Chương 42: The Dreaming Realist

"Oh?" NOBUNAGA's camera-eyes shifted fractionally.

"You still stand?... Are you that eager to rush to your death, foot soldier?"

"Who are you calling a foot soldier...!" I adjusted my glasses, glaring back at the Demon King with eyes shot with crimson veins.

"Listen well, Oda Nobunaga! You are making a massive miscalculation!"

"A miscalculation, you say?"

"Yes! You seem to think you are the living incarnation of pure destruction... but you're dead wrong! You were just a romanticist who dreamed of the future more than anyone else in history!" NOBUNAGA froze in his tracks. The low, buzzing hum of the surrounding drones hushed into an instantaneous silence.

"I've devoured every scrap of your records! Rakuichi Rakuza, the abolition of the border checkpoints, the aggressive embrace of Nanban culture... Everything you ever did was driven by a childlike, raw curiosity just to see what a 'new world' would look like!" I took a resolute step forward.

"Destruction? Hell no! You didn't want to destroy things for the sake of it! You wanted to see! A brilliant, unwritten future that no soul had ever witnessed before! The obsolete, ancient systems were just in your way, making you impatient, so you burned them to the ground to clear the path!"

"... Silence," NOBUNAGA's voice dropped into a dangerous, subterranean register.

"Hit a nerve, did I?! You were always utterly alone! Your vision was so grand, so staggering, that absolutely no one could keep up with you! Your retainers, your family—everyone just feared you as a 'Demon King.' But in truth, didn't you just want someone to look at you and say, 'That's an incredible dream'?" This was my own narrative projection. I didn't care about what the official textbooks said. But as a story, this had to be the absolute core of the man named Nobunaga. He wasn't a cold, calculated machine.

He was a lonely dreamer whose internal passion burned so intensely it accidentally incinerated everything around him.

"Shoot me! Go ahead and shoot!" I threw my arms out wide.

"But even if you kill me, it won't fill that void of your isolation! Even if you burn down the entire future, you will never be satisfied! Because what you truly desire isn't a scorched earth! You want an equal! Someone who finally understands you!" For a split second, the muzzle of NOBUNAGA's railgun appeared to tremble fractionally. Was it a logic error? No. It was the volatile fluctuation of suppressed emotion.

"Someone who... understands me?" Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. NOBUNAGA let out a hollow laugh. It was a dry, profoundly sorrowful sound.

"Jehi mo nashi.... Indeed. Not a single soul ever understood. Not Mitsuhide, not Hideyoshi, not even Ranmaru. They merely cowered before my power, or sought to exploit it for their own gain.... There was not a single person in this world capable of standing beside me to look upon the exact same horizon." He slowly tilted his head back, looking up at the jagged tear in the sky—at the sprawling neon web of Neo-Tokyo.

"That is precisely why I am going. To that future. Perhaps out there... there is something capable of quenching this insatiable thirst."

"There isn't," I stated with absolute finality.

"If you burn it down with your own hands, nothing will remain out there either. Only cold ash.... You'll just end up completely, utterly alone all over again."

"... You." NOBUNAGA locked his gaze directly onto me.

"How can you speak with such absurd certainty? Who the hell are you?"

"I am... Kataru Mono." I squared my shoulders, holding his gaze.

"Just a guy who loves stories.... And a traveler from the future who happens to know the sequel to your dream." I softened my tone just a fraction.

"Nobunaga-san. Your dream actually came true."

"... What?"

"After you died, Hideyoshi ran along the tracks you laid down. Ieyasu reinforced and stabilized them... and over the course of hundreds of years, our world was built on top of that foundation." I pointed straight up at the rift in the sky.

"That Neo-Tokyo out there is the latest volume of the story you started! We only exist because you sowed the seeds! Are you seriously going to rip your own masterpiece to pieces with your own hands?!" NOBUNAGA's crimson camera-eyes flickered violently. Error. Logical paradox. The target designated for immediate destruction was, in reality, the culmination of his own life's work.

"I... built that...? That fragile, soft, overmedicated world...?"

"Yes! A fragile, deeply complicated, and beautifully peaceful world! The exact world without conflict that you risked your entire life to forge!" I roared.

"You used to dance the Atsumori, didn't you?! You sang the lines: A man's fifty years, when compared to the realm of the heavenly lords, is but a fleeting dream, an illusion!" Dragging my battered, agonizing body forward, I closed the distance between us.

"Precisely because it's a fleeting illusion, you're supposed to pass the torch to the next generation! Don't try to live forever like an unyielding machine! To scatter ungracefully when your time comes and hand the baton to the future... that's the duty of a human being! That's what adults are supposed to do!"

"...!" NOBUNAGA actually took a physical step backward. The invincible Demon King was being actively driven back by nothing more than the raw words of an unarmed, fragile human. Yari did not miss the opening.

"... Now," Yari muttered, his blood-stained fingers striking the final command into his cracked screen.

"I won't let the time Kataru bought go to waste.... Gennai, the backdoor is wide open! Force-feed the hard shutdown sequence directly into NOBUNAGA's core!"

"You got it, boss!! I've been waiting for this exact clock cycle!!" Gennai's roaring voice echoed. SPARK! CRACKLE! SNAP! A blinding torrent of electrical feedback erupted across NOBUNAGA's entire chassis. High above us, the jagged fissure in the sky shattered like brittle glass, the neon grid of Neo-Tokyo fragmenting before seamlessly stitching itself closed. The gateway to the future was officially sealed.

"Gwwraaaaaagh...!!" NOBUNAGA dropped heavily onto one knee. The integrated railguns detached from his frame, and chunks of his obsidian nano-carbon armor began flaking off, crumbling into dull dust. He let out a low, agonizing groan, yet he refused to collapse entirely, keeping his burning eyes locked firmly onto mine.

"You...! How dare you... destroy my dream...!"

"It's not a dream," I said softly, standing directly before him as the smoke swirled around us.

"It's history.... Goodnight, Nobunaga. I hope it was a good dream." NOBUNAGA's movements ceased entirely. From the depths of his camera-eyes, the crimson hue of automated malice faded away, replaced by a quiet, deep blue luminescence. It was the gaze of a historical warlord who, in his final microsecond of consciousness, had finally returned to being a human.