ICHIBAN USHIRO NO DAIMAOU - Volume 13, 3 — Many Possibilities that are Currently Absent

Volume 13, Chapter 3: Many Possibilities that are Currently Absent

 

The days flowed by.

It was unclear what meaning the passage of time held in the afterlife, but the seasons changed and they counted the passage of five years.

Akuto and the others had supposedly grown older, but they remained the same as before. Akuto may have already transcended the concept of aging, but the others also did not age or grow as time went on.

All the students graduated from Constant Magic Academy and it shut down, but the facility continued on as a community center. The teachers either remained to work there or began working in other public positions.

The city expanded and people’s relationships somewhat changed. Even so, the people making up the city remained the same because no one aged or died.

More importantly, no way of leaving the world presented itself.

“I do not think it is good for my condition the following day. But…um…it is not that I do not like it.”

Junko spoke to Akuto in bed.

He had made love to the three girls countless times since the first time, but it did not remain fresh and surprising forever. For about a year, he had remained active every night. The three girls had two day gaps between their turns, so their desire had never waned. But by the second year, they had begun spending more nights speaking calmly.

“Has your condition ever been a problem?” asked Akuto. “Oh, but I’m just asking out of curiosity. It isn’t like I’m dead set on doing it tonight or anything.”

He and Junko exchanged a glance.

“Well, no. I suppose it has not,” she answered after some thought. “I do gain weight, though.”

“Some people think of who they are tomorrow as a different person from who they are today.”

“Yes, that is true. Are you asking why that change does not occur here?”

“Yes. I know that some percentage of our cells is replaced by the following day, but I don’t know if that happens here. Still, our relationship has progressed…and changed a little.”

He leaned over and kissed Junko. After intertwining their tongues for a bit, they moved their faces apart once more.

“I said we aren’t doing it tonight,” said Junko while narrowing her eyes.

“You’ve gotten a lot less shy. That’s fine by me of course, but you wouldn’t even let me kiss you until we came here.”

Junko’s expression stiffened.

“You are not going to say you do not like me anymore, are you?”

“Sorry if I worried you. Try to remember that falling even further in love is also a change in one’s feelings. At any rate, our bodies stay the same while our feelings alone change.”

His expression was perfectly serious and Junko nodded.

“That is true, but why are you mentioning this?”

“I’ve gradually become more and more interested in what this world really is.”

“Stop that.”

She gave a nervous look, but it appeared to be a forced expression meant to be shown to Akuto.

He realized that and shook his head.

“I understand, but I’m scared too.”

“Scared?”

“I think happiness is what we have here. We have worthwhile work, people accept us, we love, and we are loved.”

“My feelings are not going to change,” Junko quickly assured him.

“I know that. That isn’t what I meant.”

“Are you afraid of having this happiness continue?”

“That isn’t it either. I’m afraid of eternity. We will no longer die and our feelings will not change. In other words, everything is already over for us.”

He bit his lip as if finding this difficult to say.

“Over?”

“If we continue like this, it won’t create anything new. I’m trying to rehabilitate the delinquents, but I’m using an old method and their actions fall within my imagination to a disturbing degree. In other words, there’s almost nothing left for me to do.”

“But you said your work is worthwhile.”

“I did, but it’s very simple work for me. I don’t grow tired of it, but none of it is new to me.”

“But what do you mean it is over for us? Are you actually afraid of not dying?”

“Sort of. Hypothetically…well, we might actually have it for real. Anyway, if you had eternal life, what would you do?”

Junko tilted her head at that.

“I never thought about it, but it would certainly be boring. Is that what you mean?”

“It’s similar to boredom, but not quite,” began Akuto as if a dam had broken. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time because of the power I gained. I wondered if I was afraid of eternal life because of the boredom, but that isn’t it. What I’m afraid of is being forced to continue when everything is already over for me. I’d be forced to continue talking despite having nothing left to talk about. I’d be forced to continue writing despite having nothing left to write about. The delinquent rehabilitation is the same. They’ll eventually start talking the way I taught them to, but that’s nothing more than being an echo of me. Even romance is similar. We become one and thus become inseparable. That is an ending and yet we must continue on afterwards.”

