Sku-te - Down With Nana Hiiragi

Chapter 34: Echoes of a Fictional Past

The fire in the damp cave spat a shower of angry orange sparks into the heavy, charged silence that followed Arthur Ainsworth’s almost whispered, yet cataclysmic, question. The only other sound was the distant, ceaseless roar of the hidden waterfall, a monotonous, indifferent rush of water that suddenly felt like the rushing, uncaring torrent of a reality that had just been irrevocably, terrifyingly, and perhaps even liberatingly, undone. Nana Hiiragi stared at him, her violet eyes wide, her face utterly drained of colour, the half-sketched map forgotten in her lap. Kyouya Onodera’s hand had frozen midway through sharpening his makeshift blade, his usually impassive features now a mask of stunned, almost incredulous intensity. Michiru Inukai’s gentle face was etched with profound confusion and a dawning, childlike distress, her hand instinctively going to her mouth. Even Jin Tachibana, for the first time since Arthur had known him, looked momentarily, almost imperceptibly, thrown, his enigmatic smile faltering, his pale eyes fixed on Arthur with a new, sharp, unreadable intensity.

It was Nana who finally broke the spell, her voice a strangled, disbelieving whisper. “A… a story? You’re saying… everything? The island… the killings… me… it was all just… a story you read? In a… a comic book?” The sheer, insane absurdity of it seemed to overwhelm her. The carefully constructed narrative of her life, her suffering, her crimes – all reduced to pulp fiction in another world.

Arthur nodded miserably, the weight of their collective shock almost a physical blow. “Essentially, yes, Hiiragi-san. A manga, as they call them. And then an animated television series. ‘Talentless Nana’. It was… surprisingly popular for a while, in my time. Known for its dark themes, its psychological twists.” He felt a flush of shame, of acute discomfort. How could he possibly explain the ghoulish voyeurism of it all? Their real, lived pain, packaged as entertainment. It felt obscene.

Kyouya Onodera finally moved, placing his sharpened metal shard down with slow, deliberate precision. His voice, when he spoke, was dangerously quiet, each word a carefully chipped piece of ice. “So all your ‘predictions,’ Tanaka-kun… or should I say, Ainsworth-san? Your ‘Chrono-Empathic Glimpse’… your knowledge of our Talents, our weaknesses, our… our fates… it all came from this… this fictional narrative?”

“Most of it,” Arthur admitted, his gaze dropping to the cave floor. He couldn’t meet Kyouya’s piercing stare. “My memories of it are… fragmented. Incomplete. Like trying to recall a dream years later. I remembered key events, character traits, some of the deaths. Enough to make those ‘predictions.’ Enough to try and… interfere, sometimes successfully, often not.” He thought of the sheer, unmitigated unreality of it all, more like some bizarre, avant-garde play one might see in a small, underfunded provincial theatre back in Sussex, something designed to shock and confuse, than any lived experience.

“So you knew,” Nana’s voice was stronger now, laced with a dawning, terrible anger, a profound sense of betrayal. “You knew what I was. What I would do. You knew about… about Michiru?” Her gaze flicked towards the fluffy-haired girl, who was now looking at Arthur with wide, wounded eyes.

“I knew… some of it,” Arthur said wretchedly. “I knew Michiru was… important. I knew she had a powerful healing Talent. I remembered… I remembered her dying to save you, Nana-san, in the story. That’s why I tried so desperately to stop her at the docks.” He looked at Michiru. “And later, why I hoped… her body being warm, it matched some obscure detail I half-recalled about how truly powerful healing Talents might interact with death in your world, according to the lore of that story.”

Michiru’s eyes filled with tears. “So… my life… Nana-chan’s life… it was all… written down somewhere?” she whispered, her voice trembling.

“In my world, yes,” Arthur confirmed, his own voice hoarse with a mixture of guilt and a strange, weary resignation. “A fiction. Here… here it’s your reality. Our reality now, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you stop more of it?” Kyouya’s question was sharp, cutting as the blade he’d just been honing. “If you possessed such… supposedly comprehensive foreknowledge, why allow so many to die? Why not expose Nana from the outset?”

Arthur finally looked up, a spark of his old, tired frustration igniting in his eyes as he met Kyouya’s accusatory gaze. “Do you truly think I didn’t want to?” he retorted, his voice gaining a raw, defensive edge. “My memory of this… this ‘story’… it was never comprehensive, Kyouya-san. It was like a shattered mirror, reflecting only fragments, often distorted, often out of sequence. I frequently didn’t know the when or even the exact where each murder or critical event would take place until it was almost upon us, or sometimes, tragically, not until it was too late.”

He took a ragged breath, the faces of the dead flickering before his mind’s eye. “Take Nanao Nakajima, for instance. I knew where Nana planned to kill him – that cliff by the sea. It was a very vivid scene in the story. But I had no idea when she would make her move – which day, which hour. I had to shadow him for days, make a nuisance of myself, an utter fool, just waiting, hoping I could intervene at the right, critical moment. With Yuusuke Tachibana, the time traveler,” Arthur continued, his voice tight with the memory of that particularly cold-blooded murder, “again, I knew where – the lake. But not when. My warning to him was vague because my knowledge was vague. I couldn’t tell him ‘Nana will drown you by the old boathouse next Tuesday at 3 PM’ because I simply didn’t know that level of detail.”

He looked down at his hands, clenching and unclenching them. “And Touichirou Hoshino, the poor boy dying of cancer… for him, I didn’t even have an accurate location. Just a hazy recollection from the story that it was possibly in a cave somewhere on the island. Which cave? When? The story never specified. I tried to find him, to warn him, but the island is large, and he was already reclusive due to his illness.” Arthur shook his head, the weight of these specific failures, these agonizing limitations, pressing down on him.

“And what if I had tried to change things too drastically from the outset?” he pressed on, his voice gaining a note of desperation. “What if I’d stood up on that first day and announced, ‘Nana Hiiragi is a government assassin, and here’s a list of everyone she’s going to kill’? Who would have believed me? They’d have locked me up as a lunatic! Or Nana herself would have eliminated me before I drew my next breath. The story I remembered was horrific, yes, but what if my blundering attempts to play God based on a half-recalled comic book from another dimension made things even worse? Created new, unforeseen tragedies? New victims I couldn’t have predicted?” He gestured helplessly. “And frankly, Kyouya-san, I was terrified. Most of the time, I am terrified. I was alone, in a foreign land I didn’t understand, in a body that wasn’t mine, surrounded by people with often terrifying superhuman abilities, one of whom was a highly trained, remorseless assassin systematically killing everyone around me. My primary concern, I’ll admit it freely, was often my own desperate survival, and simply trying to make some kind of rudimentary sense of an utterly impossible, insane situation.”

He turned to Nana, whose face was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions – anger, betrayal, confusion, but also, Arthur thought he saw, a flicker of something else, something akin to a strange, twisted validation. If her life, her actions, had been “scripted” in some other dimension, did that lessen her own culpability? Did it make Tsuruoka’s manipulation even more monstrously profound?

“And what,” Jin Tachibana finally spoke, his voice still calm, still enigmatic, though his eyes held a new, sharp alertness, “does this… ‘story’… say happens next? Now that we have escaped this camp? Now that your ‘Talent,’ your foreknowledge of our specific immediate actions, is supposedly… depleted?”

Arthur shook his head. “That’s the problem. The story I remember… it focused primarily on Nana’s time on the island during that first year. It detailed many of her… assignments. It touched upon Kyouya’s investigation, Michiru’s sacrifice and return, the conflict with Rentaro. After that, my knowledge becomes… patchy. Vague. I remember broader strokes about Tsuruoka, about the Committee, about the ‘Enemies of Humanity,’ about a growing societal fear of Talents leading to… to situations like this internment camp.” He gestured around the damp cave. “But specific events? Timelines? Who lives, who dies from this point on? I have no idea. The narrative, for me, largely ended with the first year’s major events, or became too divergent from what I was experiencing once I started interfering. From the moment Michiru first returned, from Nana’s breakdown at the cliff, things here have already been… different, diverging significantly from what I dimly recalled. My foreknowledge of your specific futures, your day-to-day choices, is gone. As I said, I’m as blind as the rest of you now.”

