The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#Chapter 317: Cat Pago (30) - Diary, Tenth Entry. (E/N: Author said to listen to 'Kaoru Wada's 'After the Tears' while reading this chapter. I think it means this: Gakkou no Kaidan OST- Namida no Ato ni) What happened after that was like watching a malicious silent film. Dad shouted something. He grabbed Popuri's clothes, knelt down and clung to her while screaming. It was probably screaming. Looking at his mouth, it seemed like screaming, but no sound could be heard at all. Popuri stared blankly at the cutting board. There was nothing like a human arm. Only vegetables for salad that had been left half-cut at even intervals. Things that couldn't possibly make thudding sounds in the first place. An ambulance arrived. Police arrived shortly after. Only then did sounds begin to be heard little by little, intermittently. [Hanamori? Hmm... she was a rather gloomy kid. Always in the corner of the classroom, didn't talk much with other kids. If it wasn't for Hinosaka, she would've been completely isolated in class, you know?] Social misfit. Social anxiety disorder. Depressed and negative personality. [She was a somewhat strange student. Every day she carried a weapon-like baseball bat in her big backpack. I let it slide because she said it was for exercise, but who would've thought something like this would happen.] Violence. Rebellious. Weapon possession. Anger management disorder. [Oh my, don't even get me started. She was making such a fuss about seeing ghosts or something. She said she exorcised ghosts and demanded I triple her salary, and in her head, she seemed to believe that I had begged her first. When I said no, I felt like she might really do something terrible, so I just went along with it. Report to police? What if she comes to crack my head open in the middle of the night?] Delusion. Hallucination. Fantasy. Threats. [I knew she would turn out this way. She was a kid who lived in her own world from the start. She threatened people with a baseball bat, made them quit their perfectly fine jobs and get hired by some ridiculous fantasy novel-like organization. Ugh. I thought I was going to die trying to humor her. It's not strange that she would do something so vicious.] Ripley syndrome. Absence of reality. Schizophrenia. [She was a child who strangely hated her own mother from way back. She would scream that her mother was a monster and not to come near, which made the poor mother suffer terribly. We thought she had gotten better recently and called her over, but never, never did we think something like this would happen...!!] Unfilial conduct. Maternal avoidance. Assault on a parent. [...Pago, she said there was a cat named that. She said the cat could talk, that it was an anomaly. I just played along. Because she's a sick kid, a pitiful kid. You have to help when you can, right? Um, what happens to Hanamori now? Can we visit her?] Mental hospital. Isolation. Confinement. Treatment. Popuri stared blankly at the ceiling in the white room. Her sense of time was vague. It felt like she had spent an extremely long time, and yet it also felt like everything had passed by in just over ten minutes. Just from how extremely dazed her head felt, it was certain she hadn't slept properly. Should I sleep for now? she thought. Let me sleep and wake up to clear my head again. In a room where there were no objects that could become weapons, where both the room and walls were all soft, Popuri fell asleep. And when she opened her eyes. "Popuri, come quickly! I'll make you food soon!" "Popuri, you mustn't believe it!! Don't go to the kitchen!!" [Popuri. I'll arrive home soon. I bought sushi so let's eat together.] Popuri realized she had fallen into hell once again. Ugh, and Popuri poured out vomit. She vomited out everything inside, and when there was nothing left inside, she forced herself to squeeze it out and vomit anyway. If she didn't do this, she felt like she would go insane. After doing this for a while, she suddenly felt a gaze directed at her. Above the second floor stairs. A monster wrapped tightly in chains all over its body was looking down at Popuri with its neck stretched long down to the first floor. Drrrrrrrr! With a rough metallic sound, the monster slid down from the second floor. Its large body pressed down from above like a crushing weight, and chains moving like snakes wrapped around Popuri's neck and strangled her. The monster looked down at Popuri struggling as her breath was cut off and laughed with a cackling sound. Survival instinct reflexively reproduced the ingrained movements. The baseball bat struck the laughing monster's head and sent it flying like a ball. "Kyaaaaaaah!" "H-Hanamori! W-what the hell are you doing right now!!" At the commotion behind her, Popuri turned her gaze back. Hinosaka was sitting down on the floor with tears welling up, her legs seeming to have lost strength. Mr. Sato had a pale face and his eyes were wide open in shock. Popuri did not immediately direct her gaze to where they were looking. Instead, she tried to grab and hold out the chains that had been strangling her neck. "N-no! This monster was trying to, with this, with this, with this─" The words "with this" were repeated emptily. Popuri's hands groped around her neck several times. There were no chains. Her neck had been strangled just moments ago. Popuri trembled at her fingertips and looked again in terror at whatever she had struck. 