Koyomimonogatari Part 2

by Nisioisin

  I raised my hands in surrender.

  Unlike Ononoki’s earlier gesture, this was the clearest possible body language.

  “I give up, I’ll help out, will-I-ngly. So this thing you’re looking for. It’s around here?”

  “Who knows, it might not be.”

  “…”

  How irritating.

  Not even a word of thanks?

  True, it’d be more efficient to hurry up and locate whatever she was looking for as soon as possible then bid her a peaceable farewell, rather than stand around bandying words like this.

  Instead of worrying later on about how things turned out for her, I could take care of this problem on the spot─that seemed like the best way to move ahead with my exam prep.

  …

  Wasn’t precisely this sort of stopgap mentality whittling away all my study time, though? Like, it’ll be more efficient in the end if I clean my room before I start studying.

  Well, either way, that ship had sailed─it was too late to change my mind and just head home. To begin with, Ononoki had her “Unlimited Rulebook” as a last resort.

  With that, it’d be a cinch to make me do anything she wanted─and submitting before the other person busts out the big guns is how you survive in this world.

  A magic bullet against the big guns.

  I guess that’s not badass, no matter how badass I try to make it sound…

  “Well, if you say it might not be around here, then we’ll have to bear that in mind. So, what should I be looking for?”

  “Hmm, good question.”

  “…”

  “Yaaay.”

  “…Yaaay.”

  Just let me go home alreadaaay…

  003

  Ultimately, it came to pass that I joined Ononoki on her search still ignorant of what it was we were searching for─Nadeko Sengoku had looked for an “object of worship,” but this was even more open-ended. How did I let myself get suckered into it? Yet I had, and that was that.

  I couldn’t get anything more out of her no matter how hard I pressed.

  That is, Ononoki herself only seemed to have the vaguest idea─and tried to gloss over that point, but while we hadn’t known each other for very long, we knew each other pretty well.

  From her statement “Apparently it’ll be instantly recognizable,” I could see that someone else had ordered her to find this thing, and that she herself was operating on only the vaguest intel.

  See, or rather, hear… An ordinary person, under ordinary circumstances, couldn’t look for something based on information so vague it was accompanied by an “apparently,” but I suppose it was more or less par for the course for a familiar.

  A mission with an unknown objective, a search with an unknown target.

  As an expendable asset belonging to an expert, maybe she wasn’t permitted to question her owner─but anyway.

  Despite not being owned by anyone or ordered not to ask questions, I ended up joining this ill-informed search party.

  It was almost like I was a familiar myself─and I wasn’t being used by an expert but by a shikigami, so go figure.

  Where I stood, in this scenario.

  “I’d pretty much finished a creep around this area─I was just thinking I should try looking somewhere else when I ran into you.”

  “I see… Too bad.”

  If I’d only taken the next train, I could’ve avoided this whole encounter? This just wasn’t my day.

  “Oh, and just to be clear, when I said ‘a creep,’ I wasn’t talking about you, okay?”

  “Why would you be?”

  “As far as the search goes, the thing I want you to help me with…” she went on as if I hadn’t said anything.

  It’s a breach of etiquette to play dumb and ignore a retort like that. Or maybe she never ratified that treaty? Or she wasn’t talking about me, but she does think I’m a creep?

  “Is expanding my field of vision.”

  “Your field of vision?”

  “I hit a dead end─and started to think I needed to change my perspective.”

  “Well, I mean, start thinking whatever you want, but if it has something to do with me, could you clarify what it is you want me to do? Are you basically saying that when you’re searching for something, the more eyes the better?”

  “I wonder, what would be better?”

  “Stop answering my questions like that. Setting my teeth on edge doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

  “Oh? Then what is it setting? An event flag, like in a dating sim?”

  “No flags are getting set with a girl as young as you.”

  “A flag is like a banner, right? So setting a flag means raising a banner…but is it a battle standard, or are we surrendering? Tough call.”

  “…”

  This young shikigami, with her robotic thoughts and actions, occasionally, which is to say frequently, got her priorities backward. Not that I always made the right call when it came to my priorities, given that I was out here accompanying her on her treasure hunt when I absolutely needed to be studying, but one thing I could say for sure was that what this flag might or might not be signaling was pretty damn low on the list of priorities.

  That’s about as easy a call as they come.

  “So yeah, basically, it’s not about more eyes, instead I want to change my point of view. Since, as you can see, I started out as someone’s cherished doll. I’m an ankle-biter.”

