Chapter 1: Long Story Short, We Got Superpowers

“Ugh... Graaauuugggggghhhhhhhhh!”

Deep in the stygian depths of a sealed abyss, alone and desolate, I clutched at my right arm. I held it close—I held it back.

“Aaargh! Ugaaahhhhhh!”

I howled like a feral beast. It was all I could do—my arm was resisting me, struggling for supremacy, and my only recourse was to desperately cling to it to keep it from running wild. My left hand’s nails bit deeply into the skin of my right wrist.

My Power had gone berserk, intent on trampling over its host’s will—my will—and escaping from the enchainment of my body. I had to hold it back! No matter what!

“St-Stop,” I spat through clenched teeth. “I won’t let you, gods dammit!”

But try as I might to suppress them, the dark, seething emotions within me surged ever stronger, threatening to drown me in their ebon waters. A voice rang out from the depths of my being. Destroy, it commanded. Destroy it all!

The impulse was overpowering! It was maddening! It threatened to obscure the very core of my being! My sense of self was being overwritten. My own Power...was devouring me. My Power—that raging flame of judgment, that purgatorial inferno that reduced even the gods themselves to the pettiest of kindling...

That blackest of blazes known as Dark and Dark!

“Graaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!”

“Would you please quiet down?”

Suddenly, the lights came on, illuminating the literary club’s room. The timeworn lockers and the relatively unworn table that had just been replaced the year before were lit up in all their mundane glory. Massive metal shelves lined the walls, packed tightly with books that generations of upperclassmen had left (or abandoned, rather) for their successors to deal with.

“I could hear you guys from outside the room! What the heck are you doing in—wait, it’s just you, Andou?”

“St-Stay back, Kanzaki Tomoyo—nay, Closed Clock!”

“Did you really just say ‘nay’...? And stop calling me that!”

“Hurry! Flee! Go now, while I’m still...me!”

Tomoyo stared blankly at me as I crouched on the ground, clawing at my arm. She was cringing about as hard as it’s possible to cringe at someone.

I clicked my tongue. “Okay, okay,” I muttered as I stood up. She’d really killed the mood. I scratched my head (with my right arm, which wasn’t really throbbing at all) and met her contemptuous gaze.

Her name was Kanzaki Tomoyo. Her hair came down to her shoulders, just barely brushing up against her uniform’s lapel, and she’d probably be considered quite the looker under normal circumstances. Her sharp glare and irritably pursed lips sort of spoiled the effect, though; at a glance, they made her look like a bit of a hard-ass.

Truth be told, she really was a bit of a hard-ass, or at the very least, you could say she was remarkably stubborn. She was a member of the literary club, just like me.

“Man, Tomoyo, do you have to be such a party pooper? Give me a break!”

“Excuse me? Don’t try to make this about me. You’re obviously the weird one here—what kinda freak locks himself up in a dark room to...what were you doing, anyway?”

“I was merely enduring the throbbing, excruciating pain of suppressing my dark side as it awakened within my right arm!”

“Of course you were. You could’ve just said you were playing make-believe like always.”

“It’s not make-believe! It’s a simulation! What’re you planning on doing when your arm throbs with irrepressible power and you’re forced to fight your inner self someday, huh?!”

“I won’t, ’cause it’s not gonna happen! Come on, get real. I seriously don’t understand how you can keep up all that chuuni BS day after day without getting sick of it.” Tomoyo casually brushed aside my zealous argument as she took a seat at the table. It felt like she was being a little more brusque with me than she really needed to be, but that wasn’t anything new. She took any opportunity she could find to call me out on my “chuuni” side, and the way she described it left no room for doubt that she meant it as an insult.

Fortunately, I was far too tolerant of a person to snap back at that level of insult! Besides, I knew perfectly well that someday, when they appeared out of nowhere and attacked her, my dark side would finally get its chance to shine! Mwa ha ha!

“It’s unbelievable, really,” I whined. “How could the bearer of a surname like Kanzaki not appreciate my worldview?”

“What? Where do you get off making fun of people’s names like that? Stuff it!”

“I wasn’t making fun of it! I’m actually really jealous!”

“That’s just as bad!”

But seriously, though—“Kanzaki”? Cool doesn’t even begin to describe it! The characters it’s written with literally mean “cape of the gods,” for crying out loud! The gods! Having “god” in your name basically means you’ve won life’s lottery by default! “Kanzaki” easily qualified for a spot on my internal top five family names list, no question about it.

On the flip side, my family name was...Andou. “Peaceful wisteria,” basically. Hmph. Well, whatever. It’s not like that was my true name, regardless.

“I used to like my name, before you started harping on it,” sighed Tomoyo. It was starting to feel awkward being the only one who was standing up, so I sat down in the folding chair across from hers.

“Anyway, Andou,” she said, resting her chin in her hand and giving me a slightly more serious look than usual, “if you don’t give your weird, cringy ‘simulations’ a rest, you’re gonna end up in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation before you know it. You’d be screwed if something nasty actually did awaken in you and none of us took it seriously, right? You have to think about these things—they’re part of the world we live in now, after all.”

“Hmph... I’m well aware. Therein lies the purpose of the simulation!”

Tomoyo sighed again. “You’re impossible, I swear,” she muttered, her shoulders slumping with exasperation.

In spite of our differences, I understood what she was trying to say all too well. We who really had awakened to extraordinary powers could no longer call ourselves ordinary people.

It had all started a half year earlier.

Our literary club’s room was suddenly engulfed in a mysterious flood of light, and the five of us who were inside it at the time lost consciousness. We woke up some time later to find that we had acquired supernatural abilities. That was the day that my own power, Dark and Dark, awakened.

It happened so abruptly that there was no way we could cope with it, and we all fell into a complete and utter panic. I mean, can you blame us? We’d obtained supernatural powers out of absolutely nowhere, for seemingly no reason whatsoever! Nobody could explain how or why we’d been granted our powers, and that fact hadn’t changed in the six months since. Had some god or paranormal entity chosen us to receive them? Or had they always lain dormant within us and just happened to awaken at that particular moment? Who knows!

No matter what the reason might’ve been, there was just one thing that I could say for sure: I was really, honestly, happy. I’d finally taken my first step into the world of the extraordinary I’d always longed to live in.

Was I confused? Yes. Was I scared? Also yes. But the joy I felt in that moment surpassed both those feelings by a mile.

Woo-hoo! Hell yeah! We’ve got superpowers; how friggin’ cool is that?! I’d spent my whole life dreaming and fantasizing about the day I’d finally realize my own supernatural potential, and it finally, finally happened! Is there a guy out there who wouldn’t get super hyped in a situation like that? I think not!

And thus, we departed from the world of the everyday, setting forth into an extraordinary new reality of wild, mind-bending, superpowered battles—

“Not,” interjected Tomoyo as she slurped a cup of tea.

“I know, right...?” I grumbled, taking a sip from my own cup and then heaving a deep sigh of profound disappointment.

So, yeah. Honestly? We awakened to supernatural powers...and that’s it. Absolutely nothing else happened. Not a single friggin’ thing, seriously.

Some of us had been really freaked out at first, terrified by the implications of our powers and the thought of what might happen when the other shoe finally dropped. After about a month or so, though, that fear turned into more of an awkward “So, uh, I guess that’s it? Huh...” sort of feeling.

The months kept passing by, each as uneventful as the last, bringing us to our current state. We could only conclude that the awakening of our powers was, in fact, all that was going to happen. There wasn’t another shoe. Thus, we returned to our excruciatingly ordinary everyday lives.

“Come ooon,” I groaned. “Something’s gotta happen! Anything!”

“Would you please give up already? Getting your hopes up for something that’s out of the question doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s been half a year—if anything were going to happen, it would’ve by now.”

“I think not! I’m sure that any day now, a hundred magical children will be dispatched from another world to this one to fight for the right to become the king of their mystical realm!”

“Sure, and my name’s Zatch. Not happening.”

“Okay then, maybe other people all across the world have awakened to the same sort of powers that we have, and we’ll be inexplicably drawn together to take part in bizarre battles!”

“This isn’t JoJo either. Nope.”

I paused. “Is it just me, or do you know an awful lot about nerd stuff, Tomoyo?” She had a surprising aptitude for keeping up with my references, even when they were relatively deep cuts.

