Chapter 31: Their Feelings

Even though this was supposed to be my first time borrowing Hibari's power, the flight magic settled into my body with surprising ease.

According to Raika, the affinity between the Anchor and the Bluffer was important for Bluffer Wearing.

If that was the case, then perhaps the reason I was able to draw out this much power was because Hibari and I had opened our hearts and talked honestly with each other just before coming here.

Thinking about that, I landed beside my companions.

"Is there anything I can do?"

I asked the girls, who seemed to be discussing something. Until just a moment ago, I'd been desperately trying to shake off the Calamity God, so I had no idea what was going on.

But I could tell that Victoria desperately wanted something.

Victoria looked at me in surprise before eventually speaking.

"Observer. Could you hold my hand?"

She spoke with a hint of embarrassment.

It was unusual for her to openly rely on someone.

"That's the Anchor's role, right? Leave it to me."

Understanding what she meant, I slowly took Victoria's left hand.

It was soft and warm. A girl's hand.

"An... Shota-kun, don't keep squeezing my hand like that. It tickles."

"S-Sorry. I didn't mean to..."

It felt awkward in my hand, so I ended up readjusting my grip without thinking.

Even at a time like this, we looked almost like a couple on their first date.

"What are you two getting all lovey-dovey for, idiot? Let's get this done already."

Raika's voice, lower than usual, made me hurriedly look up.

She was glaring at us with an exasperated expression.

Judging by her expression, she was probably thinking something along the lines of, "What are you two flirting for? Take this seriously."

Under that gaze, Victoria turned her face away in embarrassment.

I also felt awkward and looked away.

After the strange atmosphere lingered for a moment, she composed herself and made her declaration.

"──Then, I'll do it."

The atmosphere surrounding Victoria changed as she raised her head.

The ordinary Victoria was finished.

From this point forward, the one who would accomplish a great feat was the princess of the Lost Continent, Victoria von Leonora.

She thrust out her right hand, opposite the left hand connected to mine, and a wooden staff appeared from thin air.

Taking hold of it, the girl began her solemn incantation.

"──You who will eventually converge and perish..."

I could feel some enormous power gathering around her.

Black light began gathering at the tip of her staff.

Her mind, constantly wavering between bluff and reality, was unstable.

A chaotic storm of memories poured into her mind.

Because our hands were joined and our consciousnesses were synchronized, I saw the same scenes.

As the Anchor keeping her tethered to reality, I tightened my grip on Victoria's hand.

Memories from a past that was already beginning to fade even from Victoria's own mind resurfaced.

I confronted Victoria's memories.

Uncool.

That self-deprecating thought had followed her around like a verbal tic.

When she was around elementary-school age, she was "a girl who couldn't do anything."

It wasn't anything that would cause her serious trouble in life.

She couldn't do a back hip circle. She couldn't memorize her multiplication tables. She couldn't play ball sports.

Things that, as an adult, she could look back on and laugh about as trivial childhood memories.

But to the young Victoria, they appeared as terrifying and insurmountable as enormous walls.

"──O black hole that devours all. Star of gravity."

The black light at the tip of the staff began to grow, sucking in the surrounding air.

Victoria's eyes, as she wielded the magic, weren't actually seeing it.

Her consciousness had already entered her memories.

The only thing that could truly save this tiny girl was the world of fantasy.

Manga. Novels. Anime. Movies. Dramas.

She especially loved the villains in those stories.

Cold-hearted witches. Nihilistic and mysterious boys. Boys and girls with supernatural abilities.

Reckless. Self-centered. Or simply eccentric.

Their solitary way of living, one step removed from society, seemed incredibly appealing to Victoria.

So she tried behaving that way herself.

But she quickly realized something.

Reality didn't turn you into a character from a story.

It simply made you an antisocial person who was pushed to the sidelines.

"──Let the hole floating in the heavens stand alone, returning everything to nothingness."

The black hole floating at the tip of the staff continued to expand, greedily sucking in the surrounding air with a roaring whoosh.

