Chapter Four

Chapter Four

 

1.

 

WHEN NAOMI WAS YOUNG, he would sometimes look up at the moon and reach for it. He used to think he might just barely touch it if he stood on top of Kyoto Tower.

Back then, he hadn’t known that the moon was 380,000 kilometers away from Earth, and since learning that fact, he’d never reached at it again. He wasn’t a child anymore, after all.

But now, he found himself reliving that experience. It was a peculiar feeling.

“Now! Imagine as hard as you can!” shouted Sensei, his voice echoing across the forested hill. He needed to shout to make himself heard; their training ground, in a secluded part of the Narabigaoka forest, was currently a very noisy place. “Let your mind run wild!”

Naomi’s glove vibrated fiercely. The roaring sound that filled the air was produced by the God Hand when it was operating under a heavy load. Fierce winds whipped around the area and lashed the trees back and forth; clods of soil were pulled out of the ground. The world groaned in protest as he rewrote it.

Naomi closed his hand, clutching at nothingness. His fingers wrapped around a small gray-white orb. He’d created it in a split second, simply by picturing it in his mind’s eye.

He’d realized his childhood fantasy. He was holding the moon.

“More! Stretch yourself even further. You can do anything!” shouted Sensei.

Dropping the small sphere to the ground, Naomi immediately began his next creation.

Sensei was right. Naomi had caught the moon in his hands; surely they could stretch even further. The air swirled violently once more as he rewrote reality, defining mass and volume out of nothing. His knowledge fed his imagination and gave his mental image greater precision.

He shaped a complex mixture of heavy metals and silicon into a reddish-brown lump of rock. He had created Mars.

“Whatever you visualize can be made real. There’s nothing, literally nothing, that can stop you.”

Naomi tossed the small planet aside. Pulsing with excitement, driven on by Sensei’s words, he reached out even further into the universe. Every time he created something new, he felt like his brain might break down under the strain. Still, he kept pushing further, testing the limits of his mind. He brought forth liquid iron and nickel and surrounded them with silicates. In the blink of an eye, in the palm of his hand, he reproduced a core, mantle, and crust that had taken eons to form in space. Venus.

“Tell yourself this world is yours. Tell yourself…”

Gritting his teeth, Naomi squeezed the last few drops of strength from his brain. This wasn’t impossible. He wasn’t at his limit. He could push past this—he had no limits.

Something new took shape in the palm of his right hand.

He gathered hydrogen, the simplest of all elements. He created it, concentrated it, and created even more.

The little object began to grow hotter and hotter, denser and denser. And Naomi just kept going.

Sensei shouted once again, “You’re going to be its god!”

And then, there was light.

It was like seeing the beginning of the universe—not that he could compare it to the real thing. Finally letting himself relax, Naomi felt the blood begin to drain from his overheated, exhausted brain. Its job was done now. He’d finished his creations.

Vacantly, he looked down at his hand, at the blazing ball of heat resting in it. Its surface was a single great river of flame, flowing slowly in multiple directions; every now and then, a pillar of fire would burst from its surface.

It was a tiny sun.

He looked up and met Sensei’s gaze. For once, the man wasn’t scowling at him. In fact, he was smiling.

“Not bad,” he said, offering Naomi a thumbs-up. “I’ll give that a passing grade.”

It was July 2nd, and this was their final training session. Naomi had passed his examination and become a god.

 

2.

 

[July 3rd—The Uji River Fireworks Festival]

 

THERE WERE TWO TRAIN STOPS in the Uji area: the Uji Station on Japan Railway’s Nara line, and an identically named station on the Keihan Uji line. And today, both of them were absolutely packed with people.

The sun was nearly set; evening was giving way to night. The flow of people from across the city to the festival was reaching its peak. There were couples in yukatas, families with children in tow—people of all ages, in all kinds of different clothing, all heading in the same direction.

Some among the crowds were shooting uncertain glances up at the sky; the weather was the one point of concern at the moment. The area around the festival was covered in typical summer clouds, seemingly undecided whether they were going to rain on everyone’s parade or not.

The people moved forward nonetheless, silently hoping for the best. But this time, Ichigyou Ruri wasn’t among them.

 

“On July 3rd, we went to the Fireworks Festival together.”