“Don’t call me a nerd! My brother’s really into all those battle manga, and I just end up reading the stuff he leaves lying around the house. That’s all.”

Hmm. She denied it every time I tried to call her out on her nerd-like qualities, but I was positive I was onto something. Actually, come to think of it, wouldn’t the fact that she knew the word “chuuni” in the first place make her a nerd by default?

Right around that point in the conversation, I ran out of tea. I stood up and walked over to the corner of the room where we kept our kettle.

“Get me a refill while you’re at it, Andou,” called out Tomoyo.

“Huh?” I turned around to face her—and accidentally brushed the tea caddy with my hand in the process, knocking a container of green tea off the table. Even worse, its lid was open! An epic catastrophe was playing out in front of my eyes! Agh, crap! We just bought that stuff three days ago!

“Oh, for crying out loud. Keep it together, would you?”

It happened in the blink of an eye. Faster, even. The next moment—very literally the next possible instant—Tomoyo, who had been seated in a chair across the room, was standing in front of me, holding the container I’d knocked over. I hadn’t seen her move at all. It was like watching a stop-motion movie with a really, really low frame rate.

“So you used it,” I declared. “You’ve exercised your power—the power to reign supreme over eternity itself: Closed Clock!”

Closed Clock was Kanzaki Tomoyo’s supernatural ability—the ability to bend the passage of time to her will. She couldn’t quite turn back the clock, apparently, but she could accelerate time, slow it down, or even bring it to a dead stop as she pleased.

Best as I could tell, she’d paused time the moment she saw the container of pricey tea topple from the table, walked over to it, and caught it midair. I guess the easiest way to explain the power is that it’s like a combination of The World and Clock Up.

“Yes, okay, I used it,” she admitted as I brewed a fresh batch of tea and sat back down. “But would you please cool it with the cringey power names?”

I was the one who’d named all of the literary club members’ superpowers. They were all like, “Names? Why would we give our powers names?” at first, but I wasn’t about to let it slide that easily! I came up with the most wonderful titles imaginable for all their abilities—it was a generous present from me to them.

I swear, though, not a single one of them understood how these things work! They didn’t get how vitally important having a name for your power is in a supernatural battle. Then again, the fact that I was the one to name their powers did give me something like a fifty percent stake in them, so I didn’t mind going to the trouble.

“You could’ve at least made them easier to understand,” she continued. “Like, why do they all have to be in English? Maybe if you’d picked names that made sense, you wouldn’t need to spend a whole sentence expositing about them every time you bring them up.”

“Bah! If you don’t like it, why not come up with a name of your own? I’ll approve of the change—if, that is, you really can think up something better than mine!”

“Since when do I need your approval to change my power’s name?”

“And besides,” I carried on, ignoring her, “everyone else seems totally happy with my names! You’re gonna spoil our group dynamic by being such a stick in the mud!”

“Or maybe they’re not happy with your names, but coming up with one for their own power would’ve been excruciatingly embarrassing, so they had to suck it up and make do with your chuuni nonsense.”

That’s Tomoyo, the chronic tsundere for you. Girl just can’t admit that, deep down, she really likes my names.

“By the way,” I told her, “your catchphrase is ‘Let you be trapped betwixt the hands of time and wander forever the realm of eternity!’”

“I don’t want a catchphrase!”

“Oh ho? I see now—you’re trying to say that you don’t care about your power. What you really want is to see mine, right?”

“Wrong! That’s not what I said at all! You just want to show yours off!”

“Mwa ha ha—very well, then. It’s clear you can’t be dissuaded, so I shall let you behold my power: the sable blaze, Dark and Dark!”

Going with “behold” rather than “see” was important, by the way. You gotta be particular about those little details.

I stood, taking great care to exude the relaxed, regal aura of confidence that only a true ruler can pull off. Tomoyo looked incredibly fed up, but I paid her no mind. I extended my right hand, grasped the shackle that sealed its power with my left—and removed it.

“Hold on,” interrupted Tomoyo. “For one thing, that’s just a fingerless glove you wrote ‘Seal’ on, and for another, you weren’t even wearing it a second ago, were you? You totally just pulled it out of your pocket and put it on before you started posing, didn’t you?”

“I am he who conquers chaos! A chaotic sea of darkness slumbers within my body, and the hellish flames of chaos are birthed from the murk! Let them devour my flesh, feast upon my soul, and manifest in this chaotic mortal realm!”

“Too long! And way too much chaos!”

“Dark and—wait, for real? Too many chaoses? You think so?”

“You seriously stopped there?! You were one word away! If you have to put on this stupid act, at least finish it!” Tomoyo leaned forward as she picked my act to pieces, and I slumped dejectedly back into my chair. Man... I guess I should probably put a two-chaos limit on the Malediction of Unleashing after all...

“You’re weirdly sensitive about stuff like this, y’know?” continued Tomoyo.

“I’d rather you say I’m dedicated to constant self-improvement.”

“I might have, if it weren’t for the fact that you’re pouring all that effort into improving the wrong things entirely,” she replied with a heavy sigh. “You know, I’ve gotta say, your ability is pretty much a materialization of your deepest wishes.”

“Heh! I can’t deny it.” Tomoyo probably meant that as an insult, but I laughed in the face of her sarcasm, nodded dramatically, extended my right hand, and activated my power.

Dark and Dark: the power to call forth a burst of jet-black fire from my right hand. Its flame spread out from my palm, flaring and flickering in a perpetual dance that would never coalesce into a single shape. It bore an air of sanctity, yet at the same time it carried a tinge of corruption, coming together in a strange, self-contradictory aura... Or, at least, that’s how I saw it, anyway. It was a blaze of purest black that could burn through even the darkness itself.

And come on—how cool is that?! Black flames are hella cool, and I’m hella cool for making them.

“Dark and Dark,” said Tomoyo, “the power to produce black fire from your body—period. That’s all it does. A totally useless ability.”

There I was, basking in the awesomeness of my power, and she just had to go and throw a pitcher of ice water on my fun. She was right, though. It really didn’t do anything other than make black flames. They weren’t even especially hot, thus making their effective attack power close to zero.

They were closer to an illusion than actual fire, really. Couldn’t even burn a sheet of newspaper. Y’know how hot your forehead gets when you think you might have a fever, but aren’t quite sure? They were about that hot, specifically.

In reality, fire supposedly gets closer and closer to pure white in color the hotter it gets. It’s different in manga and anime, though. There, black flames are usually a step above—the ultimate fire, as hot as it gets. Dark and Dark, however, had less firepower than a single matchstick.

So, yeah, she had a point. It really was a useless ability, but I didn’t let that get to me. I mean, come on—it was so cool!

“Wait... Ahh! Crap! I activated my ability without reciting the Malediction of Unleashing first!”

“Nobody cares! It’s fine!”

“No, it isn’t! If I fail to incant the Malediction of Unleashing before using my power, I’ll, umm...I’ll... Right, I’ll be erased from this plane of existence!”

“You obviously just made that up!”

Damnations! It’s not like me to blunder this badly. I’m not supposed to be able to use Dark and Dark unless I recite the Malediction. Hmm... We’ll just say that didn’t happen, I think. Doesn’t count; moving on!

“Y’know, Tomoyo, you don’t have to always sit on the sidelines and pick holes in my setup. Why not try getting in on the action a little like the others do?”

“Not happening. And what do you mean, ‘like the others do’? None of them play along with your chuuni crap either.”

“Yeah they do! Everyone except you’s pretty into it.”

“Oh, are they? Okay then—how about we put that to the test?” She shot me a defiant glare.

There was only one way I could respond to that sort of provocation. “You’re on,” I said with a smirk.

And so, the experiment was a go! Tomoyo hid near the door, and I went on standby in the center of the room. When one of the other members arrived at the club room, Tomoyo would shoot me a signal, and I’d initiate the same “right arm throbs with pain as my dark side awakens and tries to assert control over me” simulation I was running through earlier. The goal was to see how each of the other members would react.

I assumed that the remaining three members had all been delayed by their own various circumstances, but considering the time, they’d probably be showing up at any moment. Just as I’d expected, a few minutes after we’d taken up our positions, Tomoyo looked over at me and mouthed the words “someone’s coming!” I started clutching at my right arm and wailing in pain, just like before, and a moment later the door burst open.

