Chapter Three

Chapter Three

 

1.

 

NAOMI STUFFED HIS BACKPACK with textbooks and a school uniform.

He was wearing a sweatsuit today. It wasn’t his typical outfit, so putting it on felt a bit exciting, almost like he was on his way to a class trip or something.

Leaving his bedroom, he slid the door shut quietly behind him, then snuck down the hallway toward the front door. As he started to turn its doorknob, he heard his mother stirring in her room.

“Naomi?” she called sleepily.

Naomi had thought up an excuse for his early-morning outing, but if he could leave without being forced to explain, that was definitely better.

“I’ll see you later!”

Hurriedly stepping outside, he closed and locked the door behind him, then rushed down the apartment building stairs. Making a beeline for the first-floor storage area, he grabbed his bike and hopped on.

Once he got moving, he realized it was chillier out than he’d expected. Although it was April now, it was still brisk outside at 6 a.m. Maybe he should have brought a jacket or something.

Naomi made his way across Nishioji Street, savoring its unusual emptiness.

His destination today was Narabigaoka, a well-known scenic spot a few blocks from Hanazono Station. It was a gently sloping hill, its surface lushly green and dotted with ancient tombs; it rose to a height of roughly fifty meters above the residential neighborhood that had grown up around it. It reminded Naomi of the hill behind the school in Doraemon.

There were maintained walking paths running through the mountain itself, popular with hikers seeking a little light exertion. Today, though, Naomi had ventured off the beaten path and wandered deep into the trees.

Eventually, he found himself standing with Sensei in a small clearing surrounded by dense foliage—a secluded corner of the forest, a place where no one ever went.

“Start by picturing the result you want.” Sensei was giving Naomi a lesson—living up to his name, he approached it almost like a lecture. “Make your mental image as vivid as possible. Start with something very familiar and very simple. Plastic, rubber, paper, whatever.”

Naomi closed his eyes and focused.

He was kneeling in the dirt with his right hand pressed against the ground. On that hand, he wore the glove that the odd crow had turned itself into.

Now that his eyes were shut, the image in his mind seemed to grow just a little clearer. At first he’d tried to imagine a sheet of paper, but that just made the image of a novel pop into his mind; he’d ended up switching to plastic instead.

He visualized a small plastic block—a plain, unremarkable lump of raw material.

Gradually, he felt the sensation of the dirt beneath his hand begin to change. It wasn’t a sudden, dramatic change; it felt like the area was being slowly drained of both warmth and coldness, somehow growing less defined. It wasn’t something he’d ever felt before.

“Now reach out your hand in your mind’s eye, and…” Sensei paused, as if waiting for the right moment.

“Grab it!”

At that forceful command, Naomi visualized his hand grasping the piece of plastic. His actual right hand moved as well, grabbing reflexively at the ground, and somehow, it actually took hold of something.

His hand, which had been pressed firmly against the dirt, reached down into it. It felt like the hard-packed earth had suddenly grown soft and pliable, allowing his fingers to sink right through it.

Startled, Naomi’s eyes snapped open.

His hand was still touching the ground, its fingers spread wide. Had that sensation been an illusion, then? It had felt so real. He lifted his hand off the ground and revealed a small object. A white lump of plastic in the shape of a hexagon.

It was exactly what he’d visualized.

“It worked! It actually worked!” Naomi cried. Snatching up the object, he poked at it gingerly with his naked left hand. It looked and felt exactly like a normal piece of plastic.

“Not bad for your first try,” said Sensei with a tone of mild satisfaction. He drew a little closer and pointed at the strange glove on Naomi’s hand. “That’s the God Hand.”

As he spoke, Sensei snapped his fingers.

In an instant, a glove appeared on his right hand, the exact same one that Naomi was currently wearing. This startled him for a moment, but then he realized it likely wasn’t real. Sensei had transformed his arm into that goofy metal claw the other day, after all—this was probably more of the same, just a copy of the glove on his avatar.

Sensei turned his hand so the palm faced upward.

“The God Hand works by directly accessing the data AllTale uses to generate this simulation. It can rewrite the fabric of this world.”

Suddenly, water started pouring out of Sensei’s hand. The flow grew faster and faster until it was gushing out in torrents.

“You can turn air into water.”

The water stopped coming, then disappeared entirely. Sensei squatted down and put his hand to the ground. When he opened it again, an enormous gem the size of Naomi’s fist had appeared inside it.

“Dirt into precious stones.”

With a wave of his hand, the gem disappeared too. Sensei got back to his feet. This time, he grabbed at the empty air.

His hand seemed to close around an invisible cylinder. In answer to the motion, a solid substance took shape in midair. A white metal rod grew down to the ground; after a moment, Naomi realized it was the pole of a traffic sign.

“Nothing into something.”

Sensei grabbed the sign he’d just created. The thing was solid metal and more than two meters in length, but he swung it around like a baton. In the blink of an eye, it had also disappeared.

“All that was just an illusion,” he continued. “I’m only an avatar, so my access rights within AllTale are strictly limited. I can’t interact with anything in this world, so showing you some magic tricks is the best I can do.”

Sensei’s eyes turned down to his illusionary glove.

“But the God Hand has the permissions necessary to change this world on a physical level. It can touch objects in this world and interfere with their reality. Once you learn how to use that thing, you’ll be able to do all the tricks I just showed you for real.”

Once again, Naomi looked at his hand. Did that mean—

“So, I can do anything, basically?”

“In theory, sure. But there are a number of important limitations.” Once again, Sensei squatted down.

“First of all,” he said as he touched the ground with his glove and pulled up a free-standing whiteboard out of the dirt, “the glove can only rewrite things it’s in direct physical contact with.”

He turned the palm of his hand toward Naomi. Naomi flinched, expecting something to pop out at him, but nothing happened.

“You can’t use the glove to create something at a distance.”

“O-okay...”

“Secondly...” Sensei snapped his fingers, and illustrations and writing appeared in marker across the surface of the whiteboard. Naomi hurried over and sat down on his knees in front of it. “The time it takes to execute your commands will depend on the amount of data being altered.”

Naomi stared up at the board. There were chemical symbols and molecular diagrams sketched out on its surface: Fe, Cu, O2, H2O. All very simple molecules even he could make sense of.

“When we’re dealing with simple substances—stuff like water that has a very basic structure—it’s all quite simple. You can make that sort of thing easily and delete it just as fast.”

Naomi nodded. That was an easy enough concept to grasp.

“When it comes to complex objects, though, any modification will take time, and you may struggle to visualize them in sufficient detail. Intricate devices like PCs or smartphones are particularly tough. Same goes for manufactured machinery with a million different parts.”

Naomi considered the point. He might be able to create a passable imitation of the exterior of a car if pressed, but he had no idea what the interior components looked like. The same applied to computers.

“And of course, the most difficult of all to modify are living things.”

Sensei snapped his fingers. The writing on the whiteboard instantly changed, and new drawings appeared there, simple sketches of a dog, a cat, and a human being.

“Does that apply to everything that’s alive?”

“All living things are in a constant state of change. They require a vast amount of data to simulate. Here’s a quick question, on that note…” Sensei pointed a finger at Naomi. “Name the part of the human body that contains the largest quantity of data.”

“Um—” All the body parts and organs Naomi knew spun through his head, but after a moment, the wheel stopped at the most obvious answer.

“The brain?”

Sensei nodded, and Naomi breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

“The human brain’s storage capacity is enormous, and its contents are constantly shifting over time. Human consciousness, the manifestation of those contents, is essentially the densest possible form of information. Even with the God Hand, messing with that would be difficult.”

Naomi studied the thing he was wearing on his hand once again.

When Sensei had first described it, he’d assumed it was an all-powerful tool. Something capable of rewriting the fabric of reality should be able to change literally anything in this world. A part of him had hoped it might make impossible-seeming things very easy—like going out with Ichigyou Ruri.

The very idea still struck him as ridiculous, honestly. Naomi knew he wasn’t particularly appealing, even compared to other guys his age. He couldn’t think of a single reason why she would ever be attracted to him. They were supposedly going to start going out at some point in the future, but that seemed like an embarrassing fantasy right now.

And yet, this glove could rewrite the world. He’d hoped it could just…resolve the whole thing instantly, somehow.

Sensei had already snuffed out that brief glimmer of hope. The God Hand couldn’t make her fall in love with him, even if he wanted it to.

“I made that thing to help you prevent the accident.” When Naomi looked up, he found that Sensei was shaking his head in disapproval. “It’s not going to help you on the romantic front.”

There he goes reading my mind again…

Naomi averted his eyes awkwardly. Sensei was him, in a sense, so of course he’d know what he was thinking. That also made it impossible to deflect the criticism. All he could really do was pout.

What am I supposed to do, then? he thought, staring resentfully at the older man. If you know everything about me, you know I’m not capable of flirting with a girl.

Looking like he’d received that telepathic message, Sensei smirked evilly.

“Weren’t you listening to me last time? You can do anything now, Naomi.” He reached inside his coat. “The God Hand’s job is to prevent the accident…”

When he pulled his hand out, it was holding a notebook. It was a perfectly ordinary thing with a blue cover and a brand logo on the front, the kind used by college students. But judging from its tattered condition, it had been in active use for quite some time.

“And it’s my job to help you get the girl.”

On the cover of that notebook were the words: Ultimate Manual.

 

2.

 

IN KYOTO, THE BUSES were always crowded. You started off with that as a baseline, and then guessed how crowded it would be based on the route and the time of day.

For example, the morning rush hour in spring would see commuters jostling alongside tourists and kids on school trips. The buses got so overstuffed that no one could get on them for hours at a time. Once things got that bad, it was usually best to give up and tell yourself they weren’t running at all.

Comparatively speaking, the bus Naomi was currently riding wasn’t too packed. He was on the 13 Line a bit after 3 p.m, well before the evening rush, but after the flow of tourists had slowed down. Even so, the seats were all taken by sightseers heading to Nijo Castle or Kinkaku Temple. Six people, including Naomi, stood in the aisles.

Holding a strap with one hand, Naomi kept his phone up to his mouth with the other. A cord snaked from it to the earphones he was wearing. To anyone who saw him, it would look like he was on a phone call.

Naomi glanced to his side. Sensei was standing there, holding his tattered notebook open in his hands.

“On April 20th,” he read out in a voice only Naomi could hear, “I took the bus to borrow a book from the Kita branch of the city library.”

Naomi leaned over to look at the notebook and Sensei obligingly turned it in his direction. Thanks to their height difference, it was right at eye level. The pages were covered in text. There were numerous dated entries, each accompanied by handwritten descriptions of various mundane events.

“Something happened that day to bring the two of us a bit closer together,” Sensei said.

Naomi brought his phone a little closer to his mouth. This was a technique he’d thought up after humiliating himself the other day—a way to talk with Sensei in public without attracting attention. He’d just pretend he was on the phone with someone, instead of speaking to an invisible person standing next to him. It wasn’t especially polite behavior, but it beat getting looked at like some kind of lunatic.

“So, in other words,” he said, his voice soft with anxiety, “I just have to do what you did back then, Sensei. And then I’ll end up dating her, just like in the history AllTale recorded.”

He was thinking it over even as he spoke the words. It did seem obvious enough, really. If Sensei was telling the truth about the way things had turned out with Ruri, then events would naturally proceed in that direction.

But in that case—

“Couldn’t you just do nothing at all, then? Maybe we should just let things take their normal course.”

It couldn’t hurt to throw the idea out there. If events were going to move forward on their own, their efforts might backfire.

