c14 6

Saying, I can’t take any more of this, one member of the band left, then another, until eventually the singer was alone.
With only a singer, there was no band anymore. Despite that, the singer still called himself a band, sincerely putting his life into the songs he wrote, filling them with all his heart.
He sang about love and hatred, justice and injustice, the artifice of morality, the contradictions of the world, truth and lies, and freedom. He did it all without fear, facing the people head-on.
“You know, everyone says they like me,” the singer addressed the crowd. “Why the hell is that? What’s so great about me? That I can sing? That I write lyrics that resonate with you? Do you feel like I speak for you? Or is it because being the kind of person who likes me makes you feel special? Whatever it is, that’s not why I sing. I sing for me only. These are my feelings, not yours. We’re completely different people. We have almost nothing in common, okay? When you talk like you get me or something, what’s with that? I mean, I don’t understand any of you people, okay? Understanding people’s not that easy, is it? Are you all really that serious? I can’t promise anything other than that I won’t lie to you. How do you all feel about that?”
There were those who saw the singer as a victim of commercialism, a martyr for art, and forgave him.
Others condemned him, saying he was a child whose ego had gotten too big, an immature, wannabe revolutionary, and a clown who misunderstood things.
Yet others said the singer thought he was a tragic genius, but a failure to adapt to the world basically showed a lack of talent, and while maybe he had put out some good songs, they predicted, with cold laughter, that he would disappear, soon to be forgotten.
“Fine, let them say what they like,” the singer said dismissively, shooting back at his critics in his songs.
An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.
If they weren’t ready to be punched, they shouldn’t have raised their fists in the first place. They thought they were casting stones at him from afar, but the singer wasn’t some scarecrow that would stand still. He could go up to them and throw stones right back.
“If someone gets you, you get them right back.” That was the singer’s motto. He didn’t hold back the things he thought; he put them into words, and sharpened them.
When the singer’s words became sharp blades, he couldn’t help but hurt people. However, even things said casually can, at times, carve deeply into the heart. That is what it means to be human. No one can live without being hurt, or hurting others.
Is it not beautiful that, even as our bodies and hearts are covered in wounds, dripping blood, and we nearly die of blood loss, we still drag ourselves onward, ever onward?
If someone doesn’t want to be hurt, they should hang themselves and die. Then they’ll never be hurt again. We’re all going to die eventually, so today, tomorrow, it’s all the same.
How dare they up and die like that! Someone might get angry. Why did they have to die? Someone might be saddened. But the dead will never know that.
If it hurts, if it’s unbearable, and they can’t take it, they should just run away. Even if people try to stop them, there’s no stopping a person truly intent on ending their own life. The emergency exit known as our own deaths is always right beside us, and it’s a realistic option.
Some people say it’s a grave sin, but even if you were to lay the weight of that sin on the grave of the deceased, only the living could be sickened by it, and the dead would not feel a thing. That is because the dead are no more.
The singer never once said, Don’t criticize me, don’t hit me, don’t kick me, don’t throw stones at me.
“Do whatever you want. Say what you like. Hit me if you want to. You can bite me, and if you want to bash my head open with a rock, do it. But I’ll be doing what I want to, too, and I’m not gonna take it quietly. Let’s make a bloody mess of each other. It’s fine. We’ll be even that way, right?”
One by one, people moved away from the singer and his one man band.
One person said this.
“I can’t take this anymore. You’re exhausting to be around.”
In the end, you’re just being selfish, some said, insulting the singer.
“Yeah, I’m selfish. What of it?”
“Don’t be defiant. This is why you’ll always be a child, unable to change. You never grow as a person. Why don’t you try thinking about others? Grow up already. You can’t, can you? You’re just a dumb kid, after all. I bet you think it’s cool to act this way. Well, you’re wrong.”
That person shouted until they were red in the face, then went off somewhere and never came back.
There was someone who declared, “You’re through,” and then turned their backs on the singer, too. “To be blunt, everyone thinks so. You’re the only one who doesn’t get it.”
The singer was mystified. He was making his songs with sincerity, singing his heart out, the same as he ever had. The singer hadn’t changed in the least. Despite that, his bandmates started saying, We can do it, we’ll be a hit, with dreams stained by greed. People sang his praises, all of them started feeling good about it on their own. Eventually they started to complain and shower him with abuse, saying they’d been wrong about him, or that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. They could only take so much, they’d say, and then they eventually left the singer’s side.
The singer had loved a number of women, but they were the same.