“You want to know why you should continue? If our lives continue, why not take it easy and do so? What else can we do? Akuto, you are acting weird.”

She held his hand worriedly and he looked her in the eye.

“If we are the characters of a story, we’ve already reached the ending. If we want to do anything else – even live a peaceful life – we have to do something. We must search for the reason we must do something. We must search for that truth.”

“But why must we do that? No! For whose sake must we do that?”

Anger had almost completely filled her voice, but Akuto still nodded calmly.

“That is something else we have to search out.”

She said nothing more as if she had given up.

Junko had already left by the time he woke up the next morning. He entered the living room and found that Yoshie was gone and that Fujiko alone lay lazily on the sofa.

“It sounded like you really went at it last night,” she said sarcastically.

“Stop that. Besides, you’re always a lot more…”

She cut him off with a serious comment.

“I know. What were you arguing about?”

He sat next to her and explained the situation and she used the chance to rest her head on him.

“Are you still worried about saving the world?”

“To be honest, my focus on that has faded. I was on the verge of forgetting about Keena, Korone, and Hiroshi.”

He brushed his fingers through her hair and she skillfully adjusted her head’s position to let him.

“That just shows how happy you are.”

“Even my memories are fading. It’s like we’re stuck here in eternity.”

“Do you have a problem with eternity?”

“I think I do. While living in eternity, we need to find the meaning behind that eternity and bring this ending…to an end.”

“That’s a bit confusing, but I suppose so. Now, how about we get started?”

“Get started with what?”

“First, we can determine whether this is a dream or reality by touching each other’s bodies.”

Her hand reached around his waist.

“Those actions may be part of what has caused my memories to fade.”

He stood up and told her to leave the house.

Puzzled, she followed him and he climbed to the apartment building’s roof. They could see the entire city from there.

“Is there a reason to look at the city?” she asked.

“No.” He shook his head. “But I wanted to see into the distance. As far into the distance as I can.”

He produced a mana screen that displayed exactly what he himself could see.

“Your skill in magic certainly hasn’t waned.”

“I want to stay at the top of my game. Anyway, my vision is infinite so long as mana exists.”

“But when we were alive, there was no mana outside imperial territory. Plus, the earth was round, so you could see no better than a telescope on the surface and no better than a normal person in space.”

Akuto nodded in agreement with Fujiko’s explanation and pointed into the distance.

“But this world is completely filled with mana. The mana never ends.”

He extended his vision into the distance much like a camera zooming in. Fujiko could see the corresponding change on the screen.

“Eh? This is quite impressive.”

Her eyes opened wide as the zooming footage left the city, passed the horizon beyond it, and continued even further. Travelling past the horizon meant it reached the sky.

The sky expanded until it filled the screen and his vision showed nothing but the color blue. When he finally passed through the clouds, the screen turned white for an instant and then the darkness quickly grew. His vision reached space and ultimately vanished.

“It vanished?”

The instant after Fujiko said that, his vision filled with darkness once more and the previous series of scenes appeared in reverse. The earth expanded on the screen and it finally grew blue. And…

“Our backs!”

Sure enough, the screen displayed Akuto and Fujiko’s backs. She thought about what that meant if it really was equivalent to what Akuto could see.

“This is us right now?”

She waved her right hand and the Fujiko in the image did the same.

“Yes. This is what I’m seeing right now. I noticed this a while back.”

He moved his left arm.

“And what does it mean?” she asked.

“If the world we lived in was fictional, then the afterlife is also fictional. I started to think about what differentiated the two worlds and the answer I found was the presence or absence of an external wall,” he explained. “The world of the living had an external wall, but this world does not. No matter which three-dimensional direction you move in, you will return to your starting point. You can continue forever, but the space is finite.”

