by Nisioisin
“My lord,” Shinobu interrupted us─while she had extricated herself from beneath the bicycle, she was still sitting with her butt planted on the ground. I don’t think she was somehow trying to vie with Kagenui that way, but she spoke without getting up. “This is no time to be losing thy wits─do not let idle matters distract thee. Is there not something else that thou should be thinking about?”
“Huh?” My physical and emotional sensations transmitted directly to Shinobu─so when I was upset, she could tell in a tactile and not just intuitive manner.
True, I was upset. But I didn’t see why she should be admonishing me─except…
No. Think, Koyomi─just think.
About the non-idle matter.
Kagenui may not have been a con artist, or even really an onmyoji, but that didn’t mean I should let her string me along and swallow everything she said hook, line, and sinker.
Even if everything Kaiki said had been lies, and even discounting the stuff that Shinobu had told me─originally, it had been my own hunch, hadn’t it, that there was something suspicious about these two.
Suspicious.
Right off the bat─I’d thought they were different.
I still hadn’t heard anything, from anyone or from anywhere, to contradict that feeling.
I knew damn well that evading questions and spinning half-truths were these experts’ stock in trade.
Of course.
Of course!
If they weren’t targeting Koyomi Araragi and Shinobu Oshino─then why were they here?
Why were they at the Araragi residence?
Why was Kagenui squatting on our gate?
Why was Ononoki pressing our doorbell?
Just as I put up my guard again and was about to take an obvious defensive stance─
“Argh, shut up! Shut up shut up shut up! How long are you going to keep ringing that bell?! Can’t you see I’m pretending no one’s home?!”
Our front door burst open─to the sound of shrill, hysterical screaming from the other side.
I didn’t even need to turn my head. Didn’t need to look.
Naturally, it was my sister, Tsukihi Araragi, the strategist of Tsuganoki Second Middle School’s Fire Sisters, who came bolting through the door─still half-naked in her yukata, the idiot hadn’t even bothered to put on sandals before rushing outside.
I guess you had to give her some credit, though.
She must have at least had the common sense to think, I probably shouldn’t step outside in my nightwear. And: I shouldn’t carelessly answer the door when the rest of my family isn’t here. That was why she’d been ignoring Ononoki’s ringing for so long.
She was pretending no one was home.
But Ononoki wasn’t just ringing the doorbell. She was hammering it fast. Tsukihi was hysterical and all, but even I would have come running out in a rage. That was more heinous than a ding-dong-ditch.
For someone with such a calm face, Ononoki was a bad girl and a prankster.
Of course, even assuming I did come running out, only Tsukihi would bother to do so with an awl gripped in her good hand.
She was ruining the reputation of awls.
An awl was actually a useful tool. What a shame.
“Committing a terrorist act against the Fire Sisters’ home, this little house on the prairie where justice dwells─you’ve got some guts. Hmm?”
Tsukihi was just starting to get worked up, spewing nonsense as her claws came out─when just as suddenly her rage deflated, the claws retracting immediately. The sight that greeted her eyes must have been too much to process.
There was her brother, Koyomi Araragi. That part was fine. Nothing unusual there.
But what about the blond Lolita sitting on the ground beside him? The strange woman squatting with perfect balance atop the thin railing of our front gate? The bizarre girl hammering the doorbell with her finger even now?
It made no sense─no sense whatsoever for any of the three to be there. Indeed, the fact that there was one person, namely myself, whom she could expect to find there mixed in with the other three bizarre figures probably made it even harder for Tsukihi to make sense of the picture.
She possessed the unusual skill, Regulate Emotion, flying into hysterics at the drop of a dime and putting that hysteria back on the shelf at a moment’s notice. First things first, she took a step back to get a better view.
“Um,” she said, as if thinking out loud, “I’m pretty sure that blond girl there is the one I saw in the bathtub with my brother before…”
Why was she bringing that up?
Just process that as a hallucination.
In any case─this was looking pretty bad. I had managed to keep all this occult and aberration business totally secret from both Karen and Tsukihi. Even after Karen got stung by the bee, I’d concealed that aspect of the incident from them.
I probably needed to tell them about my condition and about Shinobu, the aberration that lived in my shadow, at some point─but I didn’t think it was the right time for that yet. I didn’t have my own thoughts in order enough to talk about it─but more than anything, Karen and Tsukihi were still too young, in my opinion.
Which is why, at the very least, I wanted to avoid dumping that stuff on them in the form of a traffic accident of a run-in. Especially if it meant starting with Tsukihi rather than Karen…
Tsukihi’s appearance threw me back into a panic after all the trouble Shinobu had gone through to get my head back in the game. The caution and composure I’d regained was in tatters.