The voice seemed like it was coming directly into Naomi’s ear. Reflexively, he reached up and touched the frame of the glasses he was wearing, which apparently had a small speaker built into them. Sensei was actually standing on top of a nearby utility pole.

The two of them waited just outside Ichigyou Ruri’s house in Shimogamo. Sensei was using his perch to keep an eye on her second-floor window.

“The weather took a sudden turn for the worse in the middle of the fireworks, and it turned into a thunderstorm. The exact time of the event itself was 8:01 p.m.”

“Right. I didn’t invite her this time, though.”

Naomi could keep up his end of the conversation without shouting, fortunately; the glasses must’ve had a built-in microphone, too. This was Naomi’s first time wearing the things, which he’d made with the God Hand to Sensei’s precise instructions. In all honesty, he didn’t quite understand how they worked. Making any sort of electronic gizmo was an extreme challenge for Naomi working on his own. But these glasses were connected to the God Hand by a cord, and the crow was apparently handling a lot of the more complex functions through that connection. He hadn’t had to implement a lot of the technology himself.

Trying to ignore the unfamiliar weight on the bridge of his nose, Naomi looked up at the darkening sky. There were a few clouds visible, but it didn’t look likely to rain.

“There won’t be any thunder in this area, right? Doesn’t this mean we’ve prevented the accident?”

“Assuming nothing happens before then, yes,” Sensei said ominously.

“I can’t imagine what could happen, though…”

But just as those words left Naomi’s mouth, he spotted something at the very edge of his vision. There was someone standing in the middle of the residential road not too far away.

At first, he thought the figure was a construction worker, mainly because it was wearing a bright yellow belt that looked like a reflective vest. On closer examination, though, there was something very odd about it. Naomi had never seen a construction worker wearing a kitsune mask before.

It was a stylized, painted fox mask, the kind of thing you could find for sale at the gift shops around the Fushimi Inari shrine. But this was Shimogamo, not Inari, and the festival wasn’t anywhere near this area. The person didn’t look like a parade performer, anyway.

Naomi lowered his glasses, trying to get a better look at the strange figure. But as soon as he did, the man disappeared entirely.

“Huh?”

When he put the glasses back on, the man was still standing there, exactly where he’d been a moment before. And he was beginning to trudge in Naomi’s direction.

He was invisible, except through the glasses. What did that mean?

“Damn it. They’re here,” growled Sensei.

“Wh-what is that thing?”

“It’s the Homeostatic System,” Sensei replied. The masked figure drew steadily closer as he spoke; Naomi couldn’t help but take a step back from that seriously creepy thing. “It detected an alteration to AllTale’s system files, and it’s here to protect their integrity. Those things will try to erase any discrepancies in the records, returning the simulation to its predetermined state.”

Those things, plural?

Naomi scanned the area, his heart thumping in his chest. Between one glance and the next, several identical masked figures materialized in the street around him. He quickly counted ten; more popped into existence by the second.

“In other words…” Naomi glanced up anxiously and met Sensei’s gaze. “They’re planning to drag you and your girlfriend to the Uji River, where you’re supposed to be.”

“What?! What should I do?!”

“Fight them, obviously.”

“You want me to fight a computer system? How?”

“Use the God Hand, idiot. Make yourself a weapon!”

Unsettled as he was, Naomi instantly crouched down and pressed his glove to the ground. He didn’t see weapons on a regular basis, unfortunately; they weren’t exactly necessary for a high schooler in modern Japan. It was hard for him to even picture one on the spur of the moment.

“Whatever you make, the God Hand will enhance its performance. Just focus on visualizing something powerful!”

Powerful? Powerful how? Uh…okay. Something you could hurt somebody with. Something you could swing at someone’s face. Something heavy. Something tough…

The glove trembled in response to Naomi’s thoughts. He wasn’t feeling too confident about the results this time, but in the next moment, there was something nice and thick and heavy in his hand.

He’d produced an encyclopedia.

Naomi was confused by this, even though it was entirely his own doing. You could certainly do some damage with a book if you swung it hard enough. But did it really qualify as a weapon?

He didn’t have time to think the matter over. The masked things were only a few paces away. Rising to his feet, Naomi brandished the hefty book; a second glance revealed that it had a cord attached to it, like some kind of throwing weapon.

He grabbed hold of that seriously oversized bookmark with both hands and swung the book into the air like a shotput hammer.