“Remember what I told you on the roof, Naomi,” Sensei replied sharply. “AllTale has infinite storage capacity. When one section of its records changes, it generates a whole string of brand-new events.”

Naomi nodded. That was the only reason Sensei’s plan to save Ruri’s life was even possible.

“The same thing’s happening right now, even as we speak. When I came here from the future, my presence immediately began to alter the course this world was taking.”

“Oh. Then things started changing the moment we met?”

“That’s right. The divergence was small at first, but over time, it’s going to grow more pronounced. There’s no telling how far off track things might get if we sit on our hands. That’s why you need to make an active effort to stay on the rails.”

“Hmm, I see…”

Naomi nodded knowingly, but in all honesty, he didn’t really get it. Sensei was his only source of information on how all this worked, though. He had to take his word for it on this stuff.

As Sensei had repeatedly pointed out, Naomi was a resident of this world. The system that kept it running was beyond his comprehension. It didn’t matter what was happening to the data behind the scenes—he could only perceive his own life as a single chain of events.

Naomi found himself looking up at Sensei’s face. This man had broken free of that chain. He’d chosen to step back in time and participate in a retake version of his own life.

What could that possibly feel like? Maybe he felt like a god. Or maybe, somewhere deep down, he felt like he was doing something wrong.

“Don’t look so nervous, Naomi.”

Naomi blinked as Sensei clapped his notebook shut.

“Just leave it to me, all right? You’re not going to fail as long as you do what I tell you. Your victory is basically preordained. No reason to overthink it, really. Just trust me, and follow the instructions in this notebook.”

Turning the notebook over in his hands, he showed Naomi its cover once again.

“It’s not every day you get a self-help book from the future, right?”

Naomi flinched a little. The words self-help book brought to mind some painful recent memories. His recent purchase, How to Be Decisive, contained more than eighty pieces of advice, all of which had been no help whatsoever. He’d wasted 2000 yen on that stupid thing.

Perhaps he bore some amount of blame for his failure, since he’d been too much of a chicken to act on the book’s advice. But come on! That stupid book just said do this and do that without a single word about what the results would be. It was always terrifying to take a risk without any guarantee of a decent outcome, right?

This notebook was different, though.

The Ultimate Manual in Sensei’s hand was a description of the future. It was offering him a guaranteed, preset path that could only lead to success.

A bit belatedly, Naomi was realizing just how amazing that was. This was exactly what he’d been looking for so desperately last week. It was the single greatest self-help book in the entire world.

“So, what should I do first, Sensei?” he asked excitedly, his heart dancing in his chest. He was eager to give this thing a try.

“Right,” Sensei said, nodding in a mildly pompous manner. “Start by taking out a book.”

“Yes, sir!”

Naomi pushed his phone into his jacket pocket and retrieved a paperback book from his bag. He was always carrying at least one with him.

“Now open it.”

More instructions already!

Naomi had put away his phone, so he couldn’t respond verbally anymore. Still, he snapped open the book with a sharp, decisive movement, like a fresh recruit carrying out his orders.

“Now drop it.”

Again, he executed his instructions faithfully. The book flopped straight to the floor and fell shut. A moment later, the bus swayed slightly, causing the paperback to slide a few feet along the floor.

“Now go pick it up.”

This seemed like a pretty involved operation, but he was keeping up so far.

The bus swayed again, and Naomi’s book slid further forward. He chased after it hurriedly on his hands and knees, managing to catch it just before it could slide out of reach.

What the hell am I doing?

A moment of self-reflection caused Naomi’s faith to waiver. Was this sequence of events really described in that journal? It was hard to see what he could possibly be accomplishing.

The bus swayed again, and Naomi’s head smacked into the backside of the person standing in front of him.

“Uh, I’m sorry…” He apologized reflexively as he looked up at the other passenger.

Meeting his gaze from above were the glowing eyes of a ruthless predator—the eyes of a viper sizing up a toad, or a lion contemplating a rabbit.

I was right the first time. She’s definitely not the cute type.

As Naomi stepped down off the bus at his stop, he looked over at his classmate.

Given his role as a rabbit, he’d been unable to do anything except quiver fearfully on the ground and await his doom. Accordingly, he’d received a hard slap across the face.

Naomi was one of the guilty parties here, so his punishment was probably warranted…but he found it a bit unfair that the true mastermind of the incident had escaped unscathed.

He appealed to his judge and jury’s sympathy with a pathetic look of remorse. Ichigyou Ruri shot him a withering glare, then turned and strode off. For a long moment, Naomi just stood there at the bus stop. His left cheek started to sting.

Oh, that hurts. That really hurts…

“Excellent,” said Sensei with a nod.

“Excellent?! What was excellent about that?!” Naomi protested angrily. Whatever he’d been doing, it had turned out horribly! “She thinks I’m a scumbag now! She probably hates me. Were you reading from the Ruin Everything Manual by mistake? What am I supposed to do now, huh?!”

“First, stop freaking out.”

Now Sensei was just asking the impossible.

His face calm and composed, the older man wagged a finger chidingly. “All of that was just a necessary bit of groundwork.” He pointed dramatically down at the ground.

“Um…” Naomi’s voice came out in a squeak. He almost wished it had gone unheard, but the library was deserted and silent today, so it carried just fine.

He was on the second floor of the library, in a corner divided from the rest by partitions. The after-school committee meeting would be starting soon. But for the moment, the only people there were Ichigyou Ruri—the first to arrive—and Naomi, who’d followed her there.

Ruri’s eyes moved from her book to Naomi’s face.

She wore the same look of scorn he’d seen earlier. Naomi almost thought she might slap him a second time, just to send a message. He wanted nothing more than to turn on his heel and flee. But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t what the Ultimate Manual said would happen.

He just needed to recite his lines. He didn’t need to think. It was just like reading from a script, really.

Gathering up all his courage, he managed to speak.

“I’m, uh…sorry about yesterday. You know, the thing that happened on the bus. I was just trying to pick this up for you.”

Embarrassed by his wooden delivery, Naomi took out his prop—a bookmark that Ruri had dropped on the bus. It was a colorful little thing with a peacock-feather design. Apparently, it had slipped out from between the pages of her paperback.

In reality, Naomi had picked it up at the bus stop, not on the bus itself. It wasn’t responsible for him face-planting into her butt.

In other words, he was lying to her. But Sensei insisted that such “minor details” weren’t important. The only thing that mattered was getting results.

“I was looking for that.” Ruri rose from her seat quickly, the hostility gone from her face. She stood ramrod straight in front of Naomi for a moment, then bowed her head to him.

“I’m very sorry. I didn’t even give you a chance to explain.”

It made Naomi feel seriously awkward. He hadn’t been expecting an apology, and he didn’t really deserve one.

“Uh, that’s okay,” he said, flapping his hand in the air. “It never would have happened if I’d just spoken up, you know?”

He knew it sounded plausible enough, though knowing that he had no good reason for bumping into her backside made him embarrassed all over again.

He really, really wanted to end this conversation. Stepping forward, he practically pushed the bookmark into Ruri’s hands. She finally raised her head and accepted it.

Ruri looked at the colorful little thing, and then looked Naomi in the eyes. The disgusted look was gone, but she wasn’t exactly smiling at him, either. Her face was composed, neutral, and cold—almost like a metal mask.

“Thank you very much.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it…”

Just as Naomi was handing back the strangely grandmotherly bookmark, a group of other committee members came up the stairs from the second floor. It was a cheerful group, chattering loudly as they approached; unsurprisingly, Kadenokouji Misuzu was among them.

Sensing a good moment to withdraw, Naomi cut off the conversation with Ichigyou as politely as he could.

In all honesty, speaking with her had been kind of intimidating. Much like Misuzu and her friends, Ruri really wasn’t the kind of person Naomi had ever interacted with before.

 

Naomi watched Ruri as she left the school building and walked off at a steady pace. It looked like she was heading straight home now that the committee meeting was over. Not that he knew her well enough to propose walking home together, of course.

“We’ve got a long way to go…but you made some progress today. A little, at least.”

Naomi thought his heart would jump out of his chest. At some point, Sensei had materialized at his side. These jump scares couldn’t be good for his heart.

“Don’t get too impatient yet, okay?” Sensei said with a smile, taking out his notebook, the Ultimate Manual, with its tantalizing promises of guaranteed results. Sensei held one of its first pages between his fingers as he continued. “Your romance is just getting started.”

 

 

3.

 

[April 23RD—WiZ message from the library committee]

 

NAOMI WAS READING IN HIS BEDROOM when his phone started to vibrate.

There was a WiZ notification on the screen, just as Sensei had predicted. Opening the app, he read the entire message.

“Chairman: For the shelf cleaning on Monday, we’re asking you all to bring your own dust cloths. Please let anyone who isn’t in the chat know before the end of the weekend.”

Naomi furrowed his brow slightly.

A certain someone wasn’t in the group, and he was responsible for passing this message to her. But the two of them weren’t in contact, really. He didn’t have her phone number or her email address.

“How am I supposed to—”

As he turned around, the question half-spoken, he found Sensei ready and waiting for him. The three-legged crow was perched on his arm like a falconer’s bird. In its beak, it held a blank white envelope, which it had presumably plucked from Naomi’s drawer.

Naomi understood what Sensei was implying.

He didn’t have Ruri’s email or her phone number, but he did have one means of reaching her. Technically. Although the idea felt very weird.

 

The committee members sat in a circle of desks that faced inward. On the whiteboard in the back of the room, the words CLEANING DAY were written in big, bold letters, and someone had added cutesy little stars around them. Naomi guessed they were Misuzu’s doing, which ended up being correct. She was the kind of girl you’d expect to do that sort of thing.

Naomi glanced at the girl sitting next to him and tried to picture her drawing sparkles on a whiteboard. It was totally impossible.

“Okay, so! As you saw in the message, we’re going to be cleaning the shelves today.”

The committee chairman started to divide up this sizable task. Soon, everyone began taking out their dust cloths and placing them on top of their tables. As Naomi did the same, he glanced over just as the girl next to him was looking his way.

Their eyes met.

Ichigyou Ruri gave him a small bow of thanks.

Naomi nodded back at her and felt himself relax a little. Apparently the letter he’d written on Friday had made it to her house in time.

Yes, he’d sent a letter. An actual, physical letter. Through the mail.

It was a pretty convenient system when you thought about it—you could send anyone a message as long as you knew where they lived. But Naomi had only taken advantage of it a handful of times in his entire life. And writing that letter in particular had been genuinely nerve-racking.

If he’d been writing to an old friend, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad. But he was writing to a girl, specifically to one he was trying to get closer to. Surely his anxiety was understandable.

In the end, he’d crumpled up seven failed drafts before finally approving his eighth try—a totally bland, businesslike message. Sensei had indicated that this was the correct approach. Naomi had paid a bit extra to expedite the letter. It had clearly gotten there on time, so that was 360 yen well spent.

Once everyone had their assignments, the library committee got to work cleaning. Ruri and Naomi didn’t really strike up a conversation; for the most part, they just ran their dust cloths silently along their assigned shelves.

 

When Naomi got home that day and checked the mail, he found that a letter addressed to him had arrived. It was a plain, standard envelope, with no decorations of any kind. But on the back was the name Ichigyou Ruri.

Hurrying back to his room, Naomi carefully opened the envelope with a pair of scissors. The letter that emerged was a simple handwritten note: Thank you for passing on the message.

The sight of it made him chuckle. Something about this sincere, one-sentence letter was oddly funny. He found himself picturing her sending it—methodically writing out the words, sealing the envelope, and placing it into the mailbox.

