by Nisioisin
Just when I’d avoided picking around my brain…
Unconcerned by my stunned expression, Kissshot pulled her right hand out from her abdomen─and she was gripping what appeared to be the hilt of a sword.
What’s more, judging from the hilt─was it a Japanese sword?
I’d guessed right.
The sword Kissshot drew from her own stomach was a great katana more than six feet long.
“The enchanted blade Kokorowatari─it may be by an unknown swordsmith, but apparently it is a fine piece. Of course, I’m not very familiar with these─a sword serves its purpose for me if it cuts well.”
“Wow…”
The wound on Kissshot’s stomach was already healing─so I could focus on the sword. It was long…but not as long as Dramaturgy’s. Still, while Dramaturgy’s flamberges did have somewhat of an artistic shape, I couldn’t deny that a katana had its own unique flavor.
To be frank, a Japanese sword didn’t seem to match the blond, dress-wearing Kissshot at all─and to begin with, fine or not, could any such weapon withstand a vampire’s supernatural strength?
“Don’t move,” she said.
Fwip, Kissshot swung her sword, Kokorowatari, as if to flick dust off of it.
But that wasn’t her intention.
“Hey─”
“Don’t move. I just cut thee.”
“Uh, what?”
“Does it hurt?”
“N-No─”
“Hm. Then my skills do not seem to have dulled─ye may move now. Ye’ve already healed.”
“Wh-What? Are you following up that going around the Earth seven-and-a-half times thing with another lie? Even if I heal, I’m not able to heal my clothes, remember? Where did you cut me?”
“Through thy torso, sideways. Ah, the happy things I slice.”
“You mean ‘sorry’!”
“Worry not about thy clothes, either. Kokorowatari’s edge is inarguably sharp─so much so that whatever it cuts pulls itself back together with time. Of course, only because it is wielded by one with my skill at arms.”
“……”
She didn’t seem to be kidding.
Seriously?
“But how is that sword able to withstand your skill─and your arm strength? It’s just a regular sword, right?”
“It is not the original. My first thrall created this with his flesh and blood using the original as material. Furthermore, I inherited it. Well, a too-sharp blade presents its own problems since what it slices sticks back together no matter how many times I cut. One might say that the blade is suited to cutting down aberrations and nothing else.”
“The aberration cutter, huh?”
“Indeed. ‘Kokorowatari’ is slightly difficult to pronounce, and it is by the name ‘aberration slayer’ that my foes came to know it. That was not always my moniker, but the blade’s,” Kissshot said─as she stored the sword back in her stomach.
It looked like she was committing seppuku.
She sure was immortal.
But then, she said the sword was a memento from her first thrall, who should have been just as immortal… Yet he was already dead.
“If an immortal vampire died, does that mean─he was slain by a hunter?”
Dramaturgy, Episode, Guillotine Cutter─did people like them exist four hundred years ago?
But Kissshot replied with a no.
“He was not a man to be slain even on his worst day.”
“Then how did he die?”
He was immortal. How else could he die?
“Suicide,” Kissshot said dispassionately.
Her cold eyes were downcast, facing the town spread out below her.
“A common reason, one accounting for nine-tenths of vampire deaths.”
“……”
“Incidentally, the remaining tenth succumb to vampire slayers─any other reasons fit within the margins of a rounding error.”
“Suicide? Why?”
“Do they not speak of dying of boredom?”
Boredom─was a killer.
Guilt could kill too─but boredom was absolutely lethal.
“While it of course depends on the situation and the age, most vampires, whether pure-blooded or formerly human, wish to die after living for two hundred years.”
“But─how does a vampire commit suicide? We’re immortal.”
“The simplest way is to throw one’s body under the sun as ye did that first day. They throw themselves to their deaths.”
“Well put, I guess…”
But─was that how it was?
I thought back to that day, and sure enough, Kissshot had asked me if I had a death wish.
“If there was anything odd about that man, it was that he chose death only a few short years after becoming a vampire─when barely anything changes in such a short time.”
He died before my eyes─Kissshot said.
By throwing himself under the sun.
He made a display of it. He flaunted it.
“And after that,” Kisshot muttered, “I created no thralls. Until I met thee, that is.”
“…Didn’t you get bored yourself?” I asked, though maybe it was inappropriate. “You’ve lived not just two hundred years─but five hundred.”
