while she three pass or puss4:33。continue tomorrow ...add
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Chapter 10: The Corridor with Butterflies
The moment I stepped into the corridor, the density of the air changed.
It was damp. But it was slightly
Prologue: The Silver Platform
The train doesn't come.
But the platform alone existed.
It was silver.
The floor, too.
The pillars, too.
The ceiling, too.
The advertisements, too.
Everything was silver.
There was no color.
Only a gloss.
It was as if someone had pasted aluminum foil over the entire world.
"This is the worst," Takaya mutters.
"Pretty much," Ill answers.
Beyond the platform, a pedestrian bridge could be seen.
Not just a normal pedestrian bridge.
It was massive.
The size of a single city.
Hundreds of walkways.
Thousands of guideboards.
Countless stairs.
Countless elevators.
I don't know where they lead.
But,
Everyone is walking there.
Showa-era families.
Students.
Office workers.
Old people.
Children.
Everyone was silver.
Only their faces were strangely nostalgic.
I've seen them somewhere before.
But their names don't come to mind.
"Another recall-type?" Takaya makes a disgusted face.
"Yep," Ill says. "This is a layer that makes you remember."
"I hate it."
"I know."
The families keep walking.
Eternally.
As if it were life itself.
It was then.
At the edge of the platform.
An old man sitting on a bench,
quietly rubs his chin.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
The moment that sound occurs,
a massive amount of imagery floods into Takaya's head.
A rainy day.
A housing complex.
In front of a station.
Fluorescent lights.
An arcade.
A convenience store.
The subway.
Someone's laughter.
Someone's shouting.
Someone's back.
It's all vague.
It's all blurry.
Yet it was strangely real.
"Ugh," Takaya holds his head. "Again?"
"It's a Recall Unit," Ill remained calm. "It drags out your memories."
"I don't need this."
"But it'll drag them out anyway."
"The worst."
The old man is still rubbing his chin.
As if telling him to remember.
But,
Takaya knew.
The more you remember,
the more you get caught here.
That's the kind of place this silver world was.
Chapter 13: Hostility Before Login
The moment the pale blue outline moved, the corridor itself reacted a beat late.
Light didn't flash first.
Sound didn't arrive first either.
Only the premonition that "it's coming" infected the floor, the walls, the butterflies, the black of the monitors, and Takaya's right arm all at once.
That was the worst part.
Before the actual attack, the mere certainty that "something is coming now" froze the body. Whether in a hospital waiting room, a room before a caseworker arrives, or the wings of a stage before a live show, that's usually the hardest part. Before it begins. Before it comes. Before it surges forward. Not knowing what will happen, yet the body reacts on its own in those few seconds.
The pressure filling the corridor right now was exactly that.
"Gachirick."
Slightly before Takaya called out, the wind stepped forward.
The gray armor isn't smooth like a completed form. The seams on the shoulders are a bit rough, and there's subtle play in the joint alignment on the back. But because of that roughness, it moves fast. Because it isn't polished to perfection, it has the speed to interrupt without hesitation.
The pale blue outline's arm swings.
It's not a slash.
It's wind pressure meant to scrape away.
Neither a straight line nor a curve, it tears through the corridor at an awkward angle. It possessed an unnaturalness, as if the world itself poured pressure into a line where it simply assumed "a wall should be here."
Gachirick's shoulder armor bites into that wind pressure.
There's no metallic clash.
Instead, it made a sound like a hard ocean roar.
Vwoom.
Following that low pitch, Zankyo-chan's turn layers in.
Pi.
Shaa.
Don.
It's not just a follow-up attack.
A beat late, Zankyo-chan rewrites the shape of the corridor where the wind pressure passed, treating it as "something that was there once again." What just happened ceases to be a one-time phenomenon. The walls and the floor re-remember the pressure from a moment ago, and that memory slows down the pale blue outline's movements.
"...I see," Takaya accidentally lets slip. "This ain't a normal attack, is it."
"Right?" Ill says. "Gachirick takes the 'now'. Zankyo-chan leaves behind the 'a little later'."
"They're taking on roles to a creepy degree."
"They're not coming together cleanly, though."
That was the good part.
A completed form's movements are strong.
But they aren't interesting to watch.