He tried to visualize her at that specific moment. Somehow, he doubted she’d been smiling. She’d probably dropped it in there with that flat, neutral expression of hers, like she was mailing in a warranty card or something.

The mental image made Naomi chuckle again.

 

4.

 

[May 6TH—Desk duty at the library]

 

RURI AND NAOMI SAT next to each other behind the checkout desk, reading their books.

The committee members on desk duty were expected to man the library during their lunch period and after school. They were there to process check-outs and returns, keep the shelves organized, post any new announcements on the walls, and repair slightly damaged books.

However, Nishiki High didn’t have that big a collection in the first place, and there usually wasn’t enough work to fill the entire shift. Unless there was some sort of special event going on, the people on duty had plenty of time to goof off.

Naomi shot a quick glance to the girl next to him. Ruri appeared to be totally engrossed in her book. He was reading too, so he wasn’t about to complain or anything. The total lack of conversation was starting to feel a little awkward, though.

They were both avid readers. Surely there were plenty of things they could chat about. A simple question like “What are you reading?” would have been enough to kick things off. Naomi had read plenty of interesting books in all sorts of genres; if he knew what kind of book she was reading, he’d probably be able to keep the conversation going for quite some time.

Of course, taking that first step was never as easy as it sounded. Otherwise, he never would have resorted to buying some rip-off self-help book.

At the moment, the only thing he knew for sure was the color of the book cover Ruri was using.

Ten minutes passed that way, as Naomi tried to psych himself up to say something. But then Ruri closed her book, got up, and started tidying the shelves. They couldn’t leave the checkout counter unmanned, so Naomi couldn’t follow.

With a very quiet little sigh, he turned back to his own book. Thanks to his less-than-cheerful mood, he was finding it hard to focus on the story.

“Oh, that sucks, dude!”

Naomi jumped a little in his seat.

Someone was talking in the library, and their voice was way too loud. The sudden burst of sound had rattled him. Looking nervously in the direction it had come from, he saw a pair of third-year boys sitting in the browsing area.

“Yeah, no kidding. And then that jerk Nishiyama just went home.”

“What a moron!”

This wasn’t going to be a one-off thing, apparently. The volume of their voices was slightly lower than it had been at first, but it was still far too loud for the library. To make matters worse, the voices were joined by the sound of a plastic bag being torn open.

Keeping his head down, Naomi glanced over. The two older boys were eating packaged bread from the school store in the browsing area. Of course, there was no eating or drinking allowed in the library. And it was the committee members’ job to enforce those rules.

Naomi tried to picture himself scolding those two and immediately winced. Averting his eyes, he returned his focus to the pages of his book. Nothing had even happened yet, but he could feel himself physically cowering.

Those guys had been at this school for much longer than him. They knew how things really worked around here, and they obviously thought they could behave any way they pleased. How was he supposed to reason with people like that?

He wanted to tell them off. Of course he did. He wanted to make them put their food away. He wanted to say, Hey, you’re going to get the books dirty, or something. No one wanted a bunch of food stains on their library books, right?

Naomi lowered his face a little further.

Why do I have to be so pathetic?

“Please don’t eat or drink in the library. It’s not allowed.”

Naomi jerked his head up in surprise. Ruri was standing right next to the two older boys, looking down at them coolly.

“Oh, right. Sorry about that.”

The two students put their food away without protest. After watching them do so, Ruri offered a small bow and a few polite words, then returned to sorting the shelves.

Naomi just looked on, his mouth hanging partially open. This ordinary girl had suddenly become an all-powerful superhero.

 

By the time they left school, Horigawa Street was glowing orange in the light of the setting sun.

There was a city bus stop just outside the gates of Nishiki High that many of the students used to commute. Ichigyou Ruri was one of them, so she lined up at the stop as usual.

“Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”

As Naomi tried to say goodbye, Ruri gave him a strange look. “Weren’t you on the same bus as me the other day?”

“Oh. Yeah, true.”

“I assumed your house was in the same direction as mine.”

“Uh, well, I was…”

Naomi felt a shiver run down his spine. Ruri probably thought of this as an innocent question, but he couldn’t help feeling like he was being interrogated. If he slipped up now, only the death penalty awaited him.

And of course, the bus was here, just to add some time pressure to the equation. It had already come to a stop and opened its doors. He had to answer now.

“I w-was actually heading to the Kita Library that day. It’s a little far away, but it’s the only branch around here that gets Deduction Magazine.”

Naomi ended up spitting the words out a bit too rapidly. It made him want to cringe. If he were a girl, he definitely wouldn’t want to date this big an idiot.

“Ah, I see.” With those flat words, Ichigyou stepped up onto the bus. But just as the doors were closing, she added one additional comment.

“I read it there every month, too.”

The doors slid shut, and the bus pulled away.

Naomi’s expression grew a little brighter as he watched it go. All in all, that had gone pretty well. He’d spoken with Ruri. He’d talked to her about reading, specifically. He’d even found out they read the same magazine. And he’d carried out his mission.

Once the bus had safely disappeared from view, Naomi took a note out of his pocket. On the small square of paper, he’d written down the exact conversation they’d just had in advance.

Thank God for the Ultimate Manual…

Naomi looked up and off to one side. Sensei was standing on the top of a building across the street with that three-legged crow perched on his arm.

Naomi offered him a small wave. It was a little embarrassing, but he wanted to convey that he’d succeeded.

Sensei responded with a thumbs-up.

 

5.

 

IRON, NAOMI CHANTED.

He didn’t speak the word out loud, but he repeated it in his mind many, many times. The more he repeated it, however, the more counterproductive it felt. The word iron wasn’t iron itself, after all—it was just a pair of syllables.

Giving up on the word, he decided to visualize the substance instead. He gripped his gloved right hand’s wrist with his left hand to steady it. He sensed that keeping it perfectly still might improve the results somehow.

With renewed focus, he mentally pictured a piece of iron. Sensei had told him not to close his eyes; he had to learn how to work with them open, apparently. The glove started to tremble slightly. Its vague, indeterminate form pulsed against his fingers. It felt a bit like the first tremors before an earthquake.

Naomi focused.

He pictured the shape, the weight, the color—the real, concrete properties of matter.

And then, he closed his hand forcefully.

His glove abruptly stopped quivering. The little tremors dissipated. All of a sudden, he realized he was holding something heavy.

Slowly, he opened his hand. There was a small iron ball sitting in his palm, shiny enough to reflect Naomi’s face.

“Sensei! Sensei!”

Naomi rushed over to his teacher, who was sitting on a log nearby. He’d been reviewing some sort of data for a while and hadn’t been paying attention. Looking over the fruits of Naomi’s labor, he murmured, “Hmm, look at that.”

“This is incredible! Look, it’s iron! It’s real iron!”

“That it is.”

Sensei made a circle with his fingers and peered at the ball through it. It was a gesture he made on a regular basis. He’d explained that he could call up all sorts of information displays this way.

“Nice and dense, too. Not many impurities…”

Naomi couldn’t suppress a smug chuckle of satisfaction at that assessment. He’d worked hard to pull this off. Harder than Sensei knew, in fact.

In the three weeks since they’d met, Naomi had practiced with the glove first thing in the morning every day. These training sessions with Sensei were intense and difficult and rarely earned him any praise. He’d been eager to surprise the man at least once, so he’d started practicing in his bedroom late into the night.

Naomi pictured the periodic table poster hanging in his room. Fe was atomic number 26, and its density was relatively high. Creating it had proven more difficult than he’d imagined, but after ten long days of solo practice, he’d finally managed to create it from scratch all on his own.

“This is pretty amazing, right? Don’t you think?” he asked Sensei, grinning happily. He felt like he deserved a few more compliments for pulling this off, in all honesty.

Sensei responded with a warm smile and by pointing into the air. Naomi looked up to see dozens of giant shiny iron balls floating in the sky—and then, suddenly, they shot down directly at him.

“Eeeek!”

I’m dead!

Throwing his arms over his head, Naomi huddled against the ground. There was no way he could ward off those enormous balls of iron. He was going to die.

Just as that thought crossed his mind, the barrage of iron balls hit the ground without a sound. They piled up there for a moment, and then disappeared all at once.

Oh. Right…

“They’re only illusions, kid. I told you I can’t interact with this world, didn’t I?” With a perfectly serious expression on his face, Sensei approached his cowering pupil.

“Next time, deal with it instead of freaking out. Make a nice thick ceiling for yourself, or dig a tunnel into the ground. Whatever. There’s all sorts of options.”

“I can’t just improvise something on the spur of the moment!”

“Oh? You can’t?” Sensei’s voice dropped in tone. It was suddenly almost hostile. “Is that what you’re going to say when her life depends on it?”

Naomi looked up at Sensei’s face. He could feel those words, colder and heavier than iron, pressing down on his shoulders.

Sensei was talking about the incident—the bolt of lightning that would hit the riverbank, claiming Ruri’s life, and their attempt to save her from that fate.

Failure wasn’t an option. They’d only have one chance.

“No matter how precisely we recreate the original events, my presence here will have an impact,” Sensei continued. “There’s no telling whether the accident will occur exactly as recorded. We can try our best, but there are no guarantees.”

Sensei paused to look Naomi straight in the eye.

“That’s why you need to be capable of protecting her, no matter what happens. Even if things take a totally unexpected turn, you need to find some way to succeed. And that means you need to become capable of doing anything.”

Fighting the urge to avert his eyes, Naomi let the words wash over him. He needed to be capable of anything? Did this man expect him to become some kind of god?

“The God Hand is powerful enough to make that possible, at least in theory.”

Naomi already knew that. Sensei had explained the glove’s potential when he gave it to him, how it could rewrite the fabric of the world. Once you learned how to use it, you could do almost anything. It did seem almost divine.

In other words, if he fell short—

“It all depends on how you use it.” Sensei gave him the answer unprompted. Unable to endure his steady gaze, Naomi looked away. He’d finally bent under the pressure.

His eyes, searching for something else to focus on, settled on his own hand. A vague sense of anxiety was bubbling up inside him, growing larger by the second.

Can I really pull this off?

He had a magic glove that could do anything, and the best he could manage with it was creating a little ball of iron. Was he really capable of playing his role competently?

It felt like there was a great weight pressing down on his heart. This was a very familiar feeling. His subconscious mind was telling him it was time to run—to get off the path he was on before the moment of truth arrived.

To the best of his ability, Naomi avoided taking risks. He didn’t like challenging himself unless the outcome was predictable. These were the rules he’d lived by for fifteen years, and they still bound him in place. He couldn’t just reinvent himself all of sudden. He’d spent his middle school years avoiding everything that made him uncomfortable; he wasn’t going to shake that habit in a day.

And yet—

He had gone out and bought himself that book, hoping he could change.

 

There was a pile of books sitting on Naomi’s desk in his bedroom. They were thicker and larger than his usual paperbacks—these were introductory texts and reference books for various scientific fields.

Naomi enjoyed studying. When you put more effort in, you would reliably be rewarded for it. It was one of the few things he could focus on without getting anxious.

So, he’d picked up a habit of studying when he was feeling nervous. He could just hit the books until his fears faded. It was his only real coping method, and in the face of this new dilemma, he turned to it once again.

First, he worked his way through a chapter of a physics text. Then he switched over to a chemistry book. He decided to skip biology; living things were supposedly too complex to mess with, after all.

In a corner of his mind, Sensei’s words of advice played on a constant loop.

“The most important thing you can do is foster your power of imagination.”

Putting down his book, Naomi stepped out onto his balcony. It was better to be out here, in case he screwed things up. Squatting down on the concrete in his sandals, he tensed his gloved hand in anticipation.

