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“Welcome. Yes, please take a seat. Make yourself comfortable. There's no need to feel intimidated here.”
How could he not feel intimidated?
It was Komaeda's first time ever being in front of the academy's board of trustees. He had heard about them, but only in whispers, as if they were some kind of mythical beings who may or may not have existed. Standing in front of them, however, he was finally able to put the rumors to rest and say for himself that they did indeed exist.
They were just a bunch of old men sitting around a table in near darkness. It was more like they were trying to intimidate him.
“This is about what happened during the practical exams, isn't it,” Komaeda said. He didn't pose it as a question so much as a statement, feeling completely sure of why he had been called there. He watched them as he took the open seat in front of the door, but he couldn't make out their expressions to tell whether he was actually welcomed there or not. The single light above the center of the table cast their faces in shadow.
The old man who greeted him first nodded his head. “Very astute. Yes, this is about what happened. But, please, there's no need to make that face. You weren't sent here just to be told that you were being expelled. Rather, we have a unique offer we would like to propose.”
An offer?
“I get to stay at the school if I accept it...?” That was the only kind of offer that Komaeda could imagine.
“You're a clever boy, I see. Yes, that is what we're ready to propose.”
Another one of the councilmen spoke. “You see, Komaeda-kun, we on the committee have always been... skeptical of the validity of 'luck' as a talent. That man- Oh, excuse me. Principal Kirigiri has been very vocal about his interest in luck. He's insisted that we select another student by raffle for the coming semester. We've been hesitant, as we've seen nothing to even prove the existence of a thing like luck, but... Well, this incident has made things rather interesting.”
Komaeda's palms felt clammy. He clutched the sides of his seat and straightened his back. “Ah... Well, you flatter me. There's really nothing interesting about my luck. It's just unfortunate. It's not like I can even control it.”
“Yes, but what if you could control it?”
“What?”
Their words caught him off guard. His ears were suddenly very open.
The committee shared a look with each other before one of them continued. “Your luck appears to be an astounding asset. In the right hands, we imagine it could be capable of great things. We would like to research your talent in conjunction with another one of our projects.”
“What kind of project?”
“That's confidential information, I'm afraid. The privacy of others is involved, so it's a sensitive matter. If you agree to accept our offer and sign a non-disclosure agreement, we'll be able to tell you all about the way your luck could help grow the hope of Hope's Peak.”
Their offer sounded too good to be true, but it had captured Komaeda's interest. They were saying all of the words he wanted to hear. If it were possible for him to personally assist in making Hope's Peak an even more brilliant place, then he was willing to do that under any circumstances. They didn't need to pose it to him as an ultimatum.
“What exactly do you need me to do...?”
Even with their faces obscured by shadows, Komaeda could make out the smile on the face of the councilman who sat across from him. “We just want to observe you and your talent. That's all.”
“My luck... could make hope grow...?”
If that was all, then...
“Yes. It may even be the final component we've been looking for. A hope like none that's ever been seen may be born with your help,” he said, folding his hands over a manila folder on the table. “Remember, Komaeda-kun, you don't have many choices here. We're already skeptical of luck as a talent, so if you don't wish to join us in this project, then you will be expelled from the academy.”
From the folder, he produced a sheet of paper and they passed the form across the table to him. Komaeda could see the words on the page, but his brain refused to interpret what they said, his thoughts scattering in a thousand directions. He could barely focus on a single word of it. It would have been careless if he signed something without completely understanding what he was getting himself into, but he just had a feeling. It felt like his luck was providing him with a rare opportunity as a way to repay him for the trouble it had caused.
They were right. He didn't have many choices, and there was only one choice that looked correct.
He signed his name.
“Now that we have your signature, we can tell you about the Kamukura Project,” the councilman said, tucking away the signed form. “Through this project, we are assembling the talents of every student that has ever crossed the threshold of Hope's Peak and gathering them together to create one magnificent, unified hope. He will embody the ideals of this school and guide the world toward the future our founder envisioned.”
“'He'? Who are you referring to?”
“The new Kamukura Izuru, of course. With any luck-” He paused to laugh at his own turn of phrase. “Indeed. With any luck, you may be able to meet him yourself.”
Was he really someone that special?
The thought that his luck might finally be useful for something made Komaeda shiver.
He wanted to meet the person who would inherit his luck.