At first every woman said things like, This is destiny, or, I’ll never break up with you, no matter what, or I want to be together until the day I die, or, Please, just don’t abandon me. But then eventually they would start to complain, saying, You don’t know what kindness is, or, You’ve gone off the rails, or, You’re a failure, or, You’re defective, or, You’re a psychotic monster. In the end they would say, Give me back the time I spent with you, and, You’re worthless, and, You’re no different from a pimp, and all sorts of other horrible things. When he kicked them out of anger they’d go on about how he injured them, or he’d given them a nosebleed, or he’d twisted their bones. Some even demanded compensation money.
There was just one.
She was different from all of them.
The day he met her, “I don’t like your songs,” she told the singer. “Your songs are all force. They lack delicacy. It’s like you’re intoxicated with yourself. They’re improvised, one-offs. Only good in the moment, without a shred of universality. You say your songs are art, but I don’t think you could be more conceited. What you do is like masturbating in front of people, and then saying, ‘Look at me, brazenly jacking off in public like this, aren’t I awesome?’”
The singer was, of course, enraged. However, it was true the singer had focused on the one-time nature of a given moment, and rather than refine what he was saying with craft, he expressed things as they really were. He had also basically been tooting his own horn, saying, If I want to masturbate, I’ll do it in front of people. I’m so honest. This is how the real deal acts. I’m awesome, huh? She was on the mark. It would be wrong to get mad.
“You may be right. But it pisses me off,” the singer told her.
“That’s a very cultured attitude, and I find it more likable than your songs.”
“I dunno what you’re talking about, but I wanna screw you now. You mind?”
“I like the way you think. I want to have wild sex, over and over, and then I’ll observe you closely. That’s my style, actually.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
Thus, the curtain rose on their relationship. They argued frequently, but the singer never once raised a hand against her. That was because she had told him, The moment you get violent, I’ll hate you, and I’ll break things off, no arguments. She had said it clearly in advance, so the singer knew without a doubt that she would do it.
She was a very honest person. When he was with her, it made the singer realize something. He wasn’t honest, he was straining himself to try and be that way.
In order to demonstrate his own sincerity, the singer had needed to put down other people. You’re liars, living lives full of deception, but I’m different, completely different. I’m honest, and pure, and beautiful.
She wasn’t like that. She was simply honest, simply herself.
The singer had carried a sign with honesty written on it, dressed himself in clothes in the colors of sincerity, and constantly said, I’m an honest person, trying to be recognized as the most honest person in the world.
No matter what people thought of her, she seemed unaffected by it. She seemed imperceptible, impossible to grasp, yet at the same time he could sense she wasn’t telling a single lie.
The singer believed honesty was righteous. He thought that one should be honest because it was the right thing to do, and that was why he had to be honest.
She didn’t care one whit about righteousness. She was simply honest. Even if she wore clothes as she walked around, in her case it was no different than if she were naked. The singer found her beautiful, and when he told her as much she looked blankly at him.
Occasionally, she would sing. Since she was so good, he asked if she had been taught by someone. It turned out her mother had been a singer when she was younger, and she had grown up listening to her lullabies. She did not write songs. When she sang, it was her mother’s songs, or songs that were popular. However, when she sang them, they all resonated as if they were her own song.
The singer got depressed.
“When I hear you sing, it feels like my heart is being torn apart. Talent is a cruel thing. I must have felt there was something lacking in my songs, and I needed to do something about it. So I wrote lyrics no one else could. I wanted to be special. It was all for that. If I had the talent, I should have been able to make any song my own just by singing it. But I can’t do that.”
When he said that, she got a mysterious look on her face, and said to him, “If you’re going to get that disappointed, why don’t you just give up singing altogether?”
However, if he gave up singing, the singer would be out of a job, what minimal income he had would be reduced to nothing, and when someone asked, Who are you? He wouldn’t be able to say,
Here, this is what I do, anymore. If he lost his place as a singer, what would happen to the singer?
He was afraid not to be a singer anymore. The singer honestly opened up and revealed those feelings to her.
“If you lose it, it might be hard on you for a while, but you might be surprised to find you’re fine with it,” she said as if it was no big deal.
“I’m scared of losing you, too.”
“Why would you lose me?”
“I mean, I can’t imagine you wanting to be with me if I wasn’t a singer anymore.”
“I don’t care whether or not you’re a singer. I never liked your songs in the first place. Didn’t I tell you that at the very beginning?”
The singer laughed at how silly it was. Soon enough, he was crying. He decided to stop singing. Then he said to her, “Why don’t we go on a trip? Let’s go somewhere far away.”
“Okay,” she responded immediately, but then uncharacteristically added a condition. “If we’ll never be coming back, let’s leave on a trip. Right now.”