“Argh!”

The encyclopedia smashed directly into the face of the nearest masked thing. The figure flew backward with astonishing force, bounced off the ground, and kept flying. A split second later, its body froze in midair with a strange, staticky sound, and that was where it stayed, totally immobilized.

Wow. That was easier than I thought.

“Nice,” said Sensei, offering him a thumbs-up.

Pulling back his encyclopedia with a tug on the cord, Naomi saw a small flash of electricity as it zipped into his hands. Maybe this was the “performance enhancement” Sensei had mentioned.

One way or another, he had the ability to take these things out—to interfere directly with creatures that weren’t even part of his world.

Maybe he could do this after all.

“Naomi.”

The voice didn’t come through his glasses this time. Sensei had hopped down off the pole at some point; he was standing back-to-back with Naomi.

“You need to hold these things off until the time of the accident has passed. That’s how you keep her safe. Just hold out another thirteen minutes!”

“What happens after that?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Get moving!”

Naomi readied his weapon with a forceful nod—this wasn’t the time for lengthy explanations. The street was already full of masked enemies.

Clearing his mind as best he could, he swung his encyclopedia-hammer at the nearest group. Several masked figures were sent soaring into the sky, where they froze. The things were still very creepy, but that was probably for the best. It made it easier to hit them without hesitation.

“They’re moving inside! Get in the yard!” shouted Sensei from above. He’d returned to his perch on top of the utility pole.

The fox-masked things had breached the wall around the property and were making their way toward Ruri’s house. Naomi rushed to follow, clambering into the yard; he’d briefly considered opening a hole in the wall instead but decided it would take too long to close it behind him.

By the time he made it over, there were already dozens of the things in the yard. Most of them must have appeared in there.

“Get lost!” Naomi arced his encyclopedia into the crowd, sending the masked things flying. With every blow, a few more froze awkwardly in midair. But he couldn’t make a dent in their numbers; they spawned quicker than he could hit them. This wasn’t looking good at all.

With a few more swings of his weapon, Naomi cut himself a path forward. He was managing, just barely, to keep the things away from Ruri’s house.

Faster. Faster!

He pushed himself to attack more quickly, more viciously. But his desperation backfired; he tried to press forward decisively but took an awkward step and lost his balance. He pitched forward and tumbled to the ground.

Naomi pushed himself up out of the dirt. It was too late; a solid wall of the eerie fox-masks encircled him completely.

Rather than attacking, however, the things joined hands. A bluish-white electric light began to arc around the circle they’d formed around him.

“They’re on the second floor!” shouted Sensei, his voice increasingly desperate.

Looking up, Naomi saw the same bluish light flashing through the window of Ruri’s room. Electric sparks arced into the air just outside it.

Oh crap, that can’t be good.

At the same moment that thought crossed his mind, he heard a loud bzzzt.

“Huh?” Stunned, Naomi looked around. The army of fox-mask men was gone, and the dirt under his feet was now a neatly paved stone path. He saw red handrails to both sides and could hear the sound of running water; he was on a bridge. He could hear large crowds on both sides of the river.

“What the…” someone murmured behind him.

Startled, Naomi turned around to see Ichigyou Ruri lying on the ground, looking just as astonished as he felt. Her casual, baggy outfit suggested she’d been lounging in her bedroom only a moment earlier.

Those masked things had done something to her. To both of them.

Oh no. Oh crap. Is this bridge—

“Naomi!” Sensei’s voice boomed out of Naomi’s glasses. They must’ve still been in communication range, but when Naomi looked for him, the older man was nowhere in sight.

“Sensei! Where are we?!”

“The bastards just abused their system privileges,” Sensei replied angrily. “They moved you right to the scene! You’re right where the lightning strike is going to happen!”

It was just as he’d feared. They were stuck in the one place they really didn’t want to be.

“Ichigyou-san!” Naomi hurriedly reached down and grabbed Ruri by the hand. They needed to run, right now. It didn’t matter where.

But just as he was pulling her up, something else pulled her sharply down.

“Ow!”

Instead of rising to her feet, Ruri pitched forward and hit the ground, caught by the ankle. Naomi came closer and saw what had snagged her—it was the ground itself. The stone surface of the bridge had warped and coiled itself around her leg, chaining her solidly in place. It was the sort of trick Naomi usually pulled with the God Hand.