A new, uneasy silence descended. The implications of Arthur’s confession, the sheer, mind-bending audacity of it, were immense, earth-shattering. Their lives, their struggles, their very identities, mirrored, however imperfectly, in a work of popular fiction from another world, another time. It was a truth so outlandish, so existentially terrifying, it was almost impossible to fully grasp.

It was Michiru, her gentle voice trembling but surprisingly firm, who finally voiced the question that hung heavy and unspoken in the damp, smoky air. “So, Arthur-san… if our lives here are… were… a story in your world… does that mean we are not truly real? That our pain… our choices… that they don’t truly matter in the grand scheme of things?”

Arthur looked at her, his heart aching at her innocent, profound, and utterly heartbreaking question. “No, Michiru-san,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite name – a fierce protectiveness, a profound empathy. “No. Absolutely not. What happens here, what you feel, what you choose to do every single day… it is absolutely, terrifyingly, undeniably real. Perhaps, in many ways, it is even more real than anything I ever experienced in my own, mundane world. The story… it was just a flawed, incomplete window, a distorted mirror reflecting a sliver of your reality. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t negate your suffering, or your courage, or your capacity for love and sacrifice.”

He looked around at their stunned, searching faces, lit by the flickering, unreliable firelight. He had laid himself bare, revealed his most unbelievable, his most vulnerable, his most insane truth. He felt strangely light, as if a tremendous, crushing burden had finally been lifted from his shoulders, but also terrified of their judgment, their potential rejection, their understandable disbelief.

It was Nana, surprisingly, who broke the heavy tension. She let out a long, shuddering breath, then, a small, hysterical, almost broken laugh escaped her lips, a sound utterly devoid of mirth. “A comic book…” she whispered, shaking her head in stunned, almost numb disbelief. “All this… all this horror… all this blood… because of a damned comic book character who just happens to look like me…” She looked directly at Arthur, and for the very first time since he had met her, he saw not anger, not betrayal, not even suspicion, but a flicker of something akin to a weary, horrified, almost surreal camaraderie. “Well, Ainsworth-san,” she said, her voice raw, cracked, almost unrecognizable. “It seems your life is, if anything, even stranger, even more unbelievable, than ours.”

Kyouya Onodera nodded slowly, his gaze distant, contemplative. “Indeed. This revelation… it re-contextualizes everything. Your past actions, your warnings… your apparent foreknowledge.” He paused, his sharp eyes meeting Arthur’s. “It also suggests that if such a narrative existed, then perhaps our struggles, our very existence, have some form of… pre-ordained pattern, even if you, personally, no longer have access to its specific details. Or, perhaps, and this is the more pertinent consideration, it offers us the definitive chance to consciously, deliberately break from it. To write our own ending.”

The future, which had always been a terrifying, oppressive unknown for Arthur despite his supposed “Talent,” now felt even more vast, more unpredictable, but also, strangely, more laden with a desperate, shared, and almost defiant agency. They were no longer just characters in a half-remembered story he carried within him like a curse. They were survivors, together, facing a monstrous, common enemy, armed now with not just their varied Talents and their hard-won courage, but with the most bizarre, the most unbelievable, the most world-shattering truth imaginable. Where they went from here, what they chose to do with this impossible knowledge, was now, truly, terrifyingly, and perhaps even liberatingly, up to them.

“Most of it,” Arthur admitted, his gaze dropping to the cave floor. He couldn’t meet Kyouya’s piercing stare. “My memories of it are… fragmented. Incomplete. Like trying to recall a dream years later. I remembered key events, character traits, some of the deaths. Enough to make those ‘predictions.’ Enough to try and… interfere, sometimes successfully, often not.” He thought of the sheer, unmitigated unreality of it all, more like some bizarre, avant-garde play one might see in a small festival theatre back in Sussex, something designed to shock and confuse, than any lived experience.

“So you knew,” Nana’s voice was stronger now, laced with a dawning, terrible anger, a profound sense of betrayal. “You knew what I was. What I would do. You knew about… about Michiru?” Her gaze flicked towards the fluffy-haired girl, who was now looking at Arthur with wide, wounded eyes.

“I knew… some of it,” Arthur said wretchedly. “I knew Michiru was… important. I knew she had a powerful healing Talent. I remembered… I remembered her dying to save you, Nana-san, in the story. That’s why I tried so desperately to stop her at the docks.” He looked at Michiru. “And later, why I hoped… her body being warm, it matched some obscure detail I half-recalled about how truly powerful healing Talents might interact with death in your world, according to the lore of that story.”

Michiru’s eyes filled with tears. “So… my life… Nana-chan’s life… it was all… written down somewhere?” she whispered, her voice trembling.

“In my world, yes,” Arthur confirmed, his own voice hoarse with a mixture of guilt and a strange, weary resignation. “A fiction. Here… here it’s your reality. Our reality now, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you stop more of it?” Kyouya’s question was sharp, cutting. “If you possessed such… comprehensive foreknowledge, why allow so many to die? Why not expose Nana from the outset?”

Arthur finally looked up, meeting Kyouya’s accusatory gaze. “Do you think I didn’t want to?” he retorted, a flash of his old, tired frustration surfacing. “My memory was imperfect, like I said. I often only remembered crucial details moments before they were due to happen, if at all. And what if I had tried to change things too drastically? The story I remembered was horrific, yes, but what if my interference, my blundering attempts to play God based on a half-recalled comic book, made things even worse? Created new, unforeseen tragedies? And frankly, Kyouya-san, I was terrified. I was alone, in a foreign land, in a body that wasn’t mine, surrounded by people with superhuman abilities, one of whom was a trained assassin systematically killing everyone around me. My primary concern, I’ll admit it, was often my own survival, and trying to make sense of an impossible situation.”

He turned to Nana, whose face was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions – anger, betrayal, confusion, but also, Arthur thought he saw, a flicker of something else, something akin to a strange, twisted validation. If her life, her actions, had been “scripted” in some other dimension, did that lessen her own culpability? Did it make Tsuruoka’s manipulation even more monstrous?

“And what,” Jin Tachibana finally spoke, his voice still calm, still enigmatic, though his eyes held a new, sharp alertness, “does this… ‘story’… say happens next? Now that we have escaped this camp? Now that your ‘Talent,’ your foreknowledge of our specific immediate actions, is supposedly… depleted?”

Arthur shook his head. “That’s the problem. The story I remember… it focused primarily on Nana’s time on the island during that first year. It detailed many of her… assignments. It touched upon Kyouya’s investigation, Michiru’s sacrifice and return, the conflict with Rentaro. After that, my knowledge becomes… patchy. Vague. I remember broader strokes about Tsuruoka, about the Committee, about the ‘Enemies of Humanity,’ about a growing societal fear of Talents leading to… to situations like this internment camp.” He gestured around the damp cave. “But specific events? Timelines? Who lives, who dies from this point on? I have no idea. The narrative, for me, largely ended with the first year’s major events, or became too divergent from what I was experiencing once I started interfering. From the moment Michiru first returned, from Nana’s breakdown at the cliff, things here have already been… different, diverging significantly from what I dimly recalled.”

He paused, then added a crucial detail, his gaze shifting, almost reluctantly, towards Nana Hiiragi, who was watching him with a disturbing, unreadable intensity. “There’s something else about this… this ‘story’ you should know. It’s… or rather, it was… ongoing. Or at least, it was still being written, still being released, just before I… before I arrived here. I never read or saw the absolute end of it, because it hadn't been created yet in my time.”

