by Nisioisin
For instance, Hitagi Senjogahara. Accepting the calamity that befell her, she suffered bravely, keeping the truth of that matter a secret from her family.
No matter how much her father worried about her, she never thought of opening up to him─she decided that she was her own responsibility.
Even after being deceived by five frauds, her resolve remained unshaken.
For instance, Suruga Kanbaru. She still had an aberration residing in her left arm. It wasn’t excessively harmful, but not exactly harmless, either─and yet her family knew nothing about it. If her sweet old grandmother, who was such a wonderful cook, knew, she’d definitely try to help, but Kanbaru refused to reveal the details─being thoughtful in her own way.
No doubt she wanted to reveal the truth and ask her grandma for advice─it had to be hard hiding such a secret from her family.
And yet.
Kanbaru was adamant about doing just that.
Not for her own sake, but for her family’s.
The two of them, the Valhalla Duo.
I respected them from the bottom of my heart.
“Ms. Kagenui, what self-respecting brother would air his little sister’s dirty laundry? I wouldn’t tattle on her like that.”
“……”
To say it like Mayoi Hachikuji.
The courage─to keep a secret.
“With your family, you lie. You deceive. You cause trouble. You inconvenience. Sometimes you incur debts and sometimes they can’t be repaid. But I think that’s fine.”
That was fine.
Because that was what family meant.
“Ms. Kagenui─defender of justice.”
I’d have loved to strike a pose and cut a cool figure as I spoke, but I still couldn’t move─I had to lean on Shinobu instead as I croaked out my words.
“If being fake is evil, then I’ll bear that burden. If faking is bad, I don’t mind being a bad guy.”
If my judgment was hypocritical.
If my resolve faked goodness.
If my feelings for Tsukihi Araragi were no more than that, then I would gladly be a hypocrite who wasn’t even a scoundrel─
I wasn’t Mèmè Oshino.
I wasn’t Deishu Kaiki.
I wasn’t Yozuru Kagenui.
I wasn’t the Fire Sisters or the Valhalla Duo, either.
Koyomi Araragi─was Koyomi Araragi.
“Fuck favorability ratings. I’m fine being the worst.”
He said─with a dashing look.
Big brother.
As long as Tsukihi continued to call me that.
It was all fine by me.
My healing was finally catching up with my damage─if I hadn’t upped my immortality beforehand, Kagenui would have killed me close to a thousand times already.
It wasn’t an exaggeration. It wasn’t hyperbole.
Each and every strike was unmistakably lethal.
She hadn’t used a single feint or setup or even a check─it was absolutely, one hundred percent, a striking style. Even her defense and submission moves were strikes, by the holy demon mother of Iriya.
Generally an opponent like that was the easiest type to face for a vampire─but she felt more like a natural enemy.
I moved away from Shinobu on shaking legs like a newborn deer─another five seconds and I would be all better.
But in those five seconds, how many times would I die again at Kagenui’s hands?
Now that I was standing alone again, I expected her to launch round two at any minute with another wave of strikes─but she didn’t.
“Man’s evil nature, huh,” she muttered instead, a sigh mingled with her words.
Her jovial attitude until just a moment ago seemed to have dissipated somewhat, which put me on guard.
Had I set her off again?
Man’s evil nature?
Say what?
“Hm. You’ve never heard of it? I gabbed about it with Oshino and Kaiki often enough.”
Kagenui gave her neck a few cracks, watching to see how I would react.
I read the movement more as a cool-down than a warm-up.
“As a high schooler, you must have heard tell of the doctrine that man’s nature is good. That’s what the Chinese philosopher Mencius believed. Folk are born with good inside. Benevolence is the heart of man, and righteousness the path of man─goodness is reckoned as the four beginnings, which are the feelings of commiseration, shame, respect, and conscience, and these can fix to grow into the four virtues of compassion, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom.”
“Umm…”
Why was she force-feeding me the classics all of a sudden?
I may have been studying for college exams, but I hadn’t chosen ethics as one of my subjects.
I did know Mencius, just his name─maybe from world history.
“So then…what’s this about man’s evil nature?” I asked.
“If the doctrine of innate good is an idealistic philosophy, then the doctrine of innate evil is a practical one. Our innate nature is greed, and greed governs human beings. That candid, faithless view was expounded by Xun Kuang─basically, folk are born with evil inside them.”
