I had to swear to keep it a secret before Kyoko would tell me anything.
"We... We were at the same Junior High. We were all on the table tennis team. Even in Junior High, we hung out together."
Kusatsu was one of us, but a year younger. She was team captain when we were third years, so we sort of stopped thinking of her that way.
"So, three months ago, Kusatsu called to say she had something good, and that everyone should hook up with her."
"It was a weird sort of drug."
"No, not uppers; I think it was something else. It was a sort of bluish, see-through liquid. You took a sniff of it, and it was like your head opened up, like you became transparent, like every corner of your body was washed clean."
"Glue? No... I don't know, but it didin't have that strong of a smell."
"Kusatsu didn't tell us much, but she said some pharmaceutical company had created it as a test product. Yeah, it was probably bullshit. But, hey, it was free, so we all tried it out."
"Right. She never charged us anything."
"She was never exactly a generous person, so I'm not sure why..."
"And a little while later, people from our group started running away."
"No, I don't know where they went! They didn't tell anyone. They just, you know, vanished. Yeah,
girls from other schools too."
"And then, Kusatsu vanished. By this point, the rest of us were starting to wonder if it had something to do with the drugs. We didn't know where she got it, but maybe it was something nobody was supposed to know about and they were taking us out. Then suddenly, one of us announced that she wasn't going to have anything to do with us anymore."
"This made us nervous. We had to know why."
"She said Kirima Nagi threatened her. Somehow, she had found out about the drugs, and she had told her to never touch them again."
"Not just the one, though. She hit every girl... In order. I was the last one."
"Started two weeks ago, right after she was suspended.
"That's why I said she had intentionally gotten herself suspended - so she would have a good reason for not coming to school, and so that she could move freely."
"No! I'm never touching drugs again!"
"Huh? No way! Why would I know Kirima Nagi? I've always avoided her up to now."
"Please, don't tell anyone, Suema! Keep it a secret! I probably should never have told you either. But I had to. I just had to! Keeping quiet was just too frightening... It was crushing me."
I held Kyoko, comforting her until she stopped crying. Then we killed some time in a booth at First Kitchen, so that her face could return to normal before I took her back home.
It was night by then, as I walked through the darkened streets, I thought things over.
Her fragmented story suggested that she had only seen a small part of what was really going on. I couldn't guess much from what she'd told me, but it sounded like she hadn't been one of the ringleaders of this group of ex-table tennis team players.
More like she did whatever the much less stable girls told her to; just a third wheel, hanging on to the cool kids.
She wasn't even a victim. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Nagi had said Kusatsu Akiko had been killed...
And she knew about my past.
But... How?
Who was she?
Should I tell the school... Or the police?
(But I promised Kyoko...)
If word got out that Kyoko had done drugs, that would be it for her - she'd be finished. It wouldn't end at suspension, either; she'd be expelled as an example to the other students. I didn't want to do that to her.
It was very dark outside.
The streetlight above me had clearly not been changed in years, and it was flickering madly.
"..."
I stopped walking.
I opened my bag under the unsteady light, and thanks to my bad habit of carrying far to much stuff around with me all of the time, I was able to get out the class directory. It listed not only phone numbers, but also addresses.
I looked up the address of the person three names before my own.
Somewhat surprisingly, Kirima Nagi, like me, lived close to school. I could walk there.
(Okay, let's do it!)
I snapped my bag closed and walked as fast as I could in that direction.
But why did I have to meet her?
Kyoko, who was actually a part of it, was running away as fast as she could. That was the more natural reaction. Anyone normal would do the same.
I was clearly a third party, and I had nothing to do with anything.
But I didn't like that.
Five years ago, things had all happened without me knowing about them. I only found out when everything was finished. My own will played no part in the matter.
If there was danger, I wanted to see it.
That's why I had chased after Boogiepop, even though there was clearly no such thing. It was all the same to me. I didn't care what it was... I just wanted to confront something.
(No more blissful ignorance for me.)
Kirima Nagi might really be a witch. I hoped she was.
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"...Uh?"
I was standing on the right street, but there were no apartment buildings, only houses.
I checked the addresses again and again, but I was clearly in the right place.
But I couldn't find any house with the name "Kirima" on the gate. Checking the directory again, I noticed that it had "Taniguchi" written in very small characters next to it. She must live there.
