The Will That Defies Entropy
Ed tilted his head in confusion. All he had done was call her name, yet she reacted with such fiery agitation, practically shouting I didn’t do anything!? From his perspective, it was utterly baffling.
“Ah! Sorry, I was talking in my sleep! Haha, I tend to fall asleep pretty quickly!”
Enya hastily tried to smooth things over. Talking in her sleep, she claimed. You idiot! Who falls asleep thirty seconds after lying down! But she soon realized how flimsy the excuse sounded. Her face crumpled as she inwardly screamed Die! Die! and bit down hard on her index finger. By now, Ed was sure to see her as a complete weirdo.
“Ah… really? You must’ve been tired. All that sweating probably did it.”
Fortunately, Ed didn’t seem to think much of it. He simply assumed she had been exhausted and dozed off instantly. Enya let out a sigh of relief and swore to herself—again and again—that she would make no more mistakes.
While she was busy making that resolution, Ed’s next words came.
“More importantly, is something bothering you? Your expression looked pretty serious earlier.”
…The expression from earlier. Enya immediately understood what he meant. It was the gloomy look she had worn when she felt left behind, watching the gap between them widen. He was asking about that.
“It’s nothing~ Don’t worry about it. I guess I was just tired.”
She didn’t want him to discover her pathetic insecurities. The so-called genius of swordsmanship, harboring an inferiority complex? She wanted to show the boy she liked only her coolest, most refined side.
…Should I just tell him the truth?
At the same time, part of her longed to confide in him. Ed was reliable, talented in so many fields. Maybe it would be better to share her worries with him and find a way through this suffocating situation. What Enya needed right now was someone to listen.
“Hey… Ed. Are you asleep?”
“…No.”
Twenty minutes later, Enya called out to him again. This time she laid her heart bare, telling him exactly how she felt. His reply came.
“Hmm. You were thinking pretty highly of me. Truth is, I’m not all that different from anyone else.”
“……?”
His answer was completely unexpected. Not that different from others? If someone like him—who excelled in every direction, filling out a perfect hexagonal stat chart—was no different from the rest, then there was practically no one in the world who could be called special.
“Heh heh. That look says you don’t believe me.”
As if he had read her mind, Ed let out a small laugh and pinpointed her exact thoughts. Then he continued.
“The truth is, I’ve failed an unbelievable number of times. Too many to count.”
Ed, who had tasted nothing but crushing failure while playing El Pandor Runtera. The only reason he stood where he was now was because he had kept challenging himself despite every single one of those defeats. Those repeated attempts had eventually led him to the number one ranking, and from there he had obtained the absurdly overpowered items known as the Mechanic Blueprint and Creator’s Hammer.
“You just can’t see it, but I’ve failed miserably. I’ve been frustrated. I’ve despaired.”
“…It’s surprising to think even you could feel that way.”
Enya couldn’t even imagine it—Ed, frustrated and in despair. He gave a faint smile.
“If you think about it, everything I do is a string of failures. Research and experimentation always come hand in hand with failure.”
“Ah… even in the things you do…”
“Yeah. Remember the entropy I mentioned before?”
Entropy. There was no way she could have forgotten. Enya had never let a single moment of that conversation in his laboratory slip from her mind.
“Yes. I remember.”
“Then do you also remember that this universe is designed so entropy always increases?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Good. Then this should be easier to understand. The fact that the universe is built so entropy constantly rises means we’ve been thrown into an environment where we can’t help but keep failing. Because disorder will only keep growing.”
“……”
Maybe it had been too long since she last heard the concept, but honestly, Enya couldn’t quite grasp it. The universe’s entropy keeps increasing, so we’ve been thrown into a place where failure is inevitable? What on earth did that mean?
“Haha, a little difficult?”
Ed, noticing her confusion, asked gently. Enya scratched her cheek.
“Yeah… I still don’t really get it.”
“Hmm… Then let me give you a simple example. What do you think makes a face beautiful?”
A beautiful face? That wasn’t a hard question at all. Enya listed every single criterion she could think of. After listening to all her conditions, Ed answered.
“See? There are an enormous number of conditions. That’s why beautiful faces tend to resemble one another. The standards for what we consider beautiful are so demanding that the people who meet every single one inevitably share certain similarities. On the other hand, ugly faces are ugly for a huge variety of reasons—eyes, nose, mouth, face size, proportions, skin condition, hair volume. If even one of those is off, the whole thing feels ugly.”
