A Borrowed Fragment of Death
Someone said it once.
Schopenhauer, wasn't it? That sleep is a fragment of death borrowed in advance.
Turn the line over as many times as I like, and I still think it's a fine one. Calling it properly philosophical might be laying it on a bit thick, but it's an expression with real chew to it—the kind of sentence that sets a whole thicket of thoughts growing.
So… if sleep really is a death we've taken out on loan, then what do you call the waking that comes the instant that sleep ends? That's a fair question, isn't it?
We rise after one short piece of death. What name are we supposed to give that rising?
The longer I sit with it, the more interesting it gets.
Maybe, I think, it's a birth we attempt day after day. The way a phoenix burns its own body and comes back new—don't we, too, step through a fragment of death every morning and wake as someone else?
Look at it that way, and Schopenhauer may have been talking about sleep, when what he really wanted to suggest was that human beings are creatures who can become better. I wouldn't dare set us beside Jesus, but perhaps he meant that people, too, can shed their faults and walk forward as someone new.
And if that isn't what he meant? So what. I like this reading. A way of living aimed at the future instead of the past, chasing a better version of yourself. Beats digging your own grave for no reason, doesn't it? Tell me I'm wrong.
"……"
So if my appearance changed in a single instant, that isn't really something to grieve over, or even to be all that shocked by. Right? Ah. I was reborn~
I told myself that, and did what I could to settle a heart that kept trying to bolt.
The strange wrongness I'd felt from the moment I opened my eyes showed no intention of fading, no matter how much time passed. I could have sworn a pair of bewitching mounds had risen on my chest, and the lines of my body had grown unreasonably lovely… The feeling was deeply weird. Yeah. Weird.
If it were only the body, fine. I could give up a hundred steps and write the whole thing off as a bad day. But the view was every bit as alien. I felt as if I'd walked into a palace out of some fantasy.
Nothing guaranteed this was a good change. Still—was this, too, a kind of rebirth?
"Even so, this feels a little past the line."
The words came out low, and strikingly languid. My old voice had never sounded like that. Then I thought of the body I'd changed into, and a changed voice hardly seemed worth mentioning.
I let out a small sigh and crossed to the mirror on the vanity beside the bed. Talk it over all I liked—seeing the thing with my own eyes was the only way to be sure.
"Hmm."
The enormous mirror gave back a woman's naked body without a shred of mercy.
The first word that surfaced was succubus. The skin was darker than any human's, closer to something demonic, and the figure might as well have been drafted to a man's ideal—the sheer size of those full breasts was enough to make the point. Add eyes that drooped in a languid slant and irises shining like aquamarine, and it was hard to say whether this was a person or some bewitching thing.
And, regrettably, I knew the answer to that question perfectly well. How could I not? She was a character from the work I'd been reading until a moment ago.
"Not a succubus. Not human, either. A homunculus, wasn't it? Unreal."
Possessed into a comic—and not even the comic, a visual novel that amounted to a side story… What kind of situation was this?
If I was going to explain how any of this happened, I'd probably have to start with a certain comic.
Vanguard. That unhinged thing.
How I ended up reading it was, honestly, a little ridiculous.
"The Vanguard minor gallery…? Did something happen in there? Why is it sitting at number one on the rankings?"
It started with curiosity. On the ranking board of a community I liked to haunt, one board kept claiming the top spot, and the name was unfamiliar enough to snag my attention.
Situations like that usually fall into one of two categories. The first is that something good happened in the industry—in a word, a hit.
The other kind goes like this.
In other words, some truly god-awful shit had gone down.
The Vanguard minor gallery was, overwhelmingly, the latter.
"What could have happened to make it like this? They're copy-pasting memorial posts?"
Even looking at the furious replies, most of me still thought, it's just a comic. Comic communities burn for the usual reasons, and those reasons are all more or less the same. A finale butchered beyond recognition, maybe, or a heroine written off and tossed aside.
What I actually found blew past anything I could have imagined. The broad strokes went like this.
"Wow…"
Even a skim made the community's incredible firepower make sense. These were big, blunt disasters, and even they were only the ones left after I'd trimmed and trimmed again. The sheer scale of the outrage left me speechless, and I could more or less understand their fury. The incidents really were that considerable.
At the same time, I couldn't help another thought entirely.
"What a waste."
A waste. That's what I mean.
The blood of a people famous for turning pain into wit hadn't gone anywhere. Most of the posts climbing that board were funny enough to give stomach cramps to someone who knew nothing about any of it. A storm of laughter hammered out of grief and suffering. If Laugh Tale existed anywhere, it had to be here. This place, overflowing with laughter, was the One Piece of comedy itself. And that made it all the more of a shame.
"It's this funny when I don't even know the context. How funny would it be if I did?"
That was why I started the comic. I wanted to enjoy the community posts properly. A reason so embarrassing I can hardly stand to say it.
Well. I started it for that, but honestly, the beginning wasn't bad. It was, against my expectations, a genuinely well-made work. The characters were plenty charming, the world was distinctive, and the pace ran clean and fast. It was fun the whole way through, and it gave me things to chew on besides. The kind of series you could see becoming a masterpiece, if things went right.