(...Must be that guardian with the different name.)
There was a house with "Taniguchi" on the gate, and the numbers seemed to match.
It was a really normal-looking home, a ready-built house like any other. A little on the wealthy side, but normally so.
Unable to connect it with Nagi's bizzare appearance during our earlier encounter, I hesitated, debating for a long time before I pushed the buzzer.
When I finally did, it made a half-hearted, ultra normal ding-dong sound.
"Who is it?" the Voice from the intercom said, surprising me.
It wasn't Nagi's voice, but rather that of a boy.
"Um, is, uh... Is Kirima-san...?" I stuttered, all flustered.
"You're Nagi's friend?" the Voice said quite cheerfully.
A moment later, the door swung open. The cheery boy stood in the doorway. He was taller than either Nagi or me, but younger; probably in Junior High. And that smile... It was friendly and warm.
"Come on it and wait. She should be back soon."
He led me to the guest room.
The inside was normal too.
There was even a set of little dools in the shap of the zodiac signs sitting on top of the cabinet.
"Here," the boy said.
"Uh, thanks."
"Gosh, I don't think I've ever met a friend of Nagi's before," the boy said airily.
"Y-you are...?" I asked.
"Her brother," he replied.
They looked nothing alike.
"Um, I'd heard Kirima-san lived alone, so..."
"Yeah, I got here about six months ago. I lived abroad with my parents until last spring, but I've got entrance tests for high school next year, so I thought that I ought to get used to Japan first."
"Your parents..."
Nagi had parents after all. But why was their name Taniguchi?
At this point, we heard a voice call out, "I'm home," from the entrance. It was Nagi.
"In here," her brother said as he stood up and went to meet her.
"You bought another girl home?" Nagi said.
Her brother laughed.
"This one's yours. She's been waiting for you."
I nearly yelped when Nagi came in.
She had changed into her school uniform, like she'd just come home from school.
"Oh, it's you," Nagi said quietly as I stood there speechless.
"Let's go upstairs."
Following her lead, we went upstairs to her bedroom.
The polar opposite of downstairs, her room was free of decoration; nothing but computers and books. One bed, two desks. One was for studying, apparently, since the surface was empty. The other desk was for her computer - or, should I say, computers. It was kind of hard to tell just how many she had.
There were multiple boxy computer towers and an assortment of other machines attached tot hem. She had three different monitors, all lined up next to each other. At first, I assumed two of them might've been televisions, but the screen savers were a dead giveaway. Worse, the pile of machinery spilled out into the floor, filling nearly half of the ten-mat room.
It felt less like a girl's bedroom and more like some mad hacker's secret lair. Much to my surprise, there were no signs of any black magic books at all.
All the books that lined Nagi's shelves were merely an assortment of reference books and difficult-looking harcover times. Still, her collection of computer software boxes looked to have her book collection beat.
Nagi pulled the chair out from the study desk, and offered it to me.
"Sit."
"Okay," I said, and I did.
"Surprised?" Nagi grinned.
"Hmm?"
"By Masaki. Everyone thinks I live alone."
"Um, yeah. I didn't know you had a brother."
"He's not my brother. We're not related." Nagi replied, shaking her head. "He's my mom's second husband's son from a previous marriage. He's a good kid, but a bit too good at manipulating me. Going to grow up to be a real Don. Sad."
"So, that's why his name's...?"
"Right, my mom's husband's name. I kept the old one."
"Hmm... Why?"
"Because I've got a father complex," Nagi replied.
I couldn't tell if she was joking.
"Your father is...?"
"I thought you'd know. Kirima Seiichi. Wrote a lot of books."
"Ehhhh?" I interrupted rather loudly. "You're kidding!"
"Nope."
"But... The Writer, Kirima Seiichi?!"
Of course, I knew him. I'd learned most of what I knew about criminal psychology or depth psychology from his books. The Scream Inside - Multiple Personality Disorder, or When a Man Kills a Man, or When the Killer's Mind Changes, or A Nightmare of Boredom, or The Proliferation of "Dunno", or VS Imaginator, and so on. He'd writter far more summaries, essays and commentaries than novels. In fact, I'd never read any of his actual novels, just his scientific writings.
