Before Koyomi had lifted a single finger, Shota's father's company collapsed on its own.
It wasn't Koyomi who brought it down. It was the lies the company had told itself.
Not even a week went by.
At school, Shota visibly started to fall apart.
The sight of him laughing loudly in the middle of his usual hangers-on was gone. Every break, he stood in a corner of the hallway with his phone to his ear, pale, talking fast to someone. There was no room left in him for hiding behind his father's business card.
The rumor got around fast.
Shota's father's company was undergoing a routine audit.
Koyomi told me about it later. Once every ten years, she said, the Kisaragi Group's routine audit became something else entirely. Not the usual audit, the kind you passed as long as the numbers added up. Every ledger, down to the last page. Every invoice, checked one by one against the actual goods. There was no fudging it.
It had come in the set year ten years ago, and ten years before that. A custom that had gone on for decades, nothing more. Nothing special about it at all.
—And this year happened to be exactly that tenth year.
And the fictitious transactions came to light.
Materials that were supposed to have been delivered and had never arrived anywhere. Invoices floating in midair. Padded bills. Years of lies, every last one of them dragged out into the open.
The Kisaragi Group's compliance department handled it calmly, like a machine. Immediate suspension of business for breach of contract. A claim for the return of damages. The other business partners scattered like baby spiders from a broken egg sac.
There was no mercy in it, and nothing personal. The rules had simply worked the way the rules worked. Whoever lied was shown the door, according to the contract. That was all it was.
In no time at all, the company could no longer keep going.
There probably aren't many stories the phrase "you reap what you sow" fits this well. They had kept padding their bills for years, and they got caught. Nobody set them up. They sank on their own, under the weight of their own lies.
At school, Shota lost his place like someone rolling down a hill.
When a guy who had been hiding behind his money lost that cover, his hangers-on drew away like a tide going out. The ones who used to laugh around Shota were already laughing around somebody else. The swagger he'd had when he sneered that my story was "the power of money" was nowhere to be found.
Maybe that's what cause and effect is. Nobody has to lift a hand. Once the thing holding a person up is pulled away, they simply crumble.
I heard the news at the tower condo.
Koyomi, same as always, set my teacup at the angle within reach of my right hand.
"Koyomi."
I looked up from my manuscript and asked. My voice came out a little hoarse.
"This... You really didn't do anything, right?"
I couldn't help asking. That night, Koyomi had definitely taken her hand off her phone. She had put the gray documents away in the drawer, too. She had promised me she wouldn't touch them.
But it was all too convenient. It was as if Koyomi had snapped her fingers, and the company had collapsed on its own.
Koyomi looked at me.
And she gave me her usual quiet smile.
"I have done nothing."
She stopped there for a moment.
Koyomi narrowed her eyes, just slightly.
"I have done nothing. ...This time."
A shiver ran down my spine.
The formal "I" she uses at school had turned into a different I, cold and curt.
She wasn't lying. Koyomi really hadn't moved a single finger. The audit had simply come in its set year, as scheduled. What had come to light were the lies that company had told on its own.
Cause and effect had simply come around.
Because I stopped her, Koyomi didn't dirty her hands. And even without her dirtying her hands, the ones who lied sank on their own, under the weight of their own lies.
Koyomi had probably known from the start. That even if she didn't move, that company would collapse by itself before long. Maybe that was why, that night, when I stopped her, she had backed down so easily.
"Even if I do nothing." That small murmur just as she closed the drawer came back to me, deep in my ears.
"...What do you mean, 'this time'?"
I was about to ask her back, and that was when—
Koyomi had already started on the next topic.
"More importantly, my god, is midnight all right for today's update?"
With her usual face of faith. As if nothing had happened.
I couldn't ask any further.
Koyomi never forgives anyone who laughs at me. But she doesn't dirty her hands. Even if she doesn't, those who do wrong sink on their own. She has probably known that since long before I did.
That's why it's "this time." This time, she didn't need to do anything. Because cause and effect settled it on its own.
Then if there's a next time—what will Koyomi do?
I couldn't put that question into words. Beyond the steam rising from the teacup, Koyomi's eyes had already gone back to their usual look, the one that sees nothing but my stories.