The tests weren't that difficult in the beginning. Just like the committee told him, they wanted to observe him. On the first day, they left him alone in a room. It wasn't a very small room. It wasn't big, either, but it felt spacious because of the way it lacked any defining features. There were no windows in that room; just the door he entered through, four white walls, a bright light over him, a table, a chair for him to sit in, and a stack of books for him to entertain himself with.
They gave him meals at regular times and his first day concluded without incident. It made him feel a little paranoid that he hadn't fulfilled their expectations. His luck had done absolutely nothing. Normally, he would have been happy about that.
Gradually, they added things to the room. They gave him a radio and a laptop as well as a book shelf. Komaeda hesitated to touch the laptop – not necessarily because he had any fear of his luck interfering with it in any way. He was just worried that they would try to extract further data from its usage. He didn't make a habit of searching for obscene things on the internet, but he had a strange feeling about the people who were observing him and he didn't want to provide them with anything more than was necessary.
They were... unsettling.
It was hard to describe why he felt bothered by them. The researchers had been nothing but polite to him. They were feeding him well and they even gave him a nice place to sleep, but he was starting to get worried...
They weren't letting him out.
Granted, he hadn't asked them if he was allowed to leave, but it seemed strange to him that they would want him to stay there in the facility when he had a perfectly good dorm room he could have returned to. It may have been for the sake of privacy again, but he had already signed that agreement, so they shouldn't have been worried about him telling anyone about their project.
The facility was located beneath the old school building. Back when he had class there, he had no idea that such a place even existed. Its halls were labyrinthine and many. A dangerous sort of curiosity made him want to explore there, but he was never allowed too far. A researcher would always find him before he went too far and he would be escorted back to his room.
He hadn't seen that person they referred to as 'Kamukura' yet, even though he was apparently their number one subject.
On the seventh day of living in that white room, one of the researchers brought a fresh pile of books. Komaeda thanked him and expected him to simply leave the room like they always did, but the researcher insisted that he arrange the books on the shelf for him to keep his area orderly. It was the first kindness Komaeda had experienced from one of them. It even made him smile.
The book shelf collapsed on him. Apparently it had been heavy enough to break both of his legs.
Komaeda didn't see that researcher again.
Good luck wasn't going to find him in a place like that, Komaeda concluded. In the sterile silence of those four walls, there were only opportunities for bad luck to manifest. It started to make him feel even more paranoid, wondering if or how things were going to get worse. The longer he spent there, the more he came to think that they were encouraging his bad luck. He didn't know why they would want to do that, especially after it had injured one of their own, but that didn't seem to deter their interest in him.
They also never mentioned that other researcher again, as if the consequences of his luck had been inconsequential.
But he kept his hopes up like always. He looked forward to rejoining the class.
When he asked them how much longer he would need to be there, they vaguely told him that he needed to stay until the project was complete. No one would tell him when the project had started or how long they expected it to take.
Nobody really seemed to have an interest in telling him anything...
But he listened. Komaeda was always listening.
After weeks spent in that room where small misfortunes were slowly accumulating, he abandoned any pretense of secrecy. He knew that they had cameras on him. Knowing that they were monitoring him and knowing that he wouldn't be removed from their research no matter what he did, he would frequently press his ear to the door and listen to the conversations outside.
Kamukura Izuru was very important. That was all he gleaned.
Here and there, he caught mentions of 'preparations' and 'procedures'. Komaeda couldn't help but wonder about what they were doing. That Kamukura person was the reason he was brought there, and he was the only interesting thing for him to think about when he wasn't reading. Based on the things he heard, it sounded like he was a science experiment – like Frankenstein's monster or a chimera cobbled together from others' parts.
He couldn't believe that, though. It sounded like they were taking the talents from other students and were injecting them into him. That was the same kind of thing he imagined when he was signing the agreement – that his luck would be researched and then physically placed into another person – but that just... didn't make any sense.
A hope like that couldn't be real hope.
That was what he thought. That was what he thought he believed, only because he couldn't imagine a hope that was manufactured in a lab.
The greatness of his classmates came from the fact that they needed to work so hard to strengthen their talents. It sounded too easy if someone was able to simply inherit all of those talents without even having to lift a finger. A person like that wouldn't know what it meant to struggle. Even someone full of talent would fall if they didn't know how they reached the top to begin with.
So he felt a bit of resentment towards him, whoever he was. Hope's Peak suddenly didn't look like the place Komaeda was used to. There were all of those scientists conducting their 'research' where no one else could see, and the whole lot of them sounded delusional.
