Onimonogatari

by Nisioisin

  Well, no wonder.

  Just saving us deserved our thanks.

  Though Oshino might say that people just go and get saved on their own.

  “Hachikuji…”

  As for Hachikuji─

  Her arms around my torso, still clutching my body and even biting into the flesh of my back, the ghost girl Mayoi Hachikuji had passed out, as far as I could tell.

  How mentally weak was she, anyway?

  I’m so let down by you.

  “…”

  I ripped her off me.

  Regardless of what we were going to do next, about the only activity that suited her posture was riding together on a bicycle. Loosening her grip was one thing, but getting her teeth out of my back was pretty rough.

  Maybe she did have ten thousand of them.

  “Good grief…” Ononoki said.

  It was hard to read her emotions from her toneless voice─she was like the old Senjogahara in a way. Which is why I feel some affinity for Ononoki.

  “I carelessly saved you, but at this rate maybe I should’ve left you alone… Did I get caught up in some confounding business? Talk about hard luck, give a guy a break.”

  That’s right, I thought about the kid, whom I’d chronologically met just yesterday but internally felt like I hadn’t seen in a good, long while, Ononoki applies male identifiers to herself.

  “Don’t say you should’ve left us alone… Life is a valuable thing.”

  “Says an immortal vampire?” shot back Ononoki. “And is that girl the ghost you mentioned yesterday? She sure is wearing a backpack… So you managed to return it. Good.”

  “Yesterday…”

  Did I mention Hachikuji?

  It was so far back that I didn’t remember.

  Well, in addition to being an aberration, Ononoki frequently worked alongside an expert, if only as a familiar, so I guess it was natural…but she could see.

  Ononoki could see Hachikuji.

  And just as naturally─the Darkness, too.

  “Kind monster sir.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “What do I want to do?”

  “With that,” Ononoki pointed.

  With her index finger, at the Darkness on the street.

  She pointed at the unmoving Darkness, which seemed to be observing us as though it was the one “witnessing” us.

  Pointing.

  For Ononoki, already an offensive maneuver.

  Unlimited Rulebook.

  She only needed to point to activate it.

  Its power─was something my body knew first-hand.

  Not my body, technically, so much as half of my body.

  “Fight?” she asked, “Or flight?”

  “Flight,” I answered immediately. “That’s not the kind of thing you try to fight.”

  “Yes. I agree.”

  I thought she might mock me for being a coward, but she lowered her finger right away. Almost as if that was her plan from the beginning─seriously, there was no reading this kid.

  Inscrutable, just like the old Senjogahara.

  “We’re running away. Hold that child, kind monster sir.”

  “Got it.”

  “As gently as you can, slowly, not making any noise. That thing might react to it and attack.”

  “…”

  Was it a beast or what? Well, true, aberrations might be animalistic, primitively speaking─and they do tend to have a creature motif.

  Not that any beast could be darkness itself…

  In any case, I did as Ononoki said and slowly picked up Hachikuji’s body. Without making a sound, I slipped a hand under her neck, checked inside her skirt, held her legs, and cradled her against my chest.

  “I feel like you added an unnecessary action there.”

  “Excuse me? What if there was an aberration inside her skirt?”

  “Fat chance, bastard,” scolded Ononoki, somewhat abrasively.

  I assumed it was her onmyoji’s influence on her, but the kid’s character traits could be pretty inconsistent.

  “Okay.”

  And then.

  Almost the moment I stood up with Hachikuji in a so-called bridal carry─Ononoki grabbed me by the collar.

  “Unlimited Rulebook: The Disengagement Edition.”

  005

  Honestly, Ononoki’s, what, special move? She uses it quite a lot so I don’t think it’s a secret technique… Anyway, I don’t really understand her Unlimited Rulebook ability or skill and how it works.

  I’ve heard that she’s a tsukumogami, or an artifact spirit, and what’s more, the tsukumogami of a corpse, but that, too (or being a tsukumogami in the first place), is something I don’t really understand.

  Her offensive power, I’m well acquainted with.

  The Araragi residence’s front entrance ended up needing to be rebuilt thanks to her offensive, or even destructive power, so I don’t need to take anyone’s word for that. It’s the reason I vaguely assumed that Ononoki was a shikigami, or familiar, specializing in offense─but now.

  Now that we’d safely escaped, I have no choice but to say, to my surprise, that I was mistaken.

