CHAPTER FOUR NADEKO SNAKE
001
Nadeko Sengoku was my sister’s classmate. I have two little sisters, and Nadeko Sengoku was friends with the younger one. Unlike the current pathetic state of my personal relationships, I was a fairly normal kid in elementary school as far as how many friends I had, but even back then I suppose you could say that while I enjoyed playing with everyone, I never enjoyed playing with specific someones. So I might have had fun with my classmates during recess, but I rarely did anything with them after school. What an unpleasant kid. Unpleasant to talk about, unpleasant to think about. In fact, I would prefer to not do either. Still, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or maybe the other way around, but either way I’m trying to say that I’ve always been like that. Which is why I’d always go home right after school, even though I didn’t take any lessons, and I’d sometimes find Nadeko Sengoku at play when I got there. My two sisters are now attached to each other, side by side no matter when, where, what, or why to the point that I am more creeped out than worried, but back in elementary school they tended to act on their own. The older one was the total outdoorsy type, while the younger mostly stayed indoors, and about once every three days she would bring a friend from school over to our home. Nadeko Sengoku wasn’t particularly good friends with my youngest sister, but more like one of her many friends, I imagined. I qualify that statement with a somewhat uncertain “I imagined” at the end because I don’t remember that time in my life very well to be honest, but when I try, of the friends my little sister used to bring home, I at least do remember Nadeko Sengoku. That’s because, coming home without having played with my friends, I ended up having to play with my little sister (My two sisters and I shared a room back then. My parents only assigned me my own room once I started middle school), mostly to liven things up by filling an open spot in a board game or the like, but I’d be called over with ridiculous frequency if Nadeko Sengoku was the one my little sister was playing with. In other words, my little sister had lots of friends (This can still be said about both of my little sisters, but they’re both incredibly talented when it comes to standing in the center of attention. I couldn’t be any more jealous, as their older brother), but out of all the classmates she brought home, Nadeko Sengoku was the rare girl who liked to do things on her own. To be frank, all of my little sister’s friends seemed the same to me, but I would of course remember the name of the girl who was always on her own, at least.
Her name was about it, though.
Yeah, I didn’t remember much, after all.
And so I’m going to have to apologize for appending yet another uncertain qualification, but Nadeko Sengoku was a reserved girl of few words who constantly looked down at the floor─I thought. That’s what I thought, but, well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m describing another one of my little sister’s friends, or maybe one of my own friends at the time. When I was in grade school, actually, I always found it annoying and irritating when my little sister had friends over. Add to that the fact I was forced to play with them, and of course I’d be left with a poor impression. When I look back at it, it must have been more annoying for those girls to have to play with their friend’s older brother, but in any case, that was in the past, so please understand a grade schooler’s sensibility. Once I started middle school, my youngest sister invited friends over less often, and even when she did, stopped inviting me to play with them. There was the fact that our rooms were now separated, but there must have been some other, bigger reason. That’s how things are. Most of her personal relationships must have been wiped clean when she graduated because both of my little sisters ended up going to a private middle school. Nadeko Sengoku was my sister’s classmate in grade school, but not now, because they went to different schools. So─it’s more than two years ago that I last saw her according to the most favorable estimate, and in truth it’s probably more than six.
Six years.
More than enough time for a person to change.
At least, I thought of myself as having utterly changed. Even when I say I was always like that, back then and now just aren’t the same. Taking a look at my elementary graduation photo album or the like now is just too painful. I know I just said something about a “grade schooler’s sensibility,” but comparing my high school self to myself in those days, I wouldn’t dare argue that I am now better or superior. We tend to look at the past through rose-colored glasses, yes, but what’s cringe-worthy here perhaps isn’t my grade school self, but the person I am now as seen by the grade school me. No, embarrassingly enough, even if he and I ran into each other in the street, we wouldn’t recognize the person standing in front of us as ourselves.
I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not.
Not being able to boast of my current self to my past self.
But sometimes it’s like that.
Which is why when I met Nadeko Sengoku again, I didn’t realize it was her at first─it took some time for me to remember. If only I’d noticed immediately, or even a little faster─if I’d noticed that she was entwined with a snake, perhaps this story wouldn’t have ended the way it did. A poignant thought, but it’s not as if my regrets mean anything either to her or to the aberration. To start this story off with its conclusion, it seems as though Nadeko Sengoku, a friend of my little sister’s whom I barely remembered, ended up a unique someone that I could never forget.
002
“I’m sorry I made you wait, my senior Araragi.”
June eleventh, a Sunday.
I’m not sure if “jockish” is the best way to put it, but at 10:55 a.m., exactly five minutes before we’d agreed to meet in front of the main gate of our school, Naoetsu High, Suruga Kanbaru, the former star of the basketball team and one year my junior, came dashing, and unable to stop, jumped, sailed easily past my head, landed, turned, and spoke those words with a fresh smile on her face and her right hand in front of her chest… I realized that I wasn’t particularly tall for a high school student, but I’d never considered my height a non-issue that a girl shorter than me could clear with a scissors jump. It seemed like I had some reconsidering to do.
“Wow… Being so transparently considerate just to avoid causing me undue mental stress testifies to your good nature. You’re just born magnanimous. The likes of me can only take three steps back and look up to take in all that you are. I’m truly stunned that you’d move me with your largeness within a mere few seconds of seeing you. Seems like I have no choice but to spend all the respect I can muster in my lifetime on you alone. Good heavens, I think I nearly resent you for that.”
“………”
She was the same as ever.
And hey, don’t go around calling people transparent.
The best response to casual kindness is to feign ignorance, okay?
“No, I really did just get here,” I assured her. “And in any case, you came early, too. There’s no reason for you to apologize.”
“I won’t have any of that. No matter what you say, the fact that I wasn’t here before my senior is cause enough for an apology. I think it’s an unforgivable sin to waste the time of someone above you.”
“I’m not above you.”
“You’re a year ahead of me so you are.”
“True, but…”
That was just a matter of age.
Not that she couldn’t easily leap over me, though.
Suruga Kanbaru─a second-year at Naoetsu High.
She was our ace basketball player until just a month earlier, and her name was known across the whole school as its biggest celebrity and star. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, it was her who had led our private prep school’s weak little sports organization to the national tournament the same year she joined it. She was a frightening junior, and a half-assed washout third-year like me would normally be unable to so much as speak to her, or even step in her shadow for that matter. Just the other day, she gave her position of team captain to one of her juniors because of an injury to her left arm, then quit the basketball team early─and it was still fresh in my mind the way the whole school was shaken by the impact of the news. I doubted the memory would ever go stale.
Kanbaru’s left arm.
It was still wrapped tight in a long white bandage.
“Yes,” Kanbaru began to say in a quiet voice, “as you can see, I’ve retired. The only thing I was ever good at was basketball, and now I have nothing to offer the school. So you ought to deal with me accordingly.”
“What do you mean, ‘deal with’ you? For all the confidence you seem to have, your self-esteem can be weirdly low. What you’ve done for the basketball team won’t go away just because you’re retiring early.”
Guilt over her early retirement─wasn’t exactly it, but then again, it seemed unreasonable to expect her to stay the exact same after all that happened to her. Personally, though, I did wish that Kanbaru wouldn’t be so self-deprecating.
“Thanks,” she told me. “I couldn’t appreciate your concern more. I’ll gladly take those feelings into consideration.”
“Take the words into consideration, too. Okay, why don’t we get going.”
“Yup,” she said before scurrying over to my side and taking my open left hand into her right in what could only be described as a natural motion. She didn’t “hold my hand” as much as wrap her fingers around mine. From there, she pushed her body into my arm, sticking to me like she was about to embrace me. Her chest was right around my elbow because of our height difference, and the delicate, nerve-dense area of my body was beset by a sensation like mashed potatoes.
“Wait, what?! Did I voice that stupid monologue out loud just now?!”
“Ah, no, you didn’t, you didn’t. Don’t worry, I only heard it telepathically.”
“That’d make it an even bigger problem! Everyone around here must have heard it, then!”
“Heheheh. Well, we’ll just have to show them, in that case. It’s not like I’m someone who worries about appearing scandalous anymore.”
“Stop smiling and saying what a girlfriend might say when you’re just my junior! You know it’s not you I’m dating, it’s your senior who you respect very much!”
Hitagi Senjogahara.
My classmate.
And girlfriend.
And─the senior that Suruga Kanbaru admired.
She, Senjogahara, was what had connected the school’s biggest celebrity and star to the ever-nondescript average student that I am. Kanbaru and Senjogahara had been junior and senior since middle school, and while this, that, and the other happened between then and now, the two were still friends as the Valhalla Duo. For a time, Suruga Kanbaru stalked me because I was the person who was dating her admired senior.
I told her, “It’s not like you ever worried about scandals to begin with. Now get off of me.”
“A date?! When did I ever call this a date?”
“Hrm?” Kanbaru tilted her head as if that were the last thing she expected to hear. “Now that you mention it, maybe you never did. I was so excited when you asked me to go somewhere with you that I didn’t really listen to what you were saying.”
“Still, I don’t know about that. I’m on the open side when it comes to sex, and I do want to follow your wishes wherever possible, but you’d proceed to the deed without even going on a date first? I worry about your future.”
“We’re not proceeding to any deed so stop worrying about me! And a high school second-year shouldn’t be talking about how open she is about sex!!”
“Then again, we’ve already come this far. This pleasure cruise has already set sail.”
“So you are enjoying it after all!”
I caught a look of how Kanbaru was dressed.
Jeans and a T-shirt, with a long-sleeved shirt on top. Expensive-looking sneakers. On her head was a baseball cap, probably in part because the sun was getting stronger. It suited a sporty girl like her perfectly, but we’ll put that aside for now.
“You’re technically wearing long sleeves and long pants like I told you…”
But.
Her jeans were stylishly ripped here and there, while her T-shirt was short enough to show off plenty of her curved waist. It almost seemed a little much… Of course, people were free to dress as they wanted on Sundays, but still…
“What do you mean?”
“We’re about to go up into the mountains.”
“The mountains? So we’re performing the deed in the mountains?”
“There’ll be no deed.”
“Hm, pretty wild. I think I like it. That’s quite manly of you. I’m into being treated rough now and then.”
“I said no deed! Listen to me!”
I was certain I’d told her to wear long sleeves and long pants to protect herself from bugs, snakes, and the like in the mountains, yet she’d showed up in clothes with plenty of openings… It didn’t seem like they’d do her much good…
“Fine,” she said. “Wherever you go, I’m willing to come along with you. Even if you try to tell me not to. Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor overcast skies will stop me.”
In fact, I could have used some clouds with all the sun we were getting.
But even the day before, when I called Kanbaru’s home, she wouldn’t listen to a word I was saying and made the same kind of distracted replies (“You don’t even need to tell me where we’re going. The needle of my compass is always pointing in whatever direction you’re headed,” and so on)… It was actually impressive in a way how prone to making assumptions she was. She went about it in a different way than Hanekawa, like she had tunnel vision and could only see straight ahead.
“In any case, this isn’t a date,” I clarified.
“Oh, so it’s not… I was so sure that it was. I’d gotten myself fired up for it.”
“Fired up?”
“Yup. I mean, this is my first-ever heterosexual date.”
I wasn’t confident I could make a good quip about it.
“I was so fired up,” she continued, “that I broke my solemn vow to myself and bought a cell phone just for today, the first one I’ve ever owned in my seventeen years alive.”
“……”
…Please let’s keep this light!
“It’d be awful if I somehow got separated from you and couldn’t get in contact,” she explained. “We live in an age where pay phones have all but disappeared, so a cell phone is an essential dating tool.”
“W-Well…you’re right. Heh, heheh. But there still are a good number of pay phones left out here in the countryside…”
“That’s not all. I woke up at four to make us lunches. One for me and one for you. Since we were going to meet at eleven, I assumed I’d get to eat lunch with you.”
As she said this, Kanbaru presented me with a bundle her bandaged left arm held… Yes, I’d noticed from the beginning, but judging by its tall rectangular shape, it was one of those multiple-box affairs…
Could we keep this light, please?
I mean, literally now…
I certainly knew we’d be together for lunch, so my plan had been to take her out to a fast food place once we were done, like a good senior. But it seemed that this junior of mine operated on a more deadly plane.
So that was her move. Homemade lunches…
It was a surprise attack.
“I was so happy and excited about getting to go on a date with my revered senior that I could barely get any sleep and also woke up early, so it was a nice diversion.”
“A diversion, huh? Is all of that for lunch, though? It’s a lot of food… I should let you know up front that I can’t eat that much.”
“I made it for us to split half and half, but I can just eat whatever you don’t finish. I hate wasting food, so I did take that into account.”
“Okay…”
I took a look at Kanbaru’s fully exposed navel.
Maybe around ten percent body fat, at the most?
Fit Sugaru’s hourglass figure.
It almost seemed like a palindrome…
It wasn’t, though.
“Hold on, Kanbaru. Are you one of those people who don’t get fat no matter how much you eat?”
“Uhm, it’s more like I’m one of those people who lose tons of weight unless they eat like crazy.”
“People like that exist?!” That would make girls envious of her… In fact, even as a boy I was envious of her! “How exactly do you get your body to do that?”
“Simple. First, start off with two sets of ten-mile sprints every morning.”
“Okay, never mind.”
So that was it.
What she considered a normal amount of exercise was on a different level.
It seemed that Suruga Kanbaru was still making sure to work out every day, even after her retirement from the basketball team. Impressive. It made perfect sense, though. She might have claimed she quit because of an injury to her left arm, but the truth lay elsewhere.
“Ah…” she let out an exaggerated sigh. “But it looks like it was all a waste… So it wasn’t a date after all. I was really looking forward to it, too. I feel like an idiot, the way I went off and got myself excited for nothing. I’m red with embarrassment. My dreams were too big for reality. It seems so obvious that a noble senior such as yourself would never bother dating a fool like me. I couldn’t have been any more conceited… I’m sorry to have troubled you with my wild assumptions. Well, this cell phone and these lunch boxes are pointless now. They’re just going to weigh us down, so I’ll toss them somewhere. Wait here just a minute, I’ll change into a tracksuit real fast.”
“Actually, this is a date!”
I lost.
Such a weak man…
“Today was a date after all, Kanbaru! Yeah, I just remembered I was, um, really looking forward to today, too! Hooray, I finally get to go on a date with Miss Kanbaru! Okay? So hold onto your phone and those lunches! You don’t need to change your clothes, either!”
Uh oh. She looked super cute.
“I’m glad. You’re very kind,” she said.
“Yeah…though I have the feeling my kindness is going to be my downfall one of these days…”
………
I was going on a date with Kanbaru, Senjogahara’s junior, before I ever went on a date with Senjogahara herself, my girlfriend. I doubted she’d count this as cheating, given how unusually lenient that tsundere girl was with Kanbaru, but it was still undeniable proof of how weak-willed I was…
Also, we were still holding hands the entire time we were having this conversation, our fingers still entwined. I made a sly effort to disentangle them, but we were locked tight as if our hands were in a rugby scrum. It felt like my hand was a piece in a wire puzzle or the victim of a submission hold.
Like a snake had wrapped itself around it.
“Still, Kanbaru. Button up that shirt you’re wearing on top. You have to agree that baring your navel is a bad idea when we’re going into the mountains. As far as those distressed jeans─well, I guess you’ll be fine with those as long as you’re careful.”
“Hmm. Okay, as you wish.”
Kanbaru followed my instructions and buttoned up her long-sleeved shirt, hiding her curved waist from sight. I had to admit that a small part of me regretted it, but I knew I shouldn’t be having such wicked thoughts about my girlfriend’s junior.
“Now let’s get going,” I said.
“Oh, now that you mention it. Are you going to be walking today?”
“Yeah. We’re heading to a mountain. I don’t know where I’d be able to park a bike, plus I can’t afford to have my only bike stolen.” The mountain bike I’d used for trips had been smashed to smithereens, after all, thanks to a certain someone’s left arm. Not that I’d say that to her since it could only come out sarcastic. “It’s not like this is much of a trip. Look, you can even see where we’re going from here. That mountain over there…”
As I said this, I suddenly remembered something. When I’d first started to speak to Kanbaru a month ago, she was so averse to touching the body of the boy dating her idol Senjogahara that she declined to ride on the back of my bicycle, opting against all common sense to run alongside me as I pedaled… And now that same girl was holding my hand, wrapping her fingers around mine, and shoving her chest into my body…
“Heheheh.” Kanbaru wore an innocent and bashful grin and nearly skipped down the street. “My senior, Araragi, my senior, Araragi, my senior, Araragi, my senior, Araragi~~~”
“………”
Well, hasn’t she grown attached!
She’s even humming to herself!
“By the way, Kanbaru… I’ve always meant to tell you this, but could you stop calling me your senior?”
“Huh?” She seemed puzzled, like she hadn’t expected to hear that. “Why? I call you my senior because you are my senior. I couldn’t imagine calling my senior anything but my senior.”
“Well, there’s a lot of other things you could call me.”
“Like ‘my senior, Kesennuma’?”
“Don’t change my name.”
No, the other part.
Plus “Kesennuma” was a place name.
“I’m talking about the ‘my senior’ part. It’s so stiff and formal.”
“O…kay. Well, sure, I suppose I am your senior, but it just sounds too serious. And ‘my senior, Araragi’ is a mouthful like my full name.”
My full name is Koyomi Araragi.
Seven syllables.
The same as “my senior, Araragi.”
“Hmm. Should I call you ‘Mister Araragi’ in that case?”
“I guess that’s one solution? But I’m only a year older, so I don’t think there’s any need for you to be so proper and uptight with me. And I feel kind of weird about being called ‘Mister’ in the first place. There’s a grade school kid I know who always calls me that, but in her case, she speaks in this weirdly polite manner.”
Her personality couldn’t be any worse, though.
That reminded me. I hadn’t seen Hachikuji lately.
……
That made me feel kind of lonely.
“Kanbaru, I know a lot happened between us over Senjogahara, but I’d like us to treat each other more like equals.”
“I see. I’m glad to hear that.”
“Then again, I’m not sure I’m on even ground with our school’s biggest star.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Nothing could ever make me happier than being with you like this. Getting to know you makes me nearly as happy as reconciling with my other esteemed senior Senjogahara. If there’s anything about you that I’m dissatisfied about, it’s that I didn’t meet you sooner in life.”
“…Uh huh.”
She really did have low self-esteem.
I could understand why, though, considering what I’d learned a month ago.
She had a lot going on, too.
“So,” she confirmed with me, “I’m getting the sense that it would be okay for me to refer to you in a more intimate way than ‘my senior’?”
“Yeah. You can call me whatever you want.”
“All right, Koyomi.”
“………”
……
Only my family calls me that!
“And Koyomi, you can call me Suruga.”
“You’re going on again like we’re an item! And why do these milestone events keep on happening between me and my girlfriend’s junior?! Even Senjogahara still calls me ‘Araragi’! Do you have any idea how much of a leap you just made?!”
“Please don’t get so worked up. You know that was supposed to be a joke, Koyomi.”
“Why are you still calling me that then, Suruga?!”
“The ‘Dashing Knight of Lightning’ Koyomi.”
“And now you’re sticking some weird slogan on my name? My grandfather gave me my name, stop messing around with it! There’s nothing dashing or lightning-like about me, and I’m not a knight, either! And that’s like, twice as long as my full name, anyway! You’re losing sight of our initial goal here!”
“The ‘Last Hero of Our Century’ Koyomi.”
“The last one this century?! Isn’t that a little premature?!”
“Well, in any case, I can’t bring myself to address my senior casually. So ‘Koyomi’ is out. I don’t feel comfortable not using a title. But if a slogan is too much, can we try a nickname?”
“A nickname…” Her sensibility could be a little off the mark…or more like off target. I couldn’t imagine her giving me a proper nickname, but then again, you never know. “Fine, then try coming up with something,” I told her.
“Yup.” Kanbaru closed her eyes for a bit as if she were deliberating. A few seconds later, her head popped up. “I thought of one,” she said.
“Wow, that was fast. Hit me with it.”
“Ragi.”
“That’s a lot cooler than I thought it’d be! Too cool, in fact!”
Like she was purposely using a nickname that was too cool for me just to make fun of me… It sounded too edgy to be the nickname of a Japanese high school kid…
“So I gathered… But shouldn’t nicknames be a little softer and more charming?”
“You have a point. In that case, we can take a bit from ‘Araragi’ and a bit from ‘Koyomi’ to get…”
“To get?”
“Ragiko.”
“Now you’re obviously making fun of me!”
“Don’t be shy, li’l Ragiko.”
“Go home! I don’t need you after all!”
“Agh! I forgot, yelling doesn’t work on a masochist! Are you the strongest opponent I’ve faced yet?!”
I was having fun talking to her.
Maybe a little too much fun.
I was nearly losing sight of what we were setting out to do.
“I know it’s probably inappropriate to say this, but…Kanbaru. Not to seize on what you said earlier, but if I’d met you before I started going out with Senjogahara, I wonder if we’d be going out instead…”
“Yes. I was actually thinking the same thing. What if I’d met you before becoming drawn to her. It’s so rare for me to feel this way about someone of the opposite sex.”
I sighed.
Of course, I wouldn’t have come to know Kanbaru if it wasn’t for Senjogahara, and the same went for Kanbaru, making this hypothetical no more than that.
“What do you say,” she offered, “to the two of us killing and burying that nuisance of a woman?”
“You’re scaring me!”
We’ve talked enough, but I still can’t pin down your character! I can’t fathom your depths! Just how much is there to you, Suruga Kanbaru?!
“I know that you respect Senjogahara as your senior, but…you’re surprisingly wicked.”
“That wasn’t praise.”
“I’m happy to be called anything by you.”
“I can’t believe you, you little masochist…”
“Ooh, little masochist. I like that. Keep going.”
“……”
While I’d harbored fears that Kanbaru might find herself lost after coming into contact with the true nature of her middle school idol Senjogahara, it seemed that thanks to such a proclivity I didn’t need to worry.
In any case, about Suruga Kanbaru.
She was actually a sapphist.
As you could probably tell from our conversation up to this point, she not only worshiped Hitagi Senjogahara as a senior but also loved her from the bottom of her heart. You could even say that yes, Kanbaru and I were rivals in love─and yet we were walking arm in arm. It was hard to say what was going on. Then again, it was probably that she felt indebted to me for what happened at the end of last month, or maybe that she felt grateful, or something along those lines…
It didn’t feel bad having one of my juniors get attached to me, but it didn’t feel great that the attraction was due to a misunderstanding.
Kanbaru simply had gone and saved herself all on her own─
“………”
But yes, I couldn’t deny it.
Indebtedness or misunderstanding or whatever, it seemed like I needed to do at least something to adjust Kanbaru’s overblown image of me. Or maybe to destroy my image… If her impression of me stayed too positive, she’d be that much more disappointed when everything went south.
Part One.
A man who was loose with money.
“Kanbaru, I forgot my wallet. Think you could lend me some cash? I promise to give it back right away.”
“Okay, sure. Is thirty thousand yen enough?”
She was rich!
Hmm…someone who was loose with other people’s time…wouldn’t be very convincing after I’d arrived before her at our meeting spot today…
Operation Ruin Koyomi Araragi’s Image, Part Two.
A hopeless lecher.
“Kanbaru, you know what I’m interested in right now? Girls’ underwear.”
“Oh, what a coincidence. Me too. I consider women’s underwear works of fine art. I never thought we’d agree on this point.”
She agreed!
Right, I could never hope to match Kanbaru when it came to smuttiness… Wait, no! Regular lechery might be out, but maybe I stood a chance if I went in some strange direction…
“I’m particularly interested,” I proclaimed, “in elementary schoolgirls’ underwear!”
“I couldn’t agree more! Wow, I always knew you weren’t the type to be constrained by what society thinks. You know how to live!”
“My stock rose?!”
Why?
Hmm. Okay, then it was time for Operation Ruin Koyomi Araragi’s Image, Part Three (I was having too much fun with this and already losing sight of my original goal).
A megalomaniac who goes on and on about his dreams.
“Kanbaru, you’re talking to a man who’s gonna be big one day!”
