by Nisioisin
Being asked for directions was already far too convenient to be a coincidence.
Coincidence. By and large, a product of malice─for such a nasty guy, Deishu Kaiki did say nifty things.
I suppose that came from a life lived on the front line. He’d been under fire, but instead of turning into a fighter, he’d remained a fraud─and an expert.
An expert and an authority─and Kagenui, too, was an expert and an authority.
An onmyoji.
The aberration roller.
Hm? I seemed to recall Shinobu having some hang-up about the word onmyoji─unless she was just hiding her tracks due to her so-called rule?
“What is wrong, my lord? Are ye thinking?”
“Thinking… Yeah, you bet. Or worrying.” Well, it was no use asking her. Pressing her wouldn’t get me anywhere. Right now, it was better if I focused on what to do next. “Kagenui and Ononoki… Picking those ruins as their base does seem like something a colleague of Oshino’s would do. I probably need to attend to this sooner rather than later. In fact, I ought to go ahead and take action today─”
“Ho-ho. Time for another battle? I can feel my spleen tingling already.”
Shinobu was grinning, visibly amused.
I considered getting into an accident on purpose, maybe ramming us into a telephone pole, but if I did, neither Shinobu nor I would emerge unscathed.
Some immortal pair we were. We couldn’t even crash a bicycle safely.
“No battles. We’re going to talk, just talk,” I said.
According to Karen, her master would be an even match for Kagenui─and we had a bona-fide aberration in Ononoki.
These weren’t opponents I was eager to take on.
I didn’t belong to some warrior race. When I came back from the edge of death, there was no exponential burst of power.
“It’s what Oshino would call a negotiation─if they can be made to understood that you and I are harmless, we won’t get hunted,” I explained.
“Hunted, eh? Perhaps that is not what they are here to do.”
“Why are they here, then?”
“Who can say? I am simply diverting myself by toying with thy words. My job is to be the voice that asks, ‘Is it?’ Heh. But calm thyself. We are one in body and spirit and share a single fate. In the push, my strength is thine.”
“Good to know.”
Not that I planned to rely on her.
Even if I didn’t use Shinobu as backup, she’d be in the background─the mere fact that we were one and our fates were linked would give me strength in a pinch.
It was at the end of the previous month that I reconciled with Shinobu─but come to think of it, she’d joined with me in body and spirit, joined in my fate, from the moment we first met. I’d failed to notice such a huge thing until just recently─had never thought to notice.
“’Tis hot… I must avouch that I hate the sun. Perhaps I should have hidden in thy shadow as ye urged. My body is turning to ash. This cap is worthless. Yet would I melt were I not a vampire.”
“Ha, I bet. Even the asphalt melts in this sort of heat.”
“Is this the global warming they speak of? Hmph─the Earth has been warming and cooling erst long ago.”
“Right?”
“Why the clamor over a change of a mere hundred or two hundred degrees?”
“If it went up and down by two hundred degrees, we’d be past clamoring.”
Okay… I should probably head straight for the ruins after I got home.
It wasn’t just a matter of wanting to handle this as quickly as possible. As a basic negotiation tactic, I wanted to take the initiative.
Lately, in shogi, the consensus seemed to be that the player who makes the first move is actually at a disadvantage, but it wasn’t like I was going there to confront them. This wasn’t a match.
We were going to talk.
Even if the two-man cell of Kagenui and Ononoki hadn’t come to our town for Shinobu and me, they were experts, so I highly doubted they were just here on vacation.
It probably had to do with aberrations.
In which case, I ought to clue them in on the town’s peculiar circumstances even if that made me a busybody─or else, this might come to affect Kanbaru or Hanekawa.
As it occurred to me earlier, the aberrations that resided in those two weren’t particularly immortal, but there was no guarantee they might not get tangled up in some mess and collaterally slayed.
It almost sounded laughable when I put it into words, but it would be just like those two. Suruga Kanbaru had the worst luck, and Tsubasa Hanekawa easily got mixed up in things.
I wouldn’t be doing any studying today.
I’d rest my liver for a day, so to speak.
It was fine─I was prepared for this.
Over spring break, when I decided to spend the rest of my days with an ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire, and to live until we died─to die until we lived, I knew I’d be dealing with this sort of stuff. It was my natural duty, even a right.
This barely qualified as trouble. I wasn’t even on the front line, and this was no match. To me─to us, it wasn’t even a minor event.
There was no flag to trigger and no choice to make. Imagine what Oshino would say if I panicked over this much.
“Well, if that’s the deal, I could even drop by the ruins on my way home…”
Glancing at Shinobu, who was beginning to nod off in the basket─it was the middle of the day, so I guess she was sleepy after all─I considered going to the abandoned building right away.
