by Nisioisin
How is that okay?! would ordinarily have been my comeback, but under the circumstances I had no choice. The time had finally come to bring to bear on my little sister the ol’ act─by now so routine a part of Koyomi Araragi that it has been granted citizenship─of silencing her with a kiss. I squared myself.
“There─”
Now that I’d made up my mind, I didn’t hesitate (since this wasn’t a first, scarily enough) and moved to steal a kiss from my little sister, four years my junior. But at that moment fate intervened.
The work of the Skytree, perhaps.
“Phew! Man, am I sweaty! Thanks for getting the bath ready, big brother! I’ll come say a proper thank-you afterwards─”
With that, the door to the bathroom banged open and a jockish girl whose high-rise, I mean, height rose to almost six feet traipsed in buck naked and covered in sweat, clutching a towel in one hand. It was Karen Araragi.
“─The fuck are you trying to pull!”
As befits a hand-to-hand combat specialist.
She was freer of hesitation than I was.
The second she appeared she unleashed a spontaneous spinning jump-kick perfectly geared to the cramped bathroom and sent both me and Tsukihi flying into the tub.
In other words, the first bath was a cozy shared affair, after all. Tsukihi’s mental wheels may spin faster, but Karen spins faster in the body department─uh huh, yeah.
Then the three Araragi siblings, Tsukihi and Karen and I, all got to know one another a little better as we took a bath together for the first time in forever─is not what happened next. Karen just threw me out.
No, this is about a big brother’s duty, compunction, point of honor, pride, story development─I attempted logical counterarguments, but she expelled me. “Are you a moron?! Use your common sense! Use your lack of common sense!”
Use your lack of common sense.
That little nugget of constructive criticism fit me like a glove.
Well, the older brother who’d been expelled from the bathroom was pathetically tragic in his own way, but compared to the girl who had to stay and get a serious earful from her older sister, I’d say he got off pretty light.
Speaking as a brother, it was truly painful to leave Tsukihi alone at the mercy of an enraged Karen, but well, I had my own issues, and it was actually a favorable outcome to be driven out into the hallway where there were no mirrors.
No, forget favorable.
Things were pretty goddamn unfavorable for me at the moment─
“Hey, Shinobu. Shinobu. Shinobu, are you awake? C’mon, wake up, Shinobu, I need you.”
Alone in my room, I checked the mirror in futile desperation, but no reflection in that one either, so I leaned in close to where my shadow fell on the carpet and called for Shinobu.
Shinobu being Shinobu Oshino.
The merest specter of she who was once the vampire Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, the one who attacked me over spring break─now a little girl.
An eight-year-old.
In other words, she was, in her own way, no longer a vampire─but now, as I was now mysteriously manifesting the “symptoms” of a vampire, I feared that something was happening to her as well.
Well, it was a totally realistic fear─since whatever else was going on, our souls were paired.
Shinobu and I were like a single entity.
The pseudo-vampire hidden in my shadow.
She who dwells in the shadows─Shinobu Oshino.
“Shinobu! Shinobu!”
Gave no response at all.
Unable to determine whether this lack of response was basically a holdover from the nocturnal habits of her vampire days or the result of something happening, my distress continued to mount.
Shinobu.
What’s wrong, Shinobu.
“Rise and shine, Shinobu! Come on, you can’t sleep all day!”
For no particular reason I tried imitating my little sisters, but as I feared, I got no reaction. Here I was, unexpectedly learning firsthand the hardships those two endure in trying to get their sleepyhead brother out of bed.
Vowing to leave off manufacturing weird excuses in my head and to leap out of bed awake and refreshed from tomorrow on, I continued calling into my shadow.
“Shinobuuu! I’ve got donuts, Shinobuuu! Your beloved Mister Donuuut! Golden Chocolaaaate!”
“For reals?!”
A little blond girl, making her entrance accompanied by this recycled line.
Casually, guilelessly.
When she appeared she had her fist in the air for no apparent reason, like a lively character from an old anime. Since I was leaning in close over my shadow, the pose became an uppercut to the jaw, and I tumbled over backwards.
Like a dead bug.
“The Golden! Where be the Golden Chocolate, my lord?! If thou hast played me false, shalt die for it, I shall tear out thy carotid artery!”
“…”
My head hurt from banging it against the floor when I fell over backwards, but that was the least of my worries, since Shinobu herself was about to kill me.
Her lively energy was seemingly enough to keep her from feeling the damage she should have experienced through our link.