The meshing of Gachirick and Zankyo-chan is a bit clumsy. The timing isn't perfect. There's static. There are even moments when Zankyo-chan's noise shakes Gachirick's footing. But that unevenness feels strangely alive.
Takaya raises his right arm slightly.
The two mouths of erosion open and close pointlessly. Snap, snap.
No, it looks pointless, but they are probably watching.
The pale blue outline.
Gachirick's back.
Zankyo-chan's noise.
The trajectory of the butterflies.
The black of the monitor.
They are measuring all of it by whether they can "bite into it or not."
"Hey," Takaya says to his right arm. "Don't bite yourself."
The right arm doesn't answer.
But the mouth on the wrist side clicks once.
That was probably meant as a reply.
For the first time, the pale blue outline clearly retreated.
Just one step.
But that was enough.
Takaya laughs.
"Heh."
"... "
"So you back up."
"It is an adjustment."
"Boring."
Thin threads of lightning run around the pale blue outline again.
It's angry.
But even its way of getting angry is disciplined. It gets angry without breaking down. It gets irritated efficiently, well within the bounds of its control. That vibe really pissed him off.
"Listen, you," Takaya steps forward slightly.
Gachirick didn't stop him this time.
Zankyo-chan also slightly lowers the density of her noise.
They were both unconsciously making time for Takaya to speak.
There was an unspoken coordination there.
"Don't try to make even the way you show emotions so clean."
"Disorder reduces accuracy."
"But sometimes being pathetic and messy makes you stronger, right?"
"It does not."
"It does," Takaya answered instantly. "Even if you're battered, even if you're a mess, sometimes just existing right there is what makes you strong."
The moment he said that, the monitors in the back of the corridor multiplied into two.
No, they didn't split.
It was a reflection.
On the left monitor, a gray city.
On the right monitor, a row of cherry blossom trees.
Both are close to reality, yet neither is reality. The very fact that wet handrails and moonlit petals were lined up side-by-side in the same resolution was absurd. It looked like a test environment for virtual reality. A space still in beta, unoptimized, where the lobby screen and the selection screen overlapped. That's what it felt like.
"...Ah," Takaya exhales softly. "So that's what it is."
"What is it?" Ill asks.
"This isn't a subway corridor. It's a pre-login lobby."
The moment those words came out, the floor of the corridor faintly glowed in a grid pattern.
Thin white lines.
Below that, trailing behind, blue lines.
And even further below, scanning lines like an old CRT monitor.
It wasn't a real floor.
It was an overlaid floor.
A subway platform.
A sanatorium hallway.
A game lobby.
A pre-stream waiting screen.
A VR calibration space.
A place where all of these were haphazardly layered, yet to be fixed into any single one.
"...Gross," Takaya says.
"Pretty much."
"But I'm right."
Ill gave a hint of a laugh. "You finally read the 'location'."
It sounded slightly happy.
Takaya clicked his tongue.
"Don't praise me."
"I'm not praising you."
Liar, Takaya thought.
But it didn't matter right now.
A lobby.
That made sense.
The white observer side standing at the entrance,
the waiting ones remaining in the waiting room,
the pale blue completed form preempting them...
It was all because this was a place where "which route to enter" hadn't been finalized yet.
And the reason pdf-side log fragments, Zankyo-chan's settings, and even Gachirick's sense of role were bleeding into here was because it still wasn't "finalized as a piece of work."
That realization made Takaya shudder slightly.
In the middle of creation.
In the middle of a world.
In the middle of a personality.
Everything is still in the lobby.
"...This is the worst."
"Therefore, it should be cut," the pale blue outline interjected.
"That again?"
"Compress the unconfirmed territory. Eliminate the noise. Close the unnecessary personality fragments."
Its words became robotic.
Takaya grimaces.
"That right there."
"What?" Ill asks.
"This guy really tries to summarize everything using words like 'personality fragments' or 'elimination'."
"Yeah."
"He's like Bacchus."
After saying it, Takaya narrowed his eyes slightly.
That word had been caught in his throat for a while now.
Bacchus.
The God of Wine.
Intoxication.
Pleasure.
Feasting.
Collapse.
Rampage.
Joy.
There were many images.
But the "Bacchus" in this lobby right now was a much cruder, more modern presence—something like a live-stream screen.
"Ill."
"What."
