by Nisioisin
Really, I feel like Hanekawa’s sleuthing percentage is a little too high, but I’d prefer if you chalked that up purely to her outstanding scholarly ability and intelligence. It’s not just because I constantly rely on her to help me out or anything.
Though she didn’t actually explain anything to me directly after my story was done─“Hmmm. You don’t say. Is this really the time?” was all she said.
I didn’t think that response was particularly unnatural─I just thought, This isn’t the time for that kind of thing, yeah, since it wasn’t the time for that kind of thing, and it wasn’t unnatural.
In other words, I didn’t notice.
Ononoki’s thoughtfulness, and Hanekawa’s thoughtfulness, and how they created a situation where it wasn’t unnatural.
“What do you think is the hardest thing to find?”
It was some time later─
All the stuff with the snake god was over, but the next stuff had started, somewhere around then─Hanekawa asked me that question.
I mean, since she asked me out of the blue like that, at first I had no idea what she was trying to say.
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Ononoki, dummy─you’ve ended up cohabitating, right? So I thought maybe I should ask you. What do you think is the hardest thing to find?”
“The hardest thing to find…”
Rings a bell.
Reminds me of when Shinobu and I were playing hide the donut in my room─umm, should I answer based on that?
“Let’s see, seems to me the hardest thing to find would be…”
“No, that question is just the warm up, how it seems to you and how you answer are irrelevant, Araragi.”
“Irrelevant? Huh? Then what’s the real question?”
“It’s ‘What do you think is the easiest thing to find?’”
“Now, that would have to be something ‘instantly recognizable’…”
But what does that actually mean? When you think about it, pretty much anything becomes “instantly recognizable” as soon as you find it.
As long as the answer isn’t “a smile,” of course…
“No, no, Araragi, you can’t let yourself get hung up on the ‘instantly recognizable’ part. I mean, it was a lie, after all.”
“A lie?”
“Well, lie might be going too far. But Ononoki wasn’t actually looking for anything. The hardest thing to find is, well, just that─you can’t find something that doesn’t exist.”
“…”
What?
Hang on a sec, I don’t disagree…but why did she lie to me like that?
“Did she tell me a little white lie just so she could hang out with me?”
“Nope,” Hanekawa flatly contradicted me.
A little too flatly.
“The answer to why she did it is ‘the easiest thing to find’─of course, things that stand out are easy to find, but what stands out? Nothing does more than someone who’s looking for something,” she said. “Constantly stopping to peer at things, squatting down, standing on tiptoe─it all adds up to some pretty suspicious behavior. Getting out of control and yelling weird things or whatever is another story, sure─but standing on the finger of a girl who looks like a doll as you search for something is pretty much just as conspicuous.”
“…”
Conspicuous─or even.
Ostentatious?
“In other words, Araragi, I imagine her intention was to make you conspicuous. So she ran you up the flagpole.”
“Like a flag…”
I─set an event flag, or rather, I was an event flag?
What kind of a guy am I?
“B-But why would Ononoki want to make me conspicuous? Did she want to parade a moron who flubbed the national exam?”
“It’s possible.”
It’s possible?
Come on, flatly contradict me already.
Now of all times.
“But not only that─you already know, don’t you, Araragi? That there was someone in town back in January that you absolutely had to avoid running into?”
“…”
“That you absolutely couldn’t run into─and who definitely didn’t want to run into you.”
Though ultimately you did run into each other, continued Hanekawa.
“He was coming to town on a daily basis, so it wouldn’t have been too surprising if you did cross paths─probably, Ononoki kept that from happening for you. By making you conspicuous, she made it easier for him to avoid you.”
“Made me easy to find─by making me hunt for something un-findable…”
So that I wouldn’t have a chance encounter─with him.
With that swindler.
“…”
“Of course, there’s no guarantee that he spotted you just because you were so conspicuous─so towering, but if he did, then he certainly would’ve avoided encountering you. Yotsugi probably just didn’t want you to have to deal with any more anxiety than you already had on your plate. A situation where nothing happens, where there’s no incident, nothing tale-worthy, is probably only going to happen thanks to someone’s consideration for you.”
Yotsugi Ononoki’s consideration.
A consideration I hadn’t even considered.
“Going on about how I’ll take care of things and not even noticing that my peaceful life is being propped up by something─what a clown. No wonder that bastard always makes fun of me.”
