to that kind of thing.
“Lady Aiko... forgive me!” One of the wolf-men walked up to Aiko and pressed his forehead to the ground.
“Um... it’s okay, really. I mean, it wasn’t your fault...” Aiko was clearly bewildered by this sudden prostration.
“But...” The wolf bowed even lower.
“This is getting really annoying. Why not just order him not to worry about it?” Yoriko said bluntly.
“Okay, then please don’t worry about it. Just do your best from now on. That’s an order.” Aiko must have also been getting fed up with it, as she took Yoriko’s suggestion immediately.
“Y-Yes ma’am!” The wolf-man’s voice was choked with tears.
Yuichi had no idea what the relationship between Aiko and this wolf-man was. All he knew was that he’d been introduced as “Nero.”
“Hey, is anyone else feeling that rumbling?” Rion asked nervously.
Yuichi could feel the ground shaking slightly.
“Don’t tell me...” he groaned, his stomach twisting into a knot.
He turned and looked back past the mansion, to the mountain’s summit high above.
There was a powerf
ul blasting sound, followed by a shockwave. Red lava began flowing from the mountaintop.
“I see. Looks like the scale of things just got even bigger!” Mutsuko exclaimed.
The lava rock hardened in the open air, sending volcanic projectiles popping loudly into the sky above. If they stayed where they were, they’d quickly be caught up in the pyroclastic or lava flows.
“Oh, none of this makes any sense!” Yuri shouted in panic.
“Okay, everyone! Let’s run for the harbor!” Mutsuko commanded gallantly.
From the boat’s second floor rear deck, Yuichi watched the island sinking. “What the heck. This can’t be happening...”
The ground they had been standing on just minutes before was now splitting apart and sinking under the ocean. It was a truly unreal sight.
The volcano had continued to violently erupt, and then, as if unable to bear the strain any longer, it had begun to split apart.
“Maybe it had a self-destruct device!” Mutsuko mused cheerfully, standing to Yuichi’s right.
“Sakaki. I’m realizing for the first time just how small I really am,” Natsuki said listlessly, standing to his left.
The three of them were leaning against the railing on the deck. The others were down below. Yoriko was resting in a cabin, with Aiko looking after her. Nero was accompanying Aiko.
Yuichi had wanted to stay with Yoriko, too, at first. But she had been so insistent on getting coddled that he’d ended up retreating to the upper deck in disgust.
“This is crazy,” Yuichi muttered. “I never thought I’d see anything like this...”
“Now that I think about it... I wonder who was it that sent the letter to the Martial Arts Preservation Society,” Mutsuko mused.
They had been taken prisoner the moment they arrived on the island, so they hadn’t been able to meet whoever had sent the invitation.
“That’s right, I’d forgotten all about that...” Yuichi said. “Looking back now, it was pretty suspicious. I wonder if someone did that just to lure us there...”
But even if that was the case, who would want to set a trap for a bunch of ordinary high school students like them?
“Good question,” Mutsuko said. “Though if there really was a dying martial art there, it’s a sad loss...”
Mutsuko gazed off at the island, daydreaming, perhaps, of mysterious fighting styles.
Yuichi decided he’d had enough of watching the island sink, and turned back around. There were more people on the boat now than there had been on their trip there.
Takashi Jonouchi and Yuri Konishi.
The two girls who had been taken for sacrifice.
The cowgirl he’d met on the island, Rion Takamichi.
“What are we gonna do with all of them?” he asked.
Yuri Konishi shouldn’t pose any more trouble for them. She seemed to have lost her desire to attack Aiko.
But the college students might be a problem. They had come in a group of five, and three of them were missing. Now that the island had sunk, there was little chance they might be found alive.
“We could just kill them and spare ourselves the trouble,” Natsuki said. “If we did it now, we could just tell everyone they went down with the island.”
“You’re kidding... right?” Yuichi asked.
It didn’t sound funny when a serial killer said it. The small smile on her face was no guarantee that it was a joke, either.
“They’ll just have to go to the police and handle it through the usual legal channels!” Mutsuko said.
It might have been dismissive of her, but Yuichi felt the same way. He couldn’t take responsibility for every single thing in every single incident he’d ever been involved in.
In Rion’s case, though, he did feel some responsibility. He had promised to save her, after all.
“Takamichi said she was attending school off the island, so she’ll probably be okay,” Mutsuko said. “Oh, or do you want her to stay with us? It’ll be like a roommate comedy! It’s ‘eat or be eaten’ with a cowgirl roommate! Wouldn’t that be novel?”
“Anything but that, please...” Yuichi already had his hands full living with his weird older sister. He didn’t need anything more piled on top of that.
“By the way, Yu! You killed a god back there, right? Maybe we ought to start calling you God-Slayer Yuichi!” Mutsuko proposed with innocent enthusiasm.
“Was that thing really a god? Not just some weird creature?” he asked.