  “An ankle-biter.”

  “In other words, I don’t have the requisite altitude to carry out a search like this. I mean, when you’re looking for something in your room and you’re stumped, you get up on a chair or a desk and scan the room, right? Tall people are at an advantage in searching for things.”

  “Hmm…from a perspective perspective, sure. If the thing you’re looking for is hidden by something, it’ll probably be easier to find with a bird’s-eye view…”

  Not always, though, of course.

  There are places that are easier to burrow into if you’re an ankle-biter─if you’re small, and sometimes a low perspective is actually more advantageous.

  Her owner must have tasked her with this search precisely because it required a low perspective─but having hit a dead end, I guess Ononoki decided she needed my help.

  “Listen, though, Ononoki. It’s true that I’m taller than you…but that’s only relatively speaking. Objectively I’m not all that tall, you know?”

  “Anyone can see that. Even someone as short as me. You’re objectionably not very tall.”

  “Objectively, not objectionably.”

  “Objectively speaking, you’re objectionable.”

  “Nope. That’s just your point of view.”

  “My perspective is the whole problem. Sure, your height isn’t going to make that much of a difference, Monstieur…but here’s the thing. You’re studying for your college entrance exams, so you must be familiar with the branch of mathematics known as addition?”

  “You don’t have to be studying for exams to be familiar with that branch of mathematics.”

  “Naturally, a mathematical girl like me knows about it too.”

  “Mathematical girl…”

  Wasn’t that the title of some ancient book on Japanese arithmetic?

  Man, Japan is really something. Before we had magical girls we had mathematical girls─maybe the popular culture of this country really hasn’t changed all that much since ancient times.

  “I find that hard to believe about you, Ononoki…”

  “Rude. Shall I prove it to you? I’ll tell you what the largest prime number is.”

  “The second you said ‘largest prime number,’ what you proved is that you know zero about math.”

  “I’m the one who discovered the concept of zero.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Right now we’re talking about addition. We take my really short height, add your pretty short height to it, and abracadabra, aberrationcadabra, it becomes a really pretty
tall height. About nine feet, specifically.”

  “…”

  Thanks for rubbing it in about my height, but that aside─to put Ononoki’s mechanical statement in terms that even someone of my limited linguistic skill could understand, she was in effect saying, “Let me ride on your shoulders.”

  The cherished dream of a cherished doll.

  Well, even if nine feet was a bit of an overstatement, we’d definitely clear six, giving Ononoki a bird’s-eye view that afforded a completely different perspective on her search─hmm, a tween girl shoulder ride event, huh?

  That was not what I’d been after, and I had no illusions that an event could make up for my depressing exam results, but if it would get me home even one minute sooner, then I had no choice.

  A flag had apparently been set whether I liked it or not, so to get out of that as well, I had no choice but to give this tween girl a ride on my shoulders.

  Wait, hang on.

  This wasn’t a first, was it?

  A shoulder ride event reminded me of this crazy occasion when I was the one getting the shoulder ride, if you can believe it─I ended up being the talk of the town for a while thanks to that.

  What a sorry urban legend.

  For someone who’d even been a vampire.

  As a shikigami, Ononoki certainly had the strength to carry me on her shoulders, but in this case it was clearly better the other way around─there’s a balance to everything. And it’s only by preserving that balance that we can maintain the proper order of things.

  But I was dealing with someone who lacked common sense.

  In addition to common sense, Ononoki also lacked things like consideration, and humanity─probably best to make sure we were on the same page. In fact, I preferred to have it in writing, but…since there wasn’t time for that, I’d have to make do with an oral response.

  Either way, I was probably overthinking it.

  Maybe thinking it over at all was a waste of effort─regrettably, however, Ononoki’s reply was totally divorced from any human response I might’ve expected.

  “Ononoki. There’s something I need to know.”

  “Something you need to know? Uh-uh, if you want to know what it feels like to embrace me, you’ll have to wait till after the mission’s over.”

  “Enough with the jokes… For this addition you’re talking about, it’s cool if you ride on my shoulders, right? I know you’ve got superhuman strength, but I still think it would look better than doing it the other way around, yeah? Don’t want to be too conspicuous, you know?”

  “Somehow I get the sense that’s not the only reason,” Ononoki prefaced, making her seem suspiciously well-versed in human emotion despite being a shikigami, after which she continued, “but no, Monstieur.”

  “Huh? What’d you say?”

  “No, Monster.”

  “Hey, what happened to the u and the i?”