“Hellooo!” called out Hatoko. “Sorry, I had cleaning duty today and it took way longer than—Juu?!”

Hatoko’s expression shifted from a full-faced smile to a look of shock and horror in an instant. She rushed over to me in a panic. “Wh-Wh-What’s wrong, Juu? Are you okay? Does your stomach hurt? Is it your appendix?! Do you have appendicitis?!”

“St-Stay back, H-Hatoko—nay, Over Element!”

“‘Over’...? N-No, you were right the first time. I’m Hatoko—”

“Ugh, aaaugh! My right aaarm!”

“Your right arm?! Does it have appendicitis?!”

“N-No, it doesn’t... Just because it’s called appendicitis...doesn’t mean you can have it in your appendages! Ugaahhh!”

“Stay with me, Juu! Don’t worry, I’ll call an ambulance right away!”

“No, don’t! This’ll actually turn into a serious problem if you—I mean, it’s pointless! This isn’t a problem the Japanese health-care system can solve...”

“So, umm, do you need treatment overseas? Like, an organ transplant? Do you need someone to donate you a new, healthy appendix?”

“An appendix transplant won’t do me any good... Arrghhh... It burns... My body, it’s aflame! Not ‘on fire,’ ‘aflame’! It’s important, trust me...”

“You’re burning up?! All right, just wait! I know what to do!”

Hatoko raised her arms up high, and a jet of water bubbled up midair, manifesting into an orb that floated above her head. She had pulled the ambient moisture out of the air itself, and she could manipulate it freely. Such was Kushikawa Hatoko’s power: Over Element!

“No, Hatoko, wait—” I stammered in vain, dropping my act just a little too late.

“Here goooes!” she shouted, bringing the watery orb crashing down onto my head.

“Guhbluhblurbublegh!” I gargled, kicking and writhing ineffectually in my aqueous prison. Augh, there’s water up my nose!

“All right, that’s enough.”

It happened in the blink of an eye. The next thing I knew, Tomoyo had dragged me out of the orb, saving me from a doubtlessly terrible fate. She must have stopped time, so really, it took less time than a blink of an eye—she’d rescued me in a literal instant.

“T-Tomoyooo!” I blubbered. “Thank you! I was so scared... I thought I was gonna drown...”

“Don’t go full wimp at the drop of a hat!” shouted Tomoyo. “And agh, you’re totally soaked, so get away from me! Hatoko, hurry up and dry this moron off! And get rid of all that water while you’re at it!”

Hatoko got right to it, blinking the orb of water out of existence and drying off my hair and clothes just as quickly. Her power allowed her to return the water she’d conjured to the atmosphere once more. Once that was done, we explained the situation to her.

“Oh, is that all?” She sighed with relief. “Juu was just playing make-believe again? I was so shocked!”

“It wasn’t make-believe! It was a simulation!”

“A ‘simulation’...? So, make-believe,” she said with a casual nod. Apparently, the nuance that distinguished the two terms escaped her.

Kushikawa Hatoko was a girl who always seemed to have a gentle look in her eyes and a pleasant smile on her face. That perpetual grin brightened up every room she stepped foot in, and it was a key component of her overall image.

Hatoko was both a member of the literary club and a friend of mine since way back when we were kids. We lived in the same neighborhood, so we ended up going to the same schools ever since elementary school as a result. It was one of those friendships that develops naturally over time, whether you like it or not.

I had actually ended up joining the literary club on Hatoko’s invitation. Our school mandated that all students join a club, and since athletic clubs were totally out of the question for me, I’d already been planning on joining something a bit more relaxed. I’d ended up accepting her invitation without sparing it a second thought.

“Hatoko,” I scolded her, “Over Element is a brutally powerful ability that’s way too much for you to handle! I’ve told you not to use it without my express permission, haven’t I?”

“Oh, right. I guess you did! I’d completely forgotten.”

“Hmph! Well, as long as you understand. Just take care from now on.”

“Okay, I will! I won’t use, umm... What was it again?”

“Over Element! And don’t even dream of forgetting it!”

“All right! I won’t forget it, even in my dreams!” I hadn’t actually meant that literally, but she seemed to get the point, so I figured it would probably work out.

Kushikawa Hatoko, the bearer of Over Element, had the power to freely manipulate the five elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and light. Drawing the ambient moisture out of the air like she had moments earlier was really only the tip of the iceberg when it came to her full capabilities. The brutal strength of the earth, the surging torrents of the waterfalls, the crimson flames of hell, the savage winds of the fiercest maelstroms, and the sacred light of the heavens above all lay within her grasp.

And, well...honestly? Five elements might be sorta overdoing it. Like, that’s basically cheating, isn’t it? Think about how that must feel for a guy who can only make black fire. It’s like the sort of ability an elementary schooler would make up to brag about how they had invented the ultimate, unbeatable superpower.

Seriously, give me a slice of that power pie! The worst part’s that the fire she can make has way higher power than mine in every aspect...

“Hey, Andou,” interjected Tomoyo, “I know you think she’s stealing your thunder, but that doesn’t give you the right to ban Hatoko from using her power! Cut it out.”

“D-Don’t be ridiculous! She’s not stealing my thunder, and it wouldn’t bother me even if she were!”

“Yeah, don’t kid yourself, Andou. Your power is basically just a third-rate copy of hers,” Tomoyo quipped sarcastically. “Fire that doesn’t burn, and that’s the end of it.”

“Now that you mention it, I wonder why Juu’s power is so weak,” added Hatoko. She meant it innocently, but it still shattered my heart to pieces.

Damnations! I’ll show you! I’ll show all of you! One day, when we’re in dire straits and all hope seems lost, my true power’s gonna awaken and blow all of your minds!

Incidentally, when Hatoko says “Juu,” she’s talking about me. It comes from my given name, Jurai, which is just about as cool as a name could possibly get, as far as I’m concerned. I always tell everyone to call me by my given name since it rules so hard, but nobody ever seems to take me up on it.

“Say, Tomoyo,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s about time you started calling me by my given name?”

“No way,” she replied. “I mean, it’s kind of a pain to pronounce. Andou works just fine.”

That’s pretty much how it always went. Anyway, point is, Hatoko always called me “Juu,” and she wasn’t showing any signs of stopping any time soon. I was sort of at a loss with her.

“Anyway,” said Tomoyo, “‘Jurai’ is a pretty unique name, isn’t it? Is there some sorta story behind it?”

“Mwa ha ha—an excellent question! If you’re so desperate to know, then I suppose I shall have to enlighten you. Take care you don’t regret this decision, though. None have learned the origins of my true name and lived to see another—”

“Oh, I think I know this one,” cut in Hatoko. “Juu was originally scheduled to be born in June, and his parents were going to name him after the month! He ended up being born a little later than expected, though, so they had to change his name at the last minute.”

“Oh, I get it. ‘Jurai’ sounds like ‘July.’”

“It means ‘a long life to come’ too—I think it’s a lovely name! I’m sure it’ll bring him lots of good fortune.”

I just stood there in silence. Curse you and your meddling, Hatoko! You ruined my chance to exposit about my true name: Guiltia Sin Jurai!

Now, the “Jurai” in “Guiltia Sin Jurai” might sound identical to my first name, but I took care to write it with the characters for “cursed lightning” instead of all that longevity stuff. It might strike you as odd that the bearer of the ebon flame Dark and Dark would have a name associated with lightning, but actually, the pitch-black fires of the Demon Realm have been abhorred by the masses as cursed lightning since time immemorial, so it all checks out.

“Guiltia” is derived from the word “guilty,” of course. While “Sin” has a similar association on the surface, it also ties in to “shin,” a term denoting divinity in Japanese, making it a cool play on words! In short, I was burdened with not one, but two inborn sins from the moment I was named!

Yeah... I’m sinful as hell, and that’s hella cool. Oh, would that I could grasp atonement with these cursed hands of mine, or whatever.

“So, when all’s said and done, Andou was given a sort of idiosyncratic name, took it to mean he’s been ‘chosen’ or something, and ended up becoming the disaster chuuni he is now as a result,” said Tomoyo, looking at me with something almost resembling pity in her eyes. That not-quite-pity was as cold as a raging blizzard, though, so I found myself naturally averting my gaze.