“You don’t need to be telling me that. In fact, I think you’re already huge. I don’t know if there’ll be any space left by your side if you get any bigger.”
“Nkk…!”
No, this much was to be expected!
I needed to keep going!
“I’m gonna become a musician!”
“Oh? Then I think I’ll become your instrument.”
“I don’t even know what that means, but what a cool line!”
Her stock had gone up in my ledger.
Man, why?
“What’s all this about?” Kanbaru asked me. “You don’t need to tell me these things because I couldn’t possibly love and respect you more than I already do.”
“Yeah, it’s useless…” Just as she was happy whatever I told her, she was going to worship me no matter what kind of person I was. “I don’t get it, though. Why do you overrate me that much?”
“Listen to you.” Kanbaru laughed. “Until just now, I’d always thought that there was no such thing as a stupid question, but I stand corrected.”
“………”
It sounded like a cool line to me for a brief moment, but then I thought about it and realized that someone here was just an idiot.
“I vowed to devote this life of mine to you,” she added. “Not because you helped mediate between me and her, but because I think you’re worthy of that kind of vow.”
“A vow, you say…”
“Yes. I thought I’d make my vow to the sun, which never stops shining upon us and bestowing its gifts, but the thought came to me at night, so I chose the closest street lamp instead.”
“That’s the most arbitrary thing I’ve ever heard of!”
“But street lamps shine upon us and bestow their gifts, too, don’t they? Life would be pretty tough without them.”
“True, but…”
Vow to the moon, at least.
Maybe it had been cloudy.
“But perhaps,” Kanbaru conceded, “I, myself, am not worthy of vowing to spend my life preying upon your good graces.”
“I don’t know where to begin with you, but that spelling mistake…”
Urkk.
Operation Ruin Koyomi Araragi’s Image was at an impasse!
“…Hmph.”
Koyomi Araragi.
Suruga Kanbaru.
Come to think of it, there’s one thing other than Senjogahara that we have in common.
Well, actually, both of us are mostly human. Only─
Koyomi Araragi’s blood.
Suruga Kanbaru’s left arm.
Each is something other than human.
No small part of my blood is a demon’s─and Kanbaru’s left arm is altogether that of a monkey. Just as I grew out my hair to hide the fang marks left on my neck by a vampire, Kanbaru hid her monkey’s left arm by wrapping it in a long bandage. That’s the real reason the once bright and shining star was forced to retire from the team early. What else could she do? There’s no playing basketball with a monkey’s arm.
Both Kanbaru and I had gotten ourselves involved with aberrations.
…And speaking of aberrations, Hitagi Senjogahara, my girlfriend and Kanbaru’s senior, had also encountered one.
For Kanbaru, a monkey.
For Senjogahara, it was a crab.
But Kanbaru and I were different from her in a decisive way─Senjogahara faced her aberration every day for over two years but finally exorcised it and became human again. Kanbaru and I got rid of our aberrations─but parts of our bodies were still not human. You could say that we were like aberrations ourselves─we’d gotten involved with them and become them.
It was─
A sad thing to have in common.
“Hm? What’s the matter?” she asked me.
“Oh… Er, nothing.”
“You’re going to spoil this date with that gloomy expression of yours.”
“Date… Fine, whatever.”
“By the way, I meant to ask you earlier, but what are we going to do once we get to this mountain? Is there anything to do up there, other than our deed?”
“If you’re being serious right now, please stay far away from any Wandervogel clubs… But I take it you haven’t been to the mountains very much?”
“My team did do some runs through the mountains as part of our training back in middle school, kind of like mock cross-country races. We ended up having to cancel them after some students started getting sprains, though.”
“Hunh.”
Then again, it wasn’t her technique per se that had made her our basketball ace, but rather that overwhelming leg strength of hers that easily hopped over my height.
“Does that mean you’re at home in the mountains?” she asked me.
“No, not particularly…”
“Stag beetles…”
“Yes. So precious they’re like black mold.”
“That doesn’t sound too valuable…”
But why would I look in the mountains for them?
That was called illegal dumping.
“I suppose it’s not exactly the kind of place to go on a date─especially considering the season,” I admitted. “I’m pretty sure I gave you a full explanation yesterday, but you know, it’s a job from Oshino.”
“Oshino? Oh, Mister Oshino.”
Kanbaru’s expression turned ambivalent as soon as she heard the name. The reaction was an uncommon one from her, but it did make sense.
Mèmè Oshino.
Me, Kanbaru, Senjogahara─the man had saved all of us. No, he would never agree to that word choice. We’d gotten saved on our own, that was the only way to put it.
A frivolous man who wore a tacky Hawaiian shirt.
He was by no means a respectable adult, but it was the immutable truth that we were obliged to him.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s apparently a small shrine up in the mountains that isn’t being used anymore, and he said to stick this talisman on its main hall─that was the job he gave us.”
“…What’s with that?” Kanbaru sounded mystified. “The talisman part doesn’t make any sense, but to begin with, can’t Mister Oshino just do it himself? He has all the time in the world, doesn’t he?”
“I agree, but that’s our job. I went into a ridiculous amount of debt when he helped me out… Doesn’t the same go for you, Kanbaru?”
“Huh?”
“I know it’s a little fuzzier in your case, but he’s a professional, despite everything else about him. He’s not so kind that he’d lend you a hand pro bono. You’re indebted to him, and you need to work to pay it off.”
“Ohh, so that’s why...” Kanbaru nodded, seemingly convinced.
“Yup,” I picked up where she left off, “that’s why I asked you to come out here. Oshino asked us to do this yesterday when I went to have Shinobu drink my blood. He said to make sure to bring you along.”
“Now that you mention it, Mister Oshino did insist that he was lending me a hand… Huh. I see, it meant that I’d be in his debt.”
“There you go.”
“All right. No point in arguing if that’s the case.”
Kanbaru squeezed and latched on to my arm even tighter. There seemed to be a complicated meaning behind the act that I couldn’t hope to understand, but at any rate, it looked like she’d made up her mind. She certainly came across as the upstanding type who honored her end of the bargain.
“Still,” she said, “I’ve been near that mountain a few times but never knew there was a shrine.”
“Me, neither… Even if it’s fallen out of use, you’d at least expect to have heard about it. Why does Oshino know about spots that locals like us aren’t aware of? I guess the same goes for that abandoned cram school he’s living in now.”
Maybe he was actually more knowledgeable about ruins than he was about aberrations. At the same time, like our pay phones, it really is the mark of a rural town that a forgotten shrine and cram school aren’t getting overrun by weirdoes… Then again, that could be exactly how you described that cram school since Oshino and Shinobu lived there…
“But─if you’re going to put it that way,” questioned Kanbaru, “why hasn’t my other dear senior come along with us? Both of you owe Mister Oshino a─”
“Senjogahara is astute about that kind of thing, so she already paid back her debt. Remember I gave Oshino a hundred thousand yen when you were there? That was it.”
“Ah, now that you mention it, you did discuss some such matter. I see, so that’s what you meant… Hm, now there’s my senior.”
“In her case, it’s not so much about being upstanding, it’s more like she hates being indebted to people. She’s the kind of person who’d endure life all alone.”
“Did she say anything about today?”
“Hmm? No, not really. Not even a ‘be careful.’”
She really hadn’t.
Since I was technically bringing “her” junior along with me, I did make sure to bring it up with her before calling on Kanbaru, but Senjogahara’s reaction had been bland, as if I shouldn’t have troubled her with such a trivial matter. I found myself wanting to complain that it was thanks to her attitude that I’d ended up going on a date with her junior before I went on one with her, conveniently turning a blind eye to my own weak will.
“Did she say anything to you, Kanbaru?”
“Mm. She said to have you pamper me.”
“………”
She really did indulge Kanbaru.
Jeez, a tsundere was supposed to show her sweet side to her boyfriend, not her junior.
“She told me something else. ‘If Araragi tries to lay a finger on you, don’t hide it from me but report it right away. He can choose between being buried in the mountains and becoming fish food, whichever he hates more.’”
“Whichever I hate more?!”
She was merciless.
But─well.
It did seem like Hitagi Senjogahara was heading in the right direction. She’d encountered an aberration before entering high school, and apparently she’d thrown everything away, given up on everything─so this meant she was getting back to where she used to be. For someone who’d endure life all alone─learning how to interact with others couldn’t be a bad thing.
I was actually glad to see it.
Since she was human─that was good.
“Oh, right, Kanbaru. Talking about Senjogahara reminds me. It’s her birthday soon, isn’t it?”
“Yes. July seventh.”
“…Sounds like you don’t need to check your calendar for that one.”
“Well, I have a request about it.”
“Anything you want. This body belongs to you, to begin with. There’s no need to check with me over every little thing, use me as you see fit.”
“No, it’s nothing that big, just that it’s a special day that I thought we could celebrate. The only thing is that I’ve been fairly detached from those kinds of events for a while now, and I don’t know how they go. That’s where I was hoping you could help me out, Kanbaru.”
“I see. You need me to strip?”
“Even I know that birthdays aren’t that kind of event! What kind of occasion are you trying to turn my girlfriend’s special day into?!”
“Ah. I jumped the gun.”
“There isn’t going to be a time when that gun ever goes off. Go back and sit on the bench. For the rest of your life. Well, actually, I’d appreciate it if you could help out with the setup and planning. I know there was a gap in your relationship, but you probably know more about Senjogahara than I do. That’s all.”
“Hmm. I don’t know, this is her first birthday since you started going out, so don’t you think you should set the mood and spend the day alone together? I feel like me trying to help out would only get in the way.”
“Get in the way?”
“Yes. An unwanted kindness can be a pain in the butt, just a nuisance.”
“Ahh. I did consider that, but I thought a livelier celebration might be good for our first birthday together. I was thinking of inviting Oshino and Shinobu, and maybe this one grade schooler that I know, and holding a nice little birthday party.”
The idea did have issues in that Senjogahara disliked Oshino, Shinobu, and Hachikuji, but that was something I needed to power through. I had to do my best to create a situation where she couldn’t say so outright.
“Well─if you’re okay with it, so am I,” Kanbaru consented.
“Really? That sounds evasive.”
“Well, if you don’t mind me saying so, while I do have the utmost respect for your intentions, she might want to spend the time alone with you.”
“You think she’s that sanctimonious about our relationship?”
She hadn’t even gone on a date with me.
I’d been asking her out pretty clearly, too.
Of course, it hadn’t been the right time, what with Kanbaru and the skills test right afterwards.
Her defenses were just so tight.
“At any rate,” I noted, “you seem to care about me and Senjogahara in a pretty normal way when you and I are supposed to be rivals fighting over her.”
“Well, true… But right now, it’s like I’m in love with her even as she’s going out with you… And I love you, her boyfriend, almost as much as I love her.”
“……”
Did she just confess to me?
Uh oh, my pulse was rising.
She might even feel my heartbeat through our arms.
“…You know, you’re letting Senjogahara influence you a little too much,” I scolded her. “The sun or a street lamp or whatever you made this vow to, you don’t have to see me in such a positive light just because I’m Senjogahara’s boyfriend. You don’t need to like someone just because she does─”
“No. That’s not what it is,” Kanbaru said awfully bluntly.
If something needed to be said, she said it, juniors and seniors be damned.
“Then,” I asked her, “could you still be carrying around baggage from last month? I don’t mind at all, really… You know what they say, hate the sin, what’s for dinner─”
“It’s not that─either,” Kanbaru stated, seemingly overlooking my gaffe. “I’m fortunate that you’re able to forget and forget, but that isn’t what it is.”
“Forget and forget…”
She made me sound so feebleminded.
I had a feeling she wasn’t wrong, though.
And it certainly was simpler that way.
“Please, listen to me,” she said. “I was stalking you, okay?”
“……”
What a thing to say so unabashedly to my face.
Like I was the one who needed a talking-to.
“So─” she continued, “I think I have a very good idea about the kind of person you are. I really believe that you deserve no less. Even if you weren’t her boyfriend, even if last month never happened, no matter how we’d met─I would have seen you as someone worthy of my respect. I swear, upon my legs.”
“…Oh.”
Well, in that case.
However.
“If it’s upon your legs─what can I say.”
“Right… I respect you so much that even if you’re bringing me to some lonely mountain on the pretext that Mister Oshino has a job for us, only to force upon me every single lustful desire that your heart cradles, I can forgive you with a smile.”
“I don’t want that kind of respect!”
And “pretext”?
“Huh? Hold on,” she said. “Are we really not proceeding to it?”
“Don’t act so genuinely surprised!”
“Wait, are you having the girl make the first move? A-ha… Your plan is to insist to your lover that it wasn’t cheating because you’d been tempted.”
“Now I get it, Kanbaru, that’s what you’re trying to do! You’re plotting to wreck my relationship with Senjogahara through this! You’re using your body, no less!”
“Oops…”
“Don’t stick your tongue out at me! You look so damn adorable, moron!”
So scheming.
Well, I knew it had to be a joke, of course.
…It was a joke, right?
“But speaking of birthdays,” she said, “it seemed a little suggestive to me when I heard that a crab had possessed her.”
“I don’t know if ‘possessed’ is the right word, but…pardon me? Suggestive? What’s suggestive about a crab? And what does it have to do with her birthday?”
“Well, she’s a Cancer, isn’t she?”
“Huh?” July seventh, right? “What are you talking about? July seventh would be Gemini.”
“Huh? No…um, I don’t think that’s correct.”
“Really? Am I the one who has it wrong? When I heard she was born on July seventh, I assumed that she was a Gemini…” I remembered it well because I’d thought then that Senjogahara having an identical twin with the same personality would suck to high heaven. “Well, it’s not like I know the exact dates of the zodiac or anything… No, but wait. I want to say Cancer starts on July twenty-third?”
“Oh.” Kanbaru seemed to have realized something. “…A quick pop quiz.”
“Why?”
“Huh?” Come on, that didn’t even count as a quiz. “I know the answer to that one, at least. Ophiuchus, right?”
“Pfft!” Suruga Kanbaru burst out laughing. “Ha…haha, ahaha!”
It seemed to hit her so hard that her knees shook and she couldn’t stay standing, and she was even clinging to my arm. She went from pushing her chest against my elbow to trapping my upper arm in her cleavage, but her irritating laughter made it extremely hard for me to register my good fortune.
“Wh-What’s so funny… Did I make that bad of a mistake?”
“O-Ophiuchus… Pff, pffahaha! Ophiuchus… Ahaha, in this day and age, y-you’re using the thirteen-sign zodiac…”
“………”
Oh.
So that’s what it was.
Right, I understood now. July seventh was Cancer in the twelve-sign zodiac…
Kanbaru finally raised her head. There were tears in her eyes. I understood why she might have found it so funny, but she’d laughed at me way too much.
“Okay, let’s go, li’l Ragiko.”
“You’re openly treating me worse! All of that respect you had for me as your senior, gone! This actually hurts pretty bad!”
“Cover for me as thanks for making you laugh that much.”
“Cover? How, when you sounded so sure? To begin with, why are you even using the thirteen-sign zodiac?”
“I mean, what can I say? Didn’t we switch from a twelve- to a thirteen-sign zodiac a while ago?”
“We tried, but it didn’t spread and people gave up on it. How could my esteemed senior Araragi not know that?”
Okay…
So it never caught on…
“I guess aberrations are the same,” I mused. “You could have the most terrifying ghoul or ghost imaginable, but it never existed if it didn’t catch on.”
“No, I don’t think it’s anything so deep…”
“I wonder what Ophiuchus is, anyway.”
“It’s a summer constellation with the alpha star Ras Alhague. It’s well known for containing Bernard’s Star, which has the largest proper motion of any fixed star.”
“No, I’m not talking about the stars themselves… I’m wondering why it has that name. Does it have to do with snakes or something?”
“I want to say that it represents the master physician Asclepius from Greek mythology. He’s grasping a snake in the constellation, which is why it’s known as Ophiuchus, or the ‘serpent-bearer.’”
“Huh.” I nodded. I’d had no idea. “Kanbaru, I’m surprised you know all that, both about the stars themselves and the constellation. Do you actually know a lot about stars or something?”
“Does it seem unlike me?”
“To be honest.”
“Hm. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I know a lot about them, but I do like looking up at the night sky. It’s a simple one, but I also own a telescope. Twice a year, I go to a stargazing event they hold at an observatory in another prefecture.”
“Huh. So not just a planetarium. Experience over knowledge, huh?”
“I like planetariums too, but those places don’t have shooting stars, do they? Fixed stars and constellations are nice, but I prefer fleeting shooting stars.”
“Yes. I hope that someday soon, Earth becomes a shooting star, too.”
“Is humanity going to be all right?!”
I couldn’t believe her.
Where was the romance in that?
That was a disaster movie.
“…And it looks like we’ve arrived after all of that talk,” I told her. “There should be stairs around here, according to Oshino─oh, there they are…Well, more like a game trail…”
A roadside mountain.
I didn’t know its name.
Oshino didn’t, either.
I should say the road had been paved to bypass the mountain, but branching off from the sidewalk, toward the peak, were steps─or at least their traces. Well, actually, you could still call them steps. I’d heard that our athletic teams came jogging all the way here, as Kanbaru mentioned too, but I doubted any of them took these stairs up the mountain. It was overgrown with foliage, and if I hadn’t known in advance, I probably wouldn’t have noticed or recognized them as such.
A game trail.
Mm, no─I saw signs of trampled grass when I looked closer. Footsteps. So the stairs weren’t totally unused, but then, whose tracks could they be? If I remembered correctly, Oshino hadn’t even approached the shrine, so they couldn’t be his. He also said the shrine was already out of use, so it couldn’t be anyone who worked there…
Was it overrun with weirdoes?
Unlikely.
“……”
I looked at the girl attached to my left arm.
Her guard was always so low, just like now, but she was such a cute girl… Would she be okay? If there were weirdoes who were textbook cases of weirdoes up there…I could protect her only so well alone. Some vampire blood still coursed through me, but that merely improved my metabolism and healing, anyway.
“Balkan, my junior.”
“What is it, Ragiko?”
“Your left arm─how’s it feeling?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, I was just wondering if anything was new or unusual about it.”
“Not in particular.”
Not in particular─she said.
True, she’d been holding that heavy-looking bundle in her left hand without switching the whole time, like it was nothing…
Maybe there was no need to worry…if having the power of that monkey left arm on top of her base stamina was the new normal for Kanbaru…
“Yup,” she assured, “it’s still strong enough that I can shove you down onto a bed with my left arm alone.”
“Then, strong enough that I could bridal-carry you with my left arm alone.”
“It’s not a bridal-carry if you do it with one arm, it’s more like a bandit making off with a village lass… But I guess I’m fine with that one.”
“Heheheh,” Kanbaru let out a vaguely obscene laugh in reply. She seemed to be enjoying herself. “You really are kind…worrying yourself over me, of all people. Ahh, I could feel safe entrusting my body and soul to you…”
“Why are you blushing and saying that like you’re deeply moved? What are you, a mind reader? Stop digging up every little thing that I’m thinking or I’ll have to get out my tinfoil hat.”
“I may not look it now, but I was once our basketball ace. I can figure out most of what people are thinking by looking into their eyes. And we’re talking about the thoughts of a senior I respect very much! As your faithful subordinate, I practically have you wrapped around my little finger.”
“Don’t have me wrapped around your little finger, then. What are you, a femme fatale? Hmph… All it takes is a look into my eyes? Yikes. I mean, that really does sound like telepathy… Okay, Kanbaru, what am I thinking right now?”
“Probably something like, ‘Would this woman take off her bra if I asked her to?’”
“Is that how you see me, Kanbaru?!”
“Want me to take it off?”
“Um, nkk… No, of course not!”
I’d hesitated for a moment despite myself.
Kanbaru only gave me a brisk nod along with an “Oh, then,” and continued to cling to my arm… Her complete non-reaction to my hesitation seemed to be intended as a show of tolerance, almost maternally broad in scope, for the ulterior motives of men, and it honestly got under my skin…
She was the one who’d gone in that direction.
Where did she get off acting like I was her younger husband?
“Let’s go,” I urged. “We haven’t even climbed up this mountain and I’m already tired…”
“Mm.”
“Do be careful where you step, though. Aside from bug bites, it sounds like there’s a ton of snakes around here.”
“Did you say ‘snake’?”
Pfft, laughed Kanbaru.
I must have reminded her of our earlier conversation about Ophiuchus.
I continued, unperturbed, “Well, apparently they aren’t poisonous. Snakes have long fangs, though, and you wouldn’t want to get a bite wound out here.”
“…Yours is on your neck, right?”
We spoke as we climbed the mountain’s stairs. Our coordinates hadn’t changed much, but the humidity seemed to shoot up the moment we entered the mountain, and it was sweltering. The stairs led to this shrine according to Oshino, but I hadn’t asked how high up it was. I didn’t imagine it was actually on the summit, but…that would be okay. It wasn’t that tall of a mountain.
“My left arm,” Kanbaru said. “Mister Oshino told me it should heal by the time I’m twenty.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes. Well, only if I don’t do it again.”
“That’s good to hear. So it means you can play basketball again after you’re twenty.”
“Right. Of course, that hope will be crushed if I slack off, so I need to keep working out on my own.” After saying that, she asked me, “What about you?”
“Huh? Me?”
“Are you going to be─a vampire for the rest of your life?”
“…I.”
The rest of my life.
A vampire─for the rest of my life.
A mock human.
Something other than human.
“I’m fine with it. In any case─unlike your left arm, it’s not that much of an issue. The sun, crosses, garlic, and all that stuff doesn’t bother me at all. Ha ha─and I heal right away if I get hurt, so I got a good deal, you know?”
“I don’t want to hear you acting tough. What Mister Oshino told me─is that you resigned yourself to being a vampire to save that girl Shinobu.”
Shinobu.
That was what the vampire who’d attacked me was called now.
That blonde vampire.
“……”
That bastard really was loose-lipped.
I hoped he hadn’t told Senjogahara. I assumed it was on account of the left arm that he provided Kanbaru with an example she could reference, so I probably didn’t need to worry…
“That’s not true,” I maintained. “They’re just residual effects. As far as Shinobu─well, she’s my responsibility. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it saving her. We have an understanding, and I’m sticking to it. It’s fine… I’m no basketball star so I can’t tell just by looking into your eyes, but you’re worried about me, aren’t you, Kanbaru?”
“…Well.”
“I’m fine. Your worries are misplaced─just like with the deed you kept bringing up.”
I cut the topic short with a little joke at the end. Kanbaru seemed to want to say more, but probably realizing it was better left unsaid, fell silent. If something needed to be said, she said it─but if she only wanted to say it, she could hold her tongue. She was too good of a woman to be wrapped around my left arm, honestly.
“Ah.”
“Oh.”
Just as our conversation ended, someone came down the stairs. Perfect timing. The person was jogging down the treacherous steps a bit precariously.
She was fully protected in her long sleeves and long pants.
There was a bag around her waist.
A hat, pulled far down on her head.
I was very unsure if she could see in front of her, and even if she could, she was running down the stairs looking only at her feet, so a couple of false moves and she might have collided with us head-on. It was a good thing that Kanbaru and I had just hit a pause in our conversation; we noticed her quicker than we normally would have and shifted to one side of the stairs to dodge her.
The moment she passed by.
She looked at the two of us─and seeming to notice us for the first time, made a startled expression, and just as soon, began descending the stairs at an even faster pace. Her figure was out of sight before we knew it. She’d sped up so much that I expected her to trip and fall at least twice before she reached the street.
“………?”
Hmm?
There was something about the girl…
It was like I’d seen her somewhere before, or maybe not.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kanbaru.
“Oh, nothing…”
“Well, I didn’t expect to run into someone on this mountain trail. I didn’t want to say it in front of you, but I was convinced we were on a road to death. She was pretty cute, too. You said the shrine isn’t being used anymore, but maybe some people still visit it, after all?”
“A girl like that, though?”
“Faith knows no age.”
“Sure, but still.”
“Just as love knows no age.”
“You didn’t need to add that, did you?”
Even as I spoke, I tried to remember where I’d seen the girl before, but I couldn’t in the end. Then again, I thought, maybe I didn’t know her in the first place. I came to the conclusion that it might have been a simple case of déjà vu.