  “You and I are right here, so stop quibbling. Listen, Monstieur. I won’t ride on your shoulders.”

  “Huh?”

  “I won’t squeeze your cranium with my thunder thighs.”

  “You can just leave it at ‘I won’t ride on your shoulders.’ And when I ask you to repeat yourself, say the same thing again the second time.”

  “I won’t ride on your shoulders, and you can’t ride on mine. Think about it, the loss would be too great if we did it that way.”

  “Loss?”

  “Whoever ended up on whoever’s shoulders, it would involve sitting, right? We’d only be adding on that person’s seated height. You may have a lot of confidence in your seated height, Monstieur, but your seated height plus inseam wouldn’t be shorter than your seated height, would it?”

  “How could that be true for anyone? My leg length isn’t a negative number.”

  “I also discovered negative numbers.”

  “You’ll get the Fields Medal for sure. Hell, they’ll establish the Ononoki Medal.”

  “The Ononoki Medal. That’s got a captivating ring to it.”

  “So by ‘loss,’ you meant that if one of us rode on the other’s shoulders, we wouldn’t be as tall as you hoped─but, still and all, Ononoki. That’s an unavoidable loss. I don’t see any way to get a higher perspective outside of, or above and beyond, a shoulder ride. Even if I held you up, at best you’d be at the same height as me.”

  “That’s not holding me up, that’s just holding me tight.”

  “Okay then, even if I tossed you upsy-daisy.”

  “I know I look like a little girl, Monstieur, but that doesn’t mean I want to be treated like one… Seriously, it’s simple. I just have to do the same thing I always do.”

  “Always do?”

  “If I call it ‘the thing she always makes me do,’ does that help?”

  “…?”

  It didn’t.

  That is, I didn’t want it to.

  004

  A few minutes later.

  I stood looking out from a lofty vantage point.

  That is, I was standing atop Ononoki─atop one of her fingers, which was thrust upward as if she was pointing at the heavens.

  “…”

  It’s not totally clear to me what her primary role as the familiar of an expert really is─but the role she actually carries out in the course of her day-to-day duties seems largely to approximate that of a chauffeur.

  Though obviously I don’t mean that this tween girl actually drives a car─the expert who employs her “can’t set foot on the ground,” so instead, Ononoki ferries her employer around on her finger or her shoulders or her head.

  Transporting someone around like a piece of luggage is impressive, and I’ve always been impressed by Ms. Expert’s ability to be transported like that as well─but never in a million years did I think that I’d have the pleasure.

  Okay, true…

  This way there was no loss…

  In fact, not an inch of my legs was wasted (whether or not I have confidence in their length is another story); moreover, the length of Ononoki’s arm and finger were added in as well, so I was in fact looking down from a height of “about nine feet,” as she had initially, and confoundingly, predicted.

  That other time I’d “gotten” a shoulder ride, my perspective had been pretty damn high as well, but this was definitely higher─I mean, I could never be on the bottom of this particular arrangement…nor, ordinarily, on top either.

  Balancing atop a single finger?

  What was I, a basketball?

  Not that I was being spun around, but as someone with a not particularly good sense of equilibrium, standing on her finger at all, however unsteadily, seemed entirely down to how good she was at adjusting the balance for me.

  It was a bit like a ride, and while this wasn’t the time or the place, I was enjoying this bit just a bit.

  “When you carry her around, do you maintain the balance for her like this?”

  “Nope, with her there’s no need. She’s got her own special riding style─though I do have to be extra careful not to make a mistake and dump her on the ground.”

  If I did, she’d be pissed off for real, said Ononoki.

  “Pissed off for real, huh…”

  For reals.

  Shinobu slept through all of this, incidentally. Given how badly she and Ononoki get along, she may’ve been awake and just playing possum.

  What sort of demon acts like a possum, though? Seems like an unbelievable step down for an aberration.

  “I’d get the blame even if it was her own fault. There isn’t much technique involved, but I do have to be really careful, it’s pretty rough. It’s so much more relaxing to carry you, Monstieur, since I know you won’t complain at all.”

  “I hate to say it, Ononoki, since it makes me happy that you think so, but I’m not that easygoing.”

  In that sense, this was the perfect height.

  It’s not like I’d get off without a scratch if she dropped me, but as long as I didn’t land on anything really t
errible, it wouldn’t be life-threatening, nor would I lose consciousness, so I’d be able to complain to Ononoki to my heart’s content.

  “…”

  Speaking of dropping things.