Chapter Eighteen: Malice... Malice

"I don't believe you."

"Then why ask?"

Horikita Manabu could only smile wryly at that.

"But are you really sure you can stay in Tokyo?"

"Yeah."

Kitagawa Ryo propped his head up and looked out the window at the cars and crowds passing by.

"That person will definitely make a move."

"Have you ever read The Little Prince, Horikita?"

After finishing his phone call and returning to the room, Kitagawa Ryo found Horikita Suzune sitting on the sofa, fresh from her shower, reading the copy of The Little Prince he had brought back the day before.

"I read it when I was little, but I've forgotten a lot of it by now."

Horikita Suzune sat primly with her legs together as she turned the pages. Her hair was still a little damp, and a faint mist seemed to linger around her.

"Do you agree with the fox, Horikita?"

Kitagawa Ryo suddenly asked her. The fox was one of the creatures the Little Prince met on Earth. It asked the Little Prince to tame it, so it could rise above the thousands upon thousands of other foxes and become the one and only fox to him. In return, the Little Prince would become the fox's one and only little boy.

"'One only understands the things one tames.' Taming is just another name for forming a bond."

Horikita Suzune slowly turned the pages. She had indeed read the classic before, and after leafing through it for a while, she remembered the story.

"Becoming one of a kind to each other is meaningless, which is why the Little Prince abandoned the fox in the end."

"So the so-called taming—the act of forming a bond—is meaningless too."

Horikita Suzune still seemed to be hung up on the idea of making friends. She stubbornly believed that a person could survive alone.

"But you want to form a bond with your brother. Or rather, that's what you've been trying to do all along."

Kitagawa Ryo had a hard time understanding Horikita Suzune, just as she still didn't understand why he had become friends with Horikita Manabu.

"Are you saying I'm a fox who keeps failing to catch up with someone, someone whose shadow I can't even see?"

"Does it make a difference?"

"It's not the same."

Horikita Suzune put down the book and pressed her lips together, arguing in spite of herself.

"I think... it's different."

"You said you wanted to follow in your brother's footsteps, but Manabu himself has already rejected that way of thinking."

Kitagawa Ryo handed Horikita Suzune the photograph of the two of them on the table.

"Want to give it a try?"

"Try what?"

"Try forming a bond with someone."

Kitagawa Ryo showed her a photo of Karuizawa Kei.

"How about trying to make a friend?"

Horikita Suzune's gaze wandered as she avoided answering. For a moment, she truly didn't want to reject the beliefs she had held for so long. She was like a child who knew she was wrong but stubbornly refused to apologize.

"...All right."

"Then let's start with the first step. How about we try to become friends?"

Kitagawa Ryo realized he was moving too fast, so he put his phone away and started over.

"You want me to tame you?"

Horikita Suzune raised her eyes without the slightest hesitation. Her reddish-purple eyes gleamed with eagerness.

"Impossible."

Kitagawa Ryo shook his head.

"I've already been tamed by a rose."

A Vote for the 520 Bonus Chapter

I'd planned to write a bonus chapter yesterday for 520, but I forgot, so I'll move it to today. Readers who see this can vote in the comments for the bonus chapter they'd like to read. I'll probably write it today or tomorrow, and it won't affect the regular updates.

There are currently four ideas:

1. An epilogue supplement to Ichinose Honami's True Ending

2. Sakayanagi Arisu's what-if story: the "Oedipus Rex" ending from Ichinose Honami's third simulation

3. Shiina Hiyori's what-if story: in the ongoing main simulation, the timeline where Kitagawa Ryo never met Karuizawa Kei

4. Karuizawa Kei's what-if story: the timeline where Ichinose Honami didn't kill Kitagawa Ryo in the second simulation

I'll start with whichever one gets the most votes in the comments. I'll see about the rest later.

Chapter Eighteen: Malice... Malice

Emi Eura's father was a full-blown drunk and gambling addict. That was why the company he worked for had fired him. After becoming unemployed, he never recognized that he was the problem. Instead, he threw himself even more recklessly into all kinds of gambling.

"Drugs and women are nothing but losses. Gambling's the only thing where you can win it back!"

Emi Eura still remembered her father picking his teeth and shamelessly holding out his hand to her mother for money when she was little.

"Just wait till I win big. Then you'll see what I can do."

But the Eura family ended up with more than ten million yen in debt. The more he gambled, the more he lost, and the more he lost, the more he gambled. He wagered all their money, then gritted his teeth and borrowed from loan sharks. With interest piling upon interest, the loans became a demon with a blood-red maw, swallowing the entire Eura family whole.