"Right now, rather than wanting to 'go kill Bacchus'..."
"Yeah."
"...I want to 'go end Bacchus'."
It was closer to a desire to log out than murderous intent.
He didn't want to defeat the god of wine.
He wanted to end the layer of "smoothing everything over with pleasure" that ruled this lobby.
He wanted to end the atmosphere of laughing off the world like a pawn in a board game.
"I understand that," Ill says quietly. "Your Bacchus isn't a god of wine. It's the layer that turns everything into entertainment."
Takaya's eyes widened slightly.
"...That's it."
Hearing it put into words made it click perfectly.
Turning absolutely everything into a stream.
Pain, failure, shame, daily life, emotional turbulence—mixing it all into "content."
Dismantling seriousness, laughing it off, but never letting go of the scent of money until the very end.
As a collective term for that layer, "Bacchus" existed inside Takaya right now.
That's why he hated it.
"You're Bacchus, aren't you," Takaya says toward the pale blue outline.
"Incomprehensible."
"No, wait," Takaya shakes his head. "You aren't Bacchus himself."
"..."
"You're the 'convenient format' Bacchus uses when he uses this lobby."
For the first time, the pale blue outline clearly fell silent.
A bullseye.
"Alright." Takaya curls the edge of his mouth up slightly. "So that's where it is."
Zankyo-chan's noise pitches up a bit.
Gachirick's wind pressure groans dully.
The dark purple butterflies trace circles in front of the two monitors.
The entire lobby was reacting to those words.
Bacchus.
The layer of "consuming pleasure" that makes the lobby a lobby.
The layer that makes everything light, saturates everything, turns everything into a spectacle, yet pays nobody's rent.
Takaya laughs.
"Well, I guess I can't go in for the kill then."
"Yeah," Ill says. "But you can go in to end it."
The pale blue outline suddenly lunges forward.
This time it's different.
The type of pressure has changed.
It's not just the pressure of efficiency.
Something else mixed into it.
Irritation.
Or the panic of not wanting to be denied.
"Here it comes."
Takaya readies his right arm slightly.
Gachirick steps half a pace forward.
Zankyo-chan drifts closer to the ceiling.
The butterflies scatter left and right.
The two monitors vomit static at the exact same time.
The gray city.
The cherry blossom trees.
And deep behind them both, a third screen faintly appears.
Reflected there was a massive hall, like a login screen.
A virtual city.
Floating advertisements.
Score displays.
Rankings.
Swarms of avatars.
Cheers.
Superchats.
Applause.
Visual effects.
Everything felt a little cheap.
But a little captivating.
That's why it was a hassle.
Looking at that screen, Takaya smiled, utterly disgusted.
"...I knew it."
"Did you see it?"
"It's 'above' the lobby, right?"
"Yeah."
That's Bacchus's hall.
Probably.
The name wasn't fixed yet.
But the air said so.
Past this underground lobby.
The layer where everything is converted into points, converted into audience reactions, and made into something "okay to laugh off."
Takaya hated it from the bottom of his heart.
"I hate that place."
"Then adapt," the pale blue outline says instantly. "Optimize. Compress your emotions. Convert them into calculable units."
"You're seriously gross," Takaya spits out. "That's exactly what I hate about it."
"What is?" Ill asks.
"Everything gets turned into a 'calculable unit', right?" Takaya glares at the third screen. "Sadness. Failure. Embarrassment. Being a loner. Daily life. Sickness. All of it gets turned into 'material' or 'scores' or 'merchandise'."
Ill says nothing.
Takaya continues. "That is the Bacchus inside of me."
Zankyo-chan chimes low at that.
Do...
Shaa...
Pi...
The order is slightly different from before.
Just by changing the sequence, the meaning of the space changes too.
By "changing the sequence," Zankyo-chan might be slightly disrupting the control of this lobby.
"Good job," Takaya says quietly, and Zankyo-chan's outline thickens a bit more.
The shoulders of the black hoodie were finally starting to look like a human shape.
There was no face yet.
But it wasn't "just noise" anymore.
Seeing that change, the pale blue outline blatantly showed panic for the first time.
"Unapproved growth."
"I don't care."
"The sequence is wrong."
"That's what's good about it."
Takaya thrusts his right arm forward.