“Convince your mind that you can make iron in the blink of an eye, and then demonstrate to yourself that it’s true.”

Air began to turn to metal in the palm of his hand.

I can do this. I can do this in a second. It’s easy, he repeated to himself, but the process still moved slowly.

Come on! Faster! Faster! he thought impatiently.

The half-completed ball of iron suddenly broke down into a kind of goo. It popped like a balloon, sending glops of the stuff flying off in all directions.

“Ew!”

 

Naomi piled a new stack of reference material on his desk. He had architecture texts, interior design books, and even a catalog from a fancy furniture store over by Shijo-Karasuma.

“Don’t assume anything’s impossible. Shrug off your doubts. Let your imagination soar.”

After flipping through the catalog for a while, Naomi picked a specific page, cut it out with a pair of scissors, and taped it to his wall. It was a listing for a desk with the staggering price tag of nearly 40,000 yen. Its design was quite simple; it had metal pipes for legs and a simple drawer.

This shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Naomi placed his right hand on the surface of his own desk, which was a simple slab of wood built into his closet space. He’d added on some shelves later to give it a bit more storage space.

He didn’t exactly dislike this desk. But if he was going to exhaust himself practicing with the God Hand, it couldn’t hurt to improve his furniture a bit while he was at it.

Naomi visualized, as best he could, that bewilderingly expensive desk.

“Believe that anything is possible. Tell yourself you’re a wizard from a fantasy novel.”

I’m a wizard, damn it. I’m a wizard!

The desk began to change form. The wood distorted and wriggled. With all his willpower, he pulled it into a brand-new shape.

The result resembled an avant-garde abstract art monstrosity. A mass of wood, having lost its purpose, stared resentfully at its creator with distorted, lumpy eyes.

 

Naomi piled up yet another stack of books. This time, he balanced them on top of the lid that partially covered his bathtub. Each book was sealed inside a Ziploc bag to protect it from the moisture. It was a trick he’d picked up some time ago.

“You can shape everything exactly as you want it. Give the world its marching orders!”

As he soaked in the tub, Naomi flipped through another book on physics, reviewing the basic concepts: the properties of matter, heat, entropy, and energy.

After finishing his chapter, he stepped out into the rinsing area. It felt kind of weird to be wearing just a glove while otherwise totally naked, but he didn’t have much choice.

He started off by washing his hair with soap and water normally. But then, instead of turning on the shower, he positioned his right hand directly over his head.

Visualizing a bath attendant pouring water from a bucket, he muttered the word “shower” to himself.

“Agh! That’s cold!”

Ice-cold water rained down on him from the glove. He jumped to his feet and stomped angrily on the ground. Hot water! I want hot water, dammit!

“Gaaah! Hot! Hot!”

This time, he hit himself with a blast of scalding water that sent him dancing across the bathroom. Apparently, he only had two output settings: zero degrees Celsius or 100.

Hadn’t Sensei told him water was supposed to be easy? Why did adults have to lie about everything?

In his frustration, he ended up practicing over and over until he finally managed to produce water at a perfect 42 degrees Celsius.

When he finally emerged from the bathroom after spending nearly two hours on this project, his mom grinned and asked if he had a crush on someone. She seemed to assume he’d been grooming himself in there.

Naomi couldn’t explain, of course, so the only retort he could think of was a sulky “leave me alone.”

 

There was a calendar hanging from a tree branch, turned to the month of May. Many of the days had already been crossed off.

Naomi looked back to his own hand with its glowing blue glove. He remembered all the hours he’d spent practicing with this thing. And with all the concentration he could muster, he squeezed his hand shut.

“Raaah!”

The glove trembled briefly.

There was something resting in his palm now—something with a bit of heft to it.

Slowly, he opened his hand.

“How’s that?”

Sensei made a ring with his fingers and peered down at the object. “Looks like copper, all right.”

Cu was 29th on the periodic table. It was only a little heavier than iron, but it had taken him quite a while to create it.

“Hey, we’ve still got time. Not that much of it, but some. Don’t get discouraged,” Sensei said, trying to counter the dejection that Naomi was clearly projecting.

Naomi hung his head slightly, squeezing the little ball of copper. There wasn’t much time left at all—that was the cold, hard truth.

He felt sorry for himself for a nice long moment...until he finally thought to check the time.

“Oh crap, I’ve got to go!” As important as this training was, he couldn’t start missing school, either.

“Hey, hold on,” shouted Sensei as he turned to run off. “You’ve got something coming up today, remember?”

 

6.

 

[May 17th—After school—Shelf-sorting duty]

 

THE TALL BOOKSHELVES TOWERED overhead like a castle rampart. Ichigyou Ruri stood before them with a small cart full of books at her side.

Having put away the books on the lower shelves, she was now contemplating the next stage of her job. The very top shelves were too tall for most people to reach; the library had a few three-level stepladders for accessing them.

Ruri stepped cautiously onto the first step of her stepladder with a single book in her arms. Rather than walking right up like most people would, she placed her other foot carefully on the first step as well.

There was a faint rattling sound. Were her legs shaking, or was it the stepladder? Maybe both.

Slowly, Ruri brought her right foot onto the second step, then followed with her left.

By the time she reached the third step, her face was blank, and her eyes were focused entirely on the gap in the bookshelf. She looked like a primitive robot, fixated solely on a single aspect of its task.

Gently, she pushed the book back into its space and, with her task complete, that blank look gave way to something a bit more human. She suddenly noticed the rest of the world around her.

Her gaze fell toward the floor.

Instantly, her face went pale. Then, she went limp.

“Unh…”

With a small groan, she tumbled from the top of the step-ladder—which was only about eighty centimeters off the ground.

“Gah!”

Naomi let out a frog-like croak as he absorbed the impact.

He’d fantasized about catching her in his arms, but that just wasn’t realistic. He didn’t have the necessary physique; realistically, the best he could do was act as a shock-absorbing mat.

Somehow, he’d never imagined a girl would feel this heavy lying on top of him. But, well, he couldn’t expect reality to be like fiction.

 

A while later, Ruri was lying on the sofa in the library’s cramped side room.

This place was a bit of a storage area, but also served as a break room. There were crammed steel shelves against the walls, overflowing with files and documents. In between the random piles of unopened cardboard boxes, someone had also deposited an old set of sofas; they were probably leftovers from some office renovation.

Naomi had helped Ruri in here and was waiting for her to recover. The top half of her face was hidden underneath a damp handkerchief.

Her breathing seemed a little shallow. Naomi could see her mouth moving slightly. After a moment, he realized he was staring at it and jerked his eyes away.

“I’m not good with heights,” Ruri groaned softly.

That seemed like an understatement, considering she’d only been less than a meter above the ground. If someone ever took this girl up to the observation deck of the Kyoto Tower, she might just drop dead on the spot.

“Everyone has their weaknesses,” Naomi said gently. “From now on, why don’t I put back all the books on the top shelves?”

“All right,” Ruri replied, pushing herself up to a sitting position. “I’ll focus on the bottom shelves, then.”

Naomi really thought she should rest a little longer. He found himself starting to reach out toward her. But he didn’t have the guts to touch her, so he ended up pulling his hand back indecisively.

“The bottom shelves have a lot of oversized books. Those things are really heavy. I’ll do them, too.”

“I’ll take the middle shelves, then.”

Naomi found himself looking for a reason to argue, but couldn’t find any. “Okay, that works.”

Ruri nodded and reached out for the juice pack Naomi had bought her from the vending machines in the school store. “Thank you for this, by the way.”

She took a long, long drink of juice through the straw for what felt like thirty seconds straight. She must have good lung capacity, Naomi thought.

 

Leaning back in the chair in his room, Naomi gazed absently at his smartphone screen.

“Splitting up the job that way was incredibly inefficient,” said Sensei from somewhere above him. He’d popped up in Naomi’s room a little earlier, as suddenly as always. “First, we had to sort out the middle shelf books from all the others. And I wasted tons of time going up and down that ladder constantly. But it forced us to communicate. We had to work together to get it done, you see? Looking back on it now, I think that was a turning point.”

“Yowch!”

Out of nowhere, the crow attacked Naomi. Its three legs unleashed a fearsome barrage of kicks at his head.

“Are you listening?”

“Sorry! Wasn’t paying attention! Gah!”

Naomi’s apology didn’t halt the assault. He had to drop his phone to protect his head.

“What are you smirking about, anyway?” Bending down, Sensei examined the screen of the fallen phone.

“I wasn’t smirking,” Naomi protested, but it was too late now.

The screen was displaying his WiZ friends list, which now contained the name Ichigyou Ruri.

He’d finally managed to add her today.

Ruri had only gotten her first smartphone upon entering high school, and she didn’t have much of an interest in it. She’d been carrying it around without really using it. Now that they were talking more, Naomi had volunteered to help her get the hang of it; while teaching her how to use WiZ, he’d showed her how to add him as her first friend.

Naomi was happy to have her name in his phone. And it was even better knowing that his name was the only one in hers. He couldn’t have described exactly what he was feeling, but it was definitely nice.

Despite his protests, he probably had been smirking. But he’d worked hard for a solid month to get this far. He felt like he’d earned the right.

Looking up at Sensei, he found the man was smiling.

“Hey, good for you.”

It was rare to get that kind of encouragement from this man. Naomi’s mood was suddenly downright buoyant.

“It’s all thanks to you, Sensei!”

This was true, of course. Naomi was entirely reliant on that Ultimate Manual. As long as he followed its descriptions to the letter, he would always get the results that it described. A few weeks ago, he could barely have spoken to Ruri, and now he had her as a contact in his phone. That would have been impossible without Sensei’s help.

Things weren’t so rosy when it came to the God Hand. His effort wasn’t producing predictable results. He was still deeply anxious about whether he’d be able to play his role when the time came.

But this part was different. He was making steady progress. As long as he carried out his instructions to the letter, he would keep getting closer to Ruri.

Sensei told him what to do, and he played the role he’d been assigned. All he was doing was following orders, really.

But still…this was a victory they’d won together. It made him really happy.

“What do we do next?” Naomi asked excitedly as he bent down to pick up his phone.

“We keep at it,” said Sensei with a smile. “We do what we need to do.”

For once, it felt like they were on the same page.

“Try to calm down, though. I don’t want you getting impatient on me.” Sensei opened his notebook and began flipping through it. That battered old thing had the future inside it—the future as it was meant to be. It was kind of awe-inspiring.

“As long as you keep this up, it’s going to work out in the end. You’ve got a cheat sheet from the future, remember? You’re guaranteed to win her over.”

Despite Sensei’s words of caution, the words win her over got Naomi’s blood pumping a little faster.

It was hard not to be impatient. Soon, he was going to have his first girlfriend ever.

 

7.

 

NAOMI WATCHED as the words June 25th were scrawled on the library’s whiteboard. It was a date about three weeks in the future.

The chairman continued writing, adding four words in large letters: Charity Used Book Sale.

“The book sale is our single biggest event of the year. Anyone heard of it before?”

A number of hands went up around the room, including Ruri’s; Naomi held his hand up hesitantly a moment later. Maybe one-third of the committee members knew about the sale, from the look of things.

“Yeah, that seems about right. It’s not really a big event.” The chairman didn’t seem particularly upset by this, fortunately.

“Starting today, we’re going to be collecting used books to sell on the 25th. We’ll set up donation boxes in the library and the classrooms and ask everyone to donate whatever they can. Of course, we don’t want anything too beaten up…”

Once the basic explanation was complete, they began dividing the committee up into teams, each with different responsibilities. People moved around the room seemingly at random, but a large group quickly formed around Kadenokouji Misuzu.

