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The boy standing in front of you is the Ultimate Florist, and you are trying your very best to kill him.
Not directly, of course. You don’t think you’re ready for that, and anyway this indirect approach is much more interesting nowadays. It’s like a resource management game, maybe, or a real time strategy game, or even a tactics game. Every character has their own stats, but unlike in a real game the UI doesn’t seem to give you direct access to those numbers, so you have to find indirect ways of measuring them. To measure strength, you have them play a carnival game, the one with the bell and hammer. To measure intelligence, you have them play a strategy game. And to measure cruelty, or violence, or despair…
…well, then you have them play a killing game.
“I don’t understand,” says the boy. “Why are we meeting in the old school building? Why not the regular student council room?”
Like you, the boy is a member of the student council of Hope’s Peak Academy. He’s a class representative from the… 76th class, you think? That information appeared on everyone’s profiles, but you were unable to find any mechanics that directly referenced the stat, so you ended up dismissing it as flavor text. Maybe if this were a really old game you’d have to prove that you’d legally bought it by periodically pulling out the manual and typing in this student’s class number, or that student’s chest size, or whatever, but real life doesn’t have those kind of protections enabled.
“I’m just passing on a message,” you say, which is true. “Soshun Murasame says we need to meet there today,” you say, which is a lie. “He says there’s a dangerous individual on this campus, and the student council should try to meet far away from her for our safety.” Part lie, part definitely the truth. Once upon a time you kept track of how many lies you were able to sneak into any conversation, just to keep track of your acting stat, but by now it’s gotten too easy to keep measuring.
Soshun Murasame is the student council president, of course—not only that, the Ultimate Student Council President. You all look up to him as the only one of you really naturally suited for his job. There’s nothing obviously student-councily about being the Ultimate Florist, like this boy, or the Ultimate Gamer, like you. When you first joined the student council, in fact, you found this fact fascinating enough that you went around and learned everyone’s special talents, thinking maybe if you had a list of the kinds of talents that led one to joining the student council, you might understand your own a little better. But you never went through with that plan.
The more intuitive conclusion, you decided back then, was that if you wanted to understand being the Ultimate Gamer then what you really needed to do was play games. And you were incredibly good at that. But then you met two people who opened your eyes to the possibility of playing games with other people, and the idea that doing so could lead to effects outside of the games. For the first time in years, you noticed yourself truly growing as a person. It was exciting! And then both those people were taken away from you.
One of them, Hajime Hinata, a friend of yours from the reserve course, never came back. The other, Chisa Yukizome, your kind and respectable teacher and mentor figure, did… but when she came back, there was another perspective ready to enter your life.
A terrifyingly interesting perspective.
You point at the television screen in front of you so your visitor looks at it. You’re not entirely sure anymore, even though you were part of the conversation, how she invited herself into your room—no one else has ever been in your room before—but there’s a very small part of you that feels like you’d maybe like to learn.
“So,” you say, “right now in this game I have these two choices. I can steal the treasure that I’ve been paid to guard, and end up with five times the money, or I can do the job and end up with less money but avoid breaking the law.”
Your visitor stares at you. She is totally fascinated by what you’re saying, and you don’t quite know what to do, because this has never happened to you before. “What are you going to do?” she asks.
You take a moment to clear your throat, not even sure what you’re suddenly anxious about, because she’s only asking about the game, isn’t she? You don’t know what else she could possibly be asking about. No other possibility makes sense… and yet, with her you get the feeling that not everything always needs to make sense.
“Well… I guess I’m going to guard the treasure.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m playing the Good path today.”
“I see, I see, I see!” She claps her hands in excitement as she says this, just like a child, and her tie bounces off of her sizable chest. “So this game lets you choose to be Good?”
You just nod, because you really can’t match her in terms of energy. “Mmhmm. Every decision point has two options, one Good and one Bad, and if you want the true endings you need to pick the same option every time. This time I’m playing Good.”
“Have you ever played Bad?”
“Oh, of course! This is a super fun game so I wanted to be sure to get all the endings. I made sure to choose all Bad for my second playthrough, but this is just a replay now.”
Once again something you said has clearly caught her interest, and she leans in closer to you. It’s uncomfortable and also… not, both at the same time. Not for the first time you wish real life had a pause key so you could figure out what kind of strange status effect this is. “Your first playthrough,” she asks, “was Good?”
“…yes.”
“Why?”
“Well…” You stop. Because it was the top option on the screen? Because it made more sense if you thought about the plot of the game’s prequel? Neither of those feels like the kind of answer she’s looking for, so you think about it a bit more. “Because we’re taught to always do Good in life?”
She leans back in her chair and thinks this over, a faint, unusual sort of laughter slipping through her lips as she does so. “Do you know what I think?” she asks.
“No,” you say, and it strikes you this may be the most honest answer you have ever given anyone.
“It sounds to me like this game of yours is a lot simpler than the real world! Only ever two options, Good and Bad… wow! What a gag!”
You bristle for a moment, but it occurs to you that maybe she’s not criticizing your game when she says this, so you pull yourself together. “I guess so,” you say, slowly. “Of course, there are newer games that have much more complicated moral systems than this one, but I think there’s always going to be that same choice at the heart of them all. And their realism is always limited because the game designers want to make sure the players get equally interesting results for every combination of choices, so nobody ever feels they did the wrong thing, even if it was the Bad thing.”
It feels like every bit of her attention is concentrated on you now. “You’re telling me that limits realism?”
“…” You go quiet. It’s not hard, after all; you’ve always been quiet. You’re not sure what she wants you to say here.
She laughs. “Hmm, okay, I see I’m not getting anything out of you on that front! Okay, how about this then! You know this school of ours, right, and how it’s soooooooooo in love with this idea of Hope? That’s a pretty binary concept right there, isn’t it? Well, if you’ve got Hope on one side in your game’s choices, what do you think the other option would be?”
You hesitate again, unsure what will come of answering her question, but you quickly realize you’re only being foolish. They’re just words, after all—they can’t change anything on their own. If this were a game you could skip this entire cutscene and start the next action sequence just by pressing the right key, and none of the gameplay would change at all. But you’re not skipping this cutscene.
“Despair,” you say, though you can’t help but notice you say it quietly, as if you’re worried the school can hear you.
“Yes! Bingo! Score one for Chiaki Nanami!” This time she’s so excited she actually leaps to her feet and dances around the chair for a few seconds before coming back to you again, and it’s with her next question that you realize you were wrong a moment ago, and this isn’t a cutscene. It’s a tutorial sequence.
“So tell me, Chiaki… this Hope we all like to talk about so much, is it Good or Bad?”
