Chapter 35: A Desperate Show of Strength

No matter how many times I delve into someone's subconscious, it always feels strange.

The closest metaphor would probably be diving into the depths of the sea.

Entering a Bluffer's inner world and reaching its very core.

The first thing I saw after entering Kanon's inner world was her past──memories from when she was at her original school.

The Able Squad is an elite unit of West School, tasked with protecting the Kansai region.

They have the highest number of Invasion of Fiction defeats. Each individual member is also top-class in their respective skills.

Of course, their squad leader, Kanon, is exceptionally talented, but the Bluffer members under her are equally outstanding.

If they had one weakness, it would probably be the lack of strength in their Anchor.

The man who had been assigned to them as their Anchor was by no means incompetent, but he was simply too conventional to truly connect with the strong personalities of the Able Squad.

And that was precisely why the tragedy occurred.

It was the night of a new moon. The night sky was covered by thick clouds, with neither the twinkle of stars nor the light of the moon visible.

"Kaho. Are there any hostile reactions in the surrounding area?"

"No, none!"

Kaho, a squad member with excellent reconnaissance abilities, answered crisply in response to her captain Kanon's call.

"I see. But then... what is this strange feeling?"

The unpleasant premonition wouldn't go away. Kanon's extensive experience kept warning her that something was wrong.

She looked around. Just like the eastern capital, the entire Ancient City was completely within the territory of the "Invasion of Fiction." Once a prosperous city beneath the Emperor's rule, the Ancient City now contained no sign of human presence.

A cold night wind blew, and Kanon shivered.

To conserve her strength, Kanon had not deployed 『Pure Land of This World』 before engaging the enemy. She couldn't exactly waste her power just to keep herself warm.

If an enemy approached, Kaho would definitely warn her.

Kanon trusted Kaho's abilities, as well as the strength of her other comrades.

──But that trust was about to be betrayed.

"............Huh?"

A sharp pain shot through Kanon's left arm.

A powerful sense of weakness followed.

The strength drained from her entire body, and Kanon collapsed into a sitting position.

A hypodermic needle was sticking into her left arm.

The squad member standing to Kanon's left had pulled out a syringe and plunged the needle into her.

She wore an eerie smile.

There was no way to tell what was going through her mind.

"Why...?"

Kanon had never even considered the possibility that one of her comrades would try to hurt her.

The normally calm and composed Kanon's mind was thrown into utter confusion.

As Kanon collapsed, she heard laughter.

"Ha... hahahahahaha! Finally! The time has finally come! Ah, this is the best! Seeing you crawling around on the ground like that... it's absolutely wonderful!"

"S-Satomi...?"

The one laughing triumphantly was her dependable vice-captain, Satomi Kagemiya.

There was no trace of her usual self. She wore nothing but a crazed smile.

"Wh-why would you do something like this...?"

"Shut up. Don't you dare speak to me so casually."

"Ugh...!"

Satomi stomped on Kanon's head, making her groan in pain.

Seeing her like that, a look of delight spread across Satomi's face.

"Ha, hahahaha! The Salvation Kanon is crawling on the ground in front of me! Ah, how wonderful!"

Satomi's crazed eyes gleamed as she stomped on Kanon's head again and again.

Kanon's beautiful black hair was stained with the marks of her shoes.

"Why...?"

Dazed, Kanon could do nothing but whisper those words.

"You want to know why? Ah, right. The voice of the Ruler rang out in our heads."

"The Ruler...?"

"That's right! The whispers of the exalted Ruler! They guided us and taught us this exquisite pleasure!"

Madness swirled within Satomi's eyes as she spoke. It was a bottomless madness, different from Ascension.

Looking around, Kanon saw that the other squad members had the same look in their eyes.

"S-Satomi! What the hell are you talking about...!"

The one who shouted was their Anchor, Takuma Ichijo. His eyes had not been consumed by madness.

However, like Kanon, he was lying helplessly on the ground. He, too, had been injected with the same substance as Kanon.

"Huh? Oh, right. You were here too. You can kill him now."

