Kizumonogatari

by Nisioisin

  Forget her uniform, her internal organs had been torn.

  “My bad, Hanekawa,” I replied without budging, my face buried in her flank.

  She was alive, and I just wanted to feel it.

  “Stay still for a bit more.”

  012

  It was probably due to the difference in volume between her right leg, which had been severed at the knee, and her left leg, which she’d lost whole. The change Kissshot underwent after consuming her left leg was a dramatic one. Her going from looking like a ten year old to a twelve year old had been a surprise─yet, despite already knowing that her body would change, I think I was even more surprised this time around.

  Having recovered her left leg, Kissshot suddenly grew to the point where she looked roughly the same age as me.

  A seventeen year old.

  She may have had me beat in height.

  Of course, between twelve and seventeen, from puberty to adolescence, is a period when appearances change the most amongst humans, too─but to give a specific example of her growth, her breast size had become something else.

  If she puffed her chest out with pride as she’d been doing, it’d be almost frightening now.

  Her face also looked far more grown-up, and accordingly, the design of her dress looked more chic. Her hair had grown even longer and was tied into a ponytail.

  Such stunning results.

  True, whatever form she took, Kissshot was actually five hundred years old.

  “Mm.”

  She sounded pleased. Just like when she’d gotten her right leg back, Kissshot didn’t bother trying to hide her feelings of satisfaction or joy, which made me, who worked as her “limbs,” happy as well. She made it feel worthwhile.

  “My body feels quite a bit better─I dare say that my immortality has nearly returned.”

  “Oh…so are you at a point where you might, you know, take care of the next battle?”

  “Unfortunately, I seem as yet unable to use my skills as a vampire. It has become harder for me to die, but that is the extent of it. Perhaps I would be able to fight Dramaturgy, but even Episode might prove too much for my current state,” Kissshot said, her tone cautious. “Let alone Guillotine Cutter.”

  “………”

  She was saying the same thing─that was my reaction.

  After that battle.

  I began by having Hanekawa, now recovered from her wounds, go back home. I thought it would be best to have her do so while Oshino kept an eye on Episode.

  In addition, Oshino didn’t seem to want to meet Hanekawa (Even after the first day, their timing was perfect in terms of not meeting each other─since Hanekawa wasn’t capable of avoiding Oshino, if anyone was doing the avoiding, it had to be him), and she picked up on this and agreed to go home.

  Saying see you again tomorrow, she went home.

  After that, Episode, who had woken up, and Oshino and I cleaned up the athletic field we’d utterly trashed. With our bare hands we filled in the holes where the giant cross had plunged into the ground, returned the sand pit to normal, gathered Hanekawa’s scattered chunks of flesh (which of course would never evaporate, wait as we might) and took care of them. (It may seem a little lurid, but we buried the collected bits in the flower bed and put up a sign reading “Here lies Tweety.” It was Mèmè Oshino, the expert, who came up with the idea, but his using twigs to mark the grave with a cross seemed to be going too far even as a morbid joke.) While I wouldn’t say we restored things to the way they were, we managed to get it to the point where most people would be fooled.

  Oshino and Episode then left me to go somewhere on their own.

  “You got me,” Episode said as he left. “Sheesh, gotta love it─I must be losing my edge, too. Upset by a total amateur like you.”

  “……”

  “Don’t glare at me like that. I apologize about the chick. I got needlessly excited. Plus─I might’ve been playing it off like it was nothing, but a battle with a thrall of the aberration slayer is no cake walk for me. I couldn’t afford to let even a regular human pitch in─though I look real bad since I lost anyway. But don’t think you’ll be able to defeat Guillotine Cutter with some stupid little trick. I may be pretty crazy, but his crazy is on a completely different level.”

  Then, as promised─well, between Hanekawa running in, Episode attacking her for running in, and me trying to kill Episode, our fight got pretty messed up, so I wouldn’t say that it was exactly as promised, but─he gave back Kissshot’s left leg.

  And so, just as he had done the other day, Oshino brought Kissshot’s left leg home with him, packed inside a Boston bag, in the early hours of April 5th.

  Kissshot immediately took it and ate it.

  She devoured it like a starved animal.

  And assumed the form of a seventeen year old.

  “So, Guillotine Cutter.”

  The priestly man with the hedgehoggish hair.

  The only one who was unarmed.

  “What’s his deal? Both you and Episode seem to be super cautious when it comes to him.”

  “I’ve already explained, have I not?”

  “Your explanations tend to be too vague. There are so many things I’m realizing after the fact. Can’t you teach me properly? I’ll listen properly, for my part.”