When their bags were packed, they walked off hand in hand. There was no destination in mind. They’d go where their feet took them, heading whatever direction they felt like, and when they didn’t feel like going any further, they’d stay there. No one could order them around. Even if someone tried to tell them what to do, they wouldn’t listen.
They decided they would look only at what they wanted to, with their eyes wide open, and if there were things they didn’t want to see, they would pass right by.
Whether it was in a field of grass wet from the morning mist, or on a night where the moon’s reflection shone in a lake, she would sing whenever the mood took her. The traveler who was no longer a singer listened adoringly to her songs.
On the day many stars fell, she said, “This trip will end some day, won’t it?”
“Even if the journey ends, I’ll still be by your side.”
“But eventually both you and I will die.”
“Not yet we won’t.”
“But it’s a matter of time. Do you want to go before me, or after?”
“I never want you to die.”
“Well, you die first then. I’ll see you off, then die alone.”
“I don’t want that, either.”
“Neither do I, you know.”
We still have to die, she said with resignation. The traveler had already loved her more than anything, but now she was maddeningly precious to him, and irreplaceable. And so, he came to realize that what she had been seeing and what he himself had been seeing was similar, but different. That was because for the traveler, he had been so elated the journey seemed to have no end in sight. However, she had never once averted her eyes from the truth that every journey must come to an end. Like grains of sand draining away in an hourglass, their time left together was running out. There was no way to slow that speed. Moreover, they had no way of knowing when their sand would run out.
Beneath a sky of falling stars, the traveler hugged her tight and prayed to God. Please, let me be with her forever. Even if we’re fated to be separated by death, don’t pull her away from me no matter what.
Ohh, I’m... the traveler thought. He didn’t want to say ‘happy’. If he thought he was happier than anything, than anyone, at that very moment he would have no choice but to stop time, to end his life. He would kill her, then kill himself. He didn’t want to do it, but he’d have no choice.
“Hey, I want to see the sea,” she said.
“Sounds good. Let’s go to the sea.”
Even if the journey would end, they were both still alive. If she wanted it, the traveler would take her anywhere.
On their way to the sea, unprompted, she began talking about her past.
“I had a big sister. Six years older than me. She was real pretty. When I was nine, she got sick and died. That changed everything. Even though the one whose life was cut short was my sister’s, not mine. When my sister died, my life changed.”
“Do you ever think stuff like, I wish I could’ve shown this sea to my sister?”
“Not in the least. The disease that made my sister waste away was a nasty one. She suffered a lot. That’s why when she couldn’t take it anymore, one day, she said to me, ‘You’ve got it great, huh. You’re in no real pain, and you can keep on living. For a long, long time. You’ll be able to do so much. I envy you more than you could ever know.’ My sister was crying. It’s pathetic, but at that moment I hated my sister. I mean, it wasn’t my fault she got sick. I wanted to say, ‘Don’t take it out on me,’ but I held back. She was going to die soon, so I pitied her.”
“I’ll bet your sister apologized.”
“Yeah. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ I told her. ‘I’m not going to die yet, so I’ll be fine. You can say even more awful things.’ But after that, my sister never complained again, and then she died.”
The two of them spent several days by the seaside. Thinking about it later, they shouldn’t have been there. They should have left immediately. However, staying a few days in one place, longer if they felt like it, wasn’t particularly uncommon for them. Like always, they rested their wings there until they decided where to go next.
It was a misty morning. In fog so dense they couldn’t make out their own feet, the two of them first encountered it.
Before thinking it might be dangerous, curiosity won out. The two went to the seaside. The mist was so thick that they would lose sight of their fingertips if they stuck their hand out in front of them. Relying almost entirely on sound, they walked as close as they could to the shoreline, holding hands, of course.
Even though they were holding hands, he started to feel like they might get separated, and the traveler got uneasy. The longer they were together, the less he wanted to part. However, because they hadn’t parted, there was nothing he could do. He could feel himself going crazy with frustration, but at the same time he was unsatisfied, and the feeling that he was not happy satisfied the traveler.
She didn’t say a word. The traveler walked in silence, too.
What was with this fog, though? It wouldn’t be odd for the sun to have come out be now, but he saw no sign of it. The waves had occasionally wet their shoes up until a little while ago, but now it was strange. He walked and walked in the direction of the sea, but the sound of the waves got further away.
Like before, she said nothing. Suddenly, the traveler found himself wanting to hear her sing.

He was about to ask for a song when suddenly she said, “Hey, where are we?”
 

9. Life is Full of Traps [rip_van_winkle]


If he hadn’t been told there was a town here once, Haruhiro would never have noticed.