“Oh, that’s right!” said Hatoko, suddenly changing the topic. “Weren’t you going to keep playing make-believe like you were when I got here?”

I glanced back over at Tomoyo, and our eyes met. She had an incredibly exasperated “Are you satisfied yet?” look on her face, but I wasn’t convinced.

Hmm. I mean, we’ve already come this far. Might as well give the other two a try while we’re at it.

Tomoyo and Hatoko hid by the door, and I went on standby in the center of the room. Another member of our club arrived just a few minutes later, but unlike the rest of us, she didn’t use the door. No, she appeared out of thin air, traveling into the room through a space of her own creation, which was business as usual as far as she was concerned.

A somewhat dainty little girl stepped out from the rippling, distorted hole in reality. Her frame was so small and her facial features were so picturesque that she almost looked like one of those super-detailed European dolls. She was holding her favorite stuffed squirrel toy in her arms.

“Ugh, aaaugh!” I bellowed, writhing as I clutched at my right arm once again.

“What’s wrong, Andou?” said the little girl, Chifuyu, a trace of confusion coloring her otherwise apathetic expression.

“St-Stay back! Away with you! Not a step closer, Chifuyu!”

“Okay,” she replied with a disinterested nod before walking away from me and taking a seat in her chair. She always used the same chair because she was fond of its cushion.

“Ugraaahhhhhh! No, get away! Don’t come any closer! Don’t worry about me—just go!”

“I said okay.”

“You definitely, definitely shouldn’t come any closer!”

“I heard you the first time,” she droned, indifferent to the bitter end.

No, no, hold up a second—that’s not how this is supposed to go, is it?

“Arrgggh... Could it be that even as I tell you to stay away, deep down, I secretly want you to come help me...?” I muttered the second part just loud enough for Chifuyu to hear it, and she cocked her head.

“I mean, look,” I continued, “whenever the protagonist is about to get consumed by the power of darkness like this, they always shout, ‘no, get away!’ at their friends to make sure they don’t get dragged in and hurt. But their friends always come to their aid in the end anyway! It’s a given! If their friends actually took that advice and stayed away, even a protagonist would freak out! Ugraaahhhhhh!”

“This is complicated. I don’t really understand.”

“It’s a front, okay? Like, saying ‘stay away’ in this sort of situation is the same as when a slapstick comedian tells someone, ‘whatever you do, don’t push me!’ They actually want you to do whatever it is they’re telling you not to do! But a protagonist can’t just go saying, ‘please, help me!’ so they have to put on an act, auggghhhhhh!”

“Andou...did you hit your head on something?”

“My head’s not the problem, it’s my arm that’s—”

“Okay, we’re done here!” said Tomoyo, clapping listlessly to signal the end of the experiment as she and Hatoko stepped out from their hiding place. She walked over and spoke to Chifuyu in a much gentler tone than the one she always used with me. “Sorry for making you play along with Andou’s stupidity, Chifuyu.”

“It’s okay,” replied Chifuyu. “Andou always acts crazy. I don’t mind.”

“You’re such a good girl, Chifuyu! Tolerating Andou’s little games is really impressive!” said Hatoko as she patted Chifuyu’s head. Chifuyu cracked the barest hint of a smile, though I had to look really closely to see it—she must’ve been pleased by the praise.

Unlike the rest of us, Himeki Chifuyu wasn’t actually a student at our school. She was a fourth grader who went to a nearby elementary school. She also happened to be the niece of Miss Satomi, the literary club’s faculty advisor, and she had been in the habit of coming by to hang out in our room every once in a while.

Half a year earlier, that habit led to her happening to be in the room on the day that our superpowers awakened, and she had been empowered right along with the rest of us. She’d started showing up more and more frequently after that, and before long she was coming by to hang out in the literary club’s room practically every day. Her school wasn’t that close to ours, but thanks to her power, World Create, it might as well have been right next door for all the difference it made to her.

“Tomoyo, Hatoko, I’m sleepy. Let me go. I’m gonna nap,” said Chifuyu, shaking off the other girls and walking over to one of the corners of the room. Chifuyu spent an awful lot of time napping for a kid her age—maybe because she was still growing?

She held out a hand, and a truly extravagant canopy bed appeared in front of her from out of nowhere. It was as luxurious as a bed could get—it had all the frills and sequins a princess could ask for, plus a small mountain of stuffed animals on top. Chifuyu climbed onto the bed and lay down, the stuffed squirrel she’d been holding since she’d arrived still clutched in her arms. (Its name was “Squirrely,” incidentally. She had a way with names that I didn’t understand at all.) Then she fell asleep, her face as still and serene as that of an angel.

Chifuyu’s World Create ability could well be described as the power of genesis itself. If she could imagine it, she could bring it into reality—space, matter, anything at all. The midair distortion she appeared through earlier was something like a warp gate—the ability to create and manipulate space at will allowed her to teleport from place to place in an instant.

Broadly speaking, her power had no limits—she could make anything and everything. She could even make things she’d never seen. Apparently, she could evoke the memory of the world itself and bring objects into being regardless of her own knowledge.

And, like...seriously? “The memory of the world itself”? What does that even mean? I could never wrap my head around it, but clearly there was some sort of intuition involved that only Chifuyu herself could understand.

“Do you get the point yet, Andou?” asked Tomoyo, her tone laden with confidence. “None of us are going to play along with your little games.” The joy of victory was already written all over her face, and I clenched my teeth.

Curses! I’ve come this far, I can’t back down now! “It’s not over yet, Tomoyo! We still have one member left—I’ll stake it all on Route of Origin!”

Once again, the other three members hid in a corner of the room (Chifuyu was still asleep, so we just left her where she was). Meanwhile, I stood in the center of the room and took a few slow, deep breaths.

Feel it. Feel the ambient mana that permeates the atmosphere, or the spiritual presence of the room, or its aura, or its ki, or whatever.

This simulation wouldn’t be like the last three. This time, we’d had Chifuyu use her ability to completely soundproof the room for us. I’d been making a racket the previous times, to be sure, but I had been holding back in my own sort of way. I’m not completely oblivious; I know that not being a nuisance is important sometimes. After all, I’m one of the chosen ones: one of those who can tell when and where to go all out!

However! Thanks to the soundproofing we’d had Chifuyu set up before she went to sleep, I had nothing to fear anymore! No matter how ridiculously loud I got, there was no danger of the racket leaking out into the rest of the school. In other words, no matter how badly my right arm throbbed this time, it wouldn’t cause any issues!

“Mwa ha ha! I’m just itching to get started—or, perhaps throbbing to get started?” I’d worked myself up into such a fit of excitement that I was dropping clever witticisms left and right. Tomoyo and Hatoko were glancing at me and whispering to each other off in the corner, but I paid them no mind. Letting them get to me would be letting them win.

A moment later, Tomoyo—who’d totally lost interest at this point—gave a listless wave to signal that my quarry was approaching. The time had finally come to pour my whole heart and soul into a death-wail to end all death-wails!

“UGRAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

“Shut up!”

No sooner had the door opened than a girl rushed inside and grabbed my throbbing right arm. I didn’t even have time to shout, “No, don’t! You can’t imagine the horrors that await you if you touch this arm of mine!” before she’d taken me down with a perfectly executed shoulder throw.

“Unbelievable! What on earth are you thinking, Andou?!” shouted the girl. “Why would you scream bloody murder out of nowhere?! Please stop to think about how obnoxious these stunts are for everyone around you!”

I wanted to explain that it was fine since we’d soundproofed the room, but the most I could manage was an “Arggghhhhhh!” as I clutched at my back. I wasn’t even faking it this time—it was a real, genuine scream of pain. Meanwhile, our club president, Takanashi Sayumi, looked down on me as I twitched and convulsed on the floor. She was absolutely trembling with rage.

“Andou, why are you so utterly incapable of controlling yourself?! You realize that most people learn to sit still by the time they graduate from elementary school, don’t you?!”

Takanashi Sayumi was a girl with a rather rare family name that had a sort of entertaining ring to it. As it so happened, that rarity had led a number of manga and light novel creators to give the name Takanashi to their protagonists in recent years. What had once been an obscure name had become somewhat famous in its own right, though Sayumi’s family name was spelled with totally different characters than the more well-known Takanashis out there.

