The hands on my clock advanced; outside my window, it was already night. The blue-white glow of my monitor was the only light in my six-mat, one-room apartment. Even the time it would have taken to turn on the fluorescent lights would have been a waste. My wondrous, Godlike typing speed blows through the wide-open Internet with wild intuition! Fear my light-speed mouse skills!

I’m an untamed beast!

I’m a wolf!

Part Three

When I returned to reality, a week had passed. I liberated myself from the mouse and keyboard for the first time in several dozen hours and entered the bathroom. Reflected in the mirror was an unbelievably dangerous person—in short, me. The stubble from not shaving, my greasy hair, empty eyes, slack jaw… a dropout, unemployed hikikomori who anyone would avoid, who no one would want to go near… a dirty, disheveled, stinking, nightmarish…

A lolicon stood there.

“Ugh.” I weakly slid onto the bathroom floor.

How could things have come to this?

What had been done could never be undone. I had… I had collected Lolita images from all over the world. And I hadn’t been satisfied with images alone. I had even gotten involved with video data, in formats like MPEG and RealMovie. My 30GB hard drive was full of the indecent bodies of little girls who, in truth, I pitied.

I can’t go on. I just can’t go on. A lolicon hikikomori is pretty much the worst thing ever. I’m less than human. I’m a monster. I can’t keep living. I can never walk in the light of day again.

True, I certainly was a hikikomori. I was fairly certain that I wasn’t a lolicon, though. My tastes were pretty conventional, and I had, in fact, even liked older women. Even so, now…

“Ahhh… hunh hunh!” Unbearable sobs poured forth, and my tears gushed onto the floor. They were tears of atonement. Yes, I acknowledged my mistakes, and I wanted to reform myself now. I wanted to change. But it was already too late.

As soon as I had started whispering things to myself like, “Nozomi is beautiful,” I knew I was going to hell. As soon as I had begun to mutter thoughts like, “Kiyomi is amazing. Even for a first-year middle school student, she’s amazing,” to myself, I was ready to fall into hell. As soon as I had begun to opine, “Wow, Russians are hardcore, and Americans do terrible things, also”, grinning to myself, I knew that there was a one hundred percent chance that I was going to hell.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I apologize, I didn’t really want to do it. I didn’t mean any harm. It was just a joke at the start. But now…