by Nisioisin
“? No, I only ate three…”
“The fourth donut was hidden inside one of the other three─they say if you want to hide a tree, do it in the forest, but in this case, the tree was hidden inside another tree, so to speak.”
“…”
“You said the donuts were all different sizes, right? Then she must’ve taken the smallest of the four remaining ones and hidden it inside the biggest one.”
“Wha… But how? Hiding a tree inside another tree…”
“Hiding a tree inside another tree would be impossible without hollowing it out. But you could do it with a fried donut. Since the inside is soft, whatever the outside might be like. All it would take would be a good squeeze.”
“Squeeze… B-But.”
Sure, but.
“Even if the inside is soft, the outside is hard, okay? You’d know if someone tried that trick─”
“Not with a torus donut. Look, Araragi, after Shinobu ate the first one her face was covered in cream─isn’t that what you said? Which means Senjogahara used whipped cream in the donuts. But since they were torus donuts, it’s unlikely that the pastry was completely wrapped around the filling like with curry bread, you know? Either the outside was decorated with cream, or the torus was split horizontally like a bagel and the cream was put in between the two halves. Either scenario would jibe with your testimony about the way Shinobu was holding the donut. The former clashes with your stated testimony that the outside was sprinkled with sugar, however, leaving us with only the latter possibility─”
“…”
Information leaking out of every word I said to her.
You’re scary, Miss Hanekawa.
“And if it’s the latter, then the donuts were split from the start, so there was no need for Shinobu to deal with the hard exterior at all. The cream probably acted as an adhesive once it was put inside the donut, I imagine? Though all that being said…there’s no proof, is there. Since you ate the proof, Araragi.”
In a certain sense, you could even say that Shinobu hid the donut in your stomach─finished Hanekawa.
Hm…
Is that why Shinobu wouldn’t squeal about where she hid the last donut, no matter how much I grilled her? That would be hard to admit, wouldn’t it, both that she had resorted to that kind of trickery to conceal Senjogahara’s donut, and that she sat silently by and let me eat it as a means of destroying the evidence.
I unconsciously threw a look of reproach at my shadow, but I felt embarrassed. I’d gobbled up the double donut with gusto, not noticing any difference from the other two, never realizing the trick that had been played on me…
Maybe that was why Hanekawa asked me about the flavor─and not because she wanted to hear more about her friend Senjogahara’s skill as a pastry chef.
I dunno, I was struck by the feeling that I needed to refine my own palate before I could say anything about Senjogahara’s skill in the kitchen.
“Sorry, but…I think that’s bullshit.”
“Bullshit? How come, it’s not like she broke the rules. Shinobu didn’t eat the donut herself, after all.”
“No, it’s definitely bullshit─her goal was to eat the donuts, right? But if she set it up so that I would eat them, then everything’s topsy-turvy. She didn’t accomplish her goal at all─”
“That’s the point, Araragi.”
“Huh?”
“Abandoning your own interests, your own goals. Setting aside your personal judgment. In other words, being selfless, self-sacrificing. That’s the point. That’s what Shinobu was trying to teach you.”
“The point…of negotiations? Of secrecy?”
“Of love.”
001
I wonder if Yotsugi Ononoki even makes a distinction between roads and everything else? I consistently have my doubts─she’s bound by neither the forces of gravity, nor buoyancy, nor lift. The creatures known as human beings who’re always bustling around her generally propel themselves by alternately moving one leg and then the other, and I can’t help but think that Yotsugi Ononoki is simply emulating them when she does so herself.
At present the human race just so happens to have adopted perambulation as its primary form of locomotion, and she’s just imitating them, no deeper meaning or consideration involved. If, for instance, crawling were to become the latest trend in human propulsion, Yotsugi Ononoki would probably start crawling around without a second thought.
According with reason holds no meaning for her─it’s adapting to reality that’s much more meaningful.
And that adaptation to reality is itself an absolutely goal-oriented way of life for a shikigami like Yotsugi Ononoki─then again, since she’s an aberration who doesn’t possess a lifeforce and can’t be said to have a way of life in the first place, and is in fact relentlessly pursuing a goal she can never achieve, maybe it’s more like a meaningless way of punishing herself.
“For me, the safest way to travel isn’t walking along the ground or soaring through the sky─it’s probably burrowing through the earth.”
Some time or other.
