???

  ***

  The beams of light carrying lost memories scattered through the dimensional fault, passing by the faceless guide of the white void, who watched them with some amusement; many of them fizzled out before they could reach any target. Their owners had already passed on, or they were plucked from a different world before the fault connected everything, meaning that their targets were now in the future or past. Most of Lethe’s stolen memories were lost this way, never returning to their original owners. The ten thousand beams that still remained out of a million scattered into multitudes of different worlds, passing through the doors even without a dimensional key.

  People in all sorts of worlds remembered their loved ones, their friends, faces of acquaintances, the meaning of random items in their possession which turned out to be mementos, or other, more banal information.

  People remembered times of sorrow, times of happiness, times of despair.

  Of course, remembering wasn’t pleasant for everyone. In Tokyo, an estimated two hundred young women remembered their abuse at the hand of criminal organizations and influential people, with Lethe being there to feast on them; a small drop of comfort was that they could finally seek justice against those monsters in the guise of men.

  In other places people remembered loved ones who ended up dying in Lethe’s vines, and some people were driven to shun their loved ones due to Lethe’s meddling who had a rude awakening to their deeds, like for example…

  September 2024

  ***

  Akane was at home, watching late night anime, as she couldn’t really sleep. While the blue Magical Girl helped her and explained the situation to her family, the feeling of estrangement remained. She went to the funeral with no idea who the man they buried was and felt incredibly isolated as she was the only one who couldn’t cry. Her family understood her situation on an intellectual level now, but she could still feel confused disgust on an emotional level.

  She wouldn’t try to take her life anymore, but it would probably be for the best if she went her own way after graduation. She was grateful for everything her family did for her until the day her grandfather died, but she couldn’t bear the icy atmosphere in her home anymore.

  Just as she thought about the various ways in which she could excuse herself out of her home life, like moving into college dorms after high school graduation, a strange light shot through her room’s wall and straight into her forehead. Her eyes widened and tears flowed as she remembered her grandfather Toshirou. How he spoiled her as the youngest grandchild, how he always made sure to greet her with a hug and say goodbye with one, too.

  How he said he wouldn’t truly die, as long as she remembered him.

  She remembered the green woman, too. How she tried to make him kill himself so his whole family would forget him.

  She remembered how her family tried to assure her that they would stand by her side, no matter what, and how the green woman mocked them for it.

  Akane sat in silence for a while, pulling her knees to her chest. A few moments later she started to audibly sob, digging her fingers into her legs.

  Just at that moment her mother opened her door and stormed towards her. She hugged Akane in a tight squeeze, crying with her.

  “I’m so sorry! I was so cruel to you! You didn’t deserve this!”

  Akane blinked in surprise, shakily wrapping her arms around her mother.

  “You remember, too…?”

  “I do!”

  The two kept holding each other for what felt like an eternity. Akane’s family had a long road of mutual forgiveness ahead of them, but for now she was glad to bask in the moment. All thoughts of removing herself from her loved ones vanished from her mind.

  Kosuke sat next to Miyu, who was still connected to the ventilator. The past day doctors held discussions barely outside the door, and from whatever snippets Kosuke could hear, they couldn’t quite agree on whether they should declare the idol brain dead or not. And of course, it looked that way. There was, frankly, nothing going on in her head anymore. So, it’s not much different from before. He would tell that to her face once she woke up, to poke her like usual in retaliation for all the little things she did to make his life as her manager hell. Once she woke up. Once she woke up…

  He genuinely feared for her. What if she remained like this? She was an orphan, so would he have to make the decision whether to pull the plug or not? Momo would never forgive him if he did, and neither would he forgive himself.

  His hand still held Miyu’s while he sat by her bedside. The past days he didn’t show up at the agency, or anywhere else but this very room.

  To occupy his mind he put together outfit and make-up ideas that would go well with Miyu’s new facial scar. He was determined to not let it affect her career in the slightest. She would still be an inspiration for children around the world; no evil would ever stop her from being that. All she had to do was wake up…

  He looked up from his notes with tired eyes as a sudden light shone into the hospital room. Dozens of light beams came through the window, wound around each other like a rope and entered Miyu’s forehead. Kosuke looked stumped at what had just happened, then he saw a sudden increase in activity on the EEG monitor.

