“What’s wrong with that?”

It is the spiritual duty of normal people to help the weak and break the strong.

“Her role is to entice you. That is why Asahina’s appearance and personality are the way they are. A timid, adorable girl who just happens to fit your tastes. You are the only person Suzumiya ever bothers listening to. Having a hold on you would be the optimal course of action.”

I fell as silent as a deep-sea fish. I recalled what Asahina had said to me half a year ago. Not the present Asahina but the adult one who came from farther into the future. After summoning me with a letter, she said, “Don’t get too close to me.” Was she saying that because of her circumstances? Or was she expressing her personal feelings?

Koizumi took advantage of my silence to continue in a voice that sounded like an old Jomon Sugi was speaking.

“What if Asahina is merely playing the role of a clumsy girl and her true personality is something different? She judged that doing so would earn your sympathy. The same goes for her position as a poor little girl childish in appearance who has to suffer Suzumiya’s unreasonable demands. It is all done to attract your attention.”

This guy’s seriously lost his sanity. I attempted to imitate Nagato’s flat voice. “I’m sick of listening to your jokes.”

Koizumi smiled a minuscule smile and spread his arms in an exaggerated fashion.

“Ah, forgive me. It would appear that I lack the ability to carry through a joke. I was lying. It was just a crazy setting I made up. I just felt like saying something serious. Did you think I really meant it? If that’s the case, my acting skills aren’t too shabby. I’m starting to feel confident about stepping onto a stage.”

He continued after a grating chuckle. “My class will be performing Shakespeare. Hamlet, to be specific. I will be playing the role of Guildenstern.”

“Never heard the name before. He’s probably just a minor character, right?”

“Originally, that would be the case. However, as we progressed, we decided to switch to the Stoppard version. Which means I will have a much bigger role.”

Good job. I didn’t know there was another version of Hamlet besides Shakespeare’s.

“Between Suzumiya’s movie and this play, my schedule has been quite tight. It’s a lot of pressure. If I appear to be mentally tired, that would be the reason why. I’m pretty confident that I would collapse if a closed space were to appear. That is another reason why I came to request your aid. To please stop the abnormal phenomena being caused by Suzumiya’s movie.”

The rational-conclusion thing? You mentioned the whole it-was-just-a-dream thing.

“I have to make Haruhi realize that everything in her movie is made up—right?”

“It must be a clear understanding. She’s quite intelligent. She is well aware of the fact that her movie is fiction. However, she wishes that the world would become that way. We need her to clearly understand that it won’t. Before the filming is over, preferably.”

And after wishing me luck, Koizumi disappeared into the night. What was that? Did he come to shove the responsibility onto me? He already has a lot to deal with so I have to handle the rest? If that’s the case, he’s come to the wrong person. We’re not talking about the joker in Old Maid here. You can’t just push it around. And Haruhi Suzumiya isn’t the fifty-third card here. Not the trump card or ace in the hole either. And she’s definitely not the maid.

“But still,” I muttered.

I can’t just ignore all of this. Nagato aside, Asahina and Koizumi look like they’re almost out of hit points. The same may be true about the entire world for that matter, but I wouldn’t know.

“That’s a problem… I suppose.”

What a pain. Damn. I’m pretty pooped myself.

I tried to come up with a plan. How to deal with Haruhi’s delusions. A way to clearly make her understand that movie and reality are separate. What would be the method to make her accept such an obvious thing? It was all just a dream… or was there something else?

Only a little time remained before the cultural festival.

The next day, I made a suggestion to Haruhi. After some wrangling, she finally agreed to it.

“Okay!” Haruhi yelled loudly as she sounded the megaphone.

“Good work! We’re done filming now! Everybody worked hard! Especially myself. Yep, I’m awesome! Great job!”

Upon hearing those words, waitress Asahina plopped down onto the ground. She looked relieved from the bottom of her heart. So relieved that it looked like she might cry. In fact, tears were flowing from her eyes. Haruhi apparently took those tears to mean that she had been overcome by emotion.

“Mikuru, it’s too early to be crying. Save those tears for when you’re awarded a Palme d’Or or an Oscar. We’ll all be happy together!”

It was lunch break, and we were gathered on the roof of the school building. Tomorrow would be the cultural festival. We had been so short on time that we didn’t even have time to calmly eat lunch.

The final battle between Mikuru and Yuki ended with the sudden awakening of some unknown power within Itsuki Koizumi and the usage of that convenient power to send Yuki flying into the deep reaches of space.

“This is perfect. We’ve made an incredible movie! If we take this to Hollywood, we’ll have an avalanche of buyers. We should start by signing a contract with a skilled agent!”

Haruhi was cheerfully intent on going global. I had no idea who was going to watch this film, but the only selling point would be the leading actress, as nobody would want anything to do with the rest of the staff. In that case, I could tag along as Asahina’s agent and promote her. I could probably make a little money that way. And while we were at it, maybe Haruhi could try to become a gravure idol or something? I was willing to send in her photographs and background without telling her.

“So it’s finally over, huh?”

Koizumi smiled at me with a sunny face.

It’s pretty aggravating, but he looked best when he had that free-of-charge smile on his face. I don’t want to see a melancholic Koizumi. It would probably give me the creeps.

“But now that we’re finished, it feels like it was all over in an instant. They say that time flies when you’re having fun, but I wonder who was having fun in this case.”

Beats me.

“Can I trust you to handle the rest? I can’t think about anything besides our class play at the moment, since you aren’t allowed to retake lines the way you can in movies.”

