by Nisioisin
Somehow that sounded even more frightening.
“At any rate, I wonder what happened to Oshino after he formed a scrum with Kagenui or Kaiki for their final suicide attack? After he entrusted that letter to Miss Hachikuji. What if he was victorious in his final battle? We’d look like total idiots.”
“With those zombies still about, ’tis unlikely he was victorious outright.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Methinks a little rice shower will not serve against 6.5 billion zombies. As his letter said, a final suicide attack would likely fail─we can but pray that he hath not yet found the me of this world.”
“And if he has, then he’s become a zombie?”
“There is also the possibility that he has simply been slain.”
“I can’t stand that possibility. Even Kaiki’s death would weigh heavy on my conscience.”
Though even death probably couldn’t make an honest man out of that swindler.
While it may seem like we were strategizing right up to the end, what we were engaging in, right up to the end, was in fact small talk.
That, too, was─just like me.
Like us.
“Keheh.”
“Hahaha.”
“Heheh.”
“Heehee.”
At last we were just laughing, about nothing in particular.
And then─the moment arrived.
She arrived.
Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade arrived on the battlefield.
“…Urk!”
Her very being lay beyond the ken of humans.
I had no clue what kind of entrance she would make─and figured that dropping from the sky with the speed of a meteorite was probably more or less her standard practice.
Or maybe she’d float down on the wings sprouting from her back, silhouetted against the moon. Or, using her vampiric ability to transform her body into mist, she might appear before our eyes even more casually and suddenly than the zombies had. I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if she burst forth from the earth.
I could even conceive of some unexpected, grotesque entrance where she devoured her way out of our innards.
Well, however she did it, the one thing I couldn’t imagine, given my understanding of her character, was a surprise attack that might in any way be perceived as cowardly, so in that sense, at least, we could maybe relax a little.
Thus, while we were on our guard, we were also looking forward to a show, immodestly enough.
Wondering just what kind of colorful entrance Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade might make in the full glory of her power.
However─her entrance.
Utterly betrayed every one of our predictions and expectations.
Betrayed in a bad sense.
She─the aberration slayer, the legendary vampire who had brought the entire world to ruin─came on stage in the most literally pedestrian manner possible, climbing the steps of the mountain path just as we had done.
The zombies certainly had the edge on her in terms of the element of surprise.
She walked under the torii─and onto the shrine grounds.
Her appearance, though, sufficed to leave us speechless.
“Urk…”
“Hmph.”
While I could do nothing but groan, Shinobu nodded with understanding even as she covered her mouth in horror.
Nodded─at the miserable sight of herself as she was in this route.
Her entire body horribly burned.
Giving off the stench of corruption and dragging one leg behind her.
More zombie-like than the zombies.
More corpse-like than the corpses.
Seeing herself in that state, Shinobu nodded.
“So ’twas─self-immolation I chose, after all.”
The same as him.
The same, Shinobu repeated.
“Him”─her aforementioned first thrall?
The thrall who, despairing of himself after only a few years as a vampire, chose suicide?
Had to be.
I’m fairly certain he─abandoned his body to the sunlight, committing suicide by self-immolation.
His suicide, however, had been successful.
The Shinobu─no, the Kissshot─who stood before me now must have tried the same thing.
To follow him into oblivion, after assuring herself that the destruction of the human race was complete─as he had, so too did she surrender herself to the sun.
Then failed.
Her entire body was horribly burned, leaving her barely a shadow of her former self.
She failed to die.
And.
“…What a wretched creature,” Shinobu spoke beside me. In a poignant voice. “To go so far and yet not perish, such a foolish variety of immortality do we enjoy─and yet ’tis precisely what she deserves. To be reduced to this despite knowing thee─despite having encountered thee…”
’Tis naught but failure, she condemned.
I wondered if she was speaking to me, but as far as I could tell from her expression, she seemed to be speaking to herself.
It was too sad a soliloquy.
Too painful.
To share with me.
“Wherefore think to die─this me?”
“Ha.”