“Well, let’s keep climbing,” I told Kanbaru. “If someone came from up there, that means there has to be something above us. I was wondering the whole time if Oshino might be playing a prank on me, but this rules it out.”
“Yep. As it almost does the possibility that you’re tricking me.”
“It not only actually existed but hasn’t been ruled out yet?”
“I’ll forgive you with a smile on my face.”
“Not a word more about how sexually frustrated you are, okay?”
“You can call it a mistake, I won’t mind. I don’t intend on pestering you afterwards.”
“You’re already pestering me.”
“Oh. In that case, how about this? You just go ahead and relieve my frustration, and I’ll probably stop harassing you. It’s the easiest and fastest way to calm a bitch in heat.”
“Well, that’s a first, a woman referring to herself that way…”
“It’s only embarrassing in the beginning. Let’s hurry and get this out of the way so there’s less trouble down the line.”
“Abandonment play, I see.”
“And you can go home!”
“So cold to my advances… Do you not like women who take the lead? I guess I need to act like I don’t really want this, then.”
“Whatever, I don’t care.”
“Just imagine. We’re holding hands against my will now… You left me with no choice, threatened me with violence, and ordered me to. And I hesitantly ask you, ‘L-Like this?’”
Nope.
Absolutely not.
“Hmph. A prude. More indifferent than cold. Being treated like air is making me lose confidence in my feminine charms. Do you not care about me at all?”
“No, that isn’t true. But I have a girlfriend, and her name is Senjogahara. If I didn’t behave indifferently, that would be a problem, no?”
“But you two seem to have a platonic relationship. I’m sure you need some space where you can unleash your pent-up sexual desires.”
“No, I don’t! And don’t volunteer to be part of that space!”
“She can take care of your emotional needs while I support your physical ones. Behold, a golden triangle.”
“No, you behold, that’s a muck of a love triangle! Why would I ever want to get dragged into that kind of Three’s Misery situation?!”
“While he said so, Araragi seemed unable to take his eyes off my breasts. At the end of the day, he could not resist his male instincts.”
“Why are you voicing a monologue?!”
“This one is a side story, so I get to be the narrator.”
“What are you even talking about?!”
And anyway.
We’d need to shrink-wrap it before it went on the shelves.
“Hmph. This isn’t going as well as I thought,” Kanbaru lamented. “With a body like mine, I expected the likes of you to become my plaything in no time.”
“Is that what you really thought about me?!”
A platonic relationship…
That was one way to describe a cool girlfriend who wouldn’t even go on a date. Either way, it looked like others could tell. I always made fun of manga where couples who’re supposed to be going out drift apart and make up over and over again and cajoled them in my mind to just get on with it, but now that I had a girlfriend, I knew that’s really how it is.
Uh-uh.
You didn’t just get on with it so smoothly.
“And why not? It makes sense when you consider her past, and it only makes her that much more moé as long as you think of her as a bashful, innocent girlfriend.”
“Bashful… I don’t know, I feel like once you start identifying a trait as moé, it starts to feel less moé and more like a selling point.”
“You’re right about that.”
We climbed the stairs.
The grass trampled underfoot that I noticed down below must have been that girl’s, I thought, and arrived at the shrine about five minutes later… Like the stairs, it was in such a state of disrepair that I wouldn’t have recognized it as such if I hadn’t been told beforehand. My concerns about weirdoes hanging around were proved utterly meaningless. Countryside or not, weirdo or not, no person would choose to be there for a single second. I could just barely tell it was once a shrine from the torii gate, but it wasn’t clear which of the structures was the main hall. I’d have to figure it out based on the layout.
Could the girl from earlier have been here too?
For what, though?
Even a god would have fled.
To put it like Oshino might, the gods are everywhere─but even so, it didn’t feel like they’d be here. Whatever… I’d get my job out of the way. All I had to do was place the talisman, which ranked it among one of the easier jobs that Oshino had tasked me with so far. I took the talisman I’d received from him out from my pocket.
But then.
“Ungh.”
Kanbaru─hopped off of my arm.
That pleasant sensation that had been with me for so long disappeared from my elbow.
“What’s wrong, Kanbaru?”
“…I guess I’m feeling tired?”
“Tired?”
From what?
Climbing those stairs?
Yes, it was a decent number of steps, but it didn’t seem like enough to wind a jock like Kanbaru. Even I was only breathing a little heavier than usual.
But Kanbaru really did seem tired, and her face looked pale, somehow. It was the first time I’d ever seen her in such a state.
“Hunh… Wanna take a break somewhere around there?” I offered. “Um…I guess the only place you could sit would be…on top of a rock… But I feel like sitting down on the wrong rock in a shrine could get you cursed…”
Putting aside whether there were any gods around at the shrine to curse us─something still felt wrong about it. I knew from experience that when my guts warned me like that, it was best to stop.
What to do in that case, though?
As I worried over the question, Kanbaru proposed, “How about we just have lunch?”
“Lunch?”
“Yes. It might be an impolite request and a breach of etiquette for a junior to suggest that we eat, but when I don’t feel well, it usually goes away if I fill my tummy up with food.”
“………”
She was like a manga character.
What a funny junior, even when she didn’t feel well.
“He did say not to eat until we placed the talisman, though… Something about keeping our bodies pure. Okay, then why don’t you go and find a place where you can spread out all those lunch boxes? I’m not the biggest fan of lunching at a deserted shrine, but I guess it has a charm of its own. I’ll run over and slap on this talisman while you do.”
“Mm. Yes, let’s do that. Sorry, but I’m going to leave the job in your hands.”
“Later.”
Turning my back on Kanbaru, I pushed through the grass toward the structures. Oshino had said to place the talisman on the main hall, but I wasn’t sure where exactly it needed to go… Inside, or could I just put it on the door? I would say that Oshino’s lack of directions was at fault for my ignorance, but then, his directions were always lacking. Maybe he was trying to tell me to think for myself.
Anyway, I decided to take a look at the edifices, and as I did, I thought again about the girl we’d passed earlier. I didn’t know why, but she bothered me… No, it wasn’t that.
It was like I’d seen her.
Like I’d met her.
But more immediately─I felt something about her.
Not that I knew what that something was.
“I do feel like I’ve met her before, though… Where was it? It’s not like I get to know middle schoolers often…”
My little sisters were one thing, but…
My little sisters?
“Hm…I wonder.”
I ended up placing the talisman on the door of a building that I took to be the main one. Actually, I felt like it might collapse in on itself if I opened the door, so you could say I had no other choice.
I gently walked away and returned to the gate. Kanbaru hadn’t returned yet. I thought about pulling out my phone…but realized that she’d never told me her number. And now that I thought about it, I hadn’t given her mine, either.
That cell phone of hers was useless after all.
And so I ended up yelling out loud.
But there was no reply.
“Kanbaru!”
I tried yelling in an even louder voice─but the result was the same.
I suddenly felt anxious.
She couldn’t not have heard my voice if she were around. While Senjogahara might, Kanbaru of all people would never leave me and head back home without a word. Losing sight of someone in a place like this could only mean─
“Kanbaru!”
I started to run, confused.
She said she wasn’t feeling well. Maybe she collapsed while looking for a place to eat… Was that what it was? Worst-case scenarios crossed my mind. How would I deal with the situation then─what would be the right course of action? If something happened to her, I’d never be able to look Senjogahara in the eyes again.
But fortunately, no worst-case scenario came to pass in any form. Running around the shrine grounds, I was finally able to find her, facing away from me.
The lunchboxes were on the ground by her side.
She looked befuddled─and stood completely still.
“Kanbaru!” I said to her, placing my hand on her shoulder.
“Hyeek!” A jolt shook her, and she turned around. “O-Oh… It’s just you.”
“What a warm greeting.”
“Ah…I’m sorry. What an unthinkable thing to say to someone I’m greatly indebted to. I was just so surprised… You suddenly grabbed my flesh, after all.”
“‘Flesh’? Come on.”
Her shoulder.
“Allow me to make up for my faux pas with my body,” she said. “I might pretend to resist a little, but it’s all a performance to make the scene more exciting, okay?”
“Good, you seem to be in a normal state of mind if you’re able to prattle on like that. I’m relieved. Yeah, I’m fully aware that you’re saying that to be ridiculous. So enough of that. You really do shriek in a cute way, you know.”
Her face─was still pale.
In fact, she looked even worse.
It didn’t seem like the right time to be poking fun at her unexpected shriek.
“What’s up, are you okay? If you’re feeling that bad─yeah, if I cleaned it up a bit, you could probably lie down on the porch of the main shrine back there. Let’s do that, I can carry you there on my back. If you’re worried about how sanitary it might be, I could lay down my jacket─”
“No…that’s not it.” Kanbaru pointed─directly ahead. “Look at that...”
“Huh?”
At the forest a bit past the shrine grounds.
She pointed at a single thick tree.
At the base of that tree─was a snake chopped into pieces.
A snake, slain, cut into five─its long, winding, squirming body, chopped.
Into five.
Slain.
But its head looked alive.
Its tongue flicking and its mouth open wide.
It was moaning in agony.
“………!”
I was struck silent by the sight─
And I suddenly remembered the kid’s name.
The girl we’d passed.
Right.
The girl’s name was─Nadeko Sengoku.
003
“This one─and then this one, I guess. Oh, that book might not be very useful. My apologies to whoever wrote it, but all it really does is tell you to memorize things. This book should be better if you’re aiming for efficiency,” Tsubasa Hanekawa said─pulling one book after another off the shelves and handing them to me.
One, two, three, four, and five.
Monday, June twelfth.
After school.
Hanekawa, class president, and I, class vice president, headed to a bookstore together on the way home from meeting and preparing for the culture festival, which loomed later in the week on Friday and Saturday. Well, it was more like I’d asked Hanekawa and she agreed to come with me.
Braids, glasses.
Tsubasa Hanekawa, the ultimate model student.
“Sorry, Hanekawa…but I’m about to go over my budget.”
“Huh? What’s your budget?”
“Ten thousand yen. I have a little more back at home, but that’s all I have in my wallet.”
“Oh. Yeah, study-aids are fairly expensive. You can’t complain when you consider what’s in them, of course. Okay, then I’ll take cost-effectiveness into consideration on top of the positives and negatives. So let’s return this book for…this one instead.”
Tsubasa Hanekawa─
Another person who had become involved with an aberration. But perhaps she needed to be placed in a different category from me, Kanbaru, and even Senjogahara─the reason being that she had no recollection of her involvement. She’d forgotten every last bit of that nightmare of a Golden Week that rivaled even my personal hell of a spring break.
But I remembered.
For me, a demon.
For Kanbaru, a monkey.
For Senjogahara, a crab.
And for Hanekawa─a cat.
“But,” Hanekawa said abruptly, “it makes me kind of happy.”
“…What does?”
“Being asked by you to help pick out study-aids. It’s like maybe all my efforts didn’t go to waste if you’re going to take school seriously.”
“………”
No.
Her efforts didn’t have much to do with it.
She did force me to become class vice president in a rehabilitation attempt, having mistaken me for a delinquent…
She could be off, or more like a runaway train.
“Er, I’m not sure if I’m taking school seriously,” I disabused her. “It’s just that I should start thinking about what to do after graduation.”
“After graduation?”
“Maybe I should say college? Senjogahara and I were talking about it the other day. And I heard what school she was trying to get into…”
“Ah. Senjogahara wanted to get into the local national university, right? She’ll be admitted on a recommendation.”
“…You know everything, don’t you.”
It was the same back-and-forth as always.
Actually, Hanekawa had taken an interest in Senjogahara before I ever did, so maybe, as the class president, it was natural for her to know that much. Come to think of it, Senjogahara didn’t seem to hate Hanekawa too badly for her excessive fussing. Inviting Hanekawa to the birthday party I was currently planning for Senjogahara probably wouldn’t earn her full wrath.
But, having a girlfriend who might get angry that I planned a birthday party for her…
“So, Araragi. Are you actually trying to get into the same university as her?”
“Don’t tell her yet, okay? I don’t want to get her hopes up in some weird way.” I hid my embarrassment─or not exactly, but still flipped through a random study-aid within my reach. “Actually, I feel like she’d say something standoffish to me.”
“Brutal… Aren’t you two boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Well yes, but. It’s like she believes that good fences make good strangers…”
“Huh? Oh, I get it. A gag based on ‘good fences make good neighbors’? Ahaha, you’re funny, Araragi.”
“Don’t go around explaining people’s jokes!”
And don’t call it a gag.
“Ahaha, Araragi! You must have been thinking that one up from the moment you said, ‘I feel like she’d say something standoffish to me’! It would’ve been easy to tell that I’d reply, ‘Aren’t you two boyfriend and girlfriend?’ Oh, you can be so elaborate!”
“Please, stop stripping down how I talk!”
I felt buck naked.
I put us back on track.
“It’s not like I have a specific goal, but I did better on the skills test the other day than I expected. I was just trying to avoid a failing grade… It of course pales in comparison to you or Senjogahara, but I did all right thanks to studying seriously for the first time in a while.”
“I forget, did you study one-on-one with her?”
“Yeah.”
In case you were wondering, Senjogahara effortlessly got the seventh highest overall score while watching over this washout as he studied. It was impressive, or maybe brilliant. She was at the level where my only possible reaction was admiration.
One more fact, in case you were wondering. Tsubasa Hanekawa got the top overall score.
It went without saying.
She took first place in every subject.
Close to a perfect score, apparently.
Putting that aside, while my scores weren’t worthy of being posted and ranked in any subject aside from math, they had still dramatically improved compared to all the skills tests I had taken up to that point.
They’d improved to the point that I was starting to have a little dream.
It was now June.
So if I hunkered down and studied for the next half-year─
“With Senjogahara tutoring me, I felt like I understood how to study for the first time in a while… It reminded me of how it used to feel in middle school. I’d given up on that kind of thing at some point during my first year here.”
“Huh… I think that’s a good thing. I do think that wanting to go to the same university as your girlfriend is a bit impure as far as motives go, but the doors to scholarship are always open. Yes, in that case, I think I’ll do everything I can to help you, too.”
“………”
Being educated by Senjogahara was scary, but education-by-Hanekawa was a pretty frightening thought, too…
Not that I told her that.
In fact, no matter how I looked at it, I needed Tsubasa Hanekawa’s help if I wanted to get into college.
“So,” I asked her, “if I can get a good idea of where I stand, I might start going to a test-prep school starting summer break. Do you know of any good ones?”
“Hmm. I can’t say that I do. I’ve never gone to a cram school or anything.”
“I see…”
Damned genius.
“But I’ll ask my friends.”
“You really know how to look out for people, you know that? I appreciate it. Of course, while I may not be able to get in this year, if I plan my studies with the understanding that I’ll take a year off after high school, I think I can do it.”
“Why are you setting your sights so low before you’ve even started? If you’re going to do this, try getting in on your first attempt… And when are you thinking of telling Senjogahara?”
“Again, once I have a good idea of where I stand…I guess? I know I’ll need her help, too. It sounds like the national university Senjogahara is trying to get into offers various exam types, so I could choose a set that focuses as much as possible on math…”
“Makes sense.” Hanekawa handed another study-aid to me. “Okay. That’s ten thousand yen on the dot.”
“…What? No way. You found a combination that costs exactly that much? You can really pull off a trick like that?”
“It’s just addition, you know.”
“………”
It was just addition, sure… But these were mostly four-digit numbers, in her head, while having a conversation… I’d thought math was my strong suit… It seemed I couldn’t hope to compare to Hanekawa even when it came to arithmetic.
The thought sapped my motivation a little, or put a dent in me…
In other words, I’d have to spend half a year busting my ass and in the throes of an immeasurable inferiority complex toward Hitagi Senjogahara and Tsubasa Hanekawa…
Well.
I just had to bust my ass.
“Incidentally, Araragi.”
“Why so formal all of a sudden?”
“Tell me more about what you said earlier. You found the corpse of a snake cut into five at the overgrown ruins of a shrine─what happened then?”
“Huh? Oh, that.”
I’d told her about it after school while we were getting ready for the culture festival. I’d only meant to update her on Oshino, but it had happened only yesterday. I couldn’t stop myself from talking about it given how fresh it was in my mind. I didn’t go into any detail because hearing about the cruel deaths of small animals could only be unpleasant, but it seemed to have grabbed Hanekawa’s attention.
“Nothing, really. Kanbaru and I did at least dig a hole for the snake and bury it…but when we wandered around the area after that, there were dead snakes all over the place.”
“Dead─all over the place?”
“Yeah. Chopped-up snakes all over the place.”
Several of them.
And then I stopped counting.
Kanbaru had looked legitimately sick.
“So we ended up going straight down the mountain… And then we ate the lunch that Kanbaru made at a nearby park. I was surprised at just how good it was, but when I asked, she told me that her grandma helped her make them. Actually, the other way around. It was more like she helped her grandma make them. When I asked her what exactly she did, it was ‘I got the knives ready’ and ‘I boiled some water’ and ‘I watched to make sure the pot didn’t boil over, but it did.’ Wanting to be a good cook when she’s already so athletic is a bit greedy, huh?”
“That might be true. But it’s too bad about Kanbaru. She’d be right in the middle of a tournament right now if not for her arm injury.”
“……”
Oh, right.
I’d nearly slipped up and run my mouth.
The only people at Naoetsu High who knew the truth behind Suruga Kanbaru’s retirement were me and Senjogahara. No one would be added to that list, and that seemed perfectly fine.
The funny thing was that once we ate lunch, Kanbaru really did feel better again. In typical born-athlete form, her body seemed to be unusually efficient at absorbing energy.
“Well, Araragi… That must have been a handful.”
“Yeah. Killing snakes that way seemed like a ritual or something and made me think. Kind of gave me the chills, it’s a very uncool thing to do. Plus the place is an abandoned shrine, you know? Oh, by the way, did you know there was a shrine there?”
“Kita-Shirahebi?” North Whitesnake Shrine─
“Yes, I guess they must have worshiped a snake god there. I’m not that familiar with it, though. I just happen to know as a local.”
“I feel like it’s precisely the kind of place you don’t know as a local… Plus, you already seem plenty familiar with it, but huh… Killing snakes in a spot where they were once worshiped… It really does seem like a kind of ritual to me. Maybe I should…report it to Oshino?”
An aberration.
I hoped I was making too much of it.
But─there was the bit about Sengoku, too.
Nadeko Sengoku.
“………”
…I didn’t want the conversation going in this direction.
Hanekawa had forgotten her involvement with an aberration. She remembers being helped by Oshino, at least, but the part where she was charmed by a cat and everything else that followed─she has no memory of it. That isn’t the only reason, but I don’t want Hanekawa to have much to do with aberrations. She doesn’t need to know about what happened with Senjogahara, or Kanbaru, or Hachikuji─not now, not later.
That’s how I see it.
Because she’s a cool person.
“But you know, Araragi, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I meant that dealing with Kanbaru must have been a handful.”
“……”
If anything.
It seemed like I needed to be worrying about myself.
“Dealing. With. Kanbaru,” she punctuated her words. “Must have been a handful, I’m asking.”
She was grinning.
Her smiling face was actually scarier than anything…
“O-Oh… Yeah, she did suddenly start feeling unwell. I wondered what it could be, but…it was nothing, fortunately.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Hanekawa said in a serious tone. Well, she said just about everything in a serious tone, but especially this time. “Don’t you think it’s a problem being a little too friendly with your girlfriend’s junior? I think it’s fine for you to be somewhat friendly with her since you were the one who helped them make up, but you shouldn’t be linking arms, should you?”
“What was I supposed to do? She’s a friendly girl.”
“Do you think that passes as an excuse?”
“Well…”
It didn’t, did it.
No matter how you looked at it.
“Part of me can understand,” she said. “I suppose this must be the first time you have a junior who looks up to you. You didn’t have any extracurriculars in middle school either and went straight home then, too, right? It’s nice to have a cute little junior. Or could it have simply been that you enjoyed how Kanbaru’s breast felt? You perv.”
“Ngkk…”
I found it vaguely difficult to argue.
She was wrong, but even if I told her that, there was no way to keep it from sounding like a lie.
Hanekawa continued, “I’m sure Kanbaru is feeling insecure to some degree because of her retirement, but isn’t that where you should jump in and set the record straight?”
“Uhhm…”
“Wouldn’t it be a shame if the Valhalla Duo split up over you when you helped bring them back together?”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
Weak-willed.
Feeble me.
“But in that sense,” observed Hanekawa, “I guess Kanbaru doesn’t have much experience with men, either. This is an odd way to put it, but maybe being treated like a star for so long deprived her of those kinds of opportunities.”
“Probably.”
Plus, she was a sapphist.
Plus, she was in love with Senjogahara.
Those were secrets, too.
“And you don’t seem too good at communicating about this stuff, either,” the class president went on. “While that’s sometimes a valid excuse, it isn’t always.”
“I dunno. Senjogahara keeps telling me to take good care of Kanbaru. ‘I won’t overlook any rudeness toward my junior,’ and that kind of thing. It makes me wonder who really has the power here. Like, if this is a love triangle, it’s one hell of an isosceles. It even sounds like Kanbaru was told by Senjogahara to have me pamper her.”
Right.
What didn’t make sense here was Senjogahara’s psychology.
What on earth was she thinking?
“Well, okay. Couldn’t it be like this?” Hanekawa gently reached for my head with both of her hands. They sandwiched it and stayed there. My own hands were full carrying a pile of study-aids so I couldn’t swat hers away.
“Huh? Wait, what?”
“Okay, go ahead.”
Hanekawa used her hands to adjust the angle of my head and pointed it directly toward her own upturned face. Our eyes met. Or so I thought, but Hanekawa’s were shut. Behind her glasses were two closed eyes, and her eyelashes seemed to be trembling. Her lips, sealed too, naturally appeared to convey a message─
“Huh? Huh? Huh?”
Wh-What was going on here?
Or rather, where was this going?
Hanekawa was the class president and someone I was indebted to, just as much as, no, even more than I was to Oshino─
B-But did I need to do something here?
She did tell me to go ahead…
Those glasses would get in the way a little, but…wait.
Wasn’t the right move here to not do anything?!
“…Like that, I guess?”
Her eyes blinked open.
Hanekawa let go.
“Araragi, were you about a second away?”
“N-No… What’re you saying?”
I admit, my voice was obviously cracking.
What was I saying?
“See. Weak-willed, feeble you.”
“………”
Coming from someone else, those words really struck me.
Not only that, I couldn’t deny it.
“You’re kind to everyone, right, Araragi? I think that when Senjogahara sees that side of you, it makes her pretty insecure. You’re the only one for her─but to take it to an extreme, it’s like you’d be fine with anyone.”
“…Insecure?”
Was she that sentimental of a person?
Then again, it was to help get rid of that part of her that I’d acted as a mediator between her and Kanbaru. So was Senjogahara, in turn, trying to help get rid of that part of me? No, it didn’t make sense. I didn’t see how that could possibly follow.
“You’re quick to go with the flow, and you don’t want to hurt people. Being kind is usually a good thing, of course, but it doesn’t always serve the people around you. Senjogahara might not want you to become too friendly with Kanbaru, you know? But she could never tell you not to befriend her and might even end up saying the opposite─am I wrong? Like she’s fine if you’re friends, she wants you to be friends, in fact, but wants you to draw a clear line… Maybe Senjogahara wants you to choose her after you’ve compared her to Kanbaru.”
“What the hell? You’re not making any sense.”
“Don’t you think Senjogahara is in a dilemma of her own? You’re very important to her as her boyfriend, and Kanbaru is very important to her as her junior.”
“Uhh.”
In addition, Kanbaru was a sapphist.
And Senjogahara already knew that.
Our relationships were pretty complicated when you took that into account.
“And Senjogahara is a tsundere,” Hanekawa said as if to wrap up our conversation. “I don’t think you should ever try to understand her actions in a simplistic way. You need to always be looking for the reasons behind them. If Senjogahara is important to you, I don’t think you should let your heart waver over a tiny little temptation. It really is a little irresponsible to be kind to everyone.”
“Yeah… Don’t worry, that part has hit home.”
Her live-fire exercise had worked.