  Miyu opened her eyes wide and looked around. Her gaze locked onto Kosuke, then she appeared to be choking as panic filled her eyes.

  “Miyu! Calm down! You’re on a ventilator! Don’t try to fight it!”

  He reached for the bedside bell to call the nurse on shift and kept holding Miyu’s hand, squeezing it. She reciprocated the gesture, holding on for dear life as her manager continued to speak calming words to her.

  ***

  Miyu coughed and held her chest. Her sternum burned and she looked with disgust at the long tube that had been all the way down to her lungs. After she woke up it took two more hours to get her extubated, as apparently a specialist had to come in and determine if she could really breathe on her own. Ironically, this was the most suffocating experience in her life, even counting the moments she was held restrained by Lethe and choked by her as she lost her memories one by one.

  She didn’t really want to remember everything Lethe did. The green monster had some sadistic fun with her before she decided to yank out so much that Miyu ceased to function as a human. She removed the ability to walk on two legs and watched her crawl on the ground. She tore the ability to form coherent words out of her, watching her uselessly move her mouth and drool. And then she only got angrier as she failed to make Miyu cry or despair.

  Miyu shivered and tried to push back any of these memories. At least the fact that she possessed them again meant that Seika or Miori must have finally killed that creature.

  She looked at her hand, which Kosuke still held.

  “Thank you… for staying by my side,” she spoke with a hoarse voice.

  He shook his head and patted hers in turn, and in this moment it felt like he was her father, rather than her manager.

  “Of course I’d stay by your side…” he let out a long sigh of relief.

  In that moment Miyu’s phone went off. Naturally, it was only vibrating, as Kosuke set it to silent in the hospital. He picked it up nonetheless, seeing how Miyu’s voice wasn’t quite ready yet.

  The second he picked it up Miyu could hear Momo shouting over the phone.

  “Where are you? I’m on my way!”

  Kosuke reflexively flinched away from the phone, then he replied.

  “We’re at the Shinjuku Medical Center. Miyu just woke up.”

  “Got it! I’m, like, sprinting there!”

  “She seems fired up,” Kosuke remarked after hanging up.

  “Oh, I bet she is. I told her she can tell me something after all of this is over… guess she’s coming here to do just that.” Miyu stared at the ceiling with a little smile.

  “Ah? What would that be?” Kosuke asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Manager… think you can run a risk assessment on your idols being openly lesbian lovers?” Miyu asked in a dry tone and grinned in her manager’s direction as she saw the spark of recognition in his eyes, and more importantly how he personally looked happy for his idols, while his professional side was screaming internally, doing calculations in his head.

  Ayame held her chest and grimaced. Just as she got used enough to the feeling inside her sternum, she regained her ability to breathe on her own. Shortly after she was extubated, and from what she heard, so was everyone who lost their ability to breathe during the incident at the café. She felt disoriented and was granted another day of bedrest to let the light sedatives she received wear off enough that she could go home, giving her ample time to think.

  She felt the absence of her best friend deeply in the past few years, and she saw how it led Seika down a path of self-destructive tendencies. She was angry that Seika just left her and cut all contact to protect her, but at the same time she sympathized deeply with how much Seika was hurting inside, while she herself remained blissfully ignorant.

  She remembered her sexual attraction to Seika in vivid detail now, not just in foggy dreams. It was slightly confusing, and it would make writing her book a tad bit more awkward in the future, as she chose to embellish sexual attraction as love to make the story more palatable for readers. Still, she smiled as she reminisced. One day she suggested that the two should kiss so Ayame could be ‘prepared for doing it with a boy’ before walking the suggestion back as a joke. Seika’s flustered face was worth her weight in gold. Playful deflection was usually her weapon of choice to avoid expressing her true attraction, which in time tempered into a feeling of friendship even more intimate than a romantic relationship. She was happy to stand by Seika’s side, even if not in a romantic way. In fact, their friendship was so sacred to her that her hesitation stemmed from the uncertainty of what a relationship could do to it. What if they broke up and with it ended their friendship, too? She would never have been able to live with that. Such an outcome would have been painfully likely in their inexperienced and utterly hormonal youth.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Ayame stared at the ceiling, wondering where she should go from here, and concluded that she would continue where she left off: as Seika’s best friend in this entire world, even if they had a nine-year gap. And maybe, now that she had almost a decade worth of experience playing the third…