Kissshot finally emitted a sound.
At first I didn’t know what it was.
Maybe she couldn’t vocalize properly because her throat was half burned? I thought that was it, but then the guttural rumblings continued─and I remembered.
I remembered that it was her laughter.
Kissshot’s.
Guffaw.
“Ha”Ha”Ha”
“…”
“Ha!”Haha!”Hahaha!”Hahahaha!”Hahahahaha!”Hahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahahaha!”
Even with half her body burned away─even having failed to die.
Even as a potential suicide, even as a failed suicide.
Even after everything that had gone wrong.
Even then she laughed heartily.
And gruesomely.
The iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire─Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.
In her helpless immortality.
Made every inch a monster─her final, ultimate beauty.
Neither I, nor even Shinobu, could get a word in edgewise in the face of that guffaw─we couldn’t even move a muscle.
Right.
Even in that state─a failed suicide, her lover’s pact unfulfilled, half her body paralyzed, even then Kissshot was the mightiest presence in the world.
Even in that state─she was not the slightest bit enfeebled.
Even on the brink of death, her entire body horribly burned, neither I nor Shinobu, nor Oshino or Kagenui─no mere “human” could stand up to this aberration.
This monstrosity.
The aberration slayer and king of the night, the bane of all and sundry.
In part we were overwhelmed by that resonant laughter─but in any case, we wouldn’t have been able to move a muscle.
Doing it through sheer willpower.
Making up for it with your fighting spirit.
I could feel in my bones that such boys’ manga thinking would get us nowhere. Such was the disparity between us─and suddenly my hands, each holding a Kokorowatari, felt useless.
To the point that if I didn’t grip the hilts so tightly that my hands bled─I might lose those trump cards then and there.
It took me back, to the beginning.
And then I realized.
I finally understood.
Just how much consideration she’d shown me when, that time over spring break, we fought to the death─
“Ha!”Haha!”Hahaha!”Hahahaha!”Hahahahaha!”Hahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahahaha─then,” she said.
Finally uttering something resembling a word.
“Then…’twas possible. Such a future. Such a world. Such a route─’twas really possible, that I and thou would lean on one another.”
Laughing as she said this─she wept.
Like that time over spring break.
Shedding bitter, red tears─she wept.
“Keheh─what a comedy of errors. ’Twas possible, and yet─I spoiled everything, with my worthless jealousies. Thou wert lost to me when I absconded from the cram school, and I felt like a bird with but one wing, half my body plucked away. But…’twas never so poignant as this. As being confronted with the possibility.”
“…”
“Then─that disagreeable Aloha brat was right all along. As though he can see through everything─how ludicrous. Were it not so?”
The two of thee?
Turning upon us a gaze flooded with red tears, her eyeballs melting into cloudy murk, she addressed us directly for the first time.
She, who could kill us without so much as lifting a pinky─instead of killing us, with her face still drawn into a rictus, asked us that question.
“’Twere.”
It was Shinobu who answered.
She’d asked the question, and it was she who answered.
“Thou art quite the clown. A most amusing tale, indeed. Look at thyself─unable to die, even now. Even immortality hath its limits─this is what they mean by not knowing when to give up the ghost. This failed death. I say unto thee, the difference between us is not so great as ye might think. ’Tis a matter of only the slightest difference in the relationships we weave with those around us─”
Hachikuji being alive.
Hachikuji being gone.
“─And the conditions were not so different. For myself, the difference was not insurmountable. With just a touch of compromise on our part. If thou hadst opened thy heart just a little more to this man─trusted him, put thyself in his hands, ye might have been the same as I. History would have corrected for it. To put it plainly, I cannot for the life of me understand why thou didst fail.”
“…Haha. Tickles me to hear. For I cannot for the life of me understand thy success.”
I want the strategy guide.
So saying, Kissshot sat down on the spot─or rather than sit down, she more or less collapsed there on the grounds of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine.
Exhibiting no inkling of weakness.
But her crimson tears─had ceased.
