by Nisioisin
So who?
Who deceived Nadeko Sengoku?
Who set her up as a god instead of doting on her─this Ogi?
Ogi?
“…gk.”
I felt as though I’d gotten my hands on an important clue, some vital intel that I ought to pass on to someone, to Gaen-senpai maybe, but I didn’t get a chance to think any more about it.
I was out of time.
I couldn’t even stay on my knees any longer, and fell flat on my face. The weight of the snakes was too much for me to keep any part of my body upright.
I sank down among them, and it was all I could do just to continue drawing breath.
“Well…it’s fine, though.”
“…”
“Or maybe it isn’t fine. It’s only natural he’d try and resist, but Big Brother Koyomi shouldn’t have tried to trick me like this. He shouldn’t have lied to me.”
“Araragi’s got nothing to do with it,” I squeezed out, in agony from the snakes pressing down on me. It was a highly honest statement, but hardly sincere, since his salvation was unmistakably part of the plan even if he hadn’t been the one who put me up to it.
It didn’t seem to warrant discussion, as far as Nadeko Sengoku was concerned, because she went ahead and declared, “It calls for a penalty. Promises have to be kept, so I’ll wait until graduation. But I’ll kill a few more. As punishment, I’ll kill a few more. I’ll slaughter five more people connected to Big Brother Koyomi. Right before his eyes.”
“…”
Five more?
I guess that was a hell of a lot better than destroying the entire town as Gaen-senpai feared.
I’d failed, but we’d get by without suffering worse─I consoled myself with this fact. I was relieved. Even six feet under I wouldn’t be able to stand an “I told you so” from Gaen-senpai or Ononoki who’d been kind enough to warn me.
Five more, though.
Apart from myself, presumably about to meet my end then and there, who would be the victims?─
“Yeah, Tsukihi and Karen are shoo-ins. Tsukihi’s my friend, but what can you do? It’s her big brother’s fault. Then Miss Hanekawa…and though I’ve never met her, that girl Big Brother Koyomi’s always calling his best friend, Mayoi Hachikuji? And I don’t want to, I really don’t, but maybe Miss Kanbaru.”
“…”
Hm.
That’d be more or less who.
If it were six, Oshino would probably fill out the roster, and if it were four, Hachikuji might be pulled from the lineup─in other words, that was the extent of it, of Nadeko Sengoku’s association with Koyomi Araragi. She acted so stuck on him but actually didn’t know much about him.
No chance in hell that Araragi’s circle of friends, his connections, was limited to five people─basically, this middle school girl was just going around saying she loved Araragi without knowing a damn thing about him.
That’s all there was to her feelings, and that’s all there was to their relationship.
Sighing, I lay there on the bare earth─or on a carpet of snakes, and mused. About how the world would get off pretty lightly, how maybe it didn’t matter if I went down now.
In my heart of hearts, I didn’t want to beg for my life, it seemed, but respecting that sentiment for what it was, and meeting it on its own terms, I might be able to pull through by feigning death or unconsciousness.
While I might have tried to deceive Nadeko Sengoku, that was in a sense “a foregone conclusion” to her, something she’d known from the start, so─she wasn’t angry at me.
She remained smiling the entire time.
Her rage, and the penalty or whatever, were all directed elsewhere─at other people. At Koyomi Araragi and Hitagi Senjogahara.
In that case, saying not my problem and calling it quits was just my style, wasn’t it? I hadn’t been able to dupe Nadeko Sengoku, but I’d just play dead where I lay.
And I’d never, seriously never, set foot in the town again─five or seven or eight people would die, but afterwards the town was stabilized, spiritually speaking, and everyone lived in peace─
Happily ever after─what a phony happily, but so what, all tales are out and out lies, so let’s take it as it comes. As a comfort.
I hadn’t accomplished my task; my client Senjogahara would be killed; and Suruga Kanbaru would get dragged into it and die as well.
Each concerned me in its own way, but once some time passed and things calmed down and I started making money again, surely I’d forget about it.
I told myself this, but couldn’t fool myself anymore.
My credentials as a swindler had been called into question by my failure to deceive just one middle school girl, and I couldn’t even lie to myself anymore.
“Sengoku,” I called Nadeko Sengoku by her name for the first time. By her surname alone.
Addressing her not as a god, not as a serpent deity.
Not as a mark.
But as a middle school girl.
“You said you didn’t want to become a god, right?”
“Yeah, and?”
“That you didn’t become one because it was what you aspired to be.”