Her hair was long and glossy, and her face had an unusually grown-up look to it for her age. Combined with her well-developed figure, she had an overall aura of maturity that the average high schooler could never hope to achieve. To top it off, her posture was incredible, and her bearing was polite and courteous. There wasn’t the slightest shred of baseness or vulgarity in the manner with which she conducted herself; she came across as a true intellectual, all things considered.

Sayumi was a third-year, one year above me, and the president of our club. She was usually gentle and understanding, but when she got mad she could be scary as hell. Unfortunately, that happened quite a lot. It didn’t take much at all to set her off, and for someone as well-mannered as her, she was weirdly quick to get physical when she was upset.

Her father was a police officer, and she’d apparently been trained in judo and aikido starting from a very early age. Violence in the name of “tough love” was her specialty. She was very good at what she did, fortunately—I didn’t know the first thing about judo, yet I found myself landing in just the right way to not seriously injure myself after she threw me. It still hurt like hell, of course.

“Y-You’ve got it all wrong, Sayumi... I couldn’t help it, my arm was throbbing...”

“They make topical creams for that.”

“That’s not—I mean, my other self was trying to—”

“What exactly do your right arm and your sense of self have to do with each other?”

“A lot, actually! There’s this super convoluted—I mean, deep and lore-rich explanation for that...”

“Well go on, then. Explain it. If I’m satisfied by your ‘deep lore,’ I’d be more than happy to apologize.”

“Sorry. I made it up. There isn’t any.” The pressure and intensity of her glare was too much for me, and I caved almost instantly. I was in a major fix. Sayumi had gone into lecture mode, and I was so overwhelmed that I reflexively fell to my knees in front of her and prepared myself to take it.

“How long are you planning to carry on with these ridiculous ‘chuuni’ antics, Andou? You realize you’re already in your second year of high school, don’t you?”

“Ah, that’s not quite right—I’m not actually a chuuni at all, and I really wish people would...stop...”

She didn’t say a word, but that silence only made the pressure she exuded more intense than ever.

“Right, sorry, I was being super chuuni.”

“Really, now... Come to think of it, Miss Satomi told me a story about you recently. Apparently, she called you out on not paying attention during class, and you replied, ‘You mean you can’t hear it, Miss Satomi? You can’t hear the voice of the winds?’ Then she smacked you.”

“Ugh!”

“That wasn’t her only story either. She also claimed that you jumped up in class and shouted, ‘What the hell?! Can’t you see that thing, Miss Satomi?!’ once.”

Oooh, crap. Sayumi was a real honor student, and was definitely one of Miss Satomi’s favorite pupils. I should’ve realized that would mean she’d get all of Miss Satomi’s inside information.

“Then there was the time you shouted, ‘Oh god—everybody, get down!’ and hid under your desk.” Oh, right, that happened. Nobody fell for it either. Talk about a disappointment.

“And the time she asked you for something and you replied, ‘Oh? You think I’d take orders from the likes of you?’ and she nearly tore your head clean off.” It was more of a punch than a tear, really, and just thinking about it sends a chill down my spine.

“And the time she scolded you and you replied, ‘Oh, sorry, mom.’ The entire class laughed at you, apparently.”

“What does that have to do with the chuuni thing?!”

Anyway, Sayumi’s lecture carried on in that general manner for a good long while. Meanwhile, the other members of the literary club were striking up an incredibly disheartening conversation as they strolled out from the corner.

“Hey, Hatoko...has Andou always been like, y’know, that? Pulling super cringey stunts in class and everything?”

“Yup! He’s been that way since forever ago. Ah, but Juu always behaves himself when he’s scared of whoever he’s talking to. He only ever messes around in Miss Satomi’s lessons these days.”

“Seriously...? God, what a wimp. He’s such a small fry, it’s almost impressive.”

“Oh, Tomoyo, Hatoko. And I see Chifuyu is here as well,” said Sayumi. At that point, Tomoyo gave her a quick explanation of the situation, and she replied that she’d more or less assumed it was something along those lines. She definitely still sounded fed up with it, though.

“Uggh...” I moaned, rubbing my aching back. “Sayumi... My back hurts so much... Would you please use Route of Origin to fix it...?”

“Absolutely not,” she snapped. “You’re not seriously injured—man up and deal with it. I made sure to throw you in a way that wouldn’t cause any real damage.”

Takanashi Sayumi’s power, Route of Origin, gave her the ability to return whatever she desired to however it was meant to be. It worked on anything, be it organic or inorganic. She could heal injuries, cure illnesses, and repair damaged or destroyed objects in the blink of an eye, all by putting them back to “how they should be.” If I had to put it in the simplest terms possible, I’d say it’s a lot like how Shining Diamond’s power or Inoue Orihime’s Rejection of Events works.

In any case, with that, the five of us had finally assembled.

Dark and Dark: Andou Jurai.

Closed Clock: Kanzaki Tomoyo.

Over Element: Kushikawa Hatoko.

World Create: Himeki Chifuyu.

Route of Origin: Takanashi Sayumi.

“So, we’ve finally gathered together once more. We, the literary club—nay, we, the Chosen Soldiers of Destiny!”

“‘Nay,’ my ass! You just made that up! Quit acting like it’s some whole big thing!” shouted Tomoyo, irritated as ever.

Hmm. Yeah, fair enough. When she put it that way, even I had to admit that “the Chosen Soldiers of Destiny” was a little too on the nose.

We were making a ruckus, of course, with predictable results. “Mnh. You’re too noisy!” grumbled Chifuyu, rubbing her eyes as she crawled off her bed. “You woke me up.”

“Oh, sorry, Chifuyu. Andou was being dumb in a loud way,” Tomoyo said.

“We’re sorry he can’t restrain himself!” Hatoko added.

“Yes, quite. My apologies for Andou’s noise,” Sayumi piled on.

Hey, wait—everyone’s blaming this on me...? I guess they’re not exactly wrong, though. Now’s the time for you to be the adult in the room, Jurai—nay, Guiltia Sin Jurai! Surely you don’t think you’ll be able to save the world if you let trifling matters such as this grate on your nerves? Be the grown-up you are and apologize!

“I’m sorry, Chifuyu.”

“Mnhh. It’s okay. I forgive you,” Chifuyu said in a somewhat satisfied tone, standing as tall and proud as she could manage (which wasn’t very tall at all). “You’re a dumbo, so you don’t know better.”

“Ha ha...ha. You know you don’t have to force yourself to be verbally abusive like the others, right?”

Gaaah, ouch! Hearing something like that from an innocent girl in a total deadpan was almost enough to make me cry a little.

“Huh? But I heard you’re called ‘Andou’ because it rhymes with ‘dumbo.’”

“Okay, which one of you jerks has been feeding Chifuyu slander?!” I spun around to find Tomoyo, Hatoko, and Sayumi all refusing to look me in the eye. All of them?! Seriously?!

I sank to my knees, smote by a sudden and deep depression. None of the other four members bothered trying to cheer me up, though; instead, they were all moving on to their own individual business. Sitting there and getting ignored by everyone was just making me feel worse, so I stood up and moved on before long as well.

That said, just because all our club’s members had gathered didn’t mean we had an actual club activity to get started on. Our club didn’t do the whole “activities” thing in the first place, really. We put out an annual magazine around the time our school had its cultural festival, but aside from that, we didn’t have much of anything to do at all.

As such, we all spent our club time however we felt like it. Tomoyo would mess around with her laptop, Hatoko would read manga (mostly romance stuff), Chifuyu would sorta just sit there and space out while hugging Squirrely, Sayumi would read complicated-looking books that I probably wouldn’t understand at all, and I’d read my light novels.

The books that Sayumi and I were reading on that particular day had come from the literary club’s shelves. The one thing our club had going for it was history, and the shelves in its room were packed with more books than you could count. Our predecessors had stuck us with—or rather, gifted us with a mountain of manga and novels, and the pile had grown bigger and bigger over the generations. By the time we’d arrived, it was a totally unmanageable quantity of books.

The lineup available to us was honestly breathtaking. We had a first edition of Slayers, for one thing, and a bunch of issues of Jump from the golden age when Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, Yu Yu Hakusho, JoJo Part Three, and Otokojuku were all running concurrently just sorta lying around.

Y’know, come to think of it, wouldn’t those fetch a pretty decent price if we auctioned them off online?