“People are born─evil.”
“Yes,” nodded Kagenui. “So if people do good, it’s not out of innate nature but rather deception─or so he proclaimed. Good is deception, fake─good is only done out of hypocrisy.”
“Hypocrisy…”
Deception.
Deceit.
“Fake─in other words, man-made,” Kagenui said.
The man-made, artificial.
Therein lay propriety─norms.
It was precisely man-made remedies that beckoned man to good, that led society in a better direction.
“Countering the prevailing notion of ‘ruling by righteousness,’ it equates to the principle of honor. All good is hypocrisy at its core, and precisely there─is an intention to be good.”
Or so it goes, Kagenui wrapped up jokingly.
Then─
“Let me ask you something,” she continued. “This is a thought game what Kaiki used to jaw about─fancy you have the real thing, and a fake that is so identical, in every way, that you can’t distinguish it from the real thing. Which do you reckon has more value?”
A natural and an artificial diamond.
They were identical down to their atomic structure─but treated as distinct.
Indistinguishable, yet treated as distinct.
One was rejected─simply for being a fake.
Omitted.
“The real deal and─the fake.”
“My reckoning on the matter was naturally that the real thing is more valuable. I think Oshino was of the opinion that they were of equal value. But according to the body what asked the question, we were both mistaken. According to Kaiki, the fake is far more valuable.”
Kagenui went on without waiting for my reply.
“Because it wills to become the real thing, the fake is more real than the real deal─kakak! He may be an incorrigible scoundrel, but what he says can be glorious. Well, if I have to, I reckon that’s the lesson I should take home from this. A lesson ten years in the making.”
Laughing, Kagenui spun about and turned her back toward me.
Then she spoke to the bruised, battered, and half-dead Ononoki.
“Let’s go. We’ve lost here.”
Abruptly, unilaterally, without telling us, Kagenui had announced that our battle was over.
The bow was back in its bag and the sword was back in its sheath.
So then.
So then…
“Uh…umm. Ms. Kagenui?”
“I’ve lost interest. We’re leaving. I would have loved to battle with the erstwhile Heartunderblade, but the peculiar way I’m feeling now, I don’t reckon my heart would be in it.”
Kagenui grabbed Ononoki by the hand and, dragging her, began plodding away─perhaps deciding that dragging was too hard, she switched to carrying Ononoki on her back
before continuing once more toward the classroom door.
“W-Wait,” I stopped her without thinking.
My body, of course, had regenerated during her lecture on Chinese philosophy (my clothes hadn’t, so I was practically butt-naked), but it wasn’t like I wanted to stop her and continue our battle.
But I stopped her without thinking.
“What? Did you have a parting gift for me?” asked Kagenui, turning around casually as if someone had called to her just as she was leaving some get-together─a friendly smile on her face, always ready for battle.
“N-No… It’s just, where are you going?”
“To the next battlefield. There are plenty of immortal aberrations out there─they’re immortal, after all. I reckon I can turn a blind eye to one. ‘Rules consisting mostly of exceptions’─you bag the bird but you never bag the nest. Let’s just say that your sister is an exception to our justice. You guide her, with your mentor’s soul.”
It does mean the money I paid to Kaiki was pure wasted, Kagenui regretted.
She sounded regretful but also amused.
“Besides, I reckon you were never quite serious about our battle in the first place…”
“Wha… N-Not serious?”
“It’d be an understatement if I said I sensed no bloodlust. I doubt you were slacking off─but it were hard to get in the spirit after that.”
“If…”
In response, I began to say the first thing that came into my head. Until Kagenui mentioned it, I hadn’t honestly been aware of this, except subconsciously. I’d been serious─I hadn’t meant to be slacking off.
“If you didn’t sense any bloodlust in me─that was probably because you treated me as a human being.”
“Huh?”
“You said it yourself. We had one human and one aberration each─the only person who ever referred to me in this state as a human being was Oshino.”
So…
Speaking of not getting into the spirit─I was the one to whom that applied.
The peculiar way I was feeling, I lost interest.
Yes, like the times when I’d dealt with ol’ Hawaiian shirts himself─trying to get mad seemed a little silly.
“Hmph… So I accidentally took a page from Oshino’s book─how embarrassing. What have I done? Now I’m depressed. In that case, why don’t I end with something I reckon he would never say─”
There was a hint of nostalgia in her voice as she said it.