Because he wasn't able to leave, however, he tried to believe them.
There would be a hope who shared his talent. As worthless as it was, there would be someone else with his luck. For a chance to meet such a person, he was willing to do whatever they told him.
After about a month of that isolation, they finally progressed on to different experiments. Despite the slight apprehension Komaeda felt at the back of his mind, they weren't difficult things. Whenever they asked him to do something, they smiled widely, but it wasn't the same as the smile that one researcher had given him. Their smiles didn't remind him of his classmates at all. Their eyes looked possessed with the desire to research him.
They played games with him.
They gave him dice and asked him to roll specific numbers. Finally, his good luck was able to shine. If they asked for sixes, he rolled sixes on as many dice as they wanted. If they wanted ones, he rolled them. He could do any combination, too.
He had to remind them that it was just his luck. He wasn't personally doing anything special to change the outcome of his rolls.
They played rock-paper-scissors with him. Then they played it again, blindfolded. If they threw paper, he threw scissors. It was that simple. It didn't matter whether they blindfolded him or not because he knew that his luck would always prevail in such a low-stakes situation.
They asked him to play darts. He hit the bull's eye every time – even blindfolded.
But, eventually, their requests became harder to agree to. The second he showed hesitation, they reminded him that he didn't have any choice. If he needed time, then they would wait for him, but they wouldn't wait forever, determined to progress with their experiments. All for the sake of hope.
As long as he reminded himself of that... That everything was for the sake of giving birth to an even greater hope...
It made it a little easier to accept what they wanted him to do. He didn't have a choice, but...
No, he didn't have a choice at all, but...
If it was for hope, then it was alright. It was fine. Everything was for the sake of that person. Like the prize waiting at the goal line, that person would be there at the end when all of their experiments were over. So it was alright. Komaeda knew that he could keep holding on through anything for a promise like that.
They asked him to play darts again.
They promised that it wouldn't hurt too badly.
Even with the promise of hope in his heart, Komaeda still winced every time a dart struck the board behind his head.
It was hard to say whether things were getting worse there in that underground facility. No matter what kinds of things they asked him to do, his luck continued to surpass their expectations, keeping him protected. All of that time he spent in the white room must have been enough to gather up a well of good luck, but like that time when the book shelf fell, Komaeda was worried that a terrible misfortune was just waiting for its chance to strike.
During one of their sessions, the researcher he was working with set down his pen and addressed him while staring at his clipboard.
“I'm very sorry about what happened to your parents.”
Thinking that his ears must have been mistaken, Komaeda looked up. “...Excuse me?”
He tapped his pen on the edge of the clipboard, still not meeting his eyes. “It says here in your file that you survived a plane crash that took the lives of your parents.”
He didn't really want to think about that. “That's true. That was... my fault. My luck wasn't able to protect them, but... It killed the hijacker, too! What a dangerous situation. It was a miracle that I made it out alive.”
“I see...”
Komaeda had a bad feeling.
“I hope you're in the mood for a trip,” the researcher said. When he finally raised his eyes, Komaeda saw the same single-minded desire swirling in them. It was like there was nothing else they could think about. Even his safety... Even their safety apparently meant nothing in their pursuit of results.
“Wh-what are you saying?” Komaeda asked, looking around. Two other researchers had entered the room, both of them significantly larger than him. Each one seized an arm and held him, solidifying his fear. “You can't be serious. If you get on a plane with me... Please, don't. You've already seen what my luck can do, haven't you? After all of the positive results I've given you, something terrible is bound to happen.”
“Would that not be a positive result?” he asked him, smirking. “Any result that proves the strength of your luck is a positive result, Komaeda-kun. Our lives are dedicated to our research – especially this research. Do you not understand its importance? Imagine if there were someone with your luck – someone who was more talented than you, who had the ability to control its effects.”
From the beginning...
That was all he could think: From the beginning, they had never intended to help him. It was just a convincing play of words that made him think that they had any intention of making his life easier.
It was all for him.
Kamukura Izuru.
“You'll die.”
They shared a laugh. “Will we?” he asked. “Your luck also prevented any casualties during the gymnasium explosion. There's no way we'll know for sure until we test it for ourselves. If we recreate the situation that caused that plane crash, will the results be different this time? I'm already dying to find out.”
“Please...”
Weren't they hearing him? Didn't they care about themselves?
