by Nisioisin
001
By revealing the true nature of Tsukihi Araragi, I will at last reach a full stop in our tale. As aggravating as she is clever, the story of my littler little sister will mark an end to this episode about me and the friends I’ve grown so close to. Not that our lives end with this story, or that the world ends with us. When all is said and done, our lives will be spared─besides, whether life, or the world, having an end promises any salvation is something we’d all do well to think upon more often. To long for an end that never comes, to wish to stop and to be unable. Don’t people experience and endure such a hell on an ordinary or extraordinary basis all the time?
Take me, for instance. Koyomi Araragi.
During spring break, I was attacked by a vampire─a legendary vampire, an ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire, the king and slayer of aberrations. My blood drained, my life and being drained, my physical body drained, my mind and psyche drained, afterwards nothing was left.
Correction. A monster was left behind. What was me was subtracted from me, and a monster remained. Hide as I might I could not hide, run as I might I could not run, and die as I like I could not die─it was the beginning of two weeks in hell.
The truth is, even now, I can’t truly say that those two weeks of hell are entirely over. Of course─even without bringing up my own unusual circumstances, there is something unreal about a word like “end” in the first place.
There is no shortage of people who choose to take their own life─but in a broad sense not even that act can truly be called an end. When the dust settles a suicide becomes its own departure point, the origin of yet new developments.
Even if justice eradicates evil…
A new evil will simply be born.
Evil may be eradicated, but it cannot be exterminated─in fact, it is quite possible for the new evil that arises to have started out on the side of justice.
Now, if my other sister, Karen, heard me say that, she’d be none too happy. In fact, her own brother or not, she’d probably make my face unhappy with her boot. She’d do so spouting that she wasn’t kicking me, the righteous blood flowing through her was.
But eventually she’d learn. Even if I never told her. It’s nothing difficult.
Even raised in a peaceful, happy-go-lucky nation and with only a normal education, she’d learn─that at the end of the day, justice is no more than a setup to be overhauled by some new justice.
Everything is an opening act, to everything.
The revolutionary can’t become a settler.
Backs are turned without fanfare, promises are broken without scruple, debts are left totally unpaid, and the weak are hardly protected.
Those are the rules.
The rules of this world.
However loudly my two sisters, my pride and joy, proclaim justice, the concept of justice is rooted in fighting evil, in being hostile to evil, so it’s inevitable.
Evil, too, has its reasons. Evil, too, has family.
Faced with this reality, few could persist in their righteousness without a shadow of doubt─and you’d be hard pressed to call those few just.
Ultimately, justice and evil aren’t binary opposites.
It isn’t a dualism, nor is this humanism.
When we start down that path, we never get started and never get finished.
We languish─and that’s how it goes.
Even supposing that a person can be just, it’s only in still images and commemorative snapshots rather than vids─eventually, the passage of time degrades meaning and significance. Negates the original sense.
Of course, this isn’t all bad─everything I’ve said hints, too, at the possibility that what exists as evil can likewise turn into justice. There is still room for penance, and for change.
Instead of stubborn pessimism, it’s probably best to accept that hope─just as after descending into hell, I found Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara, there is no telling from where salvation might come.
It can come from anywhere. We could put it this way: It is because nothing ends that salvation exists.
This placeholder might seem little more than hypocrisy, but I don’t see the harm in it. In fact, we might say that it is a clear and present representation of this final tale, replete with fakeness.
Well─in any case, I don’t want to be bombastic here on top of all that.
Let’s not speak, then, of justice and evil or of good and hypocrisy.
Of endings and beginnings.
Of living and dying.
Why put on airs?
We have no thesis. We won’t discuss noble themes.
The story I am about to tell is simply that of my sister.
Tsukihi Araragi. One half of the Fire Sisters.
My younger younger sister, my littler little sister.
In the second grade of middle school, born in April, fourteen years old, blood type B, prone to hysteria, cunning, subject to mood swings─
And also, immortal.
The tale of a mere fake.
002
“Hey, Koyomi, do you know the sure way to win at rock-paper-scissors? I bet you don’t. Of course not, I mean look at you! If I weren’t around to teach you stuff, you wouldn’t know anything at all. Ahaha. Well, what can I do. I guess I can be nice and teach you. I’ll lend you a hand, and the shirt off my back, streaking butt-naked until you get the whole picture.”
Karen Araragi.
My little sister, who’s in her last year of middle school, said this suddenly, with absolutely no preface, while doing a handstand.