At one point in the discussion, she’d casually dropped the following remark: “Sometimes the salesclerks dress up in cute outfits for stuff like this, right?”

It had been intended as an offhand comment, but a bunch of committee members had instantly latched on to it and were getting excited. Certain students began muttering the words salesgirls and cosplay and rejoined the meeting with intense focus.

Naomi had no intention of joining that group, but he did feel a small spark of excitement. Any costume Misuzu wore would look adorable by default, and it would probably attract plenty of customers to the sale, too.

Fighting against the current, Misuzu pushed her way over to Ruri.

“You should dress up too, Ru!”

Naomi was astonished at the mere suggestion. She’ll never agree to that in a million years… This was Ichigyou Ruri they were talking about, after all. He couldn’t think of anyone less likely to indulge in cosplay.

That wasn’t to say she couldn’t pull it off, of course. There were probably some options that would suit her very well. The first idea to pop into Naomi’s head was Jadis, the White Witch from the Chronicles of Narnia, accompanied by her loyal polar bear. She was a witch who wielded ice as a weapon and took pleasure in executing her enemies. It felt like a perfect fit…not that he was ever going to say so.

“I don’t think so,” said Ruri, predictably enough. “Also, didn’t I tell you to cut that out?”

“Cut what out?”

“The Ru thing.”

“Hmm. Okay. How about I call you Ruru?”

“That’s even worse.”

“Rurine?”

“No.”

“Rudy Rutabaga?”

“Excuse me?”

Misuzu seemed determined to draw Ruri out of her shell for whatever reason, but it was clearly an uphill battle. The wall of ice showed no sign of thawing.

Naomi was only a spectator, but the conversation made him increasingly nervous. Couldn’t she try to be a little more receptive? Misuzu was obviously trying to make friends.

Then again, Ruri was clearly all right on her own. She spent most of her free time reading in the classroom and seemed to prefer being left alone. It was the same in the committee meetings—she was diligent about her duties, but never struck up conversations with anyone.

The girl wasn’t a team player at all, and she seemed to know that about herself.

But wasn’t that going to be a problem?

Sensei’s instructions from that morning flashed back through Naomi’s head.

 

“The used book sale in June is going to be a big event for us, too,” Sensei said, gesturing at the calendar hanging from the tree branch.

“What do I need to do?”

“At the moment, things are heading in the right direction. If you get off track, I’ll let you know. For right now, just focus on getting books for that sale. Get as many as you possibly can. That’s all I want you thinking about.”

Naomi nodded easily. It sounded simple enough—he just had to do his normal committee job.

Naomi wrote his name on the whiteboard. Ruri was right next to him, doing the same. Rather than the flashier groups like Costumes or Publicity, they’d both chosen the least exciting option: the Book Collection team. After what Sensei had told him, Naomi had fully expected this to happen.

He’d actually been a little worried when Misuzu tried to physically drag Ruri into the Costumes group. But in the end, events had followed their proper course.

The next day, the two of them placed a donation box in their classroom and encouraged everyone to donate books.

Now he had to do everything he could to find more.

 

8.

 

HOMEROOM ENDED, and the students flowed out of the classroom.

As the noise died down, Naomi opened the lid of the donation box. Ruri was at his side and peered down into it with him. There were two books sitting at the bottom.

Frowning, Naomi looked over at the blackboard. The date written there was proof that a full week had passed. Two books over five school days meant they were getting a whole 0.4 donations per day.

“Well,” he said with an awkward little smile, “I guess they did say we shouldn’t expect too much…”

The chairman had described the results from recent years, so Naomi hadn’t been expecting anything too amazing. Still, this was a bit more depressing than he’d expected it would be.

This definitely wasn’t good enough, was it?

Sensei had told him to get as many books as he possibly could. Two donations wasn’t close to enough. At this rate, they might diverge from the events recorded in the Ultimate Manual.

Naomi wasn’t sure what to do, though. He couldn’t force his classmates to donate books. He was willing to put the effort in, but he didn’t know how.

“Katagaki-san.”

Looking over, he saw that Ruri was still staring down into the box with a serious look on her face.

“We’re on the Book Collection team, correct?” The look in her eyes was beyond serious. Was she actually a little angry?

“Our job is to collect books. We should pursue that goal any way we can. We might not succeed, but there’s no excuse for not trying.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

Naomi was a little startled at first, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. Ruri didn’t go out of her way to talk to the other committee members, true. But when it came to her actual responsibilities, she took them extremely seriously.

“Let’s do everything we can,” Ruri said, clutching her hands into fists.

They shared a common goal. That was good. But Naomi wasn’t particularly confident he could keep up with her.

 

Their avenues for action were limited, but they fully pursued every one that came to mind.

First, they got permission to place a new donation box in the faculty lounge, hoping they could guilt some teachers into supporting their students. Of course, the adults were all busy people, so they couldn’t expect much.

Next, Ruri hit on the idea of standing in the hallways at lunch holding donation boxes in their arms and calling out to people passing by. It wasn’t a bad idea in theory, but people rarely walked around with used books they were willing to donate. Still, there was a chance it would at least increase awareness of the donation drive, so they kept at it. Naomi found the process deeply embarrassing, but when he saw Ruri bowing her head to everyone who walked by, he had to follow suit.

Eventually, they even left the school grounds entirely and asked for permission to place a donation box at the nearest community center. The old man at the front desk there didn’t like the idea, but they begged and pleaded at great length. At one point, another staff member came by and said it sounded fine to him, but then they realized he thought the boxes were for recycling old newspapers. They never did manage to get approval.

And as they pursued these dead ends, the clock ticked ruthlessly forward.

 

Naomi picked up an eraser. Wiping away the numbers on the whiteboard, he wrote new ones: 37 books collected—3 days remaining.

He frowned as he considered the numbers. So did Ruri, standing beside him.

Things were not looking good.

“Hey, that’s not a bad haul, really,” called the chairman from behind them with a casual tone. “Try to bring a couple from home to pad things out a little, okay? It should be enough.” With a wave, he left the room—presumably headed home.

A part of Naomi thought he wasn’t taking this seriously enough. But it was the other way around, wasn’t it? He was taking it way too seriously. Collecting lots of books was a purely personal goal for him, with a totally selfish motivation. He wanted to follow Sensei’s instructions to the letter. He wanted to start dating Ruri.

Without that tantalizing possibility on the horizon, he wouldn’t have gotten so worked up about this either. It wouldn’t be fair of him to expect the other committee members to put in the same effort.

That said…

Naomi glanced over at Ruri. She was still staring at the numbers on the blackboard with a deadly serious look on her face.

She would have put the effort in no matter what. Even if he hadn’t helped her and she’d been forced to do it all alone, she would still have gone out there, bowed her head to everyone, and scraped together all the books she could.

He knew it was true. That was just the kind of person Ruri was.

He had to admire her for it.

“Hmm...”

Ruri nodded to herself abruptly and looked over at Naomi. His heart beat a little faster as their eyes met.

“All right. I have an idea.”

 

After a two-minute walk from the bus stop, Ruri and Naomi approached a plot of land bordered by an absolutely antique-looking wooden wall. Ruri strode confidently alongside it, and Naomi followed close behind.

A large building came into view on the property. It was a splendid old mansion, the kind of place that looked like it might charge admission.

“Come on in,” said Ruri as she opened the wooden front gate. Looking around nervously, Naomi followed her as she stepped onto the grounds.

Ruri’s home was located on a quiet residential corner in the Shimogamo district, a bit upstream along the Kamo River. There was a city-run botanical garden close nearby, and the mountains that surrounded the Kyoto Basin were noticeably closer here. There were few stores or businesses around, and no library at all, so Naomi rarely visited the area.

The house itself was a large wooden building that really did look like something out of a period TV show. If he hadn’t known better, Naomi would have assumed it was some sort of historical landmark. It was that impressive.

After double-checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone taking tickets, he hurried along after Ruri. She headed past the main building, toward the back of the spacious lot it sat on.

With a small buzz, the yellow light of incandescent bulbs cut through the darkness. Naomi swallowed as he stepped up the creaking wooden stairs.

He’d walked up into a miniature library.

Ruri had taken him to an old storage building in the corner of her backyard. The first floor had been filled with piles of random boxes, but the attic-like second floor was completely lined with wooden bookcases.

Apart from the windowed wooden door that led outside, every single inch of wall was covered with built-in shelves that were packed with books. And even that wasn’t enough storage space for the whole collection; the floor was half hidden under piles of dusty tomes.

“These are the books my grandfather collected before he passed away,” said Ruri calmly. “He just picked up anything that caught his eye, so I don’t think any of them are particularly valuable.”

The words didn’t fully register with Naomi. The sheer number of old books he was looking at was too much for him to process. A wonderful flood of information washed over him, and his brain threatened to overheat.

Moving a bit unsteadily, he headed over to a nearby shelf and squatted down in front of it. One by one, he studied the spines of the books on the lowest shelf. There were some surprisingly recent books but also many clearly older ones. Just at a glance, he saw novels, works of philosophy, map collections, and reference books. Everything was jumbled up in a chaotic, random mess; and of course, none of them had call numbers on the spine. These were wild books, unlike the domesticated varieties you’d find in a library. They’d been stuffed into these shelves at random.

“Wow.”

He hadn’t intended to say anything. But there was genuine excitement swelling up inside his chest, and he couldn’t hold it down. For someone like Naomi, this was basically a dragon’s treasure hoard.

“I guess you grew up reading these books, Ichigyou-san…”

After voicing this thought, Naomi realized it was kind of an embarrassing line. He avoided looking over at Ruri rather than risk seeing her reaction.

“I’d like to donate these books to the school sale.”

Naomi blinked and turned toward her, forgetting all about his previous concern.

“I thought it might be a little strange for one person to bring this many books. But I really want to do everything I can.”

“Uh, are you sure?” Naomi asked.

He wasn’t so sure about the idea, personally. This was his very first visit to this room, but these books already looked like priceless treasures to him. Even if none of them had monetary value, they were clearly precious in other ways.

These were mementos of her departed grandfather, after all. They were a part of her family’s history. They were part of her history.

“Doesn’t this collection mean a lot to you? Do you really want to get rid of them?”

As he spoke those words, Naomi found himself a bit perplexed by his own behavior. He was supposed to be collecting as many books as possible, but here he was, trying to discourage her from donating them.

He knew why, of course. Naomi was a booklover to his core, and a selfish part of him couldn’t help but feel it was wrong to give a whole collection away.

“I am a little sad to lose them, I suppose...” With a gentle smile, Ruri pulled a book off a nearby shelf. Running her hand over the top of it, she sent a small cloud of dust flying—it caught the light of a hanging lightbulb for a moment before disappearing.

“But I’ll never finish reading all these by myself.” She paused to look all around her, taking in the entire massive hoard. “I know my grandfather wouldn’t have hesitated to donate his old books. And more importantly, a book’s meant to be read, don’t you think?”

Ruri smiled again as she spoke those final words. That was enough to convince Naomi. He could tell she loved books as much as he did. That was what mattered, more than her words themselves. They had to get these hibernating books into the hands of people who would read them.

Meeting her gaze, he nodded firmly. Now that the decision was final, he was eager to get started.

“Okay, then. How the heck do we get them to school?”

Let’s carry them ourselves, Ruri had suggested.

They trudged slowly down the dirt road that ran alongside the Kamo River, pushing a big metal handcart. Their sluggish pace wasn’t a deliberate choice on their part; they’d gotten greedy and overloaded the cart. Even so, this load was less than one-tenth of the contents of that library.