Once the man had lost so much that he couldn't gamble anymore, he started drinking heavily. He still had no intention of getting a job and paying off the debt. His days became a cycle of drinking himself senseless, throwing up, passing out, and starting all over again. Her mother had to take on odd jobs to help support the family and scrape together the money for the monthly payments. So for a long time, Emi Eura was left at home to look after the drunken mess.

Cleaning up her father's vomit was one of Emi Eura's most familiar tasks—and one of the most miserable. The sticky mess, mixed with the acrid stench of cheap liquor and the sourness of vomit, was like the boulders Sisyphus could never push to the top of the mountain in Greek mythology. She would exhaust herself cleaning it up, only to find that he had swaggered off and thrown up all over the bed again.

When she was seven, Emi Eura seriously considered covering her father with a clear plastic sheet, so she would only have to clean the sheet wrapped around him once a day. But it was only an idea.

After starting elementary school, Emi Eura seemed to carry around a lingering, fishy stench. That smell made others exclude her without a second thought, just as no parent ever came to pick her up when she stood alone at the school gate after class.

Everywhere Emi Eura looked, she saw adults' legs and car wheels. When she looked up, parents and cars formed one wall after another. She threaded her way through the forest of walls, careful as she made her way out.

Kicking someone when they were down came naturally to humans. Even children understood that. After all, everyone knew that lifting yourself up was hard, while pushing others down was easy. And since either one could make you feel superior, choosing the easier option was only natural.

Trampling on those lower than you brought satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. After Emi Eura became a target of bullying, she seemed to turn into a cheap teddy bear, there to provide her classmates with cheap laughs. Whenever they teased her until she made a fool of herself, one person only had to start laughing for the whole class to join in with their giggles.

During that time, Emi Eura noticed Karuizawa Kei. Unlike Emi, who had always stayed silent, Karuizawa was the sort of child who apologized all the time. Her tears came easily and fiercely, yet she didn't realize that neither her apologies nor her tears did any good.

Bullies treated their victims like spinning tops they struck with whips. The faster the victim spun, the more violently they reacted, and the more excited the bullies became.

Emi Eura felt a kind of kinship with her, as if they were both suffering the same fate. She began asking around about Karuizawa Kei. One snowy winter day, she worked up the courage to approach her fellow bullying victim and try to become friends.

The snow was coming down hard that day. Emi Eura's shoes crunched as she walked through it. She took one heavy step after another, listening to the snow break beneath her feet like glass. From childhood onward, she had grown up sniffing out people's scents like a dog. She could tell that Karuizawa Kei was the same kind of person she was.

Emi Eura wanted to try huddling together with Karuizawa Kei for warmth. She thought they must have something in common, that they could surely become friends.

But she saw Karuizawa Kei standing with another boy. The boy lowered his head and said to her:

"I'm transferring to your school."

From the boy's gaze and words, Emi Eura sensed something that threw her into confusion. It was a feeling called love.

She suddenly remembered the times when boys had grabbed Karuizawa Kei and her by the hair at school. Emi Eura suddenly felt betrayed.

Karuizawa Kei and Emi Eura had both been treading carefully just to survive at school. Each of their days was as fragile as glass. They were both targets of bullying.

But.

Emi Eura watched the two of them in the distance, almost grinding her teeth.

Karuizawa Kei had a boy who liked her, and it seemed he was going to pull her out of this sea of misery.

That boy's name was Kitagawa Ryo, Emi Eura learned later. But by the time she heard his name, he had already become the center of the whole school. The moment he transferred in, he had stopped the bullying in his class without a shred of hesitation, using the blunt method of fighting violence with violence.

Emi Eura was lucky enough to witness the brawl. Kitagawa Ryo knew exactly how hard to hit. He fought in a way that made people cry out in pain but left them with no real injuries. When she heard a girl nearby say, "It's wrong to hit people," she snorted.

The results of that fight were immediate. The bullying Karuizawa Kei had faced disappeared all at once, as if it had never existed.

While Emi Eura watched, full of hatred and envy, as Karuizawa Kei's life returned to normal, she began to pick up the shattered pieces of herself and put them back together, one by one. If violence worked, then she would use violence to solve her problems.

Emi Eura began carrying a fruit knife with her. She kept it hidden in her schoolbag. One day, when the boys cornered her in a secluded spot after school as usual, she suddenly pulled it out. The blade was only four centimeters long, but the boys still all backed away at once.

Partly, they were afraid of the gleaming little knife in Emi Eura's hand. But they also thought that she was smiling strangely. Like the blade in her hand, that smile shone brightly—and looked frightening.

Emi Eura kept staring at them for a long time, until the boys shouted at one another and left. As soon as they were gone, her bearing and her body crumpled. They collapsed to the ground in a mess, and she sat there crying with the knife in her hand for a while before slowly heading home.