He didn't want that. More than anything, he never wanted to experience that moment again. There was no doubt in his mind that his current level of luck would strike them down. Going ahead would be tantamount to suicide. He was afraid for himself, of course, but he was even more afraid for them. Even when it was at its worst, his luck found ways to protect him and keep him safe, but its effects often dispersed, affecting the people around him.
They would die.
They were going to die.
“Not again...” Komaeda's voice came out softly, but even he heard the way it shook. Distress hit him and his voice grew. “Please... Please, don't do this! I don't want to do this again! Anything else! Choose anything else but this!”
“Oh, Komaeda-kun...” Putting his clipboard under his arm, the researcher who was speaking to him turned and headed to the door. “We've already made preparations.”
There was no stopping them or fighting it, so he didn't even bother to scream.
His arms were strapped to the seat on the plane even though there would have been no way for him to run once they were in the air. For the first thirty minutes, Komaeda did nothing but shake and breathe heavily as he listened to them talk casually amongst themselves. When he finally tried to speak to them, they didn't respond to him. It was like he wasn't even there. It was like he wasn't even a person. He was just their experiment, along for the ride.
He had no idea where they were going. From his seat, he could see out the window, so he could tell that they were over water. That frightened him. That was really bad. If anything decided to happen while they were above the ocean, he didn't know how they planned to save themselves. He wasn't optimistic that a few flotation devices would be able to save them in the middle of nowhere.
After about an hour in the air, they found out that something was wrong.
At that point, it was already too late.
Something hit one of the engines and the plane rapidly began to lose altitude. The pilot quickly redirected their course, but there was no doubt that they would crash. The three researchers who accompanied him started looking around for their parachutes and made the horrifying discovery that they only had three parachutes aboard the whole plane. With five passengers including the pilot, that meant that two people were going to be out of luck.
One of them grabbed one of the parachutes and ran to the hatch at the side of the plane. He jumped out before he could be caught by the others.
The other two watched as he descended over the water, foolishly not having taken a life preserver with him. The second he hit the water, he started struggling to swim.
All Komaeda could do was remind them that he had warned them. The remaining two looked at him spitefully.
After strapping on a life preserver, another one of them jumped out of the plane. At the point when he should have deployed his parachute, something went wrong and he hit the water hard. Komaeda couldn't see what was going on from his seat, but apparently that one didn't surface.
It was just him and the one who had proposed that particular experiment who remained. Komaeda watched him, grinning bitterly at the predictability of their situation. That researcher sat down across from him and secured himself in with his seatbelt, not trusting that his parachute would work after what he'd just seen. Komaeda begged him to release his arms for him, but he was ignored once again.
It was strange.
That man had seemed so willing to risk his life for his research, but when he was about to die, it looked like he regretted the decision he made.
They crashed on land; a small island somewhere out in the ocean. Komaeda closed his eyes before the crash and they didn't open until sometime after. His whole body felt weak and tired, exhausted from stress, but there didn't seem to be anything wrong with him otherwise.
He lifted his head and looked around himself.
Around him, he saw sand. In his hazy, slowly clearing vision, he saw palm trees in the distance. And behind him... Behind him, he saw the plane, black smoke rising from its wreckage. For some reason, he had been ejected from the plane along with his whole seat. He struggled against the restraints, but the straps pulled free more easily than he expected, the fastenings broken in the crash.
Once he was able to stand on his feet, he patted his hands over his vest to shake the sand off and called out.
“Is anyone there?”
“Can you hear me?”
“Is anyone alive?”
He waited for a little while, standing beside the wreckage, but he didn't receive any response.
As Komaeda watched the smoke billow toward the sky, he just kept thinking about how easily their deaths could have been avoided. If they had just listened to him, then they would've been fine. None of that would've happened. Yet, even knowing that, a heavy feeling pressed on his heart, reminding him of all the times where there was no way for him to predict or prevent a disaster from happening.
If he'd been able to tell his parents back then that getting on a plane with him was a bad idea, would they have listened to him? Maybe it was pointless to wonder about such a thing. As much as he wished that he had control over that situation, and as much as he wished that he could go back and change what happened, the fact was that there was no changing it. What happened was already in the past.
His luck decided everything for him.
The same went for those Hope's Peak researchers. Even with his warning, it may have all been his luck's fault anyway. If he wasn't lucky, then they wouldn't have been interested in him. They wouldn't have gotten on that plane.