He called himself a modern day enlightenment thinker, which is kind of hokey, but he did write an incredible number of books.
"That's my dad. He's dead now, though."
"Yeah, I knew that... But really? No, I mean really, really?"
"Why would I lie?"
"I know... But still."
"You didn't think I had a strange name?"
"Never occurred to me. Wonder why not?"
Even as I asked, I knew the answer. I had unconsciously convinced myself that Kirima Seiichi or any other writer was hardly likely to live near me. Perhaps I wanted the people that I admired so much to live in some higher realm of existence than I did.
"Basically, I'm living off of the inheritance. Can't really beat it, either. Pays for school."
"Really? But your mother..."
"She wasn't married to him anymore. I got everything. She tossed her half away on her own. She was already a Taniguchi, and she didn't want anything to do with Kirima. That took care of taxes, so I pay rent here."
Here I was, just some normal girl from a typical middle-class nuclear family, and I'm sitting here, listening to the Fire Witch herself talking about her atypical life! Her whole situation just felt sort of unreal to me. It's no wonder that she acts the way she does. She'd hardly even been brought up in anything close to a proper environment.
Even so, there was something that I had to ask.
"Um, so..."
"What? The reason?"
"Yeah. Why'd you save Kyoko?"
"My, my. You call that saving?"
"She told me everything. She got on some weird drug. You saved all of the girls from that, right?"
"Maybe I did... Maybe I didn't."
"Why? How'd you find out? What did you do about it?" I was relentless.
Nagi simply stared back at me.
I felt my heart beating. She was certainly pretty. I felt like she might actually say, "I used magic."
What she actually said was, "My father died when I was ten."
...
"Anyone could want, right here."
She said disturbing things so easily.
But she didn't look like a monomaniac to me.
"But that's-" I started to say, but Nagi turned towards the computer behind her, cutting me off.
She logged into one of the computers, loaded up some program, and hit a few keys.
A list popped up on the screen. It rolled upwards from the bottom of the screen. It appeared to be a list of people's names with numbers after them.
"Here," she said, pointing at the screen.
It read: 2-D-33, Suema Kazuko, 8:25 AM - 3:40 PM.
"That's..." I said, realizing that it was my very own attendance record.
"I'm logged into the school's network. You can get a basic outline of a student's movements with this. I noticed Kinoshita's group was suddenly getting worse, so I checked it out. Hit the drug story."
I was horrified.
"Isn't this illegal?"
"Of course it is," she said readily.
My mouth moved, but nothing came out."
"I have to," she said quietly. "Schools are kind of isolated from the rest of the society. It's a strange environment where the police can't do jack. Something violent happens, whether it's caused by a student or the teacher, and the first thing that they do is try to cover it up. Even if someone dies, they'll take a cue from the times, and claim that it was a suicidal caused by bullying, find some students who look like bullies, and just expel them for it... And that may well end up being enough, half the time."
"T-true, but..."
"I know it's wrong, but someone's got to do it. We sure as hell can't expect the teachers to."
"That's not what what I mean, but..."
But who was this girl, who would intentionally get herself suspended to do any of this?
A messiah complex - that was a creepy type of megalomania, in which you believed yourself to be some sort of savior.
In Kirima Seiichi's books, there was a case where a middle-aged man believed himself to be Batman, put on a costume and attacked an acquitted murder suspect. He wound up being killed himself, and the killer walked a second time, pleading self-defense. If the suspect had truly been innocent, the whole thing was a tragedy based on absurd principles, but if he had been guilty, then it was a tragedy in which justice had been utterly defeated by evil. Either way, it was a sad tale to recount.
This is how Kirima Nagi saw herself.
Certainly, Kirima Seiichi spent most of his time analyzing sinister phenomenon in the underbelly of the human mind, putting out books and articles on the distortions of reality that made people commit crimes, so if you wanted to, you could certainly make a case for him having a messiah complex as well.
That his daughter, particularly one who diagnosed herself as having a father complex, was the same, not particularly odd, but - when I sat there in silence, Kirima thrust a phone at me. Not one on the house's line, but undoubtedly one that was taken out in her name and paid out of her own pocket.
"Call."
"Er... Who?" My eyes widened.
Much to my surprise, Nagi replied, "Your house, of course. Tell them you're bringing a friend home for dinner, and that they should make extra."