…Though I did wonder about concluding our conversation with “And she’s a tsundere”… Wait, so Hanekawa knew what that word meant…
She really did know everything.
Maybe she was even starting to see through Senjogahara’s feline subterfuge.
Cats were Hanekawa’s specialty, after all.
“Speaking of which,” I asked her, “where were you planning on going to university? Tokyo, I guess? Or do students who get nationwide top scores on practice tests like you end up going overseas?”
“Huh? I’m not going to college, okay?”
“………Wha?”
Where did that bombshell come from.
She’d honestly caught me by surprise.
“You’re not…going to college?”
“Nope.”
“Is it a money problem? But this is you we’re talking about, I’m sure you can get a scholarship…”
I could even see her getting paid to go to school.
“It’s not like that. There isn’t really anything I’d want to study in college, anyway… Yeah, I guess I could tell you, Araragi. I’m going to go on a little journey after I graduate.”
“A-A journey?”
“I want to spend two years or so seeing the world. There are a lot of World Heritage sights you need to visit now, or they might disappear. There are times when I find myself relying on nothing but knowledge, so I think I should go out and experience more things. And if I do want to go to college, I can afterwards, and it won’t be too late.”
“……”
It was the kind of idea that floats into your head when you’re daydreaming.
Hanekawa didn’t have the grades of a student who needed an escape from the harsh realities of the struggle to get into a good school. You could tell her that entrance exams were tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter, she had the chops to handle it unassumingly. You could spring the exams on her at that very moment and she’d probably waltz her way into any school you cared to name. That’s who I was dealing with, which meant these travel plans of hers must have been fairly worked out, to the point that they weren’t going to change…
“Keep it a secret for now from our teachers and others, okay? I think they might be surprised if they heard.”
“Yeah…I’ll bet.”
“My plan is to watch and wait for the right time to bring it up.”
“I see… Well, I have a feeling that no matter when you bring it up, there’s going to be a little more than a surprised commotion…”
It would be total pandemonium, I was sure.
If the top student at a prep school made that kind of decision, leaving behind a precedent, it could even affect the institution’s legacy. This was Hanekawa, someone they held greater than great expectations of. She had to know all of this full well…
“Please don’t tell,” she requested. “In exchange, this time around, I’ll keep everything about Kanbaru a secret from Senjogahara.”
“Hey, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything particularly questionable…”
“And neither have I. But, you know?”
“Yeah. I get it.”
Hmph.
Could Oshino─have influenced her?
Hanekawa treated that rolling stone with the utmost respect. You couldn’t discount his influence, at the very least. If that were the case, it felt like Oshino had a lot of blood on his hands… What a meddlesome bastard.
So…that’s how it was. I was convinced that Hanekawa would continue to be some kind of class president even after she graduated from high school, that the gods had decided her destiny was to be a class president, but she wouldn’t be a class president or anything if she went off on a journey by herself.
I kind of felt like sighing.
Things never went smoothly.
I, a washout, was deciding this late in the game to try to go to college.
Tsubasa Hanekawa, a model student, aspired to become an outsider.
Suruga Kanbaru had retired from the basketball team early.
Mayoi Hachikuji couldn’t go back to the way things were, either.
Hitagi Senjogahara.
“…Ow!”
Then.
Hanekawa suddenly placed her right hand against her head.
As if to support it.
“Hm? What’s the matter?” I asked.
“No, it’s just─I’ve got a headache.”
“A headache?”
I recalled how Kanbaru had suddenly started to feel unwell the day before at the shrine, and I instantly began to fret. But Hanekawa soon raised her head.
“Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine. They come now and then, I started getting them a little while back. My head starts to hurt out of nowhere.”
“Whoa, hold on… That doesn’t sound fine at all.”
“Hmm. But it gets better right away. I don’t know what causes it, though… Maybe it’s because I’ve been so busy preparing for the culture festival lately that I’ve slacked on my studies.”
“You get headaches when you skip out on studying?”
How exactly did her body work?
Was she wearing some ring on her head like Monkey in Journey to the West?
She deserved to be in the diligence hall of fame.
Down to her marrow.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” I offered.
“No, it’s fine. My home─”
“Oh…right.”
A blunder.
I shouldn’t have said that.
“Sorry, I’m going to head back,” she announced. “You stay here a little longer and pick out study-aids. The ones I gave you are my suggestions, but personal preference ends up playing a big role in that kind of thing.”
“Okay. See you…”
“Yup.”
With that, Hanekawa left the bookstore like she was fleeing.
Maybe I should have walked her back until she was in the general area of her home anyway─but she was pretty headstrong, or rather, she didn’t like the idea of showing weakness to others. Since she said she was fine, I shouldn’t be a busybody.
But.
A headache…
It made me wonder a little.
For Hanekawa, a headache meant…
“………”
Hanekawa knew nothing about Senjogahara’s crab, Hachikuji’s snail, or Kanbaru’s monkey, nor anything about her own cat, at this point─
Not that it meant anything.
But nothing could change the fact that I owed a debt of gratitude to Hanekawa. It wasn’t simply over my aberration─I couldn’t begin to tell you just how often her words had saved me.
Like today.
That was why I always wanted to help her out in some way…
Sigh.
I’d have loved to be a busybody.
Though I heeded Hanekawa’s advice and continued to flip through study-aids, I just wasn’t used to it, and they all looked the same to me. I decided to go ahead and buy the ones she’d picked out (It ended up being six books in total. I did take the time to add up the prices, which did come out to ten thousand yen on the dot. Wow) and left the study-aids section. I was at my budget exactly so I couldn’t buy anything else, but the great thing about books is that it doesn’t cost a thing to peruse them. I’d look stupid checking out the latest manga with my hands full of study-aids, but on the other hand, I felt smarter just carrying them around, so maybe spending some time there wasn’t such a bad idea… Actually, I was already thinking stupid...
While I didn’t have a destination yet, I decided to start moving─and that’s when I froze. Having seen something impossible, I couldn’t help it. I nearly dropped all the study-aids I was carrying.
No.
It wasn’t exactly impossible.
The chances of two people living in the same town encountering each other at the largest bookstore in town couldn’t be particularly low─at least, it was far more likely than passing by each other on a path that you could easily miss, on stairs that led to a deserted shrine.
And even the probability of that wasn’t zero.
So─if they occurred on consecutive days.
It wasn’t a mystery.
“…Sengoku.”
There in front of the sorcery and occult shelves, located just next to the study-aid section, and reading a thick book, was Nadeko Sengoku─my little sister’s old friend, Nadeko Sengoku.
She was wholly focused on reading the book─so she hadn’t noticed me. It’s not as if I could pass directly in front of her, so I could only see her in profile, but…I could tell it was her. Sengoku, who’d come to my home to play when she was in grade school…or who’d been brought to my home to play. It was an unusual name, Nadeko Sengoku, so I’d remembered it in full. Especially the name “Nadeko.” Anyone else whose name was written with those characters would be named “Nadeshiko,” and even as a grade school kid, I’d wondered where that one syllable had gone…
She was the same age as my youngest sister.
That meant─she was now in the second year of middle school.
I couldn’t tell because she wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she probably went to the public middle school that I’d graduated from. Few kids all the way out where I lived chose to go to private school like my little sisters did.
“………”
I remembered Sengoku.
But did she remember me?
She looked surprised when we passed each other the day before─but that could just have been the sight of people other than her climbing up that mountain. Your friend’s older brother isn’t normally the kind of person you remember…which would make saying something to her odd.
But.
Snakes.
Yes, snakes─
As I was thinking, Sengoku returned the book she was reading to its shelf and began to walk. I promptly hid myself so as not to be spotted. There wasn’t any particular reason for me to hide and I’d only done so reflexively, but I missed any chance I might have had to call out to her. I took a detour, using the bookshelves as walls, made sure she was gone, and stepped over to where she’d been standing until moments earlier.
I wanted to know what book she’d been reading.
I looked at its title.
“Hold on… This is─”
The book─was a hardcover priced at twelve thousand yen.
Not a book a middle schooler could buy. Even a high school kid like me couldn’t purchase it with the cash I had on hand. I wouldn’t be able to buy any of the study-aids.
That must have been why she contented herself with reading it in the aisles.
But─more than that.
The issue was the book’s title.
I left the section in the back of the store to look around for Sengoku, but she was already nowhere to be found. Maybe she was hiding somewhere in another section, but it seemed more likely that she had exited the store. And those clothes she was wearing…
Long sleeves, long pants.
A hat pulled far down on her head, and a bag around her waist.
If my intuition was right…then yes.
“Damn… Give me a break.”
I decided to go to the cash register and pay for the time being. There was a long line of shoppers waiting, but I toughed it out. Nothing good could come from getting flustered and rushing. I needed to start by calming myself down. Still unsure what to do, I placed a ten-thousand-yen bill on the cashier’s tray. The clerk seemed surprised that my total came out to ten thousand yen on the dot, but what did I care. The honor didn’t belong to me.
Hmm.
There’s only so much you can do on your own.
I had to seek someone’s assistance…and the circumstances led me to just one person. Someone who might be particularly suited to this case… Hanekawa had just warned me, but I couldn’t help it.
With a bag filled with study-aids in my left hand, I took out my cell phone as soon as I left the store and called the number I’d learned after we were done the day before. I was reminded again of how nervous I felt about calling a new number for the first time, just like two days ago when I’d called her house.
The phone rang about five times.
“This is Suruga Kanbaru.”
No sooner than it connected, she answered with her full name. The oddly uncommon act surprised me a little.
“Liar. No human can do that.”
“Hm? Judging by that voice and the quipping, I’d say it’s my dear senior Araragi.”
“You’re right, but…”
That voice and the quipping? That’s how she figured it out?
I’d given her my number the day before, too. Hadn’t she put it into her contacts list? Now, that was sad… Well, never mind, she just hadn’t mastered using a cell phone. She didn’t seem too good with tech.
“If you have some time, Kanbaru, there was something I wanted you to help me with… What are you doing right now?”
“Heheh,” Kanbaru laughed daringly for some reason. “Whether I have time or not, I’ll go anywhere you ask me to, no matter how far. I don’t even need a reason, just give me your location and I’ll be there right away.”
“No, putting all that aside… If you’re not free, you don’t need to force yourself. I dragged you along with me just yesterday, so I’m already feeling bad. Where are you right now, and what were you doing?”
“Umm…if you must know, well…”
“That’s a pretty half-hearted reply. So you’re busy? In that case─”
“No, uh…yes,” Kanbaru said as if she’d made up her mind. “I can’t keep any secrets from you. I’m in my room at my home right now reading dirty books and indulging in dirty fantasies.”
“………”
I shouldn’t have been so insistent.
Now I felt like a sexual harasser.
“Oh, but don’t get me wrong,” she cautioned. “They might be dirty books, but it’s all boys’ love.”
“Please, why couldn’t you at least let me get that part wrong!”
“New releases came out today, you see, and including ones I couldn’t buy since we were in the middle of tests, I got around twenty.”
“Huh… Not one for paring down your selections?”
“Tsk tsk tsk. You ought to know that I love every pairing under the sun.”
“Oh, shut up!”
So Kanbaru had been at this same bookstore after school… It was probably the only one in the neighborhood big enough to have a dedicated boys’ love corner. But that meant our town really was tiny… If my life were a dating simulator, new flags would be popping up all the time.
“In other words, you’re not busy.”
“I guess I couldn’t argue if you put it that way. Thinking about how you and Mister Oshino would work together doesn’t exactly make me busy.”
“That’s what you meant by ‘dirty fantasies’?!”
“So where do you need me to go?”
“Don’t change the topic, no, wait, don’t put us back on topic! You’d better tell me, Kanbaru, who’s on top and who’s on bottom?! I’ll never forgive you if you say I’m on bottom!”
It was a stupid conversation.
Talking to her was always like this.
“Good grief, Kanbaru. It’d be nice to have an intelligent conversation with you someday… You’re supposed to be pretty smart, right?”
“From the way you spelled that, though…”
Anyway, I said.
Even as we entertained our idiotic conversation, Sengoku was getting farther and farther away from the store… Well, she could go as far away as she wanted─I knew where she would end up.
She was in street clothes.
Her sense of fashion wasn’t refined, but that wasn’t the point.
As if she was about to head to the mountains.
“The shrine we went to yesterday,” I said. “We’ll meet on the sidewalk by the stairs that lead up there. Um, location-wise─you must be closer, but I should get there first since I’m on a bike. I’ll wait for you there.”
“Really? Do you think I’m going to make you wait on me two days in a row? Your faith in me must be at rock bottom. I have my pride, and I’m not going to let a comment like that go unanswered. I’ll use this opportunity to clear my name and restore my honor. I absolutely will get there first.”
“I don’t even know how to respond to your weird sense of pride…but either way, get there as soon as you can. Oh, and don’t forget. Long sleeves and long pants.”
I was on the way back from school, so I was still in my uniform. We had just changed to our summer attire, which meant I was wearing a short-sleeved button-down, but there was nothing I could do about that now. I was wearing slacks for pants, so good enough. An insect or snake bite wouldn’t be a big deal for me anyway─those vampiric “residual effects,” once again.
“Okay. Your wish is my command.”
“All right, see you,” I said and hung up, circling behind the bookstore to the bike parking and unlocking my bicycle. More than ten minutes had passed since Sengoku left the store… I didn’t know how she was getting there, but the day before, I hadn’t seen any bicycle that might be hers near where those stairs began. She most likely walked… Well, either way, if she was heading to that shrine, I wouldn’t catch up with her.
Now that I thought about it, Kanbaru really didn’t ask me why I was summoning her…
How frighteningly loyal.
Senjogahara was obviously my superior in Kanbaru’s chain of command, but being served so assiduously by someone as high-status as Suruga Kanbaru made me feel, to be honest, more scared than happy…
There didn’t seem to be any way of ruining her image of me, though, which actually made me want to start acting like the ideal senior around her and not betray her overblown expectations.
Well─it didn’t seem like a bad thing.
“I wonder what Senjogahara was like.”
In middle school─during the Valhalla Duo’s honeymoon phase, what had it been like between them?
As I was thinking that, I reached my destination.
I got there fast. That’s a bike for you.
Or so I thought, but Kanbaru was already there.
“………”
Were there wheels on her feet or something?
There was a limit to being fleet-footed… She might have no trouble passing the average scooter and leaving it in the dust. I doubted that the automobile would have ever been invented if all of mankind could run as fast as her. If she’d gotten ready to go right after I hung up… Well, no, she’d changed into long sleeves and long pants like I’d told her (plus, having learned from the day before, she wore unripped pants and wasn’t showing her navel)…
“Uh-uh,” she said, “it didn’t take much time at all for me to put these clothes on. In the summer, I’m always in my underwear at home.”
“Kanbaru… I’m saying this purely out of concern for you, but you know I can’t make any guarantees about your chastity if you keep fanning the flames of my earthly desires.”
“I’m prepared for that.”
“Well, I’m not, okay?!”
“I trust your sense of reason.”
“I don’t trust it myself!”
“Really? I’m surprised to hear that. Do you find girls only wearing underwear when they’re at home so moé?”
“I see. So if we turn that around, as long as it’s not me, cat ears and a maid outfit work for you?”
“Ack, it was a trick question!”
I decided to go ahead and park my bike at least.
While I did feel somewhat guilty about parking it illegally, it wouldn’t be for long. I’d beg the law’s forgiveness. If it did get confiscated, I’d just resign myself to my fate. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Even taking that into account,” I remarked, “you really are fast… You could probably make it into the Olympics or something if you really tried.”
“You don’t get to go to the Olympics just because you’re fast… And I’m not cut out for track competitions, anyway.”
“Oh, I guess not.”
Senjogahara was on the track team in middle school, and they’d first met when Senjogahara heard that the basketball ace was quick and went to see Kanbaru─or something along those lines.
“From my point of view,” I said, “your speed doesn’t even seem human.”
“Hm. If it isn’t human, would that make me…amphibian?”
“Try naming an amphibian that’s a fast runner!”
“You got me there.”
“It’s not about gain. If you would call me that, I’d present myself as such with great joy.”
“Uh oh, ‘great joy’?”
“Hurry and please call me your ‘lowly, filthy pet’!”
“There are actually two equally important things I have to say to that, and while I’d normally ignore them because it’d be hard to without tripping over my words along the way, I like you so much, Kanbaru, that I’m going ahead and pointing them out anyway! First of all, I wouldn’t keep an amphibian as a pet, and second of all, your great joy has nothing particular to do with amphibians anymore!”
If you’re curious, I’d thought of a cheetah.
Of course, they aren’t animals you’d keep as pets, either.
Yippee, the feeling was mutual.
“Please, don’t be so cold and just say it,” Kanbaru pleaded. “‘Lowly, filthy pet!’ You have to try it out just once. I’m sure you’ll understand if you do.”
“Why are you acting so desperate?!”
“Urk… Why won’t anyone understand? She told me no, too…”
“Even Senjogahara didn’t want to?!”
Well, actually.
Saying it was one thing, but Kanbaru feeling great joy?
“So, what do I need to do?” she asked me.
“Oh, right. This was no time to be amusing ourselves with small talk.”
“Do you need me to strip?”
“Why so eager to take off your clothes?!”
“If you have to take them off for me instead, I wouldn’t mind.”
“We’re not talking about who should perform the action! What are you, the embodiment of my middle school fantasies?!”
“I’m someone who tries to pursue a cheerful sexy.”
“I don’t care about your creed…”
“Okay, then let me put it this way. I’m a fairy who tries to pursue a cheerful eroticism.”
“Oh my god! All you did was change ‘sexy’ to ‘eroticism’ and ‘someone’ to ‘fairy’ and you’ve turned what you were saying into something sublime…in no way whatsoever!”
What would it take to teach this woman that men could be sexually harassed, too? It seemed like an issue I needed to address.
“Then what do you want me to do?” she complained. “Just say it, don’t hold back. I’m not a refined person, so subtlety doesn’t work on me. Whenever people are roundabout, I just get esaxpera… Esapxer… Esapxer…”
“I’m sorry. I’m starting to get all beduffled.”
“Yeah, and you’re befuddling me, too!”
“So, what is it?”
“Oh─well, I’m pretty sure that up there,” I pointed at the stairs, “is someone I used to know.”
“Hm?”
“Do you remember that girl who passed by us as we were climbing these yesterday?”
“Yes. She was petite and cute.”
“I don’t know about remembering her that way…”
“To word it like you might, she was a girl with ‘pretty’ hips.”
“I wouldn’t say that!”
Well, whatever.
She was a sapphist, after all.
It made for a smoother conversation than if she didn’t remember her at all.
“I’d thought I’d seen her somewhere before…but I only remembered later. While I wasn’t a hundred percent certain yesterday, after I saw her again today at the bookstore, I knew for sure. She’s an old friend of my youngest sister’s.”
“Really, now?” Kanbaru seemed taken aback. “What a coincidence… I’m shocked.”
“Mm-hm. I was surprised, too.”
“Mm-hm. I haven’t been this surprised since I woke up this morning and saw that my alarm clock had stopped.”
“Hmm. Okay, then allow me to correct myself. Uh, I haven’t been this surprised since the Cambrian explosion.”
“Now you’ve gone too far back, and this isn’t that amazing! Don’t bring up the greatest event in Earth’s history for a coincidence like running into an old acquaintance in a small town! I’m even beginning to feel like it wasn’t such a big surprise after all now that I really think about it!”
“You can be so demanding. So─you’re saying that girl is here again today?”
“Right. Probably.”
Judging by her reaction, even Kanbaru’s quick feet hadn’t managed to get her to the stairs before Sengoku. Of course─while I could be somewhat certain that Sengoku had come straight to where we were after leaving the bookstore, it was ultimately just my guess. If she wasn’t here, she wasn’t here, and that’d be the best outcome of all.
But─the book that Sengoku was reading at the bookstore.
That was the problem.
“The book she was reading?” asked Kanbaru.
“Yeah. Well, I can tell you more about it later. Anyway, about what I wanted to ask you─I may have known this girl in the past, but it’s still awkward for me to speak to her. Actually, I don’t even know if she remembers me, and it might look like I’m using some weird pick-up move on her─the defensive instincts of a freshly pubescent girl can be a scary thing.”
“You say that like you speak from experience.”
“Well, I won’t deny that.”
All sorts of people have told me that I’m kind to everyone, but there was a price: I’d gone through some bad experiences because of it. Not that I felt like my efforts were a waste, but it didn’t feel great when I ended up not being able to help someone I might have otherwise.
“On that note, Kanbaru. You must be good with girls younger than you. You’re the biggest star at our school, after all.”
“That’s not true anymore, and I don’t feel like it ever was, but I see what you’re getting at. You’re an excellent judge of people. I really am good with younger girls.”
“I thought as much. I knew you were the right person to call.”
While not on Hanekawa’s level, Kanbaru did seem to look after others.
She’d been captain of her team in both middle school and high school.
In that sense, she was the complete opposite of the way Senjogahara was now… Or maybe I should say that Kanbaru succeeded the middle-school Senjogahara.
“To be specific, count on me,” Kanbaru boasted, “to seduce any girl younger than me in ten seconds, tops.”
“Bringing you here was the biggest mistake of my life!”
I didn’t need that kind of goodness!
I wasn’t here to ruin a girl’s life!
“Don’t tell me that you saw the basketball team as nothing more than a personal harem…”
“How far would you go?!”
“I’d take out the ‘nothing more than.’”
“That barely changes anything!”
“Hm? So she’s your youngest sister’s friend… Which means that you have a little sister… In fact, two or more…”
“………!”
Oh no!
The sapphist now knew about my little sisters!
“Heheheh… I see, your little sisters… Heh heh heh, heh heh heh. Are they anything like you, I wonder─”
“Don’t get any funny thoughts…and jeez, what is with that awful grin I doubt I’ve ever seen before?! Is that a smile you ought to be pointing at me, the object of that selfless devotion you pride yourself on?!”
If you’re curious.
They do look like me. Both of them.
“Oh, please,” scoffed Kanbaru. “I would never lay a finger on your little sisters. Yes, seducing a younger girl or two might come easier than breathing to me, but there’s no reason for me to ever do such a thing─ as long as you and I stay close.”
“Damn you, that’s a veiled threat…”
“A threat? Oh my, what a grating accusation. Such shocking words from a revered senior might cause a nervous person like me to panic and, well, who knows what I might do? Don’t you think there’s, oh, something else you ought to be saying to me right now?”
“G-Gah…”
It was happening…
She was absolutely being influenced by the present-day Senjogahara!
The very definition of a bad influence.
“Ah, I think my chest is feeling a little stiff from running here. I wonder if I could find someone to give me a massage.”
“How do I not come out ahead in that deal?!”
“Joking aside,” Kanbaru said, switching to a serious tone. “Of course I wouldn’t hesitate to help since you’re asking me─but you’re taking into account what happened yesterday, aren’t you?”
“Well─yes.”
“So─that’s what this is.”
“…Yeah.”
“Sheesh.” Kanbaru shrugged, as if she had no other choice. She raised her bandaged left arm to scratch her head─before stopping and doing so with her right hand instead. “You’re kind to everyone─that’s what she told me, and it seems like it’s true. Sure, I learned that well enough while I was stalking you─but I get a different impression now that I see it in person.”
“Kanbaru…”
“It feels so pointless to be indebted to you─that’s how she put it.”
“……”
“It’s fine. I’m talking to myself. No, I’m talking out of turn. Okay, let’s go. If we don’t hurry, this girl might finish her business.”
Her business.
Her business at a deserted shrine.
“Yeah…you’re right.”
Side by side, the two of us took the first step up the same stairs we had climbed the day before.
Today─Kanbaru wasn’t holding my hand.
“Hey, Kanbaru.”
“What is it?”
“Any plans post-graduation?”
“Post-graduation… Before my arm turned out like this, I thought college on a sports scholarship, but that’s not going to happen now. My plan is to take entrance exams and get into a school fair and square.”
“I see.”
While her left arm would heal, it wouldn’t until she turned twenty. Now seventeen, those three years had to seem long and gloomy to Kanbaru.