  The sun was about to rise on the fifth of April.

  We didn’t have to worry about sunlight as long as we were in the second-floor classroom, but I wanted Kissshot to tell me before she went to sleep.

  Actually, I was sleepy too.

  Meanwhile, Oshino had left the Boston bag behind and set out again. He’d gone for the final negotiation─for someone as sleazy as him, he was a decently hard worker.

  Well, I was paying him. He needed to earn it.

  I really had no idea when he was sleeping, though…

  “So ye say, but what practical use would there be in my explaining everything from α to ζ?”

  “I’m sure there’ll be some… Also, if you’re going to put it that way, wasn’t ‘omega’ supposed to be the last letter, rather than ‘zeta’?”

  Be that as it may.

  “Guillotine Cutter… Am I right to think that he’s ‘human’?”

  “Indeed. He is neither a vampire like Dramaturgy nor a half-vampire like Episode, but a plain, pure and simple, human.”

  “He didn’t seem all that plain to me.”

  And “pure”─I didn’t know about that part, either. The word just didn’t seem to suit him.

  “Mm. True,” Kissshot said. “He’s what ye’d call…a holy man.”

  “Hah. Don’t tell me he’s some kind of Christian spec ops.”

  “So close, yet so far.”

  Kissshot shook her head in reply to my offhand comment.

  …I’d been fine before, what with her coming across as being only ten or twelve years old, but now that she looked about the same age as me, I did feel somewhat nervous speaking to her.

  Kissshot looked beautiful and doll-like, like she was a foreign model or something.

  Or─like she was a medieval noble from a movie, though maybe it was just the dress.

  “How would I say it in the language of this country? Well, a literal translation should suffice.”

  “A literal translation?”

  “Guillotine Cutter is the archbishop of a new religion, one with little history.”

  “A-Archbishop?”

  So he was a big shot.

  An archbishop at his young age? He was human, so he had to be roughly as old as he looked, right?

  “The religion has no name─I understand little of the organization myself. But one thing is certain─the faith’s dogma denies the existence of aberrations.”

  “Huh…”

  A new religion with little history.

  Of course, Kissshot had lived for five hundred years. I couldn’t rely on her sense of time. For all I knew, she might call a religion formed before World War II a new religion.

  How m
any archbishops had come before him? He couldn’t be the first, could he?

  “Within his church, Guillotine Cutter has tasked himself with eradicating aberrations, which supposedly do not exist at all. In other words, in addition to being the archbishop, Guillotine Cutter doubles as their captain of ‘special ops,’ to use thy term.”

  “Ah ha.”

  “He is the Shadow Team Leader of the Black Squad Belonging to the Dark Number Four Group of Secret Special Operations.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like a very literal translation.”

  Couldn’t she come up with a smoother gloss on it? That was as rough as you could get.

  “But… Whatever else he may be, he’s still a human, right? No matter what methods he uses, won’t he still be no match for a vampire?”

  “Consider the situation. Neither a vampire, nor a half-vampire, but a ‘human’ has taken on vampire hunting as his specialty. If anything, it should be cause for concern─and in fact, has he not taken both my arms from me?”

  “That is true.”

  Dramaturgy, her right leg.

  Episode, her left leg.

  Guillotine Cutter, her right and left arms─twice as many parts as the others, if you looked at it that way.

  “Still, it was because I erred in not taking them seriously. I felt a tad under the weather, too,” Kissshot mouthed a lame excuse.

  I decided against needling her about it, though.

  “If work is what drives Dramaturgy to hunt vampires, and emotions Episode, then ’tis duty that spurs Guillotine Cutter. As odd as it for me to say this, faith is quite a handful.”

  Work. Emotions. Duty.

  Sure, I could see how a sense of duty might be more of a handful than emotions.

  “So, what should I do?”

  “Do as ye see fit. I leave it in thy hands.”

  “……”

  Legendary vampire or not, it felt like she was taking the reigning champion, no gimmicks style too far.

  But saying no more, Kissshot lied down on top of the makeshift bed and went straight to sleep.

  Hrmm.

  Not only did she appear to be my age, she was quite beautiful. Kissshot exposing her sleeping figure to me so unguardedly put me in an awkward spot.

  It almost felt like an invitation.

  Like it’d be rude if I didn’t do anything.

  But like I was being overly self-conscious.

  An endless spiral of delusion.

  “…Oh, whatever.”

  It was about that time (early morning), so I could just go to bed. I understood all too well from my fight with Episode that planning ahead didn’t count for much in the end. Having a flimsy plan only plunged me into confusion when it inevitably failed.