  Mana breathed heavily, sitting down on the ground inside one of the ratkin trenches. She blasted, exploded, and shot too many rodents to count at this point, and there didn’t seem to be an end to it, save for the few breaks far between which the colorful girl with the bagpipes provided them with.

  If what she heard was true, then all of this was merely a game for the people controlling the bipedal rodents, so they had no reason to stop their attacks, even as they got killed over and over again.

  “If only I had a portal coordinate to where they live. Arisu’s ability could have been really useful here!” She grimaced as she looked over the edge of the trench, waiting for the inevitable arrival of the next wave. The colorful girl landed next to her, wiping her brow.

  “Sorry about that, they’re more relentless than I ever anticipated. They really want to kill a strong enemy today.”

  Mana groaned, and her thoughts were racing. She couldn’t hold out forever, she would need to sleep at some point, and if those were people who booked an all-nighter for this event specifically, she would be in a world of trouble.

  “Mana.”

  The voice came from inside her right sleeve.

  “What is it, Portal?” she asked as she looked inside at the book, and the colorful bagpipe girl’s eyes widened.

  “Woah! Magic books that can talk?”

  “Yeah, that’s actually pretty common in the library.” Mana responded as she awaited Portal’s answer, not even seeing the girl’s further shocked reaction.

  “Warriors who never tire, who resurrect after dying, who fight for the sheer thrill of combat itself… doesn’t that remind you of anything?”

  Mana furrowed her brow and thought about all the worlds she visited so far, then she hit her open palm with her fist.

  “I got it!”

  “Eh?” came the confused voice of the woman next to her.

  “We don’t need to keep killing them if they find a more fun world where they can actually fight someone without doing harm, right?”

  Mana looked directly at the colorful girl.

  “Uh… I guess? They are mostly looking for the most fun fights. What the hell do you mean fighting without causing harm, though?!”

  “Then I have an idea.”

  ***

  Zach was incredibly bored. His avatar was again affected by the ‘Command Rodents’ AoE skill which PPiper liked to use to grief his guild. They stood in their home base, unable to move their avatars, just staring into space and killed time by talking to each other.

  “I’m kind of getting bored of that world.”

  “Yeah, same.”

  “In all these years we haven’t managed to kill a single Magical Girl! How much XP would they even be worth?”

  “You know it’s not about the XP, dumbass, it’s about the achievement! Those are super strong bosses, and we get bragging rights if we take one down.”

  “Well, right now we’re not even chipping their HP, but looks like we’re affecting their stamina at least.”

  His guild members kept chattering away, not caring about the mandatory roleplay they had going on while they weren’t near any NPCs.

  The Rodent Regiment was a group of role players – no respawns, except during the new World War 1 themed events, only talking in character. Those were the rules for their world invasions.

  Today they wanted to try out the new theme, but the nuisance called PPiper who made it her mission to protect NPCs from being killed by other players has been getting in their way. Most of her skillset was absurd. Her character was a support/control type the way she skilled it, and it was specialized against the Rodent Regiment’s racial make-up of humanoid rodent soldiers. Her bagpipe’s AoE control effect could take away their ability to act and compel them to follow her commands. No other player but one going up against their very niche makeup would ever pick that skill, as in other PvP situations it would be useless, since other guilds possessed a more varied selection of player races.

  It was clear that PPiper was targeting their group specifically, and regularly at that, but there was nothing he could do. World of Infinity was an MMO with the tagline ‘anything goes’, as long as you didn’t do anything obscene outside of the scope of the game with another player without their consent. Some members tried reporting PPiper, but ganking was simply part of the intended game experience.