“I haven’t decided on a specific school,” she said, “but I’d like to go to one with a strong basketball program─so I guess a Phys Ed school.”
“You’re not thinking of going to the same university as Senjogahara?”
“What, is that what you’re planning?”
“Actually, yeah.”
But keep it a secret from Senjogahara, I said.
Yes, Kanbaru nodded.
When it came to heeding my wishes, she was my cute junior. I hated to admit it, but Hanekawa was right about this… Just having a cute junior made me happy.
“With your grades,” I asked, “couldn’t you try to chase after Senjogahara?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m a striver, which also means my current scores are already the best I can do.”
“Ah, right. But─”
“Also,” added Kanbaru, “what would come of spending all my time tracing her footsteps?”
“……”
That seemed─like a real change in her mindset.
It wasn’t like Kanbaru to say that…or maybe I had misjudged and underestimated her on this point. Still, wasn’t the woman I met a month ago dedicated to tracing Senjogahara’s footsteps?
Did something change?
Thanks to the aberration?
Aberrations─weren’t all bad.
Good or bad wasn’t the question to begin with.
“Well, I say that,” Kanbaru continued, “but no matter what path I choose, I’d like to stay involved with both you and her even after we graduate. It’d be nice if the three of us could get together and take a commemorative photo for the final episode.”
“Final episode…”
“Or maybe I gaze up at the twilight sky to see the two of you reflected there in the final episode…”
“Did you just kill off me and Senjogahara?!”
What a crappy ending.
“So there’s this girl named Hanekawa in my class.”
“Hm.”
“Do you know her?”
“No─I’m not aware of her.”
“I guess you are in different years… But she’s famous among us. She has the best grades of our whole year, after all. She hasn’t given up her seat at the top a single time since she started at our school and is the very picture of a model student. Sounds like a joke character or something, doesn’t she? I heard the other day that she didn’t do the best just here but nationwide on a practice test once. I’m pretty sure she went to the same middle school as you and Senjogahara.”
“Is that so. There are some incredible people out there…”
“But that incredible person says she’s not going to college.”
“…Is that so.”
“She wants to go on a journey because there are a lot of things she wants to see. I don’t even know what to make of that, but it did make me think, you know? Oh, and I guess this also needs to stay secret. It’d be a huge deal if the school found out.”
“I understand… But yes, it does make you think. You could say that Naoetsu High, being what it is, doesn’t even offer any paths apart from college─so setting out on an uncharted road without qualms is something.”
“Without qualms─or with them, I don’t know. But it sounded like she’d made up her mind.”
It was probably because we already knew the way, having taken it once, but Kanbaru and I climbed up the stairs and reached the shrine sooner than we had the day before.
It goes without saying, but the shrine was just as desolate as yesterday.
Out in the distance─I could see the talisman I’d placed on the shrine’s main hall. My eyesight was enhanced after letting Shinobu drink my blood on Saturday, and I could see everything down to the individual characters written with a red-ink brush.
It was the only difference from yesterday.
“………”
I glanced over─and Kanbaru was pale. She wasn’t just moments ago, we’d been carrying on a regular conversation, but now she was visibly tired.
That was also the same as yesterday.
No─she looked worse.
It─wasn’t from climbing the stairs.
She wasn’t feeling ill.
It happened the moment we entered the grounds─the moment we passed through the gate.
“…Hey, Kanbaru.”
“I’m fine. Let’s─just hurry.”
Despite her state, Kanbaru replied firmly, encouraging me to move forward and not stand idle. She was obviously forcing herself to keep going. I started to say something but ended up doing as she said. Right now, our top priority was to attend to what we were here for.
This shrine.
It had something.
A something that messed with Kanbaru’s body.
It was originally─a job from Oshino.
And Oshino─would never give us a simple job.
As soon as I spotted a girl─long sleeves, long pants, hat pulled far down, bag around her waist─crouching in front of a large rock across the grounds, my reaction was to shout her name. So much for bringing Kanbaru all the way here.
But I couldn’t stop myself from shouting.
In Sengoku’s left hand, fingers pinched around the neck, was a snake.
In Sengoku’s right hand, a chisel.
The snake was still alive.
However─it was about to get killed any moment now.
“Stop it, Sengoku!”
“Ah…”
Sengoku─looked at me.
Using the chisel to push the brim of her cap, worn low over her eyes, back up.
Nadeko Sengoku─slowly looked at me.
“Big Brother Koyomi…”
You.
You’d still call me that─
The thought ran through my head as if I were some dark hero who once walked the line until a lapse in judgment derailed him, who, after battling through trials and hardships that you do not relate or sit through without tears, now sat among the top echelons of a shadowy organization and committed an endless chain of unspeakable, unwatchable atrocities, in the midst of which a comrade from bygone days while he was still on the side of justice appears and calls him, by his old name.
004
“A Jagirinawa.”
After pondering for a while, so began Oshino─in a frightfully weighty voice, almost as if he detested the name. He tended to speak in a flippant, or even snide way, and this wasn’t a tone you often heard him take.
“The only thing it could be is a Jagirinawa. That’s all it could be, and I can state that for a fact. Though it’s sometimes called a jakiri, a janawa, a hebikiri-nawa─snake cutting, snake rope, snake-cutting rope─or even just kuchi-nawa.”
“A ‘mouth rope’? So just one way to say ‘snake’?”
“Right. Snake,” Oshino repeated.
Snake.
The general term for reptiles in Class Reptilia, Order Squamata, Suborder Serpentes.
Noted for their long, thin, cylindrical bodies covered in scales.
So it went demon, cat, crab, snail, monkey─and now snake.
Putting aside the demon as a special case─snakes felt like they had the worst reputation of the bunch. They felt like such an ominous symbol. Cats, crabs, snails, and monkeys had nothing on them when it came to spookiness.
Ha hah, Oshino laughed as always in his falsely carefree way, forcing himself to ditch the gloomy tone.
“Well─you’re not wrong to have that impression, Araragi. Since long ago, snakes have been seen as that sort of thing. There are a ton of snake-related aberrations, after all. They’re carnivores, I guess, and we do have sayings like ‘a snake in the grass.’ Plus, some of them have lethal poisons…so I suppose you can’t blame people for feeling that way. In the way of venomous snakes, here in Japan we have pit vipers, tiger keelbacks, habus. But then on the other hand, some see snakes as holy, or at least there’s a tradition of worshiping serpent gods─it’s common to nearly every region in the world. A symbol both holy and wicked─that’s the snake.”
“And that shrine─it was for worshiping a snake god too, wasn’t it?”
“Huh? Wait, why do you know that? I kept it a secret from you. Oh, I see. Missy class president told you.”
“…How’d you figure that out?”
“Well, she’s the only one around you who’d know─ha hah, maybe I should have given the talisman job to her? You manage to reel in trouble no matter where you go. Missy class president seems like she has a better head on her shoulders.”
“She─already finished repaying you, remember?”
“Still,” I said, “snakes just feel evil to me. I don’t really get people worshiping some serpent god. The only snake I can think of that doesn’t seem evil is maybe the tsuchinoko.”
“Ah, yes. Now that takes me back. I once did everything I could to find one of those damned things hoping to collect a reward. Never caught any, though.”
“I don’t know about an expert going for that. Plus, you couldn’t even find any… Oh, how about that thing, isn’t it an aberration? The ouroboros or whatever? The circular one that’s eating its own tail…”
“Oh, that. If you’re going to bring that up, it’s not quite a snake eating its own tail, but some snakes eat other snakes. The king cobra, I think? It’s quite a sight to see photos of a snake swallowing its own kind.”
“Huh… Well, personally, I find snakes scary, not on some rational but instinctual level. Just looking at one stops me in my tracks.”
“Land-based creatures shaped like that are rare, I suppose. It’s like watching a fish swim on land. That certainly qualifies as unique, so I guess it’s only natural for people to see them as bizarre. Like, don’t you respect the first person who ever ate a sea cucumber? Ha hah. And on top of that, snakes have extraordinary vitality. You can try and try, but it takes a lot to kill one─you know? You hear about ‘half-dead’ snakes, but what that really tells you is just how many hit points those things have. For something of that size, it’s off the charts, huh? It’s important to know that snakes aren’t considered pests to humans, though. You must’ve heard of snake wine, right?”
“I’ve never had any, of course.”
“Then what about eating one? I’ve had sea snake paired with snake wine in Okinawa. They say eating snake is good for longevity.”
“I don’t really see myself ever eating snake… But I suppose it doesn’t seem as bad as a sea cucumber.”
“You’re so narrow-minded. Or rather, you’re so gutless, balking at a mere snake. Over on the mainland, there are regions where they eat woofy-woofs, okay?”
“I don’t have any intention of repudiating anyone’s food culture, but could you at least not say ‘woofy-woof’ when you’re talking about eating them?”
Another one of these conversations with Oshino.
It was that, yes.
The abandoned ruins of a defunct cram school.
The fourth floor.
There I stood facing an eccentric man with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a frivolous Hawaiian-shirted bastard to whom I owed my gratitude─Mèmè Oshino.
I was alone.
I’d asked Suruga Kanbaru and Nadeko Sengoku to stand by and wait. If you’re wondering where─they were in the Araragi family home, sitting in my room. Putting aside my parents, my two little sisters were definitely inclined to enter my room without asking, but with the door locked, it was most likely fine for a few hours… I had to admit that some part of me did feel it was dangerous to leave Suruga Kanbaru, with her personality, not to mention her Sapphic bent, under the same roof as Sengoku and my little sisters without any supervision, but well, I just had to trust my junior.
And.
Above all─I had a reason to avoid bringing Kanbaru and Sengoku here. A reason I didn’t want to bring them along to meet Oshino─
Afterwards.
Kanbaru and I brought Sengoku along with us─and headed to my home. I had Sengoku sit on the back seat of my bike. Kanbaru ran alongside us without breaking a sweat. As I’d half-expected, Kanbaru’s condition returned to normal as soon as we climbed down the mountain. That bit the day before about her feeling better after eating lunch seemed to be a misunderstanding on my part.
Luckily, no one was home.
Both of my little sisters looked to be out (there were signs that they had come home once). Since deceiving their eyes would have been the trickiest part of slipping into my home, for which I hadn’t devised any concrete plan coming back, my reaction was one of honest relief. My youngest sister, in particular… If she didn’t remember her friend from grade school offhand, seeing her in person would do it. My sister would certainly wonder what was going on if her brother came home with an old pal of hers.
“Big Brother Koyomi…” muttered Sengoku in a vanishing voice. Her face was cast down, and I barely heard her. “You…changed rooms.”
“Yeah. I’m in my own room now. Both of my little sisters are still in that room, though… I think they’ll come back after a while. Do you want to see them?”
No, Sengoku shook her head listlessly.
Her voice was muted─and so were her reactions.
She should have had six years of growth and development─yet she seemed far smaller than when we’d played before, relatively speaking, of course. Maybe it was only because I’d also seen six years of growth─
For some reason, I fell silent.
Then─
“Huh. So this is my senior’s room,” Kanbaru said in her plucky voice, smashing through the mood before it could grow awkward. She took a look around. “It’s a lot tidier than I expected.”
“Sure, compared to your room…”
“Heheheh. This is my first time in a boy’s room.”
“Oh…”
I realized as soon as she said it.
Come to think of it, this was also my first time having a girl who wasn’t family in my room. Even Senjogahara had yet to visit my house. Gauchely inviting a girl into your room was a standard rite of passage for a teenager, but I’d let in my girlfriend’s junior prior to my girlfriend… Was this okay? First a date, and now this… But fine, my little sister’s old friend was with us too─and it was an emergency.
Sengoku had told us at the shrine.
In her tiny little voice.
I’ll tell you why─so take me somewhere indoors where people won’t see us.
Why.
Why─she killed those snakes.
Why she sliced them up.
The first place that came to mind was Kanbaru’s home, but I shot the idea down internally before she could suggest it. Because Kanbaru’s room was so messy I’d call it lawless terrain, as hinted above─no, I’d go so far as to call it a warzone. I couldn’t show that kind of room to an innocent middle schooler. That left my home as the only option. And anyway, Sengoku would probably feel anxious if we took her somewhere completely new. My home was a place where she’d played more than a few times in the past.
“Okay then, why don’t we look around for some dirty books?”
“That’s what guys do when they go to their male friends’ rooms! Just sit over there!”
“I’d find it worthwhile to know your tastes.”
“Ah, so you admit owning books that are harmful to minors…”
“Says the living harmful book! Take your pick, Kanbaru, sit down or jump out of that window!”
“I’m just kidding, of course. I looked into your tastes long ago, when I was still stalking you. I know every dirty book you’ve bought lately.”
“Your tastes are quite out there, aren’t they.”
“You’re down to one option, jump out that window!”
“I’m sure most girls would, faced with that kind of fetish. Heh, but that’s like child’s play for me, I could withstand it.”
“She’s proud of it!”
When I looked.
Sengoku was snickering but trying to hide it.
Guh. I was embarrassed.
I’d been wondering the whole time on the way back: how friendly should I be acting with this old acquaintance of mine?
Not to mention─Sengoku was quiet, if anything.
She seldom spoke, and only ever did so shyly.
Since Shinobu, Oshino, Hanekawa, Senjogahara, Hachikuji, and Kanbaru were all voluble and garrulous despite their various inclinations (Shinobu: rampant arrogance, Oshino: frivolous sarcasm, Hanekawa: moralizing instruction, Senjogahara: bitter abuse, Hachikuji: two-faced politeness, Kanbaru: fawning flattery), dealing with this new silent character was refreshing. Of course, Shinobu had grown taciturn after becoming a child…
Was Sengoku quiet now just as she had been as a child? Yes, it did feel like she always had her head down─but honestly, I couldn’t recall the details vividly.
I couldn’t remember.
She was introverted, spoke little, and always faced down─
But.
She seemed to have remembered me.
Big Brother Koyomi.
Yes, Nadeko Sengoku─once referred to me in that manner. As for what I’d called her─well, I’d forgotten. Maybe Nadeko, maybe Nadeshiko. Either way, I couldn’t call her that anymore.
Sengoku─was Sengoku.
“Big Brother…and Miss Kanbaru,” Sengoku said at last, quietly of course. “Could you…please turn away for a moment?”
“……”
We silently did as she said.
We turned our backs on Sengoku and faced the wall.
While I may have told Kanbaru to jump out of the window, I felt relieved that she was with me after all. In fact, after I called out to Sengoku at the shrine, I was at a loss as she stood there stiffly, and it was Kanbaru who singlehandedly pulled off the feat of getting her to open up. Seducing any younger girl within ten seconds had been no idle boast. I was willing to admit that Big Brother Koyomi alone would have been useless. I’d have fretted miserably and that would have been it. Looking back on it, Sengoku hadn’t just frozen in place─her shoulders slumping as if the world were coming to an end, she’d gone completely blank. Drawing her back out would have been nigh impossible with my meager skills.
“My dear senior,” Kanbaru whispered as we looked at the same wall. She seemed to be hushing her voice so that Sengoku wouldn’t hear, and I replied likewise.
“What is it?”
“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you may have already noticed─but that girl, Sengoku, seems to be quite emotionally unstable. I’ve seen a lot of girls like her, both older and younger than me. She’s a serious case. The slightest shock could drive her to self-harm.”
“Self-harm…”
Those chisels.
I’d forgotten─to take them from her.
They were inside the bag around her waist.
Everything from a triangular blade to a cutting blade, a full set of five.
It didn’t sound exaggerated.
In fact.
If Kanbaru hadn’t intervened exactly when she did after I yelled Sengoku’s name─that totally could have been.
Even I could tell.
“You’re a kind person,” Kanbaru murmured, “so it might be hard for you to act merry when someone’s feeling down, but synching with her depressed state would only make things worse here. I wouldn’t say it’s like Maxwell’s demon, but I need to lift Sengoku’s spirit right now.”
“…Huh.”
So was that the reason for the earlier talk about dirty books? You know, it seemed I had underestimated Kanbaru. I’d wondered if she was just obtuse when she’d said that, but my judgment had been too superficial. Suruga Kanbaru gave more thought to her actions than I knew.
“Okay, then,” I said. “If that’s how it is, go wild. I’ll follow along.”
“Yes. I might get carried away and assault you, but I’d like your generosity to extend to that possibility, too.”
“I can’t be ‘generous’ about that! How exactly were you planning to liven things up?” I managed to pull off the impressive feat of yelling in a whisper. “Ack, now I’m starting to feel bummed out, too… The slightest shock could drive me to self-harm.”
“There’s no need for despair. You know what they say. Though it may be winter, the ice age isn’t far behind, and night is always followed by a century of darkness.”
“No one says that! What would those sayings even mean?!”
“What a seemingly positive but horribly pessimistic message!”
“There is no rain that doesn’t turn to a flood.”
“Yes, there is! It rains without turning into a flood all the time!”
“Heheheh. See? Now you sound positive again.”
“Agh! You tricked me!”
I suddenly heard a stifled laugh from behind me.
It was Sengoku.
It seemed she just barely heard us.
If that was Kanbaru’s plan all along─
She really was something.
“It’s okay now. Please turn back around,” Sengoku said.
When I did, I saw Nadeko Sengoku fully in the nude─standing straight on the bed as she looked down in embarrassment.
No─she wasn’t completely nude.
She had taken her hat off, naturally, and even her socks, but was still wearing volleyball shorts. Other than that─there wasn’t a thread left on her body. Though she did use the palms of her hands to hide her modest breasts.
“…Wait, volleyball shorts?”
Huh?
Just as I’d guessed, Sengoku attended the same middle school that I graduated from, but hadn’t they retired volleyball shorts and introduced baggier athletic shorts by the time I started there?
“Ah well,” Kanbaru said, “I just ‘happened’ to be carrying those around and lent them to her.”
“I see. You just ‘happened’ to be carrying around volleyball shorts.”
“They’re a simple and tasteful part of a young lady’s life.”
“No, that’d be a sick and twisted plot on a young lady’s life.”
“What did you think was coming to pass? What exactly did you think I wanted when I summoned you today? You’re making me doubt my own credibility. And where did you even get a pair of those things, anyway? If this were an old-timey manga, that’s the kind of item that would prompt lines like, ‘Impossible! That tribe was supposed to have been wiped out long ago!’”
“Yup. While I may not look like it, I have excellent foresight. I saw that the culture would some day be wiped out and decided to conserve a hundred and fifty pairs of them beforehand.”
“Isn’t that over-hunting, rather than conserving?”
Hadn’t she made them go extinct, to be honest?
“………”
A high school boy and a high school girl having a lively and jovial discussion about volleyball shorts while a nearly naked middle school girl stood there on a bed. An outside viewer might see it as a fairly serious case of bullying.
Sengoku’s bangs, hidden earlier by her hat, were longer than I expected, covering her eyes. Or maybe she was doing it on purpose out of embarrassment. The cuticles of her lustrous black hair shone. It seemed she’d hidden her clothes under my comforter after taking them off. The fact that she was wearing those shorts as per Kanbaru’s ministrations and that she’d taken even her bra off suggested that displaying her underwear was more embarrassing than baring her skin for this old female acquaintance of mine. She undoubtedly looked more provocative than she intended, there in nothing but volleyball shorts, but I didn’t understand middle school girls’ sensibilities…
Unfortunately─I guess you might say?
Sex appeal had nothing to do with this situation.
“What is…that?”
It had taken me a while, but the surprised words found their way out of my mouth─when I saw Nadeko Sengoku’s skin.
Her skin─was covered in traces of scales.
From the toes of her two feet up to her collarbones.
Clear traces of scales─on every inch of her body.
For a moment I wondered if scales had grown directly on her body, but I looked closer to realize that wasn’t the case. The scales were imprinted onto her body, like with a woodblock print─pressed onto her skin as it were.
“Reminds me of rope bondage marks,” Kanbaru said.
Indeed, there did seem to be signs of internal bleeding here and there on her body, and the painful-looking markings made it look like she had been tied up─asking Kanbaru why she had such intimate knowledge of rope bondage marks would only complicate things, so I decided to let it slide for the time being.
No─maybe not rope bondage marks as much as…
Something going from her toes up through her legs all the way to her torso─
It was as if something was gripped around her.
Traces of scales, on every inch of her body.
Gripped around her.
Gripping─possessing her.
The only parts of her body without those marks were her arms, as well as her head from the neck up. There was no need to go the extra step of having her show us her hips and lower abdomen, now hidden by those volleyball shorts.
Scales.
So if they were scales─fish?
A snake.
Snake…serpent.
“Big Brother?” Sengoku said.
Her voice still vanishingly small.
Her voice shaking.
“You’re a grownup already…so you aren’t having any dirty thoughts seeing me naked, are you?”
“Huh? O-Oh. No way. Right, Kanbaru?”
“Yes? Umm…I…guess?”
“Hey, play along! Where’d all that loyalty of yours go?!”
“Sengoku, it might do you good going forward to know that some people think dirty thoughts when they see little girls nude precisely because they’re adults.”
“You’ve betrayed me! And we’d gotten along so well until now!”
“I don’t know, though. I think in this case, it only makes you more suspect as a man if you show no interest whatsoever in seeing her naked, or maybe, it’s just rude to her?”
Thinking about it, I had to admit she was right.
While the situation was anything but sexual, and while there were snake scales imprinted along her entire body, it still felt impolite to see a girl naked and not feel a thing. I seemed to recall Senjogahara saying that providing some feedback was just good manners.
I spoke to her in the most serious voice I could manage.
“Let me correct myself. I do have a few little dirty thoughts seeing you nude, Sengoku.”
“……urr.” Sengoku’s shoulders began to shake, as though she were trying to stifle her anguish. “Uh, urrr…uurk.”
Tears began to stream from her eyes─and she began to cry.
“Hey, Kanbaru! I’ve made a middle school girl cry because I took your advice! A middle school girl! Do you understand? It’s all over for me! How are you going to make this right?!”
“No one could have guessed that you’d put it so directly…”
Kanbaru was looking at me, appalled.
It didn’t seem like she’d been trying to trick me.
“I,” Sengoku said, crouching down on my bed─her head bowed, mumbling so quietly it was barely audible─
The words were certain.
“I─hate having this body.”
“…Sengoku.”
“I hate it… Save me, Big Brother Koyomi,” she said─in a tearful voice.
005
And then─
An hour later.
I was visiting a derelict building inhabited by Oshino and Shinobu that once housed a cram school with only a day separating me from my last visit on Saturday.
“You’re late. I’ve been waiting,” Oshino greeted me in his arrogant, all-knowing tone.
Mèmè Oshino.
An expert on the subject of aberrations.
A specialist, an authority.
The man who lifted me from the veil of darkness I found myself under during spring break after being attacked by a vampire and getting turned into one myself in this day and age─my savior.
A Hawaiian-shirted dude, age unknown.
An awful role model with no fixed address who went from journey to journey.
Tsubasa Hanekawa, when she was charmed by a cat.
Mayoi Hachikuji, when she got lost with a snail.
Suruga Kanbaru, when she wished to a monkey.
All of them─received help from Oshino.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully repay the favor─but to be frank, if he weren’t my savior, I wouldn’t want to get to know his type very well. By no means.
He had an awful personality. He was no font of good will. He was like an avatar of caprice. While I’d known him for some time since spring break, I still couldn’t understand large swaths of his personality.
He sat cross-legged on top of a makeshift bed he had fashioned by tying together, with plastic rope, a number of desks that kids must have once used to study away. After I’d explained all of the above, Oshino said in a tormented voice almost as if he detested the name─
“A Jagirinawa.”
“A Jagirinawa, huh… Never heard of that one.”
“It’s pretty famous. I think it’s a form of serpent shamanism.”
“Serpent shaman? Not serpent-bearer?”
“Serpent-bearers are from Greek mythology. Serpent shamanism is domestic. You know, like serpent-god mediums… I guess there isn’t much point in talking to you about that. Still, a Jagirinawa… Hmm. So would that make this girl…your junior?”
“It doesn’t really feel like it because of how much younger she is. So─she’s my little sister’s friend.”
“A-ha. So she’s like a little sister to you.”
“Don’t go around assigning my acquaintances to whatever position.”
“She does call you her big brother.”
“………”
I’d told him too much.