"—Wait...!"

A shadow appeared behind him, gripping an axe.

With a sharp whoosh, Takuma's head was severed from his body. A spray of blood rained down upon Kanon, who was unable to move.

"──I'm sorry, Kanon. I couldn't be of any help to you."

His final words were burned into Kanon's ears.

"Ah... ah..."

Someone was dying.

A life was ending, a future being extinguished.

Kanon hated that moment more than anything.

Memories of her conversations with him flashed through her mind like a revolving lantern.

He had always been a little unreliable, but Kanon liked the way he worried about her, even if he did so with a slight blush.

"Bah-hahahaha! Look at that face, Salvation Kanon. What happened to that usual cool and collected attitude of yours?"

Satomi, still wearing a crazed smile even after killing her own comrade, grabbed Kanon's hair and forcibly pulled her head up.

"Ugh..."

"You're a sacrifice for His Excellency. If He absorbs a powerful Bluffer like you, the conquest of the world will proceed all the more smoothly."

"Wh-why...?"

All that came from Kanon's mouth were questions asking why.

"You... you said you'd support my ideals... that you'd give everything you had to eradicate the 'Invasion of Fiction' and eliminate lies..."

"──Of course that was a lie!"

"............Huh?"

Kanon's thoughts came to a complete stop.

"It was all a lie! Everything about talking to someone as irritating as you! Saying I sympathized with your ideals, telling you to rely on me... It all made me sick!"

"Ah..."

The mutter that escaped Kanon unconsciously went unheard.

"──So die here! Accept the Ruler's invasion!"

As if answering her furious declaration, the empty space began to crack with a strange sound.

It was a sight that seemed to completely deny the laws of the universe, something so terrifying that merely looking at it filled Kanon with fear.

The cracks in space eventually widened into a rift, and something emerged from the other side.

A gaping void of darkness.

Beyond it, slimy, writhing tentacles writhed in the darkness.

At the sight of them, Satomi's face twisted into an ecstatic smile. She prostrated herself on the ground in welcome.

"Ah, welcome, Great One! It is an honor to behold Your presence, the One destined to rule over us!"

There was no trace of reason left in her ecstatic expression.

The other squad members wore similar expressions.

Kanon finally understood the source of the unpleasant feeling she'd had earlier.

The enemy had already been right beside her.

From the world beyond, it had already noticed them. It had captivated every Bluffer except Kanon and waited for its opportunity.

The "Invasion of Fiction" was an existence born from human lies.

These extraterrestrial lifeforms, creatures from the myths of imaginary worlds, were also among its targets.

A tentacle crawled out through the rift in space.

Faced with an existence that should never have existed in this world, Kanon's body still remained powerless.

The tentacles slowly approached Kanon and the others──and eventually seized the body of Satomi, who was still prostrating herself.

"Wha... why, Great One!? I-I did everything You told me to! So why!? ...Aaaaaaaaaah!"

The tentacles swallowed Satomi.

It was anything but a gentle embrace.

The sounds of a human body breaking could be heard from within the tentacles.

The crunch of bones breaking. The splatter of blood. A scream that could no longer be called human speech.

When the tentacles moved again, all that remained was a red mass of flesh so mangled that it no longer resembled a human body.

"Aaaaaaaaaah!"

Screams erupted as the other squad members fled from the tentacles.

Along with the screams, someone's body was lifted into the air.

There was a sickening sound as a human body was crushed, and blood was splattered across the ground.

Fear eventually spread into madness.

And the vortex of madness caught Kanon as well.

The shock of betrayal. Satomi's words kept spinning around inside her head.

『It was all a lie! Everything about talking to someone as irritating as you! Saying I sympathized with your ideals, telling you to rely on me... It all made me sick!』

Kanon had loved the members of her squad who had affirmed her ideals.

She wanted to create a peaceful world where everyone could live without having to lie.

It was a childish ideal, one that had even earned her ridicule.

But it had been enough for her that they accepted it.

"──I see. So all of this is because lies are evil."

Kanon's eyes turned a deep red.