They’d considered hiring a delivery service at first, but given the number of books, it would have been a very expensive job. Two high schoolers couldn’t afford that kind of thing. After some uncertainty, they’d settled on the most basic and primitive method of all: hauling them to school a bit at a time over a bunch of trips.

It was about six kilometers from Ruri’s house in Shimogamo to Nishiki High, far enough that they’d normally take a bus to get there. Walking briskly, the trip might take a little over an hour on foot... But, dragging a heavy cart along with them, it was probably going to take twice as long.

Naomi found himself doing a little rough mental math. The used book sale was three days away; after today, they’d have two more days to move the books. They could probably manage one round trip after school per day, for a total of three trips. But that wasn’t going to be enough to get all the books to school.

Shaking his head, he gripped the rusted metal handle of the handcart a bit more firmly and pushed it stubbornly forward. Ruri was walking in back, pushing from behind. They’d found this thing in the storage building too, and it was a bit of an antique itself; every push forward made its boards squeak and groan. He was getting kind of worried that the bottom might fall out.

Dropping down onto the bench on the riverbank, Naomi finally managed to catch his breath. They were about halfway to school, but they both really needed a break.

Taking an already soggy handkerchief from his pocket, Naomi wiped the sweat off his face as best he could. It was late June—summer was sneaking up on them again.

He glanced over at Ruri, who was gulping down mineral water from a plastic bottle. Ultra-Hard Cave Water was the last thing he would have chosen from that vending machine, but for some reason her choice didn’t surprise him.

Ruri looked just as sweaty as Naomi felt. Since she was only helping out from behind, she could have gotten away with slacking off a little, but he knew by now that taking it easy wasn’t in her nature.

It’d been two and a half months now since they joined the library committee together. Maybe he’d gotten to know her a little better in that time.

“By the way, Katagaki-san,” she said, turning to look at him, “what kind of books do you like?”

“U-uh…”

She’s making small talk now?!

This was small talk, right? It had to be. He just had to come up with a reasonable reply, then. He liked all sorts of books. If he wanted to, he could have rattled off a dozen titles and then talked about every one of them at great length.

His conscious mind held him back, though. He caught his hand automatically moving toward his back pocket, but he stopped it. There was no note in there today, no cheat sheet for this one. This was a question he didn’t know about in advance.

He was sweating again, and it wasn’t just from the heat. He’d gotten careless, assuming nothing would happen today. Sensei hadn’t warned him, after all.

They were still doing their early-morning training, so he saw Sensei every day. But the man had seemed preoccupied lately. While Naomi practiced, he’d spend the entire session glaring at maps and numbers that floated in midair. The day of the accident was approaching; maybe he was busy planning their strategy for that.

Naomi had gotten more and more comfortable with their peculiar arrangement. At first he’d been nervous and pestered Sensei constantly about the day’s events…but the man always warned him when something big was coming up, so he’d stopped bothering. Naomi hadn’t asked Sensei anything about today. He didn’t know the right answer to this question.

He could screw this up completely.

“Well, I…”

His voice was actually trembling slightly. He was scared. Scared of a little small talk.

Ugh. I haven’t changed a bit.

“I read all sorts of stuff, I guess. Anything that catches my eye…” It was the vaguest, most harmless answer that he could think of.

“I see,” Ruri responded. It was a noncommittal, nothing response, and the conversation ground to a halt.

Naomi hated himself in that moment.

This wasn’t right at all.

What kind of conversation was that? It wasn’t the way classmates should talk to each other, or friends. It definitely wasn’t a conversation between a soon-to-be boyfriend and girlfriend.

A gust of wind blew by, and the small flowers on the riverbank swayed back and forth. The sun glittered on the river. Cars passed in the distance.

All of it just seemed to emphasize the awkward silence.

He needed to say something. If this kept up much longer, she was going to decide he was a fundamentally boring person. Or maybe just a jerk.

But Naomi’s mouth didn’t want to move. He couldn’t force out a single syllable. He felt about ready to cry.

“I’m a fan of adventure novels, personally.”

The silence was broken. Startled, Naomi looked up from the ground; Ruri was gazing out at the river as it flowed peacefully by.

“The heroes of those books throw themselves into their journeys. They face terrible challenges, but they never give up. That’s always appealed to me.” She was looking up, now, to where the moon hung palely in the sky. “I want to live my life that way, too,” she continued. “That’s the kind of person I want to be.”

Ruri had opened up to him; she’d just told him something real about herself. She’d taken the risk of exposing her actual thoughts and feelings. Naomi felt like she’d just given him a big push forward. He had to meet her halfway here. He owed her that much.

It wouldn’t be fair to let one person drag the cart along all by herself.

“So, actually…” His voice still trembled, unfortunately. “I like science fiction.”

He could tell she’d turned to look at him, but he couldn’t look at her himself. Instead of meeting her gaze, he focused on getting the words out coherently.

“Those books show you whole new worlds, right? And they’re really amazing, bizarre worlds, totally different from our own. But they’re not just made up out of nothing. You’ve got the science part there, too, to tie them to reality.”

The words flew out of him like an avalanche now. He was talking too fast, almost babbling. If he’d seen someone else speaking like this, he would have felt embarrassed on their behalf. But he just couldn’t stop.

“Those worlds are fiction, of course, but they feel like an extension of the one we really live in. So it kind of feels like our world’s part of the story. It makes me feel like I’m a character in a story, too.” His slowing down and losing its confidence—he hadn’t planned this out in advance, so he was seriously startling to ramble. “I mean, I know I’m just a minor character, but…well…I guess I can’t explain it very clearly.” He pushed through it with sheer willpower, like a marathon runner closing in on the finish line. “But anyway, I love science fiction.”

He’d said everything he could.

Ruri responded “I see” for the second time—another blank reply.

Naomi felt the anxiety he’d suppressed bubbling back up again. He’d taken a real gamble here. He’d rolled the dice, but there was no telling what the outcome might be. He’d told her about himself, about what he really thought and felt. Instead of reading off some line from a notebook, he’d given her his words, just as they’d popped into his head.

What if she thought they were ridiculous?

What if she disagreed with him completely?

It would almost be too much to—

“I think…”

Naomi looked over to find she was looking back at him.

“I know what you mean.”

Naomi couldn’t describe what he felt in that moment very well. Putting it into words would have cheapened the feeling somehow, or even destroyed it. But there was one thing he could say for sure.

It was the happiest he’d ever been in his sixteen years of life.

 

As they prepared to resume their trek, one book on the cart caught Naomi’s attention.

It was a novel with a striking cover, although it looked like an older book. Its corners were rounded and worn, and there was a big stain on it, too.

He picked it up and examined it. The illustration on the cover suggested that a huge, complex world awaited him inside. His curiosity was piqued.

“I think I might want to read this one.”

“You’re welcome to take it, if you want.”

It was a nice offer, and it made him happy. But this was a book she was donating to the sale, and it hadn’t been put on sale just yet.

“I’ll just have to buy it once the sale starts, I think.”

Hopefully it won’t be too expensive.

Wondering how they would set the prices, Naomi flipped through the book idly…and found something unexpected at the very back.

“Oh, look. It’s an old library book.” On the inside of the back cover, there was a paper pocket with a yellowed card inside. These cards had been part of the Kyoto Library’s lending system at some point in the past; you wouldn’t find them in any books in active circulation now. Sometimes you’d spot one in an old used book, though.

“He must have gotten it from a branch that was trimming its collection,” said Ruri, leaning over to take a look. She pulled out the card, with its list of dates in the past and handwritten names—more than ten entries in total.

When you borrowed this book, you wrote your name on the card, then the next borrower did the same. It had probably seemed normal in an era without computer databases, but…

“That’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” Naomi said vaguely.

Ruri nodded with a small smile. “The first person to check it out got to write their name at the very top. That must have felt really good.”

Naomi nodded in agreement. Maybe any booklover would understand the appeal of those cards.

 

By the time they made it to the front gate of Nishiki High, the sun was already setting. Breathing heavily, Naomi slowly lowered the handcart’s front bar. His legs quivered with fatigue.

He double-checked the time just to be sure, but as expected, the trip had taken them over two hours. One trip today really was the most they could hope for, and it would likely be the same deal tomorrow. He might not even have the stamina for trips several days in a row.

For now, though, they needed to find a place to stash all these books. Lucky for them, a familiar group of people was just emerging from inside the school grounds.

“Ruru! Where did you get all of those?!” Kadenokouji Misuzu and a few other library committee members gathered around the handcart, wide-eyed with surprise.

Naomi found himself looking down at the ground. No one else had worried much about the book sale, but now they knew how seriously he and Ruri were taking it. It was honestly embarrassing. Working hard was nothing to be ashamed of, sure, but it took some courage to act so differently from everyone else.

Ruri didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed, of course. She never did. She explained where the books came from without a hint of hesitation or shyness.

Misuzu flashed a big, brilliant smile and clapped her hands together.

 

The next afternoon, there were more than a dozen people crowded into the little storage building. A chain of teenagers passed along boxes and bags full of books bucket-brigade style. A big, muscular third year carried huge boxes of oversized books all by himself.

Once they’d emptied the shelves, they all trekked back to school together. With the rusty old handcart in the lead, they formed a convoy of sorts, with carts and wheelbarrows they’d borrowed from the school following close behind.

With so many more people around to help, the handcart moved a lot faster than yesterday. A few of the boys took shifts on the handcart, including Naomi.

At one point, as he was shoving the thing along, Misuzu trotted up and whispered, “You went to Ruru’s house, huh?” in a voice only he could hear. When he asked her what that was supposed to mean, she just smiled enigmatically at him like a goddess of love.

The group cleared out a space behind the school building, near the rear gate, and piled up their enormous haul.

They’d managed to move everything over in a single long afternoon. It had seemed like a hopeless job to do in three days, but they’d finished it entirely in one. That was the power of numbers.

“Think we should lug ’em all up to the library?”

“Seems like a waste of time. Why don’t we get the teachers’ permission to leave them out here for the next two days?”

As the chairman and older students talked it over, another upperclassman came trotting out with a flagpole and stand. The wrinkled flag had the words Library Committee Used Book Sale written on it.

“Oh wow, haven’t seen that in a while.”

“When was the last time we used it?”

Apparently the flag had been gathering dust for years. It didn’t inspire any nostalgia in the first years, of course, but it did add a touch of festival atmosphere to everything.

“Ruru!” called Misuzu, trotting over with her arms outstretched.

“Stop calling me that, please,” Ruri replied automatically for what had to be the thousandth time.

“This is amazing! I feel a little bad, though—you donated an entire library, and we barely chipped in at all!”

“It’s fine. They were just lying around gathering dust, anyway. They’ll be happier if they end up with someone who wants to read them.”

“Aw, Ruru…”

“Cut it out.”

It was genuinely hard to tell if the two girls liked each other or not. But while Ruri did look a bit annoyed about her nickname, she didn’t seem to mind the conversation itself. People who didn’t know them would have assumed they were friends, and Naomi was inclined to agree.

Ruri could probably get by fine all on her own, but maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe this miniature festival would help her open up to the others, at least a little.

A group of three girls had now formed around Ruri, chatting cheerfully.

Naomi felt as happy as if he’d made a new friend himself.

 

9.

 

THE DISASTER THAT FOLLOWED was pure bad luck. They’d piled up the books by the rear gate, where neither students nor teachers went very often. They’d left that flagpole in its stand. Nobody had seen a reason why that might be a problem. They’d covered up the books that weren’t in boxes with sheets of newspaper, to protect them in case it started raining. And the rear gate had a newly installed, motion-activated security light. The teacher who’d given them permission to leave the books back there didn’t know about it either.