“I did say that. What about it?”
“Then, do you want to become a manga artist?”
037
Taking an unexpected tack, taking your interlocutor by surprise, or unawares, and thereby taking them at their most vulnerable, is a basic conversational technique─as practiced by fortune tellers and swindlers, it’s called a “cold reading.” Out of nowhere, you ask something like, “You’re not feeling well today, are you?” If the mark is feeling even slightly unwell (and there isn’t a person alive who can maintain perfect health all the time), they’ll think you’ve hit on the truth and their heart will skip a beat.
Even if the mark is feeling perfectly well, your totally off-base─and let’s be honest, totally ambiguous─question will still make their heart skip a beat. They’ll start wondering why you’d say something so off-base.
Not feeling well? Why would he say that when I’m feeling fine? Am I suffering from some malady that I’m not aware of?
That’s what they end up thinking─and when they do, they become distracted, which is the same as not thinking, and that creates a weakness to be exploited.
But anyone with even a modicum of psychological knowledge will be familiar with this most elementary of techniques, so if the swindler isn’t careful about who he uses it on, his true colors will be exposed for all to see.
What I pulled on Nadeko Sengoku─on Sengoku, though, was no cold reading.
I knew that it was the truth.
I’d had a glimpse behind the curtain.
As proof, Sengoku was neither “startled” by my words, nor did she “think” about them.
She shouted─ “A…urrr…ghaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Mightily distorting that adorable face of hers, turning bright red and opening her eyes wide─she gave full throat to her rage.
In that instant, the mound of snakes filling the space between us parted like the Red Sea.
She was in absolute command.
It was truly the deed of a god.
Even the most sympathetic observer, however, could not have called what she did next godlike─Sengoku ran towards me at full speed, throwing her ophidian mane into wild disarray. Not a smidgen of the composure or self-possession befitting a deity was in evidence. In fact, she went sprawling three full times before she made it to where I lay, crushed nearly to death under the weight of the snakes covering my body, losing her balance on the slippery snow that had melted thanks to all the critters.
Nothing in the world could have been more indecent as the contents of her dress were displayed for all the world to see. Sengoku paid that no heed, however, not even bothering to rearrange
her disheveled clothing as she sped towards me.
“Aa, a, a, a, aa, aaaaaa, aaaaaaaaaaa, a, aa, aaa, aaaa, aaaa!”
When she finally reached me, her staccato scream of rage was accompanied by a punch to my face. Not a slap, not a chop; a tightly clenched fist.
It hurt, naturally.
But it was the haymaker of an off-balance middle school girl, so a slight turn of the head was all it took to kill its momentum.
Without regard for whether or not she had done any damage, however, Sengoku proceeded to punch me in the face again with her other fist.
She wasn’t in any kind of proper stance, it wasn’t even her dominant hand, nothing.
That sort of punch.
“H-How do you know that, how do you know that, how do you know that, how do you know that! Aaa, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
What with all the snakes smothering my body, inclining my head was just about the only form of resistance available to me, so it was pretty much an all-you-can-punch buffet.
I couldn’t dampen the full force of each punch, of course, and the damage accumulated bit by bit─but the same went for Sengoku.
When you punch people.
Your fists also get busted up.
In fact, Sengoku was probably taking more damage than I was.
She may have been a god, she may have attained divinity, wielding great power and commanding legions of snakes─but she was still a middle school girl, not exactly battle-hardened.
She was weak in hand-to-hand combat.
I’d had plenty of time, a full month, to carefully take her “measure” while we were engaged in cat’s cradle, so I’m qualified to make that statement─then again, she did have a “mysterious ailment.”
Her busted fists would likely heal up soon─but Sengoku was too enraged, too frenzied, too discombobulated to think about turning her power to healing.
If she’d used her snakes instead of hitting me directly─if she’d sent her poisonous snakes to assault me, she could’ve settled things in the blink of an eye, but it seemed she couldn’t be satisfied unless she was striking me with her own two fists.
“Th-That means!” Sengoku screamed, shaking her blood-drenched fists.
Screamed until her face was crimson.
“Y-You saw them! You saw you saw you saw you saw you saw you saw you saw!”
“Yeah, I saw them.”
It wasn’t cold reading, but nor do I have ESP or any other sort of psychic power, so naturally, I wasn’t saying that like I’d seen through her as Oshino might have.
Unlike his seeing through, there was a trick to how I penetrated her secret.
It wasn’t that I saw through anything, I just plain saw.