At least nothing appeared─nothing disappeared to be out of the ordinary with Shinobu. Consoling myself with this fact, whilst simultaneously dealing with the fresh anxiety of being excoriated and possibly slain by Shinobu, I raised my torso off the floor and said, “Something’s horribly wrong, Shinobu! I don’t appear in the mirror!”
“What sayest thou? Speakest of the tale of Snow White? Fair ye may be, my lord, but sadly not fairest of them all, methinks.”
Shinobu’s gaze darted about the room as she said this.
I’d hoped that raising my voice would force her into following my script, but it didn’t seem to have worked. I’m pretty sure the only reason her gaze was darting about the room was because she was looking for donuts.
Don’t tell anyone, but it made me surprisingly happy that she called me “fair,” even if she was just bullshitting.
“…”
Shinobu’s glance ceased its darting.
Having likely ascertained that she wouldn’t find any donuts no matter where she looked, she fixed me with an icy glare.
Terrifying.
Terrifying enough to make me stop worrying about that piddling no reflection thing.
Is that any way to look at your “lord and master”?
“Heed these words, my lord. Art thou aware?”
“Of wh-what?”
“That in this world there be lies which may be told, and lies which must ne’er be. Lies which concern not the immortal soul fall into the former camp, whilst those which do fall into the latter.”
“Get real, the only thing you’re worried about are lies that concern donuts, right?!”
What, is your immortal soul a donut?! Complete with a void in the center?!
“’Tis just so…” said Shinobu, moving languidly─and laughing gruesomely.
Don’t bust out your signature expression for this!
“This place be devoid of donuts… Devoid of donuts, as unto the center of a donut itself. Wherefore I shall pierce thee bodily and make a donut of thee, my lord!”
“The Donut Effect!”
Joking aside, Shinobu really did come at me, but ever since spring break she had lost almost all of her vampiric power, and her attack was nothing more than the pretty little Bodyattack you would expect from an eight-year-old. I simply caught her in a gentle bear hug. A simple display of my hugging prowess.
Still, my blood ran cold for a moment.
Her expression, at least, was deadly serious.
“Ahh. To be so embraced by thee, my lord, I feel my anger cooling even now.”
“You’re too soft on your lord.”
While not being turned into a donut was certainly something of a relief, at the same time it engendered another feeling quite apart from that.
You see, up to that point, whenever the physical and mental “after-effects” of having been a vampire─my symptoms─grew stronger, Shinobu’s vampiric “nature”─her symptoms─grew stronger in direct proportion.
At present, however, Shinobu’s vampiric power remained lost despite the fact that I was in vampire mode, me and me alone─this had never happened before.
No, it wasn’t just─that it had never happened before.
It was something that could never happen, no matter what. Wasn’t it?
Never─under any circumstances.
“Shinobu. Please listen.”
“Mmm. If thou dost not embrace me further, I shall pay thee no heeeed.”
“Listen!”
You can’t always let your body rule your mind!
You’re a little girl, for crying out loud!
I summed up that morning’s events from the time my sisters woke me up─or no, I didn’t sum anything up. I went on and on, blah blah blah, telling her every single thing in excruciating detail.
As she listened, Shinobu’s face indeed underwent a transformation from soft and sweet to something much more serious. Seemingly the gravity of my predicament had gotten through to her.
“…And that’s what happened.”
“Hmm. I see,” Shinobu nodded. “At long last thy relationship with thine own sisters hath crossed a certain line.”
“Nope, that’s not the important bit!”
“It may not be important, but ’tis most serious indeed. How wilt thou fix this mess thou hast made? Or hast thou already given up hope of further anime adaptations?”
“Shinobu, please, work with me here. We can talk about my sisters later. I’m seriously confused right now─it’s the first time this has ever happened,” I implored her, my tone becoming more and more frantic. “I mean, it’s really tough not having a reflection. How can I put this, it really hits me where it hurts.”
“Indeed? And yet a mirror is naught but a reflector of light.”
Shinobu, for whom it was probably the most obvious and banal thing in the world not to have a reflection, wasn’t sharing my agitation. She just gazed blankly back at me. I don’t think she meant it maliciously, but I couldn’t help feeling frustrated by her lackadaisical response.
I wanted to get us on the same page, but how to do it?
Without my having to do anything, however, Shinobu received the wireless signal of my angst, if not my thoughts, through our soul linkage. With a light shrug she said, “What,” finally seeming ready to engage with me, “hast my lord turned without giving me to drink of his blood?”
“Yeah, that’s it, that’s what I’m trying to tell you…or no, not quite. Here, look at the nail on my pinky toe. It’s split, right?”