  Come to think of it, the onmyoji she serves, namely Yozuru Kagenui, is a ridiculously offensive fighter─so why would her partner, Ononoki, be specialized entirely in offense? Who would put together a team that lopsided?

  If anything, the Unlimited Rulebook might be a skill for escaping─I couldn’t get away from that Darkness for all I’d pedaled my bike, but she made a perfect getaway literally burdened by the two of us.

  To explain what she actually did, though, she just seemed to jump as hard as she could using both of her legs…

  “No, kind monster sir, that’s correct. While I gave it a cool name like the Disengagement Edition, we simply ran away.”

  “Simply…”

  “However, we did so vertically. Since you’d proved that horizontal flight was meaningless…I thought it might have trouble dealing with up-and-down movements… Looks like I nailed it.”

  “…”

  I felt somehow bamboozled, but at the end of the day, we’d gotten away and that’s all that mattered.

  So─if you’re wondering where we escaped to, we were now in a place with a lot of memories for me ever since spring break, a hidden base of sorts where I once staged a lethal battle with Ononoki and her master, Kagenui. In other words, the abandoned cram school.

  We were on the ruins’ fourth floor.

  One of its three classrooms was serving as our resting spot. Finding rest in ruins might sound strange…but having gotten away from that Darkness, there was no reason for us not to feel relieved.

  Hachikuji was still passed out.

  Placing her on the floor would be crude even under the circumstances, so I put some nearby desks together to make a bed just like Oshino used to and laid her there.

  While Hachikuji was grown for a fifth grader, she was still an elementary schooler. Three desks put together was enough.

  Having put my shirt over her in place of a blanket then balled up my jeans for her to use as a pillow, I was in nothing but my underpants now.

  Hmm.

  It was out of consideration for Hachikuji’s wellbeing, so why did I just look like a pervert?

  Frankly, I could live without being branded an exhibitionist on top of everything else…

  “You’re quite muscular, kind monster sir,” Ononoki said.

  Once we’d settled down.

  “Yep, those are good muscles.”

  “…”

  “Good muscles. You must work out, because those are good muscles. It was hard to tell from over your clothes, but those are some good muscles.”

  “…”

  She was praising my muscles… But it’s not like I worked out, it was just one of the effects of turning into a vampire over spring break…

  “How about staying undressed from now on? You should show off your muscles more, kind monster
sir. I think you have a fine ottermode physique.”

  “Can we, uh, talk about something other than muscles?”

  “Come on, don’t be like that, how about some poses? As a way to thank me for saving you.”

  “Little girl’s trying to guilt-trip me, huh?”

  “If you showed me an abs and thighs pose, I might not mind sharing the secret of my Unlimited Rulebook.”

  “Isn’t that a pretty important secret?!”

  The kid was a mess.

  Though again, it reminded me of Senjogahara.

  …Except she never reacted to my muscles. Someone getting this into them was troubling, but no reaction at all was, in its own way, sad.

  “Yeah, I can’t deny that I’m interested in the Unlimited Rulebook…”

  Given Kagenui’s specialty, there was no guarantee that we would never fight again… Though it did seem like she wasn’t in town at the moment.

  “But what I really want to know about right now is that Darkness. Do you really not have any idea, Ononoki?”

  “I said I don’t know…”

  She came to touch my abs as she spoke. She did it so casually that I nearly overlooked it, but this was outright groping.

  “Your muscles are the only thing I know about, kind monster sir.”

  “What do you know about my muscles…”

  “What don’t I know?”

  When Ononoki asserted this with her blank look, she was surprisingly convincing.

  Maybe she did find out, somehow.

  It could even be that… Wait, find what out?

  Geez, there’s no secret to my muscles.

  “Well, what about you, kind monster sir? Do you have any idea… Do you have any I-dea?”

  “Emphasize it as you might, that’s not a very good pun or play on words… No, no idea.”

  Maybe I did, though.

  I had too good of an idea.

  You could even say my whole life was the idea.

  That said…if you were to ask what it might be in particular, I’d have to throw up my hands.

  Every aberration has its reasons, sure, but was that unreasonable, unidentifiable Darkness even describable as an aberration?

  Unreasonable, unidentifiable─and of unknown cause.

  “I dunno,” I said. “It’s not like I’m an expert on aberrations… I’m just a dime-a-dozen pseudo-vampiric high schooler.”

  “I don’t think there are even a dozen of those…”

  “In fact, thinking back on all the aberrations I’ve dealt with─”

  A vampire.