Yotsugi Ononoki, one half of the two-man cell─seized the opportunity.
“Unlimited Rulebook, rules consisting mostly of exceptions─he said with a dashing look.”
Did I really say that compared to Kagenui, Ononoki seemed like the normal one? Because I must have had no idea what I was talking about if I did. Talk about underestimating a person.
Her index finger, which was pressing the doorbell even after Tsukihi had come rushing out, exploded.
No, not exploded.
Rather─it expanded in volume, in explosive fashion.
I was already familiar with Dramaturgy─an expert vampire hunter that I had encountered over spring break, he hunted vampires despite being a vampire himself. A kinslayer aberration.
Dramaturgy stretched the limits of his unique vampiric transformation abilities to hideously contort and disfigure his arms, wielding them as exquisite twin flamberges─I can still recall, with perfect clarity, the pain those blades inscribed into my flesh.
And as much as I disliked it, I was flashing back on that memory.
But whereas Dramaturgy transformed his arms into blades, Ononoki transformed her finger into a blunt instrument.
The first thing I thought of─was a humongous hammer.
A giant hammer─like the thunderbolt of the gods.
Ononoki’s enlarged, swollen, ginormous index finger completely obliterated the columns on our front gate as if they were no more than Styrofoam.
I hadn’t just been upset. I’d also been careless.
It was the middle of the day, the sun still high in the sky─I can’t deny having assumed that there was no way a battle could unfold in a residential neighborhood.
But I was wrong.
My assumption could not have been more misguided.
Although night was the time for aberrations, even when the sun was up, even in the middle of the day, whenever, wherever, they were always near.
There, and also not there.
Oshino had drilled that into my head!
“Nrk…”
My most flagrant assumption, however, was yet to be exposed─not just my physical, but also my mental stance had been all wrong.
I was sure that Ononoki’s sudden hammer strike must be aimed at me, or if not me, then Shinobu─but I was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
Her hammer, Unlimited Rulebook, obliterated the columns of our front gate like Styrofoam…and then kep
t going.
And going.
And going.
Until it obliterated Tsukihi Araragi’s top half.
“………nkk?!”
Enlarged, swollen, and ginormous─it devastated her from the waist up, along with the door behind her─like mere Styrofoam.
“Tsu-Tsukihi-chaaaan!”
I couldn’t even grasp what had happened, what I was seeing.
But I didn’t need to understand─my body began moving on instinct.
Sending me flying toward Ononoki, who wasn’t paying any attention to me. Shinobu, attached to my shadow, dragged along by the momentum, helplessly tumbled across the asphalt.
But I was incapable of worrying about even Shinobu, now.
All I could see was red. The whole world was red.
Searing, crimson rage.
What had she done?
To Tsukihi Araragi. To Tsukihi-chan.
To my little sister who was more precious than anything else in the world!
“Cool your head, fiendish young man. Don’t get so hotheaded. Don’t young people these days know? Anger is a hellfire that burns the wielder─it’s fire, pure fire.”
I remember up until the point I was about to grab Ononoki by the neck─but after that, my memory cut off like a sandstorm. The next thing I knew, I was lying folded up on the ground.
Folded up.
That may sound vague, but it was the most accurate expression for my predicament.
My legs, my knees, my waist, my arms, my elbows, my shoulders, my neck, were all folded over and under, in and out, like the gussets of a bellow─neatly, like in some celebrity homemaker’s storage tips.
And the very person who had reduced me to this state, Yozuru Kagenui─was balanced atop my folded-up back, in a squatting position exactly like before.
Smiling. In an amused─even a good-natured way.
“You reckon what Oshino would say at a time like this? You’re so spirited, did something good happen to you?”
“Ngh…”
Why─just why?
Why did she know so much about Oshino? Why was she able to quote him? And at a time like this!
“Damn you! You…you pieces of shit! My sister! You killed my sister…Tsukihi! You won’t get away with this!”
“Huh? No kidding─that child is your sister?” asked Kagenui, surprised. She nodded, as if something suddenly made sense. “Of course. I just reckoned you happened to have the same surname.”
What?
The two of them…didn’t even know that this was my house?
Then what in hell were they doing here?
“I see. There was some noise in my information. This must have been a very shocking sight for you, then. So sorry about that,” Kagenui apologized offhandedly like she’d spilled some water on the table.
An apology.
An apology?
“Ngh… You think an apology is going to cut it?!”
“Watch for yourself.”
