by Nisioisin
“A-ha. So she’s like a little sister to you.”
“Don’t go around assigning my acquaintances to whatever position.”
“She does call you her big brother.”
“………”
I’d told him too much.
What an honest chump.
It was like I couldn’t tell a lie…
No, I was just bad at hiding things.
“And that ‘big brother’ of days gone by,” Oshino added, “is now ‘li’l Ragiko’… Time really does fly like an arrow.”
“I don’t get called that! That was just a joke Kanbaru made!”
“I think it suits you well, though.”
“Forget about it!”
“You know, I’ve been calling those girls ‘li’l missy’ tsundere and ‘li’l missy’ class president all this time, while you are simply Araragi, and I was beginning to feel prejudiced. From now on, I’ll be more impartial and call you li’l Ragiko.”
“Please, don’t! I’m begging you!”
“It does feel like it could stick.”
After we went back and forth like that for a bit, Oshino got back on track.
“At any rate. You managed to finish your job on time regardless. Good work, Araragi.”
“Oh… Yeah, I guess.” I’d never expected to be thanked by Oshino. I was so taken aback that my reaction must have seemed a little odd.
“I have to say, I couldn’t ever have done it myself. Give my thanks to that missy, too. Er, uh─”
Oshino started to think.
He must have meant Kanbaru, but… Ah, he wasn’t sure what to call her. That made me realize he hadn’t settled on a tag for her yet. Hanekawa was li’l missy class president, Senjogahara was li’l missy tsundere, and Hachikuji was li’l lost girl… So Kanbaru would be, say, li’l miss sporty?
“That li’l miss pervy.”
“……”
It seemed that Oshino saw Kanbaru more as a pervy character than as an athlete.
Not that I didn’t see where he was coming from.
I thought he’d hit the mark, myself.
“Couldn’t you at least draw the line at something like ‘li’l miss sapphy’? She is, despite it all, a girl…”
“Huh? You think so? Okay, I’d be fine with that. Anyway─both you and her are now even with me. Let her know that.”
“Even? So─we don’t owe you anything?”
“Right.”
“There’s something I wanted to ask you just to be sure, Oshino─may I?”
“What is it?”
“It seemed like the moment we entered those shrine grounds, Kanbaru suddenly started feeling sick… Is that relevant?”
I’d had Kanbaru wait at home because I wanted to ask Oshino the question when she wasn’t around.
Hmm, Oshino said with a sidelong glance.
“Araragi─what about you?”
“Huh?”
“How did you feel? Did you get sick or anything?”
“No─I was fine.”
“I see. Well, you’d given little Shinobu your blood the day before─so I guess it makes sense. It means you were lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Remember what I just told you? It isn’t something I could have ever done. That shrine used to be the center of this town.”
“The center? Really? If anything, I’d say it’s placed─”
“Not in terms of location. Well, it stopped being used long ago. There shouldn’t be anything to the place nowadays, seeing how everyone has forgotten about it, but─Shinobu.”
“Shinobu? What about her?”
“You know how she wandered into this town─she’s a legendary vampire from a noble bloodline. A vampire, the king of aberrations. I guess you could say her influence activated the spot. Bad things─were starting to gather there.”
“There? You mean─at that shrine?”
That shrine─even the gods seemed not to visit.
Bad things.
“Yep. You could say it had become like an air pocket, or maybe a kind of hangout─places like that exist, centers. Part of why I stayed here even after Shinobu’s case ended was to find that hangout─though my main goal, of course, was to collect aberrations. Ha hah. I got to meet missy class president and missy tsundere thanks to it, so I will say I had my fun.”
“When you say bad things─what exactly do you mean?”
“Various things. It’s not something I can put concisely…or rather, these things don’t have names yet. You couldn’t even call them aberrations at this point.”
A haunt frequented by the bizarre.
That─is what it had become.
What gathered there─weren’t humans.
The literally bizarre had.
“And Kanbaru started feeling sick─because of that?” I asked.
“That’s right. Li’l miss sapphy’s left arm is still a monkey’s─so it’s easier for her to be affected by bad things. It’s the same for you, but as aberrations, there’s an overwhelming difference in rank between her monkey and Shinobu. It means that while she’s lost her resistance against those kinds of phenomena, you’ve actually built up a decent resistance to bad things.”
“…Did you know all along, Oshino? That Kanbaru would feel that way?”
“Don’t glare at me. You’re always so spirited, Araragi, something good happen to you? It’s not like li’l miss sapphy suffered anything in particular. And─she owed me. She wouldn’t be paying me back unless she went through a few struggles. Her, especially. Don’t you agree?”
