HEADPHONE ACTOR III

There was no longer anyone around me.

    The setting sun, cut off from view by the buildings up to now, was perfectly visible from here.
    Its light, bathing the entire world in crimson, seemed like a furious flame, ready to burn everything in sight.

    Running up a steep avenue, I made it to the apex of the hill, almost out of breath.

    On the other end of the headphones, the voice that had guided me this far muttered something to me. But I couldn’t make it out. I was too focused on catching my breath once more.

    I imagine it was just about the time I was told everything would expire, fade off into oblivion. Or maybe that time had already passed long ago.

    But, at top of the hill I had clambered up, there was nothing.
    To be more accurate, there was a massive sky spread before me, drawn atop an equally massive wall.

    “…No. This isn’t it.”

    I felt a tremendous sense of discomfort. There was something that should be here, exactly what I couldn’t quite remember—but it wasn’t.
    My ragged breath gradually returned to its normal rhythm.
    As it did, the cause behind this discomfort faintly began to grow clear.

    —It wasn’t that something wasn’t here.
    It’s that she wasn’t here.

    “And I thought I could finally tell her, too…”

    The words unconsciously fell out of my mouth.
    My shadow, long and stretched out over the ground, began to dim. The sun was almost completely below the horizon.

    “I guess…I guess this was doomed from the start. This was the last place left, the only place I could have ever told her, and now…”

    The words coming from my headphones seemed to speak for my own mind, a mind still unable to recall everything.

    “Everything’s already over! It’s…it’s just…everything! All over!”

    —It’s time to give it up.
    I will never have the chance to see her again.
    I was already aware of that.

    “If…if this is the kind of world I’m doomed to live in, then—!”

    You don’t have to say that, do you?
    Maybe you weren’t on time,
    but at the very end of it all,
    —you came to realize where your own emotions lay.

By the time I turned myself around, the city was experiencing its final moments. On the other side from the enclosed sky as it crumbled to the ground, I left my final words to her. “I’m sorry…Takane.”

I gazed at the carcass of the program as it burned itself away, my consciousness growing faint. The words I heard from the other side of the headphones were more than enough to lull me back to sleep.

• Previous: Yuukei Yesterday II
• Title: Kagerou Daze, Vol2_ Headphone Actor
• Next: Yuukei Yesterday III