The Calamity God sensed the activation of the powerful magic, roared, and charged straight toward Victoria.

But a bullet slammed into its snout.

"She's working hard, isn't she? Don't get in her way."

A large-caliber bullet fired from Raika's anti-materiel rifle hindered the Calamity God's movement.

The Fantasm Bullet, fired with all of Raika's strength, had enough power to make even the enhanced Calamity God stagger backward.

There may have been no convenient salvation waiting for her in the real world, but there were people who helped her.

Her kind parents. Her cheerful childhood friend. All of her classmates were kind to her.

She was helped so many times that, alongside her gratitude, she began to feel inferior.

I can't do anything on my own.

I'm always the one being helped.

Uncool.

──The people who helped her were gone.

The place where Victoria had lived became a domain of death.

All that remained after the Calamity God's arrival were corpses and a childhood friend whose mind had been broken.

She couldn't remain helpless anymore.

Even if it meant being ostracized, even if it meant hurting someone, she had to become strong like the villains in those stories.

And so she changed. She was able to change.

Victoria von Leonora, the Bluffer, became her ideal self.

That was precisely why she couldn't allow herself to tarnish that ideal here.

Victoria von Leonora had to be an ideal existence.

The person she was now could never return to being that uncool version of herself.

As I stared into her memories, I found myself standing face-to-face with her in a pitch-black space before I even realized it.

It was probably the same phenomenon that had occurred when I spoke with Raika before.

Victoria stood before me with her eyes lowered.

"...This is the real me. Small, uncool, and someone I could never show to anyone."

"──That's lonely."

I couldn't imagine anything lonelier than being unable to reveal your true self to anyone.

When I gave her my honest impression, Victoria lowered her head slightly.

"Loneliness isn't a reason for me to stop. I stood by and watched Mama and Papa die, and I bound Hi-chan down. This is only what I deserve. It's my duty."

For the first time, I felt like I was looking directly into her eyes.

I faced her two eyes without the eyepatch covering them.

"From what you've told me, I don't think it was Victoria's fault. There was nothing anyone could have done. The damage caused by the Calamity God, the contempt directed at you citizens, even the deaths of your parents..."

"That has nothing to do with me. The fact that I bound Hi-chan down hasn't changed."

She said it with a self-deprecating smile.

It was an unbearably painful, almost despairing smile.

"In the end, it's all self-satisfaction. Being cool. Being the princess of the Lost Kingdom. Even my status as a Bluffer and my magic. All of it is just me deceiving my weak self. ──I'm really so uncool."

The way she spoke about herself with such contempt was nothing like her usual confident demeanor.

Seeing that, I finally realized that the Victoria I usually saw was nothing but a bluff.

She must have always been questioning herself deep down.

Is this really enough?

Have I become someone who can stand proudly in front of what I've lost? Have I become someone no one can laugh at?

For a girl who had grown weaker after becoming trapped in doubt, what she needed was an honest answer.

I opened my mouth.

"...Is that really so? At least, I think it's pretty cool."

"──Huh?"

My eyes met both of hers.

"Everyone lies to themselves to some extent. We talk about our dreams for the future, act all proud about having a personal motto... even try smoking."

The difference between her and everyone else was merely a matter of degree.

How seriously we deceived ourselves. That was all.

"Even if you're lying to yourself, even if you're just trying to look cool, even if it's nothing more than self-satisfaction, as long as you can be proud of who you are, I think that's enough. If things get too hard, you can tell someone you trust. Hibari isn't weak anymore. I'm sure she'll be there to help you. ...And besides, I want to be there for you too."

Looking back at her past had probably caused the doubts she had about herself to swell up again.

So once more, I affirmed her.

Even if I was the only one who did it, I would affirm her bluff, and the weakness she had never been able to reveal to anyone.

"So I think it's fine for Victoria to stay just the way she is. Even if people laugh at you, you should still be proud of yourself."

The black light at the tip of the wand was finally complete.

A black hole. A recreation of a celestial body whose powerful gravity could swallow even light.

