by Nisioisin
I carefully slid open the screen to Kanbaru’s room.
Well, not so carefully, more like to hell with it, but─sure enough!
“…”
There was nothing there worthy of a sure enough.
What an anticlimax.
It was just as Ms. Kagenui said─we’d only gone there to confirm her suspicions, pretty much. Kanbaru’s room was like an empty husk, nothing there but two vacant futons lined up side by side.
“It’s weird that there aren’t three, though,” I muttered.
Why only two futons for three people?
What exactly had been going on here?
It’s not like I didn’t have my suspicions, I had plenty of them and they were massive, but in any case, now was the time for action─even though it seemed deserted, I crept into the room, careful not to make a sound.
And checked the futons.
Feels like a cliché from a detective show, but they were still warm.
They can’t have got far may or may not have been the appropriate follow-up, but someone had definitely been lying on these futons until very recently─next I smelled the pillows. The pillow on one of the futons bore the lingering scent of Karen and Tsukihi, while the pillow on the other bore the lingering scent of Kanbaru─all three of them had been there until very recently indeed.
It did comfort me somewhat that the combination had been Kanbaru on one and Karen + Tsukihi on the other─and then I saw it.
As I gazed all around the room, I saw something that hadn’t been there the other day when I came to clean.
“…”
A paper crane.
Since Kanbaru’s room was in the Japanese style, it had a grand tokonoma alcove─usually heaped with drifts of garbage. But in the spic-and-span alcove, which, if I may be permitted a small toot on my own horn, was only empty because I’d taken the trouble to clear it out, sat a paper crane, like a traditional decoration.
A paper crane is, it goes without saying, a representative form of origami─I bet there’s not a single Japanese person who’s never folded one, and yet.
And yet─a paper crane?
“What is it, kind monster sir?”
“Look at this.”
Ononoki came up beside me and I pointed at my discovery─maybe I was being overly cautious, but I didn’t want to be too hasty about touching it.
“…”
“You’re probably thinking, It’s nothing but a paper crane, what’s the big deal, but Kanbaru’s not the type of person to decorate her room with something like this. That’s not the type of person she is. I mean, she doesn’t have an inkling about decorating the tokonoma in the first place, she just thinks of it as a convenient place to put stuff. A stack of pervy books would be one thing, but something as refined as this?”
“Yeah, refined,” echoed Ononoki, shaking her head─expressionlessly, which really made her seem like a doll.
The kind with a spring in its neck, that wobbles when you touch it.
I seriously wanted to touch it.
“It certainly is a ve-ry fine example─anyway, go on, monstieur, pick it up.”
“Huh? But…what if it’s some kind of clue?”
“It’s okay, kind monster sir, if it’s what I think it is─me, I’m a shikigami, or a corpse, so if I touched it I’m pretty sure nothing would happen, but you’re still human…”
“All right.”
That still bothered me, but this was no time for a Q&A─with Kanbaru and my sisters missing, nothing had changed. It was a race against time, there wasn’t a moment to lose.
I picked up the paper crane.
Treating it as if it were some kind of explosive device─
A small, perfectly white paper crane.
“Ick!!”
I shrieked─not in surprise, but because it freaked me out.
The second I picked it up─I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding, I’m honestly just putting the facts down on paper here exactly as they occurred─the lone paper crane suddenly became a string of a thousand.
It was like─a string of cranes had been planted in the floor of the alcove, and the single visible one was the bud, so that when I pulled it up I uprooted the whole thing.
A string of paper cranes.
Pretty banal, really, something everybody’s familiar with─mostly as something you make for a friend or family member who’s in the hospital. Coming out of nowhere, appearing suddenly and unexpectedly like that, though, it almost made me piss my pants.
I think it’s one of the elemental fears of humankind─a dense swarm of tiny things wriggling around is creepy, even if they’re inorganic.
Maybe it’s even more basic than that, and we’re just scared of anything innumerable─but anyway, I trembled at their abundance. I didn’t let go of the one I was holding, at least.
“H-Hey, Ononoki─”
“Just as I thought.”
“J-Just as you thought? If this is what you were expecting, why the hell didn’t you warn me─that it was going to turn into a whole string of them!”
“Well, I wondered if you’d be startled.”
“…”
I was doubly infuriated by the thought that I had Kaiki to thank for this aspect of her personality.
What if my shriek had woken up Kanbaru’s grandparents? No, I mean, really.
Under the circumstances, they’d think I was a kidnapper.
There was no way I’d be able to talk my way out of this one.
Still holding the string of cranes out before me like a lantern, I turned to Ononoki.
“Well? What was just as you expected?”