You want to tell her it’s Good. That’s why you’re here at this school, after all, isn’t it? But the moment your mouth opens to pronounce the word, you remember Hajime, and suddenly you can’t go through with it. Instead you frown and say, “Neither, I guess?”
“Oho! And why not?”
You don’t think you have the answer to this question yet; you’re about to blow your combo. But the nice thing about tutorial sequences is you can always replay them later. “Because if Hope was simply Good, we wouldn’t need to use a different word for it?”
Her smile is the widest smile you have ever seen.
It’s not until sometime later, in the privacy of the bathroom, that you verbalize what she’s doing. She’s playing you. You—you!—are the game. There’s an ending she’s trying to achieve, and right now she’s trying out different moves on you to see what does the most damage or what grants her the most progress along her desired route. She’s—what’s the phrase?—she’s pushing your buttons. She’s not really interested in you at all.
But there you have to stop yourself mid-rant, not that any of it was out loud of course, because that’s not true, is it? She is interested in you. When you two were in your room together, you could have convinced yourself you were the most important person in the entire world just from the way she was looking at you. Even she couldn’t fake something like that. It’s just that you’re not the only most important person in the world.
There was never a moment when she saw you and thought to herself, “Yes, Chiaki Nanami is the girl my life will now revolve around.” Your entire class, all fourteen of you, are now her subjects—her playthings. And from what you’ve seen from the snippets of conversations with this or that of your classmates, you know she cares as much about their thoughts as she does yours. Oh, she’s interested in you all right, but that interest is in service to some larger interest. To whatever it was she was trying to guide you to that night—has been trying to guide you to, lately, every time you’ve talked elsewhere in the school. How is it possible for her to have such a goal and for her interest yet to be genuine?
You don’t know. Maybe it’s time you consult a walkthrough, or at least a higher-level player. Normally in this kind of scenario you would talk to Instructor Yukizome, but that won’t work this time. So that leaves…
You find him in the gym. He’s been spending more time here lately, you’ve noticed, since she started talking to him; he’s also been looking at his hands more, as if wondering what they’re capable of. For a moment you wonder what quirks you might have picked up recently, but introspection isn’t your goal today, to whatever extent learning about her can be separated from learning about yourself.
“Nekomaru?” you ask, while he cools down from a workout on a machine whose name you don’t know because in your world, gyms are monolithic buildings that turn the screen black and decrease your energy in exchange for increasing your strength.
He looks down at you and his face instantly breaks into an enormous smile, followed quickly by his loud laughter even though neither of you has done anything at all amusing. “Chiaki!” he says after his laughter. “I never thought I’d see you in the gym! Do you want me to show you the basics?”
You shake your head and pout, because even though he’s right that you’re utterly unfamiliar with the basics of exercise it still hurts you a little that he thinks so. “No, I… I actually wanted to ask you about your talent. About team management.”
He laughs again, though this time you’re ready for it. “What’s this?! Not content with simply joining the gym, you want to form a team now? Well, so be it! I, Nekomaru Nidai, will gladly coach you and all your friends in becoming the greatest athletes you can possibly be!!!”
For a fleeting moment you even consider his offer, so infectious is his enthusiasm… but you are a girl on a mission. “No! I don’t want to exercise; I just wanted you to explain things to me. I like it when people explain things. I want you to explain team management.”
He tilts his head in puzzlement, the lightning in his eyes almost dying for a moment. “Explain?! But none of us can truly understand one another’s talents, can we? It is like your games! This humble team manager is honored when you share them with us, and I was glad to learn I was a bad enough dude to rescue the president! But I could never understand games the way you do.”
“…” Protest almost jumps out of you, and it is only your years of habitual quiet that allow you to press it back down. Because there is someone who wants to talk about games with you, to learn about them, to come to understand the things you care about. But she’s yours. You don’t want to share her with Nekomaru—even though rationally you recognize that she’s his too, that he has his own conversations with her, his own personal student and… and teacher…
“Okay,” you say, “then can you answer just one question? When you’re managing someone, you need to care about them, right?”
“Of course! My love for every one of my athletes is the purest and most honest feeling a man can possibly have!”
“But… aren’t you using them? Aren’t you training them to become better?”
“Managing is training, yes!!! I do not understand your little questions, Chiaki.”
You frown. You aren’t sure if you’re not making yourself clear enough because you don’t really speak his language, or if it’s because you don’t really want to know his answer. But if you go to the menu and quit this level early then you’ll lose all your progress. “What I want to know is… if you’re trying to make somebody do something, isn’t your caring about them dishonest? Isn’t that just manipulation?”
Nekomaru stares at you a moment longer before leaping to his feet in front of you, and his jacket seems to explode from his torso with the force of his proclamation. “You have hit upon the very heart of team management!!!” He clasps your shoulder with one enormous hand and answers your question loudly enough for the entire gym to hear him. “Management—training—teaching—can only work if both the teacher and the pupil desire the same thing! In that case the caring is genuine because it is there to help you! The pupil already has the same urge to succeed as the teacher—what the teacher brings is only the knowledge of how to get there!”
You reel, and not only from the overloud bellowing mere inches from your poor ears. This path that you are being led on, this talk of Good and Bad and Hope and Despair… is it the same path you want to go on? Is she using you, or is she helping you?
The answer is there before you are sure you want to look for it. The way she looked at you—the way she listened to you like no one ever has—yes, you want to follow her path. You may not know what that path is yet but she is the only one who can possibly show it to you. You want this. You want to let her care about you. You want to learn what she thinks about hope… and about despair. You’re locked into this route and its inevitable ending.
Nekomaru looks at you, his face showing signs of concern in response to your silence. “Chiaki… is this about her? The things she’s been telling us…?”
You nod. He seems to share your desire to protect the privacy of his own personal bond with her, and neither of you speak her name, though you both know without doubt whom you are talking about.
“She’s… I think she’s teaching me things,” she says. “I think she can help me understand things about games, and about myself, that I never knew were there.”
“Yes!!! I feel the same way about team management!” His voice drops momentarily to a normal person’s volume, which you suppose must mean he is trying to whisper to you. “Chiaki! I do not know yet what path she is trying to guide me down. For now, I still am eager to find out!!! But I swear to you, if it turns out she is an evil influence, I shall lay down my life to protect us all”—and here he raises his arm and bellows to the heavens, and you feel yourself being lifted from the ground and blown backwards, and the very door to the gym is blasted off its hinges by the force of his proclamation—“or my name isn’t NEKOMARU NIDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAI!!!”