Turning his back on the downed plane, he headed toward the distance.
Not long after being stranded on that island, a boat arrived.
Without any way to contact Hope's Peak to find out if they planned to come for him or not, Komaeda decided to take his safety into his own hands. He observed the boat without making his presence known and figured out that they were some kind of pirates. Because they looked like his only ticket off the island, he snuck aboard their ship while they weren't watching.
He found a place below deck where he was able to hide himself beneath a tarp covering a storage of firearms. At the least, if anyone discovered him, he had a means of protecting himself. Holding his breath, he checked that one of the handguns was loaded and waited.
The men who went below deck didn't speak Japanese, but the radio they listened to played news from back home.
He spent a day inside that boat, his stomach growling so loudly that he feared he would be found.
Thankfully, the boat eventually reached land. When there was no one around, he snuck back out and took the handgun he'd been clutching along with him just in case his luck ran out again before he was able to escape. For being able to escape the ship unharmed, he feared that there would be something terrible awaiting him back at Hope's Peak...
Komaeda arrived back at school at night. He wanted to just go back to his dorm and sleep and forget about the wild ride he'd been on, but he knew that it would have been wiser to report back to the researchers who would've no doubt been wondering whether he'd been able to survive. They were going to be so surprised to see him again, he thought. With that amusing thought, he went back to the old school building where the labs were located.
Outside the building, he found the two guards laying on the ground, unconscious. That was the first sign that the bad feeling he had was more than just a feeling. He knelt to check that they were alive, then cautiously entered the building, wondering what had happened to them. The halls felt even quieter than they normally would have for some reason. Every one of his foot falls seemed to echo.
Because he finally wasn't being supervised, he curiously made his way around the building, feeling confident with the gun inside his jacket pocket. There were many unused and vacant rooms, but there were also a number of locked doors that he was unable to check.
As he made his way lower, he suddenly heard voices.
It sounded like two girls. Weird, since he hadn't seen any women in the building before.
Noticing something red at his feet, he peeked around the corner and followed what he reluctantly began to realize was a blood trail to a pile of bodies laying in the middle of the hallway. A black-haired girl in what appeared to be combat gear sheathed a pair of knives and followed another girl in gaudy clothing toward the end of the hall.
Those two... There was no question that they had just murdered those guards. Despite her size, that black-haired girl had taken them down with complete ease. He had no idea what they would have been doing there, so he couldn't believe they were students of Hope's Peak, but they did appear to be around his age. With skills like that, he wouldn't have been surprised if that girl was the ultimate assassin or something along those lines.
But Hope's Peak wouldn't have allowed two such dangerous individuals onto their campus, would they have...?
Using the retinal scanner, they entered the room at the end of the hallway. Komaeda decided to stay and watch where things were going. Even from the other end of the hall, he could hear that other girl's voice; overly familiar and grating on his ears.
She addressed the person inside as “Kamukura”.
At that moment, Komaeda's ears stopped working. He turned and started walking in the other direction, going back the way he came. His mind was swimming with questions. When he reached the elevator, he pressed the button and traveled farther down, toward the laboratory level.
Why were they there? Who were those girls?
Why were they speaking to Kamukura Izuru?
Had the project already been completed while he was away? Had they... Had Hope's Peak really planned to abandon him on that island after they had collected all of the necessary data from the plane crash?
The laboratory level was dark. It felt strange to see it that way after he had gotten used to its painfully bright white walls. He wasn't able to find the lights, so he kept walking through the darkness.
Eventually, his foot touched something unusual. It felt soft, like... Like a human body.
He kept moving. He could hear the unpleasant squelching of blood under his feet.
It was all gone.
Those inhuman researchers got what they deserved, but the hope they sacrificed themselves for was about to fall into the hands of those two girls. The thought of such a thing happening made Komaeda begin to shake, and once he started shaking, he couldn't stop it. Looking back, some of the days he spent there in that laboratory may have even been pleasant, so he just didn't know how he was supposed to feel.
Was it alright to laugh at them?
Even if he didn't mean it, he was laughing anyway.
After that night, Komaeda took his time to wander around the campus, never returning to his dorm, never going back to class. He was supposed to be suspended, so that was fine. The committee probably thought that he was dead, and he wouldn't have been surprised if his class had started to assume the same thing, being unable to reach him. In that case, he was just a ghost who no one would notice.
