Could it be that this tunnel simply has no end?
Just as Hachiman thought this, the world outside the window suddenly brightened up.
The bus seemed to have finally driven out of that extraordinarily long tunnel.
Sunlight streamed into the carriage, yet it brought none of the sweltering heat typical of summer.
The scenery outside the window suddenly became unbelievably vast. What met the eyes first was a landscape covered entirely in verdant green, as if they had been transported from some sealed world into another slumbering kingdom.
The air felt thin and quiet. Even the sound of the wind lacked the bustle found in the city, and the summer heat that should have been present had entirely dissipated.
Hachiman could be certain that this was the countryside.
However, it was unlike the bustling, lively countryside filled with the smoke of cooking fires from his memory. Instead, it was a place far more serene, far more surreal—like a countryside preserved as a memory inside a piece of amber. The grayish-blue sky hung low overhead, and the layers of clouds were so light and thin they looked like sheets of paper on the verge of tearing at any moment.
The mountain ridges in the distance formed soft, somewhat unnatural curves, their edges so clean that not a single sharp line could be seen.
——Speaking of which, are there really that many mountains near Chiba?
The curiosity in the young boy's heart was tossed to the back of his mind a moment later.
Beside the road stood a long queue of utility poles, standing in silence, with each single pole spaced out exactly the same distance from the next.
They stretched out into the distance within his field of vision, extending toward a point where the end could not be seen, as if wordlessly pointing toward something that had been forgotten.
There was no one in the fields by the roadside.
There weren't even any tire tracks left behind by tractors.
A scarecrow stood in the center with its head tilted to one side, but no smile was drawn onto its fabric face, nor did it have any expression whatsoever. It was just a blank canvas that made one's heart clench in an instant.
The wind brushed through its sleeves, yet it did not move, looking as though it were anchored to some specific moment where time had stopped.
The vehicle continued forward, the undercarriage giving off slight vibrations.
Hachiman suddenly realized—from the moment they drove out of the tunnel up until now, not a single sound had emerged from this entire countryside.
There was no chirping of cicadas, no barking of dogs, and no human speech.
There was only the wind, yet it was so faint it could hardly be heard clearly.
It felt like entering a location that repeatedly appeared in dreams but had never actually been reached.
Rather than the countryside, it felt more like the edge of the world.
[Now arriving at ■■ Town. Passengers who wish to disembark, please prepare yourself.]
[Next stop——]
The bus broadcast rang out, giving him a start while simultaneously making Hachiman feel that things were taking an even more ominous turn.
The name of the stop sounded blurry in his ears, as if it had been hit with a mosaic pattern—he knew describing a sound as "having a mosaic pattern" sounded completely absurd, but that was exactly the reality of it.
"Big brother..."
Komachi seemed to have realized that something was amiss as well, nervously gripping the corner of Hachiman's sleeve.
"It's fine."
Hachiman comforted his anxious younger sister, while trying his best to calm himself down.
In any case, he would stay seated a bit longer to see how things developed——
"If I were you, I would get off the bus right now."
Suddenly, the person in the front seat spoke up.
Hachiman felt his heart skip a beat: up until the moment that party spoke, he hadn't even known there was actually someone sitting in the front seat!
At this moment, the passenger in the front seat had already stood up.
The other party was wearing a black trench coat—an outfit that was clearly not normal in the middle of summer.
However, Hachiman couldn't care less about that and could only ask the other party: "Excuse me, but where exactly is this place? And who are you?"
"Me?" The other party's footsteps paused for a moment, and then he turned his head around. When Hachiman saw that familiar face, his heart thumped heavily—granted, even now he couldn't remember the appearances and names of all his classmates, but this individual was so completely nonconforming that even he recognized him. He watched as this eye-patch-wearing passenger said with a beaming smile:
"I am a chuunibyou, you see."
Hachiman looked completely embarrassed.
To talk bad about someone behind their back and end up getting caught right in the act by that very person! Even though he had long since grown used to social death, facing this kind of situation still made his heart itch with discomfort every single time!
And so Hikigaya spoke up: "Sorry, Asakura-san, Komachi didn't mean it on purpose."
Komachi nodded her head frantically beside him.
After all, the gaze from the other party's left eye—the one not covered by the eyepatch—stared over like a snake, making her skin crawl.
Fortunately, the other party didn't seem to have any intention of sweating the small stuff, and simply left the carriage quickly.
In a bizarre place like this, having a familiar person around was obviously—well, even if they rarely spoke under normal circumstances and their relationship stopped at the level of mere NPCs, having someone he recognized still ultimately brought an subconscious sense of reliance in his heart. After all, humans are social creatures.
