Chapter 108: Chapter 3.3
The name of this feeling
"In that case, I won't hold back."
No sooner had Siesta murmured those words than she vanished. "...!"
I knew better than anyone on the planet how strong she was. Siesta ran so fast, she might as well have been teleporting. Choosing a random direction, I dodged, and almost immediately, a gunshot rang out right next to me.
"I guess it's not going to be possible to end you with just one shot."
I had the devil's luck and had won out this time; I might be rolling on the ground, but I'd dodged that bullet. I took cover behind an abandoned bus. "Couldn't you have given me a bit of a head start?"
"There is no 'time out' in war. Never mind that. What do I have to do to win this fight?"
"Look, don't fire, and then confirm things afterward. ...You win if I admit I lost."
"I see. Then we'll call it a battle against time. Considering your personality, though, I get the feeling this may drag on for quite a while."
Siesta wasn't even entertaining the possibility she might lose. Not only that, but she'd tacitly managed to insult me for not knowing when to quit.
"Sorry, but I'm flipping our power dynamic today." I fired from behind the bus...but Siesta evaded with an acrobatic leap.
"Aiming for my legs. That's kind of you."
"No, it's just not normal to aim for my head first thing like you did." "But you won't admit defeat unless I inflict a lethal injury, will you?"
Even as we traded this combat-specific banter, I got my breathing under control behind the bus, working out a strategy. This place had been messed up nicely during the fight with Seed two weeks ago, so at least I'd secured cover.
"Do you think you can beat me like that?" "...!"
I'd just tripped my own death flag. I heard the Ace Detective's voice above me. Siesta had gotten up onto the bus's roof and jumped off with no
hesitation, kicking my right arm hard and knocking the pistol out of my hand. "...! As a matter of fact, I did supersede your intentions once, remember?"
Without even glancing at the gun I'd dropped, I ducked under the bus.
"In terms of feelings, yes. Unless you can beat me with actual skill right now, there's no point."
Right again. I'd known that too, I'd stressed about it, and I'd still stepped onto this battlefield. There was no way I could just back down after that.
"...!"
Spotting Siesta's legs from below the bus, I burst out from under the vehicle, drew and leveled my second gun, and fired. But...
"...I seriously almost died."
As if she'd predicted my move, Siesta had also fired, and the bullet had zipped right past my head. No, maybe it had grazed it for a few millimeters— a small trickle of blood ran down my cheek.
"Do you want to die?" Siesta tilted her head in a show of innocence.
Still cool as a cucumber, huh? In that case... "Well, you said so yourself— this is war."
Without hesitating or really aiming, I fired a series of shots at Siesta. I wasn't planning to kill her, of course; that would have defeated the whole purpose of this fight. My attacks were based in my trust that Siesta would evade. But if even one of those shots managed to graze her, the way hers had against my cheek—
"I see."
Siesta dodged the rain of bullets using moves that would have done an action-movie star proud. Then she took a leap so high, you'd think she launched herself with a trampoline, landing on top of a mound of rubble that was several meters tall. She looked down at me, her face expressionless.
"Are there tranquilizers in those bullets of yours?" She'd seen right through my plan.
"...!"
"Your expression is always so easy to read." With a laid-back suggestion that I should work on my poker face, Siesta evaded another of my bullets by jumping down. "Your conditions for victory don't include killing me. You're only trying to temporarily immobilize me."
...Had she picked up on my scheme when I got impatient and fired at random? Still... "Yeah, all the weapons I'm using have that drug in them.
Even 0.01 milligram of this stuff will stop an African elephant or a blue whale. In other words, if even one shot grazes you, I win."
Forget lethal injury: She couldn't even afford to get a scratch. On a battlefield, that restriction would inflict the greatest pressure imaginable. She may have read my hand, but I could use that against her.
"I never planned to let any of your attacks touch me in the first place."
In the next moment, I felt a human presence right behind me. By the time I realized it was Siesta, she'd already kicked my right arm up again, knocking my gun far away.
"...! Look what you did! We're just getting started, and now my right arm's out of commission." With my left hand, I promptly pulled a knife out of my jacket and pointed it at her.
"Is the tip of that coated with the tranquilizer, too?"
Siesta's fist flew at my face; she was holding a ballpoint pen. I knocked it away with the knife, but this time she landed a powerful roundhouse kick to my side.
"...! ...Hff." She'd knocked the wind out of me, and I rolled across the asphalt according to the laws of physics. Needless to say, my entire body hurt. But that pain was no match for my stubborn refusal to quit. I reached for the gun I'd dropped—
"Annnd you're dead."