But before we left Mister Donut, I’d spent one of the two thousand-yen bills that Kaiki had mercifully spared on a box of donuts to bring home as a present to my little sisters (Shinobu kept nagging from the side, “What about me? Where is my present?!” like that was going to happen), so instead I decided to drop it off first.
I could also give it to Kagenui and Ononoki, but I had to admit that it seemed a little insincere to repurpose something as a peace offering. Moreover, Ononoki might not love Mister Donut as much as Shinobu did just because they were both aberrations. Despite her calm expression, maybe Ononoki preferred super-spicy food.
It would be a shame if it backfired. I also didn’t want to seem too obsequious.
I just wanted to make the first move.
As I pondered how best to proceed, I was under the impression that I was approaching the issue with a fair sense of urgency─but I was in fact operating as slow as molasses, at a turtle’s pace, and soon I was in for a rude awakening.
Really soon.
Pedaling my bike and arriving home, I spotted, believe it or not, the very two people in question─Kagenui and Ononoki─at our front gate, ringing our doorbell.
Kagenui noticed me and said, “You again.” Ononoki also turned in my direction, as if in imitation, her face expressionless.
Incidentally, as the one being stared at, what with a blond Lolita crammed into the front basket of my bicycle like a sack of groceries, I made for a pretty indecorous sight.
Downright indecorous.
“Hello…” I bobbed my head.
Seeing them side by side like this, they really did come across as a two-man cell─if I were to say every cracked pot has its broken lid, it might not sound very generous, but Kagenui and Ononoki seemed to fit together perfectly like two pieces of a puzzle.
Human and aberration. Onmyoji and shikigami.
“First your sister and now this waif, eh, fiendish young man. Quite the basket of eggs you’ve got there. Or should I say an orgy of them? Ha, I wouldn’t mind luck like yours.”
Like before, Kagenui’s feet weren’t touching the ground as she spoke.
This time she was squatting agilely atop our gate─like a thief about to jump over it to sneak into our house.
I take that back, she didn’t look like anything. She in fact was a suspicious person.
“Sister, that is not a waif, but a vampire. If you must, she is closer
to a hag─he said with a dashing look.”
Her face actually blank, this was Ononoki, her finger still on the doorbell.
Shinobu twitched at the word “hag” and woke up moodily.
Maybe she felt more offended than moody.
Hmm, I knew that Shinobu was dissatisfied with her current Lolita appearance (More than once, in the middle of the night, I’d witnessed her patting at her own flat chest and heaving a poignant sigh. It was sad), but she didn’t seem to appreciate being called a hag, either.
For someone who’d been alive for five centuries, she could be surprisingly touchy.
“Hmph. How the little rookie ba─”
Barks, kakak. I think Shinobu wanted to say so with aplomb and elegantly leap to the ground, but alas, the basket wasn’t designed to be exited with any ease by a person crammed in there (to be ridden in, actually), and her struggles began. She should have accepted my help, but stubbornly refusing it, she finally freed herself from her reverse ET by twisting and tipping the bike over sideways.
She didn’t have a shred of dignity left. It was decidedly unimpressive.
“Ah. Literally from the cradle to the grave, eh, fiendish young man,” teased Kagenui. “I reckon you’d even fancy a zombie caller from the dirt. They say necrophilia is an aristocratic predilection. Kakak, a fair playboy.”
“……”
The Araragi residence’s gate, nowhere as grand as the one for Kanbaru’s mansion, was just a narrow steel fence─but Kagenui’s balance did not so much as falter as she perched atop it on the tips of her toes.
Agile didn’t begin to describe it.
I’ve never seen a circus, but from what I’ve heard and imagine─in balance tricks like the tightrope, performers maintain equilibrium by actively swaying their bodies. That might seem risky at first glance, but apparently it’s more dangerous to stop and hold still─I guess it’s like how bamboos are less likely to snap than cedars in a typhoon?
Kagenui, however, directly contradicted that theory. It was like time had frozen in a bubble around her or as if some invisible pane of glass spread underneath her feet─she didn’t even budge. The spot was high, and her footing wasn’t exactly stable, but as far as I could tell, she wasn’t even trying to balance herself.
She was beyond advanced. With equipoise like hers, she could probably do a handstand on a balance ball and make it look like child’s play. In fact─she almost looked like she could walk on water.
Karen might have sensed more, but an amateur like me wasn’t able to comprehend even the basic wonders of Yozuru Kagenui.
I just found it mysterious.
Mysterious─and inexplicable.
“Man, I don’t know,” I blurted out without meaning to.
If it was as Shinobu said (her testimony was much more reliable than Kaiki’s), Ononoki was the nonhuman and, whatever her true nature, an aberration─but she seemed the more normal of the two.