And so Hachiman quickly made a decision, pulling Komachi along to disembark from the vehicle together with the other party.
The station was a tiny wooden one, somewhat resembling the type of a rain shelter; even in a place like this, it carried a heavy atmosphere of the "countryside."
After watching the bus drive away, Hachiman couldn't help but ask the other party: "Would it have been really bad if we kept riding that bus?"
"Fifty-fifty."
While studying the moss-covered bus stop sign with keen interest, the other party replied casually: "A fifty percent chance is that you would be sent back to the real world, treating everything you saw as a bizarre dream; the other half is becoming lost on the road, falling victim to spiriting away along with the bus."
Spiriting away? Hachiman chewed over this word in his mind.
"If it's spiriting away, does it mean disappearing forever?" Komachi couldn't help but ask.
"It depends. Sometimes you can still go back, but people who are spirited away generally experience a different flow of time compared to the outside world. It's entirely possible that you merely feel like you sat on a long-distance bus for two hours, yet when you step off, the outside world has already passed twenty years."
What on earth is that, it sounds terrifying?! Komachi's face was completely written with fear, and she pressed herself even closer to her older brother.
"Then what should we do now?" Hachiman asked.
"Why do you think I have a solution?" The other party stopped his evaluation of the bus stop sign—Hachiman also took the opportunity to glance at it, discovering that the sign was already severely corroded by rust, and it was entirely impossible to see the characters on it clearly even without the obstruction of the moss—and asked him in return.
"...Because Asakura-san... is the real deal, right?"
Hachiman said softly.
The so-called chuunibyou refers to acting as if one possesses superpowers or some kind of special trait to perform nonconforming actions. In the vast majority of cases, it is essentially a behavior derived from a adolescent desire to show off and attract others.
Particularly for boys, chuunibyou can be considered a form of romance or a mandatory path in life: even someone like Hachiman, a very, very long time ago, had created some dark-past settings that he now wanted to erase at all costs.
But if these nonconforming actions were not mere posturing but were originally necessary, then it naturally couldn't be counted as chuunibyou, but rather a "person with superpowers" in the truest sense.
☆
Asakura glanced at the Hikigaya siblings, especially toward the older brother's side. Regarding this classmate who always hid by himself in the corner of the classroom, remaining detached from the world, he didn't actually have much of an impression beyond knowing that the guy was a closeted homosexual.
But looking at it now, the other party's psychological quality was unexpectedly good. Clearly, his mindset had completely collapsed while on the bus just now, yet not only did he refrain from showing it, but he had also re-established his mental conditioning in such a short amount of time.
——Could it be that this guy has experienced an absolute social death before?
Considering the other party's sexual orientation, combined with the fact that this country was still slightly traditional in this regard, it felt as though it wasn't entirely impossible.
"In any case, let's look around first."
Asakura did not directly answer Hachiman's words, but turned around and spoke.
The Hikigaya siblings naturally had no better alternative, so they followed behind Asakura, wandering around together in this place that was presumably a countryside village.
However, the more they wandered, the more Hachiman could sense the creepiness of this location.
They passed a row of completely vacant wooden houses. The wind chimes in front of the doors swayed gently but made no sound, merely reflecting transparent light, and the curtains billowed slightly in the wind as if someone had just left that window.
They crossed a tiny stone bridge that was almost swallowed up by vines. There was no stream beneath the bridge, only a dried-up riverbed. Komachi reached out her hand to pull away the vines and discovered a line of words carved onto the bridge pillar, which had been worn down by time until only a blurry indentation remained.
They passed a pond outside the village. The surface of the water was perfectly still without a single reflection, showing only a shallow layer of silver light. Asakura casually tossed a small pebble inside, yet it failed to splash up any water, creating only faint ripples that expanded and contracted like breathing.
They kept walking until dusk.
They stood on a slope, watching the entire countryside become enveloped in an orange light; everything was terrifyingly serene.
In the end, Asakura summarized.
"Since things have come to this, let's eat first." Having said that, he slapped open a watermelon.
"Is a watermelon picked from a field in a godforsaken place like this really safe to eat?" Hachiman complained.
Moreover, for some unknown reason, despite having walked for an entire afternoon, he did not feel hungry at all, and he barely felt any exhaustion. Although Komachi looked a bit drained, her state seemed to be just a bit of mental drowsiness, with no apparent physical discomfort whatsoever.
"Don't worry, nothing will happen. Even if worst comes to worst, I will help cremate you guys."