She is not the first person to visit you in the hospital while your arm recovers from its collision with the wall when you were blown away by Nekomaru, but hers is the visit you were looking forward to the most. She skips into the room so carelessly it’s like she was already there a minute ago and only stepped outside to check on something. Instead of greeting you like a normal person, she winks at you conspiratorially, moves to one corner of the room, and dramatically pulls away a curtain.
Behind the curtain is your TV, one of your consoles, and two controllers already plugged into it. You stare at her in disbelief. “How did you…?”
She winks again. “Connections! There’s an Ultimate Neurologist somewhere around here whom I was able to convince to smuggle a few tiny things into your room before you got here. Surprised?”
You are very surprised, even flattered, but you are feeling a little too proud just now to say so in words. So you say nothing for a few seconds, which is normal for you, and then ask, “Did you want to play a game together?”
“Yes! Obviously. Why would I have bothered bringing you all this stuff if I didn’t want to play with you? Look, I even brought your silly game where you have to be Good or Bad all the time if you want.”
“That’s only singleplayer,” you say, and start to sort through the pile of your game discs. “Umm, let’s see. This is a fighting game… that would be fun, but I probably shouldn’t try that with my arm right now. This one isn’t very good. Oh… would you like to try a resource management game? In this one, you have a list of characters and you assign them different tasks each day, and you try to build things like a flower pin, or a house, or a boat, and so on.”
She shrugs and hops into the hospital bed beside you, and the cooling fan in your cheeks unexpectedly stops working. “What the hell, I’ll try anything once. Is this how I hold the controller?”
“Yes!” You smile at her and navigate the game to the two-player setup menus. “Did you want to try a cooperative or competitive match? Since it’s your first time, maybe—”
“Competitive!” She laughs off your suggestion before you can even finish making it. “There’s no such thing as cooperation, Chiaki. You know that, don’t you?”
You look at her, suddenly frightened by your bedfellow, and think back to your conversation with Nekomaru. He praised cooperation above all else, didn’t he? You try to reconstruct his argument and moreover to reconstruct the confidence he exuded while making it. “No! Cooperation occurs whenever we have the same goals. When a teacher, for example—“
“Oh, teachers! Come on, Chiaki, do you really think you know more about teaching than I do?” That shuts you up, and the smug glint in her eye shows she’s noticed. “Cooperation is shooting yourself in the foot so you don’t accidentally run faster than anyone else. No, it doesn’t matter what your goal is or how many other losers you share that goal with… you’re going to compete on the way there. Tell me, Chiaki… when you had to take care of your class all by yourself for six months, what did you do?”
You hesitate for a moment, because your answer sounds a little like bragging but on the other hand she probably won’t take it that way. “…I organized activities? I encouraged everyone to show up every day? Um, let’s see, I learned how to book meeting rooms…”
“Right, but less specific than that! In the face of adversity, what did you do? Did you just roll over and take it?”
You shake your head and sit up a little more proudly in bed. “No! I did my best.”
“Exactly! That’s what everyone loves about you so much, Chiaki”—you gulp a little at her choice of word—“you’re always doing your best! And even now that you’ve got your beloved teacher back, are you really going to go back to the quiet, no-account sort of person you were before?”
“…no. I’m going to keep doing my best.”
“And there you have it. That’s teamwork for you… everyone doing their best. But you can’t not notice everyone else, can you? Otherwise you’ll have no idea what’s already getting done. And then it’s just like a game, isn’t it? Somebody’s going to be the best player, and it might as well be you. And we both know why that is, don’t we?”
You look down at your controller; you still haven’t pressed the Start button, so the screen continues to display the choice between gamemodes. “Because I’m the Ultimate Gamer,” you say, and you are. And you play to win, or… or what would be the point?
You choose to play a competitive match after all, and for a while the two of you play together in complete silence, which surprises you until you notice she’s genuinely trying to win. After all that you thought she’d turn the game itself into another conversational gambit, another way to try to win you over to her point of view, but is she? Or is she just being sucked into the fun of playing a game, a feeling you’re certainly familiar with?
One thing you do notice is that she’s doing well. You’re doing better, of course, you are the Ultimate Gamer and besides you’ve actually played this before, but she’s thinking through the consequences of her choices and trying to make long-term decisions for her characters. She’s not investing enough resources in some of the booster effects, which means in a few turns your lead will really take off, but boosters are always complicated and she’s genuinely doing well despite her lack of knowledge. You wonder if she’s done this kind of thing with your classmates—not gaming specifically, of course, but meeting them in their own talents to better impress them with her own.
“…hey, Chiaki,” she says at one point, and you’re surprised again because her voice is the calmest you’ve ever heard it. Is she trying to tell you something? Or is she in the zone?
“Mmmm?”
“You know I’m always going to beat you, right?”
You look at the screen and laugh. “My score is twice yours and there are only three days left.”
“Oh, not in this silly little game!” Her normal energy returns to her in an instant as she casually dismisses all the work the two of you have done in the last forty minutes. “But there are bigger games out there, you know? The games of the real world? Like the ones you play with your classmates to get them to behave that are just like this one, except there you tell yourself that life isn’t really a game because these are real people, your ‘friends,’ not mindless preprogrammed automatons?”
“Ummm…”
“You’re lying to yourself about that, by the way! You’re playing a game there too.”
You try to act like you don’t know what she’s talking about, but you sincerely doubt it works; you’ve never told her, or anyone, that you have that kind of thought sometime, but she read it off you without the least bit of visible effort. In your dismay you almost assign a character to sleep instead of clean by mistake. “What’s your point?” you ask her, and you are briefly shocked at the anger in your voice—too much gaming getting to you, maybe?
“Oh, nothing much! But we’re going to play a lot of games together, you and I, as part of me teaching you how the world really works. Real world games. I just thought I’d let you know in advance that I’m going to win.”
You’ve heard lines like that before from men all over the world who want you to know you’re going to lose to them because you’re a girl and girls can’t be good at video games. You always beat them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get you angry every time, and so you’re angry now. “I don’t think you will,” you tell her.
“Oh really? Such arrogance! Such unbridled hope… or is it really despair? Tell me why, Chiaki! Why do you think you’ll win? Because you’re the Ultimate Gamer? Or is it because—even though I just got through telling you that I’ll be teaching you things, which you think should make you feel cooperative—you’re just such a deeply competitive person?”
You look down at your controller again, not sure what to say. You have a bad feeling she’s right. Your score in the game is still twice hers, but for the first time in your life you think maybe that doesn’t mean anything. Or worse, maybe it means too much. Is this what doing your best really means? Doing better than everyone else as well? And is the deck between the two of you really stacked so completely in her favor?
