by Nisioisin
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.”
“I’m going on ahead.”
“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?’”
“Uh…if you thought that’d get me excited, actually─it doesn’t, dammit!”
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.
Side story or no, she could never become the narrator.
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.
“If you’re going to call me a prude, then what about her?” I said. “She’s totally chaste.”
“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.”
“Well, if she is selling, I don’t see how it’s wrong to take her up on the offer.”
“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?
There clearly weren’t any gods in this shrine.
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 br
each 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.
“Heyyy, Kanbaru─!”
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?”
I did as she said and looked in the direction she pointed.
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.
Or so─it looked.
“………!”
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.
The location─a big-box bookseller not far from Naoetsu High.
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.
A class president among class presidents.
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.”