by Nisioisin
“How was I supposed to predict that?!”
Damn it, she was always undermining my expectations!
Couldn’t she ever act like I thought she might for a change?
“Um, I’m not super familiar with that game, but is that actually fun for high schoolers to play?”
“What are you talking about? Great games can be enjoyed by people of any age. I’ve already spent nearly three thousand yen today alone. There’s a small line of kids behind me, but I don’t have any intention of giving up my seat.”
“You’re acting like a terrible person just because you have some money! What are you doing?! Stop right now and let those kids play!”
“Hmph. My senior, of all people, saying the same thing as that clerk who just kicked me out of the store.”
“You got kicked out?!”
“If someone gets angry at you for real, the only thing to do is get just as angry back at them.”
“No! You need to apologize for real!”
“Even if I’m being told the same thing, an order from you is different. Fine, I’ll go to the next machine down and start playing Mushiking…”
“Stop playing them!”
“It’s important to always stay playful, Araragi. It’s through play, not study, that we’ve grown and built our history as humans. Oh, that’s right. Speaking of which, a little while back, I was playing cards with two friends and we decided to play President…”
“So you’re ‘Oracle’s Auricle’?!”
I couldn’t believe the girl.
She was so cute.
So cute that she never became too cute for me.
“All right then, my senior Araragi. Why don’t you tell me why you called?”
“Right…”
I couldn’t talk to her about anything serious without some stupid banter first, so I’d write our conversation so far off as a necessary introduction.
“Kanbaru. I want you to lend me your strength.”
“Lend it to you? Don’t be silly. My strength belongs to you from the start. All you have to do is tell me how to use it.”
“……”
That was actually cool…
It was a cool, grown-up thing to say.
Even though she was amusing herself by playing video games meant for children…
I began to wonder. Why did she have such a hardboiled personality? That, at least, couldn’t have been Senjogahara’s influence…
“I want you to find Shinobu. That twerp ran away from home.”
“She ran away from home?”
“She absconded, in other words.”
“Oh. Okay, then. That’s all I need to hear. So you’re saying I need to strip?”
“If you’re that desperate to, then you’re welcome to take off all the clothes you want next time we’re alone! We can both do it, we’ll make a contest out of taking it all off and showing it all off! Heh, you’re going to be blown away if you ever see me strip! So please, Kanbaru, hold off on that for now and just find Shinobu like a normal person would find someone! I hate to say it, but I’m putting more hope in you than anyone else! I need you to lend me those legs that can run faster than a bike!”
“Lend them to you? Don’t be silly. My calves, thighs, knee pits, shins, ankles, and groin all belong to you from the start.”
“That doesn’t sound very hardboiled to me!”
“What was that? The soles of my feet? Now there’s the man I’ve come to know. So kinky that you fear no gods…”
“I never said that!”
She was a total pervert!
She just ruined all of Senjogahara’s careful spin!
“You’re overestimating me. I’m not that much of a pervert,” denied Kanbaru. “The words ‘women-only train car’ gets me terribly excited, but that’s where it stops.”
“That already makes you unique!”
“Ah, so you acknowledge me as your perverted slave at the end of the day.”
“No, I never called you my slave!”
“I just remembered. Speaking of kinky acts.”
“That’s how you keep this conversation going? You do realize we’re still in high school…”
“Fine, then we can say indecent acts instead. I understand that you engaged in an indecent act with her last night.”
“………”
Why did Kanbaru know?
Well, actually, if she knew, that meant…
“That’s right, I heard it straight from her. She said she engaged in an indecent act with you under the stars.”
“There’s nothing indecent about a kiss, is there?!”
Maybe it was on the far reaches of a scale of indecency. Did I not want to see it that way because I was a little boy?
“And wait, Senjogahara goes around talking about stuff like that?”
What an open person…
There was nothing about it to feel guilty over, we were boyfriend and girlfriend…but it did feel like she could afford to be more tactful.
“Did she tell you today at school?”
“No, I heard about it last night. Well, I say I heard about it, but…it’s more like she forced the information on me, calling me in the dead of the night and bragging about it for five hours or so.”
“What an annoying senior!”