“Myself from another world. And─my servant from another world.” With her eyes riveted on us, she said, “I shall return ye curs to thine own world.”
“…Huh?”
For a moment I couldn’t comprehend what she’d said.
Neither of us could.
And wait, how did Kissshot know right off the bat that we were travelers from another route─Shinobu and I were obviously familiar figures to her, but there was no way she could have perceived the truth in the blink of an eye.
I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t think she was endowed with such powers of deduction.
So how─in the same instant my question began to form, I guessed the answer.
It was Oshino.
Mèmè Oshino.
Eleven years ago, in the course of collecting tales of aberrations, Oshino had happened upon the urban legend about me and Shinobu─in other words, sometime around April or May, he’d become aware of the possibility that we were from another route.
And if he made some inferences from that.
And hinted at them─to her, while they were cohabitating in the ruins of the abandoned cram school─
About the whole route concept.
If at that point he’d told her about the existence of parallel worlds.
Though of course, even if he did, it probably went in one ear and out the other─because if she’d been attentive, the world wouldn’t have fallen into this state.
But actually seeing us.
Together like this.
When she, when Kissshot, saw Shinobu Oshino and Koyomi Araragi working together─it must have dawned on her.
And.
In a flash she must have put it all together.
Because this sight, of herself in someone else’s company, was what she’d sought for centuries─
“Return us to our own world… What dost thou mean?”
With no attempt to hide her suspicion, Shinobu glared back at herself.
In a sense, it was an appallingly tone-deaf response.
She wasn’t even trying to understand what was in the other party’s heart─though her interlocutor was herself, in this other world she was someone else, a stranger.
You’re not supposed to meet yourself, either in the world of the past or the world of the future─which is why I’d been careful not to meet myself eleven years ago─but now.
What did they see? What were they thinking?
How incompatible─are two different selves?
“What, dost thou mean to stay in this ruined─in this world that I have ruined? If ’tis possible, dost thou not wish to return, to thine own world?” demanded Kissshot─as though she were sounding us out.
“Aye─yet there is not sufficient energy for such.”
“If there were, wouldst thou wish to go?” the legendary vampire threw back in response. “If I consume, for instance, all my would-be thralls, my misbegotten thralls who now run rampant in this town, the resultant energy may be sufficient.”
“Thou speakest nonsense. ’Tis exactly why thou didst fail. Those zombies were once the residents of this town. Humans. Convert them not into energy.”
“Convert not humans into energy.”
“Never.”
“’Tis─most unlike me.”
“’Tis most like this me.”
“Then convert me,” Kissshot shot back, placing the palm of her hand on her own chest. “The spiritual energy thou couldst derive from Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade herself in her full glory, even though I be on the brink of death, should suffice for a journey to another route.”
Not just suffice─if we spent that much energy, we’d have change coming to us.
This time, I really did─let the two enchanted blades fall from my hands.
Of course.
In his letter, Oshino did make the over-the-top request that I save the world─but not once did he, in a single line or word, ask me to defeat Kissshot.
He wasn’t counting on me to accomplish anything so ambitious.
Facing her like this.
Showing ourselves to her, was enough.
That was all it took─to save her.
To save the world.
The girl standing there in front of me─had also meant the six hundred-year-old Kissshot.
If Oshino could see us, me and Shinobu wielding four deadly, enchanted great katana, could see us prepared for a violent end, no doubt he’d say:
You’re awfully spirited today. Something good happen to you?─and at least.
Something good did happen to her.
And so.
And so also to us.
“Convert thee into spiritual energy─by which thou meanest, drink thy blood.”
“Aye, needless to say, ’tis precisely my meaning.”
“And needless to say, thou wilt die.”
“Needless to say, I might as well be dead.”
“I see.”
That was all.
That was the extent of the conversation between Shinobu Oshino and Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade─they probably didn’t really understand one another.
In the end they were selves from different worlds, different people, strangers.
No way they’d understand or get through to one another.
And yet. And so.
They had no use for needless chatter.