“……”
He─may have been right.
It was just that I couldn’t see it in such a strict light. Maybe that suffering was something Kanbaru needed to experience. At least, I couldn’t see her complaining to Oshino even if she found out. That was the kind of person she was.
“Well, the rest is up to her now,” Oshino said. “The fate of that left arm is her problem. If she can make it to twenty without incident─she’ll be freed from her aberration.”
“That’d be nice.”
“Hm. You’re a good person, Araragi. As usual…”
“What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds like you’re trying to imply something.”
“Not really. I was just wondering if you weren’t a little jealous. Of her going back from fellow non-human to human again.”
“…Not really. I’ve already made peace with myself when it comes to my body. It’s all sorted and settled, so─stop trying to stir up trouble by saying those kinds of things. Don’t say anything unnecessary to Kanbaru, either. I don’t want her to feel like she owes me anything.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. You stuck the talisman on the door of the main hall, right? That’s a little bit of a lazy job, but it’s fine. It should scatter those bad things to some degree.”
“To some degree?”
“A talisman placed by an amateur isn’t going to change things that dramatically. In fact, it’d be an issue if they did. We only need to nudge the natural flow of things─or else who knows what could happen elsewhere. In that sense, the choice to do a half-assed job by placing it on the door might not have been a bad choice at all.”
“…Why couldn’t you do it? Whether it’s aberrations or whatever bad things that precede them─that’s your field of expertise, isn’t it? Or is this a case of you forcing yourself to come up with a job so that Kanbaru could pay off her debt to you?”
“I won’t say that wasn’t a factor, but it really would’ve been hard for me. Just look at me, I’m as thin and wimpy as I seem. I don’t have the stamina to climb up a mountain.”
“That’s not the line of a wanderer going from journey to journey.”
“Ha hah. Was I being transparent? Well, yes, that was a joke. Physical stamina isn’t the issue─it’s more of a mental thing. Just like what happened to you and li’l miss sapphy because you’re aberrations─I stimulate those bad things needlessly because I’m an expert. I’d have no
choice but to do something if they decided to attack me, and in that case, I’d end up turning that hangout into a perfect vacuum. There’s no telling what might stream into it next─worst case, we’d have another Shinobu.”
“I don’t really get it…but is it like how humans shouldn’t affect the balance of the natural world just to make things more convenient for us? Sending someone like me or Kanbaru instead of the too-powerful Oshino going there helped to keep them calm?”
“Yeah, something like that,” he brushed me off.
The truth must have been a bit more complicated─or maybe it was something else entirely─but there didn’t seem to be any point in delving into the matter.
Kanbaru and Oshino were even now.
Just as long as that much was clear.
“Not just her, you know,” Oshino said breezily. “Your debts with me are all settled now, too.”
“…Huh?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. Those didn’t seem like words he would ever speak. “I owed you…five million yen.”
“In cash terms, yes. That was how much your job this time was worth, though. You essentially managed to prevent the Great Yokai War from taking place.”
“I-It was that big of a deal?”
I wished he would’ve told me earlier.
But when I thought about it, the job was big enough to instantly cancel out Kanbaru’s bill despite her headache of a case─so I should have expected him to deduct a suitably sizable chunk of my debts, too. Not taking yourself into account sounded beautiful, but in reality it just made you feel like an idiot…
“We’re all settled,” Oshino assured, “but I almost feel like I owe you a little bit of change. Whatever. Let’s talk about that girl─the missy who’s like your little sister. You’re making this sound like a pretty urgent matter, after all.”
“Am I?”
“It’s only her arms and neck and head that’s unaffected, right? Ouch. Once the Jagirinawa comes up to her face, that’s it. Araragi. The Jagirinawa is an aberration that kills people. I need you to understand that. This case─is a rather serious one.”
“………”
I’d thought─that might be so. Those scale marks had a sinister air. But it felt so much more grave coming from an expert’s mouth.
It wasn’t a deathly aberration.
It was a─killing aberration.
“Snake venom can kill humans─they say. Neurotoxins, hemotoxins, cardiotoxins, the whole gamut. If you don’t go at it with a serum, you can get pulled into it. Snakes─are tricky, you see.”
Though, surprisingly enough, the poisonous ones tend to taste better─Oshino added.
“Oshino… Exactly what kind of aberration is the Jagirinawa?”
“Before I let you know, tell me the title of the book missy was reading in the bookstore aisle. You said to miss sapphy that you’d tell her later, but you never did, did you? What book was it? Looking at it made you feel certain that there was something about that girl.”