He saw a flicker of something – hope? Dread? – in Nana’s eyes. “And Nana-san,” Arthur continued, choosing his words very carefully, the Japanese feeling heavy and inadequate for what he was trying to convey, “in the version of the story I knew, your character… she begins to change. Profoundly. After certain events, after certain realizations about Tsuruoka and the Committee… she starts… she starts trying to save Talents, not eliminate them.”

Nana’s breath hitched, an almost inaudible gasp. Kyouya’s head tilted slightly, his analytical gaze sharpening further.

“In fact,” Arthur pressed on, remembering the dark, vengeful turn the fictional Nana had taken, “the Nana in the manga… she wants nothing more than to, well…” He hesitated, searching for a way to translate a rather brutal English idiom. He pictured, for a fleeting, absurd moment, the old, battered woodchipper his neighbour in Crawley, old Mr. Henderson, used with noisy relish on his garden waste every autumn. “She wants to ram Tsuruoka into a… a proverbial woodchipper.” He made a crude, forceful pushing and grinding motion with his hands, then quickly dropped them, flushing slightly at the inadequacy of the gesture. “She wants to see him utterly, completely destroyed. And she’d undoubtedly go through every last member of The Committee to do so, to make them all pay for what they did to her, to everyone.”

He looked around at their stunned faces. “As for anyone else in the story… Kyouya-san, Michiru-san, Jin-san… what their ultimate fates were according to that unfinished narrative… I genuinely don’t know. My memory focuses mostly on… on Nana’s arc, as she was the titular character.”

A new, even heavier silence descended upon the cave, thick with the implications of this latest, astonishing revelation. The idea that Nana Hiiragi, their island’s most feared and prolific killer, was “destined” in some other-worldly fiction to become a savior, a destroyer of the very system that had created her, was almost too much to comprehend.

It was Michiru, her gentle voice trembling but firm, who finally voiced the question that hung heavy and unspoken in the damp, smoky air. “So, Arthur-san… if our lives here are… were… a story in your world… does that mean we are not truly real? That our pain… our choices… that they don’t truly matter in the grand scheme of things?”

Arthur looked at her, his heart aching at her innocent, profound, and utterly heartbreaking question. “No, Michiru-san,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite name – a fierce protectiveness, a profound empathy. “No. Absolutely not. What happens here, what you feel, what you choose to do every single day… it is absolutely, terrifyingly, undeniably real. Perhaps, in many ways, it is even more real than anything I ever experienced in my own, mundane world. The story… it was just a flawed, incomplete window, a distorted mirror reflecting a sliver of your reality. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t negate your suffering, or your courage, or your capacity for love and sacrifice.”

He looked around at their stunned, searching faces, lit by the flickering, unreliable firelight. He had laid himself bare, revealed his most unbelievable, his most vulnerable, his most insane truth. He felt strangely light, as if a tremendous, crushing burden had finally been lifted from his shoulders, but also terrified of their judgment, their potential rejection, their understandable disbelief.

It was Nana, surprisingly, who broke the heavy tension. She let out a long, shuddering breath, then, a small, hysterical, almost broken laugh escaped her lips, a sound utterly devoid of mirth. “A comic book…” she whispered, shaking her head in stunned, almost numb disbelief. “All this… all this horror… all this blood… because of a damned comic book character who just happens to look like me… and who then, apparently, decides to go after Tsuruoka like a… a human woodchipper?” She looked directly at Arthur, and for the very first time since he had met her, he saw not anger, not betrayal, not even suspicion, but a flicker of something akin to a weary, horrified, almost surreal camaraderie. “Well, Ainsworth-san,” she said, her voice raw, cracked, almost unrecognizable. “It seems your life is, if anything, even stranger, even more unbelievable, than ours.”

Kyouya Onodera nodded slowly, his gaze distant, contemplative. “Indeed. This revelation… it re-contextualizes everything. Your past actions, your warnings… your apparent foreknowledge.” He paused, his sharp eyes meeting Arthur’s. “It also suggests that if such a narrative existed, then perhaps our struggles, our very existence, have some form of… pre-ordained pattern, even if you, personally, no longer have access to its specific details. Or, perhaps, and this is the more pertinent consideration,” his gaze flicked briefly towards Nana, then back to Arthur, “it offers us the definitive chance to consciously, deliberately break from it. Or, for some, to perhaps… embrace a different version of their scripted path.”

The future, which had always been a terrifying, oppressive unknown for Arthur despite his supposed “Talent,” now felt even more vast, more unpredictable, but also, strangely, more laden with a desperate, shared, and almost defiant agency. They were no longer just characters in a half-remembered story he carried within him like a curse. They were survivors, together, facing a monstrous, common enemy, armed now with not just their varied Talents and their hard-won courage, but with the most bizarre, the most unbelievable, the most world-shattering truth imaginable. Where they went from here, what they chose to do with this impossible knowledge, was now, truly, terrifyingly, and perhaps even liberatingly, up to them.

Heh

Chapter 8: A Head in the Classroom

Arthur managed to slip back into the hushed, pre-dawn stillness of the dormitory just as the faintest hint of grey was outlining the window frames. He looked like something dredged from a nightmare – his clothes were torn, caked with mud, and stained with darker, more ominous patches he refused to identify. His face was smudged with dirt, his hair matted with sweat and grime, and a wild, haunted, almost feral look burned in his eyes. He moved with the stiff, jerky movements of someone pushed far beyond their physical and emotional limits.

He quickly, furtively, bundled the obscene canvas satchel, with its horrifying, weighty contents, into the dark recesses at the bottom of his rickety wardrobe, beneath a pile of seldom-used spare blankets. Then, he made his way to the communal showers. He scrubbed himself raw under the steaming water, trying to wash away the physical filth and the clinging, fetid odour of the night’s gruesome ordeal, but the mental contamination, the profound sense of self-loathing and violation, felt indelible. His hands, when he eventually managed to stop their violent trembling, still felt slick with an imaginary residue.

He skipped breakfast, the mere thought of food threatening to bring up the meagre contents of his stomach. He spent the early part of the morning in a dissociated daze, sitting rigidly on the edge of his bed, the image of Shinji’s lifeless, accusing eyes and the horrifying, sickening thud of rock against decaying bone replaying in an endless, torturous loop in his mind. He had to do this. He had to see this terrible, self-appointed task through. There was no turning back now. The die was cast.

The opportunity he’d been dreading, yet grimly anticipating, came during a long, unstructured free period before lunch. Most of the students were in the classroom, the usual low hum of chatter, the rustle of textbook pages, and the occasional burst of laughter filling the air with a deceptive sense of normalcy. Mr. Saito was at his desk at the front, spectacles perched on the end of his nose, diligently grading papers. Yūka Somezaki was present, huddled at her usual isolated desk near the back, looking even more pale and drawn than usual. She kept darting nervous, frightened glances towards Arthur, her hands twisting restlessly in her lap. She clearly hadn’t slept well after his ominous “warning” the previous day.

Arthur took a deep, steadying breath, the air feeling thick and heavy in his lungs. He retrieved the heavy canvas satchel from his room, its grim weight a palpable reminder of his night’s work. He walked to the front of the classroom, the satchel held carefully in front of him. The low hum of chatter gradually died down as students noticed him, their expressions shifting from indifference to curiosity, then to a dawning unease. He looked tired, dishevelled, and profoundly grim – a stark, unsettling contrast to his usual awkward, almost invisible demeanour. He placed his phone on a nearby empty desk, its screen lighting up.

“Yesterday,” his translated voice began, the synthesized Japanese tones cutting cleanly through the sudden, expectant silence, “I mentioned my growing concerns about the activities of the ‘Enemies of Humanity’ and their potential operations on the north side of this island. Last night, I took it upon myself to investigate those concerns further.”