At the same time... No, Siesta had leveled her gun a moment faster than I had, and she spoke from above me, stopping me. When I slowly raised my head, Siesta had her gun trained on me. She was holding it in her left hand.
"If I pull this trigger now, you'll die. But I won't do it. I don't think you're that dumb to not understand what that means, Kimi."
Slowly, Siesta narrowed her blue eyes. Just as I'd begun this fight based on that hijacking incident, Siesta was trying to make me admit I'd lost by re- creating the way she'd pinned Bat down.
"...You call me stupid all the time, but you're ending with that?"
It was like she said, though: If I didn't want to get hurt, if I didn't want to end up with a lethal injury, I needed to back down here. But Siesta was holding that gun in her left hand, and as I gazed at her, a conversation we'd once had came to mind.
It had been an ordinary day. As usual, we were broke, and we were sitting at the dinner table in a cheap apartment in some foreign country. Like the
majority of Japanese people, Siesta was poking at the side dishes with chopsticks she held in her right hand, and I'd asked her, "Siesta, weren't you left-handed?"
It was pretty late for that question, and she'd looked perplexed. Well, sure. She ate her meals like that all the time, and when she fought, she held her gun in her right hand. Even so, I'd gotten the impression that she was left-handed because that was the hand she'd used to pull me into this world.
"Let's go on a journey," she'd said. She always held her left hand out to me, smiling that hundred-million-watt smile. That's why I'd gotten the wrong idea.
"Are you stupid, Kimi?" Siesta had said, the way she always did. "I hold my gun in my right hand."
"I think you were trying for chopsticks there."
After we'd lobbed jokes at each other, for some reason, Siesta had smiled. "That's why my left hand is the only one I'll ever hold out to you."
It was Siesta's philosophy; I sort of got it and sort of didn't. If I tried to explain it, I would probably reduce it to something trite. As long as I kept the answer hidden inside myself, though, I'd be able to keep taking the left hand she held out to me. So, on that day, I hadn't asked her to elaborate.
If there was just one thing I understood now, it was that Siesta was standing here with a gun in the hand she should have been holding out to me. To borrow her words: I was no longer too dumb to understand what that meant.
"...Yeah, you're right. I lose."
On my knees, with Siesta holding me at gunpoint, I pathetically admitted defeat.
—But...
"So can I say one last thing?"
In the center of a clear, obstacle-free scramble intersection, raising both hands to show I was done resisting, I slowly got to my feet.
"Begging for your life?"
"Don't go killing me after I've admitted I lost."
I glanced at Siesta's eyes; they still looked dangerous. I sighed. "No, that's not it. I just realized you'd asked why I was trying to stop you, and I hadn't told you."
It was the question Siesta had asked right before we'd launched into this
fight. Why wouldn't I let her die if she was going to turn into a monster someday? Why did I follow her so persistently, trying to stay involved? In my head, the answer was far too obvious, but I hadn't put it into words for Siesta.
Now that I thought about it, we'd always been like that. We never told each other the important stuff; we'd both assumed the other knew, and we'd always ended up just missing each other. We'd believed in our invisible bond
—no, we'd definitely had one of those. It was just that, somewhere along the way, we'd started to rely on it too much.
We'd never confirmed our bond in words, though. We'd thought we didn't need to. We'd figured that when we stood back-to-back in the middle of a firefight, the other person would just get it.
"Thoughts transcend words. When you put it that way, yeah, it sounds good."
Without flinching from the gun that was trained on me, I took one step toward Siesta, then another.
"—What are you...?" Siesta couldn't tell what I was trying to do. She tightened her grip on the gun.
"I figured I'd demonstrate that you need words to properly convey some things."
We'd had three whole years. We'd done all that bantering. Yet we'd somehow skipped this sort of thing a little too often.
"Why did I want to bring you back to life? Why did I think those three years of constant trouble were fun? You know there's only one answer to that."
They were such simple words, and yet I'd never said them. Saying them out loud would've sounded cliché, at least to me.
"It's because I love you."
When I said that, Siesta's blue eyes widened.
I wasn't going to explain whether that "love" was romantic love or family love or neighborly love. I hadn't managed to put a name to it yet, either. Even so, this feeling had been with me all through those three years without changing a bit, and that was the plainest, clearest term for it.
"That's... What do I even say? I didn't expect that."
Siesta had lowered her gun, although she probably didn't realize it. She sounded rather dazed.
"You went all this time without noticing a thing like that? The Ace Detective herself ?"
"...The problem is that your tsundere behavior is beyond normal." We joked around with each other, and then we both smiled a little. My words really had gotten through to her that time.