“Oh… Well, it’s exactly what you’d expect. A twelve-thousand-yen hardcover called A Complete Collection of Snake Curses.”
“…The title makes it sound like a recent book. Not from before the war or the Edo period.”
“Yeah. The cover looked brand-new, too.”
But that title─was more than enough to make me think of the dead snakes, chopped into five, that I’d seen the day before. Of course, as soon as I witnessed the carcasses on Sunday, I vaguely suspected Sengoku, whom we’d just passed on the stairs…but it was when I saw the book’s title that my suspicion turned into certainty.
Long sleeves, long pants.
But her long pants─may not have been for entering the mountains, and more a way to hide the scale marks imprinted on her legs.
In fact, that had to be it.
This body.
I hate having this body─she’d said.
Kanbaru must have understood the way Sengoku felt. The bandage wrapped around her left arm was there to hide her monkey’s arm. When I thought about it, that was on a different level from me growing out my hair in the back to hide my bite marks. And come to think of it, when Kanbaru wanted to show me what lay under the bandages, she’d invited me to her house─not wanting anyone else to see.
In that sense, those two faced similar circumstances.
Those two.
What could they be─talking about right now?
……
Miss sapphy, you better not be seducing her.
I’m trusting you… I’m trusting you, all right?
“My limited knowledge doesn’t cover what kind of book that is,” Oshino admitted, “but it must include information on the Jagirinawa. Serpent shamanism is basically synonymous with snake curses, after all…”
“So are serpent shamans like witch doctors or something?”
“Well, yes. These aren’t naturally occurring aberrations─they’re commanded by someone’s clear, or explicit, malice… Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be malice, but siccing the Jagirinawa on someone sounds like nothing else.”
“Oh…I heard that, too.”
“Hm? You did?”
“Well, yeah.”
Sengoku didn’t give me a name.
It was partly my fault because I didn’t feel like grilling an introvert like her─but Sengoku stubbornly refused to give up a name.
The culprit’s name.
But─she did tell me it was someone in her class.
A friend─from her class.
What with a curse placed on her, I thought “former friend” was more like it.
I told Oshino, “It’s a middle schooler’s idea of a charm─some sort of fad, apparently. These charms go a little deep into the occult… Most are complete whiffs, of course, but I guess you could say Sengoku is the unlucky exception.”
“Unlucky, huh?” Oshino echoed suggestively. “Charms and curses. I suppose the two are similar. But Araragi, from what you’re saying, the perpetrator is a rank amateur, a middle schooler… The Jagirinawa isn’t supposed to be the kind of aberration that a beginner can handle.”
“Like a broken clock getting the time right, couldn’t it have been a fluke?”
“Could it? Hmm. Why did this classmate want to curse missy to begin with?”
“According to the bits and pieces I gathered from her, it was actually over love. Someone being head over heels. This friend had a boy she liked, and that boy told Sengoku he loved her, but not knowing any of that, Sengoku turned him down─earning her resentment.”
“Hm. How typical.”
“Well, this is a middle-school romance we’re talking about.” Not that the views of someone who’d never dated a girl until his last year of high school counted for much.
“If she started dating him without knowing, that’s one thing,” commented Oshino, “but you’d think turning him down wouldn’t have mattered.”
“It’s about feelings, I guess. Maybe when Sengoku turned him down, the other girl resented something precious to her getting dissed?” I made it sound like my interpretation, but it was Kanbaru’s take. How could I hope to understand the mentality of a middle school girl? If Kanbaru thought so, I could only suppose that she was right.
“Huh. Well, who cares about the reason. People don’t need reasons to hate each other. So things soured─and ended with a curse. Ah, how fleeting friendship is. That’s why I don’t make friends.”
“…Is that so.” I wanted to retort to that, but if I tried to quip at everything Oshino said, our conversation would last through the night, and then some… I needed to control myself. I couldn’t leave those two waiting forever. “Sengoku said she was reading A Complete Collection of Snake Curses because she wanted to figure out how to get rid of hers. Today wasn’t the first time she read that book, either. She’d been going back to it over and over for a while now, almost every day, reading, then reading some more, and consulting it─to try every curse removal, ritual purification, exorcism, and the like by herself.”
That’s what those were.
The sliced snakes.
It wasn’t like a ritual─a ritual was precisely what it was. Using a chisel struck me as grotesque at first, but it seemed that those were the only bladed objects Sengoku owned. Maybe the most readily accessible edged tools for a middle school girl was in fact her chisel set.