Out of respect for those shelves and the weight of the history they bore, I’d taken to referring to them as the Used Bookstore of the Divine: God Off. I’d been trying to get everyone else to call it that, but it just wasn’t catching on no matter what I did. Sniffle.

“By the way, Sayumi?” piped up Tomoyo, looking up from her laptop. “You were pretty late today, huh? Did something happen?”

“Oh, yes. Something did, actually. The student council president, Kudou, apprehended me.”

“What?!” I exclaimed, snapping my book shut. “So the time has come at last—they are finally making their move... It was only a matter of time—they have been monitoring us from the shadows ever since our powers awakened. Watch your back, Sayumi! In all likelihood, the president’s one of their loyal minions!”

“Right, thanks. We’ll take it from here, chuuni-boy,” said Tomoyo, sarcastically shutting down my attempt to enlighten her about the hidden truth of the world we lived in. “What did she want to talk about, Sayumi?”

“Just petty nitpicking, essentially. Our budget’s too high for a club of our size, other clubs in our position would have been forcibly disbanded ages ago... The usual.” She sighed wearily.

Kudou, the student council’s president, would take absolutely any excuse she could find to get on the literary club’s case. I’d never actually met her myself, but I’d heard stories about how she was serious and stubborn to a fault. Apparently, she took umbrage with the fact that a club as small as ours was monopolizing our room, which was pretty darn huge.

In any case, I had quickly reached the conclusion that she was a fated enemy we were destined to take on in battle, and I spent ages trying to convince my fellow literary club members of the threat she posed. None of them gave me the time of day. Hmph! Don’t blame me when worse comes to worst and we’re caught unprepared!

“Of course, I can’t say I don’t understand where she’s coming from. We are a club that was brought together solely out of mutual disinterest in all the other clubs available to us,” continued Sayumi in a slightly self-deprecating tone.

Sayumi had been lured into joining the literary club by the Used Bookstore of the Divine, to my understanding. She was the sort of person who had an astonishing variety and quantity of interests, and I’m sure that the treasure trove of pop culture our room contained must have been a big draw for her. She certainly couldn’t have found any of that stuff in the school library.

Tomoyo crossed her arms and nodded in understanding. “Yeah, I get that. Chifuyu’s not a student here, so there are really only four of us on paper, and we’re taking up this whole room on our own.”

Chifuyu had settled down in our room half a year beforehand. We’d asked her why she was spending so much time here, and she’d replied with a very simple, “I like it here.” On the one hand, that was about as direct an answer as we could hope for, but on the other hand, it didn’t actually tell us anything about her deeper reasoning. On the other other hand, we didn’t have any reason to turn her away if she wanted to hang out, so here she stayed.

“Guess that means we’ll have to recruit some members,” continued Tomoyo. “Sounds like a real pain, though.”

“Mwa ha ha! Fret not, Tomoyo—nay, Closed Clock! Those who have been chosen will make their way here by their own volition, one way or another. We’ve no need to search for them; the unbreakable chains of destiny already bind their fates to ours!”

“Can it, chuuni.” Tomoyo shot me down...

“He practically defines the word. A chuuni indeed.” ...and Sayumi stepped in to deal the finishing blow.

At that point, Hatoko jumped into the conversation. “Hey,” she piped up, “what does ‘chuuni’ really mean, anyway?”

“Huh? Err...” I hesitated. How do you explain it in simple terms? Hmm...

“When I’m asked like that, it’s hard to answer... I don’t much like to talk about my motives. But surprisingly...or rather, as I expected...the reason is the key to understanding myself...”

“She asked you, not the leader of the Phantom Brigade,” Tomoyo interjected, curtly cutting me off.

Dang, she actually got that one? She really does pick up on all the deep cuts. Always nice to have talent like hers around.

“I have to admit,” Tomoyo continued, “‘chuunibyou’ really is a tough concept to explain. Like, I get it, but only in a vague, instinctual sorta way. If I had to give an answer, I’d probably just point at Andou and say ‘people like that.’”

“Wait a second—me? A living example of chuunibyou? You’ve gotta be kidding!”

“What? You seriously think you aren’t?”

“That’s not what I’m saying! I mean, it’s not...exactly... Okay, look at it this way: Do you think it’s okay to call overweight people fat? If you saw someone you thought wasn’t much of a looker, would you call them an uggo to their face? No way, right? That’s all I’m trying to say here.”

“Now I’m more confused than ever. Are you self-aware about this or not?”

I had to think about that one for a minute. “Am I or am I not self-aware about my own case of chuunibyou?” was a really hard question to answer. Was I aware that people liked to use that word to make fun of people like me? Well, yeah. Did that mean I had to admit that I was that thing? I dunno—something felt wrong about that.

“Hmph. Am I self-aware? What a pointless question to ask. Not a single person in this realm is capable of explaining my innermost thoughts—no, not even me.”

“Wow, way to answer that in the most chuuni-tastic way possible,” Tomoyo quipped.

I was through with taking her lip and fired right back. “Hah! Look at you, thinking you can fit anyone and everyone into your sad little boxes! People like you are always going on about how ‘L’Arc-en-Ciel’s the visual kei band, right?’ or ‘Nisioisin’s the light novel author, right?’ or ‘I only read Jump for Hunter x Hunter these days’! People like you are the ones who go running your mouths online even though you don’t know crap about what you’re talking about! Get off your high horse!”

“Like you can talk about high horses! And screw you, I buy Jump every week! I even turn in the reader surveys!” she retorted.

I see somebody knows an awful lot about Jump. “Hah! I bet you only bother with the surveys cause you read about them in Bakuman, you bandwagon jumper!”

“What?! That’s not... Ugh!” I seemed to have hit the bull’s-eye. Tomoyo scowled, but she didn’t have a comeback for that one. Not that I didn’t get her—reading Bakuman really did make you wanna fill out those surveys...and I didn’t exactly have the right to talk, seeing as I’d never bothered sending in a single one of them myself.

“Anyway, that’s enough of that,” I said, trying to get us back on topic. “Let’s have a show of hands. Who here thinks they know what ‘chuunibyou’ means?”

Tomoyo and Sayumi raised their hands, while Hatoko and Chifuyu kept theirs down. It was an even split, not counting me.

“You know what it means, Sayumi?” I asked.

“Yes. Well, in terms of its literal meaning, at least.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering the sheer breadth of her interests. Subcultures are such a big thing these days, we might as well just call them “culture,” and she was apparently well-versed in a wide variety of them.

“I have to agree with Tomoyo, though,” she continued. “It’s a difficult term to define. I can’t say I understand it in anything more than a vague sense.”

“Mhh... ‘Chuuni’ really is complicated, huh, Chifuyu?” whined Hatoko.

“Chuuni’s complicated,” Chifuyu agreed with a nod. Neither of them were keeping up with the conversation very well, but at least they had each other.

“I pulled up a few definitions online,” said Tomoyo, who’d been typing away at her computer the whole time, “but none of them really do it for me. Like, what does ‘Chuunibyou (eighth-grader syndrome): a term referring to patterns of behavior most commonly seen in adolescent individuals’ even mean? That doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “that’s not helpful at all.”

“It doesn’t even touch on all the different types of chuunibyou either!” Tomoyo continued. “Like, there are chuunis who act all counterculture because they think it’s cool, chuunis who pretend to be super tough delinquents and talk about fighting all the time, and chuunis like Andou who go all ‘evil eye’ on you and live in their own weird little delusions.”

Wow, okay! Why don’t you tell me how you really feel about me?

“I guess that’s always how it goes with this sorta internet slang, though,” she added. “Dictionary definitions never seem to help much. Like, it’s the same deal with ‘tsundere.’”

“Oh, yeah. That makes sense,” I replied.

It was a really solid comparison. Back when the word first came into usage, “tsundere” meant something along the lines of “a person who’s mean to you in public, but affectionate when you’re alone with them.” These days, though, the meaning’s expanded pretty dramatically. It can be defined in all sorts of ways at this point, and it’d be all but impossible to explain the term to someone who’d never heard of it without resorting to definition by example.

“Going back to an earlier subject, I think I understand what Andou was trying to say when he was talking about being self-aware about his own chuunibyou,” Sayumi said in a quiet, thoughtful tone. “I believe the term ‘fujoshi’ might fall into a very similar category.”

