The Unspoken Truth Chapter 8

Chapter 8 Everything happened so quick, I tell you. I guess Pride was right about it. There were quite some long intervals between the first couple of sins, but as I’m getting near to defeating all of them, they seem to be shorter. I myself don’t have a clue as to why this had happened. The only thing is, the situations on the normal world got even worse. There was something more than violence that makes things go really, really wrong. It was vanity. It can be even worse when the person who suffered this narcissus syndrome comes from a blue-blood family. I was in the library, looking for some textbooks concerning Japan’s isolation period. I heard that they were going to be in the exams, which was in 3 weeks time. Our History teacher was so vigilant about Japan’s history; I respect his patriotism, really, but I think he needs to be a bit broader on the general world history. We aren’t going to learn much if we just focus on one country. But, I guess, being the child of a World War 2 veteran, people like him would be quite hard to accept other cultures. Anyways, when I had finished checking out a few books, exactly on the 10th corridor on the 3rd floor, was where I bumped into Calvin. Instead of being the nice, respective English gentleman, he replied a bit harshly. “Get those eyes fixed, will you?” he said annoyingly as he swept his uniform like there was some dust on it as he passed. He didn’t even say his usual ‘mate’, which is what he mostly uses at the end of his sentence, as some British people do. “Maybe he’s pissed at somebody,” I said to myself as I went to the Administration to go pick up a couple of papers. I met Darius on the way; he was just out from the instrument locker, which was inside the Administration building, carrying his guitar. They had constructed a place in it for storing student’s instruments after the previous location, which was above the Music room, up in the 5th floor, got robbed by some corny thieves who tried to make a joke out of this but failed to do so. When the staff opened the room, they found shards of glass on the floor, 3 violins, a saxophone and 2 flutes missing from their spots, and a sign written roughly that said: “Retrieving lost property of the Swedish Philharmonic, please do not disturb.” The case went to the yearbook, and won the Weird Crimes award. The music teachers have had short traumas on that incident, so they decided to desert that room and use another one, which was apparently in the Administration area, where it was way safer because important documents are stored there. “Going to practice guitar, Darius?” I greeted him. He sort of forced a smile. “Yeah….” I looked at his back as he went past me. “Probably not in the mood,” I remarked as I went inside the building. I rushed to my class after it was 3 minutes to the end of lunch. However, when I had entered the class, there was a great debate, in which the aura of debating was felt everywhere inside the classroom. I found Nanaho and Calvin arguing about something as the rest of the class only observed them. “Don’t be a jerk; you know election’s already over since the beginning of this term, for crying out loud!”

“Please comply; I do realize that your leadership skills are not as good as mine. I can make a better replacement for you.” “YOU COULD’VE SAID THAT MONTHS AGO, DAMMIT!” Nanaho and Calvin are arguing like hell, I found out. It began when Calvin had suddenly asked Nanaho to come down from her position as class leader. Nanaho asked him why, and from that question, the tension has already been felt. Calvin had argued very one-sidedly; the reasons were all related to him being better than Nanaho. That, my friends, is one of the things I call madness, not just because he never wanted to be president before, but because his way of debating never sounded so...cunning before. It was completely different like the Calvin we used to know; the typical English gentleman who’s nice with anybody, including his other 3 English friends. “Admit it, Nanaho, that type of impertinence will not go far on your career as class president; resign now and you’ll see the difference,” Calvin had attacked her point. “What type of impertinence now, huh? You are the one that’s being so ruthless with your doggone ego!” Nanaho had totally lost her patience. “My ego!? Nanaho, this is not about egos, this is about skill! You do not possess such skill to become a good leader; therefore I wish for you to resign before this class’ reputation goes any lower.” There was another scene that I never saw before in my entire year in 9-E; Nanaho did a ‘walk-out’ from her position. After a moment looking furiously at Calvin whose eyes were still cold and his head raised up, she finally said, “You know what, I don’t care. I don’t effing care what happens. That’s it. I don’t care. Do what you like.” She drifted to her seat, at a loss for words and emotions. A wry smile formed in the corner of Calvin’s mouth. “Since Nanaho has resigned from her position as Class president, I will now take place of her. Rules and traditions will change, and there will be no questioning as to what made these changes happen. I presume all of you understand,” announced Calvin to the class as he walked to his seat like he was the most important person in all of our class; no, make that the whole of our grade. Sensei was confused of this new situation when he asked Nanaho a favor pertaining to her as class leader “But Nanaho, you cannot resign until the end of the term, that is what you have said early in this year,” Sensei reminded her. “No. Talk to Calvin.” “Please, Nanaho, you do not have to answer in such a rude manner. “ “No, I’m not rude. I’m just saying, go see Calvin.” Calvin stood from his seat. “Yes Sensei, I am the class president now, since Nanaho there made a sudden retirement at the inappropriate time, so I had no choice but to take her position for the rest of this year,” he explained to him. It was indirectly wrong; Nanaho didn’t just stood up and proclaimed she wanted to resign. “Oh, by the gods, not those demented classroom politics again; I thought it was already long gone.” I cussed as I witnessed the event. Since then, Calvin was the one we were forced to turn to whenever there are issues regarding our class. We had a hard time communicating and talking to him, because in every single issue, there has to be something that is related to him. Whether it be introductory speeches in chapel time for the Christians, a ‘short’ speech in the debate