The whole of Ruins No. 7 was in a low depression, and they could look out over the whole of it from the edge.
To describe it simply, it was a pit full of holes. What was more, those holes were in indescribable shapes.
No, maybe they weren’t indescribable. They were kind of warped, roundish holes, but seeing so many of them so close together in the ground like this, he found it unbearably unpleasant. It gave him the chills, his body itched, and he wanted to look away. That visceral hatred for them never weakened.
Haruhiro wasn’t a fan of beehives, but this was way worse than a honeycomb.
Alice was beside Haruhiro, looking at the pit full of holes, seemingly unfazed. It didn’t seem to make Alice feel much of anything.
I can’t be compatible with anyone who’s okay with this, Haruhiro thought. I can’t imagine us ever understanding each other, but when I get close to Alice, I can stop being me, and become us. Or rather, I just do. Can I control whether I become us or not?
He wouldn’t be able to say for sure without testing it, but it was clearly caused by Haruhiro’s magic, Resonance. It was apparently an exceptionally rare variety of magic, and Haruhiro’s was the first case of it Alice had seen, too. Because of that, there was still a lot they didn’t know.
There had to be a secret, or at least unknown, elements of
Resonance. Like, maybe it didn’t just strengthen another’s magic, but it let him inside their heart. That, or it made him sympathize with them.
He hadn’t said a word of this to Alice yet. His reasoning was that it was better not to say anything vague, and he’d somehow convinced himself that was why, but the truth was it’d just be awkward to talk about. Like, anyone would hate what he was doing, right?
Intentional or not, Haruhiro had peered inside Alice’s heart. If he had the choice, he wouldn’t have wanted to. But Alice saw Haruhiro’s Resonance as some kind of power-up item. One that had the name Alice C on it, and could be used at any time.
More than that, despite being an item, it activated automatically, and when Alice wanted it the item said, I’ll be right there, and came over on its own.
Convenient.
If there was an item like that, he’d have wanted it. Oh, right, there was one right here.
However, good and bad were two sides of the same coin, and it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that a convenient item had drawbacks.
Normally, when you take medicine, you do it aware of the effects and side effects. Whether what he said was going to be vague or not, Haruhiro probably needed to open up to Alice about this.
Should I say it? How should I say it? Maybe I shouldn’t after all? No, I have to, right?
While he was still agonizing over it, they came to Ruins No. 7.
“Alice,” Haruhiro began.
“Shut up.”
I mean, this is the response I get, after all that? He was frustrated.
I decide, “Okay, I’m gonna say it,” and of course this is how it goes. We just don’t get along. It’s not a matter of like or dislike. I think we’re a bad match. We’ve been together for a while, but it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe I should just become us. Hold on tight, activate Resonance, and see what happens. Do I just suddenly hug Alice? That’s not gonna work. I’ll get pushed away, then pummeled.
I’ve got a lot of other things I want to say. Like I want to search for my comrades, I want to find my comrades, and I want to see my comrades. I say that occasionally, but Alice either ignores it outright, or brushes me off with a, “Yeah, we can do that later.” Alice is really good at giving off the impression that bringing things up won’t do any good.
Beyond Ruins No. 7 a forest that was redder than red spread out. It wasn’t red red. It had a yellow tinge to it. It was vibrant color, but too bright, and with a depth to it. Ruins No. 7 was close enough to the Scarlet Forest that he could see it from here.
According to Alice, the king’s castle in the center of the Scarlet Forest was Ruins No. 1, or something. It might have seemed Ruins No. 1 and No. 7 were right next to each other, but that wasn’t it; the Scarlet Forest around Ruins No. 1 was just incredibly vast.
The Scarlet Forest was swarming with monsters so strong that even Alice powered up with Haruhiro’s Resonance couldn’t defeat.
They couldn’t reach the king’s castle without crossing the forest, but getting through the forest was incredibly difficult. In fact, it was fair to say it was impossible. For Haruhiro and Alice as they were now, at least.
“That forest, it wasn’t always there, right?” Haruhiro said. “It’s not the ruins itself...”
In Parano, with the exception of the Iron Tower of Heaven, the Valley of Worldly Desires, the Sanzu River, and the seven Ruins, everything was in flux and changed without human intervention.
Though Alice didn’t look in Haruhiro’s direction, he got a response for once.
“Well, yeah,” Alice said, “back when I fled the castle, it was a lot smaller.”
“That’s how you were able to get out of the forest?”
“I only went through with it because there was a chance of success. The Scarlet Forest was created by Sleeping Man. Sleeping Man is asleep somewhere in the forest still, dreaming.”
“Then if we find him and wake him up...”