“I saw them,” I said, very conscious of the havoc my own teeth had wrought on the inside of my mouth. “I just put in ten yen, and open sesame.”
Money.
Maybe it is everything after all─I laughed to myself.
In nihilistic resignation, and in all sincerity.
“A…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! B-But I said to never ever open it─even Big Brother Koyomi was never supposed to see!”
“They’re pretty good, your drawings.”
Yes─that’s what was inside the sealed closet in Sengoku’s room. The contents of the closet, which had driven me to break and enter into their home, not that trespassing is a rarity for me, had been totally useless in “deceiving,” or in “perceiving,” Nadeko Sengoku.
Notebooks.
Not just one or two, but piles of them.
Well, every kid likes to draw some frames in a sketchbook or a lined notebook and pretend to be a manga artist.
Even me, embarrassingly enough.
Maybe kids who devote their youth to sports are different, but no kid who likes manga doesn’t play at being a manga artist. The initial investment is essentially nil; all you need is a notebook and pencil.
A mountain of such notebooks had been crammed into Sengoku’s closet─they were worthless, but that’s exactly why she didn’t want anyone to see them.
Someone seeing your creations.
For a pubescent child it was worse than someone reading your diary.
If you were still in elementary school, that would be one thing, but still actively doodling all that head-in-the-clouds stuff as a second-year middle schooler?
Someone seeing your daydreams─seeing your inner self?
It’s so shameful you want to die.
“But my god, the stories… What the hell is up with that nonsensical doe-eyed rom-com? Is this the fucking eighties? No such guy has ever existed, it’s ridiculous. Not to mention how smutty it gets.”
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“And there was so much background and world-building, it was overwhelming. Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a little? If you tightened things up, I think it could have real mass appeal.”
“I-I’ll kill you! Kill you, kill you, kill you─you hear me, buddy, I’ll kill you and then kill myself!”
Sengoku’s face steamed with humiliation as she listened to me trampling all over her work, and she hit me again.
Well, well.
“Buddy,” eh?
Finally─treated as an equal.
By Nadeko Sengoku, she of the closed-off heart, who shuts out everyone and trusts no one.
“Killing me won’t help. I’ve got a habit of keeping notebooks as well, you see. There’s a fairly detailed record of everything that happened on a given day. So you can kill me, but when those notebooks come to light, your ‘creations’ will, too.”
This was not at all true.
My notebooks are encrypted to a certain degree and can’t be easily deciphered.
“Did you never even stop to think about it? Your parents are bound to open that closet if your whereabouts remain unknown, no matter how much they may dote on you. Do you really think that when they do, they’ll burn all the notebooks in there without even looking inside them?”
“…!”
She was struck dumb.
The fool really hadn’t thought it through.
“But, well, if you quit this whole god thing, become human again, and go back to your room right now, you can probably take care of the whole thing, no problem. If you’re that ashamed of─”
“Are you kidding me~~?! You think I’m going to give up being a god for such a stupid reason?!”
“Something like that, yeah.”
My words might not have come out all that clearly since I was getting punched in the face as I spoke, but as long as the message got across.
“So, tell me, what would make you give up being a god?”
“…!”
“No matter who I talked to…Senjogahara, Hanekawa, even your parents, no one mentioned this little hobby of yours. No one said a word about it, because no one had any idea. There was no hint of it in any description of you, not anywhere. No foreshadowing, nary an intimation. There were plenty of people who knew that you were sweet on Araragi, but not a single person knew about the contents of your notebooks. Araragi had no idea, and neither did his sisters. That’s how stubbornly you kept your shameful little creations secret.” My face continued to be battered throughout this monologue. “You didn’t tell a soul. Because it’s your true dream.”
Dream.
I hesitated slightly before letting that embarrassing little word roll off my tongue. The second someone like me utters that word, it starts to sound false.
But just because it sounds false.
Doesn’t necessarily mean it is.
“Because our true wishes aren’t something we tell other people─or even gods. Your beloved Fujio Fujiko didn’t tell anyone but each other about their dreams of becoming manga artists.” That last part was an out-and-out lie. I hadn’t the faintest. It was a lie that sounded like a lie. For once I hated my tongue, lying even at a time like this. “You’re probably happy as a god. You’re probably having fun. Seems like it, anyway. I’m not out to drag yo
u off your pedestal. But you didn’t actually want to become a god, right?”
She’d said it was just happenstance.
That it was a twist of fate, a freak occurrence─like an accident, so even supposing someone intended for it to happen, that someone wasn’t her.