competition that Nara had joined, even making announcements on the hallway. One important similarity from those events was; it was all revolving around him. I have never seen a person so one-sided and so focusing on himself and his dignity. Mysteriously, Anthony, Richard, and Darius have fallen short to his vanity; they had decided to follow him as sidekicks. And they made the matters even worse. “Hey, give respect to the class leader,” Anthony requested from Hariz as he passed by. When Hariz refused, he was beaten by the three of them after school. The news had quickly passed on, and a couple of days later the students had forcefully revered Calvin and his three assistants, who always guarded him wherever he go. Nobody could understand why the trio looked so loyal to Calvin who was loathed by some of us because of his actions. “Seriously, Calvin is the worst thing that ever happened this year, exceeding Asari,” Fumiko complained. “I-I-I don’t know what to do anymore. Him being in control as the class leader is just...just…” said Kiyomi as she started to sob. “We gotta do something here,” said Tatsu. “How are we even going to do that something? This is already out of hand! How come Hariz gets beaten to a pulp just by refusing to bow at Calvin? Even bowing like that’s already nuts, man!” Ryouichi argued. He paused for a while and then spoke again. “You know, let’s put it this way. You know those figures of history such as Charles Cornwallis, Adolf Hitler, and Alexander the Great? Most of them died or devastated at the end because of their bad sense of pride. Let’s just wait and hope that he ends up like that.” Well, he was quite right. I learned about it the next day. Out of bad luck, I had encountered Calvin and his gang in the 7th corridor on the 1st floor, which was where the canteen was located if you turn right. It happened just after the lunch bell rang in a rainy day. There was a flash of thunder rolling far away at a distance. “Yoshio!” I hear him call on me. I was stopped at my tracks, and I turned to him. He signaled a gesture to come forward towards him. I gulped, and hope that he doesn’t do anything bad. “Over here, Yoshio, and no need to give respect,” he ordered as he backed out Richard who was about to tell me to bow. I approached closer to him. “Look at me. Look at my eyes,” He ordered. After a moment pausing, I finally ‘obeyed’ him. I saw that his eyes had changed into an owl’s eyes, and the eye had hypnotized me to sleep. I had heard some sounds, but it was very fuzzy and I can’t remember at all. But there was a voice who spoke, the man’s voice who, I presumed, was Pride. “So, welcome to my humble abode.” I can hear his voice and Calvin’s saying that sentence at the same time. I guess that it was really true—Pride had taken over Calvin at the start. And I could say that his reign over Calvin’s body was quite long , a few weeks, if I could remember. I slowly opened my eyes after sometime sleeping. I can hear the voices of winds howling furiously, and the sound of thunder rolling and roaring. I regained my vision, and I realized that I was lying on the ground, facing the sky above. It was a light grey with swirling black clouds, but there was no rain. I stood up, and looked around me. It was the same background everywhere. What’s even more surprising, I am standing on a small