  A cat.

  A crab.

  A snail.

  A monkey.

  A snake.

  A bee─and a bird.

  Also, a corpse.

  “─There’s something different about it. I’ve never seen an aberration as abstract as darkness itself. What kind of aberrational phenomenon is it supposed to be?”

  That there was any in the middle of the day already felt odd. Well, aberrations appearing only at night, during the witching hour and so on, might just be a preconception, but for it to be that clear?

  No, clear it wasn’t…not when it couldn’t be seen.

  “Darkness,” Ononoki mumbled, like she was talking to herself. “True, it must be Darkness…”

  “Hm? What?”

  “Well… How do I put this? I hope what we’re up against really is Darkness. That it’s just Darkness…”

  Ononoki remained expressionless, like she felt nothing, but also like she might be finding our situation simply tedious.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “That thing is Darkness, no matter how you look at it.”

  “But you can’t look at it, can you? That black mass is much more likely to be just a phenomenon accompanying an aberration.”

  “Oh, okay…”

  “If we start saying that, though, we can’t be sure if we’re even ‘up against’ it. Maybe it wasn’t in order to come after you that it appeared, kind monster sir…just as a typhoon or a storm or any other meteorological phenomenon isn’t going after a person.”

  “But then, that thing was obviously after me and Hachikuji.”

  “Right…”

  Ononoki sounded so indecisive.

  “No good,” she said, seeming to realize this herself. “I’m just too captivated by your muscles to get my thoughts straight.”

  “It’s fine that you’re having trouble getting your thoughts straight, but could you go find a different reason?”

  “My sister might know something…but I can’t get in contact with her right now.”

  It goes without saying that by “sister” Ononoki meant Yozuru Kagenui─the violent onmyoji.

  Indeed, being an expert, and also an old acquaintance of Oshino, she might possess some knowledge about that object (if it even was one).

  She might…but actually, I was more relieved than anything to hear that Ononoki couldn’t contact her.

  Kagenui is one of those types I’d rather not deal with for the rest of my life, although things probably won’t go that way.

  “Where is she, by the way, and what’s she doing? It must be work, right?”

  “Yes, it’s work, and of course the details are a secret. Why are you being so nosy? The nerve.”

  “I wasn’t asking to be nosy…” I was only trying to be polite, but the onmyoji community took confidentiality much more seriously than I’d expected.

  “If you really want to know, you could offer me those muscles.”

  “Yikes, offer them like how?”

  “Gouge some out and feed it to me.”

  “Talk about scarring.” It seemed like we were on the same page, but we weren’t. “Whatever, it’s not like it’s a problem if we can’t get in touch with her. We’ll figure it out once night falls, anyway.”

  “Why is that? Do you suddenly become bright after dark?”

  “No, I don’t come with such a useful function… It’s just when Shinobu wakes up.”

  Ononoki visibly grimaced when she heard the name. A normally expressionless face twisting into a grimace really underscored the level of disgust.

  It was hard to blame her, though.

  Once upon a time, in this very abandoned cram school, Ononoki nearly got murdered by Shinobu─no, that’s not a good way to put it.

  Shinobu was clearly playing around then.

  She just toyed with Ononoki─of course it’d make her resentful, of course she’d hate her.

  In any case, I pretended not to notice her reaction and continued. “Appearances aside, she’s the king of aberrations─she’d be well-versed on the subject even if it weren’t for a months-long elite education at the hands of Mèmè Oshino, a pro just like Kagenui. Shinobu’s an even greater expert than the experts, in other words. She has to know something about that Darkness. Which is why we’re bound to learn what it really is once she wakes up.”

  “…Keh,” spat Ononoki, not hiding her displeasure.

  She had a lot to learn as a human being, I thought─no wonder, she was an aberration. Since she used to be human, maybe it was more accurate to say she’d learned to be too aberrational.

  “I’m not buying the knowledge of a geriatric like her.”

  “Don’t call Shinobu geriatric,” I scolded.

  “And ‘once she wakes up’? Are you saying that wicked woman is asleep right now? Unbelievable… To think she’d be napping while her master is fighting for his life.”

  “I’m not really her master…”

  But when it came to that part of our relationship, things got hard to explain. At the very least, it was extremely difficult to convince someone like Ononoki who had a perfect, or a logically consistent master-servant relationship… Maybe the smart choice was to give up on trying from the start.

  “What, are you not that vampire’s master, kind monster sir?”