He paused, letting the tension build, his gaze sweeping slowly across the room, taking in the rows of young, now apprehensive faces. He looked particularly tired, his eyes bloodshot, his posture radiating a bone-deep weariness that was entirely genuine.

“The encounter was… more harrowing than I could have possibly imagined,” he continued, his voice via the phone carefully measured, almost flat, which only served to heighten the underlying menace. “They are more dangerous, more depraved, than any of us can truly comprehend. It seems they may have found a new, terrifying weapon… or perhaps, a new, unholy method for creating their soldiers.” He let his gaze linger for a charged moment on Yūka Somezaki, whose eyes were now wide with a dawning, visceral horror. She looked like a trapped animal. “They may be… reanimating the dead. Or perhaps… the dead are their new weapon.”

A collective, sharp intake of breath, a series of stifled gasps, went through the classroom. Horrified whispers erupted, quickly shushed by the sheer gravity of his pronouncement. Mr. Saito looked up sharply from his papers, his expression morphing from mild irritation at the interruption to genuine alarm.

Arthur slowly began to walk down the central aisle between the rows of desks, the canvas satchel held carefully, almost reverently, in front of him. Students leaned away instinctively as he passed, a mixture of fear and morbid curiosity on their faces. He could feel Nana Hiiragi’s sharp, intensely analytical gaze on him, a silent, probing question in her eyes. Kyouya Onodera’s stare was equally intense, unblinking, his usual impassivity overlaid with a flicker of something that might have been cold, scientific interest. Arthur stopped when he reached Yūka Somezaki’s desk.

Her face was chalk-white, devoid of all colour, her breath coming in shallow, rapid, audible gasps. She looked like she was about to bolt, her eyes darting wildly between Arthur, the ominous bag, and the distant, unreachable sanctuary of the classroom door.

“I brought back… evidence,” Arthur’s phone announced into the suddenly tomb-like, suffocating silence of the room. With a deliberate, almost ceremonial movement, he lifted the heavy, cloth-covered satchel and placed it directly onto the polished surface of Yūka’s desk. The top of the bag was loosely tied with a drawstring, but a horrifyingly familiar, vaguely spherical shape, still partially obscured by the stained canvas, was sickeningly evident. A hint of dark, matted hair. The pale, obscene curve of a decaying forehead. The unmistakable, ghastly outline of a human head.

Yūka Somezaki stared at the bag, her eyes fixed, unblinking, on the dreadful shape within. A strangled, gurgling whimper escaped her lips. Her body began to tremble violently. Then, she let out a raw, piercing, animalistic scream that seemed to tear through the very fabric of the room, a sound of pure, unadulterated terror and shattered sanity. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she slumped sideways, fainting dead away, her chair crashing to the floor with a deafening clatter.

The classroom exploded into utter chaos. Students shrieked, some scrambling back from their desks in blind panic, knocking over more chairs, their faces contorted in horror and disbelief. Mr. Saito rushed forward, his own face a mask of horrified disbelief and dawning anger. “Tanaka-kun! What is the meaning of this outrage? What have you done?!” he babbled, his voice cracking.

Kyouya Onodera was on his feet, not joining the general panic, but moving with a grim, purposeful stride towards Yūka’s desk, his eyes narrowed, fixed on the dreadful bag and its horrifying contents. Nana Hiiragi, however, remained seated, a preternatural calm amidst the pandemonium. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her pen, her gaze flitting with sharp, analytical intensity between the bag, the unconscious Yūka, and Arthur himself. A chillingly thoughtful, almost appraising expression settled on her face. Arthur had just thrown a live, decapitated grenade into her carefully managed hunting ground, and she was trying to understand the trajectory, the motive, the potential fallout.

The immediate aftermath was a blur of hysterical shouting, terrified crying, and Mr. Saito’s increasingly desperate, high-pitched attempts to restore some semblance of order. The dreadful bag and its horrifying contents were quickly, and with much trepidation, removed by a shaken, pale-faced Mr. Saito himself, who then had Yūka carried off to the school infirmary by two equally terrified older students. Arthur found himself being sternly interrogated by a visibly furious Mr. Saito and another grim-faced teacher in the corridor, his phone struggling to keep up with the barrage of angry questions and accusations. He stuck rigidly to his story: he had found the reanimated corpse, a clear and undeniable sign of the ‘Enemies of Humanity’ at work on their very doorstep. He was merely presenting irrefutable proof of a dangerous new threat. He was met with profound disbelief, horrified condemnation for his barbaric methods, and stern warnings about vigilante actions, but no one could deny the sheer, visceral horror of what he had unveiled. The image of that bag, that shape, would be seared into their minds for a long time.

Later that day, after the initial chaos had subsided into a sort of stunned, fearful quiet, Nana Hiiragi, driven by a potent mixture of cold suspicion, intellectual curiosity, and the pressing need to understand this new, unpredictable variable that Arthur Tanaka represented, visited Yūka in her dormitory room. Yūka had been discharged from the infirmary but was clearly in a state of profound psychological distress, sedated but still babbling incoherently about Shinji, about monsters with decaying faces, about heads in bags.

Nana, seeing an opportunity to probe Yūka’s shattered psyche and perhaps confirm her own suspicions about the girl’s true Talent, began her subtle, psychological torment. "The dead are restless, aren’t they, Somezaki-san," Nana might have said, her voice a soft, sympathetic, almost hypnotic coo, as she sat beside Yūka’s bed. "They whisper things to me sometimes, you know? Especially around those who are… close to them. They say… they say Shinji is lonely. They say you should join him. They even whisper… that you should kill me before I tell everyone your dark secrets."

This, Arthur surmised from his anime knowledge, was the point at which Nana would have feigned terror at her own “revelations,” fleeing dramatically into the nearby woods, deliberately goading a terrified and now highly suggestible Yūka into sending her reanimated servitors (likely lesser zombies she’d created from small animals or perhaps even older, forgotten human remains from the island’s lightless past) after her. Nana would have then easily evaded them, using the orchestrated chase to confirm Yūka’s necromantic Talent beyond any doubt. She would have then confronted the distraught Yūka, expecting to force a full confession about the arson that had killed the real Shinji, before delivering her own fatal, poisoned strike.

But things didn’t go exactly as Nana might have planned, or as Arthur had recalled from the source material. Arthur’s brutal, shockingly public display with Shinji’s severed head had already done irreparable damage to Yūka’s carefully constructed delusions. The foundation of her morbid obsession had been shattered. When Nana confronted her, after the feigned flight and the easily evaded pursuit of a few pathetic, shambling creatures, Yūka was already broken, a hollow shell of her former self. She confessed to the fire, yes, her words tumbling out in a torrent of guilt, self-loathing, and raw terror, but her confession was interspersed with horrified babbling about Shinji’s true, decaying face, the unimaginable horror in that canvas bag, the monstrousness of it all. She wasn't just confessing a crime; she was reliving a profound, sanity-shattering trauma.

Nana, poised to strike, her poisoned needle glinting faintly in the dim light of the dorm room, hesitated. Yūka was a wreck, utterly defeated, her spirit seemingly crushed beyond repair. There was no fight left in her, no defiance, only a raw, pathetic, abject misery. Killing her now felt… empty. Almost unsporting. This wasn’t the calculated elimination of a dangerous, hidden threat; it was like putting down a wounded, whimpering, already dying animal. Perhaps Tsuruoka wouldn’t even count this as a proper, satisfying kill, not with the target already so mentally and emotionally destroyed by another student’s grotesque actions. Nana, for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, reasons that felt uncomfortably like a nascent, unwelcome flicker of pity or perhaps even a dawning, unsettling doubt about her own mission, slowly lowered her hand. She left Yūka Somezaki to her madness, a broken toy she no longer had any interest in.