That meant Senjogahara had been up nearly all night, even if she’d called right after getting back from the observatory. She didn’t show any signs of being sleepy when I met her in the morning, though… Did she wear an iron mask or something? You can only be so expressionless.
Still, Senjogahara was bragging? So it was something to brag about. Hitagi Senjogahara never struck me as the type to talk herself up, but then again, not only were she and Kanbaru junior and senior, they were both girls.
So she’d talk, huh?
That was a little surprising to learn.
“Allow me to congratulate you,” Kanbaru said.
“Oh… Thanks.”
“But I don’t want you thinking that you’ve won quite yet.”
“Was that a declaration of war?!”
“Love means never having to say sorry…to you!”
“Hold on, to me?!”
We were getting way too off track.
Even so, she was mobile enough to make up for all my wasted time and more…
The strong always have a fundamental advantage.
They get to do what they want.
“In any case, yes,” Kanbaru reiterated. “You’re saying you just want me to find that cute blond girl. I hear you loud and clear. If it’s a request coming from you, then I’m really going to run. Heheheh, however big the world is, only three things out there can get me serious about moving my legs: my two dear seniors and BL novel release dates.”
“At the risk of being misunderstood, I’m going to say it doesn’t make me particularly happy to be on that list!”
Actually, no. I didn’t want to be on it at all.
She needed to make that last one a separate category.
“You know,” she footnoted, “even though I go for most any boys’ love genre, there are a few that I still can’t get into… Some of those novels wouldn’t get me serious about moving my legs.”
“Enough!”
And.
They might not get her serious, but it sounded like she bought them anyway.
“But didn’t you take your basketball matches seriously before you retired?” I asked her.
“If I have to give an answer, then I’d say no, contrary to expectations. I’d tear up the floor in the gym if I got serious.”
“Sorry, is your body a tank or something?!”
“And, well, you leave behind afterimages if you move around too fast in a small area like that. Basketball is played with five people a team, so cloning techniques are against the rules.”
“Don’t mess with the level of realism of our world for no good reason! Aberrations are enough, people can’t actually leave behind afterimages!”
; “Being called for traveling would be a more pressing issue than the number of players.”
“Refs shouldn’t be calling beginner fouls like traveling if a player’s cloning herself, should they!”
“I can get up to nine people by cloning myself. If I can just make one more, I’d be able to visualize an entire match on my own.”
“No, you wouldn’t! That’s not possible, of course it’s not! You won’t fool me no matter how detailed your explanation gets!”
“A request from you is a different story, though. I think I’ll try taking off my limiters for once and running like I mean it.”
“I don’t know, part of me feels like it wants to stop you?!”
I wasn’t sure if she was kidding.
She was as dangerous as a junior could get. A ballistic missile.
“There’s no point in trying to stop me. I’ve received an order from my senior, and nothing could make me happier. I’ll vow to you right now, I’m going to run until I can’t move another step.”
“Listen, you don’t need to push yourself. I know you’re fast, but didn’t you tell me before that you weren’t good at running long distances or something?”
“Huh? Oh, don’t worry, that was part of my character and background story when I first appeared, before I really started to take shape.”
“Don’t say that kind of thing out loud!”
“If it really bothers you that much, then I wouldn’t mind reverting back to those defaults.”
“Stop talking like you’re a video game options menu!”
Well.
When Kanbaru said she wasn’t good at running, it was different from when I said it. I didn’t have too much to worry about.
“Heheheh. Now that I’ve received an order from you, my old name won’t do. Having evolved, I should assume a new one. That’s right, I’m no longer Suruga Kanbaru─I’m Omega Kanbaru.”
“Be still my heart!”
“Incidentally, if a marina evolves, it becomes a mariner.”
“Sounds both tougher and fouler!”
“And if a ‘Caution: Falling Rocks’ sign evolves, it becomes a ‘Caution: Falling Meteors’ sign.”
“Hold on, I don’t need that much evolution!”
What would happen if I evolved?
I actually wanted to give that a little thought.
“Anyway, Kanbaru. If you find Shinobu─um, I actually don’t know about you. There is the stuff with your left arm, so I wonder if you’d be okay… No, you’d still be in danger if that’s all you had. Okay, so if you find Shinobu, do not approach her, just contact me immediately.”
“What? You’re saying I can’t run up and hug her?!”