A Kannon statue appeared behind her. The statue raised its enormous hand high into the air before bringing it crashing down upon the tentacles.

A deafening boom rang out as the ground was violently gouged apart.

The Old One that had emerged from another world was obliterated in an instant by a single overwhelming blow.

Kanon, having unleashed such overwhelming destruction, stood surrounded by shattered corpses and muttered to no one in particular.

"I see. Symptomatic treatment can never truly save anyone. How foolish of me. I had forgotten such an obvious truth. ──Then, as I thought. I will save the world myself. By eradicating lies, the root cause of everything, I will bring peace to this world."

Her solemn declaration, however, was nothing more than a desperate show of strength.

In other words, Salvation Kanon's ideal of creating a "world without lies" had been a lie from the very beginning.

The moment she forcibly buried that guilt deep within herself and tried to conceal it, Kanon's ideal had already begun to collapse.

"──Putting on a brave face is more exhausting than you think."

I spoke to her in a pure white world.

It was an incredibly barren world, so white that it was almost frightening.

Kanon's inner world.

Within it, she sat curled up like a sulking child.

"But everyone else seems to manage just fine."

Her voice sounded terribly tired.

"I can't do it. Smiling with your face while harboring anger in your heart, praising someone with your mouth while cursing them inside... I'm not actually afraid of lies themselves. I'm afraid of lies. When I think that the person standing in front of me might be hiding one, I'm terrified. So I just wished they would all disappear."

"Kanon, you're an honest person."

"Yes. Will you laugh and call me foolish? But I can't become a liar like──like Usobuki Raika."

Her words were so frail that she sounded as though she might burst into tears.

I crouched down so I could meet her gaze as she lowered her head.

I looked directly into Kanon's eyes.

"You seem to hate that part of yourself, Kanon, but I like that honest, uncompromising part of you."

"............Huh?"

As she raised her head, I continued speaking.

"I used to wish there were no lies either."

"You too, Shota...?"

"Yeah. I could sort of tell when people were lying to me. Every time I realized someone was lying, I'd get this uncomfortable feeling. Even now, I haven't completely overcome that."

"You're just like me," I told her.

Even the transcendent Salvation Kanon was, at her core, just like an ordinary person such as me.

"So at least with me, I want to be able to interact with the real you, without you putting on a brave face. ...It's selfish, but whenever I look at you, I somehow find myself wanting that."

"But... but!"

Kanon spoke like a lost child.

"...What if you are lying to me too? That fear controls me. ...I'm weak, aren't I? I'm still carrying around a fear that everyone else overcame as a matter of course."

It was probably a fear everyone experienced as a child.

And perhaps that was precisely why I, an ordinary person who simply happened to have the aptitude to be an Anchor, could speak to her.

"──Then I'll make you a promise. I won't. I, at least, won't tell you any lies that would hurt you, Kanon. I want to become someone you can be around without having to put on a brave face."

"Why would you go this far for me...?"

"Because it's something I can relate to. I used to put unnecessary pressure on myself, trying too hard to look strong, and end up exhausting myself. ...I've already learned how much it can save you to have someone willing to listen when you're like that."

What came to mind was when I'd first arrived at Fantasia High School.

Back when I didn't know which way was up or down and was simply trying to make myself look like a respectable person.

Then I happened to meet her while she was smoking a cigarette, and she ended up saving me.

"So I want to help Kanon live a normal life. So you won't have to choose to sacrifice countless people for the sake of your ideals. ...I think it's okay for Kanon to have someone she can lean on. So I'll be that person."

"──!"

Her tear-filled eyes looked toward me.

Her bright red lips cautiously formed the words.

"...You're not lying?"

"No. I won't tell you lies that would hurt you, Kanon."

I smiled reassuringly, and a single tear spilled from her wide-open eyes.

When that tear fell to the ground, a faint red color began spreading across Kanon's previously pure-white world.

It was a tiny change, like a single drop of red liquid falling into a bottle filled with water.

And yet, it was a decisive one.

The next moment, our consciousness returned from the inner world to reality.