When he returned to the old school building the next night and knocked on the door where the girls had spoken to Kamukura, he received no answer. Either he left with them or he'd gone somewhere on his own.
Until he could find out where he went, Komaeda decided to figure out who those girls were. Because he hadn't seen them before, he pulled a quick search on the incoming class and researched them the same way he'd researched the students in his own class. He discovered two girls who perfectly matched the two he had seen. Just like he thought, one of them was the Ultimate Soldier. The other was the Ultimate Fashionista – quite a harmless-sounding title for someone who he'd seen step over dead bodies with a gleeful stride.
He had to do something about them. He already knew that Hope's Peak wouldn't.
That place he'd put all of his hope in... When had it gone so wrong?
It may have been a mistake from the beginning, when they decided that they could manufacture a perfect hope. But even so, he wouldn't have wished anything so terrible upon those researchers. No matter how much pain they put him through, he had been the one to agree to it, believing just as strongly in Kamukura Izuru's hope. Even if he hadn't liked them, they had been working toward the same goal together.
He didn't have to like them to want to avenge them. He wanted to save their hope from those girls, no matter what.
Unfortunately, that resolve came a little too late.
The next day, before he was able to find Ikusaba and Enoshima, the student council was massacred.
There was no doubt in his mind who was responsible.
A riot broke out in response and the reserve course students swarmed the main course building, attempting to burst through the gates. None of them recognized Komaeda as a member of the main course, so he was able to talk to some of them to figure out what was going on.
The things they told him were beyond belief.
It appeared that someone had told them about the Kamukura Project. Even if they didn't know its name, they were aware that the money from the reserve course's tuition was being funneled into an underground human experimentation project.
They also claimed that the student council had been murdered by the very subject of the school's experiments. Komaeda didn't know what to think about that, but it made him feel uncomfortable. He still hadn't seen Kamukura Izuru for himself, so he didn't know what he was like, but he didn't want to believe that he would have been involved in Enoshima and Ikusaba's machinations, whatever they were. Their actions appeared to be driving the reserve course into a deep despair, so if that had been their intention, then they were succeeding.
Kamukura Izuru was a product of Hope's Peak's research, but Komaeda didn't want to believe that he could be anything like the ones who made him.
He headed back to the main course building to warn the class. It was raining and he felt miserable, but he hoped that they would be just as excited to see him as he was to see them.
On his way there, he crossed through the courtyard. As he was passing the large statue of the founder, he heard an unusual noise, so he stopped and turned around. A peculiar scene unfolded in front of his eyes. The ground in front of the statue slid back and revealed a descending stairway beneath it. When Komaeda heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs, he quickly hid behind the statue and waited until he heard the sound of the ground sliding back into place.
When he stood up, he saw Tsumiki running away, her back to him.
That was a revelation. There was another passage underneath the statue, just like the underground facilities beneath the old school building. Chances were, the two were connected through those maze-like hallways he hadn't been able to fully explore.
The fact that Tsumiki emerged from there made him very skeptical of her. To his knowledge, she had no reason to be down there.
He had a feeling, that was all. His luck would handle the rest if there was a 'rest' to be handled.
The rain soaked his clothes. It would have been nice if his luck had provided him with an umbrella, but he still had the gun tucked within his jacket pocket, so he had all the protection he was going to need. A little bit of rain wasn't going to hurt him. He was resolved to protect them, even if it meant killing Enoshima Junko.
They hadn't been as happy to see him as he'd hoped. The atmosphere in the classroom weighed on him, but he shook it off. As he reached into his pocket, ready to tell them about his plan, he ended up getting cut off.
They were only concerned about Tsumiki.
Well, she had been there when he wasn't. That was alright. It made sense. They would've been closer with her, so even if he hadn't been there for a long time, of course they would've cared about someone they had become better friends with. He'd never been able to really tell them how much he cherished them. He wished that he could use his words like a normal person to express his feelings to them.
It was no matter. He would help them look for Tsumiki.
He could kill Enoshima Junko on his own. He was the one holding the gun. The rest of them didn't need to witness that, though it may have served as a stepping stone to bring them even closer to becoming greater hope. There would be other opportunities in the future if he succeeded, anyway. It was better to do it himself than to risk their safety.
He made sure that Pekoyama knew about where he was going. He had a feeling that Enoshima's little soldier would be right around the corner, so he expected that he'd need backup.
With their class rep at his side, Komaeda puzzled around with the statue until the secret passageway opened. It was easy to shrug it off as simple luck that he'd found it.