At the sight of your confusion and despair, she only giggles. “Upupupupupupu…”
The two of you are walking side by side, she blowing bubble gum and you playing industriously through a shooter game on your Game Girl Advance. She’s being unusually quiet, and you realize this is because she can tell you’ve got something you want to say to her. You try to put it off as long as you can, just to spite her—she can be so cruel sometimes, though you could never hold it against her, because it’s your fault for encouraging her—but eventually you give in. As you always do.
“We had a talk about you,” you say, and realize that isn’t really clear enough. “All of us in the class, I mean, we stayed in the room after lessons were over and talked about what you’re doing to us.”
She doesn’t so much as miss a step at this news, though to be fair you suppose she might have heard about it already from someone else. “Did you indeed! Just you students, having such an important conversation all by yourself? You didn’t invite your poor belabored teacher to help you out!?”
“No.” You deliver the final shots to the boss of the current level, watch contentedly as it explodes for several seconds, then pause the game to better devote your attention to your conversation. “This was all about us and what you’re saying to us… about ourselves, and about Hope’s Peak.” She doesn’t offer anything in response, so you shrug and keep going. “Some of us think you should stop talking to us about these things. They think you’re a bad influence.”
“And what were my favorite gamer’s thoughts on the matter?”
“Oh, well.” You smile at her. “You’re definitely a bad influence. But I don’t think that means I’m wrong to talk to you, does it? When I first came to Hope’s Peak, I worried I would spend the whole time staring at my game screens because that was all I knew how to do. All I thought I could do. But I’ve learned so much more in that time, and that’s because of you.”
She giggles, the same creepy giggle she uses whenever you thinks you’ve made progress. “How about the others?”
You hesitate here, both because you don’t want to name names and also because you don’t think you can do your classmates justice. Mahiru, who’d kept her feelings about the death of her friend quiet for so long, spoke at such length and with such complexity and feeling about the true character of Hope’s Peak—how could you try to reproduce that? Nekomaru’s praise of cooperation and teamwork was impassioned and also suspiciously well-reasoned, as if he’d been arguing much the same points in private for some time. Tanaka… well, you can’t quite claim to have understood everything he said, but it was clear he believed it all deeply.
So you just shrug. “Hiyoko’s on your side,” you say, because you don’t want to tell her nothing and besides surely she knows that already. “Whole-heartedly. Mikan too, which surprised me more.”
“Ahhh, yes, my darling Mikan.” She smiles and spits out her gum despite there being no trash cans anywhere remotely near to you. “You remind me of her a little, you know.”
You shiver. Mikan’s attraction is obviously far more physical and emotional in nature than it is based on anything your companion has specifically tried to convince her of, and you’d be lying if you said that didn’t play a role with you too, though you’d really rather she didn’t know that. But maybe it’s impossible to really hide anything from her. Still, you make an effort to seem to ignore her jibe by getting back to the topic you actually wanted to discuss with her: “We decided to have a vote for whether we wanted to keep talking to you about… about whatever it is you’re trying to show us. We decided the vote had to be unanimous. Um, when I say ‘we’ I’m kind of lying, those were mostly my ideas.”
She reaches out to run a hand through your hair and you shiver again. “Such leadership! I take it the vote went well, then?”
“Yes. We all… we all agreed we could at least listen to you.”
“But why did you propose such a thing in the first place? What if somebody had voted against me?! Think of the agonizing despair you’d have felt then, to be cut off from any more of our conversations.” The delight on her face is quite at odds with the things she’s saying, but it’s hardly the first time that has happened.
“It’s like a game,” you say, all but automatically. “Um, imagine you’re playing an FPS game, or even something third-person. You spend the first part of the game playing with only one gun and slowly leveling it up, but then at some point you get a second gun. Now you’ve got an actual choice: do you keep putting your XP into the old gun, or do you try the new one instead? If you do choose the old one, it may seem like your gameplay hasn’t changed from the beginning, but actually, you’re much more attached to the old gun than you were when it was just the only option you had. So I wanted everyone to have to deliberately commit themselves to putting their XP into talking to you.”
For a long while she only giggles, and you would be unnerved if you didn’t know that the giggling only comes when she approves of what you’ve said. She doesn’t put on as big a show anymore of being utterly fascinated when you explain gaming things to her, not like she did the first time she visited your room, but you can tell she still understands and appreciates everything you say. In fact, sometimes you’re not sure you need to say things out loud at all for her to understand them.
Eventually she stops giggling. “Well done, Chiaki!” she says, and a happy warmth spreads through you at those words of praise. “You’ve definitely beaten a level! But are you ready for your bonus round question?”
“Yes! …I think.”
“Why did you care how committed they were to me? Does that really have anything to do with you?”
It’s amazing how good she is at this, at guessing what you really wanted to talk about. Somehow you almost find yourself in despair at how amazing it is. You could easily give a glib answer, something like “I wanted to make you happy,” which is certainly true, but not the reason for your actions and also not something you’re needed for anyway. Even if you hadn’t forced that vote, you’re sure she would have found a way to keep all your classmates on her side. Maybe you hastened the results a bit, but they were never really in doubt.
So you turn to her and tell her the only thing you can tell her, the truth, because you desperately need to know what she thinks about it. “I did it because I could.”
“Ohhhhhhhh?”
“Yeah. I realized I’ve had so much practice leading my classmates to have fun together, I could lead them to other conclusions instead… probably. So I played with them. I figured out which of them had objections to your ideas, and which of them were most in favor, and I played them against each other. When the weak spot of someone’s argument was exposed, I asked them the right questions for massive damage. And because I was so quiet, only saying a little bit here and there, I don’t think anyone even noticed I was doing it.”
She smiles an evil smile, and once again you’re reminded that she’s using you. Blatantly using you. But it’s not so bad, really; you’re loving every step of the way and besides, if you get enough practice, maybe someday you can beat her at her own game. The fact that she probably knows you’re thinking that worries you less than it probably should.
“Listen to you, Chiaki! You’ve come such a long way, haven’t you?”
“I think I have. And if I can do that with my classmates—play them, play them against each other—I can do it with anyone, can’t I? If I get enough practice? Instead of being sad because life isn’t a game and there are options that aren’t available to me, I can treat life as a game and find ways to make those options available. I can convince people to do what I want them to”—just like you, you don’t say out loud—“and because everyone knows I’m quiet, I always have lots of time to plan out my next moves. I bet I could even get better at lying if I wanted to.”
She smirks at you, clearly noticing that despite your list of accomplishments present and future, you’re still not happy about this. “Buuuuuuuut…?”