“Look for a guy whose face I don’t know? In that forest? Don’t be crazy.”
“I guess we can’t get through to the castle without going through a shortcut, huh?”
“Well, if your Resonance were more impressive, I might’ve been able to brute force my way through.”
“Complaining about it to me’s not going to help...”
“They’re coming out.”
“Huh?”
“Look.”
Haruhiro looked in the direction Alice gestured.
That, huh?
He saw something crawl out of one of the hundreds of holes. It was pretty far off, so he couldn’t make it out. It was probably human, though.
Alice grabbed Haruhiro by the head and forced him to crouch. “Hide.”
“If you’d just told me to...”
“Shut up. You’re annoying.”
The two of them crouched low, watching what the person who came out of the hole would do.
“I knew all along that Ruins No. 7... Rainbow Mole’s Nest was connected to that piece of shit’s castle.”
“Rainbow... Mole?”
“Same as with Sleeping Man, I haven’t met him. He’s been around longer than me. I hear Rainbow Mole dug all those holes.”
“There are all sorts, huh...”
“There were more, back before that piece of shit started capturing and killing all sorts of folks. The rest became his vassals, like Ahiru, Sleeping Man, or Rainbow Mole. There were a lot of people who were stomped flat and became shadows, too.”
“Shadows?”
“If you just watch, you’ll see.”
That was all Alice said before going quiet.
The person who came out of the hole was walking a narrow path between the holes. Though it was narrow, it was still wide enough for two adults to pass each other.
It was too soon to be able to make things out clearly, but judging from the color of the coat, it had to be Ahiru. Ahiru used the secret passage in Rainbow Mole’s Nest to go to the castle, meet the king, and now he was returning.
“You’re meeting up with him, right?” Haruhiro asked.
Alice didn’t answer. There was nothing he could do about that, so he followed Ahiru with his eyes. They had gone to the trouble of roping Ahiru into spying for them, so what exactly was Ahiru up to here? He’d have liked a careful explanation.
“You could trust me a little more...”
“Yeah, that’s a shadow,” Alice said, adding, “Knew it.” A shadow? Where?
“Ah...!” Haruhiro blinked.
Could that be it, maybe?
A black form appeared from the same hole Ahiru had come out of. It looked like a shadow. But Parano had no sun, so nothing cast anything fit to be called a shadow.
Wait, what was even casting that shadow? Shadows were made when light was obstructed and an area was darkened. It was impossible for a shadow to exist on its own.
No, Alice had just been saying that Parano was a place where things happened even if they were impossible. As well as that there were a lot of people who were stomped by the king and became shadows.
The shadow seemed to be tailing Ahiru, but perhaps because it was keeping a reasonable distance, Ahiru had long since stopped looking back. Had he not noticed the shadow, or was he just pretending not to?
“What’s with the shadow?” Haruhiro asked.
“They’re the real spies. Not that they’ve got any real intelligence. They don’t have much... I guess you’d call it independence. They patrol around the castle, and they follow the vassals and monitor them like that.”
“So Ahiru’s being watched?”
“Not always. There were no shadows in Ruins No. 5, as a matter of fact.”
“Maybe... you weren’t checking all of the statues, you were looking for shadows?”
“Why would I want to check out some crummy statues Ahiru made?”
“Nah, I thought it was weird...”
“I couldn’t make contact with Ahiru if he had shadows following him.”
“What about taking them out?”
“I mean, they’re shadows. I don’t know how to kill them. I guess, in theory, if you shone a bright light on them, that might help, but where’re we gonna find a light like that? Even if we had one, most shadows are humans who ended up like that because they defied that piece of shit.”
“It’s better not to erase them, then.”
“You might end up a shadow yourself, you know?”
“Same goes for you, Alice.”
“That shithead wants to make me submit to him. He won’t just turn me into a shadow without talking first. That gives me an opening.”
Alice stood up. It seemed the plan was to move away from here. Where to now?
Even if he was getting sick of all this, Haruhiro had no choice but to follow. His magic was Resonance, after all. Thanks to that, he couldn’t even protect himself alone.
Philia drew power from objects. Narci enhanced one’s own power.
What was Doppel again? If he recalled, Alice said something about those with low self-esteem being able to put out doppels.
Narci had to be the opposite of that.
For Philia, a dependence on the object might have been key. Alice had said something about a person’s mental stance, their tendency deciding a person’s magic, too.
Well, what’s Resonance, then?
He couldn’t do anything alone. And he could sympathize with others. Well, it wasn’t so much that he could as that it just happened. When it activated, he became that person.
Thinking about it, isn’t that exactly who I am...?
Alice was already walking off.

Chapter end