When I was going along, being taken along, on a high-altitude trip fueled by her “Unlimited Rulebook”─it’s really up to the observer whether to consider that mode of travel jumping or flying─she suddenly started explaining this to me.
In a monotone that sounded like a failed impersonation.
Lacking intonation.
Or even context.
“Tunneling through the earth like a mole─I think that’s probably the safest way for me to travel.”
Unless she was just making a groundless joke about being underground versus going underground, I couldn’t even guess at what she was trying to say.
Safe.
Sure, being underground is probably safe.
Especially for someone like her, someone for whom battle is inevitable, an indispensable safety might well be found there.
There─beneath the earth.
She might find a safety that the surface doesn’t afford her.
After all, in that kind of hermetically sealed environment there’s no fear of a surprise attack, even from above─given the lack of obstructions in the sky, aerial movement naturally allows for the greatest velocity, but a lack of obstructions also means a lack of potential cover.
Which is why Yotsugi Ononoki said that subterranean travel was the safest─or so I thought, but she just quietly shook her head at my interpretation.
Shook her head expressionlessly.
And said in a monotone, “No. It’s because there are no people around.”
No people around.
There was no one for her to imitate, hence no one to be influenced by.
It was the one place she could really be herself.
002
“Oh. Kind monster sir. Monstieur for short. What a coincidence, running into you like this. Yaaay.”
“…”
“Hey now, what’s with the cold shoulder? That sort of behavior’s no good for my moral education. How are you going to explain it to Big Sis if I end up as a delinquent, yaaay.”
“…”
I turned on my heel and started back the way I’d come, but Ononoki zipped around in front of me so fast that she was just a blur, tenaciously maintaining her sideways peace sign like I was a television camera or something. This may not be a nice thing to say about a girl you’re friends with, but the fact is that I had no patience for it right then.
Patently no patience.
Please don’t misunderstand me.
It’s not Ononoki that I had no patience for─sure, I couldn’t hide the fact that I was a little fed up with her “yaaay sideways peace sign,” wherever she might’ve picked it up, but my feelings towards Yotsugi Ononoki, this shikigami aberration, this tsukumogami employed and commanded by an expert, were generally positive.
And the ignominious nicknames she gave me─kind monster sir, monstieur, and so forth─had to do with my vampiric nature. It wasn’t that I treated
her monstrously─be kind to young girls.
That’s my motto.
And yet, if running into someone you don’t want to run into at an inopportune time is the worst-case scenario, what do you call running into someone you do want to run into at an inopportune time? And the current time was, indeed, inopportune. My patience was exhausted.
Specifically.
It was the middle of January.
I was on my way home from the national exam─for the second day in a row, I had gone to the test center, filled up the scantron sheet, and taken the train back to my town.
Having walked Senjogahara to her place, I was now on my way home─and just about halfway between our houses, I bumped into this girl.
The timing seemed just a little too good, it felt like I’d been ambushed; but while I might have a reason to ambush Ononoki, I couldn’t think of a good reason why she might ambush me, so it was probably just happenstance. No question about it.
“Hey, what’re you doing, Monstieur?”
“Hm?”
“Hey, hello, over here,” Ononoki beckoned with a twitch of her two fingers.
Or no, not beckoned─I’m pretty sure she was urging me to do something with that gesture, but body language is a means of linguistic expression that only works when it’s based on a certain level of mutual comprehension.
Mutual comprehension is difficult with an aberration even at the best of times, and Ononoki lacks facial expressions in the bargain─to put it in kanji terms, she was a difficult and obscure character, not part of the standard list.
In other words, unreadable.
“Yaaay.”
“Come on, enough with the sideways peace sign. I have enough trouble reading it as it is, don’t make it any more complicated.”
“Oh man. Everyone and their mother gives me a hard time about my sideways peace sign.”
“Everyone and their mother? Did someone besides me complain to you about it? Who was it?”
“That’s a secret.”
“A secret?”
“Obviously. Why would I tell you anything? Know your place.”
“…”
What the hell.
Sure, I may’ve accidentally strayed into her private affairs, but why shut me down so forcefully…
“Let’s get to know each other’s places.”
“Each other’s? You and me? That’s, well, that’s a surprisingly ardent approach, but…”
“You see, this body language. This hand gesture,” she started to explain, as if she thought we weren’t going to get anywhere otherwise.
Well, I was the one thinking that.
But the gesture she now gesticulated struck me as completely different from her earlier body language… Was this doll just doing whatever popped into her head?