Karuizawa Kei and Kitagawa Ryo grew closer and closer. They spent nearly every day together. At lunchtime, they sat together in the courtyard and ate their bento. Emi Eura could see Karuizawa Kei relaxing around Kitagawa Ryo every day, opening herself up in both body and speech as if every pore in her skin were stretching wide to breathe in the air around him. Just by sitting next to him, she seemed to build a world of her own, closed off from everyone else.

In that world, Karuizawa Kei was free to be as selfish as she pleased. She could say whatever she wanted to Kitagawa Ryo, complain when she was annoyed, and tell him whenever something good happened. No matter what she asked, Kitagawa Ryo always had an answer, like an all-knowing encyclopedia.

Standing in a corner nearby, Emi Eura used a toothpick to skin a frog alive. The act itself gave her no pleasure, but after someone in class saw her do it the other day, a lot of girls started keeping their distance. So she had taken to doing it.

She felt like the little match girl in a fairy tale, watching Karuizawa Kei from the snow and ice, hoping to bask in a little of her light. Each passing day was another matchstick. When Karuizawa Kei finished her bento and packed up, Emi Eura would stick the toothpick into the frog's head and toss it in the trash.

On graduation photo day, Emi Eura's class lined up behind Karuizawa Kei and Kitagawa Ryo's. For the rest of elementary school, she was no longer bullied, but she was still completely isolated. Emi Eura stood by herself, like a strange tree jutting sideways from a cliff, standing there brazenly and out of place.

Emi Eura looked up through a gap in the crowd and saw the two of them secretly holding hands.

Kitagawa Ryo disappeared.

Karuizawa Kei moved on to junior high by herself. On the first day of school, Emi Eura noticed that she and Karuizawa Kei had been assigned to the same class.

She took the initiative to push Karuizawa Kei into the center of the girls' social circle. The only lesson Emi Eura had learned from her father was that if you wanted a gambling addict to lose a lot, you had to let him win a couple of times first.

Karuizawa Kei was still laughably naive. Step by step, Emi Eura lured and guided her through the transformation from victim to bully. She thought bitterly that if Kitagawa Ryo hadn't shown up back then, Karuizawa Kei would have turned out this way a long time ago.

Then, with the help of Wakata's rumors, she would brand Karuizawa Kei a "murderer" and a "bully." She could then transform herself into a champion of "justice" and use that as an excuse to take revenge on Karuizawa Kei.

But unexpectedly, Karuizawa Kei seemed to genuinely think of her as a friend.

When Emi Eura realized that, she almost laughed out loud.

Karuizawa Kei hadn't even known her in elementary school, let alone bullied her. But in Emi Eura's heart, Karuizawa Kei was far more despicable than any of the bullies. When she saw Karuizawa Kei humbly bowing her head before her and pleading, one half of Emi Eura savored the result she had expected. The other half still wasn't satisfied. It even wanted to strike while the iron was hot and utterly crush that humble plea, leaving Karuizawa Kei not a shred of dignity.

Emi Eura had a knife in her bag that day. She had gotten used to carrying one over the past two years. She decided that day she would give Karuizawa Kei a pain she would remember for the rest of her life. She knew Karuizawa Kei would wear the white dress Kitagawa Ryo had given her.

She was waiting to stain it red with blood.

When Emi Eura had filled her heart with hopes of having a friend, she had gotten no response. So all those hopes had turned into an equal measure of vengeance. Perhaps that feeling had followed her around like a shadow long before then, but only in the past two years had it finally found someone to take revenge on.

Then Kitagawa Ryo came back.

So Emi Eura thought of a better way to take revenge on Karuizawa Kei.

She would personally destroy Karuizawa Kei's support, no matter the cost.

[I just hate you. Even though you treated me like a friend. I hate you for getting what I wished for before I could. I hate you for having a better life than me. I hate that the person I once pitied now has a better future than I do. I hate my own weakness too. I hate that I was unlucky enough to be born into the wrong family, that I wasn't capable enough to change it. I'll give you all the hatred I have for myself. I'll use every bit of it to hate you.]

"I want to meet with Emi Eura alone."

After seeing Horikita Suzune off, Kitagawa Ryo called Karuizawa Kei and spoke without any preamble.

"I see..."

Karuizawa Kei neither agreed nor disagreed from the other end of the call.

"Okay, I'll hang up, then."

Just as Kitagawa Ryo was about to end the call, Karuizawa Kei suddenly shouted:

"Wait!"

"Didn't we agree to go see her together?"

She suddenly rejected Kitagawa Ryo's suggestion.

"Don't... Don't go anywhere. I'm coming right over. Ryo, you have to stay by my side."

Her voice was so resolute that Kitagawa Ryo held his breath. Until now, she had never stated what she wanted so seriously.