“Maybe so. It’s true that people have to go and get saved on their own─but in reality, it’s impossible to live life all on your own,” Hanekawa riffed on Oshino’s catchphrase. Perhaps it was an observation based on her experiences living overseas, even if she was still just location scouting. “You can’t live all on your own, and even if you wanted to─everyone ends up benefitting from someone’s good graces somehow. Eating, traveling, a change of clothes─even sleeping, probably. All of it’s possible thanks to someone else.”
“Well…yeah, totally. Though we go through our daily lives without ever being aware of it.”
“We sure do. That inconspicuous consideration is probably the hardest thing to find,” summed up Hanekawa.
Who knows how unpleasant that summary would’ve sounded in Ononoki’s monotone, but coming from Hanekawa, it somehow wasn’t grating─no.
Maybe it wouldn’t have sounded unpleasant even coming from Ononoki.
It was that kind of feeling.
001
When I say that Yozuru Kagenui doesn’t walk down any road, it’s neither a metaphor nor some impressionistic, high-concept declaration─she literally never sets foot on the ground, every day of her life governed by that constraint.
Which, on its own, makes it sound like a children’s game.
Living, proceeding, almost as if she were playing a one-woman game of king of the hill─where the ground is an ocean or the abyss, and you can only walk on raised things like stone steps or concrete walls. The first time I encountered her, she was standing on top of a mailbox.
Well, it might be a game if an elementary school student were the one doing it, but she’s a grown woman, so it comes off as pretty damn eccentric─not to mention the fact that elementary school students can play that kind of game because they weigh so little, whereas it’s actually pretty difficult for a grown-up. By now I’m sure I don’t need to tell how impressive her physical prowess is, but I find myself wondering if that prowess might actually be the result of the daily conditioning this eccentricity affords her.
However you dress it up, though, eccentric is eccentric─a little too eccentric to touch upon, so I’ve never asked her about it directly.
But as far as I can tell from what I’ve picked up here and there in our conversations, and from a certain origami enthusiast, there does seem to be a real reason─or at least, it’s clear she’s not just doing it for the physical conditioning, nor as a game.
Of course, even if there is a reason, I doubt any
one could uphold such a norm without some real drive.
As her enemy.
Or as someone who’s battled her head-on, battled and been driven through like that norm─well, well well well, I can safely say no one else is as scary as she is.
I’ve met quite a few experts in her field, Oshino included, but I have to say Yozuru Kagenui is the scariest of them all.
I’m terrified of her.
So much scarier than an aberration.
So much stronger than a demon.
An onmyoji who drives out aberrations by beating them up has to be rarer than an aberration─then again, it’s precisely because she’s that kind of person that her behavioral principle is so straightforward and easy to understand, while at the same time being irregular.
The randomness of never walking on the road is perhaps symbolic of her irregularity.
That reminds me, she told me once that she specializes in immortal aberrations because “with them, there’s no such thing as going too far,” but I wonder. Can I take those words at face value?
While her methodology may be easier to understand than Oshino’s or Kaiki’s, she’s the most antisocial of the whole bunch, the biggest misfit─there’s something I’d be curious to ask her, a human being who nonetheless dwells in a darkness darker than an aberration’s.
And who doesn’t walk on roads.
I want to ask her, What is a road?
I’m pretty sure she’d answer:
“Roads aren’t the only places what are good for walking.”
002
“Take that!”
“Gff!”
“And that! And that!”
“Gff! Gff!”
You might get the impression from these cute battle cries and grunts that the spectacle depicted here is nothing more than some friendly horseplay, but in fact they express an extraordinarily mild version of Ms. Kagenui beating the shit out of me. With a final “And that!” she released a back kick fit to tear off my entire flank─it felt as if a section of my torso popped out, like I was a Jenga tower or something, and I finally collapsed to the ground, ending our little back-and-forth.
“Well now, aren’t you out of shape─when we had that little dust-up over the summer, I reckon you had a mite more backbone.”
Not that I didn’t smash that backbone to splinters─noted Ms. Kagenui, leaping through the air and landing on a brand-new stone lantern.
Landing atop a lantern at a sacred shrine seemed like blasphemy, but she’d probably be forgiven at a shrine like this, where no god was currently present─though given that she couldn’t set foot on the ground, she might’ve done the same thing even at a shrine where a god was in residence.