“I know who’s behind this. An acquaintance of Big Sis’s and mine. This is a message─in Lupin the Third terms, it’s like a calling card, advance notice of a crime.”
“A calling card… Wait, is this a kidnapping then? Yeah, it’s been carried out─”
Or no?
Maybe the kidnapping itself wasn’t the point, maybe there was something else─though that didn’t provide any consolation, nor alter the fact that Kanbaru, Karen, and Tsukihi were gone.
But─a calling card?
“That bastard loves this kind of parlor trick─he loves to scare people with malicious little pranks. Unbelievable, what a creep. But at least this time it’s blatantly obvious why the message was delivered in the form of a crane.”
“It…is?”
“It’s a bird,” Ononoki explained. “The shape of a bird─a phoenix. In other words, this flock of cranes, birds who are said to live for a thousand years, implies your sister Tsukihi.”
“Hunh?”
“Come on, monstieur. We’ve succeeded in our reconnaissance mission, our work here is done. Let’s head back to Big Sis─we need her to analyze that string of cranes. If our acquaintance is involved, I’m honestly not sure how involved Big Sis is going to want to get…but I’m pretty sure she’ll help that much, at least.”
013
“Tadatsuru Teori─puppeteer,” said Ms. Kagenui.
It didn’t require much effort to discern the unmistakable feelings of antipathy, not to say animosity, Ms. Kagenui felt towards this individual.
She was visibly aggravated.
“Tadatsuru?”
She’d spoken the name when she was talking to Ms. Gaen on the phone earlier, hadn’t she? But at the time, I hadn’t realized it was a person’s name─
In the end, Ononoki and I hadn’t found anything other than the “calling card,” so with it in hand we turned around and headed right back to the vacant land, er, wasteland where the ruins of the cram school had stood.
“Um,” I started to tell Ms. Kagenui about what we’d found─my junior and my two little sisters had disappeared almost as if they’d vanished into thin air, the futons still warm─but she cut me off.
“No need.”
It seemed like she grasped everything her familiar was doing if she put her mind to it, so maybe she just understood what was going on with
out my needing to explain.
I hadn’t imagined that Ononoki’s every experience might be getting transmitted to Ms. Kagenui…
Did they have an actual telepathic connection, even if it was a one-way street?
That’d be a hell of a thing.
Thinking back, there might’ve been a few shady moments I’d rather Ms. Kagenui didn’t know about, but all I could do was comfort myself with the thought that she couldn’t have the full picture. I didn’t want to deal with any more stress than I already had to.
Well, even if she’d gotten an indirect grasp of the situation through her familiar’s eyes, seeing something in person was different, so I went to hand over the string of cranes I was holding.
Ms. Kagenui just glanced at it, though, and made no move to take it─almost like she’d seen something unclean.
Assuming that thing wasn’t me─it was the cranes she loathed.
Then she’d said:
Tadatsuru Teori.
Puppeteer.
“Tadatsuru, you say…” I was studying for my college entrance exams, aspiring to attend a national university─and anyway, math had always been my strongest subject.
Tadatsuru, Yozuru, Yotsugi─sine, cosine, cotangent.
Each of their names was an alternate reading of a trigonometric function. Which naturally made me curious to triangulate some kind of connection between Ms. Kagenui and Ononoki─and that puppeteer…
Seemed like there had to be some kind of common denominator.
But judging from Ms. Kagenui’s brusque manner, it felt intrusive to ask…or rather, given the current emergency, I’d rather not take the time to ask if I could get away with it.
All I wanted was to find out where Kanbaru and Karen and Tsukihi were.
That was my overriding priority.
“Hm?”
“I just…”
“Tadatsuru is a puppeteer and, well, an expert─an expert of sorts who specializes in immortal aberrations, just like yours truly. I reckon I already told you that.”
She put extra oomph into the just like yours truly, but I was pretty sure it was not because she wanted to emphasize that fact.
In fact, it sounded like her tone had become more emphatic in spite of herself, because she couldn’t stand it─she just couldn’t say it calmly.
But asking about that felt intrusive too.
I didn’t feel like I could point it out.
It’s not like I wasn’t interested─in what kind of relationship Ms. Kagenui had with this Tadatsuru person, and I might need to know at some point─but given the current vibe, I couldn’t come right out and ask her.
“When you say you already told me that,” I began cautiously.
Although Ms. Kagenui was a violent person, I didn’t think she was the type to make sparks fly for no reason, and maybe I didn’t need to be so cautious. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but be on my guard. I was terrified that she might fly into a rage.
