by Nisioisin
Well, the two reasons were virtually identical, but two big reasons above and beyond the shock of having fallen for that kind of bait-and-switch.
First, there was the embarrassment of having this pointed out to me by my little sister Karen Araragi, who I had heretofore thought was made entirely of muscle, right down to her brain, or even her soul─the shock of shame, in other words. Then there was the shock of having that casual, almost considerate bait-and-switch, almost like a magician’s sleight of hand, pulled on me by none other than Ms. Kagenui.
To think that Yozuru Kagenui, a walking tempest who always tries to solve everything with violence, would do something like that─at some point I had likened Shinobu to a hurricane, but Ms. Kagenui was a calamity with the potential to do even more damage. That’s how dangerous she was, and yet.
“…”
Well.
Maybe it was precisely because she was that kind of person that Karen had been able to see through the stratagem─
“I see…so that’s Ms. Kagenui’s version of acting like an adult…”
Unlike Oshino and Kaiki.
By turning my indiscreet question into a game, she wrapped things up without making them awkward─no.
Maybe my question had been so “intrusive” that instead of leaping straight into solving the situation with violence, she’d had to opt for that kind of street-smart “adult behavior.”
“But if that’s true, what am I supposed to do about it?” I asked Karen.
Thoroughly dispirited by my own rashness, that is, by the fact that I’d once again acted on impulse, I equally thoroughly put myself in Karen’s hands.
At this point I idolized my little sister Karen as my savior.
“How the hell should I know? Figure it out for yourself.”
“…”
My savior was cold.
“But yeah, if someone showed me that kind of consideration, forced that kind of consideration on me, I’d do my best not to embarrass her. At the very least, I’d try not to let it come out that I’d consulted my exemplary little sister about it and figured out that the whole challenge idea was just a pretext.”
“Not sure who this exemplary sister you’re talking about is, but well, yeah. It’d be pretty uncouth to point that out.”
Pretending not to consider someone’s casual consideration. Sounds like something Kanbaru would do.
Maybe that was what I needed to do at this point─but then, could I?
“If I pretend not to have considered it, I’m still headed for a showdown… In other words, I’m challenging her to a pointless fight I know I have no hope of winning, and I’m gonna get the shit beaten out of me…”
“Too bad. Go get the shit beaten out of you.”
“You don’t have any interest in keeping your big brother safe?”
“The only thing I’m interested in is keeping my big brother honest.”
“What if he honestly doesn’t want to get the shit beaten out of him?”
And my honesty aside, if I tried to hide my intention to return the favor─by which I mean Ms. Kagenui’s casual consideration, I really was going to need some kind of pretext when I faced her.
I couldn’t rush blindly into battle without preparing some possible means of success; she’d suspect that I’d come intending to throw the match. But she also wasn’t the type of person to just let it go if I gave up and said, I’ve decided to forget about our challenge.
Even if she were, I didn’t want to embarrass her.
“…”
What a mind-fuck.
Did I actually have to figure out a way to try to land a blow, not in order to win─but to lose convincingly?
I had to come up with a way to win, but mustn’t win that way? Why was I stuck doing all this cloak-and-dagger maneuvering?
It was like getting a question wrong on purpose to keep the class average from going up too much… If this was the price of acting on impulse, it was too steep for me.
“Looks like a body’s come to the end of the line, as she would say.”
“Your body’s come to the end of the line? Wow, you mastered the martial arts just like that, big brother?”
What a dumbass.
And this dumbass was the one who’d pointed out how insensitive I’d been.
005
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
So how did I fix this blunder, you ask─how did I put together an ersatz strategy for victory?
Well, it was nothing to be proud of.
It’s not like there’s all that much variation in my patterns of thought and behavior─I decided to retread the way I took on Ms. Kagenui over summer break.
Even if it’s a little late at this point, I’ll give a quick summary for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: One day over the summer, in order to challenge Ms. Kagenui, I let the legendary vampire Shinobu Oshino, or what’s left of her anyway, drink my blood…thereby mutually raising our vampiric levels and strengthening myself (and her).
The thing is.
However much I may have raised my skill as a vampire, I was shockingly helpless in the face of Ms. Kagenui, specialist in immortal aberrations─nevertheless, that had been the best option available to me.
The worst, but at the same time, the best.