This was what system privileges really meant: the power to control and reshape the world around him.

His glove vibrating fiercely, Naomi ripped the stone apart. But the bridge reacted immediately, reforming the chain in the blink of an eye. This wasn’t going to work; the system was too fast for him.

Springing to his feet, Naomi looked wildly from one side of the bridge to the other. There were thick crowds on either end. After a moment, he realized they weren’t made up of humans—it was the army of fox-masks who had brought him here.

Their menacing silence conveyed their message clearly enough.

Stop trying to run. Stay right where you are. Let events continue the way they’re supposed to.

Naomi looked up at the sky. The dark, stormy clouds above had started to rumble ominously.

“Two minutes left!” came the voice in his ear, tense and abrupt.

“Sensei…” Naomi called to future self, his voice pleading. He called to the man who’d trained him, who’d spent the last three months with him, guiding him and teasing him like a brother.

The days they’d spent in training flashed through his mind in rapid succession. From the day they’d met, they’d walked this road together.

“Listen, Naomi.” His answer came, as always, not even a hint of despair in his tone. “This is it. This is the moment of truth. Don’t worry about the repercussions, all right?” Sensei paused for just a moment to let his instructions sink in, then went on. “Give those bastards a real show.”

Naomi nodded in reply. His mind was already kicking into gear, visualizing what a real show might be. If he could visualize it, he could make it real.

Naomi held his right hand up toward the sky. Then, he began to focus.

A small sphere formed in the palm of his glove. It grew quickly to the size of a baseball, then to the size of a soccer ball, then even larger than Naomi himself.

The sphere writhed with motion, in a state of constant change. For a moment, its surface looked like iron. In the next, it was water, and then fire. It was everything at once, everything that made up this world, consolidated into a single ball of chaos.

“Nngh…” A grunt forced its way out of Naomi’s mouth. His brain struggled under the strain, and blood coursed through his head like boiling water. Keeping himself conscious and focused took sheer willpower.

The sphere grew to the size of an oil storage tank.

From far away, Naomi could hear the crowds of spectators babbling in confusion. The sphere was visible to everyone on the banks of the river by now.

Sensei had told him to give them a real show, so he’d make this the evening’s grand finale.

A flash of light tore through the sky, and thunder crashed. The moment of truth was finally here.

Naomi began to close his hand, trying to grip the enormous thing he’d created. Its sheer, impossible mass resisted fiercely, but little by little, his fingers squeezed around it, crushing it. The thing was practically a planet, but he was going to squeeze it down until it fit in his hand.

Is this really possible?

For a moment, Naomi’s conviction wavered as the sheer implausibility of what he was doing overcame his powers of imagination. He wasn’t anyone special, after all. He was just another nobody. Could he really pull off a miracle?

He faltered, knowing he was just one step before the goal line. His self-doubt, his indecisiveness, bogged him down, and he knew he was going to fail—

“I know you, Naomi,” he heard, the words shoving him forward—words that, in a way, came from Naomi himself. “You can do this.”

With all his strength, Naomi squeezed his hand shut. The enormous sphere he’d created pulsed inside his fist.

Then, he gently, carefully opened his hand again.

A small black sphere, about one centimeter in diameter, rose up into the air; although it seemed tiny and unobtrusive, the world distorted and twisted around it. Naomi tried to reduce its power with the glove, but it was too powerful to completely contain.

This wasn’t something a human being was meant to control—the all-consuming remnant of a star, a black hole.

The sky flashed with blinding light and an ear-splitting roar shook the air. A great electric current hurtled down from the heavens at near-light speed, heading straight for Ichigyou Ruri, exactly as it was meant to.

But that bolt of lightning never hit her.

The black hole distorted its path. A torrent of energy coursed violently through the atmosphere; oxygen and water spun around the bridge with the force of a tornado.

Naomi pushed his imagination just a little further. He forced the world to change. And through his glasses, he saw the last remnants of the thunderbolt disappear into the abyss.

 

A thick fog had settled all around the bridge, probably from the river evaporating around it. As he stared blearily out at it, an idle thought slipped through Naomi’s mind: It kinda reminds me of a rock concert.

It was oddly quiet. At first he thought he might have blown out his ears, but then he heard the faint sound of the river and realized his hearing was just fine.