Later that night, alone in her room, tormented by the fractured images of Arthur’s terrible evidence and Nana’s insidious whispers, Yūka Somezaki, in a final, desperate act of denial or a desperate plea for reassurance, tried one last time to summon Shinji. But the image Arthur had so brutally seared into her mind – the decaying, unrecognizable horror in that bag, the vacant eyes, the lolling jaw – had irrevocably tainted her Talent, her connection to her morbid fantasy. When Shinji’s ghostly form flickered into existence before her, it was no longer the romanticised, beloved boyfriend of her carefully nurtured delusions. It was a leering, putrescent corpse, its eyes vacant pits of horror, its flesh sloughing from its bones, its silent scream an echo of her own shattered sanity. She saw, for the first, horrifyingly clear time, what she had truly been embracing, what she had truly become.

The disgust, the self-loathing, the sheer, unadulterated terror, were overwhelming. With a choked, animalistic sob, Yūka screamed at the horrifying apparition, revoking the necromantic energies with a violence that shook her to her core, letting Shinji’s ghastly form dissolve into nothingness for the final, absolute time. She collapsed onto the cold floor, weeping, her body wracked with convulsions, and vowed, with every fibre of her broken being, never again to touch the cursed, defiling power of necromancy.

Arthur, unaware of the specific details of Nana’s subsequent interaction with Yūka, only knew that Yūka Somezaki remained alive, albeit a profoundly changed, withdrawn, and terrified shell of her former self. He had, through a horrifying, morally grey, and deeply traumatizing act, indirectly saved a life from Nana Hiiragi’s list. The cost to his own psyche, however, was mounting with every passing day. He was no hero; he was just a desperate, frightened man playing an increasingly deadly game with pieces of his own sanity, in a world that seemed determined to strip him of every last shred of his former self. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that his actions had not gone unnoticed by the island's true predator.

Hej

Heh

Chapter 17: The Truth About Jin

The uneasy, unspoken truce that had formed between Arthur and Kyouya Onodera settled into the grim, unfolding routine of the second school year. Kyouya, armed with Arthur’s dire warnings about manufactured food shortages and impending internal conflict, became even more watchful, his movements more deliberate, his observations more acute. Arthur, for his part, continued his solitary, heartbreaking watch over Michiru Inukai’s still, unnervingly preserved form in her sealed-off dormitory room, a silent, daily ritual that did little to soothe his frayed nerves but provided a strange, painful focal point for his grief and his stubborn, almost defiant hope.

The long, isolated weeks of the inter-term break, however, had afforded him ample, unwelcome time for reflection, for sifting through the chaotic, fragmented memories of the anime that served as his cursed, unreliable roadmap through this deadly reality. He’d replayed scenes in his mind, pieced together snatches of dialogue, connected half-forgotten character arcs. One name, one enigmatic face, had begun to trouble him more insistently during those lonely vigils: Jin Tachibana. The aloof, strikingly white-haired student who had arrived later in the previous year, the one whose presence often felt… dissonant, out of sync with the other students, his pronouncements occasionally too insightful, his detachment too profound. There was a piece of the intricate, horrifying puzzle missing, a vital connection he hadn’t quite made.

Then, late one night, as he sat by Michiru’s bedside, the silence of the deserted school pressing in on him, it had clicked. A chilling cascade of forgotten details from the anime resurfaced from the depths of his recall – a complex, tragic backstory involving Jin, another student, a past conflict, and a hidden identity. It was a deeply personal revelation, one that directly, devastatingly, concerned Kyouya Onodera.

For weeks into the new term, Arthur wrestled with the knowledge, the weight of it a heavy burden. Should he tell Kyouya? Such a truth could shatter him, derail his relentless quest for his missing sister, Rin. Or, perhaps, it could provide him with a new, terrible focus. Their wary understanding was still fragile; this could destroy it, or solidify it in ways Arthur couldn’t predict. But as the food supplies visibly dwindled, as Arthur’s grim forecast began to manifest with chilling accuracy, and as Kyouya’s quiet respect for Arthur’s unwelcome prescience grew, Arthur decided he couldn’t withhold it any longer. Kyouya deserved to know, whatever the cost.

He sought out Kyouya a few weeks into the new term, finding him, as he often did, in a quiet, secluded corner of the school library, surrounded by stacks of arcane-looking texts. The initial whispers of dwindling food supplies in the canteen, just as Arthur had “predicted” to him, were now becoming anxious murmurs throughout the student body, adding a new, sharp layer of tension to the already oppressive school atmosphere.

“Onodera,” Arthur began, his phone held ready, his expression grim. He didn’t bother with pleasantries; their interactions were rarely burdened by them. “There’s something else. Something more… personal. It concerns… your sister, Rin.”

Kyouya looked up from the ancient, leather-bound volume he was studying, his pale eyes instantly sharpening, losing their distant, scholarly focus. His sister. Rin was his driving motivation, the unwavering, singular reason he endured the horrors of this island, the burning core of his relentless search for answers. Any mention of her, however oblique, was guaranteed to command his absolute, undivided attention.

“What about her?” Kyouya’s voice was low, dangerously controlled, but with an unmistakable undercurrent of coiled intensity. He placed his book down carefully, his full attention now fixed on Arthur.

Arthur took a deep, steadying breath. This was it. There was no easy way to deliver such news. “Your sister, Rin…” he began, his phone translating his carefully chosen, hesitant English words into precise, unpitying Japanese. “I believe she is here, Onodera. On this island. But not… not as you would expect her to be.” He paused, letting the synthesized words hang in the heavy silence of the library alcove. “She’s here, I believe, as Jin Tachibana.”

Kyouya’s stoic, almost carved expression finally, catastrophically, broke. A flicker of utter disbelief, then a dawning, rapidly escalating wave of horrified understanding, washed across his usually impassive features. He said nothing, his lips parting slightly as if to speak, then closing again. His knuckles were bone-white where he gripped the edge of the heavy wooden table.

Arthur pressed on, his own heart aching with a reluctant sympathy for the pain he was inflicting, laying out the grim theory his fragmented, cursed knowledge had pieced together. “The real Jin Tachibana… I believe he was a student here some years ago. There was a… a significant conflict on this island. A civil war, of sorts, between factions of students, quite possibly triggered by the kind of manufactured food shortages I warned you about. A previous iteration of the Committee’s cruel experiments in social pressure.” He watched Kyouya absorb this, his face pale as death, his eyes wide and haunted. “During that conflict, I believe the real Jin Tachibana was severely injured, perhaps critically, while trying to protect your sister, Rin. He might be hospitalized somewhere on the mainland now, brain-damaged beyond recovery… or he could be dead. My… glimpses… are unclear on his precise fate.”

He saw Kyouya swallow hard, his gaze dropping to the scarred surface of the table, his mind clearly reeling from the brutal implications of Arthur’s words. “Rin… your sister…” Arthur continued, his phone’s voice softening almost imperceptibly, though the words themselves remained sharp as glass. “She was deeply troubled, wasn’t she? You’ve mentioned her struggles. Prone to depression, perhaps even suicidal ideations? Burdened by a profound sense of guilt, especially if Jin, this other boy, was so grievously hurt, or even died, protecting her.” Arthur’s phone conveyed the gentle but firm assertion. “After that incident, perhaps needing an identity to shield herself, a way to survive in the aftermath of whatever horrors she witnessed, or perhaps even found and manipulated by the Committee who saw a broken, malleable asset… she took on Jin Tachibana’s name, his persona. The Jin Tachibana we see now, the one who walks these halls… I believe that is your sister, Rin, hiding in plain sight, perhaps even from herself.”

The silence in the library alcove was thick, suffocating, broken only by the distant, careless rustle of someone turning pages in another section. Kyouya stared at the table, his shoulders slumped, as if the weight of Arthur’s revelation was a physical burden pressing him down. His quest, his entire reason for being on this island, had just been twisted into a horrifying, unrecognizable shape.