platform with no walls or fences. It was made of stone and a couple of rocks, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable at any point in my sleep. I looked down the edge of the platform, and I backed out as I went weak on what I saw. It was some sort of a black hole that was swirling furiously and bolts of lightning was coming out from it. I could see some kind of material that appeared small in my view being sucked into the hole and never seen again. It turns out that there were also chunks of material, such as stone, rocks, pillars, columns, floating and hanging lifelessly, defying gravity, if there was one in this world. There were a set of stairs that led me into another room; another platform, to be more specific. The stairs had no handles as a guard for falling off, and this made me quite frightened, although I claimed I never had a phobia of heights before. I walked slowly and carefully, making sure that every step is correct so I don’t slip out and fall sideways and meet my doom. The steps are made of hard granite, but they seem to be a bit fragile once they are stepped. I looked at the wooden door, which was not supported by a wall, and there was a person’s name engraved on it. Erzherzog Calvin Friedrich Maynolf Ernst von Hermann. “Hey, wait a second; Calvin only has one surname in the attendance folder!” I remembered. But that didn’t matter anymore, because I already knew that this was another Calvin that I’m about to face. When I had opened the door and entered a big platform that has some ruins and rubbles of pillars, statues, and walls inside it, the previous platform that I started with had suddenly cracked, broke into pieces, and fell short to the all-devouring black hole that swallowed it all mercilessly. I have to be quick before something worse happens next. I went over some big pile of castle rubble, went under a large pillar of stone that was lying horizontally and had left a space below it. I found another step of stairs that lead me into another room, but this time there was nothing that greeted me at the end of those stairs. I was feeling a bit anxious now, since I know that sooner or later the platform before me was going to break and fall like the previous one. As I didn’t want to waste my time being stressed over this, I finally made a decision to go past the last step of stairs. As I closed my eyes and prayed to the gods that I will be alright, I entered some sort of dimensional void. It only consisted of a pathway with no railings of support, and an exit that had light emanating brightly from inside it. I trotted calmly on the path way until I suddenly saw a figure of a large, bronze, owl appearing from the bottom on my left, flapping furiously, as he tried to push me away from the pathway and made me fall. There was still some more distance that I had to travel, and I didn’t want to die in vain only because of a giant owl who’s trying to get in my way. I ran as fast as I could, trying to ignore the gusts of wind that is pushing me to the right of the slightly narrow pathway made out of brown stone. I had finally made it to the end of the path way before the owl had wanted to unleash one immense flap. I was in a set of stairs again, and this time I was at a closed space. There were no more open platforms without any walls or ceilings, it was all closed now. I breathed a sigh of relief as I headed up into a room. The rather large circular room with a pillar on the center was filled with nothing but reflecting glass everywhere on the walls and the pillar as well. I looked at it for a while, after a short-lived fear that Lust can make herself appear again amongst the reflections. I was stupid enough to realize that I had already defeated her before in her own world.

After thinking and observing for a while at these mirrors, I figured out that they have something to do with vanity. When one has a case of narcissism, they would always spend the time they could kill to make themselves more noticed and more important than others, thinking that they’re the best living human being ever created on this earth. Well, Calvin’s case was similar to that; he took advantage of his royal ancestry to try and make himself more superior to others; that is when he was being possessed by Pride. Before he got possessed, he had even requested that he kept his royal ancestry hidden to other students outside our class, so that’s another class secret that nobody except 9-E knows about. Anyway, since the room had defined Calvin’s problem for me already, I decided to go onwards into another ascending set of stairs which was discovered after I accidentally touched one of the mirrors and found out that I can pass through it. When I had reached the end of the stairs, I found myself at another dimensional void, and this time, the void surrounding me was a bit darker than the previous one. Here, I just ran for my life, because the pathway was the same, a straight rocky path that lead me into a shining exit. Around one third of my journey through the pathway, another owl had appeared, and this time, it was in the color of silver, and it had started to rain down sharp feathers on me. Most of them had pinned to the ground and some were eaten by the void if they had missed either me or the ground. A few almost caught me as I was nearing the exit. Since I have to be fast, I literally jumped and reached out to the exit with both of my hands. “Attack of the Hooting Mad Owls”, I tried to humor myself, exhausted as I was in the final location of this whole area; A numerous amount of stair cases with only one exit. On this time, Pride spoke to my in my head. “You have finally gone past my two henchmen. What an amazing feat of survival.” “Stop that rubbish; just show up your face right here, and now!” I angrily demanded. “Oh please, be a little patient, will you? You’re almost there! I swear you’ll have fun trying to kick some British butts off the ground!” was all that I could hear as a reply as he laughed peculiarly. Traversing through this maze of stair cases was one nightmare. Some lead you to nowhere and then a few of them made you return to where you had started this maze. Some were dead ends (I almost fell to the vicious dark hole at the bottom as I was a victim of this type of staircase). It was like a giant puzzle to solve, and every time I tried to put some pieces together, I always ended getting in the wrong way. As I was nervous and stressed about this annoying puzzle, I remembered that someone had said this. “You will find most things in life when you least expected it,” he said. I was in thought for a while, meditating on this statement. Moments later, I found out that if the statement were to be applied to this puzzles, it means I have to find sets of staircases that had seemed to be impossible to pass because they were destroyed or badly damaged. And so I had tried to go through a seemingly impassable staircase. I was thinking that I would fall or stumble, but as I walked, it was okay; nothing had happened to me. And so I kept walking until I face another number of stairs in which one of them was also broken. I walked over it and it was okay. So I did the same to the other groups of stairs that try to deceive me into making me start at my original position again.

When I had finally reached the end.