"—Except..." But just then, blue flames flickered in Siesta's eyes again. "Some problems can't be overcome with feelings alone."
A gunshot rang out. The bullet whizzed right past my cheek.
"You knew that, too. Getting a romantic confession from you won't be enough to persuade me now."
"I don't recall confessing that." "Oh, I see. So you were proposing?"
Why were those my only options? Smiling halfheartedly, I obediently put my hands up again. I'd already admitted defeat. My weapons weren't nearby, so I couldn't afford to resist anyway.
"I knew I'd be no match for you."
That was something I'd known right from the start—And so... "From here on out, we'll take you on."
The next instant, there was an earsplitting explosion, and black smoke rose. "—! A grenade!"
Registering an intruder, Siesta took a huge leap backward to create some distance.
However, a girl interrupted our battle, cutting through the smoke in pursuit of Siesta.
"Not even meeting your maid one last time, after all the trouble you've caused her? That's rather heartless, don't you think?"
The maid revolted against her mistress, holding a rapier. A gust of wind ruffled her pale silver hair. Then—
"Charlie! Now!"
From the phone in my breast pocket, a girl's voice echoed across the battlefield. Then I heard a gunshot. It was the sound of a lone agent sniping the Ace Detective from a distant rooftop.
"...! So that's...what it was."
At the last second, Siesta managed to dodge the tranquilizer bullet, and it
took a divot out of the asphalt instead. However, she'd caught on to my—or rather, our—plan, and she grimaced.
"Sorry, Siesta. The real final showdown starts now." Until we saved the Ace Detective, we would never stop.
A certain boy's recollection
"Why are you so bad at being a team player?"
The sun was almost set, and Siesta stalked down the lane ahead of me, sighing. In terms of walking speed, neither of us was accommodating the other...but that probably wasn't what she meant.
We were on our way home after safely failing a certain mission. It had failed for one clear reason: my hopeless inability to get along with Charlotte Arisaka Anderson, who'd joined us for the maneuver. No matter how often we got scolded for making the same mistake, there was no hope for improvement until the cause was removed.
"I've never teamed up with anybody before, ever. You can ask me to match somebody's pace now, but that hurdle's too high."
Siesta and I had set off on our travels around the world about a year ago. Even before that—I should probably say unfortunately—I hadn't had a single person I could call a friend. It was due to my annoying, innate predisposition for getting dragged into trouble. People wanted to avoid it, so they ended up avoiding me. Before I knew it, fifteen years had passed.
"Are you all right with that?"
"What I want has nothing to do with it," I said flatly. I'd thought about trying to change several times, though. Even at fifteen, I sometimes sighed and wondered whether there wasn't a slightly better way to live. Still, as long as I had this predisposition, I wouldn't be able to team up with anyone, and nobody would be able to match my pace.
"Well, I'm used to it." Forcing a smile, I walked over the asphalt. Forget friends, I'd never even had parents. That meant I'd had the skills it took to live alone from the time I was a kid.
"There are some things you can't deal with on your own, though. Like today, for example."
Over her shoulder, Siesta seemed to be implying that I should make some
friends. Because I hadn't been able to get along with Charlie today, I'd come close to taking an enemy bullet. Even so, Siesta had ultimately stepped in and rescued me.
"I may not always be around, you know."
...The woman had dragged me on this journey, and now she was making irresponsible comments out of nowhere.
"That said, if I find companions, I might end up putting them in danger instead."
Considering my knack for attracting trouble, the possibility was pretty high. Those were the stars Kimihiko Kimizuka had been born under. Rather than saying I'd resigned myself to that fate, I'd reached enlightenment instead. I didn't need friends who'd walk with me.
"Where are you going?"
The next thing I knew, I heard Siesta's voice behind me. "Are you stupid, Kimi?"
Then it came up beside me, on my left.
"That's how easy it is to walk with somebody."
The setting sun dyed the pavement orange, and two black shadows stretched across it.
"Of course I'm not your lover, and I'm sure I'm not even your friend. I don't even know whether you could call me a companion. But..." Siesta faced forward as she spoke. "Right now, I'm standing next to you."
The orange light shone gently on her pale silver hair. When I stole a glance at her profile, it seemed more dignified and beautiful than any famous painting or sculpture.
"You'll have comrades too someday." Looking over at me, Siesta gave a soft smile. "And I'm sure you'll combine your strengths to accomplish something."
...I dunno about that. I can't really picture it. Then there was that predisposition of mine. Even if Siesta was right, those future comrades might all be weirdos.
"Well, if it ever happens, I'll introduce you." "Yes, I'll be looking forward to it."
Treading on our long shadows, we started down the sunset lane, side by side.
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