What an honest chump.
It was like I couldn’t tell a lie…
No, I was just bad at hiding things.
“And that ‘big brother’ of days gone by,” Oshino added, “is now ‘li’l Ragiko’… Time really does fly like an arrow.”
“I don’t get called that! That was just a joke Kanbaru made!”
“I think it suits you well, though.”
“Forget about it!”
“You know, I’ve been calling those girls ‘li’l missy’ tsundere and ‘li’l missy’ class president all this time, while you are simply Araragi, and I was beginning to feel prejudiced. From now on, I’ll be more impartial and call you li’l Ragiko.”
“Please, don’t! I’m begging you!”
“It does feel like it could stick.”
After we went back and forth like that for a bit, Oshino got back on track.
“At any rate. You managed to finish your job on time regardless. Good work, Araragi.”
“Oh… Yeah, I guess.” I’d never expected to be thanked by Oshino. I was so taken aback that my reaction must have seemed a little odd.
“I have to say, I couldn’t ever have done it myself. Give my thanks to that missy, too. Er, uh─”
Oshino started to think.
He must have meant Kanbaru, but… Ah, he wasn’t sure what to call her. That made me realize he hadn’t settled on a tag for her yet. Hanekawa was li’l missy class president, Senjogahara was li’l missy tsundere, and Hachikuji was li’l lost girl… So Kanbaru would be, say, li’l miss sporty?
“That li’l miss pervy.”
“……”
It seemed that Oshino saw Kanbaru more as a pervy character than as an athlete.
Not that I didn’t see where he was coming from.
I thought he’d hit the mark, myself.
“Couldn’t you at least draw the line at something like ‘li’l miss sapphy’? She is, despite it all, a girl…”
“Huh? You think so? Okay, I’d be fine with that. Anyway─both you and her are now even with me. Let her know that.”
“Even? So─we don’t owe you anything?”
“Right.”
“There’s something I wanted to ask you just to be sure, Oshino─may I?”
“What is it?”
“It seemed like the moment we entered those shrine grounds, Kanbaru suddenly started feeling sick… Is that relevant?”
I’d had Kanbaru wait at home because I wanted to ask Oshino the question when she wasn’t around.
Hmm, Oshino said with a sidelong glance.
“Araragi─what about you?”
“Huh?”
“How did you feel? Did you get sick or anything?”
“No─I was fine.”
“I see. Well, you’d given little Shinobu your blood the day before─so I guess it makes sense. It means you were lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Remember what I just told you? It isn’t something I could have ever done. That shrine used to be the center of this town.”
“The center? Really? If anything, I’d say it’s placed─”
“Not in terms of location. Well, it stopped being used long ago. There shouldn’t be anything to the place nowadays, seeing how everyone has forgotten about it, but─Shinobu.”
“Shinobu? What about her?”
“You know how she wandered into this town─she’s a legendary vampire from a noble bloodline. A vampire, the king of aberrations. I guess you could say her influence activated the spot. Bad things─were starting to gather there.”
“There? You mean─at that shrine?”
That shrine─even the gods seemed not to visit.
Bad things.
“Yep. You could say it had become like an air pocket, or maybe a kind of hangout─places like that exist, centers. Part of why I stayed here even after Shinobu’s case ended was to find that hangout─though my main goal, of course, was to collect aberrations. Ha hah. I got to meet missy class president and missy tsundere thanks to it, so I will say I had my fun.”
“Various things. It’s not something I can put concisely…or rather, these things don’t have names yet. You couldn’t even call them aberrations at this point.”
A haunt frequented by the bizarre.
That─is what it had become.
What gathered there─weren’t humans.
The literally bizarre had.
“And Kanbaru started feeling sick─because of that?” I asked.
“That’s right. Li’l miss sapphy’s left arm is still a monkey’s─so it’s easier for her to be affected by bad things. It’s the same for you, but as aberrations, there’s an overwhelming difference in rank between her monkey and Shinobu. It means that while she’s lost her resistance against those kinds of phenomena, you’ve actually built up a decent resistance to bad things.”
“Don’t glare at me. You’re always so spirited, Araragi, something good happen to you? It’s not like li’l miss sapphy suffered anything in particular. And─she owed me. She wouldn’t be paying me back unless she went through a few struggles. Her, especially. Don’t you agree?”
“……”
He─may have been right.
It was just that I couldn’t see it in such a strict light. Maybe that suffering was something Kanbaru needed to experience. At least, I couldn’t see her complaining to Oshino even if she found out. That was the kind of person she was.
“Well, the rest is up to her now,” Oshino said. “The fate of that left arm is her problem. If she can make it to twenty without incident─she’ll be freed from her aberration.”
“Hm. You’re a good person, Araragi. As usual…”
“What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds like you’re trying to imply something.”
“Not really. I was just wondering if you weren’t a little jealous. Of her going back from fellow non-human to human again.”
“…Not really. I’ve already made peace with myself when it comes to my body. It’s all sorted and settled, so─stop trying to stir up trouble by saying those kinds of things. Don’t say anything unnecessary to Kanbaru, either. I don’t want her to feel like she owes me anything.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. You stuck the talisman on the door of the main hall, right? That’s a little bit of a lazy job, but it’s fine. It should scatter those bad things to some degree.”
“To some degree?”
“A talisman placed by an amateur isn’t going to change things that dramatically. In fact, it’d be an issue if they did. We only need to nudge the natural flow of things─or else who knows what could happen elsewhere. In that sense, the choice to do a half-assed job by placing it on the door might not have been a bad choice at all.”
“…Why couldn’t you do it? Whether it’s aberrations or whatever bad things that precede them─that’s your field of expertise, isn’t it? Or is this a case of you forcing yourself to come up with a job so that Kanbaru could pay off her debt to you?”
“I won’t say that wasn’t a factor, but it really would’ve been hard for me. Just look at me, I’m as thin and wimpy as I seem. I don’t have the stamina to climb up a mountain.”
“Ha hah. Was I being transparent? Well, yes, that was a joke. Physical stamina isn’t the issue─it’s more of a mental thing. Just like what happened to you and li’l miss sapphy because you’re aberrations─I stimulate those bad things needlessly because I’m an expert. I’d have no choice but to do something if they decided to attack me, and in that case, I’d end up turning that hangout into a perfect vacuum. There’s no telling what might stream into it next─worst case, we’d have another Shinobu.”
“I don’t really get it…but is it like how humans shouldn’t affect the balance of the natural world just to make things more convenient for us? Sending someone like me or Kanbaru instead of the too-powerful Oshino going there helped to keep them calm?”
The truth must have been a bit more complicated─or maybe it was something else entirely─but there didn’t seem to be any point in delving into the matter.
Kanbaru and Oshino were even now.
Just as long as that much was clear.
“Not just her, you know,” Oshino said breezily. “Your debts with me are all settled now, too.”
“…Huh?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. Those didn’t seem like words he would ever speak. “I owed you…five million yen.”
“In cash terms, yes. That was how much your job this time was worth, though. You essentially managed to prevent the Great Yokai War from taking place.”
“I-It was that big of a deal?”
I wished he would’ve told me earlier.
But when I thought about it, the job was big enough to instantly cancel out Kanbaru’s bill despite her headache of a case─so I should have expected him to deduct a suitably sizable chunk of my debts, too. Not taking yourself into account sounded beautiful, but in reality it just made you feel like an idiot…
“We’re all settled,” Oshino assured, “but I almost feel like I owe you a little bit of change. Whatever. Let’s talk about that girl─the missy who’s like your little sister. You’re making this sound like a pretty urgent matter, after all.”
“Am I?”
“It’s only her arms and neck and head that’s unaffected, right? Ouch. Once the Jagirinawa comes up to her face, that’s it. Araragi. The Jagirinawa is an aberration that kills people. I need you to understand that. This case─is a rather serious one.”
“………”
I’d thought─that might be so. Those scale marks had a sinister air. But it felt so much more grave coming from an expert’s mouth.
It wasn’t a deathly aberration.
It was a─killing aberration.
“Snake venom can kill humans─they say. Neurotoxins, hemotoxins, cardiotoxins, the whole gamut. If you don’t go at it with a serum, you can get pulled into it. Snakes─are tricky, you see.”
“Oshino… Exactly what kind of aberration is the Jagirinawa?”
“Before I let you know, tell me the title of the book missy was reading in the bookstore aisle. You said to miss sapphy that you’d tell her later, but you never did, did you? What book was it? Looking at it made you feel certain that there was something about that girl.”
“Oh… Well, it’s exactly what you’d expect. A twelve-thousand-yen hardcover called A Complete Collection of Snake Curses.”
“…The title makes it sound like a recent book. Not from before the war or the Edo period.”
“Yeah. The cover looked brand-new, too.”
But that title─was more than enough to make me think of the dead snakes, chopped into five, that I’d seen the day before. Of course, as soon as I witnessed the carcasses on Sunday, I vaguely suspected Sengoku, whom we’d just passed on the stairs…but it was when I saw the book’s title that my suspicion turned into certainty.
Long sleeves, long pants.
But her long pants─may not have been for entering the mountains, and more a way to hide the scale marks imprinted on her legs.
In fact, that had to be it.
This body.
Kanbaru must have understood the way Sengoku felt. The bandage wrapped around her left arm was there to hide her monkey’s arm. When I thought about it, that was on a different level from me growing out my hair in the back to hide my bite marks. And come to think of it, when Kanbaru wanted to show me what lay under the bandages, she’d invited me to her house─not wanting anyone else to see.
In that sense, those two faced similar circumstances.
Those two.
What could they be─talking about right now?
……
Miss sapphy, you better not be seducing her.
I’m trusting you… I’m trusting you, all right?
“My limited knowledge doesn’t cover what kind of book that is,” Oshino admitted, “but it must include information on the Jagirinawa. Serpent shamanism is basically synonymous with snake curses, after all…”
“So are serpent shamans like witch doctors or something?”
“Well, yes. These aren’t naturally occurring aberrations─they’re commanded by someone’s clear, or explicit, malice… Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be malice, but siccing the Jagirinawa on someone sounds like nothing else.”
“Oh…I heard that, too.”
“Hm? You did?”
“Well, yeah.”
Sengoku didn’t give me a name.
It was partly my fault because I didn’t feel like grilling an introvert like her─but Sengoku stubbornly refused to give up a name.
The culprit’s name.
But─she did tell me it was someone in her class.
A friend─from her class.
What with a curse placed on her, I thought “former friend” was more like it.
I told Oshino, “It’s a middle schooler’s idea of a charm─some sort of fad, apparently. These charms go a little deep into the occult… Most are complete whiffs, of course, but I guess you could say Sengoku is the unlucky exception.”
“Unlucky, huh?” Oshino echoed suggestively. “Charms and curses. I suppose the two are similar. But Araragi, from what you’re saying, the perpetrator is a rank amateur, a middle schooler… The Jagirinawa isn’t supposed to be the kind of aberration that a beginner can handle.”
“Like a broken clock getting the time right, couldn’t it have been a fluke?”
“Could it? Hmm. Why did this classmate want to curse missy to begin with?”
“According to the bits and pieces I gathered from her, it was actually over love. Someone being head over heels. This friend had a boy she liked, and that boy told Sengoku he loved her, but not knowing any of that, Sengoku turned him down─earning her resentment.”
“Hm. How typical.”
“Well, this is a middle-school romance we’re talking about.” Not that the views of someone who’d never dated a girl until his last year of high school counted for much.
“If she started dating him without knowing, that’s one thing,” commented Oshino, “but you’d think turning him down wouldn’t have mattered.”
“It’s about feelings, I guess. Maybe when Sengoku turned him down, the other girl resented something precious to her getting dissed?” I made it sound like my interpretation, but it was Kanbaru’s take. How could I hope to understand the mentality of a middle school girl? If Kanbaru thought so, I could only suppose that she was right.
“Huh. Well, who cares about the reason. People don’t need reasons to hate each other. So things soured─and ended with a curse. Ah, how fleeting friendship is. That’s why I don’t make friends.”
“…Is that so.” I wanted to retort to that, but if I tried to quip at everything Oshino said, our conversation would last through the night, and then some… I needed to control myself. I couldn’t leave those two waiting forever. “Sengoku said she was reading A Complete Collection of Snake Curses because she wanted to figure out how to get rid of hers. Today wasn’t the first time she read that book, either. She’d been going back to it over and over for a while now, almost every day, reading, then reading some more, and consulting it─to try every curse removal, ritual purification, exorcism, and the like by herself.”
That’s what those were.
The sliced snakes.
It wasn’t like a ritual─a ritual was precisely what it was. Using a chisel struck me as grotesque at first, but it seemed that those were the only bladed objects Sengoku owned. Maybe the most readily accessible edged tools for a middle school girl was in fact her chisel set.
“Removing a snake curse by killing snakes─the idea smells fishy to me,” I continued. “And actually, she said her condition started to get worse when she started killing snakes like that─”
“No, Araragi. Repelling a Jagirinawa by cutting up snakes isn’t wrong. Actually, it’s the right and proper thing to do. The method was probably listed in the Jagirinawa section of the so-called Complete Collection… But she’s quite the brave young lady, isn’t she? Catching snakes on her own and killing them. It’s wonderful. You keep describing her as docile and quiet, but I find that hard to believe.”
“Well, this is the countryside at the end of the day. You can’t let yourself be surprised by a girl who picks up snakes with her bare hands.”
“That’s hard for me to accept, as a city boy.”
Well.
You could say Sengoku had been pushed to that point by the curse─by the Jagirinawa.
She’d cried.
There was nothing brave about her.
If anything, she was delicate. Too delicate.
“It’s not that killing snakes will remove a snake curse, Araragi─what’s important here is the cutting up of snakes. Here, the snakes are a metaphor for rope. Jagirinawa─nawa, rope. No matter how tightly you’re bound, cut the rope and you’ll be free.”
“Bound…”
Rope bondage marks.
She was being bound─by a snake.
A rope, huh?
Oshino went on. “There’s a saying that once you’re bitten by a snake, you’ll jump at the sight of a rope, and in this case, snake equals rope. What makes a rope a rope is that it can be cut.”
“…That doesn’t seem to make sense, though. Sengoku said she’s already killed more than ten snakes at that shrine. But far from going away…”
The curse was─only getting worse.
The more snakes she killed, the faster the scales climbed up rolling from her toes─that’s what she told me. It was proof that the curse was progressing.
“Well, like I always say,” reminded Oshino, “when it comes to these things─the process matters. This missy who’s like your little sister is a complete, rank amateur─right? In general, it’s harder to remove a curse than to place one, so of course her condition is going to get worse if she goes by her half-knowledge. If you kill snakes while a snake is possessing you, of course you’re going to make it mad. You’re right in that regard, Araragi.”
“……”
“But this conversation is helping me see why a curse placed by another complete amateur of a middle school girl has been so successful. My initial assumption was that hell has no fury like a woman scorned, but I guess I missed the mark. It’s bad luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“Missy probably learned that a curse had been placed on her before it ever began to work. Judging by the fact that she knows exactly who it was, she must have heard it straight from the girl. ‘Damn you, I placed a curse on you!’ or something. Missy panicked, went to the bookstore to find out how to get rid of it, and climbed up a mountain that’s known for having a lot of snakes─so she could cut ’em up. I guess she found the shrine by accident? Well, maybe she knew about it in advance. Then, she got busy killing those snakes.”
“The spot. Remember what I said? An air pocket, a hangout─”
“Oh.”
A place where bad things─gathered.
Those bad things that Shinobu’s presence had activated.
“And that─strengthened the curse?” I asked.
“Not strengthened, most likely it wouldn’t have triggered at all if not for that spot. Unlike you and miss sapphy, her body must be a regular human one─so while she probably didn’t feel unwell, the bad things affected her in the form of the Jagirinawa.”
She had no way to fight back─no resistance.
A rank amateur.
“So it’s like she deepened her own wounds,” I said.
“It’s like she wounded herself. Although it’s a cruel way to put it, nothing would have happened if only she’d done nothing. Actually, the description in this Complete Collection of Snake Curses might be half-assed to begin with. I try to refrain from speaking ill of books I haven’t read, but it’s a strong possibility. On top of it all, you have an amateur edition curse-removal ritual in a spot like that. Those bad things must have worked in a bad direction.”
“What a quagmire.”
“A quagmire, indeed.”
Your bad luck─could get that bad?
“I suppose the silver lining for her was being reunited with you right as matters were coming to a head─you do plan on doing something for the girl, right?”
“…Am I wrong to?”
“No, not necessarily. Neither seek nor shun the fight, after all. But it is a little tough for me to understand. I get taking pity on her, but why go so far? Because she’s your little sister’s old friend? Or because her last name reminds you of your girlfriend’s?”
“Huh? Oh, because Sengoku is a ‘thousand koku’ as in how they used to value territories, and Senjogahara means ‘battlefield’? Actually, I’d never considered that one. I only realized for the first time now. Well, no─I mean, she’s in such distress. Isn’t it normal to─want to do something?”
“What a good person,” Oshino said.
He gave it such an unpleasant ring.
“There’s a book called the Compilation of Snake Curses that was put together in mid-Edo─it’s an odd tome containing nothing but snake-related aberrations. That’s where the Jagirinawa first appears in print. With an illustration, to boot.”
“An illustration? What does it look like?”
“It depicts a man who’s being constricted by a giant snake. The tail’s design resembles a straw rope, while the snake’s head is─in the man’s mouth. His jaw is open as far as it can go, almost as if he’s a snake─that’s the picture. Snakes can swallow animals as big as chickens whole, after all.”
“Constricted─”
“Gripped. Possessed.”
“……”
“In other words, Araragi. Missy’s body is─in the grips of such a giant snake as we speak. A snake is gripping and possessing and constricting her. Tightly─and mercilessly.”
“But…she said it doesn’t hurt.”
“That’s a lie, of course it does. She’s trying to endure the pain. Don’t I keep on telling you that trust is key? You’re dealing with a quiet kid, you need to try to read what’s in her heart─looking into her eyes.”
“Looking─into her eyes.”
That reminded me, when Sengoku said it didn’t hurt, Kanbaru seemed to want to say something… So that’s what it was? She said things that needed to be said─but kept her mouth shut if she only wanted to say it. That certainly would have been very Kanbaru.
“Wrapping around a prey’s body and pulverizing its bones to make it easier to eat before swallowing it is typical snake behavior. It’s not easy to get a snake to release you once it has you in its grip.”
Those marks were only on her skin, and she seemed to be able to take off and put on clothes freely, volleyball shorts aside. That had kept me from thinking that an aberration might have Sengoku’s body in its grip, but what did I know─I just couldn’t see it.
“A rope─right?” I asked Oshino. “And bound? So those scale marks across her body aren’t traces─at this very moment, an invisible snake is manifestly gnawing into her.”
This giant snake, the Jagirinawa, was invisible to my eyes, to Kanbaru’s, and of course to Sengoku’s, so we only saw through to the effect that the aberration was having on Sengoku’s skin.
“Even then,” Oshino explained, “I think it’s only because you and miss sapphy are essentially half-human, half-creature that you can see those marks at all. The same goes for missy, who’s in its grip. I’d imagine that anyone other than you three─missy tsundere or missy class president, for example─wouldn’t even see the marks. They might be able to see the internal bleeding, though.”
There was no need for her to hide the marks with long pants.
No reason to be ashamed of her body.
That’s what Oshino said.
But that didn’t seem like the problem to me. Yes, that might be the case, logically speaking─and maybe it was another instance of Sengoku’s bad luck that Kanbaru and I happened to be the ones to see her body─but didn’t it more than qualify as an issue if she saw herself that way?
“Maybe,” Oshino admitted. “Yes, you might be right.”
“That was an awfully quick admission.”
“You can’t be honest and upfront if you aren’t just chilling?”
“Come to think of it, I get that she dresses in long sleeves and long pants when she goes out, but what’s she been doing at school so far? Do the girls at your old middle school not wear skirts as part of their uniforms?”
“Not really, they’re more like dresses. Kind of an all-in-one? Have you seen them on your research forays?”
“Ah, yes. So that’s your alma mater. Those are cute─but wouldn’t they still leave her legs exposed?”
“That’s why Sengoku’s been taking school off since those marks became visible, though she managed while she could still hide them with socks─well, okay, Oshino, what about this? Is there some way to make the body of this Jagirinawa visible? Would you be able to see it?”
“No way, I’m just a human.”
Mr. Expert didn’t seem to mind at all that he couldn’t.
He was practically shirking his duties with that line.
“And not just me,” he said. “In this kind of case, it’s basically hard for others to see what the possessed can’t see themselves. No matter how much of a former vampire you may be. As a side note, it isn’t the person in the Jagirinawa’s grip but the one who cast the snake who can see it─and this is an accidental case, so I doubt even she could. This friend probably hasn’t even realized that the curse took. Otherwise, it’d be a huge deal in their class… Well, no, maybe that friend is just keeping quiet about it. That really would be full-blown malice…but I don’t think that’s what it is. Missy would be long dead if it were. But there’s no point in going over all these possibilities. Talk about guesswork. Oh, but one thing─while you may not be able to see it, Araragi, you just might be able to touch it.”
“Hm…like you did once?”
“Uhhh, what’re you talking about?” Pretty pointlessly in my view, Oshino was playing dumb. “If you can touch it, you should be able to peel it off…but you might not want to. Snakes are savage animals. Do that and I’m sure the Jagirinawa will attack you. And even if you somehow escape it, it’ll seek out the classmate who cast the curse next.”
“The curse turning on the caster.”
“You know what they say─when one is cursed, two holes are dug. This girl must not have meant to kill missy and probably doesn’t believe in curses to begin with. I think she honestly intended to just go, ‘Damn you, I placed a curse on you!’ out of spite. Hmm. I don’t like that she decided to get the occult involved over something so petty, though… How’s an outsider like me supposed to make a living? This business is bad for me.”
“I can’t tell if you misspoke there or not.”
“Ha hah. Well, I guess it’s fine.”
With those words, Oshino got off his makeshift bed. He then plodded away and tried to exit the room, so I hastily called out to his back.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“Eh. Wait here a second.”
That was all he said before leaving the classroom for real.
He was a fickle person. Actually, he was just being selfish.
Now what… If I had time, I wanted to check up on Shinobu, but if I missed Oshino in the process, that’d be stupid… Which classroom was Shinobu in, anyway? It was rare for her and Oshino to be in different ones. Had she gotten into another fight with Oshino over some Mister Donuts?
Fine, I would just file a status report.
I pulled out my cell phone and tried calling Kanbaru─Sengoku, by the way, still didn’t have one, in typical fashion for a rural middle schooler. Then again, even if my parents found them, this was Kanbaru so she’d do just fine … As long as they didn’t discover that she was a pretty serious pervert and a real-deal sapphist, Kanbaru was an exemplary young woman who excelled at academics as well as athletics.
But the moment I tried to open my contacts list─
“Thanks for waiting.”
Oshino returned.
That was quick.
He really acted like he saw through everything.
“Hm? What’s that modern convenience you have there? Were you about to call someone?”
“Well…I was just thinking of contacting Kanbaru and Sengoku in advance. It seems like this will take more time than I thought.”
“No need to call in that case. I’m already done talking here. Take this.”
From his position at the entryway, Oshino tossed straight at me whatever he was holding in his right hand. The sudden projectile threw me off balance, but I was somehow able to catch the item without dropping it.
It was a traditional amulet.
It was shaped like a standard amulet─but the pouch said nothing.
There were no words indicating if it was for, say, traffic safety or fertility.
“What’s─this?”
“You can purify it with that. The Jagirinawa.”
“……”
“There’s a talisman inside of it. What you might call a protective charm. It’s different from the one I had you place…and the pouch it’s in is nothing, just a sheath. The talisman is a bit of a powerful one, so safety measures are required. Safety measures, or maybe a limiter. Don’t get it wrong, though, it’s not as if all you’re going to have to do is place that talisman on her forehead like she’s a jiangshi or something. In fact, don’t ever take that talisman out of its pouch. Like I said, it’s a safety measure, a limiter. There’s no telling what might happen. I’m going to tell you the correct method for this, so do your best to remember for later. I could go out there myself, but it’s probably better if I don’t─as far as building a relationship of trust with the young lady, you and li’l miss sapphy are already set. That claim of being able to seduce younger girls within ten seconds doesn’t sound like false advertising, either. I’m so impressed. I’m so jealous. Ha hah, and while you seem to have forgotten, it seems missy’s memories of you are rather nice ones, no? She wouldn’t be able to strip on a moment’s notice in a man’s room otherwise, Big Brother Koyomi.”