“I understand the concept, but what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But I can say a few things with no real proof. They may both be fictional, but there is a fiction with something outside and there is a fiction with only the inside. And in the latter case, some are the protagonists and some are the background characters. I think whatever we do will be successful…while in this world at least.”

He gave a mischievous sidelong glance toward Fujiko.

She blushed and gave a small bitter smile with the corners of her mouth.

“So you realized I was still thinking of ruling the world.”

“We’re a better pair than anyone else realizes,” he said. “Even if the others haven’t caught on, I know what you’re up to. You’ve approached within a step away from constructing a governmental structure with me at the center, haven’t you?”

“I have. How about it? Will you sit on the throne or will you let it end with nothing more than a wealthy life? You can do whatever you want.”

“And you know I won’t do either. This is just an elaborate prank. You find it more fun when a fortune built up to be squandered is destroyed in some exciting way.”

He smiled.

“Oh, dear. I’m happy you understand everything, but it’s still disappointing that you knew what I was planning.”

She smiled as well.

“I’m going to go a step beyond that. How about I crush this world in my grasp?”

“Eh?”

He had spoken so casually that it caught Fujiko off guard.

“This is a finite world and it’s filled with mana. Those are the rules, and that means…”

He stretched out his hand and bent his fingers as if training his grip.

The world began to creak.

“Ahh,” cried Fujiko in surprise.

The city shook, the air vibrated, and the pressure caused everything to groan.

The earth also shook. The earth would not normally be filled with mana, but this finite space was entirely filled with mana and thus the earth itself was made of mana.

Akuto essentially held that finite space in his grasp.

Fujiko realized he was crushing the very world into a smaller size.

“Akuto-sama…”

She quietly called his name in fear.

This was no different from suicide.

This was a world where they did not die and could not die, but would everything return to nothingness if he crushed that very world? His expression made it clear he had already resolved himself to answering that question.

His expression was calm as he quietly clenched his fist.

Seeing that, Fujiko simply took his other hand in her own.

The earth ripped up as if gathering in the center of the space, the ocean approached the city as it raged like a tsunami, the buildings cracked, and the people began floating up into the air.

Pressure reached the entire planet as if the earth had sunk into the depths of an ocean.

This was an ending of the world that no one had seen before.

Fujiko clung to Akuto and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders, but then static suddenly came from the mana screen.

That static was soon followed by a voice.

“No! That ending isn’t allowed!”

The words were oddly accented and Akuto recognized the voice.

He turned toward the mana screen he had abandoned and he found a blonde version of Keena.

“Keena,” he muttered.

This was the other Keena that had appeared as a distortion when Keena aka the Law of Identity had reset the world.

Akuto and the others had worked to erase her existence because she was not meant to exist.

“Why?”

This unexpected development stopped his hand.

“I won’t let you end things like that!” repeated the blonde Keena. “I disappeared because I was satisfied! But all of you aren’t truly satisficed, are you!?”

Akuto stopped moving and prepared to respond to Keena, but the mana screen disappeared.

“Was that just an illusion?” asked Fujiko. “No, it couldn’t be.”

Based on Akuto’s reaction, she was certain it was not an illusion.

He loosened his grip, the world stopped shrinking, and it slowly began returning to normal. The scene had been quite a spectacle, but the people gave no sign of noticing. They all walked through the city as if that scene of near destruction had never happened.

“We aren’t truly satisfied?”

Fujiko looked at Akuto and he looked back before closing his eyes.

“It seems so.”

“I had known this from the beginning. I had wondered if we were not actually satisfying you.”

She kissed him and stepped through the door from the roof ahead of him.

He stared into the sky for a while before doing the same. He passed Yoshie as she came to the roof and she gave him a disappointed look.

“I’m a girl too, you know? So I don’t like hearing that. I came here because I detected a distortion, but this is what I find.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m not sure how to respond to an apology either. But is there anything you want me to think about?”