The mouths of erosion were trying to form a third one.
Slightly above the elbow.
It wasn't that the skin was tearing, but more like the bite marks were aligning beneath the skin.
Rather than pain, the sense of a foreign object was thick.
But this was fine.
It wasn't clean.
It wasn't complete.
It was constantly midway through.
And because of that, he was still on this side.
"I don't want to become a 'completed me' like you just yet."
When Takaya said that, the pale blue outline looked at him head-on.
It was a gaze that, for the first time, made him feel like they were "looking at each other."
"Then what will you become?"
Takaya falls silent for a moment.
He still didn't have an answer to that question.
Falling to the waiting side like the Waiting One was wrong.
Leaning toward the White Observer Side was wrong.
Becoming a completed form was wrong.
So what would he become?
He didn't know.
But there was one thing he could say.
"...For now," Takaya glares at the third screen, the virtual city hall, and says: "I want to make Bacchus's lobby shut up."
It was less a declaration and more a very serious muttering to himself.
And that muttering was far more natural to Takaya.
Ill laughs slightly at that.
"That works."
"It's sloppy."
"Sloppy is fine."
Gachirick's wind pressure lowers slightly.
Zankyo-chan's noise becomes a bit more like breathing.
The butterflies land on the borders of the three screens.
The entire lobby was beginning to switch to the next layer.
Takaya feels it.
The corridor will end soon.
Next is the hall.
Bacchus's layer.
The layer that laughs while turning everything into a product.
He hates it.
But he has no choice but to go.
"Ill."
"What."
"Is it long again from here?"
"Pretty much."
"The worst."
"Yeah."
Takaya laughs.
He had no choice but to laugh.
And, aiming for the third screen, he took a single step forward.
システムの都合上、今回はここまで（第十三章の終わりまで）とさせていただきます。
この続きの「第十章 蝶のいる通路」以降の翻訳をご希望の場合は、そのまま「続きをお願い」と返信してくださいね。続きのテキストから順番に翻訳していきます！
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I spend my days wasting time dreaming of touching breasts, yet even if I escape the cage funded by public money, I still wonder whether it is time to put an end to the absurd violence of names, the incomprehensible accusations, and the endless death orders from the God-System and Outer-Science factions.
Maybe I belong to a generation that can finally die in peace.
Author: TAKAYA
Episode 22 / 22
Movie Edition:
"The Everyday Life of Takaya Yagyo at the Edge of the District Star"
The train never came.
Yet the platform existed.
Everything was silver.
The floor.
The pillars.
The ceiling.
The advertisements.
Everything.
There was no color.
Only metallic shine.
It looked as if somebody had wrapped the entire world in aluminum foil.
"Worst place imaginable."
Takaya muttered.
"Pretty much."
Illu answered.
Beyond the platform stood a pedestrian bridge.
Not an ordinary bridge.
A gigantic one.
Large enough to contain an entire city.
Hundreds of passageways.
Thousands of signs.
Countless staircases.
Countless elevators.
No one knew where they led.
Yet everyone kept walking.
Families from another era.
Students.
Office workers.
Elderly people.
Children.
All of them silver.
Their faces felt strangely familiar.
Faces he had seen before.
Yet their names would never come to mind.
"Another memory-layer."
Takaya frowned.
"Yeah."
Illu replied.
"This is the place that forces people to remember."
"I hate it already."
"I know."
The families continued walking.
Endlessly.
Like life itself.
Then it happened.
At the far end of the platform sat an old man on a bench.
Slowly rubbing his chin.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
The moment the sound reached Takaya's ears, a flood of images burst into his mind.
Rain.
Apartment blocks.
Train stations.
Fluorescent lights.
Arcades.
Convenience stores.
Subways.
Someone laughing.
Someone shouting.
Someone walking away.
All of it vague.
All of it blurred.
Yet painfully real.
"Damn."
Takaya pressed a hand against his forehead.
"Not again."
"A Recall Unit."
Illu said calmly.
"It pulls memories out."
"I don't want them."
"It doesn't care."
The old man continued rubbing his chin.
As though he were saying:
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
But Takaya already knew.
The more you remembered,
the more this place captured you.
That was the rule of the Silver World.
elon scam woke me up, so irritable.
always ??俺の足もとにも及ばないくせに