…When she thought about it, he was right. Ugly people were ugly for truly diverse reasons, while beautiful people were beautiful for similar ones.
“Families work the same way. All happy families are alike in their happiness, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“…That makes sense.”
“It’s the same when I build my suits. Miss a single screw, or miscalculate a formula by even a fraction, and the whole thing stops functioning. Only when hundreds of screws and joints operate without the slightest error does the suit work perfectly.”
Ed paused to catch his breath. Since Enya seemed to be following along, it was time to bring it all together.
“So what I’m saying is that there are endless ways to fail. Because this world is constantly moving toward disorder. Success is ultimately the process of discovering a single point of order amid all that chaos.”
“The process of discovering order…”
“Exactly. But finding that order isn’t easy. Even if you manage to create one, time passes and entropy increases, turning it back into disorder. That’s why so many couples who reach the order of marriage still fall apart before long. The disorder between them grows until the form of their marriage collapses. My suits will eventually wear out and corrode too. No matter how great an invention is, it will always drift toward losing its order in the end.”
A deep terror suddenly gripped Enya. It felt as though the universe itself harbored a profound malice toward humanity. Every legacy humans built, every brilliant civilization, was ultimately destined to lose its shape, scatter into disorder, and vanish. The nihilistic thought drained her of motivation and will.
“But there is one thing that defies a universe marching toward disorder.”
At that moment, Ed spoke with deep meaning. One thing that could resist the universe’s slide into chaos. Enya asked what it was. His answer came.
“Human will. The will to seek order.”
“……”
“Take the couple from the earlier example who lost the form of their marriage. Do they simply end there? No. They never stop at that point. Humans are creatures who cannot tolerate disorder. They clash, they break, they despair—and in the end they move forward to find order again. Perhaps they’ll reunite and create something even stronger.”
Enya’s mouth slowly fell open. She was beginning to understand why Ed could be such an extraordinary person. He was teaching her the importance of an unshakable will—the very spirit of Baldohjae, the one that never yields to any trial!
“So as long as you don’t give up, you’ll find your path. No matter how many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of failures you face, you only need to succeed once.”
Enya clenched her fist. She reflected on how she had compared herself to others and let herself shrink. In the end, everything would be solved if she simply walked her own path without wavering, just as Ed said. No matter how far ahead others pulled, no matter if she couldn’t match Ed’s grades, finding her own order would resolve it all. There was no need to falter.
“Thank you. My head feels much clearer now.”
“Ahem. Glad it helped. Honestly I was a little embarrassed, like I was just bragging about myself the whole time.”
Enya gave a soft smile. The more she learned about him, the more she liked him. After hearing his thoughts, respect was beginning to bloom alongside her affection. Though they wielded different weapons and practiced different swordsmanship, she could feel that she and Ed were ultimately walking in the same direction.
“Whoa. It’s already past one. Shall we sleep now?”
“Yeah.”
After all the talking, the hour had slipped well past one in the morning. About twenty minutes later, Ed’s breathing grew steady and soft as he fell asleep.
But Enya’s heart was still pounding too violently for sleep to come. The conversation they had shared had caused her feelings for Ed to swell beyond control, and the fire in her chest refused to be quenched.
“Ed……”
She reached for the spare pillow on the bed and hugged it tightly to herself. This pillow he might have rested his head on, this pillow that might still carry his scent—she pressed it fully against her body, trying to soothe the emotions boiling inside her.
Curled around it, she looked like a fetus sleeping in its mother’s womb. Enya felt as though she were being reborn.
I like him…
For the first time, there was a man she liked. A man she wanted to resemble, to stay beside, to respect and follow.
“Haa… haa…”
She hugged the pillow even harder. Lying in his bed, beneath his blanket, clutching his pillow tight. In a space saturated with his presence, embracing his pillow, she felt an ecstatic sensation—like she was being reborn, conceived anew through his values.
Our entropy…
Enya thought of the unknown flow of entropy between herself and Ed. She wanted to bind it in the shape of love. She wanted to pour every ounce of her strength and will into it, to keep it from ever collapsing, for a very, very long time. With those thoughts, she held the pillow close.