A handstand. Which was actually typical of her.
By the way, just so there are no misunderstandings, allow me to clarify that it was not as if we were in our living room at home, or in Karen’s own room, or even in a gym or some other sports facility─we were in the middle of a residential neighborhood, atop a section of paved surface commonly referred to as a sidewalk.
Beneath the brilliant, glittering sun, perched above the asphalt, my sister, believe it or not, was upside down. In a way, it was even more embarrassing than if she had gone streaking.
The Nike Shox she was wearing, supposedly designed not only to absorb impact but to spring off the ground as you stepped, served no purpose at the moment.
“Huh? What are you blabbering on about? A sure way to win at rock-paper-scissors? You expect me to believe that? I mean, there isn’t any. That’s about as ridiculous as you.”
An acrobatic posture is an accomplishment in its own right, but since I’m hardly the type of person who enjoys being gawked at by the whole neighborhood, I’d have preferred to put at least three miles in both physical and emotional distance between myself and a mysterious schoolgirl standing on her head (if it were up to me, she’d either stop that or stop being my little sister), but I didn’t have much of a choice and answered her instead.
Maybe this stupid way of walking was part of her fitness regimen, but for my own part I was doing everything I could to get her to knock it off. I aimed sharp kicks to her head from behind whenever I saw an opening, but she seemed to have eyes on her back like the hundred-eyed goblin and managed to dodge each and every strike.
I guess a martial arts junkie like Karen was just cut from different cloth. Without real gaps in her defense, I wouldn’t be able to kick her head─well, not that that was my goal.
I sure wouldn’t have minded landing one, though. It sounded like a great way of repaying her for her daily antics.
By the way, Karen’s hair was styled in her usual, old-school ponytail, but when she did a handstand, her long hair wound up touching the ground and dragging along, so she wrapped it around her neck like a scarf while she was upside down.
If I could gr
ab the end and give it a tug, I could choke her nice and good. I’d given that a few tries as well, but of course my attempts had all ended in failure.
Given that it was the height of summer, August fourteenth, with about a week left of summer vacation, a scarf of hair seemed like it would be too warm, or even hot (plus her face was just inches away from the baking asphalt), but perhaps it was precisely what Miss Karen Araragi’s Spartan nature craved.
A woman on fire─she even liked to call herself “a human fireball.” The first character in her name meant fire, but I almost wanted to scrunch it together with the second to yield the one for phosphorus.
“Heheh. But there is a way. As surely as I exist.”
With that declaration, for a moment Karen appeared to sink, but then ricocheted up like a powerful spring, performed an agile, elegant somersault, and returned her body to the right way round.
Karen Araragi, the woman in the jersey. I forgot to mention that she’s also quite tall.
Even though she’s a girl, still in middle school, and what’s more my little sister, Karen is taller than me (incidentally, I stopped growing in the second year of middle school, can you believe it), so when she stood upright, her eyes hovered higher than mine─um, in which case, maybe she ought to spend the whole rest of her life standing on her head? Was I self-centered to think so?
“Listen,” she said, “knowing it will completely change your rock-paper-scissors life. I’d kind of like to keep it to myself, but it’s thanks to you that I’m enjoying this fine day. Not that I’m trying to pay back that debt, just think of it as a special, cool gesture.”
Heck, I haven’t even shared this with Tsukihi, she added with a cheeky grin.
Her legs never stopped moving. She was marching backward at a brisk pace.
She was indeed agile, but it hardly surprised me at this point─when it came to physical prowess, including her sense of balance, she was a regular monster. Despite being human, maybe she was more monstrous than a vampire.
She wasn’t the Fire Sisters’ “enforcer” for nothing─without even recalling the whole bee commotion from the other day.
Compared to her ongoing training, walking backwards was almost normal.
It’s just that being seen with her tends to get very embarrassing. Generally speaking, though, that means everything.
“I don’t have a rock-paper-scissors life, let alone completely changing it.”
“Oh, but you might. Even morning, day, and night. Don’t reject possibilities, okay? Imagine the advantages of being great at rock-paper-scissors. For instance, Russian roulette. What if an argument over who goes first comes down to a game of rock-paper-scissors?”
“The probability would still be the same.”
Pretty remedial stuff she ought to have learned by her third year of middle school.
More to the point, when was I ever going to be forced to play Russian roulette? Once things came to that, I was most likely well on my way to kicking the bucket, no?
“Huh? The probability is the same? Are you sure? Isn’t the person pulling the trigger first at a disadvantage?”