She shrugged her shoulders in resignation.

“Yes. Please think about how to leave this place.”

He looked her directly in the eye as he made the request.

“This is going to get lengthy. Let’s talk in my room.”

She urged him to return to their apartment.

Brave felt utterly defeated.

He had kept count up to the 35th time.

He had killed Akuto more times than that, but nothing had changed. Not a thing.

Bouichirou had stopped hiding his pity partway through and Brave had clearly felt the sympathy of one who had been through the exact same thing.

“You should stop. Surely you know that.”

“I know all too well that someone is maliciously refusing to let me change history,” replied Brave in despair.

“That’s right. For some reason, this flow of events is not allowed to change.”

“But I’m one of the people who caused history to head down that path.”

“Yes. Even your futile struggles to change history are a part of that history. That is how it seems to work.” Bouichirou sighed. “I realized after I died, that my death was already decided.”

“Then I’m doomed to continually suffer in the same way? I have to repeat this unrewarded murder again and again as long as my will remains? And all of it is meaningless?”

Brave asked despite knowing the answer.

“Exactly.” Bouichirou nodded. “That is undoubtedly your role.”

“My role? So I have to work for the sake of someone’s plot? Why?”

“In this world…no, that is not a good way of putting it. In any world, there is no one with free will. Even you are doing this because you desire the result that will satisfy you, but those thoughts are in line with the ‘story’. What is happiness? If your stomach is full and a member of the opposite sex stands beside you, then you are satisfied. Even if that member of the opposite sex dies, the feeling of loss will not last too long. It does not create a gap that cannot be filled by another. Even those who seek out the finest foods despite their full stomach will settle for the food nearby when their stomach grows empty. There is no difference between biological satisfaction and happiness. If it were not for the ‘story’, that is. Many things are given value in a religious way: love, bloodline, success, one’s view of life, etc. But in a purely biological perspective, such things should not be given value. Stories support the human intellect, but they also infect it like a virus.”

“But we managed to resist it. We realized that and we’re trying to destroy the natural story. We know the history reaching this point is unnatural. The characters have realized they live in an artificial story, so the story has grown unstable!”

Brave’s eyes sparkled at this new discovery, but Bouichirou’s expression did not change.

“That is the kind of story this is.”

“What?”

“This is a story of divulging what stories are. The convenient deus ex machina does not exist simply as catharsis. It appears in order to tell us what it is we perceive as a story and to help us believe that the story is fictional. That God tells us of the pleasures and limits of the story. And thus we ourselves have become the deus ex machina.”

Bouichirou pointed at himself and then at Brave.

“We are the deus ex machina?”

“Rewriting history can save one from any problem. Even an unfortunate death or a terrible failure.”

“So…the deus ex machina hasn’t been forbidden. It just will fail?”

“Yes. And that leads to a single conclusion.”

“I get it. We’re not the protagonist.”

Brave was dumbfounded.

“That’s right.” Bouichirou disinterestedly dug into the ground with his foot. “And yet your role as a side character has yet to end. After all, Brave is now your only name and you have not lost that title. Most likely, all you are allowed now is to display bravery once everything has been lost.”

“And yet I’m still a side character, huh? So who’s the protagonist?”

He asked despite knowing the answer.

“That is of course the one who divulged several layers of fiction in the story. Most likely, the ending will come when he brings an end to the story exactly as the story dictates. The role of a demon king is to destroy the world, is it not? If a story does not allow the prince and princess to marry and live happily ever after, it must end with the world ending.”

“In other words, I’m important?” asked Akuto.

He still could not believe it.

“I think so.” Yoshie’s expression was completely serious. “You will bring an end to the world. What exactly that means gets tricky, though.”

“So whatever it means, I have to settle things?”

She nodded.

“The blonde Keena disappeared when she was satisfied, so you must be satisfied as well.”

“I get that, but what does it mean for me to be satisfied?”