“Aye. Didst say ’twas crushed by thy sister.”
“If it hasn’t healed, then we can assume I’m not in vampire form right now.”
“Aha,” said Shinobu, taking hold of the ankle I had proffered for inspection and roughly rolling around the toe in question like it was a perfectly natural thing to do.
“Owowowow!”
“Calm thyself. ’Tis distracting.”
“…!”
I didn’t think she could possibly be doing it just to mess with me, so I looked on silently as this scene, ripe with a certain kind of sadism, unfolded─I endured the pain as I waited for the results of Shinobu’s “examination.”
“Hmm. I see.”
“Y-You figured it out?”
“’Tis hard to say─nay, I discerned what is afoot, but cannot for the life of me determine why it should be so─”
How vague.
Not that I’d had my hopes up.
From her reply, it didn’t sound like she’d actually figured anything out─the matter would go no further than a little girl torturing my toe, and I wasn’t about to let that happen. The only thing that would go down was my favorability rating.
“What the hell, Shinobu. If it’s hard to say, forget about that part and just tell me what you discerned, and in a way I can understand.”
“Aye, so I shall─but first, my lord,” said Shinobu. “Clothe thyself.”
006
“Cutting to the chase, my lord, thou art most definitely a vampire at present─just as thou didst suspect. Lacking a reflection is a purely vampiric phenomenon, it has naught to do with any other sort of aberration,” Shinobu explained. As she’d commanded, I was dressed in whatever clothes had been lying around. What had been lying around, or hanging on the wall, getting aired out, was my school uniform, which I wasn’t wearing lately since I wasn’t going to school.
You might call my look Naked Uniform.
Sexy? No?
“A vampiric phenomenon… But Shinobu, see for yourself, my toenail.”
“Quit thrusting it at me. I shall only torture thy foot once a day.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for, is it? It’s not like I enjoyed it, did I?”
“’Tis I who ought to say, see for thyself.” And she did as much. “Thy toe. ’Tis healed.”
“Huh?”
Hearing this, I grabbed my foot and peered intently at it─I had to force myself into a kind of yoga pose, but anyway, I examined the toe in question.
The nail was split, and there were traces of blood─no, it didn’t look healed to me at all.
“That is naught but a superficial view─internally, ’tis quite another matter.”
“Internally?”
“I was not there to witness the scene with mine own eyes, so I cannot be sure, but I have reason to believe that when thy sister didst stomp upon thy foot, the bones of that toe were well and truly broken.”
“Broken?”
She really did crush it!
Super painful, right?!
What the hell was that hair-washing devil thinking?!
“Calm thyself. ’Twas naught but an infinitesimal fracture.”
“An infinitesimal fracture…”
What the hell is that?
An infinitesimally small fracture?
Or does it mean the entire bone was fractured into infinitesimally small pieces?
Because the latter sounded hard to bounce back from…
“When I perpetrated my torture…er, palpitated thy toe, it felt as if the bone had been broken but had since set─which is to say, ’tis healed. Even if not entirely.”
“I see…”
Come to think of it, Senjogahara or somebody was telling me about that.
About banging your pinky toe on the corner of the dresser and curling up in pain─it might sound like just a funny story, but in fact a lot of the time people shatter the bone in their toe like that. Because a broken pinky toe doesn’t actually affect your life all that much on a practical level, it often heals up without the person ever realizing it had been broken─something like that, anyway?
Incidentally, when I tried out the “banging your pinky toe on a corner” subject on Hanekawa, her only response was, “Huh? I’ve never banged my pinky toe on a corner.” That aside, if what Shinobu said was true, it all added up.
Which reminds me, by which I mean, now that she’d said it, the excruciating pain from when it happened had vanished without a trace─interesting.
So this─was a form of healing as well?
“But it’s totally different from my impression of how a vampire’s body heals…”
“Thy impression.”
“Yeah.”
To be honest, I’m loath to compare it to spring break, when I was transformed into a full-on vampire─but back then, if my arm, or leg, or even head got blown off, it’d heal a second later.
No, the already overblown phrase “a second later” doesn’t even cover it.
If a part of my body was destroyed, it regenerated simultaneously─is, I think, closer to the truth. Hard to believe if you haven’t seen it with your own eyes.
But it’s true. I know because I didn’t just see it, I experienced it, experienced it personally�
��the vampiric healing factor is, how can I put this, a bat-shit crazy, fucked up, out of control, jaw-dropping thing.
Or at least I’d thought it was.