In that underground room, they found another Mitarai, but they also found the person Komaeda had been looking for. She had a really hateable face. Just looking at the way she smirked made him want to shoot her, but he wasn't that petty. He was used to being looked down on and had never felt like he belonged anywhere but beneath others' heels.
Her, though...
His place was above despair. He wouldn't let himself be trampled by her.
So he lifted the gun, his hand steady despite the rep's dismay. He had a straight shot on her...
Until, at that moment, he felt something unlike anything he'd ever felt before. It was a premonition; a shiver up his spine that told him that something wasn't quite right, even though she was right there in front of him. Against his better judgment, that feeling made him take his eyes off of her and he whirled around with his gun arm still held firmly in front of himself.
On the other side of the muzzle, staring at him with an unreadable expression, was a young man he'd never seen before. Yet, when his eyes fell upon him, he felt a complete sense of familiarity.
“You are...?”
In retrospect, after Komaeda realized who he was, he was glad that the gun had jammed. Coincidences didn't exist in his world, so no mistake had been made. That man was supposed to live. The same luck that kept him from pulling the trigger was the same luck that allowed the gun to be calmly taken from him, the same luck that struck the handbook in his breast pocket while consequently striking his heart in an entirely different way.
That silly thing he'd always heard about the world moving in slow motion when you meet the person of your dreams turned out to be true. He didn't feel a single bit of shock when the gun was turned on him, nor did he feel any pain when the bullet hit him. Even when he was laying on the ground, his mind was still away in that place where he felt nothing but that surprisingly gentle touch.
Everything that had happened to him up until that moment had become worthwhile.
Everything was perfect – he knew.
With luck like that, everything would finally be okay. Everything would fall into place.
He'd given birth to his own savior. It was all thanks to his miserable luck.
To the magnificent one he saw before him in his fading vision, he wished to say “happy birthday”.
“And that's about all of it! Well? What do you think? Was that story boring, too?”
Kamukura's gaze was still on the horizon where the sun was setting on the city. His eyes looked even redder than the sky, Komaeda thought, his heart pounding in his chest, full of affection. He had to resist the urge to touch him. Sitting next to him was enough.
“So what you are saying is that I inherited my luck from you.”
“I suppose that was the moral of my story, wasn't it?” Komaeda laughed and swung his feet back and forth over the edge of the roof where they were seated. “It was just a series of unfortunate events, but it all happened for a reason. In the end, it was for the sake of meeting you. At the moment we met, I felt true hope fill my life. If I could have chosen to live without my luck, I would have, but since I can't change the things that have already happened, I'm grateful that someone exists who can share my luck's burdens.”
Kamukura tilted his head. A long lock of his hair fell across his face. “Grateful...?”
“Why are you looking at me like you're so confused, huh?” Komaeda asked, smiling. He picked up his feet and moved himself closer to him. That time, he wasn't able to resist; he lifted his good hand and touched his cheek. “Hey, Kamukura-kun. Listen to me for a second, okay? After all... You seem to be the only one who does...”
“I am listening.”
Komaeda looked into his eyes and hoped that he could convey his sincerity. “I am truly grateful that you exist. I was afraid that I would go my entire life without ever knowing a single person who understood what my luck was like. When I agreed to the project, they promised me the ability to control my luck. That was just a lie, but that was never what I wanted to begin with. I was just tired of hurting people.”
“You cannot hurt me.”
“I know,” Komaeda said. His heart swelled. “That's why I love you.”
He didn't know whether Kamukura understood that kind of feeling. In a lot of ways, he was still like a child; a newly born hope that had yet to understand the reason for its existence. But every second they spent together, Komaeda could see him trying. Little by little, gradually, Kamukura was transforming into an even more incredible person.
Letting him go, Komaeda moved over and put his feet back over the edge. Closing his eyes for a moment, he inhaled the evening air and savored its chill in his lungs. When he opened his eyes again, the sun was just barely hanging on to the horizon.
Out of that terrible situation, he received a single ray of hope.
“No matter what happens, I hope you'll always remember that you're important to me, even if I'm insignificant,” he said.
“Komaeda.”
Unexpectedly hearing his name made Komaeda turn and look at him in surprise.
He found Kamukura looking at him, but his stare wasn't as cold as what Komaeda was used to. There was a new warmth there. In the waning light, he could have even believed that he was smiling.
“Thank you.”