“You live in a fiction yet you hate fiction. You have a natural urge to divulge fictions, so you will do so one after another. You destroyed the system closing us in, but the next system activated. The fiction has multiple layers. It is in an infinite retreat. It’s like a hell that continues on and on forever, so it isn’t an easy thing to deal with.”

Yoshie clung to him from behind as he sat in a chair.

“Quick question.”

“What? I thought we were having a serious discussion.”

“I’m asking because this is a serious discussion. Why are you hugging me from behind?”

“I’m indulging in my reward for playing the role of a side character. Specifically, the role of one of the three Goddesses.”

“But this isn’t exactly a sexy topic of discussion.”

“Won’t you look more like a villain if you’re stroking a girl while having a normal conversation?”

“Am I still a villain?”

She delighted as he tickled her cheek.

“Hee hee. If this upcoming role of yours isn’t that of a villain, what is it?”

“Again, what am I supposed to do to make myself satisfied?”

“You need to bring this world to an end…but that’s a tricky thing. First of all, we have to explain what exactly this world is.” She began her explanation. “The afterlife changes based on our…no, mostly based on your thoughts. It’s as if it were made for us. That means this world can take on any form.”

“I understand that much.”

“No, you don’t really understand what it means for it to take on any form. Are you familiar with the concept of possible worlds?”

“Possible worlds?”

Akuto “recalled” a term he did not previously known as if scanning through his brain and retrieving the data.

“I see. It’s a thought experiment where you assume a world where anything is possible and thus say anything logically feasible can happen.”

“Yes. In other words, anything that can be described in text can happen. That also tells us the limits of this world: anything that cannot be described cannot happen.”

Yoshie then began explaining the concept of possible worlds which was difficult to grasp just from the database information.

For example, the two statements “an elephant flew through the sky” and “Hitler visited Paris in the year 2000 AD” were both impossible in reality, but they worked in writing. If elephants were flying creatures and if Hitler had not died, they could occur even in reality. They were true in a world that could have been. In that case, it became clear that near infinite possibilities were contained within the world. They could even be seen as existing as infinite parallel worlds.

“You will create all of those logically possible worlds,” said Yoshie as if giving an order.

“All of them?” he asked back in astonishment.

“What remains after that will be your own will. You will see all worlds and choose for yourself.”

“I suppose I should search for the possibility of saving the world in this world where I can do anything. If I don’t, we may never escape this place.”

“In that case, I think you should start right away.” She produced a mana screen and displayed a model of history. “The data you can view is a copy of that from the world just before it was destroyed, but you can use that to calculate back and construct all possibilities.”

“But I feel like the worlds I would create would fairly ridiculous,” he said.

“That’s fine,” she replied. “Even the ridiculous worlds are a possibility.”

Akuto then decided to bring out those possibilities himself.

The world let out a groan.

Only a small number of people noticed it, but Brave and Bouichirou were of course two such people.

“What is this?” asked Brave.

Even as he asked, he felt the world losing its shape.

“This is the instant in which the world is altered,” explained Bouichirou. “I felt this on a small scale whenever you travelled back in time. The one doing it does not notice, though.”

“Then the one altering it now is…”

“Needless to say, it is the demon king. Activate the suit. We need to escape this.”

“Escape?”

He activated the suit’s time travel functionality and expanded the range to bring Bouichirou with him.

“We will erase ourselves from this space. The demon king is freely altering the world of the afterlife, but we will remove ourselves as factors in that.”

“You can explain later.”

Brave travelled to a time period he had not visited before. In order to avoid being seen, he travelled to a tall mountain peak during a period when mankind had yet to develop magical civilization and was not even using electromagnetic signals.

“I figured you wouldn’t want to be cold, so I chose a rocky mountain of only 2000 meters during the summer.”

All they could see were rocky mountains and a forest down below. The taller mountains had snow on their peaks, but this sunny peak was warm.

“Thank you. The weather might be better here than in the afterlife. This cool wind is quite nice.”

Bouichirou sat on a nearby rock.