“What if he doesn’t get a bullet? Then the chance of shooting yourself heightens.”
“Huh? What? Help me out here.”
“You see─”
“What does ‘heightens’ mean?”
“That’s what you don’t understand?!”
Was a simple word like “heightens” not part of her vocabulary? How did she ever manage to survive for fifteen years?!
And your backstory is that you have good grades!
“Heightens… Heightens…” she muttered. “Hmph. That sounds like the name of some demon.”
“You’re thinking of Hiten!” I hollered like a straight man, although to be honest I wasn’t sure if it was a demon. I considered myself a utility player when it came to fielding a joke, but I was rusty about some shows.
“Wait, the Dutch scientist who studied Saturn’s rings and wrote a pioneering treatise on probability, Christian…”
“I think you mean Huygens… It’s not even pronounced the same way. Besides, why would you not know what ‘heightens’ means and come up with Huygens?!”
“Hrrm, then who could it be… I feel like I’ve come across it somewhere.” Her arms folded, Karen got sidetracked into recalling some random name─search as she might, she was lost now.
“Hey, you want me to believe that someone with such a poor vocabulary actually knows a foolproof way to win at rock-paper-scissors?”
“It’s not about knowing, it’s about feeling. When it comes down to it, what you know or don’t know doesn’t matter, it’s what you can do, and do do…”
“Well, true…”
Just look at Hanekawa. She’s certainly a treasure trove of knowledge─but what’s so amazing about her, so exhilarating, is how she applies it.
The veni vidi vici of knowledge. No half-measures for her.
No wonder there are all kinds of crazy rumors about Hanekawa, like that she took the ancient Chinese imperial exams while in middle school, or that she passed the German A-levels over summer vacation as a high school freshman (I spread those rumors, by the way).
“So Koyomi, I might not know my probability theory, but I’ve survived Russian roulette and that’s what really matters.”
“You’ve played Russian roulette?!”
It wasn’t a hypothetical!
Seriously, it wasn’t a hypothetical?!
If it was true, and she survived, that meant her opponent blew his brains out!
Officer, we have a criminal case! A case involving my little sister!
“Hm? Oh, don’t worry,” Karen assured me. “Once we were down to the last chamber, my opponent chickened out and gave up. Bzzz, end of game.”
“I guess it’s fine, then… Wait, no, that’s so not fine.”
You Fire Sisters… I knew they got up to some insane stuff, but not that they’d been in a conflict where firearms made a showing…
Did I need to go to the cops for real?
“That Italian Mafioso was a pretty tough cookie, though.”
“What was an Italian Mafioso doing in our little country town?!”
“Mostly sightseeing, apparently.”
“Sightseeing!”
“You know how delinquents go on a school trip and get into a big fight with the local high school thugs in some manga? It was that sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?!”
If all this was true, it went well beyond playing at defenders of justice.
What had I done to deserve such a sister? Forget about justice, this slant-eyed Ponytail Head was defender of jack squat.
“It got pretty exciting toward the end! A real party─that’s how it got to Russian roulette. Ahaha, a Japanese girl playing Russian roulette with the Italian Mafia. That’s so globalist, you forget who’s from where.”
“In that case, how about we exile you and strip you of your citizenship.” It was time for Karen to leave Japan, if she cared about peace. “Hm? But wait a sec. If your opponent had the last chamber, that means you went to bat first, no?”
It was odd to be speaking of Russian roulette like it was baseball, but anyway, for the last one to fall to her opponent, she had to have been the first to place the gun to her head… But didn’t that mean she’d lost at rock-paper-scissors when they were deciding the order?
What happened to her sure way? Unless maybe it wasn’t one on one? If there were three of them─
“Koyomi, you idiot!”
Karen hit me. Across the face, for no good reason.
When it came to violence, my sister never hesitated. She studied at a dojo geared toward actual combat, and her skills were beyond first-rate, but when it came to mental composure she was a rank amateur.
Sadly.
“In a serious battle where lives are on the line,” she proclaimed, “I’d never use anything as underhanded as a sure way to win at it! I embody justice!”
What a pinhead. She’d forgotten what she’d told me only a minute ago.
Well, once we started talking about Russian roulette, the rest was probably all nonsense. The whole premise was bankrupt.
“What’s my name?!” yelled my sister.
“Uh, wasn’t that the line of an incredible villain?”
An incredibly funny one, too. What Jagi lacked in strength, he made up for in impact relative to his fictional brothers.