Maybe that was part of the onmyoji-shikigami deal: a proper, hierarchical master-servant relationship with a clear and precise chain of command, unlike the strange and complicated bond between Shinobu and me.
Ononoki did just refer to Kagenui as “sister”─but that didn’t necessarily mean they were sisters, did it? Wasn’t it only a mode of address like “big brother”?
“Ah, right, right, I ought to thank you first. What a great help you were. I found Eikow Cram School just where you said it would be. It’s so difficult getting there, I reckon I might not ever have without your instructions─and you actually helped Yotsugi, too.” Kagenui said all this in such a laidback, easygoing manner. There was no hint of hostility or menace. “Maybe you’ve heard this before, but they say that folk what are easy to ask directions from have a mentor’s soul. Their aura beckons people. Not that I put much stock in jaw like ‘auras.’”
Her face broke into a smile.
It was a pleasant smile. A very─pleasant smile.
If I hadn’t heard that she was an expert on immortal aberrations, I would’ve seen her as an ordinary, friendly lady. The source of that info happened to be the world’s most unreliable and ominous man, so it was all the harder for me to settle on a stance.
“I don’t know if a body has asked me for directions once in my life─do you reckon that means I don’t have an aura?”
“That is why you walk no road, sister… None stretches before your feet, and none behind─he said with a dashing look.”
I couldn’t even tell if Ononoki’s words were meant as consolation.
Maybe it was sibling-speak? An inside joke?
I didn’t know how to react─and had never met anyone so hard to converse with as these two. It wasn’t like they put up barriers, they were frank─but Kagenui and Ononoki seemed to have their own little world. They didn’t seem to need anyone else.
Honestly, it was as awkward as being invited to another family’s family gathering─and we were standing in front of my house.
I couldn’t just stay silent, though. If I let them lead, this negotiation would never get off the ground.
“Actually…there’s something I wanted to get straight.”
Negotiate─I had to negotiate with them.
My inept strategy was already derailed, unfortunately, and they had made the first move─but if I didn’t get overwhelmed any further, I had a chance to turn things around.
The consensus─was that going second gave you an edge.
Waiting for Shinobu to struggle free at last from under the overturned bicycle, I screwed up my courage and said, “You two came to this town because you’re hunting us─an unholy immortal and its thrall.” As for who was whose thrall, I skipped all that because it was too convoluted. “You came here to kill us, didn’t you? It wasn’t just coincidence that you both asked me for directions─you were scouting us out.”
“……”
“……”
I cut straight to the chase, with no plan, letting the chips fall where they may. We weren’t going to get anywhere unless we spoke the same language, so I decided to just go for it and see how things turned out. You could say I was swinging blindly.
In response, however, Kagenui and Ononoki─cocked their heads at me simultaneously, in apparent puzzlement.
As for Kagenui, she even wore a wry smile. “Oi, I don’t know what you’re on about, fiendish young man, but I reckon you’ve got the wrong idea,” she said.
The wrong idea?
Huh? Had Kaiki duped me, in fact? Had I let him shake me down for some pocket money?
Possible!
If so, then I probably looked like a total head-case to them─accusing someone of wanting to kill you just for asking directions? Talk about having illusions of grandeur.
Yikes. Now I was in a whole different kind of hot water. How was I going to worm my way out of this? At this rate, I was going to be negotiating with a psychiatrist.
Just as I was starting to panic: “W-Well, it’s not like you’re coming out of left field─but you’ve sure got some britches on you,” said Kagenui, seeming honestly put out. “The matter regarding the ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire, the king and slayer of aberrations, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, is considered resolved. As an aberration, she has already been thoroughly slain─as an aberration, her thrall is only present as an absence. You’re each other’s alibi and proof of nonexistence, and regardless of the type of specialist, you’re untouchable now. Besides, in our business we’ve got better things to do than squander resources on an ordinary human experiencing a few aftereffects.”
“……nkk.”
Just as I was starting to relax, I felt myself tense up again. Kagenui knew Shinobu’s former name─only Hanekawa and I were supposed to at this point, and no one still called her that.
An expert.
A ghostbuster─a professional.
The immortal slayer and aberration roller─
“I suppose Oshino’s meddling is to thank for it. Sticking that beak where it
doesn’t belong is his specialty,” Kagenui muttered almost as if she was talking to herself─wait.
Just now─did she mention Oshino?
Judging from the context, she couldn’t have meant Shinobu─so who was she talking about?
It wasn’t very hard to figure out.
Our savior─the slacker in the Hawaiian shirt.
This woman, Yozuru Kagenui─knew Mèmè Oshino?