Just one word.
“Goodbye.”
Yozuru Kagenui pronounced it in such a natural and fluent way that I realized─she might not be a genuine Kyotoite, after all.
013
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
Stuff that happened before I was roused from bed by my sisters as usual the next day.
Kagenui left the ruins with Ononoki on her back─obviously as soon as she set one foot outside, she could no longer touch the ground, so she walked away atop a series of walls, fences, guardrails, and such. Her sprightly movement and sense of balance remained impeccable even with Ononoki on her back. After sinking my teeth into Shinobu’s neck and taking my blood back, returning her to little-girl form and getting me as close to human as possible, I got on my bike and rode home with her in the front basket.
By the way, Ononoki left with her clothes in tatters, but I wasn’t nearly brave enough to pedal home butt-naked─needless to say, before returning Shinobu to little-girl form, I asked her to use her Create Matter skill to whip me up a set of clothes. She had good taste but could be unnecessarily upscale, so it took a fair amount of time for us to reach an agreement.
“I can’t wear clothes this flamboyant! Can’t you make something more normal?!”
“My pride does not permit me to create mere fast fashion! While I am coordinating thy habiliments, ye shan’t look slatternly!”
Remember, we were having this epic debate at night in an abandoned building, after the two-man cell had already left.
That was why it took us so long to get home.
Come to think of it, over that spring break when I went through hell, Tsukihi had texted a question to me: Where was it that Mytyl and Tyltyl found the blue bird of happiness?
Obviously I didn’t reply, but even I knew the answer to that.
In their own home.
So my blue bird had been you two─the Fire Sisters.
When I arrived home (Shinobu had returned to my shadow by then) with that cool thought, Karen, still standing by the front hall, was arguing with her parents.
Her parents.
In other words, they were also my mother and father.
“You will not pass! The only one who is allowed to is my brother!”
……
This was all because of me.
My orders had been so narrow that Karen and my parents─nah, how the heck was it my fault?
Karen was the real thing, a real moron.
She was like a badly designed game script. I ended up wasting even more time then and there explaining to our parents why our front door had been destroyed.
Not that I had any real explanation to offer them.
I just made up some nonsense excuses as I’d done with Karen─obviously my parents didn’t accept them as readily as she did, but being realists, they never dreamed the destruction might actually be the work of a shape-shifter (they seemed to suspect Karen was pranking them, as if something of this level could still be classified as such). In the end, though, I brought them around.
Indeed, my parents seemed to consider the fact that Karen had changed her hairstyle for the first time in ten years the more important matter─I was a little worried that she might pin the blame for that on me. However…
“Huh? What are you talking about? Wasn’t it always like this?”
Karen, herself, sounded confused.
She’d already forgotten her ponytail era.
My sister really did worry me sometimes.
But─that was also the side of her that saved me at times.
In any case, once my parents began scolding Karen in earnest, I snuck away to the second floor.
To my other little sister, Tsukihi Araragi.
Tsukihi, for her part, was lying on the top bunk, still asleep like she’d been before I headed out, just like I told her.
Dressed in a yukata in place of pajamas.
With the left side over the right, my mistake intact.
Dammit, at least fix that.
Shidenotori.
Aberration, bird of omen, lesser cuckoo.
However much I tried to hide the truth, the time might come, perhaps through some accident where she suffered an injury serious enough to remove a piece of her body (indeed, much as I had suffered several times during my battle with Kagenui), when Tsukihi would discover what she was─but until that day came, just as I had told Kagenui, I would keep the truth about my little sister hidden safe in my heart.
If justice practiced by those who could not die was nothing but a fiasco, then likely Tsukihi, with an aberration from the sacred realm residing in her, had forfeited her claim to that principle. Even if she attempted to do justice, as with Shinobu and me, it would only be an obscene, purging justice.
It would be a heartless justice.
The human heart is not a vessel to fill with things but a fire to blaze and kindle─well said.
Brood parasitism.
Kagenui was probably right─maybe she did have justice on her side.
At the very least, not many people watching a TV segment on the rearing behavior of cuckoos would find it pleasant.
The inefficient breeding method known as brood parasitism would seem crafty and underhanded to most.
I’m pretty sure that would be my simple view of it, too.
Still, though.
Tsukihi wasn’t like the cuckoo, little or otherwise.
To say the least─she’d never tried to push Karen or me out of the nest.
