The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria
Book 2: Chapter 11

May 4 (Monday), Greenery Day

May 4 (Monday), 7:49 AMI realize my hands and feet are cuffed, and I’m lying on the floor with a blanket covering me. I’m still too groggy to think straight.

I’m in pain, but I can’t tell if it’s a dream or reality.

It’s like I’m sinking into a bottomless swamp.

I flounder and struggle uselessly, descending deeper and deeper into the muck until I no longer even know why I’m resisting its pull. Eventually, I can’t fight it even though I want to. The swamp simply swallows me up. My body is filled with slime and detritus, to the point where I myself am nothing more than filth. I’m scum, inside and out, until the sludge slathered over me erases my profile and buries me.

I can no longer see myself for the boy I am.

The boy I am, huh?

When I first gained this body, I made it a point to think of myself the way Kazuki Hoshino would, but now I do so naturally without any conscious effort. It’s not so much that I’ve grown accustomed to it as that his physical form pushes my thoughts in that direction. I’m sure that if I let his body lead the way, I can truly become Kazuki Hoshino.

Now that I’m fully awake, I sit up. The scent of peppermint tells me where I am. Not Ryu Miyazaki’s apartment, where I should be, but the home of Maria Otonashi.

I can hear someone snoring softly. Looking over at the bed, I see Maria Otonashi asleep, facing in my direction. Her expression isn’t her usual tense mask. In slumber, at least, she actually looks like a girl about my age… I mean, she is, more or less.

“What’re you looking at?” The innocence vanishes from her face as if it was never there.

“You’re cute when you’re asleep, Otonashi.”

“So it’s ‘Yuhei Ishihara’ now.”

She knows it’s me in an instant, even though up until yesterday, the hour of seven to eight in the morning was “Kazuki Hoshino” time.

Maria Otonashi sits up in bed and looks into my eyes.

“I hate to break it to you, but it seems you’re still alive.”

“……Huh?” It’s too sudden for me to respond.

“I’m saying the owner is still among the living.”At first, I can’t process what she’s telling me, but bit by bit, the gravity of her unthinkable claim is dawning on me.

What— What is this…?

My brain is struggling to keep up, and all I can do is stare at her face.

“Well, guess I’d better get moving. I don’t have time to spend all day chitchatting with you here.” Maria Otonashi takes a jacket out of her closet and slips it on.

“Where are you going…?”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m going to look for the owner. Where else?”

If the owner is indeed alive, then that would be the natural course of action. She opens the door to the apartment and leaves without a glance behind her.

What is this? What’s happening? How exactly did I end up in this situation?

Our plan must have failed yesterday. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be in this mess now.

At any rate, I have to get my bearings. I look for a phone so I can call Ryu Miyazaki. Kazuki Hoshino’s is sitting on the table. I reach out for it…

“…!”

…and I draw my hand back in fright as it begins loudly vibrating, almost as if it were waiting for that exact moment.

Looking at the clock, I can see that it’s eight AM sharp. This hour has belonged to me since yesterday. I’m sure Ryu Miyazaki factored this in when he timed his call.

I pick up the phone and check the number.

“……Huh?”

It’s not the number I expected. This number belonged to— No, that’s not possible! There’s no way the owner of this number could be calling me!

But who is, then?

Trying to ignore the tremble in my fingers, I press the button to answer the call.

“……Hello?”

“……” The person on the other end remains silent.

“Hello…? Who is this?”

“Riko Asami.”

“Wha…?!”

I can’t say anything else.

“Why are you so surprised?”

“B-but…”

“You thought I was dead? You thought I’d been killed? Sorry, but I’m here talking to you right now.”

It’s unmistakably Riko Asami’s voice.

“That’s impossible! You’re gone! Ryu Miyazaki killed you!”

“…Heh…heh-heh, I know that all too well, but you can’t see anything beyond yourself. Idiot. Don’t you understand? There’s no way he could kill me.”

Ryu Miyazaki couldn’t kill Riko Asami? …I find that hard to believe. She should’ve been the person he wanted removed from his life the most.

“How big of a moron do you have to be to think I was dead without doing the deed yourself? You’re trash—too disgusting to even look at. I hope you get thrown in the incinerator like the garbage you are.”

Mumbling quietly, Riko Asami takes advantage of my confusion to lay into me.

As the realization that she’s still alive finally takes hold, I notice something.

“…Why are you talking like that?”

“Talking like what?”

“I mean, it sounds just like…”

“Like how you used to talk? Before you started acting tough? Back in those dark days when all you could do was swallow everything you wanted to say? …You’re one to talk.”

