Andry's Trashbin

“Too Terrible to Look At”      Hello. JIN speaking.      Did you enjoy Kagerou Daze 2: A Headphone Actor ?      This novel was written in the middle of summer, with the temperature outside never going below the upper eighties—not unlike the story setting I was writing about. Of course, I had the AC set to seventy-three degrees and gorged myself on pizza throughout the project, but the point remains.      I apologize for leeching off everyone at the office in the meantime.      Which reminds me. In the afterword to my previous novel, Kagerou Daze: In a Daze , I wrote something along the lines of “If this winds up being a flop, I’ll have to write a school romance/comedy next!” Luckily, thanks to all of you, the response I received for that book exceeded all expectations. Thanks! *smile*      As a result, the manifesto above is not the reason why this volume wound up being a bit school romance/comedy-ish.      The real reason is simply that I have grown starved for affection. Rest assured

August 15. The height of summer.      The suburban road, well separated from the people and car noise you found in the city, was instead infected with the loud, echoing call of the nearby cicadas.      The long, straight road was interrupted only by rusted-out signs and small houses, dotting the path for what seemed like the rest of the world.      Next to the sidewalk, notably cracked and lacking in terms of solid pavement, the unkempt weeds extended toward the sky as high as they could.      It was well into the afternoon by now. I felt like I had been walking down this path for hours, but I imagine it was only for twenty or thirty minutes in reality.      When you’re faced with a never-ending onrush of catastrophic events, time always seems to pass a lot more slowly than it actually does.      —It all started yesterday.      I, Shintaro Kisaragi, have wound up getting shoved out into the outside world for some reason after approximately two years of the exciting, laugh-a-minute nerd

Did my last words make it through?      I no longer had any way of knowing, but they must have. It felt like they did.      I felt oddly strange.      As if I was flying through the sky, or was suspended in a body of lukewarm water…      Indeed, as if I had just woken up from something or other.      My near-exhausted breath, my legs racked with pain, the sense of drowsiness that seemed to forever frustrate me…I didn’t feel any of it now.      Did I die, I wonder?      Is this seemingly infinite darkness what the afterlife is supposed to be…?      I had imagined something a bit more like a fairy tale, somehow. God must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel.      He could have at least turned the lights on for me…      “Ugh, this is making no sense at all to…Huh?! Ah! Ah, ahhh…! Wow, I can talk. Nngh…and I… have a body, too.”      I patted down my body from head to toe, but it seemed I still retained full control of my body and voice.      “Okay, so where am I, then? It doesn’t seem like I’m lo

 The height of summer.      The sky out the window was a clear, crisp shade of blue, a giant cumulonimbus cloud looming from afar.      “…I give up. I don’t get any of this at all…”      The austere brutality of summer school was wreaking its full havoc on the classroom.      Haruka smiled briskly as he worked his way through the stack of assignment sheets in front of him, but from my perspective, I was faced with a painful battle, one where I could barely manage to comprehend each individual question.      Weeks had passed since the school festival. We were now both second-year students at the high school.      Which didn’t count for much. Our class still comprised merely the two of us, Haruka and me, and regrettably the school didn’t boot out Mr. Tateyama and replace him with another teacher for us.      The new school year meant a slow, steady rise in difficulty, and since I (to be totally honest here) wasn’t exactly a brainiac, my grades on every test always trended below average.

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 i

“Daaang…That girl’s beat thirty-seven in a row…”     “Yeah, I heard from some guy that she actually placed second nationwide in a Dead Bullet -1989- tournament.”     “Dude! Really?! You mean ‘Dancing Flash Ene’?! Man, no wonder she’s so dialed in like that. Whoa, check it out, she beat her high score again! …But why’s she crying, though?”     The science storage room was undoubtedly witnessing the most exciting scene it had ever hosted since the school’s opening.     I kept a firm grip on my controller, unable to wipe the tears away from my eyes.     No matter how hard things got, once I picked up the controller, there was nothing that could take my hands off of it.     That was the credo I lived by as a gamer, something that lay at the root of my personality, and I wasn’t sure I could do anything to break the habit any longer.     The big-screen monitor displayed a hand holding a gun at the bottom, twisting left or right based on my controller input as it shot down the barrage of tar

I didn’t think I’d seen the landscape before me transform so wildly as this ever before in my life.     With every step I took, another stoplight was sent flying, another building swayed wildly over its foundation.     The air shifted and swirled before me, and my body propelled itself forward through the wind with every breath I took.     The intersection was packed with people.     The signals and signs had already lost all meaning to them, and the lawless roads were now host to a gaggle of colorful cars, abandoned in assorted unlikely locations and angles.     Some people were screaming something or other.     Some were punching and flailing at their fellow man.     All of them looked petrified, wailing pitifully at the end of the world.     The screaming infant I heard for just a moment almost made me stop running.     “Keep going. This area’s going to be all over within twelve minutes, so don’t let yourself look back at them…Make a left at the next light.”     The voice from my he