  A murmur went through the players as they began moving their limbs again.

  “It wore off!” a few of them declared. Zach nodded and waved them all towards himself.

  “Okay, enter with some distance to each other so we don’t get blown away immediately. Give us some buffs with the drums and the battle standard before we walk through, then change to guns.”

  Nodding went through the ranks of the Rodent Regiment, buffs were applied, gear was repaired by their dedicated crafters, and then they passed through their portals, screaming bloody murder.

  ***

  To their surprise, the Magical Girls and the witch weren’t in the trenches. They couldn’t see anyone on the streets, either.

  The rodents converged in one of the larger central trenches to discuss strategy.

  “We need two lookouts and snipers. Is the apartment building still good?” Zach asked one of his fellow rodents.

  “They blew off one of the balconies, but the rest should still be serviceable. Will be a trip to get there, though.”

  “Do it.”

  Just as they confirmed his command with a nod, they heard a voice from above.

  “I commend you, Rodent Regiment!”

  It was the young girl wearing a witch robe. She stood in the air as if it were solid ground. Zach thought he could see a slight distortion under her, like she was standing on a heavily translucent object.

  “You have fought valiantly, so I, Mana Kanno, of the Infinite Library, grant you access to an even better place for combat!”

  The rodents looked at each other in confusion.

  “Is this some kind of secret event?” one of them whispered to Zach.

  “How would I know? The whole game is procedurally generated by an AI. Could very well be.” Zach whispered back, not even caring that they were all breaking the roleplaying rule.

  “If you are ready,” the small witch continued, “I will now bring you to a place of eternal, blissful combat! To Valhalla!”

  Seriously? They have a world based on it?!

  Zach was euphoric! He was growing a little bored of this particular world, so this was like winning the lottery. A game world based on the mythological seat of dead warriors seemed like just the thing to get the guild a space where they could live out some carnage.

  Just in that moment, the witch extended a hand, and a massive hole opened under the assembled Rodent Regiment, swallowing them whole.

  ***

  They found themselves in an expansive, grassy field, just outside an impossibly large longhouse with shields for roof tiles. The stars shone down on them from overhead and the moon shone even brighter – though it was seemingly mounted on a chariot hunted by wolves.

  No mistaking it. This is Norse mythology.

  Zach grinned and had a look around. All fifty of his comrades were there with him, and all around them, carnage.

  Helmeted warriors wearing chainmail fought each other with spears, swords and axes. The shouts of the victorious and the screams of the dying surrounded the bipedal rats, mice and hamsters.

  Zach immediately opened his console and registered the world coordinate to his guild’s database after he took in the sights.

  After a moment, the warriors turned their way. Their eyes were frenzied, and they recognized that these strange creatures in their midst did not belong to their ranks, immediately ceasing combat with each other to stand shoulder to shoulder and face the new unknown threat.

  Zach ordered his fellow players to take formation as the Einherjar took their challenge. From this day forward, immortal warriors from two different worlds would clash in this field every day, dying and resurrecting to repeat the process, much to Odin’s satisfaction.

  ***

  “Huh. They aren’t coming back. What did you do?”

  The colorful girl, apparently called ‘Annette’, looked over the battlefield that was once a crossroad in Kawaguchi. After Mana summoned a portal to Yggdrasil, the world of the jolly man called Odin who eagerly befriended her and kept calling her ‘young seidrkona’, the Rodent Regiment appeared to have abandoned their invasion of Kawaguchi.

  Mana looked up at her with tired eyes but still managed a little smile.

  “I sent them to a place where they’re not the only warriors coming back to life. I have a feeling they’ll be welcomed warmly and will like it.”

  A wave of relief visibly went through Annette and the Flower Brigade who just joined the two of them. Mana turned their way and gave them a quick thumbs up.

  “Well, I’ll leave the rest to you. I have something I need to take care of.”

  She entered her trusty portal, only allowing herself to let out a quiet sigh as she was all alone in the safety of the infinite library once more. She rummaged through her pocket and pulled out the letter which Doppelg?nger gave Hitoishi. She didn’t expect much from reading it, but if her future self arranged for it to be given to her, there must have been something about it.