“But isn’t that just grinding? I mean, what I’m talking about is more or less just leveling up my Charisma stat, isn’t it? I can’t keep manipulating people because I can forever, there needs to be an achievement or boss battle or something waiting for me! But I don’t know what it is, because all I’m seeing is overworld and I don’t even know where the dungeons are!”
It startles you when you realize that you’re crying; it startles you far more when she leans closer and licks up one of your tears. You are utterly unprepared to find her face so close to yours and it’s all you can do to remain upright. She smirks at you again. “My kitten needs a quest, does she?”
She’s never called you that before, and this time you really do need to sit down, but fortunately there’s a fountain behind you and its rim is inviting. “So,” she says while you stare up at her with all your emotions whipped up to a frenzy, “remember that great chat we had that one time?! About your silly game with its silly fucking rules of morality, and how you said that Hope’s Peak Academy couldn’t be good because it was a different word?”
“Yes,” you say, as quickly as possible because you don’t want her to stop talking.
“What do you think now? What do you really think about Hope’s Peak and all it’s trying to do to this world?”
You think about yourself when you first came to Hope’s Peak, terrified that it would only cement you further in your antisocial ways. You think about poor Hajime, and all his worries, and the still unexplained mystery of his disappearance. You think about things she’s hinted at but you’ve never been able to confirm for yourself, like the sinister-sounding “Hope Cultivation Plan.” You think about Mahiru’s friend and Fuyuhiko’s sister, and how little you really know about the circumstances of their deaths, and how it seemed like the school all but ordered them both to keep quiet about the incident. You think—briefly—about the event with Nagito and Instructor Yukizome. You think about Nekomaru’s telling you that no two students could ever really understand each other’s talents. If that’s true, if you’ll never be able to be able to connect with someone over the thing that’s most important to them—what are any of you even here for? Are you here for yourselves… or for Hope’s Peak?
You look up at her and sniff away some of your tears. “I don’t think it’s a very skilled player,” you say. “Maybe it’s looking at those options and believing it’s choosing Good… but I think a lot of the time it ends up following the Bad route instead.”
“Yes! And if trying to spread hope leads to such horrible results, what should you really be doing with your time instead?”
The words taste like stone on your tongue. “Spread… despair?”
“Bingo.”
It’s then that you realize, much too late, where you are: yours and Hajime’s fountain. She’s brought you to this place intentionally. You think you won your conversation with Hajime back then—not that you thought of it as winning back then, when you believed wholeheartedly in cooperation—but you don’t anticipate winning this one. You’ve never once won a conversation with her, and your hope that someday you will… comes and goes.
“But how could despair be a good thing?”
She shrugs. “It’s working well enough on you, isn’t it?”
This stops you in your tracks as one of the less predictable things she’s ever said. “Me? But our conversations don’t make me feel despair… they make me feel happy!”
“Of course they do! But don’t kid yourself that you’re not just focusing on the happy parts because that’s the only way you know how to stay afloat.” She leers at you unpleasantly. “When I started your treatment, you were a promising class representative learning how to make friends for the first time, believing that doing your best meant working together with partners on an equal footing, and just starting to hope there was a life for you outside of your talent. And then I happened, and now look at you! You’re miserable! You have no idea how to meet new people anymore. You’ve locked yourself back in your talent, but now instead of just blowing up aliens you’re also manipulating the people you thought were your friends. Because you can! Because you’re back to thinking life is just a game! Because you want to win! How can you tell me you’re not going against everything Hope’s Peak stands for—that your life isn’t entirely plunged into despair?” She looks at you and starts to laugh again, but more of a menacing cackle than her preferred giggle. “Are you telling me you haven’t even noticed!? Are you shitting me? Oh wow, how delightfully despair-inducing is that?
“And for what have you subjected yourself to all this despair? Because I make you happy! Well, that should tell you something right there, shouldn’t it? Because despair is all I care about, Chiaki, and everything I do for you is for that end.”
You stare up at her, your tears flowing once more. “I… I don’t understand,” you say. “Why are you telling me all this? I thought I was… your student.”
She cackles once more. “Because you need to know this! Because as long as you still think you’re following hope, you can never truly spread despair. You need to accept who you are—what I’ve made you—before you can truly become the despair I know you can be.”
“Become… despair?”
“Think about it, Chiaki! You’ve learned you can manipulate the people around you as if you were in a game. Well, who’s to say you’re not? Do you really care about their feelings any more than you do for random game characters? You can hurt them, make them miserable, even kill them… and why shouldn’t you? What does it matter?”
More despair hits you as you realize you no longer know the answer to her question. You can say what anyone else would say—but you no longer believe it. “But they’re real people. I can’t reset the game afterwards and put them all right back the way they were before I killed them.”
“There are a lot of kinds of games, Chiaki,” she says, lecturing you about the one thing she has no right to know more about than you do. “And we’ve got what, seven billion people on this stupid fucking planet? You’re seriously telling me messing up just one of them is going to make a big difference?”
“I guess… I guess it could be a roguelike of some kind, or even a clicker game… the enemies are all pretty randomized there…”
She leans in and smiles at you again. “That’s right, Chiaki. The enemies are randomized, aren’t they? And all but endless.”
You think again about Mahiru and Fuyuhiko and the pain they’re still bearing because of their losses. If someone dies in real life, other people are affected by their death. But specifically, they’re affected by… despair? Can you really use the creation of despair as an argument against the creation of despair? How could such a shaky premise ever stand against her endless words and smiles? Don’t you want this conversation to be over—don’t you want her to praise you again?
And that’s the trap, isn’t it? You and Mikan—and all the rest as well, you’re sure, each to their own degrees. She’s not just trying to convert you to the ways of despair; it’s her you’re all addicted to now. She is the unstoppable figurehead of the movement, and all you are is a quiet little girl. Sure, a lot of video games are about overcoming overwhelming odds, but she’s made it very clear that she intends to beat you in any real world games.
“The thing a lot of video games are about,” she says, and you wonder not for the first time if she can somehow read your mind, “is changing everything. If you can make people do what you want them to do, there’s no fun in making them believe in hope—they’re already there! A truly skilled player, a true ultimate gamer, should be able to take people who believe in hope… and submerge them in despair. The world is your destructible environment! Isn’t it time you found out what your graphics card can really handle?”
Were you a bit more detached, you’d be able to marvel at how many ways she’s trying to trap you. She’s telling you that making people despair doesn’t matter at the same time she’s telling you it matters more than anything else. She’s appealing to your sense of competition. She’s using your own lingo. And of course she’s beautiful—terribly, fatally beautiful. Maybe you’re finally out of defense points.