So if there were no restrictions, letting Shinobu drink even more of my blood and powering myself up to face Ms. Kagenui would be my “ace in the hole,” a “no-brainer,” an obvious choice for how to defeat her at this game she cooked up─but this time I couldn’t use that plan as such.
I could no longer turn myself into a vampire─and Ms. Kagenui knew it. So if I pretended that I had, then yeah, it would only make the beating I received that much worse.
And anyway, if I gave any sign of becoming more vampiricized than I already was, as an expert─as an expert who takes down immortal aberrations in the name of justice, Ms. Kagenui would obliterate me without fail.
The fact that she let me go over summer break was nothing short of a miracle─since she’s fundamentally not one for sob stories.
Since she’s a pro.
So vampiricization was off the table, even as a strategy for losing─but the possibility of having Shinobu exercise her power on my behalf, well, that idea was alive and well.
Her power to manifest matter, specifically.
One of Shinobu’s fabulous abilities (fabilities, I like to call them) is that she can completely ignore the laws of conservation, of energy and mass, to construct at will, out of shadows and darkness, anything that she’s able to imagine─and so, on this occasion I had her make me a pistol.
A handgun.
A firearm.
Woo-hoo!
I don’t care how strong Ms. Kagenui is. With a gun, beating her will be a cinch!
Yeah right.
I wouldn’t even be able to beat her with a bazooka─a silver bullet might kill her if she were a vampire, but no matter what kind of bullet I used, nothing was going to penetrate Ms. Kagenui’s defenses, let alone kill her.
I went with the gun idea in spite of all this for purely rhetorical reasons─“hit,” she had said.
If I hit her even once─it would do.
So it shouldn’t matter if I hit her with my fist, or with a bullet!
Exactly the kind of rash impulse a complete idiot like myself would act on─and crucially, it was one hundred percent destined to fail.
It was extremely convincing as bad ideas go─once I pulled the trigger, the bullet wouldn’t even graze Ms. Kagenui.
A moronic high schooler with a moronic little sister played a game and lost─end of story. As a spur-of-the-moment response to her casual consideration…no, as a blunder in response to a mishap, I’d say it deserved a passing grade.
Which is how I ended up going to Kita-Shirahebi Shrine the next day with a pistol in my hand (a pretty strange pistol, since Shinobu had just kind of thrown together the design, somewhere between an automati
c and a revolver).
It was pretty dangerous putting a pistol in the hands of a foolhardy guy like me, even if I do say so myself, but we’ll leave that aside. I still wanted to know about the relationship between Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki, that hadn’t changed…but probably best to put that off a little longer until some other things were tidied up.
My not very reliable intuition, however─informed me that Ms. Kagenui’s habit of never setting foot on the ground might have something to do with Ononoki.
Just as I paid dearly for having Shinobu by my side─couldn’t I maybe ask her about that, at least?
If I could just find out that one thing.
I could settle down a tiny bit and face my exams─that was my thinking, anyway.
But when I arrived at the grounds of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, I discovered that my not very reliable intuition had failed me again─though not on the subject of Ms. Kagenui and Ononoki’s relationship.
“What the…”
The grounds of that shrine without a god.
That empty, forsaken hangout for aberrations─where just the building, just the facilities had been renewed.
Was deserted─the strongest woman I’d ever met, the lifetime-undefeated expert Yozuru Kagenui, was gone.
Vanished, without a trace.
“What the?”
Impossible, she’d never leave without saying some kind of goodbye─never mind leaving Ononoki behind.
“What the…”
To be continued.
001
I don’t know what Izuko Gaen thinks about roads─that is to say, I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know anything about that woman who goes around brazenly pronouncing, pompously declaring that she knows everything─I know that she’s Mèmè Oshino, Deishu Kaiki, and Yozuru Kagenui’s “senpai,” and that she’s Suruga Kanbaru’s “aunt,” but that’s about it. If you can call that level of knowledge “knowing” someone, then I guess I know pretty much everyone.
Then again, all it takes to become friends with someone in modern society is knowing their screen name and cell number, so in that sense she and I are perfectly well acquainted. And above all, Izuko Gaen does refer to me as her “friend.”
Even though she doesn’t really know me very well.
Or does she?
Maybe she knows me─the same way she knows everything?
If so─well, that wouldn’t be all that surprising.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if I took up a tiny micro-percent of her vast array of knowledge─but that would mean that she has a handle on me, which isn’t necessarily a good feeling.