"──Arise, black star of the void! Swallow everything and return it to nothingness!"

"...O, OOOOOOO!"

The vortex of gravity was unleashed, immediately reaching the Calamity God.

The Calamity God's body was caught within the gravitational field and pinned in midair.

According to the laws of physics, the Calamity God should have been sucked into the black hole and annihilated.

But this was a clash between fiction and fiction.

There was a difference in their levels: Victoria's individual lie versus the Calamity God, clad in the fictions humanity had accumulated throughout its history.

At least when it came to a contest of raw power.

In a few dozen seconds, the Calamity God would probably break free of its bonds.

But those few dozen seconds were more than enough for her.

Kibogaoka Hibari took off toward the Calamity God, finally making her move.

"──Illusion Release. Blade, extended deployment."

The blade that unfolded from the tip of her wand began to expand, radiating light.

The true nature of the blade Hibari wielded was the embodiment of all the hope she carried.

The hope she herself felt for the future, as well as the hope entrusted to her by others, had gathered within that radiant blade.

Perhaps it was nothing more than a delusion.

The "hope" Hibari carried had no physical form. There was no way to even prove that someone else's "hope" had truly been entrusted to her.

The realist side of Hibari understood that all too well.

But what she was wielding now was the power of a bluff.

As long as she believed that hope was there, the power of Kibogaoka Hibari would become real.

She released all of it at once from the form contained within the blade. Overflowing light expanded outward, nearly enveloping Hibari's body as she soared through the sky.

Having approached the immobilized Calamity God, Hibari casually pointed her blade forward.

The light concentrated at the tip of the blade was released with a focused trajectory.

"Go...oooooo!"

Everyone present held their breath at the sight of that single attack.

The blade transformed into a torrent of light and surged toward the Calamity God.

The sight of it glittering as it swept across the sky was beautiful, almost like a storm of falling cherry blossoms.

The Calamity God opened its jaws and unleashed a purple breath to meet it head-on.

The torrent of light and the breath collided violently──and eventually, the light of hope engulfed everything.

"O, OOOOOOO!"

Light enveloped the Calamity God's body.

The effectiveness of Hibari's attack was immediately obvious.

Starting from the areas swallowed by the torrent, its body vanished as though it had never existed in the first place.

The purple flames covering its outer shell disappeared into the light. Its mighty wings disappeared into the light. Its black scales disappeared into the light.

Its body, stripped of its outer shell, gradually began to vanish.

For the Calamity God, the power wielded by Hibari was nothing short of its natural enemy.

The fear of the maladies humanity had accumulated throughout history.

The lies born from that fear.

All of them were being swallowed by the light of hope.

──For the Calamity God to simply vanish like this was the correct course of history.

Just before the Calamity God's body was completely swallowed by the light and annihilated, a single shadow burst into the scene.

"──I apologize for interrupting, but please excuse me."

A Kannon statue with a halo of light behind it. Black hair that gave off an air of calm composure.

The Bluffer floating through the air was Salvation Kanon.

Her right arm, which should have been injured in the battle moments ago, had somehow already healed completely.

The power surging through her body was on an entirely different level from before.

──And her eyes were glowing with an intense red light.

"I must extend a hand of salvation to every corner of the world. Please become my sustenance."

The Kannon statue extended a hand toward the dying Calamity God.

Then, like iron filings being drawn toward a magnet, the Calamity God was pulled toward her palm.

It was an almost absurd sight.

The Calamity God, enormous even compared to the Kannon statue, was compressed into the palm of her hand in an instant.

Everyone could only stare at the scene in stunned silence.

No one even understood what was happening.

They had never even imagined absorbing "Invasion of Fiction."

Naturally, no one could possibly have anticipated what would happen next.

Except for one person who had been watching the world from outside it.

Just before the Calamity God was completely absorbed into the Kannon statue, a single gunshot rang out.

"You've finally shown your true colors. The irregularity outside the scenario."

The bullet fired by Raika struck Kanon.