That night, the wind picked up.

The flag blew over, covering up the light, which turned it on automatically. Soon, the fabric started to smoke.

By the time the students arrived at school the next morning, the area near the back gate was fenced off by yellow tape. Police officers had been ducking under that tape for some time as they came and went from the scene. Inside this restricted area, there was another, smaller taped-off space; within it was a huge lump of smoking ashes. The only things that hadn’t burned away completely were a few pieces of melted plastic and the charred remnants of some thicker old covers.

The fire had started in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the residents nearby had noticed it quickly, and the fire department had put out the blaze before it could spread to the school building. The only damage had been to the library committee’s belongings out in back.

In the morning, the police had arrived to examine the scene. This was a huge event for a high school, of course, so a crowd of onlookers watched from a distance.

“A fire?”

“Wow, looks like it was going for a while.”

“I’m just glad it didn’t burn down the building, too…”

While most of the spectators whispered excitedly to each other, there was one group of onlookers who didn’t say a word—the members of the library committee, the people who’d spent their afternoon bringing those books here, just watched in stunned silence.

Misuzu and Ruri were part of that group. Ruri’s eyes were still and cold, like lumps of burnt-out charcoal that would never catch fire again. She was staring at a small piece of a book cover, one of the few scraps that survived the blaze.

It was a chunk of that beat-up old novel Naomi had wanted to buy.

 

From the rooftop, the sky was an unbroken field of blue. The city, and the mountains that surrounded it, looked the same as ever.

The world kept on turning, no matter what happened.

“If you knew it would happen…” Naomi’s voice shook slightly, different from the way it had trembled the other day on the riverbank. “Couldn’t we have prevented this?”

“That would have thrown history off track,” Sensei replied flatly. “Our goal is to save her life. To make that happen, we need your relationship to develop as recorded. The fire was a necessary part of that process.”

Naomi raised his hands reflexively. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to grab Sensei by the collar, or just throw a punch at him. He’d never done either of those things before to anyone. But even as he reached out, he realized it was pointless. His hands slipped ineffectually through Sensei’s body, quickly losing their momentum.

He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t even vent his anger on this man in Ruri’s stead. With no outlet to escape through, his anger swirled around in his head aimlessly, feeding on itself.

Memories of the days they’d spent preparing for the book sale flashed through his mind. How they’d gone around asking people to help them out, and that first sweaty trip back with that cart full of books. The way everyone had chipped in to help.

They’d worked so hard. All for nothing.

And Sensei had known all about it from the start.

“The used book sale was canceled.” Naomi looked up. Sensei was staring down at him; he flinched slightly. There was strength in those eyes. This man had chosen his path, and he wouldn’t be diverted from it. He was absolutely determined to reach his goal.

Naomi could understand that. He was Sensei, on some level—it made sense that he could follow the man’s thought process.

Sensei was desperate.

Just as Naomi had thrown himself into gathering those books, Sensei had thrown himself into his plan. He knew the fire would be a sad, painful event, but he was convinced that it was necessary.

“The canceled sale depressed her deeply. I wanted her to cheer up, so I made a conscious effort to talk to her more often than before. It brought us closer.”

Sensei paused for a moment, then issued his next order.

“You’re going to do the same.”

With those words, he strode past Naomi and disappeared. There would be no further explanations. He expected Naomi to simply do as he was told.

It was the correct answer, after all—according to his notebook.

 

10.

 

NAOMI WATCHED his desk clock closely. It was a digital model with large numbers and read 11:58.

He didn’t want to leave too early or too late. He’d decided to wear a sweatsuit for this, as he felt it might involve some exercise. He had a backpack on too, but it was empty. He couldn’t decide what to pack.

As midnight ticked closer, Naomi looked down at his hands. He wore the God Hand on his right. That had been his biggest worry at first, but fortunately, the crow transformed itself into the glove without complaint, just like it did during his morning training sessions.

As the display silently switched to 12:00, Naomi stepped quietly out of his room.

He took care to leave the apartment as quietly as possible. Their old, heavy front door tended to squeak at the slightest provocation, so he closed it carefully and locked it behind him.

When he turned around, he found Sensei standing in the hallway in front of him.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Naomi froze up. A jolt of fear ran through him; he felt like a zebra staring down a lion. Swallowing, he clutched the wrist of his gloved hand.

“I’m going to use the God Hand,” he squeaked out, “to recreate those books.”

“Don’t be an idiot!”

Sensei strode up to Naomi and glared down at him.

“I did explain how that thing works, didn’t I? Information-dense objects are exponentially harder to create or modify. And a single book is packed full of information. Are you planning to copy out every single page, word by word? Do you know how many hours that would take?”

It was a barrage of words. He wasn’t yelling, but there was a clear, cold anger in his tone.

“Even if you somehow succeeded, you’d be altering the course of history. If the used book sale isn’t canceled, my manual won’t be useful anymore. You won’t end up dating her. And we’ll have no way to predict how the accident might play out.”

Naomi flinched again. Sensei’s words were hitting home.

“If we can’t save her, it would be your fault.”

It was true, of course. Everything he was saying was the truth. Sensei knew the correct choice. He had the right answers. Saving Ruri’s life was far more important than a used book sale.

Which meant—

“The reason…”

“What was that?”

Naomi was going to be wrong.

“The reason we’re preventing this accident…is so Ichigyou-san can be happy.” He stared back into Sensei’s eyes with the fiercest expression he could muster. “But right now, she’s miserable.”

There wasn’t any rational logic behind this choice. Naomi knew he was letting his emotions take over. This wasn’t the safe path; it led directly into the unknown.

To the best of his ability, Naomi avoided taking risks. He didn’t like challenging himself unless the outcome was predictable. His mind screamed at him to stop.

But he was still going to make the wrong choice. He was heading down the path of risk and uncertainty, where failure was more likely than success.

Sensei wanted him to stop. Stopping was clearly the smarter decision.

So what?

He wasn’t doing this for Sensei, or for himself. He was doing it for her.

He walked past Sensei, picking up the pace with every step. Sensei couldn’t touch him or stop him. He was grateful for that now.

Without looking back, he ran down the dark, deserted street toward the high school.

 

Deep inside the darkened library, Naomi flipped on a single desk lamp. He wasn’t about to turn on the overhead lights and risk a security guard discovering him.

Some careful sneaking had brought him undetected to the second floor of the library. He didn’t have a key, of course, but he’d used his glove to open a convenient hole in the entrance door.

The hole-opening part wasn’t too difficult, but he’d struggled a little bit with repairing the door afterward. He’d always thought of the school doors as nothing but planks of wood, but they were actually composite objects with layers of veneer and protective coating; he couldn’t recreate all that instantly. It would have been easier to make his hole in the glass part of the door, in retrospect.

Naomi checked his watch; it was 12:30 a.m. By 6:30 or so, the teachers and students with early morning activities would start trickling in. He needed to make as many books as possible in that time.

Crouching down next to his lamp, Naomi held his right hand out a few inches above the floor.

The first ninety minutes slipped by before he knew it.

Naomi focused on his task intently. His glove vibrated. And in the space under his palm, a book materialized out of thin air. This was his third creation so far. The first and second were nowhere to be seen, however. He’d erased both of them shortly after creating them.

The book had taken form quite nicely this time. Naomi remembered it clearly as one of the volumes he’d seen in Ruri’s storage building. Although it was technically brand new, it looked appropriately worn and aged; a glance at the side showed that the paper was visibly yellowed.

The moment he picked it up and opened it, though, Naomi grimaced. Its contents were pure gibberish.

There were letters on the pages, aligned in neat sentences and paragraphs, resembling a novel in their length and spacing. But there wasn’t a single coherent phrase to be found in any of it. It was the kind of nonsense you’d see when a computer screwed up encoding a text file. There were even a few bizarre symbols mixed in with the real characters. This wasn’t something you could read.

His first and second tries had the exact same problem. Naomi understood why he’d failed. He’d been practicing with the God Hand for two and a half months by now, after all. He had a good sense for the way it worked in practice.

It could only create things he could imagine. There was no way he could use it to recreate the text of a book he’d never read.

Sensei had asked him if he planned to copy out the books word by word. That was clearly the only real way it could be done. He’d need to flip through a book while creating a copy of it.

But the original books had been destroyed. They were only ashes at this point, and even those had been dumped in the trash by now.

Sensei knew all of this. He’d warned Naomi in advance that this project simply wasn’t possible. If he really wanted to, he probably could have taken the glove back somehow, but he hadn’t bothered. Maybe he’d decided to let Naomi frustrate himself instead.

Maybe he knew Naomi would come back beaten and defeated.

A dark, miserable feeling spread through Naomi’s mind. He knew this sensation very well—he’d experienced it countless times. It was like an old friend by now.

Resignation.

Everything was telling him to give up, that there was nothing more to be done. There was no time. His goal was impossible. The glove couldn’t do what he wanted it to.

He understood that all too well.

“So what?” he muttered defiantly to himself, picturing her face. “So what?!” It didn’t matter if this was pointless. He just didn’t want to give up. He wouldn’t.

He felt his face distorting like a frustrated toddler’s. He crumpled up the useless book in his hand.

He felt the glove quivering.

Blinking, he looked down at it. It really was quivering. He wasn’t consciously trying to create anything at the moment; it was moving all on its own.

The part on the back of his hand began to shift and ripple. A long, thin cord emerged; at the end there was a bit that looked like a camera lens. It wriggled into place, then began emitting light—almost like a projector.

A holographic image took shape in front of him. His eyes went wide. This technology was familiar—he saw images of things like it nearly every morning at his training sessions, as a part of his daily lectures.

This thing was far more advanced than any technology in Naomi’s world. There was only one person who could be using it.

“Sensei?”

There was no reply, but the blurry, vague image grew sharper, forming a clearly defined holographic model. He was looking at an old, stuffed bookshelf, one of the shelves from the old storage building.

Naomi reached out to the 3D model. As his hand drew closer, one of the books popped off the shelf and floated up in front of him.

He moved his hand experimentally; the holographic book responded, spinning in midair. After a moment, he managed to open it.

“Wait, is this…”

Closing the 3D model of the book, he reached out for another. It popped out just as easily.

Finally, he understood.

This was his source material—the guide he needed to reconstruct those burned books. Somehow, Sensei had provided him perfect reproductions of the books as they had been. This was the breakthrough he’d been hoping for. It was his chance to succeed.

Naomi looked up at the ceiling of the library—something told him Sensei was in that direction. “Thank you so much!” he whispered fiercely.

There was no reply, of course. But Naomi thought he could hear someone mutter, “What a moron,” anyway. And then add, “Focus on the job at hand.”

Naomi checked his watch. It was 1:35 a.m.

With this reference material, he could recreate the books perfectly. The only question now was how many he could finish before his time ran out. He had five hours—or only five hours, really. How far could he get?

Snapping the 3D book shut, he held his hand out once again. He didn’t have any time to waste on thinking about it. He might not even get through ten books at this rate. Even five might be tough.

But despite the risks, he felt joyful as he threw himself into the task. A part of him was scared he might not succeed, but a bigger part of him was happy that he didn’t have to give up yet.

 

11.

 

NISHIKI HIGH STUDENTS flowed down Horigawa Street. It was a perfectly ordinary morning and a perfectly normal day—just another weekday in June. The Culture Festival and Sports Day were still far away, exams weren’t for a while, and there weren’t any special events scheduled.