“So you say the demon king has altered the afterlife?” asked Brave with hands on his hips.

“He alters it all the time, but this time he altogether erased it.”

“Erased it? You mean he’s resetting it to redo it?”

“Yes. It seems the afterlife was a world the demon king has free control over. He likely realized that thanks to the knowledge of those around him.”

Bouichirou sounded fairly bewildered.

“Free control? I thought that place granted everyone’s wishes and his will was simply the strongest.”

Brave was suspicious because the dead had been there before the demon king.

“It is possible the memories of those people were only created once the demon king arrived. It would be impossible for them to be aware of it, however.”

Brave accepted that explanation, but his expression did not change.

“That’s based on the theory that no one would realize it if the world and all our memories were created five minutes ago. I’m familiar with that, but if it’s true…what does that make us?”

“That is a natural question, but it is a difficult one to answer as we are on the inside.” Bouichirou chose his words carefully. “However, if we assume the entire universe was created by the Law of Identity, it means we are fictional beings, as is the demon king.”

“That’s what you were talking about before, isn’t it?”

“The afterlife exists on the inside and we can think of it as existing inside the demon king.”

“Yeah,” agreed Brave. “I get it. We all died and were resurrected. But it was the demon king that resurrected us.”

“That is how I understand it. The world has been reconstructed as data. Just as the former computer Gods attempted to do.”

“Then why did he erase it and try to redo it? If he’s on the level of a God, why didn’t he accept the world he created?”

“Based on his words, I assume it be because that was a world of an eternal ending.”

Bouichirou nodded as if to say he understood the feeling.

“I don’t really get it.”

Brave had been frowning this whole time.

“He realized there is no story in satisfying his own desires.”

“I realized that before he did. Otherwise, I would have been living with my girlfriend in this world.”

“We cannot do that. That is simply the type of existence we are.”

Hearing that, Brave finally changed his expression.

“Existence? You explained that earlier, didn’t you?”

“If the people of the afterlife are fictional characters, we alone exist. The two of us and the demon king.”

“The two of us and the demon king?”

Brave was taken aback.

“We may have been chosen by the Law of Identity. We were chosen as side characters, but we were still given important parts to play.”

Bouichirou’s expression was oddly calm.

“I do feel like destiny is playing a hand in things. And we weren’t wrapped up in what just happened.”

“The demon king is redoing the story itself and he will likely study the result by using the people…no, the characters of the afterlife.”

That was Bouichirou’s conclusion and Brave accepted it.

“But there’s no way he can do that.”

“Yes. As he did not succeed the first time, he cannot succeed the second time unless someone else’s power is at work.”

“And that’s what we’ll do?” asked Brave in shock.

Bouichirou nodded.

“You have already made up your mind, haven’t you? It is only natural that it be the hero who saves the world.”

“But how?”

“There is a way. We will enter the demon king’s world. We will enter, but we will interfere without being incorporated into it. We can travel on the path of history that the Law of Identity has created. Of course, there will be a sacrifice.”

“A sacrifice?”

“We will be interfering with the demon king’s world, but our individual personalities will not.”

Bouichirou seemed to have made up his mind about something and that statement sounded ominous to Brave.

“What do you mean by that? What sacrifice?”

“Just like the Law of Identity, the demon king does not handle the people as individual personalities. The people all have an internal side, but in the story, all else is nothing more than a collection of elements unneeded for a personality. That will remain the same even after he reorganizes the world.”

“I see.” Having caught on, Brave took a deep sigh. “We’ll be treated as a combined personality playing the role of the hero.”

“Yes. It is most likely for the Law of Identity’s convenience, but that is how the characters work in this world.”

“I don’t want that to happen,” said Brave.

But then Bouichirou vanished before his eyes.

Brave closed his eyes as if scrutinizing the memories, consciousness, and knowledge that came flowing in.

He took several calm breaths and finally looked up into the sky.

“I understand. We have to put on a show for the Law of Identity.”