“‘Fujoshi’?” I said, reflexively parroting the word back at her.

Hatoko, meanwhile, was more confused than ever. “Huh? What does ‘fujoshi’ mean? I don’t understand any of these words you keep using!” She was practically begging for someone to bring her up to speed on our jargon, but I didn’t want to derail Sayumi’s thought process, so I decided to hold off on explaining for the moment.

“You see,” she continued, “I happen to self-identify as a fujoshi, and—”

“Wait a second,” I said, derailing Sayumi’s thought process.

“What is it?” she asked, cocking her head. She doesn’t get it? Really? Really?! She dropped a bombshell like that on us without missing a beat, and she doesn’t see why we might be shocked?!

“S-Sayumi, you identify as...a fujoshi?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you’re sure you’re using the word right? This isn’t some sort of wacky misunderstanding?”

“I’m quite sure,” she said with a smile as bright and serene as a water lily in full bloom. “Having a discerning appreciation for boys’ love is the mark of a well-mannered lady.”

I was dumbstruck. I glanced over at Tomoyo, who presumably knew that “fujoshi” meant “a woman who’s really into guy-on-guy homoerotica.” I shot her an “Is that true?” sort of look, and she responded with a “Definitely not” headshake.

Gotta say, I did not see that coming! Sayumi’s a fujoshi? She hadn’t shown any signs of it up until that moment, so I was really caught by surprise. On the other hand, she did have more hobbies than I could count. It was probably just another one of her myriad interests.

“So, while I’m personally self-aware of the fact that I’m a fujoshi,” she continued, “I would still be upset if someone were to say, ‘You’re into that fujoshi crap?’ or call me a ‘nasty fujo’ to my face. In short, in spite of my self-awareness, I can’t help but take offense when the term is used pejoratively.”

“Ooh, I get it!” I exclaimed. “Yeah, I can totally relate!”

She was right. In fact, she was spot-on. Like, I got that I had a bad case of chuunibyou. I didn’t really like admitting it, but I got it. Even so, I couldn’t just sit down and take it when somebody called me a chuuni and meant it as an insult!

“I’m surprised, Sayumi. You really get the whole chuuni thing after all! Which makes it weird that you’re always going right along with Tomoyo whenever she makes fun of me for it!”

“Oh, that’s quite simple to explain. I do understand chuunibyou to a certain extent, yes, but I don’t understand you in the slightest.” She smiled as brightly as she could while vivisecting me with her ever-sharp tongue. My heart certainly felt ready to break, at least.

“Doesn’t the word itself seem pretty off base when you really think about it, though?” I asked. “Like, it means ‘eighth-grader syndrome,’ but it’s not like it’s actually a disease.”

“Maybe not for most people, but in your case it’s definitely pathological,” Tomoyo declared. She was really dedicated to jumping in for a jab whenever she could manage, but I decided to ignore her.

“Don’t you think there should be a better name for it?” I continued. “Like ‘those who fight back against destiny, the Fatebreakers!’”

“Y’know, that’s so out there, it almost circles around to being a good idea again. Anyone who’d be happy to call themself a ‘Fatebreaker’ is definitely a giant chuuni.” Tomoyo sighed deeply, but I didn’t give it so much as a second thought.

Hmm. Okay, maybe “Fatebreakers” is a little too straightforward. I came up with it off the cuff, though—you can’t expect every moment of improv to produce a work of inspired genius. Good names aren’t made in a day!

I’d spent just about an eternity coming up with the names of all of our powers, which was a big part of why I was so fond of them. My own power name, Dark and Dark, was probably my favorite of the bunch. Like, I mean, damn, right? I’m so good at coming up with names, it almost scares me!

“Heeey, can’t you explain what ‘chuuni’ means yet? If you don’t hurry up, Chifuyu’s gonna start napping again!” Hatoko pleaded, breaking me out of my self-satisfied self-reflection.

Chifuyu was seated on Hatoko’s lap, clearly nodding off already. It really did look like she’d be off to Naptown at any minute. I didn’t necessarily see anything wrong with that, but I had reached a conclusion about what the word “chuuni” meant to me, so I decided I might as well put it on the table.

“Sorry for the wait, Hatoko, Chifuyu. Allow me to enlighten you about the truth of this world!”

“Great! We’ve been waiting for this!”

“Hurry up. I’m sleepy.”

“To have chuunibyou is to think that you just might be someone special. It is to indulge in dark, stylish backstories and proper nouns of your own creation, to be just a little self-absorbed, and to maaaybe occasionally get side-eyed by the people around you... It’s to be a person like me, basically. In short...”

I held my head tall and proud as I confidently declared my conclusion:

“...to be a chuuni is to never lie to yourself, even as you lie to the world!”

We with chuunibyou constantly lie to the world at large. We can’t bring ourselves to accept the dull, conventional world we’ve been born into, so we add an element of fiction to the mix and twist it to our liking. All it takes is a little lie here and there to make this a more palatable place to live.

Sometimes that means talking about nonexistent nonsense and annoying the hell out of everyone around us. We spout lies and falsehoods with wild abandon. But still, I can’t bring myself to turn my back on the feelings that cause me to act this way. I love all those things that the world at large derides as “chuuni nonsense.”

Words like “stygian” and “bloody” and “calamity” are the friggin’ coolest! Shadowy agencies that conduct global conspiracies and transcendent, otherworldly beings that watch us from afar set my heart aflutter! Every proper noun should be elaborate enough to need a line or two of clarification! Everyone and everything needs at least one alternate name! The more stupidly overwrought, the better!

I’d love to save the world, or something like that, and save some cute girls along the way. Dark and Dark wouldn’t be even the slightest bit helpful for that sort of thing, of course, but I still love my power to death. If there’s one thing I know I can always count on, it’s that I truly like the things I like. I know that feeling will never lead me astray.

“Well, you sure made that sound nice,” Tomoyo said with a sarcastic smile.

“The fact that you went with ‘the world’ rather than ‘society’ or ‘your peers’ is certainly in line with your aesthetic,” added Sayumi in much the same tone. Their smiles didn’t have the derisive edge that I was used to when they made that sort of comment, though. They weren’t openly contemptful, at the very least, and I didn’t get the sense they were ridiculing me either.

“To never lie to yourself...” muttered Hatoko. “That makes being a ‘chuuni’ sound sort of cool, doesn’t it?”

“You bet it does! Being a chuuni’s as cool as it gets!”

“I see now... In that case, you really must be a chuuni after all, Juu!” she declared with a smile as bright as the sun.

Hatoko and I had known each other for a long, long time, and even after all those years, she’d never been able to understand the things I liked. In spite of that, though, I had a feeling that she understood me better than anyone else.

As Hatoko was smiling away without a care in the world, Chifuyu slipped off her lap and walked over to stand in front of me. “Is being a chuuni cool?” she asked.

“That’s right!” I replied. “Chuunis are the coolest!”

Chifuyu cocked her head in confusion. “But you’re not cool at all, Andou.”

A few seconds passed in total silence. Then the dam burst, and the room was filled with hysterical laughter. I, meanwhile, knelt down, placed a hand on Chifuyu’s head, and whispered in an almost mournful tone.

“That was low.”

The rest of the day passed by without incident, and eventually the time came for us to bring our club activities to a close and make our way home.

Some of us commuted by train, while others walked all the way to and from school. For at least part of the trip, though, we all took the same route. Chifuyu could use her ability to whisk herself home in a fraction of a second, of course, but she was always one to follow her whims, and on that particular day, she decided to walk along with us at least part of the way home.

We passed through our school’s front gate, chatting aimlessly as we walked along. The street beside us was tinged orange by the setting sun, and since none of the other clubs ended their activities at the same time we chose to wrap up ours, nobody else was around. I squinted as I gazed up at the _blazingly red sky.

“Twilight—the hour of eventide. It won’t be much longer before the beastly horrors of the gloam slither their way out of hiding...”

“Give it a rest, chuuni-boy.”

“I’m quite certain he was trying to make an opportunity to show off his command of chuuni trivia and explain the association between twilight and traditional monster lore.”

“Ah, right, I almost forgot! Juu, my mom said that she made some extra stew for you, so I’ll bring it over later tonight.”

“Sleepy...”