Because unlike Tsubasa Hanekawa, when she has a handle on something it’s more like she has command of it─and that right there is the difference between Hanekawa, who “only knows what she knows,” and Izuko Gaen, who “knows everything.”
An analogy to shogi should make things clear.
I may have a basic knowledge of how the individual pieces move, of how I can move them─but Hanekawa understands the sum of her forces as an “army.” That’s having a handle on things─the ability to connect and synthesize knowledge.
The ability to link pieces of knowledge with one another.
That’s what it means to be an intellectual.
You could also call it the difference between trivia and knowledge─but Izuko Gaen doesn’t just understand her own forces, she understands the enemy’s as well─though her view isn’t so unilateral as to see the other camp as an enemy at all. She sees the pieces lined up on both sides of the board as a single collective “army”─a unified “unit.”
And that’s what it means to have command of something.
To have it in the palm of your hand.
To hold its fate in your hands.
In one sense that means that she’s the kind of all-around shogi player who can sit on either side of the table, who can go first or second, and it doesn’t matter─but being seen as “one of them” by someone like that goes beyond “not necessarily a good feeling,” it’s full-on creepy. Because even if she calls you a “friend,” that only means that you’re a five-sided piece with the word “friend” on it.
Friends can be useful.
The path of friendship has a certain utility.
That’s all.
Which is to say, nothing more than that.
Then again, I don’t know how the “friend” piece moves─
002
“The solution is for you to die.”
“Huh?”
“Sacrifice your rook to strike at the king─is not what I mean, though.”
“Huh? Huh?”
“Don’t worry, it’ll only hurt for an instant,” Ms. Gaen said as she swung her sword.
I felt like I’d seen that sword before.
No, not quite─not at all. I’d never seen that particular sword before in my life, but it resembled one with which I was familiar.
Resembled?
That’s not right either.
That makes it sound like the one I know is the real thing─but the sword I’d seen in the past, that I’d known in the past, that I’d cut and been cut with, that was the replica.
While the katana she was presently swinging─was the real deal.
A katana─known as the Aberration Slayer.
The Aberration Slayer.
The original Aberration Slayer, supposed to have vanished long, long ago.
That katana.
That real-deal katana─slashed through me.
Through my fingers, my wrists, my elbows, my biceps, my shoulders, my ankles, my shins, my knees, my thighs, my hips, my waist, my belly, my chest, my collarbones, my neck, my throat, my jaw, my nose, my eyes, my brain, my scalp─it cut all of them.
Into slices.
In an instant.
I tried to scream─but my mouth, my throat, my lungs, had all been sliced into rings like the kind you use for a ring toss.
The instant part hadn’t been a lie, but Ms. Gaen had told one, and a whopper at that─because that sword moves so fast.
So blazingly fast.
That I didn’t feel any pain at all.
003
Backtracking.
Backtracking in time─and going back up that mountain track.
Early on the morning of the thirteenth of March, the day of the entrance exam for the school I hoped to attend, I climbed the steps to Kita-Shirahebi Shrine where it sat atop the crest of the mountain─as had been my habit for the past month or so.
Habit.
Though if you do something every single day, maybe it’s more of a routine?
Well, since I was basically hiking, or maybe trail-running, every day, it was good for my health─but the reason I stuck to my routine so readily, without even thinking about it, even on the day that was going to decide the course of my future, might actually be that I’m a diligent guy.
Being diligent isn’t necessarily a virtue, though, and in this case maybe I just didn’t know when to quit and got dragged along by force of habit…
In this case maybe my habit was a bad one─more vice than virtue.
In fact, Tsubasa Hanekawa, whose level of diligence, whose diligence strength, is much stronger than mine, had told me that there was no point in searching Kita-Shirahebi Shrine anymore, that if I was going to search I should do it someplace else─and Ononoki never even seemed concerned about it in the first place, but for me, it was one more thing I couldn’t quit… Against my better judgment, or maybe just indifferent to it, I kept on going to Kita-Shirahebi Shrine every day.
Visiting the precincts of that shrine where there was no longer any god.
And of course no middle school girl.
And─no expert.
“Well, not knowing when to give up the ghost seems pretty natural for a vampire─”
Being immortal and all.
Though in my case I wasn’t immortal, I just didn’t have a reflection─an utterly useless, and in fact pretty annoying, undead trait
to possess.
Anyway, that was about the size of things.