Riko Asami laughs quietly as she continues.

“You haven’t changed at all.”

You’re saying I haven’t changed? After I put in so much time and effort to do so? After my admiration for Maria Otonashi led me to reinvent myself as a different person? After I’m about to become Kazuki Hoshino? …I haven’t changed after all that?

Where does someone as pathetic as Riko Asami get off saying that to me?!

“…Shut the hell up. Someone must have put you up to this call to piss me off, huh?”

This Riko Asami of the past, this weakling, throws my hostility right back in my face. “That’s right.”

“…Huh?”

“You’re trying to steal someone else’s body like you somehow deserve it, and I can’t let you do that… Who the hell do you think you are? You need to be put in your place. You need to just curl up and die. That’s why…”

Riko Asami’s voice is free of any real emotion.

“…I’m going to destroy this Box.”

“What… What are you saying…?”

“You know that I can do it. After all, I—Riko Asami—am the owner.”

I have no response for that, so I stay silent. My hand is shaking as it holds the phone.

She chuckles as she speaks to me.

“Don’t get any ideas that you’re going to make it out of this somehow, okay, ‘Riko Asami’?”

May 4 (Monday), 10:01 AM

“……H-hel— Help me…… Help me, Ryu……”

The cry in the message belonged to Riko Asami.

Now that I thought about it, Miyazaki had never once referred to his sibling as his younger brother. I had just assumed my foe was male, since “Riko Asami” always spoke in a boy’s voice—my voice—and went by the name “Yuhei Ishihara.” Of course, Miyazaki intentionally never corrected me by mentioning a sister.

I never in my wildest dreams would have guessed that Asami and Miyazaki were related. Their last names are different, and there haven’t been any rumors to that effect going around school. Even though she would come into classroom 2-3 pretty much every day, I never saw anything that would make me suspect, either. If I had to guess, I’d say their messy family situation convinced them to keep the fact they’re brother and sister a secret.In all likelihood, Asami wasn’t coming to our classroom to see just Maria, but Miyazaki, too.

“Maria, when did you realize ‘Yuhei Ishihara’ was female?”

“Good question. My suspicions to that effect became much stronger when we went into the girls’ bathroom together.”

“……She went to the girls’ room in my body?”

“Why’re you asking a question you already know the answer to?” She sounds exasperated…but in this case, shouldn’t I be the one getting upset? “I finally figured out who she really was when I started asking around later. Miyazaki’s classmates from middle school all pretty much knew he and Asami were related by blood. I was sure she was the owner when I found the bodies at her home.”

So Maria saw the corpses, too…

“But where the heck is Asami, actually…?”

After discovering the owner’s identity by herself, Maria had apparently spent most of Saturday searching for Asami, but she hadn’t had any luck finding her as of yet.

Maria stoops down and reaches under her bed, and I hear a soft rip like she’s peeling something off.

“What’re you doing?”

“I set up an IC recorder under my bed. I had a feeling that if I left ‘Riko Asami’ here by herself, she might call Miyazaki or somebody and reveal some info she’s been hiding from us.”

Maria pulls out the recorder and presses play. She fast-forwards a few times as she searches for a section where our captive is speaking.

“……Hello?” a voice says.

“…She called!”

“Yeah.”

We can’t hear the voice of the caller very clearly, but it probably belongs to a girl. We can tell it’s not Miyazaki, at least. I snatch my phone from the table and scroll through the call history. She must have erased both the incoming and outgoing calls, because I can’t find anything new.

I’m not certain, but it sounds like the voices on the recording are arguing.

Maria hooks the recorder up to her laptop, transfers the data over to it, and begins listening to it again on her headphones. She must be trying to hear everything she possibly can.

Her face grows so intense that it almost frightens me.

After a while, she takes off the headphones and hands them to me. I nod and put them on.

“Hello…? Who is this?”

“Riko Asami.”

I can’t believe my ears when she says that name.

After listening for a bit, a question forms in my mind. Is this really her? She doesn’t talk like the Asami I know at all. She never mumbled so quietly like this. The girl I know has a personality more like that of “Yuhei Ishihara”—or I should say “Riko Asami.”

Now that I think about it, Asami has been acting a bit weird since the thirtieth. Yeah, she seemed darker than usual. It wasn’t the fact that Maria made me a bento that was making her behave strangely, though. Not really. Thinking back on it, the Week in the Mud would’ve already been underway by that point.

Asami had simply been trying to act like her old self… But why?

“Don’t get any ideas that you’re gonna make it out of this somehow, okay, ‘Riko Asami’?”

I tune in and concentrate on the rest of the conversation.