  I had to fight with room to breathe, though that was asking for a lot.

  Hanekawa was visiting again after sundown─and I needed to talk to her. Until then, I might as well get plenty of sleep so that I’d be in top shape. Even without any sleep, of course, my vampire body, “always maintaining its healthiest condition,” would be in top shape, but this was more about taking care of myself mentally.

  It was already April 5th. Before I’d even noticed, spring break was drawing to an end.

  Was I safely turning back into a human before the new school year? Because loopy talk like “going on a journey of self-discovery” wouldn’t do then─I faded into sleep thinking such thoughts.

  Vampires may normally sleep in caskets─but like Kissshot and Oshino, I slept on a bed made of desks.

  By the time I woke up, it was already evening.

  I’d had no dreams.

  Vampires didn’t dream, apparently.

  Come to think of it, when I did the math, I was sleeping about twelve hours a day. But what could I do? Not much while the sun was out.

  They say that nothing rears a child better than sleep.

  Kissshot was still sleeping─not that sleep was rearing her, but waking up beside a blond beauty was more unsettling to me than sharing a room with a little girl.

  As for Hanekawa─it seemed like she hadn’t arrived yet. Nor had Oshino come back. He knew that Hanekawa would be visiting, so he wouldn’t be around for a while if he really meant to avoid meeting her.

  I wasn’t trying to review the material or anything, but while I waited for Hanekawa, I started rereading a superpowered school action manga that Oshino had borrowed and returned after my first time through it.

  Hanekawa arrived around when I was done with volume five. She said she’d gotten lost on the way.

  This always happened─as Oshino said earlier, it was an effect of the barrier. What an annoying barrier─but on the flip side, it made for an ideal hiding place for Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade to regain her strength.

  It must’ve been covered─by the fee.

  Scratch that, Oshino had just gone ahead with it. For the sake of balance, as he put it.

  “Good morning, Araragi.”

  Putting her flashlight to the side, Hanekawa sat in a chair.

  She was in her school uniform.

  Both her blouse and her sweater had been ripped apart by Episode the day before, so I was secretly hoping to be treated to my first sight of Tsubasa Hanekawa in street clothes, but it seemed that my hopes had been betrayed.

  “Traitor.”

  “Hunh? Wait, what? How? I haven’t betrayed you, Araragi.”

  “Sorry, just talking to myself.”

  More like talking nonsense.

  Well, she’d have a backup uniform, wouldn’t she. I’d heard that the girls’ uniforms wore out more easily, too.

  “Hanekawa, how’s the wound on your stomach?”

  “The wound─well, there’s nothing left of the wound.”

  “Ah. Here, show me.”

  “What ‘here’?”

  I got scolded.

  I was being pretty serious, though. Then again, we’d made extra sure the night before, and if Hanekawa said she was fine, she probably was.

  Healing with vampire blood.

  I’d begun to worry afterwards that it might end up turning Hanekawa into a vampire too, but when I checked with Oshino, an expert, he said there was no risk.

  It seemed that vampirism and immortality were two different systems─or rather, they weren’t really interrelated. One wasn’t the byproduct of the other, they were independent.

  “For a moment there, I thought maybe being a vampire isn’t all bad if I can heal injured people─but then, if I hadn’t turned into a vampire, you wouldn’t have been maimed like that.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Ahaha, laughed Hanekawa. She then looked toward Kissshot, dozing the time away atop a line of desks, and said, “Oh. So it’s true. Miss Heartunderblade has gotten bigger. Wow, and she’s become stunningly beautiful. I can still see traces of how she looked before, but…she’s almost a different person.”

  “You’d agree, speaking as a woman?”

  “Anyone would, just look at that. Her hair is in a ponytail… I guess she keeps it like that even when she’s asleep?”

  She went, Hnmm.

  There seemed to be something on her mind. Well, maybe women were more sensitive when it came to women’s appearances.

  Hanekawa sat there for a while longer, seemingly in thought, before facing me again and reaching inside her bag. “Here you go, Araragi. I bought you a Coke,” she said, holding out a drink that she’d probably bought from a vending machine in the area.

  I took it.

  “Hey, thanks.”

  “And a Diet Coke for me, if you were wondering.”

  “Huh.”

  “If your body naturally puts on muscle, does that mean you can take as many calories as you want without getting fat? That’d make any girl jealous.”

  “Nah, I wonder. If anything, it’s that I don’t feel hungry. Like I’d be fine if I didn’t eat.”

  Kissshot didn’t eat much either. It seemed like we ate as a luxury, for the taste of it, not becau
se our stomachs were empty.