“I can always change my mind later, can’t I?” you ask her. “If I don’t like it. I can stop spreading—being—despair.”
She throws her arms around and laughs uproariously. “Of course you can! Nothing we do is ever really permanent, is it? And if by some silly accident something is permanent”—she leans back from you and makes an exaggerated throat-cutting motion—“well hey, it doesn’t really matter.”
“…okay.” You stare at the ground and try very hard to forget that you’re sitting at that fountain where you had such different conversations such a long time ago. “I’ll try it.”
You look up at her, at that face you love so much, and she’s smiling at you. “I’ll try it,” you repeat.
And for the first time in a long while, you smile back at her. You feel happy again. Maybe this is where you were meant to be all along. “I’ll spread despair.”
It’s much later in the school year and in your training, and she’s been excited all day, leading you around like an escort mission or a summoned pet, but now everything’s finally ready. You’re waiting in her room—her room!—sitting on her bed, and you don’t know what to expect anymore, only—and of this you are certain—that whatever she’s planning is going to change your life. The game girl is going to advance. “This is it, Chiaki, this is what I’ve been building you up for all this time!” she’s said to you. “You’re my most important project, Chiaki, not like the rest of those losers from your class!”
You’ve smiled at this, because you know it’s true and also it’s not true, both at the same time. “What have you told my classmates, then?”
“That you’re just a loser compared to them, of course, duhhhh! Come on, are you excited to see my surprise for you or not?!”
And you are excited. You look down at your hands and there’s neither a controller nor your handheld there and somehow you hadn’t even noticed. You don’t know what’s coming. You’re not so naïve as to think it’ll be physical, because your connection isn’t physical—except in the sense that it absolutely is—but that doesn’t rule much out. She’s holding your experience bar, and she’s noticed it’s almost full, and now you’re going to level up… whatever that means.
“Ohhh Chiaki! Are you still here? Are you are you are you are you are you?!” She’s returning now, her voice getting louder as she walks the hallway to her room.
“Yes,” you say, just loud enough for your voice to carry outside.
“Great! I’ve told you about the Hope Cultivation Plan, haven’t I? The Izuru Kamukura project? Once or twice? Dropped a few hints here and there?”
You suddenly have even less idea where this is going than you did a moment ago. “Yes…?”
She prances into her room, followed by a strange boy with improbably long hair and the most evil aura you’ve ever known. “Well, I thought it was time you two finally got to meet each other! Izuru Kamukura, meet Chiaki Nanami! Chiaki, meet Izuru! Except, wait, my mistake…”
You stare into the boy—Izuru—‘s scorching red eyes. You cannot move. Everything feels suddenly horribly wrong.
“Upupupupupupu! Isn’t that so terribly despair-inducing? What a mistake I made! How can I introduce the two of you…”
Izuru stares back at you. His expression is completely dispassionate, even bored. He clearly doesn’t recognize you at all.
“…when you’ve already met?!”
You recognize him.
You can’t bring yourself to think his name, but you recognize him.
You remember the sweet, earnest, worried boy he used to be before he disappeared… before, you now realize, Hope’s Peak Academy got to him. For a moment the crushing despair encircling your heart lifts as you feel a shot of pure rage—this is the evil led to by following hope?—but even that rage quickly fades back away. It’s tempting, so so tempting, to think that she brought Izuru here to you so that you could feel that anger, but she’s already turned you against your school. This added measure would be unnecessary for that goal, and she knows you far too well to make that mistake.
No, your true answer is in the delight you see in her eyes as she watches you: delight in your despair, without the least hint of love or friendship remaining. Everything, for her, was for this moment. She has taught you—raised you—so that you would know her methods, know without doubt that she is now cutting you loose and betraying you. It is not enough that you feel despair at the sight of Izuru Kamukura, remembering the boy he used to be. She wanted you to know that all you ever were to her was a toy to prepare for that despair—because with that knowledge, your despair grows deeper still. You’ve noticed some of your classmates stumbling around with sunken eyes lately, and in this moment you realize you were not even the first for her to destroy in this way.
Something hard hits your elbow and you notice that you’ve fallen off the bed, as you used to do when you lost a game. But then, you have. This is the bad ending. You, the golden girl of 77-B, became enticed—ensnared—seduced—by this creature, and watched with glee as she tore your life down around you. She has leveled you up and now she is sacrificing you to add to her own power.
Her familiar, incessant laughter surrounds you as you stare at the floor from your ninety-degree angle, no longer even able to move as despair fills your useless body. This is the end, gamer girl! You’ve made her bed and lain in it, and now you have no continues, no extra lives, no save files to reload—this is the real world. All you ever, ever were to her was a pathetic animal to poke with sticks and see how it dies. That is your true despair. That is what she wanted you to see.
And then… the credits fail to roll.
It’s not her ending—she still has more of your classmates to destroy. It’s only yours. But if it’s your ending, that means you’re still the player.
You still have a controller.
And this isn’t a game… but it so very much is.
When you reach the bad ending in a game, there’s nothing left for you to do, even if your character is still alive; the writers of the game have dictated that your story is over because everything important has been taken away and there is no chance of recovering it. But since you are still alive—the laughter still surrounding you is proof enough of that—that means you still have a chance to view things differently. Maybe you’ve been wrong all this time about what’s important.
You get back onto the bed—and the laughter suddenly stops. She stares at you in genuine confusion, and, “Chiaki?” she asks, while Izuru continues to watch the two of you without interest.
“That was very well done,” you say, and you marvel at how heavy your voice sounds and yet how light your body feels. “You used all the weapons I was weak against and obliterated my life bar.”
She stares at you a moment longer before beginning to laugh again, hints of frenzy dancing about her expression. “Yes! Yes, I did, didn’t I? Oh, the despair you felt just now, it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted, since, since, since… well, since little Fuyuhiko earlier today, honestly. But still!”
You nod. “Well done. You’ve beaten the tutorial sequence.”
That shuts her up, at least for a moment. Then she’s standing over you, tie dangling in your face, shouting. “Tutorial sequence? What the hell do you mean tutorial sequence, you little twerp?! I ruined your life! I filled you with despair—delightful, delectable despair! And you have the nerve to sit there on my bed and say that was nothing more than a tutorial sequence?”
“It’s like a shooter game,” you say to her, your years of quiet calmness allowing you to ignore her angry incoherence altogether. “At the beginning the game knows the player is still getting used to the controls, so she doesn’t have to handle more than a handful of enemies at once, or maybe even just one. Even the first boss battle is always pretty easy. The player won’t be able to beat the game until she can handle entire screens full of enemies and enemy bullets and defeat everyone all at once.”