Of course, the further it went, the more the rot showed. Characters with no business in the plot showed up in droves. Screen time got padded in ways that reeked of chasing popularity. And if you remember that a mobile gacha game launched right around the time those chapters were serializing… the timing was a little too neat.
Even accounting for that, I still think it deserved to be called a fine work. Which is exactly why the readers were so angry. Ruin a series like this, and of course they'd be furious.
Without quite noticing, I sank deeper and deeper into the comic.
And then the long-awaited ending.
"Fuck…"
I understood, down to the bone, how the Vanguard faithful must have felt.
The finale was a war, as a last chapter ought to be. Revolutionaries set on tearing down the world's order, with the protagonist at their head, against the forces of the sole government determined to keep the current regime standing. Calling it an all-star battle would not have been an exaggeration. Anyone who loved the series could have watched it with sweating palms. It was the sort of material that all but guaranteed a masterpiece.
And yet, for all that promise, my eyes were trembling in small, tight shakes.
"……"
Last volume. Forty-two pages left. If this really was the end, then aside from a so-called nuclear bad ending where everybody dies, the only remotely plausible finish was a Swordmaster Yamato ending. Gather the entire all-star cast, and then bang, boom, done…? You set all of this up this well, and that's the ending?
No way… it couldn't be that.
I did my best to ignore the obvious and turned the page. What was waiting for me there—
"Huh…?"
—was a trash-fire of a development that blew straight past even my shabby imagination.
Out of absolutely nowhere, the strongest character in the story, the one they called a third power, crashed into the war and started grinding every last person into mince, ally and enemy alike. And I mean finely. Protagonist, heroines, it didn't matter—every one of them turned into honest-to-god chunks of meat. The panel of a face, split clean in half, sailing up into the sky is a scene I will boldly declare one of the greats in the history of comics.
Even if it had ended there, it would have deserved to be called a masterpiece of the century. But Pino, the Witch of the Crowd, ground every character down and then took her own head off, and the comic ended.
A finish so extraordinary that fuck came out of me on its own.
"…What did I just read?"
Every character I'd grown attached to became meat in a single instant, and I couldn't accept it. I fell straight into a what the hell is this, fuck, give them back state, and had the remarkable experience of feeling the screws in my skull come flying out. Is that where the phrase screw-up comes from? Those long-nosed bastards really do have a way with words. I never thought a comic could make me this angry.
Considering I'd only wanted to enjoy the community posts, it was a pretty funny ending.
Thanks to that, I understood why the series had ended up like this. In the end, you could say the cause was the publisher's abuse driving the artist off the rails. Creators getting ground down by impossible serialization demands is common enough, and wrecking your own comic out of sheer rage isn't unheard of, even if it's rarer.
Understanding is one thing. Feeling is another.
"So why did it suddenly floor the gas?! Fuck… just try writing the rest like you don't care. I dare you."
After that I transformed into an enraged rioter and turned my eyes to that damned visual novel.
Whatever garbage the story turned out to be, it was something put out under the official—capital-O Official—banner, and it was the only place left where I could still burn a little hope circuit. So I chose it.
I started reading the visual novel at speed.
And, by the look of it, I got possessed.
…What?
"……"
I rubbed my chin and sank into thought.
Fortunately, in all this wide room, there was still no one but me, and the hour looked like early morning.
Of all things, possessed as the protagonist of a novel I hadn't even finished…
Honestly, bewilderment was the biggest of it.
And not even the original comic—a visual novel that's basically a side story? I've never even seen this pattern in a novel…
The visual novel Vanguard: The Last One was split into Part One and Part Two, and the protagonist of Part Two was my present self: Lust Hope.
The problem was that I'd finished Part One and hadn't finished Part Two. The small mercy was that I'd read the early stretch, so I could more or less infer the situation.
The life of Pino, the Witch of the Crowd, was a miserable one. Misfortune had dogged her since childhood, and her relationships kept falling apart. That didn't change after she gained her power, so despite the alias Witch of the Crowd, she suffered from a severe distrust and hatred of people. The same went for the crowds that followed her.
"But loneliness was a separate matter."
Ironic, you could say. The strongest being alive, burning with loneliness in the middle of a multitude… Should I call that funny-sad?
That was the truth of Pino, the Witch of the Crowd. A wounded girl with the power to end the world, groaning because she couldn't make a single friend.
She couldn't trust a world that kept betraying her, and she couldn't trust the crowds that worshiped her for her ability. So the method she chose was to make a friend herself.
The homunculus born of that choice was named Lust Hope. Which would be yours truly, as of right now.
"Well, that makes the story simpler."
Once I sorted my thoughts, the outline of the situation came into view. A loser of a witch who hadn't had a friend in centuries wants one, and I'm the friend-to-be. What's at stake is the life of the world. And, probably, my life as well.
"…Is this a bad thing?"
Turning the situation over, a thought occurred to me out of nowhere. An albino character I'd already liked—my absolute favorite, even—obsessed with me…
"Isn't this actually the best?"
Maybe I could do this.