“……”
I didn’t know about that, to be honest.
When it came to people who never stopped talking like Senjogahara, Kanbaru, Hanekawa, or Hachikuji, I could make some sort of guess about how they felt─whether those words were frank ones or not─but it was hard to deal with someone who spoke so little. Someone with a shy personality. Who buckled under pressure and cast her eyes downward at the smallest provocation─
When I thought about the situation, it was surprising that this very same girl had flatly turned down a boy. Someone with her personality seemed like the type who couldn’t say no and got dragged into being someone’s girlfriend… But, once again, I had no right whatsoever to be talking about these affairs of the heart.
“I think it’s like how you wouldn’t be embarrassed to strip naked in front of a doctor,” Oshino said. “That’s what a relationship of trust is. Oh, wasn’t Asclepius from the constellation Ophiuchus a patron saint of medicine? Another hint, perhaps.”
“But, Oshino…is it really okay?”
“Is what okay?”
“For you to be so…quick and simple with a way to purify her. You normally act more pompous, you know? You go into these tiny little details, or you’re never really cooperative. I feel like you went easy on your usual mountain of trivia too. Don’t tell me you’re not being serious about this now that I don’t owe you anything.”
“Oh, Araragi. You just love nagging me, don’t you? You and I know full well that you’ll complain if I do pile on the trivia. I’m starting to think that the real tsundere here is you, not li’l missy tsundere. How so spirited, something good happen to you? I didn’t use to say all that to be mean or anything. It was the same for missy class president, missy tsundere, li’l lost girl, miss sapphy, and especially you, Araragi. Each of you stuck your own neck into an aberration, didn’t you?”
“Well, that’s…”
“If I may,” Oshino continued, “all of you were perpetrators. Whether or not you meant to be, you were complicit with your aberrations. For people who’ve gotten their hands dirty to wash their feet, a certain process becomes necessary. But it’s different in this case, isn’t it? Nadeko Sengoku is clearly nothing more than a poor victim. She’s done nothing wrong. Even the reason the Jagirinawa was set upon her is weak. For every aberration, there is a reason─but none of that reason here is missy’s doing. Ten snakes, was it? She may have killed them, but even that was her trying to defend herself. She was unlucky, it wasn’t her day─that’s it. I’m not so unreasonable to hold accountable the victim of someone’s malice. What people like that need is to be saved.”
“………”
Sorry, Oshino, I thought you were acting that way to be mean…
It made sense now… That was why his tone sounded so grave from the moment he first named the Jagirinawa. It didn’t have anything to do with the Jagirinawa itself. That was purely Oshino thinking about the victim, Nadeko Sengoku.
“Crimes need to be atoned for, but you can’t allow someone to be judged for a crime they never committed. People in trouble need to be saved─right? Yes, I may not be the nicest guy, but even I have that much kindness for others left in my heart. Though that isn’t to say I’m doing this entirely as volunteer work─this is my job.”
“Yeah, I figured as much.”
“But it’s fine. This can be the change left over from the work you and miss sapphy did for me. The missy who’s like your little sister doesn’t need to do a thing in return.”
“…I see.”
Yes, there may have been that issue of perpetrator versus victim.
But even then, it felt like he was playing favorites.
Maybe he liked middle schoolers.
“But, Araragi. Let me give you just one warning─when one is cursed, two holes are dug. I know I’m saying it again, but I want you to keep the words close in mind, and I want you to think closely about them.”
“Oh… Well, that won’t be hard, it’s not unheard-of advice. You don’t need to do anything special to learn that. I’ve had plenty of chances to find out what it means that have nothing to do with aberrations.”
“I’m sure that’s true─but, Araragi. I don’t know how you see this, but it’s not as if I’m going to be living here forever,” Oshino said, his tone staying frivolous. “Eventually I’ll be done collecting and researching. After all, you and miss sapphy have solved one of my main concerns, or rather, achieved one of my main goals. I will leave this town some day. And when I do, you’re not going to be able to come to me for advice, you know?”
Our debts─had been settled, too.
Oshino continued.
“It’s been a while since I first started wandering from place to place, but this is the first time I’ve ever spoken this much with any one person. There is the fact that you’ve gotten yourself involved with one aberration after the next─but the thing that’s a little odd about you is that you try to deal with every single one. Once you’ve experienced an aberration, you’re more likely to attract them in the future─that much is true, but most people who encountered an aberration will then go out of their way to avoid them.”
“……”
“That’s how things balance themselves out. This relates to what I said about you being a tsundere, but you say all kinds of things about girls, don’t you? That they’re meddling, or that they’re good at looking after others. But all of those traits apply to you, Araragi─not that it’s a bad thing. I’m so envious of your personality that I keep saying nasty things to you, but I think you’re good the way you are. But─what are you planning to do once I’m gone?”
“Er─well.”
Well─I hadn’t ever thought about that.
It went without saying that Oshino wouldn’t reside in my town for the rest of his life, it was like a given─but the question of what I’d do once he was gone wasn’t one I could answer on the spot.
Did we have to talk about this right now?
Oshino went on. “Aberrations exist as though it’s natural for them to be there─they aren’t something you should go out seeking. Do that and of course you might end up as the perp. I think you worry too much, Araragi. You’re overprotective. You have a tendency to try to do something─even when you could just leave it alone.”
“But…” But still. “Once I find out─what am I supposed to do? I know about these things whether I want to or not─so I can’t look the other way or pretend not to know.”
“Ha hah, so would it have been better if you’d forgotten it all, like missy class president? That just might be the best outcome for people like you, Araragi. Forgetting it all─little Shinobu too.”
Something like that?
Of course it wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t ever going to turn out like it had for Hanekawa.
“That’s right,” Oshino said, “little Shinobu, too─yes, right. You’re going to have to look after her all by yourself once I’m gone. That was the choice you made─though you’re of course free to abandon her, too.”
“Come on─Oshino.”
“You need to always be aware of the fact. Because Shinobu isn’t human. You shouldn’t allow yourself to get weirdly empathetic. She’s a vampire. She can look like that now, but that doesn’t change the fact─okay?”
“……”
“Sorry, was that a mean thing to say? There’s no need to worry, though, we’ve gotten to know each other so well. I’m not going to disappear all of a sudden one day without even saying goodbye. I’m an adult, I do know my manners. But if you’re thinking about what to do after graduating from high school─I think it wouldn’t hurt to think about this while you’re at it.”
“So what you’re trying to say is that it’s irresponsible for me to attempt to save everyone I come across? That it’s irresponsible to be kind to everyone─Hanekawa told me that one, too. But, Oshino, I can’t become someone like you. Like you say, I’m about a tenth vampire─an actual aberration. I can’t get on the human side and go around banishing aberrations.”
If I did, the very first one I needed to banish was myself.
Then Shinobu.
And that─wasn’t happening.
It wasn’t something I could do.
“I wouldn’t say that’s true,” Oshino told me. “This job is all knowledge and know-how anyway. A half-human, half-creature who hunts spirits? Sounds cool, like a manga character.”
“Well…maybe it is possible, since there’s even a Hawaiian-shirted specialist in the field…”
“And,” Oshino reminded me, “if ever in your life you feel like it, Araragi…you can abandon Shinobu and go back to being a full-fledged human─I hope you don’t forget that, either.”
006
We were in the remains of the shrine.
That abandoned shrine atop the mountain.
It was the dead of the night, after we had been busy preparing for so long.
I considered waiting until the next day, but if we waited one more day, those scale marks, the Jagirinawa’s grip, might reach up to her neck (she wouldn’t be able to hide it if that happened since she couldn’t walk around wearing a scarf in this season─even if regular people couldn’t see those markings). The middle of the night or not, we decided to fight for every minute and second and do it as soon as possible. My family took a hands-off approach with me, and the same went without saying for Kanbaru. A slight issue arose regarding Sengoku’s curfew as an active-duty middle schooler, but she asked one of her school friends to come up with an alibi for her (a sleepover or something like that). It seems obvious, but Sengoku apparently had friends other than the one who had cursed her.
Having a lot of friends.
A good thing, I thought.
While I was more than a little worried at first about doing this at the same shrine ruins where everything began, Oshino gave us his stamp of approval, telling us it was fine. I thought he said it because we had already placed the talisman on the main hall, but it was actually a matter of process. Even if we were dealing with bad things, all we had to do was get them on our side─according to him. The Jagirinawa’s existence would be more conspicuous precisely because of the location─it would be easier to come in contact with─or something like that.
But, I guessed, it was an expert’s advice. I’d trust it.
Shinobu was in a room on the third floor so I gave her a casual greeting (She really had gotten in a fight with Oshino over Mister Donuts. He’d eaten all of her favorite flavors yet again. Mèmè Oshino, you’re not even immature, you’re just childish) before leaving the abandoned cram school and heading straight back home. Sure enough, Kanbaru hadn’t laid a finger on Sengoku despite sharing a room with her the whole time, nor had she gone after my little sisters, both of whom were now home.
“Great job holding yourself back, Kanbaru!”
“Yes…and hearing the earnestness in your words of praise, for the first time I’m wondering if I’d joked around too much in your presence, and am regretting it…”
Kanbaru seemed depressed.
She not only hadn’t tried to seduce Sengoku, but they’d been chatting.
“Miss Kanbaru was kind to me, Big Brother,” the introverted Sengoku jumped in to stand up for her. “She let me borrow her volleyball shorts, too.”
“That doesn’t count as kindness,” I played the straight man for Sengoku, a first.
A day for the history books.
In any case, talking to her was hard because our exchanges weren’t punctuated with jokes unlike with the rest of the bunch. Thanks to those bastards, I couldn’t have normal conversations anymore. Sadly for Sengoku, she’d have to go along with our style.
I had her and Kanbaru sneak out of my house while I kept my two little sisters busy, and then I stepped out, too, with nary an excuse. My sisters seemed suspicious (especially my youngest sister, perceptive girl), but I forced them away in the end and proceeded to the rendezvous point to meet up with the girls. We went to a general (and not a convenience) store that was open late to buy the needed tools (neither Kanbaru nor Sengoku had much money on them given how sudden this was, so I paid for it all) before heading to the mountains. We all walked.
“Sengoku.”
“Uh, yes…Big Brother?”
She’d twitched.
Maybe she thought I was going to yell at her.
So delicate, like she was made of glass.
“Those marks on you─I heard they actually hurt. Are you okay?”
“Ah…” All the color drained from her face. “U-Um… Please don’t be mad.”
“No, I’m not trying to blame you for anything.”
She probably thought I was about to scold her for lying. I didn’t know if she was timid, or too quick to see herself as a victim… Every time a character like her appeared in a manga, I’d wonder how irritating someone like that would be in real life, but it actually wasn’t that bad… I simply felt like protecting her, prior to whether or not I was a good person. Of course, the fact that she was quite a bit younger than me helped.
“W-Well.” Sengoku tugged her hat far down her face. As if to hide it. As if she didn’t want to be seen. “It hurts, like something is tightening down on me, but…I can still bear it.”
Pulverizing the bones─to make it easier to eat.
Snake behavior.
“…Having to bear it is wrong to begin with. If something hurts─it’s okay to say so.”
“He’s right,” Kanbaru butted in. “Getting tied up is one thing, but staying tied up takes a surprising toll on your body. Whether it’s a snake or ropes.”
“Kanbaru, why you would gloss over getting tied up, and more subtly, the emotional toll of it, baffles me.”
This woman didn’t regret a thing.
Sengoku stifled a giggle at our back-and-forth.
Despite her timidity, maybe she was quick to laugh. In that case, talking about the thirteen-sign zodiac, which set off even Kanbaru, was absolutely off limits around Sengoku. She might laugh herself to death.
We sprayed each other with a bug repellent from the general store before going up the mountain. It was the middle of the night, which meant we needed to worry about bugs before any aberrations. While we were all fully protected in long sleeves and long pants, it was an additional safety measure for Kanbaru and me and could help Sengoku down along the line.
Once we finished, we got going.
It was pitch black, of course.
As we climbed the stairs, all three of us lit the way ahead with the flashlights we’d bought at the same general store. The wild animals and insects were horribly loud. It wasn’t that way in the afternoon, and I felt like we were explorers on some expedition. I was almost deluded into thinking I was lost in a jungle.
“You know, Sengoku,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering about something. Why did you turn that boy down? You didn’t have any idea your friend had feelings for him, right? So there wasn’t any reason for you to say no.”
“Well…”
She fell silent.
Someone with so little mental fortitude, who went quiet over just that much, rejecting a confession of love was even more perplexing…
“I-I’m sorry,” she apologized. For no reason.
“Um, it’s not something you need to apologize for.”
“Ah, y-yes, you’re right. I-I’m sorry. I’m…well… I’m sorry.”
She’d apologized twice between a single pair of quotation marks.
Three times in total.
“No, Sengoku─”
Kanbaru spoke up. “That was a rather insensitive question. It’s unlike you. Be more considerate.”
“Oh…really?”
“Yes, really. There are plenty of reasons to say no. In fact, why date someone you don’t particularly love?”
“Hmm…”
It was a legitimate point.
I also realized that Kanbaru making one came to me as a surprise.
“We’re not going out!”
“Huh…is that true?” asked Sengoku, puzzled. “You aren’t dating Miss Kanbaru?”
“No!”
“O-Oh… You seemed to get along so well that…I was sure you two were.”
“I’ll admit that we get along.”
About as well as I got along with Hachikuji.
Then again, unlike Hachikuji, at least Kanbaru never maligned me… In that sense, maybe I got along with her a little better.
…As for the girl I was actually dating, she only ever seemed to malign me…
“Kanbaru. Back me up and tell her no.”
“Mm. He’s right, we’re not going out.” She told Sengoku in an explanatory tone, “He and I are just having fun─we’re playing around.”
“That is very open to misinterpretation, isn’t it!”
“Are you just being straight-up pernicious?! I hate you!”
“Hey. That kind of hurt.”
“Ack… Er, sorry. I love you.”
Wasn’t she going to receive anything I said with great joy? What a difficult girl.
Actually, I was the weak one here for apologizing.
Even as Kanbaru and I bickered, Sengoku mumbled, “Oh…so you’re not going out,” sounding relieved for some reason.
“I turned him down because there’s someone else I like,” she told us. Her apparent embarrassment was sweet. “But…that friend seems to have misunderstood me…and now this happened… I-I wonder if it was my fault…”
“Don’t blame yourself. Then again, it wasn’t supposed to end up this bad─it’s because of that shrine.”
Because of that shrine.
“Oh yeah, Kanbaru. You’re probably going to start feeling sick again… A talisman’s effect isn’t immediate, or so I’ve been told.”
“Fine with me. Plus, I can be ready for it if I know it’s coming.”
“I see.”
What a jock.
All it took was guts, huh?
I’d normally refute it as unscientific but found myself believing it because it was Kanbaru. She was, after all, a formidable woman who’d gone from clumsy girl to national-level basketball player thanks to nothing but guts and the effort to go with it.
“Big Brother Koyomi, how much do you remember about before?”
“Uh…well, not much, to be honest. I don’t have a very good memory.”
“Oh…”
Sengoku was visibly disappointed.
“You, on the other hand,” I hastily turned the subject to her, “remembered me. I’m impressed because we’d only played together a few times when you were little. And I was just your friend’s older brother. You normally forget that stuff.”
“I didn’t get to play with people all that much,” Sengoku said haltingly. “Back then, the only friend I had who’d play with me after school was Rara…”
Rara must have meant my youngest sister. Right, the friends she brought over used to call her that. Her grade-school nickname, Rara, excerpted from our family name, Araragi. Now, though, she and my other little sister combined were Tsuganoki Second Middle School’s “Fire Sisters”…
How things change.
Of course people change.
But if we’re going to talk about those days, back then I was annoyed when my little sisters brought over their friends and made me play with them…
That’s how it was at that age.
“Though Rara and I don’t go to the same middle school…all the times I got to play with her, and you, are my precious memories.”
“I see…”
That─made me feel better.
By the way, I hadn’t told Sengoku about the aberrations that Kanbaru and I bore, only giving her a whiff of the fact that we had anything to do with them. I certainly could share that with her, and maybe I needed to in terms of building a relationship of trust, but after talking it over with Kanbaru, I paid heed to the possibility that it might only accelerate a mental breakdown. So Sengoku probably didn’t understand why anyone would feel sick from going to the shrine, and perhaps thought that Kanbaru was spiritually sensitive, or something. Then again, that wasn’t altogether wrong.
“I’m an only child,” Sengoku said. “I was jealous─that she had an older brother.”
“………”
It sounded like a case of wanting what you can’t have.
Like someone without a little sister wanting a little sister.
At times I wished I had an older brother or sister, or a younger brother─and envied people who had them. But maybe it was different for someone like me, who had actual little sisters, and for Sengoku, who was an only child.
So─she was an only child.
“Hey, what about you, Kanbaru? You don’t have any siblings─do you?”
“Nope. I’m an only child, too.”
“I see.”
And so was Senjogahara. And Hachikuji, and Hanekawa.
Huh, so they were all only children.
And─Shinobu?
Did vampires have siblings?
“Okay─we’re here.”
The ruins of a shrine.
A desolate, barren sight.
The talisman was still─stuck to the door.
“Are you feeling okay, Kanbaru?”
“Yes. Better than I thought.”
“Try saying something stupid.”
“I like reading books on the road and making myself carsick.”
“Try saying something funny.”
“Try saying something perverted.”
“Just when I thought the girl I liked was a virgin, it turned out she was vermin.”
“Okay.”
That last one was a little weird, but she seemed fine.
Next to me, Sengoku was hugging herself and shaking. We’d tickled her funny bone.
She really was quick to laugh.
It seemed she was more amused by my interaction with Kanbaru than the actual content, but in fact that was a good audience reaction, so I couldn’t complain.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s get ready now… Let’s get ready already.”
Kanbaru asked me, “Why did you bother to rephrase yourself?”
We found an appropriate spot…which is to say a location that wasn’t too overgrown, then placed four flashlights, the three we held and one more in my bag, in each corner. They formed a square and illuminated the center.
The ground was dirt.
We drew lines in it next using a nearby tree branch and linked the flashlights into an actual square─a so-called spiritual boundary. It was pretty makeshift but would do, according to Oshino, because the simple fact that it was demarcated was what mattered most about these boundaries. We spread a plastic sheet on the ground to cover the square. Another purchase from the general store, naturally.
And then─Sengoku entered the square.
Alone.
In a school swimsuit.
“………”
The swimsuit wasn’t from the general store (they don’t sell them at general stores). Just like those volleyball shorts, Kanbaru had “happened” to have one ready.
I said to her, “You didn’t have the money to buy a flashlight, so what are you doing carrying around volleyball shorts and school swimsuits?”
“There are some things in this world that money can’t buy.”
“I completely agree, but volleyball shorts and school swimsuits aren’t among them.”
“I was trying to play to your tastes.”
“Well, don’t.”
“You’re not denying it’s to your taste?”
I checked to find that Sengoku was indeed chuckling to herself in the boundary… It was for the joke factor that she was wearing a school swimsuit in the middle of a decrepit shrine, but she found it funny too?
At any rate.
To see how the purification was proceeding, we needed to keep track of the scale marks on her skin, and Oshino’s instructions were that she shouldn’t stay in long sleeves and long pants, but we couldn’t have her in nothing but a pair of volleyball shorts outdoors. While showing us the Jagirinawa’s marks in my room, Sengoku had taken her hands off of her chest at one point, causing her to start crying all over again─a mishap that even an honest guy like me didn’t share with Oshino─so this was particularly necessary.
And so, a school swimsuit.
Instead of changing at the shrine, she’d worn it under her long sleeves and long pants like an elementary schoolgirl might. Though we could see the scale markings on her legs, the swimsuit hid her torso, making it difficult to gauge the extent of her affliction─and maybe I was just imagining it, but they seemed to have climbed up to around her neck. Had its grip on her tightened since the evening?
We simply didn’t see it.
But Sengoku’s body─was still in the grip of a giant snake.
I handed her the amulet Oshino had given me.
“Now, sit in the center…on the sheet. Hold the amulet as tight as you can, close your eyes, calm your breathing─and all you need to do is pray.”
“Pray…to what?” asked Sengoku.
“To something. In this case, probably to─”
The snake.
The Jagirinawa.
“Okay…I’ll try my best.”
“Alrighty.”
“Big Brother Koyomi…you’ll watch over me?”
“I will.”
“You have to watch over me.”
“…Yup, I will.”
In any case─it was the only thing I could do.
Honestly, it was all up to Sengoku from here.
No matter─what happened.
People who get saved got saved on their own.
I exited the boundary, and together with Kanbaru, who had just finished lighting a mosquito coil, circled around at a distance to stand in front of Sengoku.
“Okay…”
Sengoku’s eyes were already shut.
Both of her hands─were squeezed tight in front of her chest.
The ritual had already begun.
Not even Oshino knew how long it would take─he’d said to be prepared to stay here all night in the worst case. Kanbaru and I were one thing, but I didn’t know if Sengoku’s psyche could hold out for that long. We’d just have to try. There was no rehearsing this.
The glow of the flashlights.
They gently illuminated her─from four corners.
“Hey,” Kanbaru spoke to me.
Her voice was so small I could have missed it, even though she stood right next to me. It must have been her way of being considerate to Sengoku, who was concentrating inside the boundary, but in that case, wasn’t it best not to talk at all?
“What is it?” I said. “No more banter from here on out.”
We couldn’t afford to have Sengoku laugh during the ritual.
It would all be for naught then.
“Yes, I know… But there’s something I was wondering about, now that we’re here.”
“What?”
“That’s one hell of a way to put it…but yeah. You mean chopping up those snakes.”
“Yes. Wasn’t doing that, only in the proper way, the correct measure, rather than this onerous ceremony?”
“Well, yes…and I said the same thing, but it sounds like that way would take even more time. According to Oshino, that is. Apparently, when it comes to snake-chopping, what’s important is actually the locale.”
“The locale… And since bad things are gathered here…”
“Well, this spot is the absolute worst, but that doesn’t mean anywhere else would do. I didn’t have enough time to ask for details, but he talked about it not being very effective unless you use snakes from Tohoku, or something.”
“Regional differences?”
They had to be spoken about, and all.
Sengoku had chosen this mountain because she’d heard she could find snakes here, but she’d needed to do a better job picking her mountain and her snakes for a ritual─supposedly. Of course, as far as that went, it would have been best if Nadeko Sengoku hadn’t done anything to begin with.
This spot where bad things gathered.
But now, ironically enough─we needed to get those bad things on our side to help cleanse Sengoku of her aberration.
“Got it, makes sense,” Kanbaru said. “Mister Oshino keeps some pretty handy things around, doesn’t he? An amulet you can use to exorcise aberrations?”
“When I bothered him about it, he said it’s not that handy of an item. It’s useless except in cases like this one.”
It only worked because the aberration had been sent by a human.
And only because it was a snake.
“So we’re combating foul play with foul play,” Kanbaru commented.
“He described it as one heterodoxy for another.”
“I guess it’s fine if it saves Sengoku… Still, you really do try to help out every person you come across, don’t you?”
Kind to everyone.
Irresponsibly─kind to everyone.
“I wouldn’t say every person, but I do whenever I can,” I answered. “Especially if it’s someone I know.”
“I think that’s part of what my dear senior loves about you, and I, too, think it’s part of your charm. I─at this point, I’m glad that she’s going out with someone like you. But I do hope─”
“If─the day ever comes when you have to choose just one person, I hope you’ll choose her without a second thought.”
“……”
“You’re free to sacrifice yourself as much as you want, but please take good care of her… Not that I really have any right to be saying this.”
Kanbaru’s left arm.
It once tried to kill me.
Not because anyone shackled it.