She’s stomping around the room now, knocking little keepsakes off of her desk and onto the floor as she goes. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!” she yells, and suddenly rounds on Izuru. “Izuru, make her spit out what she means!” Izuru pays her no heed.
You smirk. “Anyone can unsettle a single person if they try hard enough—look at you right now. And you’re very, very good at that. You were a different person to every one of my classmates, telling us all exactly what we needed to hear for us to believe in your cause and want to do anything you’d say. But if you keep acting like that—treating every person like their own little game—it’ll take you forever to really spread despair across the world, won’t it?”
“But worming my way into people’s heads is what I love to do,” she says, almost whining, and for a moment you marvel at how you used to idolize her, when in reality you simply never dared challenge her on anything that she said.
“Then perhaps,” you answer her, standing up to look her full in the face, “it’s time to stop solo-questing and join a party. Perhaps you need someone who can manage whole groups of people at once and play them off of each other—someone who doesn’t mind working from the shadows.” You extend your hand. “Hi, I’m Chiaki Nanami. The Ultimate Gamer. Except, wait, my mistake… we’ve already met.”
The last bit is an improvisation, even more than the rest of your speech, but it seems to be the ironic touch that seals the deal, both reminding her of your earlier descent into despair and also building off of it. She takes your hand and begins to shake it, hesitantly at first, then gaining in vigor until you would grimace in pain if you hadn’t recently lost interest in the concept.
Then she stops. “You think you’re pretty clever, Chiaki,” she says, “and maybe you are! I look forward to finding out! But don’t think for a moment I don’t know what’s really going on in that pretty head of yours!”
You find yourself off-beat again, or maybe your foot misses the dance-pad altogether, and your combo abruptly dissipates. “What’s that?”
“Hope.” She spits it out like a dirty word. “You convinced yourself that I was in love with you or some shit like that, and now you’re putting on this whole act because you hope if you work well enough for me, if you kill enough people, if you spread enough despair, maybe someday I really will love you.” She smiles cruelly. “Well? I’m right, aren’t I?! Upupupupupu!”
You do your best to hold your ground against her. “I’m not doing this for hope,” you say, “but for despair. I understand now that humans are nothing but game entities, and I am nothing but my talent. I will spread despair because there is nothing else worth doing.”
But you still haven’t learned how to lie to her. You look down at the ground and add two more words. “…I think.”
She picks up on this last admission, as you knew full well she would. Her smile grows wider and crueler. “You don’t know why you’re doing this, do you, Chiaki? You’re ready to work to end the world with me… without even knowing for sure why?”
Suddenly, even though she’s more or less on your side, you cannot look her in the eye. “I guess so.”
“Ahhhhhhh!” she says, and it is the happiest sound you have ever heard a human produce, “how positively despair-inducing! I can work with this.”
Somewhat more than a dozen computer monitors surround you in your control room, each showing the confused face of one of your fellow student council members as the security cameras in the old classroom swivel to follow them. The Ultimate Florist, the Ultimate Student Council President, and all the rest are present, and they’re probably wondering where you are. In a moment they’ll be wondering why the doors are locked. And in another moment…
“Hi,” you say, and the final camera activates: the one pointing at you. You flip the switch that will broadcast your image, and whatever other images you choose to add to the stream, to the entirety of the reserve course. “I’m Chiaki Nanami, 77-B’s class representative—the Ultimate Gamer. I’ve gathered you here to play a game with you.”
All of that is true. Everyone standing there—except Soshun Murasame, who needed a subtler hand—was sent there directly by you, because you wanted them to feel the despair of learning they were betrayed by one of their own. You wanted that despair to lie behind their last moments so that you could drink it in for yourself and also show it to the reserve course. It’s not there just yet—they still don’t know what’s going on, they still think you’re joking—but in a moment, oh, yes.
It’s not your first time livestreaming a game. You tried it once or twice before you first came to Hope’s Peak Academy, but one too many comments demanding you remove your shirt made you realize the world was more interested in your body than in the game you were playing, so you gave that up. That won’t be a problem this time. As you begin to read out the killing game’s sparse instructions and watch the despair start to settle on the faces of your fellow council members, you convince yourself you can feel the attention and outrage of the reserve course growing as they watch your stream.
From then you settle into the zone, as you call it, and you have no idea how much time passes before it’s over. Your focus is entirely on the game—switching the broadcast to this camera or that to show each student’s final moments, unlocking hidden weapon caches, even allowing yourself the occasional moment of professional commentary. A new wave of despair washes through your body every time one of them dies, and you’re suddenly glad you’re sitting down because you don’t think your legs could take this
When it’s all over you switch the broadcast back to your own camera so that the reserve course can see your calm, contented, bloodless smile. You’ve won the game. You didn’t get a perfect score, you guess, because Izuru left Soshun still technically alive, but there’ll be time to deal with him later. “Thanks for watching!” you tell the reserve course through your camera. “This special episode has been sponsored by Hope’s Peak Academy, paid for by the generous support of viewers like you.”
Then the door behind you opens, and Izuru—bloodied, even limping slightly, but still filled with purpose—walks in so that the two of you can perform your final lie together. You look back at him—you allow yourself to look worried—and you cut the camera feed.
It’s the final despair for the reserve course. You described Izuru in your commentary as a victim in all this, the unwilling subject of the Hope Cultivation Plan, which allowed you to frame yourself as the mastermind of the council’s mutual killing game. You made yourself the villain to give the reserve course somebody else to hate. They would have one last hope to cling to, the hope they could find you someday and enact justice on you. But by pretending that Izuru killed you too, you strip them even of the hope of revenge… or at least, you redirect that hope entirely against Hope’s Peak Academy.
It is a good plan. An excellent lie.
Although, when Izuru lifts you from your chair by the throat and holds you dangling helplessly before him, you abruptly realize it may turn out to not be a lie at all.
You fight his grip—instinctually, at least, your body’s basic urge to live asserting itself—but it’s obviously useless. Izuru Kamukura is the Ultimate Hope, talented beyond imagination. All you do is play video games. The air is leaving your body, the life, the hope. This is a cutscene for sure, your controls all useless as you wait once more for the screen to fade to black. Already there are spots dotting your vision, suggesting your graphics card is failing, and your speakers are going staticky and parts of your body have their drivers crash. Only your brain is still working—overclocking, even—as you process what’s happening to you.