“Means ‘I’m on a bit of a hunt for something, and if you happen to have the time, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind helping me look for it, Monstieur.’”
“How would anyone know that?!”
You can’t express such a complicated request with only two fingers!
I’m not a telepath!
“Telepath? Don’t you mean Derepath?”
“What does that even mean? Is it supposed to be a variation on tsundere?”
“So, what about it? Are you going to help me or not? Tell me now. If you don’t want to help me, then hurry up and get out of my sight.”
“…”
Her word choice…
Her tone…
Who the hell was giving this girl her moral education─though, the influence of others has a much more direct effect on Ononoki than it does on other aberrations.
She must be hanging out with the wrong crowd─this tween really embodies the expression “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.”
For crying out loud, be a little choosier about your friends─not that I’m one to talk. I haven’t exactly been hanging out with the best crowd myself lately.
“I’d love to help you, but…”
On a hunt, huh.
Did we really just happen to run into each other while Ononoki was out looking for something? Even so…
“I just finished my exam, and I’m wiped out─Senjogahara made me go over my answers with her at her house afterwards, and it got ugly.”
That’s what I meant by inopportune─it wasn’t just an inopportune time to run into Yotsugi Ononoki, I didn’t feel like running into anybody, didn’t feel like talking to anybody at all.
What I needed to do was get myself home as quickly possible, review the questions I’d gotten wrong, and get a handle on the areas that were giving me trouble─I was in such a hurry that even stopping to talk with Ononoki for this long felt like I was wasting precious time, never mind going on some treasure hunt.
“Your exam? Ohhh. You mean that National Center Exam you were telling me about before. Back in my day, it was called the Common First-Stage Exam.”
“Um, why’s a tween spouting a stale line people of a certain age supply on cue?”
I really gotta find out whose influence this is.
“It used to be called ‘First-Stage’ but now it’s ‘Center’? What kind of a name change is that? It’s a total turnaround. Maybe there was just some issue with the naming rights.”
“That’s some issue, in its own way!”
“They use that scantron sheet thing, right? I know all about that. Ahem. Yaaay.”
“…”
Pretty impressive, except it was probably thanks to me. I seem to recall mentioning it when I was “telling her about it before.”
“What’s the big deal, then? The exam’s over, right? Why are you acting like you’re in such a rush? I don’t have time for your I’m so busy routine, Monstieur.”
“Um, I’m not doing any routine.”
Or did I start acting that way without realizing it?
Reassuring myself that I hadn’t, I said, “To put it bluntly, my scantron sheet results were pretty disgraceful. It’s looking like I’m gonna need to give myself an extra boost from here on out.”
“Hmmm… Well, that just goes to show what a warrior you are, Monstieur. No filling in the tough ones on a hunch for you. Me, I’d take a gamble on one-in-five odds, but you just leave that blank space pure and unsullied.”
“’Fraid not.”
Nothing upright and unsullied about me.
More like down and dirty.
How else would I be shamelessly going about my life after experiencing the kind of year I have?
“The thing is, my hunches are no good. Every single time I gambled on those one-in-five odds, I got it wrong.”
“Yaaay. I mean, wow.”
Her reaction and her catchphrase came out of order.
And what kind of a catchphrase is that, anyway?
“Amazing. I said one in five, but with a little bit of studying you should be able to reduce the odds to one in three or even one in two. What the hell have you been doing this past year to get them all wrong? You’d be better off dead.”
“…”
Why so harsh?
I should be asking you who the hell you’ve been hanging out with since the last time I saw you.
“This past year I’ve mainly been getting attacked by a vampire and beaten half to death by a cat, dealing with girls falling on me or losing her way, getting my ass kicked by a monkey, being enwrapped by a snake, and duped by a swindler, watching my little sisters become targets, traveling through time, getting attacked by darkness, and told that I only have six months left to live. When exactly should I have been studying? Dammit.”
“I’m not saying you should have been studying, I’m saying you’d be better off dead.”
“Don’t you try and kill me, at least.”
“I’m going to keep on berating you until you agree to help out with my search. I’m going to keep on telling you to drop dead.”
“Don’t. Because I won’t feel like helping you.”
“You won’t?”
>
“Will I?”
“You’re a will-I son of a bitch.”
“Is that supposed to be like a wily son of a bitch? Clumsy, but fine, fine.”