“No!!”
In more ways than one, because none of them would turn out well.
“Hold on there,” complained Kanbaru. “I can’t have you making light of me like that. My life isn’t so dear to me that I wouldn’t trade it in to cuddle with a little girl.”
“Well, it’s going to have to be dear to you for now… And what’s so great about getting to cuddle with a little girl, anyway?”
“How could you need anything more to be happy in life?!”
“You’re mad at me!”
My own junior, mad at me! Over not knowing I only needed a cute little girl to be happy in life!
“Putting your principles and beliefs aside, Kanbaru… I think I’m the only person in the world right now who could stand up to Shinobu, realistically speaking─Oshino can’t for his own reasons. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Sengoku is helping out too, so fill each other in if you happen to meet… Oh, right. Sengoku gave me your volleyball shorts and school swimsuit to hold onto.”
“Oh, thank you. They’re not washed, are they?”
“Uh, I think they are.”
“Excuse me?!”
She’d shouted. She really needed to do something about her characterization…
“Foolish…” she muttered. “It was all meaningless if they’re washed… It’s unlike you to allow such a misdeed.”
“Um, how exactly do you see me? Do you expect me to stop a middle schooler from washing a pair of volleyball shorts and a school swimsuit that she wore?”
“I can’t believe you… How could you be this cruel? You gave me hope, only to snatch it away seconds later… I’d surely have committed suicide by now if I had potassium cyanide with me here…”
“The premise that you’d ever have any with you is far-fetched in the first place…”
So it was something she’d want to kill herself over?
Is that how she saw herself?
“My senior Araragi, I truly regret having to say this to you of all people, but I have no choice. It looks like you’re going to have to pay for this blunder.”
“………”
Why, exactly?
At the same time, I couldn’t let this put a dent in Kanbaru’s motivation…
People with power really do have an advantage…
“Understand?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah…just tell me what I need to do.”
“You only need to ‘aah’ once.”
“Is that supposed to be romantic?!”
What was even going on now?
“I just said that I’ll make it up to you. I’d be happy to pay you recompense. What do you need me to do?”
“Okay, then. You need to sleep in those volleyball shorts and school swimsuit for a night, sweat like crazy into them, and return them to me unwashed. If you do that, I’ll forgive you.”
“You realize that actually doing that would make us both perverts of the highest order?! Actually, it might make you even worse off than me!”
“Sounds like a fun path to walk down, so long as you’re by my side.”
“I’m sorry, Kanbaru, but I’m not ready to die with you!”
“Then I could always make it a forced lovers’ suicide.”
“That’s called a murder-suicide!”
“We better think of how to go about this some other time.”
“No, think better of it right now!”
“Anyway, you said Sengoku’s helping us out too? In that case, it feels like─there are a handful of people on this.”
“Yeah. I know this might not sound very convincing after all the time we’ve wasted talking nonsense─but every second counts. Please, Kanbaru. Help us.”
“Of course. I’m so on board that it brings tears to my eyes. It’s not in me to say no to you. I act only according to your orders,” Kanbaru said, then hung up the phone.
She was supposedly at the neighborhood supermarket, but neighborhood or not, there was only one supermarket in the area… You could call it our podunk town’s one lifeline, so I began to feel honestly concerned that Kanbaru was now holding B and digging through its flooring as she dashed outside─but it was heartening to have her on board, that nonsensical and unrealistic concern aside.
So. On to the last person.
The last person with first-hand knowledge of Shinobu─
I called Hitagi Senjogahara’s number.
The phone rang for an awfully long time─it felt like I waited almost twenty seconds. Right as I was on the verge of wondering if I was going to be sent to voice mail, the call went through at last.
“I’m not going.”
“………”
She opened with a refusal.
What was she, psychic?
And she’d said no, too…
“It felt like it took you forever to pick up the phone, did something happen?”
“No? Not particularly? It was too much of a bother to pick up the phone, and I let it sit in my pocket without checking who the caller was, but it rang for so long that I gave up and checked only to see that it was you, which made me think I didn’t have to pick up after all, so I went to press the power button to hang up on you but accidentally pressed the call button instead and had no choice but to take it. What do you want?”
&n
bsp; “Why would I want anything from you now?!”