“Why?” Kyouya finally managed to choke out, his voice barely a whisper, raw with a pain and confusion that cut Arthur to the core. “Why would she do that? Why not… why not come to me, if she was here?”

“Fear, perhaps,” Arthur’s phone translated softly. “Profound, overwhelming guilt. A belief that she was a burden, as you’ve sometimes feared she felt. Or, and this is just as likely, Onodera, manipulation. The Committee… Tsuruoka… they are masters of it. Perhaps they found her in her despair, offered her a deal, a way to disappear into a new identity, leveraging her trauma, her vulnerability. They are not above such monstrous tactics.” He paused, then added the most chilling possibility. “Rin might even have been… one of their assets for a time, before Nana Hiiragi. A predecessor, broken by her experiences, then repurposed by Tsuruoka. It would fit their pattern.”

Kyouya Onodera slowly raised his head. The raw pain was still evident in his eyes, but beneath it, a new, colder, almost terrifying resolve was beginning to solidify. The news was clearly devastating, a seismic shock to the foundations of his world, but it also seemed to galvanize him, to forge his grief and confusion into a sharper, more focused weapon. If Rin was here, if she was truly Jin Tachibana, then his quest had a new, terrible, and immediate focus. The island’s secrets, he now understood, were not just abstract horrors; they were deeply, terrifyingly personal.

“This ‘Talent’ of yours, Tanaka,” Kyouya said at last, his voice regaining some of its usual hard, steady cadence, though an undercurrent of profound turmoil still resonated within it. “It reveals… exceptionally inconvenient, and often painful, truths.”

“It often feels more like an inescapable curse, Onodera,” Arthur’s phone replied, the weariness in his own English tone undoubtedly lost in translation. “But this is what I have seen. This is what I believe, with a fair degree of certainty, to be the truth of the matter.”

Kyouya nodded slowly, his gaze distant, already processing, analyzing, re-evaluating everything he thought he knew. “If Rin is Jin…” he murmured, almost to himself. “…then everything changes.” He stood up abruptly, the ancient book he had been reading forgotten on the table. “Thank you, Tanaka,” he said, his voice surprisingly formal. “You have given me… a great deal to consider. And to act upon.”

He turned and walked away, his strides long and purposeful, leaving Arthur alone in the quiet, shadowed alcove. Arthur watched him go, a sense of grim satisfaction mingling with a profound unease. He had armed Kyouya Onodera with a terrible, transformative truth. Whether it would ultimately help him, or lead him to further despair, Arthur couldn’t say. But Kyouya now possessed a crucial, agonizingly personal piece of the island’s dark puzzle. And their strange, unspoken, almost unwilling alliance, built upon a shared foundation of unwelcome knowledge and the ever-present shadow of the island’s darkness, had undeniably, irrevocably, deepened. The game, Arthur knew, was evolving once more, and the stakes, already impossibly high, were rising for everyone involved.

Nana Hiiragi

Of course the hate for her is well deserved.

First off, blaming "brainwashing" lets her off the hook far too easily. Patty Hearst tried the same trick in the 1970's and it didn't exactly work out well for her. Ironically, Patty spent more time in prisoner for her bank robberies than Nana does for her 10+ murders, which in itself is unfair - Nana gets away with far too much because she's a girl, instead of in spite of it.

Yes, she would be hated just as much if Nana was male (probably more so).

It should be noted that all Nana's murders were premeditated, on her own cognisance and with malice. Just because she was told to do so, doesn't mean she had to.

In addition to that, just because she may not have wanted to do kill anyone, she was certainly happy to do so (smiling when thinking about killing Mirichu as well as the "won't be shy in killing you" part). Nana is a person who would rather murder someone than think of any sort of alternative (as is the case later on).

Futher more, stating that she's a "child soldier" carries no weight - she's killing civilians, which if she was a soldier makes her actions even more odious.

The fact that people try to exonerate Nana because she was "mind controlled" doesn't hold much water considering she was fully aware of what she was doing; didn't need to; didn't bother querying anything and was fully cognisant during her pre-meditated murders; and she quite happily carried another one out, with no doubt more to come.

In addition, there is no reason why she couldn't have asked questions or even did her own reason about Talents and so forth.

I wasn't surprised that the anime didn't get a second season (if it wasn't just for boosting manga sales) because Nana is so unrelatable, unrelatable and pretty much evil personified. Even later on, she's totally dislikable, obnoxious character.

Considering she's supposed to be intelligent, you would have thought, at the very least, queries the morality, if not the legality and ethics of killing schoolchildren (let alone those she killed before she arrived at the island). She's fully aware of what she's doing, so it's all on her own head. She certainly deserves to be punished far longer than three years (that ends up around 3 months for every kid).

I wouldn't be surprised if Nana Hiiragi does enjoy killing people - she is always smiling happily when thinking about killing her victims.

Whilst she may say that she doesn't want to kill any more, later on - it certainly doesn't stop her (no doubt it would be the first thing she thinks of to solve problems, instead of anything else).

Hopefully, she won't have a happy ending (preferably meet a nasty end - with her own poison needs would be nicely ironic). Whilst she may have "changed" for dubious reasons she will have to end up killing people again at some point. Even though she's changed, she's still an insufferable, nasty little bitch. I've got very little sympathy for her, especially as she was sadistic killing everyone.

And yes, killing Nano led to more people suffering - all because of Nana (no idea why Nano should forgive her - obviously he forgot how Nana taunted him before he fell, although I do hear he did beat the crap out of her as well).

Hopefully she will pay some sort of price for her actions.

Whist Nanao killed more people than Nana, it should be noted that Nana was the cause. It was nice of him really to leave Nana alone, considering she had no compulsion about killing Nanao - he certainly would have had a good reason to seek revenge on her.

In addition, for those who subscribe to those who view Nana as a child soldier (which is dubious to say the least), there is still precedent for requesting reparations and the same for prosecuting child soldiers too (DOMINIC ONGWEN).

.

Chapter 33: The Unravelling of Reality

The crackling fire in the damp cave cast long, dancing shadows on the weary faces of the assembled escapees. Nana Hiiragi, her expression a mixture of fierce determination and a newfound, fragile openness, was sketching a rough map of the local terrain based on Jin’s latest reconnaissance. Kyouya Onodera, his usual stoicism a comforting presence, was methodically sharpening a scavenged piece of metal into a makeshift blade. Michiru Inukai, her gentle aura a small beacon of warmth in the grim surroundings, was quietly tending to a minor cut on the arm of one of the younger children they had managed to rescue from the camp. Jin himself sat a little apart, observing them all with that unnervingly calm, almost prescient gaze of his. They were a battered, disparate group, united by shared trauma and a desperate, uncertain hope.

Arthur Ainsworth watched them for a long moment, the weight of his secrets, his impossible knowledge, pressing down on him with an almost physical force. He had told them his “Talent” was depleted, a necessary first step. But now, after the shared ordeal of the escape, after witnessing their courage, their resilience, their willingness to trust each other in the face of overwhelming odds, he felt a profound, almost aching need for true openness, for complete, unvarnished honesty, whatever the consequences. This fragile alliance, this nascent resistance, could not be built on a foundation of lies, not his lies, at any rate. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the smoky air filling his lungs.

“Everyone,” he began, his voice a little louder than he intended, drawing their attention. He spoke in Japanese, his accent still noticeable, his grammar sometimes clumsy, but his fluency born of years of desperate necessity and now, a strange kind of acceptance. “There is something more I need to tell you. Something… fundamental.”

He saw Kyouya’s eyes narrow slightly, Nana pause in her map-making, Michiru look up with gentle concern. Jin’s expression remained unreadable.