'Mom' was there. Popuri let out a scream. Screaming, screaming, screaming. She lost consciousness just like that. "Popuri, come quickly! I'll make you food soon!" "Popuri, you mustn't believe it!! Don't go to the kitchen!!" [Popuri. I'll arrive home soon. I bought sushi so let's eat together.] She had fallen into hell again. Clang!! Popuri abandoned her bat and everything else and fled from the house. "Pago! Pago!! Pago!!! Where are you! Please come out!! Pago!!!" Popuri ran. Not knowing where to run or what to look for or how, she ran blindly searching only for Pago. It was at that moment that a white cat tail came into her view. The white tail was running quickly from the left side of her vision to the right. Behind it, some monster was pursuing it, repeatedly opening and closing its snout as if trying to bite with hideous and enormous teeth. The monster's mouth was just about to touch the cat's tail. "Pago!!" Popuri rammed her body into the monster. She didn't deliver any follow-up attacks or finishing blows. She couldn't. Just trembling, she hastily picked up the white cat. Meow. A cat's meowing sound. The cat looked up at Popuri. Right side, left side. Both the same golden color. It wasn't Pago. Screeeeech! Crash! From beside Popuri, a chilling sound echoed. The sound of a car suddenly stopping. The sound of something being hit. Someone was hit by a car! someone said. It's that kid! That kid pushed someone into the road!! someone said. Someone said. Someone said. Someone said. Accusing eyes. Shocked eyes. Disgusted eyes. Eyes looking at a murderer. A mental patient. A crazy woman. Meow! The cat scratched the back of Popuri's hands that were holding it, as if annoyed. Blood spurted up, and the cat escaped from her arms and ran away. Left alone, Popuri looked at the road with unfocused eyes. She saw something that she had pushed, something that had been hit by the car. 'Mom' was there. Popuri grabbed a piece of metal scattered nearby, whose original purpose was unknown. And stabbed it straight toward her own eyes. Her vision turned black. *** When she came to her senses, Popuri had been moved to somewhere that looked like a room. Was it because she could no longer see ahead? Strange sounds became more audible to Popuri's ears. [Oh, this reaction is quite interesting too, isn't it? Who would've thought she'd stab her own eyes.] [The viewer response is quite good too. The message board is about to explode right now. If we keep going like this, we might get ratings similar to the highest-rated episode we filmed before, the 'Mom Switching' episode, Producer.] [Hahaha! That's truly our channel's eternal masterpiece! We brought a completely different person to the set, and everyone from the dad role to the neighborhood extras insisted 'That's your mom.' The kid trembled in terror, then finally gave up and reluctantly called her '...mom' for the first time - that expression! I still can't forget it!] [What should we do next?] [Bring in the actors playing Hinosaka and Sato. They'll tell the protagonist they came to rescue her, that this is all an illusion so let's escape. And just when she defeats the enemy and reaches a happy ending and falls asleep, we'll have her open her eyes in a mental hospital bed. Ah, damn it was a dream!] [The reaction from noise marketing will be amazing! It'll be absolutely on fire! Let's prepare right away!] How noisy, Popuri thought. Since she had damaged her eyes to avoid seeing things she didn't want to see, now her ears were the problem. If she blocked her ears too, would she stop hearing those annoying sounds? When she roughly searched her pockets, for some reason there was something like an awl inside. She picked it up and─ "Stop. You foolish thing." Smack! Along with a sharp voice, something struck her hand away. "......" "Phew. Finally found you. Damn anomaly. How complexly it twisted the stage." "......" "Listen carefully, Blackie. What you're experiencing right now is—" "A social experiment. The Truman Show. Lamp ghost story. The type of ghost story that denies the subject's life and existence, and desecrates their dignity." "─Did you already know?" "I realized it when I heard that damn broadcast nonsense just now. Ah, they're trying to turn my entire life into a caricature. They're trying to cover everything I've achieved with the narrative of 'it was all in the palm of their hand.'" Popuri let out a bitter laugh. "They failed because they tried to cram too many things simultaneously to break my mind. If they had consistently gone with the delusion of a mental patient throughout, it would have been more devastating." But just because she laughed didn't mean there was joy in it. Rather, that laughter was more sorrowful than crying would have been. "But what's the use of realizing that?" "Should I escape from the mental hospital? Then I'll just go from being a mental patient to being a criminal with mental illness. Or they'll just redefine that as another delusion I'm having while drugged." "Should I somehow find those damn broadcast staff and beat them up? Then in the next scene they'll just overlay it with 'Great! Everyone played their victim roles well! Let's go to the next scene!'" The viciousness of ghost stories that destroy the