That’s how the trip home always went: an unremarkable walk with unremarkable conversation to entertain us. But then, suddenly, something different happened.

Chifuyu let out a little gasp and pointed down the street ahead of us. There, by the side of the road, was a single cat, lying by a utility pole. Its fur was pure black, but one of its hind legs was stained a deep, dark red. The surrounding pavement was dyed the same color.

It was still alive, and I could just barely hear its faint, pained meows. Chifuyu sped off toward it without another word, and the rest of us followed after her.

“Poor kitty... It must hurt,” Chifuyu muttered.

I had to agree with her. The bloodstained cat was so obviously in pain, it was hard to look at. Maybe it had been hit by a car or attacked by a wild dog. The specifics were anyone’s guess, but it had definitely been through some sort of terrible accident.

I know I’m always going on about bloody this, bloody that, but when it all comes down to it, there’s nothing cool at all about real-life blood. The gory scene before us was just awful and pitiful, not to mention depressing.

“Sayumi...” whimpered Chifuyu, staring up at her with an imploring look in her eyes. All of us knew in an instant what she was asking for.

Route of Origin: the power to return anything to the way it was meant to be. It worked the same way on objects and creatures alike. If Sayumi were to use her power, she could save the cat before us from the brink of death in the literal blink of an eye.

And yet, as I glanced over at her, I could see a shadow of doubt cross her face. She was hesitating. Her overall demeanor was as strong and firm as ever, but I could still tell how conflicted she was. I knew exactly what she was going through. And so, I spoke up.

“It’s all right, Sayumi.”

“Andou...?”

“It’s fine. It’s just an injured cat. Not a big deal.” Not a big deal. I made sure to make those words especially clear.

She hesitated for just a moment longer, then nodded. “All right,” she said, and stepped up to the cat. She knelt down and laid a gentle hand on its black fur...and that’s all it took. Route of Origin did the rest. In an instant, the cat’s injury was healed, and the blood that had been spattered around it vanished. Everything returned to the way it was meant to be.

The cat let out a quick, happy meow, then dashed off down the street. Chifuyu turned around and looked up at Sayumi.

“I think the kitty said thank you.”

“I suppose it did,” Sayumi agreed, her voice somewhat subdued. A shadow still lingered over her expression, and I had a feeling that the rest of us looked the same way. Not even Chifuyu, the youngest of us, was smiling.

Every one of us was feeling conflicted. It was an apprehension that came hand in hand with our abilities. We were all tormented by the same doubt.

Question #1: Was using her ability to save the cat’s life the right thing for Sayumi to do?

All of us—well, all of us aside from me—possessed powers that were by no means a laughing matter. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call these abilities godlike. Saving a world or two would be the simplest of tasks for them as a result...for better or for worse.

Take Route of Origin. Sayumi could, in theory, use it to cure absolutely anyone of absolutely any illness. If she marched on over to a hospital and healed the injuries and illnesses of each and every patient inside, she would undoubtedly bring happiness and fortune to a ton of people.

The other three’s powers had the potential to be just as useful. With Closed Clock and Over Element, Tomoyo and Hatoko could probably dismantle terrorist organizations and even stop wars. Chifuyu could use World Create to build schools out of nothing in developing countries.

But would doing all those things be the right decision?

No. It couldn’t possibly be. It would upend the world’s balance. I know, “the world’s balance” is a pretty ambiguous way of putting it, but it’s still the best phrase to explain what I’m trying to get at here.

If illnesses and injuries were to suddenly stop being a problem, then everyone who works in a hospital would find themselves out of a job. Everyone who works at a pharmaceutical company or an insurance company would get the boot as well. Then there’s the matter of age; how old would a person have to get before you decide to stop healing them? Eighty years old? A hundred? So many people die of “age-related complications”; how does that factor into the equation?

And, of course, you always have to keep in mind that literal lives would hang in the balance for each and every one of those decisions. That was too heavy a weight for Sayumi to carry, and the same was true for the other three and their powers as well. When all was said and done, upending the world based solely off our own personal points of view would be unambiguously wrong.

However...does all that logic, do all those rationalizations, mean that letting that cat die would’ve been the right thing to do? Would the ethical choice have been to look a living creature you could’ve saved in the eye, tell it “I’m sorry, I can’t take responsibility for you,” and walk away?

The answer to that question is no. It couldn’t possibly be right. And so, in the end, we were left with no answer at all.

We just didn’t know.

And so, half a year passed—half a year since our abilities had awakened. We hadn’t just spent all that time playing around. We’d thought as hard as we could about all these big, looming questions. We’d worried about them; we’d agonized over them. We’d had more troubles and regrets than I can list. Frankly, many of those troubles were with each other. We’d fought and butted heads over and over.

And the answer we had obtained after all that time? “We don’t know.”

We had no clue what was right and what was wrong. We hadn’t the foggiest idea what we should do with our powers. Even if we wanted to save the world, we had no idea what we could do to bring about that result.

There would never be a question #2 because question #1 could never be answered. We desperately thought it through, over and over, until we finally reached the answer that there was no answer. That we just didn’t know.

And so, we decided to do whatever we wanted to.

Sayumi didn’t save the cat because she thought it’d be a good deed or because she felt obligated to. She saved it because she wanted to. That’s all there was to it. It was a completely and utterly irresponsible thing to do...but what’s so wrong about that?

Long story short, the world is as cruel and brutal as it is large. Even if we do have godlike powers, children like us still stand absolutely no chance of changing it. Even if we were to try to meddle with the world, to tip the balance, it probably wouldn’t be possible for us to change anything in any real fashion.

Thus, we decided not to try at all—to only do what we felt like doing. We would use our powers freely for whatever petty nonsense we felt like using them for, and if we happened to stumble across a life we could save, we might very well do so reflexively.

That logic may seem flimsy, and perhaps it is, but it was the path that we’d chosen for ourselves. It’s the path we’d followed for half a year, and the path that had brought us to an injured cat we’d saved.

“Most of those big battle manga totally gloss over this whole issue, don’t they?” Tomoyo mused, her face aglow with the light of sunset. “The protagonist in those stories always ends up saving everyone around them, and that’s the end of it. They never ignore anyone in need who they happen to come across, but they also never go out of their way to search for people who need their help.”

“Feels like they’d find tons of them if they bothered to look,” she added with a somewhat cynical smile. “It’s the same deal with all those Super Sentai and Kamen Rider shows. The heroes in them never bother trying to save people from poverty or starvation, and they never go out to try to stop any wars. Superheroes are powerless in the face of the horrors that humans inflict on each other.”

In so many words, a superhero really does need a villain to fight to justify their own existence. On the other hand, overthinking fiction like that isn’t exactly the most productive use of time. Furthermore, there’ve been all sorts of Kamen Riders over the franchise’s history; some of the riders in Ryuki and Faiz weren’t exactly great people, for example.

I turned my gaze to the crimson-stained sky and heaved a sigh. “Ironic, isn’t it? Gaining power that could rival the gods just drives home the pettiness of your own trifling existence.”

My self-flagellating musing brought the conversation to a sudden stop. A moment later, Tomoyo put on an obviously forced smile and replied, “Well, it’s not like your power’s going to be rivaling any gods any time soon regardless.”

I played along, jabbing right back at her. “Excuse me? Surely you’re not talking about the obsidian flame of oblivion, Dark and Dark?”

“And what if I am? Got a problem with that? Just so you know, if all of us actually fought for real, you’d be the first to die for sure. Bet you wouldn’t last five seconds.”

“Hah! I see you understand nothing, Tomoyo! The very instant before I would perish, Dark and Dark would evolve into its ultimate, unleashed form! I’ve got this whole plot twist—ahem... My dark side, with which I’ll have finally reconciled, would lend me its strength and unlock my power’s true potential, allowing it to develop into Dark and Dark...of the End!”

“Don’t give your power’s next form a name before it actually evolves! That’s so lame that it’s painful!”

“Oh, and never fear: all of your powers have ultimate, unleashed forms as well!”

“I don’t want one!”

Tomoyo shook her head with a sigh as she took down my quips one by one. Hatoko grinned happily as she watched us spar, Chifuyu didn’t seem to be listening, and Sayumi smiled in that mature way she was so good at.

And so, we walked on once more. Just another group of perfectly ordinary students on their way home from school.