Some of the students walking toward the front gate seemed happy or excited; others looked tired or annoyed. But none of them looked at all unusual.

Ruri was one of the students in the crowd, perfectly composed. There were no powerful emotions coursing through her; her mind was like the surface of a placid lake.

Yesterday, the library committee’s books had all been burned to ashes.

Ruri had put a great deal of effort into gathering them up over the last three weeks. And most of them had belonged to her grandfather—books she had grown up admiring and reading. They were special to her. She was sad that they were gone, of course.

But that wasn’t the main thing on her mind.

Yesterday, the committee chairman had sent a group message telling everyone that the used book sale was officially canceled. That knowledge cast a deep shadow over her thoughts.

She’d been looking forward to it.

It wasn’t that she’d expected anything to come of it. There wasn’t a concrete objective she’d been working toward. But as she devoted herself to gathering books, she’d started to think of the sale’s success as a worthwhile goal in itself.

Ruri had always been uncomfortable in groups. In middle school, she’d kept her communication with her classmates to the bare minimum, mostly for assignments and the like. But after entering high school, she’d found herself on the library committee, working closely with a boy from her class. Then she’d started collaborating with the whole group, giving their project everything she had. That was all new for her.

It had been a kind of adventure.

She’d thrown herself at a new, totally unfamiliar challenge. She’d risked interacting with others. She’d grown closer to a stranger, and she’d overcome her fears. Maybe the average person wouldn’t think she was doing anything unusual—those things came naturally to most people, it seemed. But for Ruri, it had been an adventure, one she’d wanted to face head on and triumph over, like the protagonists from her favorite stories.

But reality wasn’t a children’s book. Adventures don’t always end in success and glory; sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you fail for no good reason. Her family’s books had burned to ashes, and the used book sale wasn’t even going to happen.

Ruri found herself remembering something her new friend Naomi had told her earlier in the week: “I know I’m just a minor character.”

She understood exactly what he meant.

Ruri didn’t think of herself as a minor character in someone else’s story, but she clearly wasn’t a protagonist, either. She didn’t have any magic ability to counteract this disaster, and no one was going to swoop in to fix things for her. No hero was coming. This was the real world, after all.

It was obvious, really. There was nothing worth whining about. The grown-ups of the world had learned these lessons long ago; they were just facts of life.

Ruri’s heart was calm. It was calm because she understood, now, that she wasn’t in a story.

She was just another ordinary person.

“Hey, Ichigyou-san…”

Someone called to Ruri at the shoe lockers by the entrance. She recognized the voice at once—she’d heard it a lot lately. Ruri turned to Naomi, but at the sight of his face, she couldn’t suppress a small frown. It was first thing in the morning, but Naomi appeared completely exhausted. There were deep bags under his half-opened eyes, and his whole face drooped.

At first, she wondered if he’d pulled an all-nighter, but this level of fatigue suggested something else. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days—but he’d seemed perfectly fine yesterday. There was something more to it.

Naomi offered Ruri a weak smile, then tottered off toward the library, beckoning her to follow.

There was a single cardboard box sitting on top of the checkout desk. At Naomi’s urging, Ruri opened it uncertainly.

Her eyes went wide.

The box was full of old books. She knew some of them. She recognized some of them. There were forty or so, clearly books from her grandfather’s collection. But that wasn’t possible.

“Turns out there was one box that got stashed somewhere else. I found it yesterday,” Naomi explained with a smile.

Still doubting her own eyes, Ruri picked up one of the books. As she held it in her hand, she finally believed it was real. It had the weathered feel of an old book; its pages were yellowed, and it even had a few familiar bumps and scrapes.

The still waters of her heart...rippled. Her chest felt oddly hot.

Some of them had survived. They hadn’t all burned to ash. It lit a new fire in Ruri’s heart.

If we have these, maybe…

“There’s less than fifty in there,” Naomi said, “but that’s enough to hold a book sale, right?”

Her eyes still fixed on the box, Ruri nodded firmly.

They could do this. They’d lost almost all their stock, so it was back to being a small event, but that didn’t matter. They could have the book sale after all.

She felt genuine joy bubbling up inside her.

That was when she noticed it. Her eyes settled on one particular book inside the box, familiar to her, like the others. She picked it up, a strange electric tingle running through her body.

It was an old novel with an attractive cover, but its corners were rounded and worn, and there was a big stain on it, too. It was the book Naomi had told her he was interested in, the one with the library card mounted on the inside of the back cover.

It had burned to ashes yesterday.

Ruri’s thoughts spun through her mind in a confused jumble. It didn’t make any sense—this book had been destroyed. She’d seen a charred fragment of its cover. Had her eyes played tricks on her? How could it be here if it had burned up in the fire?

Or had Naomi somehow found a different copy of this book last night? That didn’t seem too realistic. There were more than forty books in this box; he couldn’t possibly have bought them all in one night and made them look convincingly used. And he couldn’t possibly have known about some of these familiar little dings. It would have required actual magic.

Uncertainly, she looked over in search of answers. She met his eyes.

Katagaki Naomi beamed at her.

“Thank goodness some of them were all right.”

In that moment, Ruri understood, somehow. The truth of it jumped directly into her mind, bypassing conscious thought or logic.

It was him. He had done something to make this happen. She had no idea what; there was no plausible explanation. But there was no doubt in her mind.

Ruri opened her mouth to speak; she had so many questions. But before she could get a single word out, Naomi’s head swung toward her. He pitched forward limply, his forehead hitting her shoulder.

Startled, Ruri just barely managed to grab hold of him and ease his fall to the ground.

She looked at his face. She’d never seen it this close before. Naomi was breathing softly and regularly in his sleep. His slack face suggested that he was utterly exhausted. What on earth had he been doing to wear himself out like this? Well, that was the one question she knew the answer to.

He’d been working magic.

He’d done it for the used book sale. For the group. Maybe even for Ruri herself. He’d made it in the nick of time and saved her.

The hero had showed up after all.

“Eeeeek!” A shrill cry broke the silence. Ruri looked up to see Misuzu hopping excitedly in the library entrance.

“Ruru! Eee! Katagaki-kun! Hee hee hee!”

The meaning of her shrieks was unclear at best, but Ruri got the general idea. How was she going to explain any of this, exactly?

As Misuzu pranced into the room, the other library committee members began to trickle in behind her. It was odd; the message about the book sale being canceled went out yesterday, so there was no reason for them to be here instead of heading to their classrooms.

Finally, the committee’s chairman walked in and looked around the library at the others.

“What, you too?”

He reached into his bag and retrieved a few books. The others took that as their cue to open their backpacks and tote bags to take out their own contributions. There were novels, how-to guides, even coffee-table books—their size and content varied widely. Before long, they’d formed a nice pile on the check-out counter.

At the very end, Kadenokouji Misuzu triumphantly added a romance novel with a cover full of hearts, placing it ceremoniously on the pile like the crown at a coronation.

Ruri smiled. Her little adventure wasn’t quite over yet.

 

12.

 

NAOMI’S EYES slowly cracked open.

A thin curtain swayed in front of him. Through it, he could see the sky—a mix of blue and orange. It was either evening or dawn, but he had no idea which.

What time is it…?

If it was evening, the day was practically over. And if it was dawn, it was actually tomorrow. Either way, too much time had passed.

“Wait…” His eyes went wide. “The book sale!”

Naomi popped up to a sitting position, his heart pounding in his chest. Not good—he’d fallen asleep!

His mind finally managed to piece together where he was—in the side room in the library, lying on one of the couches. How many hours had he been here? Was the day already over? What had happened with the book sale?

“We couldn’t wake you up,” someone said.

Startled, Naomi turned toward the voice, and once again blinked in confusion. Ichigyou Ruri was sitting on the smaller sofa, looking as self-possessed as always with her usual calm expression on her face. But her outfit…that was another story.

She was wearing a frilly white apron over a bright blue dress. Her poofy skirt looked like it might flip up if she turned around too quickly, and he couldn’t even look at her tights without blushing. He recognized the look—it was a classic “Alice in Wonderland” costume. That didn’t help him make sense of the situation, though. Why was she wearing that?!

“I decided I’d sell as many books as possible,” Ruri said after a moment. It sounded like this was her attempt at explaining herself, and her tone suggested it hadn’t been an easy decision. Naomi had to assume that Misuzu had worn her down.

“Oh! Wait!” said Naomi, his mind finally jumping back to the most important topic. “Does that mean, uh…did the book sale…?” His voice trailed off hesitantly. All he could remember was handing over a single box of books to Ruri in the morning. He’d passed out immediately afterward. He had no idea how things had gone after that.

For all he knew, once the sale had been canceled, they hadn’t been able to reverse that decision. The box might be sitting under the front counter right now. Naomi stared at Ruri with all the fear of a defendant waiting for his verdict.

In response, she reached into the pocket of her apron and took out a piece of paper. She unfolded it carefully, then held it out dramatically for Naomi’s inspection.

Used Book Sale: SOLD OUT! Total Donations: 34,850 yen!

Naomi just stared at it blankly, then clenched his hands into fists. But just squeezing them tightly wasn’t enough—he threw his arms up in triumph.

I did it.

Pure joy pulsed through his veins. All the pain and exhaustion he’d endured the previous night melted from his mind.

I pulled it off. I didn’t give up for once, and it worked!

“Katagaki-san…” Naomi looked over at Ruri and started in surprise. She’d moved to the chair right next to his sofa; she was staring at him from only a few feet away.

“Thank you.” The words were simple, but her tone was heartfelt. Naomi could feel himself blushing. He understood, of course, that she was thanking him for finding that box of books. She had no idea that he’d spent all night making them with a magical glove. There wasn’t anything special about her gratitude.

“Hey, no problem,” he responded with a smile.

He’d assumed that would end the conversation, but for some reason, Ruri was still staring at him intently. She didn’t seem to feel they were done yet.

“Uhm, it’s not like I really did anything that—”

“Thank you very much,” Ruri interrupted with a shake of her head.

Then, she smiled at him.

Naomi didn’t have time to brace for impact. It took a few moments for him to even understand what he was feeling. The first symptom was purely physical; there was a wonderful warmth in his chest that showed no signs of fading. Finally, he managed to put words to it.

That smile was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.

Melodramatic as it might sound, he knew he would never forget this moment. No matter what else happened, no matter how long he lived, he was going to treasure that smile forever.

“You know…” Naomi was a little surprised to hear his own voice. His mouth seemed like it was moving all on its own.

He wanted to say it. He really, truly did. His conscious mind was holding him back, though. Was there really a point to telling her now? Who knew what would happen? Everything might fall apart.

“I, uh…”

So what? Just say it. It’s the truth.

“I love you, Ichigyou-san.”

Naomi’s gaze fell to the floor as he spoke. He couldn’t bear to look at anything else in that moment—not at himself, and certainly not at her.

He’d said it.

He’d actually said it.

“I see,” Ruri replied.

Maybe this was what it felt like when a judge sentenced you to death.

“Well, it takes two people to have a relationship.”

Naomi’s eyes widened in surprise. These weren’t the words he’d been expecting to hear.

“I suppose…”

Slowly, cautiously, he looked up.

“We can give it a try together.”

That same smile was waiting for him.

 

There was a book sitting on the table in that side room; it was the beat-up old novel that had caught Naomi’s eye. Ruri had set it aside for him during the book sale.

The pocket inside its back cover still had that yellowed paper card sitting inside it. Scribbled across the neatly printed lines were the names of everyone who’d ever borrowed it, in order, starting from the top.

And on the very first line, in faded ink that was by now only barely legible, was the name Ichigyou Ruri.