Yukimasa looked around the room. There were any number of possibilities. He tried to write a few lines in his book.

The ceiling collapsed. The three of them were crushed to death.

It was hardly quality literature, but he had no obligation to make the story interesting.

The ceiling collapsed —

But the second half of the sentence immediately disappeared. So, dropping the roof on them wouldn’t work. There were still plenty of options, though. As he tried a different approach, the book suddenly filled in the previous line for him:

I died.

Yukimasa shuddered. There had never been such a seemingly final mention of his death before. Being filled with holes, or caught in a cave-in, or torn apart by monsters — those kinds of graphic descriptions were plentiful and obviously suggested his death, but a direct mention of it had never shown up before.

“That’s...kind of strange for a first-person story, isn’t it?”

He tried to make light of it. If he was the writer, there was no way he would write about his own death. At any rate, all he had to do was remove the line.

He quickly traced the letters, erasing them. He would have to focus on setting up a development that wouldn’t accidentally result in his own death at the same time. But before he could think of a new scenario to write about, the letters reappeared.

I died.

He erased them again.

I disappeared.

I vanished.

I became nothing.

My vital functions ceased.

I ended.

“What is going on?! I’m supposed to have the strongest ability, to see the future and change it!” It wasn’t the ability to make things go however he wanted, but it should have been enough that, with a bit of clever thinking, he could get out of any situation.

But the book was no longer permitting any development except for his own death. No matter how many times he erased the words, it would just display another way of saying that he had died.

“Shit! What am I supposed to do?!”

Death.

Death.

Death.

Death.

Death.

Death.

The text was no longer even forming sentences. The words were repeating so rapidly that Yukimasa couldn’t erase them fast enough. But his entire power relied on using the book, so he couldn’t just throw it away.

“That’s right! If I destroy it...” He immediately ripped out the page, shredding it into tiny pieces. It would stop being a novel that way. Tearing out each page, he ripped the entire book apart. He could very well lose his ability by doing it, but his slowly approaching demise was far more frightening.

“A-Anyway, I should run.”

He had no idea why, but he knew that if Yogiri arrived, he himself would die. So he turned away from the metal door and began to run from the room.

However, a terrible premonition stopped him dead in his tracks. He needed to run, but he couldn’t help but worry about the thing behind him. He knew he didn’t need to, but he felt driven to turn and look back. Every instinct told him not to do it, yet a similar instinct told him it was wrong to ignore the source of his fear.

Yukimasa turned around. Nothing had changed. The only things in the room were the scattered pieces of his book. There was nothing else. It was all in his head. He tried to convince himself of that.

Suddenly, letters appeared on the ground. Words describing his death spilled out of the book’s remnants where they covered the floor. In an instant, the words had crawled up the walls and reached the ceiling. The persistence of those words seemed determined to tell him there was no way he could escape it.

With a clunk, something reached the other side of the metal door, and the handle began to turn. The door opened, and Yogiri’s group stepped out. Cracking sounds came from the ceiling, bits of mortar flaking down. And then Yukimasa met Yogiri’s eyes.

“Die.”

That merciless command was the last thing he ever heard.

“What?! Is that how you greet people?! He was one of our classmates!” Hanakawa shrieked.

“I felt killing intent coming from him,” Yogiri replied. He had sensed danger from the ceiling above, and knew that the source of it had been Yukimasa Aihara, so he had killed him first. That was all there was to it.

-Volume 4 pages 122, 123, and 124