Hachiman: "..."
Cremate what? Our corpses? Isn't jumping straight to cremation a bit too cutting corners?
"Where on earth is this place?" After a long silence, Hachiman finally asked again.
"Have you ever heard of the term 'liminal space'?" Asakura, who was currently spitting out watermelon seeds, countered with a question.
"Like the Backrooms?" Hachiman, who spent a lot of time surfing the web, thought about it and asked.
"Pretty much." Asakura put down the melon in his hand: "To be precise, it should be considered 'Weirdcore'."
"Isn't that an... um, internet aesthetic concept? It usually feels like a collection of pictures and things like that?" Hachiman couldn't help but ask, feeling his skin crawl a bit: "Are you saying that things like the Backrooms are actually real?"
"I don't know."
Asakura replied: "It's not like I've ever encountered them."
"..."
"Let's continue talking about Weirdcore. This thing itself has a certain connection to psychological horror in modern people. When almost everyone shares the same feeling toward this aesthetic expression, it can go a step further and be viewed as a manifestation of modern 'collective unconsciousness'."
Asakura summarized once more: "In short, Weirdcore is the venting of excess emotions and memories through 'scenes' rather than 'symbols' by the collective unconscious. It's just like ghost stories or urban legends—sometimes they are clearly completely made up and even somewhat ridiculous stories, but once the legend becomes popular and everyone subconsciously gets an impression of it, even if it didn't originally exist, a supernatural entity corresponding to that legend will be created because of this 'impression'."
"This world is truly dangerous."
Hachiman muttered: "As expected, staying cooped up at home and not going out during summer vacation is the correct choice..."
"Don't worry, ordinary people won't cross paths with this kind of thing."
Asakura said: "Just treat it as a somewhat special trip and don't take it too much to heart. Well, even though I say that, it's not even guaranteed that you'll remember it after this anyway."
"It actually comes with a built-in memory wipe? That feels even more dangerous."
"No, I will manually wipe your memories." Asakura said while eating the watermelon.
"Eh..."
"You're remarkably calm about it. Anyone else would be terrified hearing me say that in the past."
"I feel like with this kind of mess, one would be much happier not remembering it." Hachiman said, half-opening his dead-fish eyes.
"You're unexpectedly perceptive, you know..."
Asakura arched his eyebrows in surprise.
"I just hate trouble, that's all. But as for Komachi..." Hikigaya looked toward his younger sister.
"Mm, having my memories deleted and stuff sounds a bit scary." Komachi said in a low voice.
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it." Asakura said generously.
"Will we be able to choose autonomously when the time comes?" The girl asked expectantly.
"When the time comes, I will just take action directly."
"Ugh, that doesn't feel like you intend to show any mercy whatsoever. Komachi is a bit afraid of pain, so please show a little mercy then, big brother."
"Don't worry, I will be very gentle." Asakura said: "Also, keep an eye on your older brother. His face completely contorted hearing you say that kind of thing."
"That's a no-go, brother! Your face isn't that good-looking to begin with, so if it contorts any further, it'll be even more disastrous!" Komachi then said to Hachiman in a highly sycophantic manner.
"Well, I am truly sorry that my face isn't that good-looking!"
The brother and sister started bickering with one another.
Meanwhile, Asakura was still eating his melon—in both senses of the phrase—completely devoid of any sense of crisis.
This space had already been determined by him to be a place that wasn't dangerous for him at all back when he first took the vehicle to enter it.
Arriving in this space was naturally no coincidence either; rather, it was the first stop of the second half of his tour of supernatural anomalies. Originally, he had even prepared himself to ride this bus a few more times, but he hadn't expected to succeed on his very first attempt.
Looking back now, it was likely that the Hikigaya siblings shared a connection with this space, making theirs a legitimate entry, whereas Asakura was here because of the existence of [Scale]. All filtering mechanisms were ineffective against him, allowing him to sneak into this space along with the siblings like a smuggler.
The barrier of this space was incredibly fragile; even a single flicker of flame from [Candle] could burn right through it. Exactly when to leave depended entirely on Asakura's own whim.
However, he had not yet found the meaning behind the existence of this space—this place was not a magical domain, and there was no such thing as a 'core'. It was precisely because of this that the formation of this liminal space scenario made Asakura feel strange.
If the root cause of the problem couldn't be found, then even if the entire space were burned to the ground, a brand-new Weirdcore space might simply generate again after a while. This was why Asakura patiently accompanied the Hikigaya siblings as they idled about here—although he was, admittedly, very idle himself anyway.