Bit by bit, the fog began to clear, revealing his surroundings. He could make out the bridge railings, and the stone pavement, and…

And her. Sitting on the bridge with her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide.

She was alive. Ichigyou Ruri had survived.

“Katagaki-san?” she murmured in a small, stunned voice. Naomi stumbled forward, overwhelmed, and dropped to his knees in front of her. He needed to make sure it was real, that she was real, so he wrapped his arms around her.

She’s really here. She’s breathing, and I can feel her pulse.

She’s alive.

“Ichigyou-san…” His voice cracked, something caught in his throat that mangled his voice, but he couldn’t stop the words flowing out of him, either.

“You’re…all right. I d-did it! I actually did it…”

He clung to her, sobbing, with tears rolling down his face. Yet again, he’d found a way to make himself an embarrassment. But then Ruri hugged him back, and he felt a little less ashamed.

Just then, he finally remembered about Sensei. He needed to share the good news right away—this was why Sensei had come from the future, after all.

With that thought, he finally regained his composure, and realized he’d been hugging Ruri for an awkwardly long time. Suddenly embarrassed, he pulled back and reached up to touch the side of his glasses, hoping they weren’t broken.

“Sensei!”

The moment he called out to his mentor, Naomi realized he was already here, standing on one of the posts of the guardrail. When had he arrived?

“Sensei,” he called out again, rising to his feet.

Ruri would probably find this a little odd, since the man was invisible to her. But he could explain everything to her later. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to celebrate this victory with his future self. He wanted to see Sensei’s face glowing with joy.

For some reason, though, the man had his hood on again. Most of his face was hidden in shadow. After a moment, he began to speak.

“The contents need to fit their vessel perfectly.”

Naomi blinked in confusion.

“I had to eliminate the discrepancies between her digitized consciousness and the physical structure of her brain. I needed to get her mind as close as possible to the way it was at the very moment of the accident.”

What is he talking about? I don’t get it.

“The compatibility ratio finally broke the necessary threshold. As of this moment—”

“Um, Sensei—”

“I can synchronize her.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sensei snapped his fingers.

Instantly, black wings sprouted from the glove on Naomi’s right hand. They beat fiercely in the air, pulling it free; a moment later, it transformed back into the three-legged crow and flew off into the night sky.

Just as quickly, eight enormous claws rained down from the sky. Each the size of a pillar, they slammed into the stone surface of the bridge, forming a perfect octagon.

Ichigyou Ruri was in its center.

“The girl’s in love,” Sensei murmured. The space between the pillars solidified into glass-like walls. Ruri was trapped inside, like a fish in an aquarium. Naomi could see her shouting, but he couldn’t hear anything.

“She fell head over heels for you, and that’s what pushed her over the line. Her mental state is virtually identical to the way it was at the moment of that accident. Everything’s finally ready.”

I don’t get it. What is he talking about? Isn’t he supposed to be me? Why can’t I understand him?!

Suddenly, the claw-like pillars grew taller. The octagonal aquarium stretched up into the starry sky and pierced it like a knife, opening a yawning hole.

“When that bolt of lightning hit her, she didn’t actually die,” Sensei said. “But she was left brain dead.”

The inside of the tank filled up with light. The walls grew white. And Ruri, still shouting silently inside it, faded away into the brilliance.

Before she disappeared completely, Naomi thought he saw her call his name.

The claws jerked up out of the bridge. As if gravity had been reversed, the great cage fell up into the sky. And just like that, they disappeared, taking her with them.

Naomi and Sensei were left behind.

Naomi stared at his future self, disbelieving, his mind a blank. Then, and only then, did Sensei pull back his hood.

He was smiling. He looked genuinely happy.

“Thanks for everything, Naomi,” he said. “And goodbye.” With those words, he dissolved into tiny sparkles, almost like a little firework. Just like a firework, the sparkles quickly faded away into the night. Where he’d stood, there was only the darkness of the sky.

Naomi’s fingers twitched involuntarily as he stared at the space where the light had been.

The night was hot and sticky. He could feel the humid, sauna-like air pressing directly against his bare, gloveless hands.

The fireworks were over for this year, another festival come to an end. But instead of trudging home, Naomi looked up at the silent sky and spoke in a soft, trembling voice.

“Sensei?”