It had certainly been unspeakably powerful, but it had also looked like a mash-up of fairly common animals. It was hard to buy something like that as a god.
“I can’t believe you were so calm in the face of it...” Natsuki said, her voice a mix of reverence and disbelief. At the ritual site, Natsuki had remained on backup duty. She hadn’t even tried to approach The Head of All.
“Well, really, you can get god authorization anywhere!” Mutsuko said. “I mean, they used to use that word to refer to old kings and natural phenomena, so it’s pretty reasonable that people would venerate that thing. You saw how gold and shiny it was! They probably thought they’d get something out of it!”
“At any rate, anything that’s alive can be killed,” Yuichi said. What he’d done wasn’t special.
But Mutsuko’s reaction to his offhanded comment wasn’t what he was expecting. “Yu... you’ve become such a natural at condescension. It’s kind of cool...” Her eyes became dewy, as if greatly touched.
“Huh? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “I’m not trying to sound cool...”
“Ah! Doesn’t killing a god get you perks?” she asked, quickly changing topics. “Has it awakened new abilities within you? C’mon! Can you use the power of the god you killed or something?”
“Of course not!” he snapped. “And I don’t want any more weird powers than I have already!” Just the thought of more unwelcome powers awakening within him made him feel slightly sick.
I’m not gonna undergo any weird changes... am I?
As Yuichi fell deep into thought, Mutsuko put a hand on his head and mussed his hair around.
“Hey, you’re embarrassing me...”
“You did great this time, Yu!” she proclaimed. “I see you learned from the vampire incident and used your full power right off the bat! I give it an 8 out of 10!”
Mutsuko continued to tousle his hair with sisterly affection. Yuichi had to wonder where the two docked points came from, but he wasn’t entirely displeased.
Epilogue: The Bookseller’s Melancholy
It was a room full of books and bookshelves.
The bookshelves were lined up with no particular system to them, with great stacks of books piled up all over the floor.
Amidst them there was a faint light, and beneath it sat a girl reading a book.
She had long, red hair and wore an old-fashioned dress. Somehow, she gave an impression of a worn-out antique.
She sat atop a stack of books, flipping through the pages lightly.
Her name was Ende, and she called herself a bookseller.
Of course, her treatment of the books was a little too rough for her to be a real bookseller, but it was the stacks of unlimited books that made her what she was.
The further she read, the more her expression darkened. By the time she reached the last page, her face was completely frozen.
“How?” Ende gazed at the book in disbelief.
The page detailed Mutsuko and her gang’s escape from the collapsing island, and then, their safe return home. This was not the ending she’d expected.
She had set the stage, even combining alien lifeforms and mythical creatures. Mutsuko should have died in the face of so overpowering a concept. The only valid resolution should have been the complete destruction of the entire party.
But that hadn’t happened. The monster had been destroyed without ever revealing its full power, and even the foreshadowing for its return had been nipped in the bud. After all that, it could nev
er return again.
It was impossible to overturn a story once told, or to force a development that completely defied logic. That was the unbreakable rule.
“Is Mutsuko Sakaki really that powerful?” Ende wondered.
She had twisted the story, forcing it to its least likely conclusion. Ende pondered for a time about what to do next.
At last, she concluded, “Never mind. It’s such a pain...” and she threw the book away. It sank into another mountain of books.
Really, it had just been about Soul Reader from the start. She’d decided to kill Mutsuko Sakaki because the girl got on her nerves, but it was nothing to get obsessed over. Quite the contrary: obsessing over it any further could be the true fatal mistake.
“It passed the time, at least,” she breathed, aware that there was still a hint of strain in her tone. “But that Yuichi Sakaki... he’s trouble, too.”
All he was was physically strong, but that was what made him so dangerous. It was easy to bend logic when it came to hazy, abstract story concepts like magic and psychic powers. Such things could easily be wiped away.
But an opponent who simply trained, day after day, to become stronger, building a power with a foundation in one’s own self-confidence... that was a hard type to crush.
“Well, Yuichi Sakaki’s already mixed up with her, so maybe I’ll just sit back and watch, for now,” she said. “We’ll wait and see... if my story and yours will ever cross again.”
Ende grabbed a random book and began reading a new story.
✽✽✽✽✽
The day after returning from the island, they headed back home.
The trip took several hours, between the local buses and the bullet train, which meant the sun was already setting by the time Yuichi arrived back in Seishin.
There was something reassuring about the site of the old, familiar station. It felt like he was back to his everyday life.
“You’re going to leave your injured little sister behind?!” Yoriko pouted when he said he was going to walk Aiko home.
“You’ve been treated, so now you just need rest,” Yuichi told her. “Go back home and go to bed already, Yori.”
Yoriko grumbled and complained, but he patted her on the head, and she sullenly did as she was told.
Humanity’s Extinction Happens During Summer Vacation?! Page 16