“You mean that this person─is the stray expert, right? A stray dog, the lone wolf who doesn’t belong to Ms. Gaen’s faction─”
“If you don’t,” said Ononoki.
Interrupting me.
Incidentally, it seemed that the entire time Ononoki had been gone, Ms. Kagenui had been standing on top of a rock (I had a hard time seeing the distinction between that rock and the ground, but I’m sure there was one). Now she was back on Ononoki’s shoulders.
“If you don’t belong to Ms. Gaen’s faction, then you essentially don’t belong, period…since what Ms. Gaen has is less of a faction and more of a network. In other words, Tadatsuru is like an off-line computer.”
“Yotsugi. No need to tell him anything irrelevant,” Ms. Kagenui reproved her familiar.
I wasn’t sure which part of that could possibly be “irrelevant”─but I felt like that piece of intel sufficed to give me a sense of just how exceptional this Tadatsuru Teori was.
Even Mèmè Oshino and Deishu Kaiki, misfits to the end, were part of Ms. Gaen’s faction─network. Those two, those two were.
But Tadatsuru.
Wasn’t.
In which case, I couldn’t even begin to imagine how stray this dog was─and when I forced myself, all I could envision was someone too outsized for words like eccentric or ominous. He loomed large, and I started to get scared.
“So you’re saying that an expert who specializes in immortal aberrations─is the one who abducted my sisters and my friend? Then, his goal is…”
This was a kidnapping.
It was easy to get distracted thanks to the involvement of aberrations and experts, but this was a clear case of kidnapping─it certainly wasn’t some spiriting-away. Depending on the facts, depending on how they unfolded, we’d need to alert the police post-haste.
No, it was ninety-nine percent clear that we needed to, but on the off chance that we’d be devising another solution ourselves…
“What, Ms. Kagenui? What does─Tadatsuru Teori want?”
“I reckon I ought to call Gaen-senpai before I answer─a body’s subjectivity can muddy the waters, after all. Subjectivity, or personal feelings. What I can tell you is that our boy Tadatsuru…” Whereupon Ms. Kagenui described Tadatsuru Teori in what actually seemed to me a very detached way. It seemed like a real rarity for a straight shooter like Ms. Kagenui─“has a tendency to let his personal enmities guide his actions, so his professional work is weak. By virtue of which, the present situation isn’t as hopeless as you might imagine, young man. But…”
“But?”
“I want to make it absolutely clear to you that in this situation, as always, you mustn’t fall back on your vampiric power. Let’s get that straight before you find out what’s going on and fly off the handle.”
“…”
So was she anticipating a situation that would make me fly off the handle? While I may not be quick-tempered, I am quick to jump to conclusions, and I was ready to fly off the handle right then and there─but because I was dealing with Ms. Kagenui, a violent onmyoji who was itching to shut me up with one blow from her fist, I somehow managed to retain my composure.
“I understand that,” I managed to respond. “If I keep on transforming into a vampire─not having a reflection will be the least of my worries. I get it already.”
“Do you really, though? I declined to bring it up when we were jawing earlier, but─it isn’t just you. Who can’t transform into a vampire, I mean,” reminded Ms. Kagenui, looking down at my feet.
It was night, and the moonlight wasn’t that bright, so my shadow was hard to see unless you really strained your eyes─but I guess an expert like her could even see Shinobu Oshino where she lurked in my shadow.
Could stare at her.
“The former Heartunderblade mustn’t transform into a vampire, either.”
“…”
“Stands to reason, I reckon. That’s the inevitable logical conclusion, isn’t it? The soul linkage between you and the former Heartunderblade is a geometric progression─so if you don’t transform into a vampire, the former Heartunderblade can’t regain the power what she’s lost. Your companion must henceforth remain an eight-year-old girl in perpetuity.”
It occurred to me that, depending on how you looked at it, that might not be such bad news, but of course it was. Shinobu being stuck as an eight-year-old girl might be an even bigger problem than my own inability to transform into a vampire.
“Yup…” I tried to nod along as if I was already well aware of that, but I’m not sure I pulled it off. It was just as she’d said, of course, I didn’t need to be told that it was the inevitable logical conclusion, and it would’ve been weird if I’d been surprised when Ms. Kagenui pointed it out─but even though I felt like I had a handle on it, however tenuous, “discouraged” doesn’t even begin to cover how I felt, confronted with the naked truth like that.
Discouragement, yeah, that was what I felt more keenly than anything.
It made me realize just how much I’d been count
ing on Shinobu─unconsciously. I realized just how much I’d been counting on the power and battle prowess that Shinobu─that Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade regained when she drank my blood, even if it was only a fraction of her true strength.