“In the spirit of… of complete honesty, now that we are in this together,” Arthur continued, his heart pounding a nervous tattoo against his ribs, “I must confess something. First and foremost… I never actually possessed any Talent. Not in the way you understand it. The ‘Chrono-Empathic Glimpse,’ the future prediction… it was all a fabrication. A lie I concocted on my first day on the island out of sheer terror and a desperate need to survive.”

A ripple of surprise went through the small group. Michiru looked confused. Nana’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, a flicker of reassessment, perhaps even a dawning understanding of some of his past, inexplicable actions, crossing her face. Kyouya merely nodded slowly, as if confirming a long-held, private suspicion.

“I have no doubt,” Arthur pressed on, encouraged by their mostly silent, attentive reception, “that many of you, especially Kyouya-san, perhaps even Nana-san, suspected as much. My ‘predictions’ were often… conveniently vague, or unsettlingly specific in ways that defied conventional precognition.” He met their gazes, one by one. “Therefore, you’ll all undoubtedly be wondering how I was so frequently, so disturbingly accurate with those predictions. After all, guessing such specific events, such personal futures, so often… that would be statistically, almost astronomically, impossible.”

He paused, gathering his courage for the next, far more difficult part. The air in the cave felt thick with unspoken questions. “Well,” he said, a humorless, self-deprecating smile touching his lips, “this is where things get… considerably weirder. More than weird, in fact. Almost unbelievable. And to be frank, even I struggle to comprehend it most days. It sounds like something out of a cheap, sensationalist paperback I’d have scoffed at back in… well, back home, on a dreary, ordinary May evening, a lifetime ago.”

He took another deep breath. “The truth is… I’m not actually from this time period. Not your time period, anyway. To me, this era, your present… it is a future. A horrible, disastrous, almost unthinkable future.” He saw Michiru’s hand fly to her mouth, Nana’s eyes widen further in stunned disbelief. Kyouya’s expression remained intensely focused, analytical. “I’m actually from what you would all regard as the distant past. Well before the first, and certainly before the second, of the great Talent Wars that so catastrophically shaped your world.” The mention of "two Talent Wars" was a deliberate insertion, a piece of world history he knew, that they perhaps only half-remembered or had been taught a sanitized version of.

“How I got here, from my time to yours,” Arthur continued, his voice low, earnest, “I honestly, truly, do not know. I was in my kitchen, in Crawley – that’s a town in England – and then… I was on that ferry, in Kenji Tanaka’s body. One moment, marmalade and existential despair; the next, a Japanese school uniform and a one-way ticket to this island nightmare.” He shook his head. “My best guess is that either The Committee have access to some sort of rudimentary, perhaps unstable, time-traveling technology or experimental Talent they were testing… or, and this feels somehow more likely given the sheer, random improbability of it all, I was pulled here, torn from my own existence, by some incredibly powerful, unknown Talent for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.”

He saw the disbelief warring with a dawning, horrified curiosity on their faces. “The second, and perhaps more immediate, problem this presents for me,” he pressed on, needing to get it all out now that he had started, “is that I don’t know for certain whether this future I’ve found myself in is my own world’s future, a terrible timeline I am now trapped within… or if I’m in some kind of parallel universe, an alternate reality, or even, though it sounds absurd, another entirely different Earth-like planet that just happens to have a similar history up to a certain point.”

He looked at them, their faces illuminated by the flickering firelight, their expressions a mixture of shock, skepticism, and a reluctant, dawning consideration. “Now,” he said, his voice dropping even lower, his gaze intense, “now I get to the weirdest part. The part that explains everything, and yet, explains nothing at all.” He hesitated, the sheer, unbelievable audacity of what he was about to say almost choking him. “In my time, in my world… there was a popular Japanese anime television series, based on an even more popular manga comic book series. It was called ‘Munō na Nana’.” He pronounced the Japanese title carefully, watching their faces. “Talentless Nana.”

He saw Nana Hiiragi herself flinch, her eyes widening in startled, almost fearful recognition of her own name embedded in that bizarre, foreign title. Kyouya’s head tilted, a flicker of something sharp and analytical in his gaze.

Arthur leaned forward, his voice barely a whisper now, yet carrying an unbearable weight of impossible truth. “Can you all,” he asked, his gaze sweeping across their stunned, uncomprehending faces, “can you all perhaps begin to see where this is going?”

The fire crackled, spitting a shower of sparks into the heavy, charged silence of the cave. The only other sound was the distant, ceaseless roar of the waterfall, a sound that suddenly felt like the rushing, indifferent torrent of a reality that had just been irrevocably, terrifyingly, and perhaps liberatingly, undone.

Chapter 36: An Idea Forged in Unreality

The crackling fire cast flickering, uncertain light upon the stunned, contemplative faces of the survivors huddled in the damp chill of the cave. Arthur Ainsworth’s revelations – the impossible truth of his origin, the bizarre mirroring of their lives in a fictional narrative from his world – had settled over them, a heavy, almost suffocating blanket of existential shock. The questions had come, a barrage of disbelief, anger, sorrow, and dawning, horrified comprehension. He had answered them as honestly, as completely as his fragmented memory and his own profound bewilderment allowed. Now, an exhausted, uneasy silence held sway, broken only by the drip of water from the cave ceiling and the distant, ceaseless roar of the waterfall. They were all looking at him, waiting. He had mentioned an idea, before the floodgates of their questions had opened.

Arthur looked from one face to another – Kyouya’s sharp, analytical gaze, now tinged with a new, almost grudging respect; Michiru’s gentle, compassionate eyes, still wide with a mixture of awe and sorrow; Jin’s unreadable, placid mask, which perhaps concealed a universe of calculation; and Nana’s, her expression raw, vulnerable, yet with a new, hard glint of something that might have been a terrible, nascent resolve. He thought of all they had endured, all the horrors Tsuruoka and the Committee had inflicted upon them, all the senseless death and suffering. His own small, English life, with its mundane worries about council tax and the leaky guttering back in Crawley, felt like a half-forgotten dream from another planet, another eon. This, right here, this cave, these faces, this desperate struggle – this was his reality now. And these people, these… characters made real… they deserved more than the grim narrative he remembered.

“Yes,” he said, his voice quiet but carrying a surprising conviction in the stillness, almost as if speaking to unseen arbiters of fate as much as to them. He managed a small, tired smile. “Yes, I truly would like you all to write a happy ending for yourselves. You do all, more than anyone I have ever known, truly deserve it.” It was a strange thing to say, he knew, echoing the user's own prompt to him as an AI, a bizarre breaking of a fourth wall that only he was truly aware of. It felt like something one might say when discussing the merits of a play seen in a small theatre, perhaps somewhere on the festival circuit down near the coast, not to people whose very lives were at stake. Yet, the sentiment was utterly, profoundly sincere.

He then turned, his gaze finding Nana Hiiragi’s. She looked back at him, her violet eyes wary, still shadowed with the pain of his revelations and the memory of her own brutal unmasking. He knew, before he could even speak of his idea, there was something else that needed to be said, a personal reckoning that was long overdue.

“Hiiragi-san… Nana,” he began, his voice softer now, the Japanese words chosen with care, though the sentiment was pure, unadulterated Arthur Ainsworth. “I do have one apology I must make before I mention the idea I have. An apology specifically to you.”

Nana’s eyes widened slightly, a flicker of surprise, perhaps suspicion, in their depths. The others watched, silent, intrigued.

“Back in the alleyway,” Arthur continued, the memory of that cold, rainy night, his own harsh, unforgiving words, vivid in his mind, “all those months ago… after you had escaped from Tsuruoka’s… ‘lesson’.” He saw her flinch almost imperceptibly at the euphemism. “What I said to you then… the things I revealed about your parents, about Tsuruoka’s manipulations… while the information itself was true, as far as my knowledge of the ‘story’ went, the way I delivered it… my attitude towards you…” He shook his head, a deep shame washing over him. “I had let my knowledge of what you had done on the island, what the ‘Nana’ in the story had done, control my feelings towards you, the person standing before me, far too much. Especially then, when you were so clearly… broken, desperate.”