“How could I not be bored?” Kissshot replied without drama. “I’ve had nothing to do.”
“……”
“Nothing─absolutely nothing for me to ever do. When there is, those vampire hunters respond by swarming to me like flies─just as those three followed me here on my sightseeing trip.”
“Sightseeing.”
That, I thought, was probably a lie. But then again, maybe it was true─if it was here in this country that she created her first thrall─
“…Yet I was not bored by thee, my servant. Thy actions, every one of them─were absurd.”
It must have been the first time in history that a human had offered his own neck to a vampire, Kissshot observed with an amused laugh.
Compared to the age she looked now, it was such a childlike laugh.
“Ye also dared to call me Kissshot from the beginning.”
“Oh… I never got a good chance to ask about it, but everyone sounds surprised when I call you by that name. Even Oshino. Am I not supposed to or something?”
“It is the rare fool who calls a vampire by her true name.”
“True name? Is that like a first name?”
“…To try to explain it would be foolish as well. But perhaps ’tis generational, or rather, epochal. I speak not only of myself, but of those three as well. Out of fashion and out of date. If we wanted to match the current age, perhaps we need to appear as that boy does.”
“You think you need to dress like Oshino? No way, I’d never accept anything about that sleaze ball as being ideal.”
“I speak more of reality than ideals.”
In any case, Kissshot said.
“That is about all I can speak of. And now I am more interested in hearing thy story. Seventeen years, correct? Ye can’t have spent all of it idly. Try to amuse me.”
“Ack.”
Whatta way to put me on the spot.
Plus, she’d set the bar very high for interesting stories.
“U-Umm… Okay, then how about a funny little story. There was once a man. While he was a decent young man, he had a weakness for drink. If that was all, you could write it off as a personal foible, but one day, he drove drunk and struck a young girl crossing on a green light, her hand up in the air. Drunk as he was, he didn’t notice that he’d hit the girl until the next morning, when he saw the blood on his car’s bumper in his apartment’s parking lot. He then learned through the newspaper that the name of the girl he struck was ‘Rika.’ Turning himself in would be the right thing to do, but the man hesitated. There should have been no witnesses, so if he never spoke up… While he wrestled with such thoughts, night came─and that was when the phone in his apartment rang. ‘My name’s Rika. I’m in front of your apartment,’ the voice simply
said, before the line died. ‘Rika?! That’s impossible!’ The man began to tremble. The voice was unmistakably a young child’s lisp. Could it be the girl he ran over, the one that should be dead? Then the phone rang for a second time. ‘My name’s Rika. I’m on the first floor now.’ The man’s room was on the fifth! Surely, that was where ‘Rika’ was headed. Upon realizing this, the man’s trembling gave way to terror. Then, a third call. ‘My name’s Rika. I just got on the elevator.’ What─too lazy to use the stairs?!”
“……”
I’d bombed.
And after I’d gone on for so long, too.
I’d tried to mimic the style of a raconteur, which may have been incredibly grating.
“No, not that kind. A regular, interesting story,” Kissshot said.
“Urk…”
My pride was wounded!
I was more used to playing the straight man…
But I couldn’t turn back, not after being dismissed like that!
“O-Okay, then part two!”
“Oh?”
“An old proverb: ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a yaaay!’”
“………”
She didn’t even grin.
One-liners weren’t working out, either.
“Fine, then part three! Let me tell you an embarrassing story. That bit earlier about world history reminded me of it!”
“I’m expecting quite a bit of this.”
“Once, on a test, I was asked the following: ‘Prior to World War II, Japan faced the ABCD line. Give the names of the countries corresponding to each of the letters in ABCD.’ So this is how I answered! ‘A: U.S.A., B: Great Britain, C : China, and…D: Deutschland’!”
“……”
Kissshot cocked her head to the side.
She wasn’t even going to laugh at my embarrassing stories?
“Um… Well you see, what’s funny is that while I correctly answered ‘U.S.A.’ and ‘Great Britain’ though they don’t start with those letters, I couldn’t figure out what ‘D’ stood for and went with the first thing I could think of, even though it was in German. But like, Germany was on the Axis side?”
I was now being reduced to explaining my own jokes.
In response Kissshot said, “What sort of line is this ABCD line?”