Whose decision was this? Hers or Izuru’s? You don’t even know. One way or another, it seems you’ve outlived your usefulness and now you won’t even get to tell her goodbye. The idea that your life is being stolen from you in your moment of greatest triumph is the most depairful idea you’ve ever imagined, and somehow, as you hang by the neck and your lifebar drains away, the despair washes through your body one last time and you find yourself smiling.
Izuru sees this, snarls, and throws you to the floor.
You spend the next several minutes choking for air, staring at the closed door long after Izuru has left. What just happened? Did he refuse to execute a victim who welcomed her sentence? Did he worry he was giving you hope instead of despair? Or was it the boy you still can’t bring yourself to name, somewhere deep inside him, refusing to kill you because he learned that you still have the capacity for happiness? Only one thing’s for certain: what you thought was a cutscene was actually a quick time event, and you passed.
Then she’s kneeling beside you—was she in the room the whole time? watching you die?—and she’s smiling her humorless smile. “Aww, poor Chiaki! Does your neck hurt? Here, let me kiss it all better!”
She does. As her first kiss alights on your throat, your breath—what you have of it—catches without warning. Her next, and her next, are just as welcome, and then she begins to move. Her next kiss is higher up on your neck. Then your chin. Then at last, at last, your lips. You kiss her back, because close to both death and despair as you are, it’s all you want and know how to do. She shifts her body to lean over you better, and you let her. You feel her exquisitely nailed fingers begin to undo your ribbon and unbutton your shirt. You reach down to figure out what, if anything, she actually keeps under her improbably short skirt. From the quick time event you progress to a new minigame.
This minigame isn’t a reward for you, you realize in one flash of lucidity while your head nestles between her breasts and all your processors are clearly overheating. Your involvement is all but incidental. What she’s celebrating—what you’re both celebrating—is the very fact that you can respond like this. The deaths of the student council have earned no mourning from you, only a glorious moment of hedonism and exploration of one another’s bodies. The despair that their deaths brought you led only to happiness, not sadness. And yet even in this insult that no one else can witness, you are still able to find despair, and with despair comes only bliss.
Afterwards, as you lie in her arms with a score tally animating before your eyes and an Achievement Unlocked! sound echoing in your ears, she begins to inspect your breasts in earnest, and you smile at the irony that this particular livestream really did get your shirt off. “What are you doing?” you ask her. You know your voice sounds more loving and affectionate than it should and you’re revealing your true feelings for her, feelings quite separate from those you feel for despair in the abstract, and you know that she’ll recognize this and take it as an advantage to laugh at you… but you don’t care.
“Upupupu! I’m checking out your proportions, what does it look like I’m doing?” You smile again, knowing all that information is freely available on your profile and it looks like she dismissed it as just so much flavor text, and you are weak, so you are happy. “You mostly keep everything hidden under your shirt and jacket and shit, but you’re actually a pretty good match for me!”
Another burst of despair reaches you as you consider that maybe this was the true reason she wanted to take your clothes off—not to insult the memories of the student council, not even to enjoy the release of doing all those things with you, but simply to measure your body. She sees the realization hit you and she smiles hugely, and you sink deeper into despair—and into her arms—accepting that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never really be her equal at this. Life is competition, not cooperation, and she always wins. Every move you make for despair is tainted by the fact you’re also doing it for her, because you love her, but she holds no such weakness for you. You and all your classmates and all the world are nothing more but tools to her. Today you have done a good job, but she won’t praise you for it tomorrow—not because she’ll have forgotten, but because she’ll want to see you suffer at the lack of praise. And suffer you will, and despair, and all the rest of it… gladly.
“You know, Chiaki,” she says, “we’re all going to have to lie low for a while after this. I’ve got my own plans, but you and Izuru should disappear. We don’t want anyone finding out you’re still alive, after all!”
You nod. That makes sense. “Where should I go?”
“Ehhhhh? What the hell do I care?! Towa City or something, you’ll figure it out. But listen, while you’re gone I want you to practice your acting, okay? There’s more to it than just telling convincing lies. The shut-in geek girl look’s really cute on you, but you’re going to need to be able to put more energy into things for what’s coming next.”
You gaze into her eyes, pathetically open and adoring. “What’s coming next?”
“We’re going to do another killing game! Or you are. I’m going to get a bunch of chumps together and lock them in this building, and I want you to play a game with them. Not a quick slaughter like this bullshit, a proper game, lasting days or even weeks, with rules. That stuff’s all your forte more than mine. We’ll get you a Monokuma to control, like a robot one, and you’re going to watch them all kill each other and broadcast it to the world.”
To the world. Just hearing the words from her lips shows you how petty this game with the student council really was. This wasn’t your ultimate achievement; it was one more tutorial sequence. The overwhelming despair of her plan is filling your body and you desire nothing more but to play the minigame with her again and revel in your impurity, and maybe she’ll even let you, but you need a little more information first. “Why do I need to practice acting?”
“In case you’re caught! I don’t want them to see little old Chiaki Nanami sitting in her control room, quietly presiding over their fates. I want them to see fucking Junko Enoshima, so that’s who you’re gonna have to be!”
“Junko…!?” You stare at her, suddenly terrified. “But you—but there’s no way that I can—”
She laughs this off. “I said you’re going to be Junko, so you will be Junko, got that?! Look, I’ll even send Mukuro in there with you to help you out, and you can do anything you want with her. You got this, Chiaki? This is going to be the most despair-inducing thing we’ve ever done! We’ll take the very hope of the world and make it destroy itself, and it’ll be your fingers guiding it every step of the way! How can you not want to be part of this?!”
You continue to stare at her, seeking for the truth she’s not telling you, because there has to be a catch somewhere… and you find it. She’s not passing this chance on to you because you’ll be so good at it—although you will be, you are the Ultimate Gamer after all—but because she doesn’t know for sure whether it’ll work. And because it’s her that’s uncertain, that’s as good as total certainty that it won’t. You’re going to get caught doing this, and you’re going to die. You and Mukuro both are being sacrificed in the name of despair so that she can continue her own work in private.
Because despite all the love you feel for her, there are really only two ways she knows how to interact with people. She tells them the truth to make them do what she wants, or she tells them lies to make them do what she wants. You’re all tools to her, nothing more… but also nothing less. Even she is a tool to herself, a tool for despair. At the moment she’s handling you by lying to you, and whether she trusts you enough to believe you’ll see through her lie doesn’t really matter, because you’ve always known all of this. From the beginning you’ve known she was playing you. But what drew you to her… what still draws you… is that she’s so honest about it.
Even before Izuru picked you up by the throat, did you ever truly believe you’d get out of all this alive?
You guess… it doesn’t really matter.
Everything is for despair. Everything is for your teacher.
You accept her betrayal with a kiss.