For my part, I was lying flat on my back in the center of the ceremonial path, so I was obstructing any right I might have had to criticize her.
“Gk…” I moaned. Every inch of my body felt bruised. “This is ridiculous… I thought we agreed that fighting was out of bounds this time…”
“’Fraid not. The only restriction was on meta jokes.”
“Was that it? I really had the wrong impression…”
“That is, you were the one what invited a body here to fight, no?”
“Was I?”
I was.
I really had the wrong idea.
If you just heard that snippet, you might get the mistaken impression that I’m suicidal, but yes, on this particular occasion, I myself, of my own volition, asked Ms. Kagenui to spar with me─spar?
What, am I trying to become an MMA fighter or something?
And this wretched outcome─
“You know a body was going easy on you, right? Niiice and easy.”
“Yeah, I’m aware of that…”
Couldn’t she have gone a little easier on me, though? Niiicer and easier. Like a sponge filled with holes.
“I’m painfully aware of that…”
“By the by, what were you after? Challenging a body to a fight out of the blue like that.”
“…”
I had assumed that since she knew the circumstances, she’d be able to guess without a full explanation and accept my reckless challenge on those grounds…but apparently, Ms. Kagenui had beaten the shit out of me for no particular reason, without knowing the reason.
She’s really something.
That’s not the kind of thing just anyone is capable of.
Since she was Oshino’s classmate, I ended up unconsciously expecting her to be the “perceptive” type like him─but turns out she’s nothing like Oshino, or Kaiki.
Easy to understand in a good sense.
And easy to understand in a bad sense.
Though I guess they do have something in common, insofar as there’s nothing straightforward about dealing with any of them…
“Good question…”
February.
One day towards the end of February, I visited Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─that once-again-godless shrine where I’d almost died countless times, where there had recently been another casualty, was definitely not a place I went lightly, but this expert with whom I had business.
Ms. Kagenui, Ms. Yozuru Kagenui the violent onmyoji, had taken up residence there, so that day I had no choice.
Yes, just as Mèmè Oshino had lodged in the ruins of that erstwhile abandoned cram school while he was staying in town, Yozuru Kagenui was at present lodging at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─which took a you can’t be serious level of inner strength.
As an expert, she ought to know better than anyone what kind of a place that shrine is─I thought maybe she was there under orders from the ringleader of their little group of experts, but from what she said, it didn’t sound like it.
Apparently, and this makes perfect sense to me, or seems natural, but those two don’t exactly see eye to eye─even if she wasn’t raising a flag of rebellion, the fact that she was living at the shrine was at least done somewhat out of spite.
Though─there was the thing with Tadatsuru.
So calling it spite might be going too far─but Ms. Kagenui herself must’ve had some level of self-awareness about it, because rather than making her shikigami Yotsugi Ononoki stay there with her, she put her in my home as a kind of precaution.
Putting a tween girl in my home…
As a precaution?!
“…”
Well, anyway.
To give an update, or, a simple summary of my present circumstances: Last summer a legendary vampire drank my blood, and if you can believe it, I turned into a vampire myself, after which I somehow managed to return to being human, though with some lingering vampirism in my body─if that was all, it wouldn’t have been an impediment to me living life as a human being, but stupid me, I relied on that lingering vampirism to deal with the various difficulties that I encountered thereafter.
I don’t think I was wrong to do so.
If I hadn’t, I never would’ve been able to overcome those difficulties─and even my vampirism hadn’t been enough to overcome that incident involving the serpent deity.
So I’d had no choice.
Even if I had known how it would turn out.
But I do have to pay the price.
The price for relying on the power of an aberration─on the power of darkness.
As I continued to flirt with the darkness of my own accord, as I continued to stray into the darkness, I was once again suffusing my body with darkness─of my own accord.
Concisely put, the fact that I was turning into a vampire became plainly apparent─it was a transformation I hadn’t intended, and what’s more, it’s irreversible.
For now, I just don’t appear in mirrors or photographs─right, just a small bug, but if I keep relying on my vampiric power, I’ll start turning to ash under the sun’s rays, I’ll become unable to eat garlic, I’ll melt at the touch of holy water.
In return I get absolute, awesome power─but I have no hope of continuing to be part of human society.
In other words, from here on
out I can’t rely any more on my vampiric nature, regardless of what I have to cope with─that’s the long and the short of it.