“That’s right, our common sense means nothing to you!”
What a sad way for a joke to fall flat.
And then we continued, until, at last, the clock ticked to midnight, bringing the date to April 7th─which meant that Kissshot and I spoke on top of the abandoned building’s roof until the last day of Naoetsu High’s spring break was here.
While I’d felt like Kissshot’s cold eyes were brimming with an intent to stifle my parade of silly jokes, partway through, the two of us found ourselves in one of those moods where anything is funny, and both of us started to erupt in laughter at whatever either of us said.
I think most of it was meaningless talk.
I think most of it was empty talk.
But probably─
When I look back on that spring break, the most vivid memory from it, the one I’d never forget, was going to be chatting with Kissshot that day, that time there.
It would be the fact that we laughed together.
“All right,” Kissshot said, standing as she wiped tears of laughter out of her still-cold eyes, “I suppose it’s about time to turn thee back into a human.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
That was right─I had somehow forgotten.
I surprised even myself… How does someone forget something that important?
I’d spent too much time having fun, but, well─the party was winding down.
“Speaking of which─didn’t your first thrall ever say that he wanted to turn back into a human?”
“…Mmm, that’s iffy.”
“Iffy?”
What an uncharacteristically contemporary word for her.
“At that time I was in fact unable to turn him back into a human─and I plan to use the lessons I learned then this time around. Are ye ready?”
“Er… Well, I’m actually a little hungry. I think it’s because I laughed so much. Could I get a bite to eat first? I’m pretty sure we’re out of food, so can I quickly go get something?”
“Hm? I am famished too, after suddenly returning to my perfect form─but is thy hunger so pressing?”
“Uh, not really.”
“Will ye bring back thy rations here?”
“Rations…”
What a weird way to put it. Was it just her dated sensibility?
“Well, it’s my last night as a vampire. I think it’s me being reluctant to just quit being one. Is there anything you want?”
“I’ve neither likes nor dislikes.”
“Huh.”
Only a convenience store would be open at that hour, of course, so it wasn’t like we had many options.
“Very well. Follow thy heart, servant. I shall humor thy sentiment of wanting to remain my servant for a while longer─I will make preparations on the second floor.”
“’Kay.”
And with that, our conversation on the roof came to an end.
While I said only convenience stores would be open, the closest one was pretty far away─it would take an hour, round-trip, from the abandoned cram school.
That is, if I didn’t run there using the leg speed of a vampire.
But─I didn’t feel like running. If anything, I walked at a deliberate pace.
Phew.
What to do.
“I suppose it’s about time to turn thee back into a human,” she’d said. I couldn’t deny that I’d balked after her all-too-casual words.
After all, I was a chicken, and I was a loser.
However─my telling Kissshot that I was “reluctant to just quit being one” was a convenient lie. Of course it wasn’t that I wanted to be her servant for just a little more. How could I?
But…
I was reluctant to say goodbye to her.
“…Hrrm.”
And probably…Kissshot felt the same way.
Something to discuss in turning me back into a human─in the end, there’d been nothing.
All she’d wanted to do was talk to me. Finish with a little get-together.
“I dunno.”
Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.
The iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire.
The legendary vampire.
The aberration slayer.
“I guess─she’s going to go off somewhere.”
She’d recovered all of her body parts. There’d be no reason for her to stay any longer in this town─or country.
Sightseeing, she’d said.
Considering the story about her first thrall, this was probably like a trip down memory lane for her─only, this visit had left those memories plastered over with unimaginably awful ones.
A stolen heart and four torn-off limbs.
She created a second thrall out of desperation, but he was a regular person. Not only that, he told her he wanted to become human again.
At least she said I didn’t bore her.
“She said she’d been invited to become a god, but declined─what a contrast with Guillotine Cutter.”
She would leave this country, and then what? Wander the world again?
No, she said that she only gallivanted around because her youth had gotten the better of her. So maybe she didn’t travel that much lately.
Could she even ride planes, to begin with? Wait─she could just sprout wings and fly through the air. What a convenient body.
Still, I wasn’t reluctant to quit being a vampire.
Probably the only thing that bound me and Kissshot was my being one, and I’d simply gotten cold feet about losing our tie.
I felt like I understood why Oshino, despite being such a joker, never said goodbye.
“What can you do, though?”