  “Where to now, Mana?” Portal asked quietly.

  “Home,” Mana answered, stowing her letter again. “I feel like I need two days’ worth of sleep.”

  Moon of the Murdered Singer, 1067 AR

  ***

  Seika awoke in one of Madame Bille’s guest rooms. Her memory was hazy, and she couldn’t see very well. Her left hand wandered around to try and find where her glasses went, then she felt something unexpected. To her left was a warm body, sharing the bed with her. She blinked and turned her head to the side, finding a sleeping Miori clinging to her arm.

  The younger woman stirred and opened her eyes, slowly. Seika could see her beautiful smile as their eyes met, then the blonde drew closer to place another kiss on her lips. They shared that moment but broke the kiss off immediately after trying to do it with tongue.

  “…let’s not do that with morning breath.” Seika mumbled.

  “…yeah,” Miori agreed.

  “All those romance novels were lying to me!” Seika added with a little chuckle and Miori joined in.

  “My memory is a little hazy… did we do anything?” Seika asked cautiously and Miori shook her head.

  “After we kissed you passed out and I brought you here – you put your whole body under a lot of stress yesterday, after all. You were treated by a healer who Madame Bille brought in, but she said your wounds were deep, so she could only partially heal your shoulder. You should still go to a doctor back home… also…”

  Miori traced the left side of Seika’s face with her fingers. The bandages were gone, but Miori’s index finger slid over something bumpy above and under Seika’s left eye.

  “…you look kind of handsome with scars, Senpai.”

  “Scars?” Seika blinked and sat up. She found her cracked glasses on the nightstand and walked over to a mirror. She still wore her right arm in a sling, with her shoulder bandaged, and her left eye had two lines drawn over it, scars left exactly where Lethe slashed her with her sharp nails yesterday.

  Miori was right, she did look somewhat handsome with this new scar. However, she now looked like a fantasy anime’s protagonist, rather than an average office worker. This would be hard to explain to her colleagues, but maybe she could use the fact that the office exploded to her benefit. After explaining how that happened.

  “I caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people today. I will have to make it up to Watanabe, and to Hifumi at the very least.”

  Seika smiled wistfully at her image in the mirror.

  “Hifumi?” Miori raised an eyebrow, stepping behind Seika and wrapping her arms around her hips. Such a simple gesture, but it instantly felt like it relieved a decade of stress. Seika sighed and leaned against Miori - her girlfriend, as she realized now.

  “One of my authors. I used her as bait to draw Lethe out. Maybe you’ve seen her work around? The Starfaring Maiden?”

  Miori pondered a moment, but then she nodded.

  “I have, actually. Ayame praised it quite a bit one time.”

  Seika paused and turned around.

  “You know Ayame?!”

  Miori smiled and nodded. “Been her friend for the past nine years. She wanted to tell you about my feelings for you on Christmas, but…”

  Miori’s voice trailed off as she looked outside of the window, then she gasped as Seika hugged her as hard as she could with one arm.

  “…thank you! I abandoned her… It’s comforting to know she still had a friend.”

  Miori smiled and put her hand on Seika’s cheek, looking her in the eyes. She wanted to say something, but the door to their room suddenly opened.

  “Seika!”

  That was Hifumi’s voice. The young woman ran through the door and jumped towards her editor, hugging her hard enough to choke her, causing Miori to raise an eyebrow.

  “Hurk… There she is… Miori, this is Hifumi Ebiko, author of The Starfaring Maiden…” Seika managed to squeeze out towards Miori, who gave the younger woman a polite nod and smile, though Seika could tell that her lover didn’t appreciate the interruption just now.

  “The pretty lady said you would take care of things! Did you?!”

  Hifumi kept hugging Seika tightly, then she suddenly turned red and let go, walking towards the door.

  “Erm… tell me everything! After you got yourselves dressed!”

  The doors slammed shut, and only now Seika realized that both her and Miori were in their underwear, causing them both to turn red and face away from each other.