“Kanbaru…I do think you have the right to say that. In fact─I think you’re especially qualified.”
“…Good to know.”
“I’m just as glad that you’re Senjogahara’s junior as you’re glad that I’m her boyfriend.”
“Hearing that from you─really helps. Oh…”
There, Kanbaru pointed straight ahead.
And when I looked at her.
The scale markings on the parts of her body that weren’t covered by the school swimsuit─those clear traces etched across every inch of her skin─were gradually fading. Oshino had said to be prepared to spend all night, but not even ten minutes had passed.
So─it was powerful.
It was going well, too.
The scale marks around her collarbones─disappeared.
The Jagirinawa was leaving Sengoku.
“It looks like it’s going forward─without a hitch.”
“Yes,” Kanbaru agreed.
“Neat.”
Given my own presence, which tended to jinx everything, this state of affairs, quite honestly, could qualify as unexpected. Well, thank goodness. Now Sengoku needed to stay focused for another minute─
“Still,” I said, “it’s not like everything will be over once we rid her of the snake.” To avoid sapping Sengoku’s motivation, I hadn’t told her this ahead of time, of course. “At the minimum, her relationship with that old friend is going to be irreparably broken.”
“Well…you might be right.” Kanbaru nodded. “There aren’t too many people who could forgive such a thing. Nope… Not that Sengoku would want to mend the friendship, and the other party might not want to, either.”
“So a breakdown─in their relationship.”
Humans were scarier than aberrations.
No need to give voice to such a cliché, though.
“Romantic entanglements are so damn scary,” I said. “But I wonder who Sengoku has a crush on. I’m a little jealous to know that someone out there is the object of that cute a girl’s affections.”
Were this a rom-com manga, the love interest would turn out to be none other than me, but I highly doubted that was the case here. I was her “big brother” and nothing more.
Brother and sister─
While I said I was jealous, I had a girlfriend, so of course, if Sengoku really did have feelings for me, it would just be a headache… But using this opportunity to revive our ties perhaps wasn’t such a bad thing. It would be sweet, and she was precarious enough that someone needed to watch over her, though I had no idea what my little sisters would say…
“She is a girl, after all. And─she’s fourteen? Heheh,” Kanbaru chuckled. “Myself included, not every girl her age longs for a prince in a white coat to come in and swoop her away.”
“Well yeah, I’m sure…”
Because, for one thing, it would be a prince on a white horse.
Sheesh, white coat… Like a doctor?
Ophiuchus.
“Come on, Kanbaru, didn’t I tell you no idle talk? We’re not done yet, so we can’t risk breaking her concen─”
“Look!” Kanbaru suddenly yelled.
I was the one whose concentration had broken. Carelessly─I’d taken my eyes off of Sengoku. When I returned my gaze back at her─Nadeko Sengoku had collapsed face-up on the plastic sheet we’d laid on the ground─and was twitching freakishly, violently.
Her mouth.
It was open wide.
Her jaw was stretched as far as it would go.
Like a snake─swallowing an egg.
Like there could even be─a snake’s head inside.
“Wh-What happened?!”
“I-I don’t know─she suddenly…”
They were about halfway gone.
But─the other half remained.
They hadn’t disappeared.
And.
They were even on Sengoku’s neck, where they didn’t seem to be only moments ago. The snake─the Jagirinawa had her in its grip.
What happened…what went wrong?
Where had we gone wrong?
The illustration of the Jagirinawa that Oshino had said was in the Compilation of Snake Curses─of a man constricted by a snake that entered into his body through his mouth─not a deathly but a murderous, killing aberration.
A serpent god.
Possession by a serpent god.
“Did it fail?!” shouted Kanbaru. “Is that it?! It failed, and the purification ritual went out of control, ran amok─”
“No─this ritual isn’t supposed to be a risky stunt… It isn’t some powerful feat. That’s why it’s heterodox. It shouldn’t be double-teaming her, there’s no reason it would. Because this is supposed to be like a negotiation with the aberration─”
Ask it.
You need to ask it─Oshino had said.
Humble yourself before it.
And yet… Did Sengoku let herself get distracted, like in Senjogahara’s case? Even then…the aberration suddenly reaching its final stage like this…
It was going so well until we were halfway in, too!
“…Halfway?”
Crap, I realized belatedly.
Sengoku was writhing on the plastic sheet.
Her legs, still yet to fill out, that extended from the school swimsuit─the scale markings were half gone from them as well.
Half gone─in only the crudest way.
The scale marks had completely disappeared from her right leg─but remained on every inch of her left leg, from her toes to her crotch.
Not a single one had disappeared.
I didn’t know about her torso, but it was the same for her neck and collarbones, as clear as day once you noticed─
“Kanbaru…I had it all wrong. If only we could see, we’d have gotten it right away─”
“What do you mean?!”
“………kk!”
Even so─
There were hints we should have picked up on.
The traces covered every inch of her skin aside from her arms and her neck up. Her toes, her shins, her calves─and she had two legs. For one snake to wind itself around every inch of both of her legs was structurally impossible. If there’d been only one snake, there couldn’t have been markings on her inner thighs.
From the tips of each leg’s toes.
A Jagirinawa had its grip on her─one for each leg.
As if they were constricting Sengoku’s body.
Two snakes.
“…Dammit!”
One of them─had been removed with the power of Oshino’s amulet.
The Jagirinawa had gone away.
Gone away here and there.
But then the amulet’s power was spent.
I hadn’t said enough─had I realized that there were two Jagirinawa, Oshino would have come up with an appropriate plan. Unlike every other time, there was no limit to how much he would help. Nadeko Sengoku was a victim, and he was pulling out all the stops. But because we’d premised our discussion on one Jagirinawa, he’d prepared a strategy for just one─
Which is why the other─was running wild. Of course it was─the other giant snake with which it had shared its grip on Sengoku had been exorcised.
“Kanbaru! Stay there─no, get back!”
“Shouldn’t we contact Mister Oshino─”
“He doesn’t have a cell phone!”
Not on principle─but because he failed at modern gizmos.
So─our only choice was a hardline approach.
I rushed into the makeshift boundary─into the square illuminated by the flashlights. I grabbed onto Sengoku’s body and sat her upright─she was hot to the touch. You could say burning. It was so bad I thought my hand might get scalded─
The scale markings at the base of her neck.
They were now digging so far into her skin that calling them traces would be ludicrous. They were eating into her to the point of altering her silhouette─gnawing in as if to pulverize bone and tear flesh.
As if to chop her up.
Eating into her.
I could almost hear her body─groan and creak.
“Sengoku…”
Her eyes had rolled back─she’d lost consciousness.
Swallowed whole─
“Nkk…!”
I laid her body, which I was holding, on the plastic sheet again. Then, I slowly reached my hands toward her.
No, not toward her.
Toward the Jagirinawa.
“Even if I can’t see it─I should be able to touch it.”
He’d said so.
Ever since spring break─vampire blood ran through my veins. Blood. You could say I was an aberration myself─and an aberration should be able to touch another aberration.
If I could touch it, I could peel it off.
Right.
The key was to imagine it. To visualize the Jagirinawa through the traces that its scales etched into Sengoku’s body─and to puzzle out the manner it exercised its grip. I couldn’t afford to be wrong. Dammit… Like the younger of my two little sisters, and unlike the older, I was ever the indoorsy type…so this was my first time touching a snake. The first one ever was going to be an aberration…
Courage, me.
Even Sengoku, who used to play with that youngest sister of mine, caught more than ten snakes on her own─what kind of big brother feared doing as much?
“Agh…hkk!”
Slither─
An unpleasant sensation, in both of my hands.
A sensation like sticking my hands into mucus.
A sensation like spiked scales stabbing into them.
It was plain disgusting.
What made it disgusting was that I was touching something I couldn’t see─I’d never thought that doing so would be as viscerally repulsive. I’d mustered such a strong will to touch it─but now wanted to take my hands off of the aberration as soon as I possibly could.
I tried to use its sliminess to my advantage by sliding my hands around it to get them in the right position. Grabbing its cylindrical body, about the size of what a musclehead’s thigh must be, I then─pulled with all my might.
Plus─it was slippery.
Because I was pulling in the same direction as its scales, I wasn’t putting my strength to much use. I changed my approach and dug my nails into the giant snake’s body (so soft it felt like my fingers sank into it) before pulling again─
To peel it off─!
“G…aaaaaagh!”
I looked at where the pain came from to see blood─spurting everywhere. My arm was flattened as if a machine press had gotten hold of everything from my wrist to my elbow, and two deep, deep holes had been bored into that flattened area.
“─A-Already?!”
The snake’s head had already pulled out of Sengoku’s mouth─my fingers burrowing into its torso had been understood as an attack, and it had exited her body to strike back at me. I didn’t notice until it bit me because I couldn’t see it─
“Oww…wwwww!!”
The overwhelming pain made me leap and roll away confused─meanwhile, Sengoku’s body seemed to flap and flop at random around the plastic sheet in the square, likely as a result of the Jagirinawa undoing its grasp on her body. I could only guess since I couldn’t see it, but it must have been the case, given the situation.
Which meant─that it was coming to grip and possess me next!
Before it could try, I slammed my flattened right arm on the ground. Even greater pain came over me─but a moment before my arm hit the ground, I could sense the buried fangs─the Jagirinawa’s, no doubt─sliding out. Realizing that my plan was to pin its head between my arm and the ground, it had preempted me. As a result, all I managed to do was bang my injured arm against the earth.
It almost felt like my arm had torn off.
A moment later, it was my leg.
My left ankle.
Scrush─a flattening sound.
As with my arm─it seemed this snake could crush a human body just with its bite… What monstrous jaw strength. Well, it was a literal monster’s jaw strength, but even so─
Estimating where the Jagirinawa’s head would be based on the fang marks drilled into my ankle, I nevertheless stuck my fingers between its mouth and my foot and pried them apart─though it was biting down on me with an absurd amount of force, I used the small gap I created to twist my leg out. It was shot, down to the bones, but the nerves still seemed intact. It was fine, it still moved.
It would have been nice if I could hold on to the snake’s mouth, but I reflexively let go when I felt a wet slap on my hand (the snake’s long, forked tongue must have licked me).
“Nkk!”
Still, the blind, haphazard kick I sent the Jagirinawa’s way with my other leg seemed to hit it, or at least it felt that way. It was the same sensation as kicking a rubber ball, so I doubted that I’d dealt any damage. I then rolled backward, two times, three times, to put some distance between myself and the Jagirinawa.
It was only the day before yesterday that I’d given Shinobu my blood.
That meant my body should have been able to heal itself even faster than normal─but my flattened right arm and left ankle weren’t recovering so easily. They didn’t even show signs of doing so. The pain wasn’t going away, either… Wait…was the Jagirinawa a poisonous snake?
Even vampires are susceptible to poison. All the more so considering how minimally vampiric I was. Shinobu in her prime would have brushed off such a wound─
I hopped myself back up on one leg. My right arm dangled uselessly at my side… It hurt too much even to raise.
It wasn’t as if I had no experience battling aberrations, and their kin and ilk, over the past few months. In fact, you could say I was fairly experienced for the short amount of time. But─I’d never fought an aberration that I couldn’t see. I’d always thought of the invisible man as a ridiculous concept in this day and age, not even good for a joke. I never imagined that an invisible enemy could be this dreadful!
I was up against a snake.
I recalled that snakes had some tissue called pit organs that allowed them to sense infrared radiation and to find prey via heat─which meant our eye levels’ height difference probably didn’t work to my advantage. It went past trying not to be seen by your enemy while seeing him.
Ssszzzsss…
I could hear a sound.
“……kk! A-Ahh!”
While I was able to stand on my left leg, I couldn’t use it for much else. My movement was now as inefficient as it could be, but─the Jagirinawa had probably tried to attack my upper body, and I dare say that I dodged it.
Turning around, I tried to guess where it landed.
The Jagirinawa’s landing point─
Was clear to me.
“I─I might be able to do this.”
I stood on guard so I could confirm my guess.
I waited for the second strike, my eyes glued─I kept my eyes glued to the Jagirinawa’s current position. To tell what your opponent is thinking─you look into their eyes. Not that I knew whether I should be looking into the snake’s eyes or pit organs, not that the Jagirinawa was visible to begin with─
I leapt aside and dodged it.
Clamp! came a noise from right beside me, as if a bear trap had been set off─no doubt the sound of the Jagirinawa’s mouth closing as it missed. It gave me chills─if that thing ever got around my head, it was game over. It’d be bitten straight off.
But…
I saw a way for me to win.
This arena─was my ally.
A dirt ground.
Overgrown with grass.
And snakes─were creatures that crawled on the ground.
That was true even if the creature was an aberration.
I might not see the Jagirinawa itself, but it left behind a clear trail─just like the scale markings etched into Sengoku’s body.
The churned ground sent up dust.
The grass parted like it was in the way.
On asphalt or concrete, I wouldn’t be so lucky. If the serpent exorcism were taking place at the abandoned cram school where Oshino lived, like in Senjogahara or Kanbaru’s case─I’d be toast. But wait.
Maybe this stage direction came courtesy of Oshino.
Right, come to think of it, this aberration could ignore clothes. It only made sense for it to be able to do the same for dirt or grass. Even its slithering sszss and the sound of its mouth snapping shut shouldn’t have been audible. If the Jagirinawa couldn’t ignore the field’s physicality─that was the arena’s doing. On these grounds, the serpent, too, merely invisible, existed.
Because it was an aberration.
Like me and Kanbaru.
Like a prank curse actually taking.
An air pocket─a hangout.
Where bad things─gathered.
Oshino had said to make allies of the bad things─which meant this must have been part of the measure. The basic stratagem was predicated on creating a boundary, but the abandoned cram school hadn’t been designated as the stage, just in case something unexpected like this happened─and maybe it was all thanks to the enhanced field that I could hear and touch the aberration.
Mèmè Oshino.
It hurt to feel so powerless.
The upshot was that for Senjogahara and Kanbaru too, I’d turned it all in to Oshino─I relied on him from start to finish. He wasn’t going to be in our town forever, and yet, in each and every case─this time too!
Maybe I was the one who wasn’t regretting a thing.
I’d learned nothing from all my time with Oshino.
I didn’t see─a thing.
“Nkk…”
I somehow dodged the Jagirinawa’s next attack, too.
Still…it felt like I was getting nowhere. If I focused on just dodging its attacks, then thanks to the power of the bad things that gathered on the premises, I could gauge the Jagirinawa’s position and movements with some degree of accuracy from how it disturbed the dirt and grass─but striking back was a pretty tall order. Attacking would require wild guesses, and my right arm and left leg were out of commission. How was I supposed to mount a proper attack?
It was like─my body wasn’t healing at all.
The pain was only getting worse.
It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to be spreading.
Could it really have been─poison?
Neurotoxins, hemotoxins, cardiotoxins.
A serum was─indispensable.
Would my attacks work on an aberration to begin with? Even regular snakes had such vitality that they seemed to refuse to die. Could a half-assed thing like me, a human with a bit of residual vampirism, hope to oppose it? It didn’t seem completely futile, given that the Jagirinawa started attacking me the moment I dug my fingers into its body─but at this rate, wasn’t kiting it all I could ever hope to do?
What would count as defeating this aberration?
No.
There was a more fundamental question… Was it even okay to defeat─this aberration? If I defeated it, would that be the end? Was it the handiest solution─as Mèmè Oshino might say?
Demons, cats, crabs, snails, monkeys─
Snakes.
Some saw snakes as holy─
“My senior Araragi!”
It was Kanbaru.
Suruga Kanbaru─was dashing toward me.
At full speed.
Idiot, I told her to stay away─no, wait!
“……!”
Right…maybe Kanbaru could!
Kanbaru’s left arm, the monkey’s paw, the monkey’s arm─had the terrifying attack power we needed to counter the Jagirinawa! Within her left arm─resided a catapult that could smash through concrete blocks unaided. The Jagirinawa could have a body of steel and still be helpless against Kanbaru’s unbridled strength.
But─if there was a problem, it was that unlike me, Kanbaru didn’t have any healing abilities. If the Jagirinawa dodged her attack and retaliated with a bite, there would be no way to undo the damage. It would be irreparable and irreversible─and if I was right and the Jagirinawa was a poisonous snake, her life would be in immediate danger under even the most optimistic of scenarios. How ironic. I had the ability to recover from attacks but couldn’t deal any damage, while the opposite went for her. Another factor I needed to keep in mind was affinity. This field was a bane to Kanbaru. Even now, she must be feeling pretty sick─
In fact.
However.
“─Forgive me!”
Kanbaru’s attack was aimed─at me.
Not the Jagirinawa. Me.
With that left arm, she grabbed me hard by the base of my neck and, drawing on her momentum, used her vaunted legs to all but leap─and shove me. I, with my one good leg, couldn’t hope to stand firm. Like a speck of dust in a raging sandstorm─I was blown away. Her left hand, still planted on my neck, wouldn’t let go. It didn’t let go. It held on. We flew about fifteen feet in the air like that─
It may have been a soft, dirt surface blanketed with foliage.
But the full-body impact was so stunning that I couldn’t breathe for a moment.
Kanbaru had made good on her word and shoved me off my feet with her left arm alone─though it wasn’t down onto a bed.
I yelled, “Wh-What was that for─Kanbaru!”
She silently lay on top of me, in a full mount in grappling terms, using not only her left arm but her entire body to restrain me. I couldn’t begin to resist given the state of my right arm and left─no.
Not even if my body was in perfect condition.
Not even if Kanbaru’s arm wasn’t a monkey’s arm.
If she really tried to pin me down, there was nothing I could do about it. A jock on the national level against a washout whose only extracurricular activity was biking home. Being a year older or a guy didn’t matter one bit. Struggle as I might, I couldn’t even budge. My body was pasted to the ground, and though Kanbaru couldn’t be that heavy, I felt like she was crushing me.
“Kanbaru…you─”
“Stay still! Calm down!”
“Calm down?”
“The poison is going to spread through your blood if you don’t!”
Kanbaru was close to me─our faces were practically touching, but she shouted so loud I thought she’d perforate my eardrums.
“Snakes are savage but shy creatures─they won’t do anything if you don’t approach and assault them! Don’t provoke it! Just stay still, and the snake will go away!”
“………kk.”
Snake─behavior.
It was the same─even for an aberration.
Be it gripping or the use of pit organs.
Kanbaru was exactly right.
Even I─knew that much.
If I stayed still─the Jagirinawa would leave.
I’d already peeled it off of Sengoku.
The snake─would go back.
“…B-But, Kanbaru! That─”
It would only go back.
It wouldn’t be banished.
It would return.
Turning back on the caster of the curse─
When one is cursed, two holes are dug.
Like a snake piercing the skin─two holes are dug.
“I beg you─” Kanbaru said in a pained voice. Like she was pleading with me. “Don’t mistake who you’re trying to save here.”
Ssszzzsss.
Ssszzzsss.
Ssszzzsss.
I heard it.
The sound of the Jagirinawa crawling on the ground─I couldn’t see the dust rising or the grass being parted from my angle. But─I could tell the sound was receding at a steady pace. The Jagirinawa─was trying to crawl away. Perhaps it had lost sight of me after Kanbaru’s left arm had transported me fifteen feet away in one go. Or maybe─the Jagirinawa hadn’t given a damn about me in the first place.
The snake─was going back.
Back to the one who had cast it.
Bringing back with it─its curse.
“………”
Slump─I could feel my strength leaving me. I wouldn’t make it in time. I could give chase, but what hope did I have of following a snake I couldn’t see? Its sound and its presence would vanish once it left the grounds. And, to begin with, there was no getting out from under Kanbaru.
Even if I could─I couldn’t see myself doing it.
“My senior Araragi…”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized to her. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’m sorry I forced that role onto you.”
“Please, don’t apologize… I wouldn’t know how to reply.”
“Yeah…sorry.”
“My senior Araragi.”
“I’m sorry, Kanbaru… I’m really sorry…”
Sorry─was all I could say to her.
It felt like I was always apologizing to Kanbaru when it mattered the most. I really felt bad. Burdening her…for being such a pathetic senior, I really did─feel bad.
Kanbaru’s decision was the right one. There was no denying it. I could have continued, but I had almost no chance of beating the Jagirinawa. How could I, a mock aberration, ever handle a real, live aberration? Frantically dodging the snake’s biting attacks and collapsing from the poison rushing through my body as a result was the best outcome I could have hoped for.
But─I just hadn’t been able to give up.
It was like I’d been throwing a tantrum.
That’s why it hurt so much.
The pain in my right arm, the pain in my left leg─
They were nothing compared to this other pain.
I was flimsy.
I was feeble.
I was─utterly powerless.
The snake gone─
Sengoku approached Kanbaru and me with faltering steps, having regained consciousness. The boundary was pointless now that the aberration had departed─and the scale markings eating into her flesh had vanished from every inch of her skin visible on her swimsuit-clad body.
Not half-gone.
Fully gone.
Her skin was fair, smooth, beautiful.
She wasn’t hurting anymore.
She wasn’t going to have to cry anymore─
“Big Brother Koyomi. Thank you for saving me.”
Stop it.
Sengoku.
Please…don’t mouth words like “thank you” that I can’t bear to hear. I don’t have any right to be thanked by you. Because of all things─I was trying to save even the person who cursed you.
007
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
I was roused awake the next day as usual by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi and began getting ready to go to school. Tuesday, June thirteenth, a weekday. My right arm and my left leg seemed to have healed to the point where everyday tasks didn’t pose an issue. With Kanbaru and Sengoku supporting me on both sides, pathetically enough, I had gone to the abandoned cram school afterwards to have Shinobu drink a bit of my blood so as to bolster my body’s healing capabilities. However hands-off my parents, I couldn’t come home with a crushed arm and foot. As ever, Shinobu didn’t speak to me. Perhaps she was appalled, perhaps she wasn’t thinking anything at all. Either way, she couldn’t have minded a surprise opportunity to drink even more of my blood and must have been in one of her better moods. As a matter of proper procedure I did give a simple report of the events to Oshino, but he didn’t say much either. Perhaps he was appalled─perhaps he wasn’t thinking anything at all.
After that, I spent the night with everyone in one of the abandoned cram school’s rooms. Sengoku had lied to her parents and said she was at a friend’s sleepover party, so she had to be somewhere that night. With no other suitable locations available to us, we slept right there in the ruins. We were excited at first like kids on a school trip, but all three of us must have been tired and fell asleep in no time.
If it’s winter, then spring isn’t far behind.
Night is always followed by day.
Kanbaru and I walked Sengoku home, promised to meet again, then parted ways. After putting together some plans for Senjogahara’s birthday party for a bit, I split up with Kanbaru too at a crosswalk. Then, once I finally got home and got to work falling back asleep in my own bed, I was roused awake by my little sisters. For no real reason, I asked Tsukihi, “Do you remember Sengoku?”
She replied saying she did.
When I heard that, I remembered─just as she’d called me Big Brother Koyomi, I’d called her Sen.
Even so─
I couldn’t call her that now.
Changing into my school uniform, I began to think.
About why there had been two Jagirinawa.
Why two snakes─had possessed Sengoku.
There was that girl, her friend, with her misbegotten grudge─she resented how the boy she fancied confessed to Sengoku only to get turned down. The girl turned to occult charms, a fad at her school, and to a top-drawer curse at that. It was her way of venting steam, and she must not have thought that it would actually work…
That incident alone offered up one more person─another character who might have resented Sengoku. Yes, the boy whom Sengoku had given the cold shoulder. As with Sengoku’s friend, I didn’t know his name─but it wouldn’t be shocking if he, too, held a misbegotten grudge against her. You could even call it reasonable, psychologically speaking. A simple case─of romantic entanglements. Of being head over heels. The girls didn’t have an exclusive patent on those charms that were a fad at their school. It was entirely possible for someone to attempt a curse without informing the target like an honest fool. Placing a curse in earnest─also a possibility.
When one is cursed, two holes are dug.
Well, that’s all just my conjecture. I don’t have any firm evidence, and even if I’m right, who the Jagirinawa went back to, the girl or the boy, and how a returned curse works is something I can’t hope to figure out.
However you look at it, that would be shoes on a snake.