He took a breath, forcing himself to meet her gaze. “What I said to you then, my tone, my accusations… it was unnecessarily cruel, Hiiragi-san. No,” he corrected himself, the English word slipping out before he rephrased it in Japanese, “it was more than cruel. It was… indakuteki… vindictive. I was judging you, condemning you, based on a script I carried in my head, without truly seeing the manipulated, suffering individual before me. I saw only the monster I remembered from the fiction, and I acted monstrously in return.” He bowed his head slightly, a gesture of genuine remorse. “For that, for my cruelty, for my lack of compassion in that moment… I sincerely, deeply, apologize.”

The silence in the cave was absolute. Nana stared at him, her expression unreadable for a long moment. Arthur kept his head slightly bowed, awaiting her reaction, his own heart pounding. He had laid himself bare again, this time not with a grand, unbelievable truth about the nature of their reality, but with a simple, personal admission of his own flawed humanity, his own capacity for cruelty.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, Nana nodded. A single, slow inclination of her head. When she looked up, her eyes were glistening, but not with anger. It was something else, something softer, more vulnerable. “Thank you… Arthur-san,” she whispered, her voice barely audible above the crackling fire. The use of his true first name, without any prompting, was a quiet acknowledgment, perhaps even an acceptance. “I… I did many terrible things. I deserved… your anger.”

“Perhaps,” Arthur said quietly. “But no one deserves to have their pain used against them in that way. My knowledge… it should have led to more understanding, not less.”

Kyouya cleared his throat, breaking the fragile moment. “Your apology is noted, Ainsworth. Your capacity for… self-reflection… is unexpected.” There was no sarcasm in his voice, merely a statement of analytical observation. Michiru offered Arthur a small, watery smile of approval. Jin remained, as ever, a silent, watchful enigma.

Arthur felt a small measure of peace settle within him. It wasn’t absolution, not for him, perhaps not even for Nana. But it was a clearing of the air, a necessary step. He straightened up, feeling as though a small, personal weight had been lifted, allowing him to focus on the larger, more pressing burdens that still remained, the ones that threatened to crush them all. He thought of the sheer, unmitigated audacity of what he was about to propose – an unqualified, middle-aged Englishman, a former accounts clerk from Crawley, suggesting a plan to a group of fugitive teenagers with superhuman abilities that involved infiltrating a secret Japanese government facility for similarly gifted children, all to teach them the "truth" based on a half-remembered comic book and his own horrifying experiences. If someone had pitched that as a film idea back in England, even on a dreary, uninspired Tuesday afternoon in a sleepy town like Chichester, they’d have been politely, or perhaps not so politely, laughed out of the room. Yet here he was, in a damp cave in the Japanese wilderness, about to do just that. The sheer, surreal madness of his current existence was still, at times, utterly overwhelming.

“Right then,” he said, his voice a little stronger now, his gaze sweeping over their expectant, firelit faces. “My idea…” He paused, collecting his thoughts, trying to frame the sheer improbability of his plan in a way that sounded at least partially sane.

“Let’s be brutally honest with ourselves,” Arthur began, his Japanese measured, each word chosen with care. “It’s obvious, painfully so, that we, as we are now – a handful of fugitives with limited resources – can’t possibly hope to take on not just the established Japanese government, but by extension, its army, its security forces, and a large, increasingly hostile population of Talentless civilians who are being deliberately, systematically fed a diet of fear and misinformation.”

He saw nods of grim agreement from Kyouya and even Nana. Michiru looked anxious, but attentive.

“Therefore,” Arthur continued, “our primary battle isn’t a physical one, not yet. It’s a battle for hearts and minds. A battle against lies. We need to show the government’s propaganda for what it truly is: a calculated deception. We need to expose The Committee for the monstrous, manipulative entity it is. And, perhaps most painfully, but most crucially, we need to show other Talents, especially the younger ones, what their likely ultimate fate is under Tsuruoka’s regime – that horrifying transformation into those… ‘Enemies of Humanity’ – no matter how unpleasant that truth may be.” He saw Nana flinch slightly at the memory, her own experience in Tsuruoka’s facility no doubt still raw.

“But,” Arthur pressed on, a new note of urgency in his voice, “we also need to offer an alternative. We need to show that, with the right guidance, the right training, perhaps even a different understanding of their own abilities, Talents can be controlled, can be a force for good, or at least, not for inevitable monstrosity. We need to find a way, if one even exists, to hopefully stop that terrible fate, that transformation, that Tsuruoka seems so keen to either weaponize or present as an unavoidable horror. We need to give everyone – Talentless and Talented alike – a genuine reason to question the government’s narrative, to doubt The Committee’s authority.”

He leaned forward slightly, his gaze earnest. “We need to make it abundantly clear that Talents are, at their core, essentially the same as Talentless people. They have the same fears, the same hopes, the same desires for peace and security. They buy the same food, listen to the same music, laugh at the same stupid jokes.” A faint, sad smile touched his lips. “To that end, if we are to have any hope at all, we need enough people, a critical mass, willing to understand this, willing to help us bring down a corrupt government and its insidious support structure. We need to bring those who facilitate all these horrors, like Tsuruoka and his Committee cronies, to justice.”

He paused, letting his words sink in. “It’s a monumental task. Almost impossible. So, where do we even begin?” He looked around at their faces again. “To that end, I think one place to start, perhaps the most vulnerable yet potentially the most receptive, would be with school children. Specifically, with the students who are currently, or will soon be, funneled into the Committee’s island academies. We need to show them what The Committee truly has in store for them, show them the lies they are being fed, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll start to think for themselves, to want something different – something better than the future Tsuruoka is offering them.”

He took a deep breath, then laid out the core of his audacious, almost suicidal plan. “Therefore, I propose this: if a certain island school, the one we all know so well, is still running – and I have no doubt Tsuruoka would have restaffed it and filled it with a new batch of unsuspecting students by now – I believe I should return there.”

A stunned silence greeted his words. Michiru gasped. Nana’s eyes widened in disbelief, then narrowed in sharp concern. Kyouya simply stared at him, his expression unreadable. Jin, as always, remained a placid enigma.

“Return?” Nana finally managed, her voice incredulous. “Arthur-san, Tsuruoka wants you dead. You said so yourself. Going back there would be…”

“Extremely dangerous, yes, I’m acutely aware of that,” Arthur acknowledged, his voice grim. “But hear me out. I would return with a new identity, of course. Different appearance, if possible. Fake qualifications, certainly. The Committee’s bureaucracy, while efficient in its brutality, is likely still susceptible to well-crafted forgeries, especially for something as mundane as a new teaching position for a seemingly harmless, Talentless foreigner.” He almost snorted at the irony. “And once I’m there, once I’m inside… I start teaching. Not mathematics, or history, or whatever subject they might deem me qualified for. I start teaching… well, I start teaching the truth. Subtly at first, then more overtly as I identify potential allies, as I gauge the students’ receptiveness. I expose the lies, I plant the seeds of doubt, I try to give them the tools to think for themselves, to resist the indoctrination.”

He looked at them, his gaze steady, his heart pounding in his chest. “It’s a long shot. A horribly dangerous, probably insane long shot. But it’s a start. It’s an idea. And right now, frankly, it’s the only one I have that doesn’t involve us just… waiting in this cave for Tsuruoka’s agents to eventually find us and pick us off one by one.”

The fire crackled again, filling the sudden, heavy silence. Arthur had laid his desperate, improbable plan on the table. Now, he could only wait for their reaction.

Song about anime