boundary between reality and fiction lies precisely in this point. No matter what actions you take, no matter how miraculous and heroic achievements you accomplish, they define all of it as 'staging on a set.' You can never win unless you escape from the stage itself. And the stage is the world itself. How on earth are you supposed to beat this? By what means are you supposed to 'exorcise' this? "It's all over. It's all finished. From the very beginning, we were just toys of this world, toys of god─" "No. You're wrong, Popuri." Not Blackie, but Popuri. When she flinched at being called by her name, something licked around her eyelids. Then light leaked in through her eyelids. When Popuri opened her eyes in confusion, Pago, who had somehow moved away from her, was looking at her with an extremely wicked and vile expression. "On a stage? A virtual scenario? Hahahaha! How ridiculous! You're terrified just because I showed you some hallucinations and auditory illusions!" "How wonderful! It was worth deliberately hovering around and gradually eroding your mind! I actually intended to do this from the beginning, but you know how much trouble I had because it just wouldn't work!" "But those tedious days end with this! Anomaly exterminator woman!! Your story ends here too! This Lord Pago will devour you!!" What the hell is this supposed to mean? While Popuri was stunned, the exorcism diary flew from somewhere and opened wide in front of her. And on that blank page, new text began writing itself. --- --- --- 『Pago』 An anomaly in the form of a cat with white fur and heterochromatic eyes of blue and yellow. It pretends to stay by people's side and help them, but in reality it only makes vicious deals where it takes more than the help it provides. It possesses the ability to erode human minds and create auditory and visual hallucinations, using these to trap humans in illusions that threaten their dignity and identity. However, all of this is merely illusion, and actually overlaying the world is impossible for any anomaly, including Pago. The method to defeat it is to defeat the main body that must exist within the illusion. The following extermination method can be applied to Pago and all anomalies of similar mental interference and illusion types. Immediately after the illusion is seen through, the anomaly will inevitably reveal its anomaly-like bizarre appearance. There is no worry of confusion. The anomaly must consistently appear around the victim and cannot become someone completely unrecognized. The anomaly can definitely be physically exterminated. --- --- --- Popuri's eyes widened. She immediately realized what Pago was trying to do right now. He was overlaying it. That this wasn't some grand virtual scenario, but merely the illusion of an anomaly called Pago that could be physically exterminated. And he was rewriting the narrative itself so that this type of ghost story wouldn't be able to exert power even without him in the future. But that was. "Stop! Pago!! You want me to exterminate you with my own hands!?" "Hahaha! You can't let go of your affection even knowing the truth? Then die as you are!!" Pago, no longer in the form of a cute cat but transformed into a hideous and bizarre beast, pounced on Popuri. Popuri didn't want to fight, but according to the narrative Pago had prepared, her body was already moving on its own and taking a combat stance. New content continued to be added to the diary. --- --- --- I was betrayed by Pago. I believed he was a good anomaly, a helpful anomaly, but in fact it was all fake. From the beginning, he was watching for an opening from beside me to devour me. --- --- --- No! Popuri wanted to shout that. But her mouth couldn't make a sound as if blocked by something. As if to replace her voice, the baseball bat she swung smashed Pago's flesh and muscles. --- --- --- I was in considerable danger due to the illusion, but as always, I came to my senses and was able to break it. Pago struggled desperately in the crumbling world trying to defeat me, and I fought back with my weapon. Despite having this kind of power, he had been deceiving me by pretending to be an ordinary cat all this time. I can't forgive that. --- --- --- Blood was splattered. The sound of breaking bones echoed. She twisted the neck that now emitted chilling howls instead of human language. --- --- --- Pago's true form was very hideous and vicious, but not enough to defeat me. The baseball bat I swung crushed his vital points, and Pago convulsed then became unable to move. Then the illusion completely collapsed, and I was able to safely return to true reality. --- --- --- Pago fell down. The evil 'mastermind' who orchestrated all of this was exterminated by the anomaly exterminator. The narrative was complete. Only then, having barely regained freedom of her body, Popuri threw down both her baseball bat and exorcism diary and ran toward Pago. Popuri's hands gripped the fur of the bloodied anomaly. The anomaly's eyes met with Popuri's. He didn't say any words of comfort or praise to her until the end. Because an anomaly had to die as an anomaly. Only his eyes spoke. Well done. *** "You, whom I met long ago in a dream, were my friend." "When I woke from the dream, I realized that you were a monster." "I did not deny this." "Because it was a tribute to the kindest monster in the world."