Koizumi still had on his usual grin. He placed his hand on my shoulder and whispered in a soft voice, “One more thing. An expression of gratitude. From both my organization and myself.”

And with that said, he left the roof. Nagato silently walked off after him with her usual blank expression.

Asahina was with Haruhi, who had one hand around Asahina’s shoulders and the other pointing toward the ocean as they looked off into the distance.

“We’re aiming for a Hollywood blockbuster!” she shouted. Feel free to point, but if you cross the ocean in that direction, you’ll end up in Australia.

“Good grief,” I muttered as I set the video camera down and sat. It may be over for Koizumi, Nagato, and Asahina. But this is only the beginning of the end for me. There’s still something I have to do.

Somebody had to take the mass quantity of digital video I had filmed and somehow transform the accumulation of junk digital information into the semblance of a movie. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t need to tell you to whom that task would fall.

It was Friday evening. Haruhi and I were the only people in the club room. The other three were working with their respective classes.

It was great that we’d finished shooting and all, but since the filming had taken so long, we barely had any time left to do the remaining tasks. As I replayed the footage I had loaded onto the computer, I came to the conclusion that we would have to turn this into a Mikuru Asahina promotional video clip. Very simple.

To be honest, I didn’t even have the slightest pixel of an idea as to what kind of movie Haruhi was making to the very end. Are the waitress, Death-girl, and grinning boy on the monitor okay in the head? And naturally, there wasn’t enough time left to search around for visual effects, and I didn’t have that ability to begin with. We’d just have to screen the film without any processing or editing.

Haruhi grumbled, “We can’t display an unfinished work! Do something about it!”

Is she talking to me?

“That’s easy for you to say. The cultural festival’s tomorrow and I’m already exhausted. Editing this thing to fit the story you made up was the best I could manage. I probably won’t want to watch any movies for a while.”

However, Haruhi excelled at crushing other people’s opinions in an instant.

“Won’t there be enough time with an all-nighter?”

And who’s going to do that? Except I didn’t say that. Since I was the only one there and Haruhi’s ebony eyes were looking straight at me.

“You just have to stay overnight and finish the job.”

And then Haruhi said something that left me utterly speechless.

“I’ll help too.”

In hindsight, Haruhi wasn’t any help at all. She stood behind me for a while interfering, but it didn’t even take an hour before she was sprawled on the table asleep. Damn. I should have filmed her sleeping. Then I could have put a still shot of that face after the ending credits rolled.

And I should mention that I also fell asleep soon after. By the time I opened my eyes, it was already morning and the keyboard was imprinted into half of my face.

Which means that there had been no point in staying overnight. The movie remained unfinished. I managed to cut and piece the thing into something under thirty minutes, but the result was pretty pathetic. Just a wreck filmed on a whim by a bunch of amateurs who didn’t have the slightest clue about movies. I should have just defied Haruhi and only used the bunny Asahina shopping district commercials. When you consider that the objective of my editing was to match a story that didn’t exist, which would be like spurring on a failure, the result would have to be something awful. In the end, there had been no dubbing or visual effects added. Just a garbage movie so bad it was laughable. I couldn’t even show this to Taniguchi.

As I considered tossing the computer out the window, I squinted at the morning sunlight streaming in. I’d slept in an unnatural position, so my back was aching.

By the time Haruhi, who had woken up first, had shaken me awake, it was six thirty in the morning. Now that I think about it, this is the first time I’ve ever stayed overnight at school.

“Hey, how’d it go?”

Haruhi looked at the monitor over my shoulder. I had no choice but to move the mouse.

The film began playing.

“… Huh?”

As I listened to Haruhi’s soft cheering, I was astonished. A CG movie I had never made was magnificently displaying a moving title. At that point, The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00 began playing with a crappy story, dialogue you could barely hear, and shaky video; you could even hear the director yelling off the screen at times. However, the visual effects could be considered acceptable for a high school amateur film. Lasers were shooting from Asahina’s eye and strange rays were shooting from Nagato’s wand.

“Heheh—”

Haruhi was expressing her admiration.

“Not bad, huh? It feels a little lacking, but you did a good job.”

It wasn’t me. Unless another personality surfaced and did this while I was sleeping, there is no way I could ever accomplish this. Somebody else did it. Most likely candidate, Nagato. Possible contender, Koizumi. Out of the question, Asahina. Dark horse, somebody who hasn’t made an appearance yet. Something like that.

We spent the next period of time silently appreciating our autonomously produced movie. I might have felt something different if I were watching this on a big screen instead of this small monitor.

The video on the display shifted to the last scene. Koizumi and Asahina were holding hands as they walked under cherry blossom trees in full bloom. The camera then panned up to show a blue sky. Cheap-sounding music began playing soon after as the staff roll began scrolling vertically.

And at the very end, Haruhi began narrating.

The idea I had devised was to force Haruhi to deliver this narration. I convinced her that the director herself should deliver these closing words as a bit of an inside joke.

They were the magic words that canceled everything that had occurred.

“This story is a work of fiction. There is no relation to any real people, organizations, events, or other names and phenomena. It’s all made up. If anything seems familiar, it’s just a coincidence. Oh, the commercials are an exception. Here’s a shout-out to Ohmori Electronics and Yamatsuchi Model Shop! Give them lots of business! What? Say it again? This story is a work of fiction. There is no relation to any real people, organizations… Hey, Kyon. Why do I have to say this? Shouldn’t it be obvious?”