I couldn’t turn my neck. It was pressed against the ground as stiff as if it had been set in plaster. But Kagenui jerked my neck forcefully in the direction of our front door─as easily as you might twist a baby’s arm.
Forcing my eyes to behold the scene once more.
The destroyed pillars, the demolished gate.
No trace of the front door remained, and just inside that opening, gruesomely annihilated, lay Tsukihi Araragi’s lower half─
“Wha…”
When I saw what Kagenui meant─I could barely believe my own eyes.
“H-Huh?” I sputtered.
Tsukihi─didn’t have a scratch on her. As if in inverse proportion to the demolition around her, her upper half, which ought to have been blown clean from her body, was attached firmly to her lower half, right where you would expect to find it.
She was propped unconscious against the wall in the hallway─but was perfectly alive.
Completely fine, as if the dramatic scene I had just witnessed had all been an optical illusion.
She was healthy and whole.
But considering how all of the non-corporeal parts of her upper body─her scanty yukata, the accessories in her hair, and so forth─had, indeed, been obliterated, blown to kingdom come just as had been seared into my memory… Considering that the only thing that remained whole was Tsukihi’s now exposed, naked upper body…
Perhaps the real optical illusion was what I was seeing now.
“Nope,” I muttered without thinking.
Nope.
I knew this─knew it like the twists and turns of hell. I had seen it, had been shown it, time and time again.
I recognized this hellish truth. It wasn’t an optical illusion─but regeneration.
Healing, recovery─and immortality.
To be injured and injured and not to die, to be obliterated and obliterated and not to die, to be killed and killed and not to die, to die and die and not to die─this was immortality, perennial and everlasting.
Shinobu Oshino had been living and dying for five hundred years like this─I, too, had lived and died this way, if only for two weeks.
I had died again and again.
Which is why─I was accustomed to this sight, the upper body blown wretchedly from the rest regenerating exuberantly in the span of a few blinks.
A sight I was accustomed to and tired of. A death I was accustomed to and tired of.
Immortality. This was immortality─but.
Why did my little sister, of all people, possess the skill of an aberration?!
“Mister Koyomi Araragi─kind monster sir. It seems your fate is closely entwined with such immortal aberrations. You’re a daredevil who’d leap over hell. I’m the one who’s surprised here.”
Her index finger having returned to normal size at some point, Ononoki stated the facts with a blank expression.
“Your sister is afflicted with an immortal bird of omen. From the outset she was your sister but not your sister, Tsukihi Araragi but not Tsukihi Araragi, human but not human. What you see there is a rare bird of fire, the evil phoenix─he said with a dashing look.”
010
“Shide no tori.”
Afterwards, that was how Shinobu Oshino began her explanation as usual. “To wit─a lesser-cuckoo aberration.”
The lesser cuckoo.
Family Cuculiformes, Order Cuculidae.
A summer bird, eleven inches in overall length, with a wingspan of six inches and five-inch tail feathers─its back is fawn-colored while its stomach is grayish with white mottling.
“Young leaves in my eyes, lesser cuckoos in the mountain, first bonito of the season─that lesser cuckoo. Those two spoke of it as a phoenix, but this bird of death is ill so grand as that word would suggest. In Japan, most people think of peacocks when they picture a phoenix, according to that shallow brat.”
Known primarily as the hototogisu, there were many ways to write the lesser cuckoo’s name in Japanese characters─and nowadays few remembered its association with phoenixes. Once upon a time, however, it was believed to be a migratory bird that could pass to and from the afterlife.
A fitting bird for the Obon season.
It went without saying, but the lesser cuckoo was one of the most familiar birds in Japanese culture. For instance, in the oldest surviving collection of Japanese poetry, the Man’yoshu, which was compiled during the Nara Period, there are over 150 poems dedicated to the cuckoo─as one of the season words utilized in classical poetry, it symbolized summer.
Unlike even the katydid and cricket, which had switched names over that time, one of the most surprising things was that the bird had already been known as the hototogisu over a thousand years ago, like some universal constant.
One of the bird’s most distinctive features is its cry─extremely distinct and immediately recognizable upon hearing, it is often written as teppen kaketaka.
O lesser cuckoo─do you feed on lizards too with that cry of yours?
“And ’tis not only t
he diversity of characters used to inscribe the bird’s name. It also sports an unparalleled number of aliases─outfacing any other species of bird. The brat jabbered a few. These are only the ones I remember, but there was the evening bird, the nightwatch bird, the bird of murk…the shoeclaw bird, the five-dew bird, the kokila, and of course─the shide no taosa.”