by Nisioisin
It was she─the woman I’d met under the street lamp that day.
Her golden hair. It was now even longer and loosely tied together at her nape.
A chic dress─and she was far taller than me.
She was simply beautiful.
Not just “cute” or “cool”─it seemed like the first time in my life that I was struck by actual beauty.
No.
I’d felt the same way that day, too.
She truly was perfect. Her form was one of perfection.
“Woo-hooo! I’m back, I’m baaack!”
“……”
Well, if she weren’t skipping around in the classroom so wildly in her perfect form, perhaps I’d have felt even more struck, even moved.
She really was whooping it up. Forget dignity.
“By the way, Kissshot…it seems like Oshino took his leave this afternoon.”
“Hm? So what?”
“Well, your heart. Aren’t you going to get mad at him?”
“’Tis a trifling matter, I shall grant him forgiveness─I mean, I don’t care!”
Kee hee hee, she laughed girlishly in spite of her current form, still hopping and skipping around.
Hrmm.
I hadn’t noticed when she was under that street lamp, given the circumstances…but Kissshot’s breasts were huge.
Every time she skipped, they bounced and bounced, bounced and bounced.
The bust of her dress was fairly exposed, as well.
Ah, so that (ten years old), by way of that (seventeen years old), finally ended up like this (twenty-seven years old)…
A grand mystery.
“……”
With her feeling so happy and hyper, maybe she’d let me touch those breasts if I asked─the low thought passed through my mind, but I didn’t have the courage to put the plan into action.
It certainly didn’t mesh with being moved.
“Hm.”
Halt.
Kissshot stopped moving.
Wait, had she read my mind?
I suddenly felt uneasy and asked her, “Wh-What’s wrong, Kissshot?”
I felt like my voice was quivering slightly, too.
“………”
Kissshot didn’t move for a while, only causing my discomfort to grow, but after a bit, she replied, “Huh? What is it? Were ye speaking to my afterimage?”
“Y-Your afterimage?”
“I just circled the Earth seven and a half times.”
“What are you, light?!” I interjected for what would probably be the first and only time in my life.
“Just kidding, just kidding! If I had circled it seven and a half times, I would be in Brazil right now!” Kissshot cackled.
Sheesh, she really was being hyper.
“Mhhm. It is truly a wonderful thing to be myself and complete─my dear servant.”
Kissshot frolicked for another two hours or so, but at last she began to calm down.
Once she did, she said, “Allow me to give my thanks once again. Of course, I had expected thee to do a splendid job of gathering my arms and legs, but even to collect my heart, which I had not even noticed was missing, was quite unanticipated. I bestow my praise upon thee.”
“I dunno about that.”
Though she thanked and praised me, something still didn’t feel right. I just couldn’t get rid of the sense that everything had been fixed. That I’d danced to someone’s tune.
“It feels like all I did was wander around aimlessly─rather than me gathering them, they just gathered together,” I said.
If anyone deserved credit, it was probably Oshino. But he wouldn’t like my saying so. In that case, it was thanks to Hanekawa.
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
By the way, she wasn’t visiting that night. The next time we met would be during the new school year─as we’d decided. Together.
Of course, now that all three of the three vampire hunters had been defeated, it seemed unthinkable that coming would put her in danger all over again─but we’d judged that it was best for her to stay away from the abandoned cram school.
Plus, it hadn’t been a given that Guillotine Cutter would return Kissshot’s arms when we’d agreed on that.
I say the new school year like it was some far-off event─but it was only two days away.
Just around the corner.
The next time we met─I’d be human.
Should be, at least.
…Oshino left having avoided Hanekawa, openly at the end, but perhaps Hanekawa had wanted to at least meet him? In fact─I’d forgotten to ask her.
Whatever. There was nothing I could do about it.
At any rate.
“Kissshot. I’m sorry to have to ask this when you’re celebrating─but I’d like you to hurry up and turn me back into a human.”
“Ah yes, there was that matter. Calm thyself, I shall turn thee back─but, my servant. Won’t ye have a little talk with me first?”
“A talk?”
“There is so much─well, not much to talk about. Only, in turning thee back into a human, there is something I wish to discuss,” Kissshot said in a perfectly cool tone. Her cold eyes had returned as well.
She seemed to be serious now.
“Sure, I guess.”
“Mm. Then let us change our venue.”
“We can’t do it here?”
“Doing so would pose no problem, but, well, I’d like to create the right mood.”
Let’s go upstairs, Kissshot said.
I did as she said, leaving the classroom and climbing the stairs─it looked like it had stopped raining, but it was now night. No matter where I went, there was no danger of evaporating.
Kissshot overtook me partway up the stairs, and she ended up climbing to the fourth floor. She chose the same classroom Oshino and I had entered that afternoon. Just as I was fully expecting to begin our talk there, Kissshot asked in a sullen voice, “Can we go no higher?”
“They probably don’t have a usable rooftop. I didn’t see anything like an emergency exit up to it, either,” I said.
“Hmph.”
Kissshot glared at the ceiling.
Sharply.
When she did, a portion of it blew off.
Concrete began to crumble down on us, but making no effort to dodge, she said, “Come with me, servant.”
Then (as if it were the most natural thing to do) she sprouted bat-like wings (!) from her exposed back─her dress being just as revealing there as it was on the front─and flapped her way outside through the hole that her gaze had punched in the ceiling.
“……”
I didn’t know where to begin with that one.
Her biology seemed to be made up of plot holes.
Wait, so Kissshot was able to destroy things with her gaze… Even Episode’s mean stare paled in comparison to that.
She outclassed Dramaturgy’s abilities of transformation, too. She’d sprouted those wings.
I attempted to do the same, but while I could do plants after my years of visualization practice, I’d never even imagined myself with wings before. It wasn’t happening.
So I just jumped up through the hole.
Making that kind of jump is still pretty impressive, you know?
We were on the rooftop floor of the abandoned, ruined cram school─well, “rooftop floor” might not be accurate. We were just on top of a roof.
And there, on top of that roof, Kissshot sat, her arms around her legs.
Under the starlight, sitting there looking almost melancholic, she had a strange sensuality to her. I began to feel kind of nervous.
Somehow.
I grew timid and shrank.
Her perfect form─a perfect figure.
A perfect existence.
A greater existence.
I felt reminded of the fact that, after all, I was nothing more than her thrall.
“Hm?” Kissshot abruptly looked my way. “What is the matter? Approach me.”
“…Okay.”
I did as she said─and sat down next to Kissshot.
Then, suddenly, she hit me with a head-butt.
Nailed me, forehead to forehead.
“Wh-What was that for?!”
“Why cower so? Thou art my precious servant. I won’t eat thee.”
“O-Oh…”
Her words showed that she knew exactly how I was feeling.
But she was right─seeing Kissshot laugh, I felt stupid to be cowering. The thought helped me relax all at once.
“Now, what do I talk about with thee?”
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to discuss?”
In turning me back into a human. She’d said so.
“Ah, that was not quite accurate. It is not that I wish to speak to thee of something. I merely wish to speak with thee of something.”
“? That’s an odd thing to say.”
Let’s chat.
I recalled Hanekawa saying something along those lines to me once.
Well, vampire or not, I guess she was a woman?
Maybe she enjoyed chatting.
Perhaps this was like her full-recovery party.
“And this is something necessary in order to turn me back into a human?”
“Indeed it is. For me.”
“Hmph. You’ve lived for five hundred years, though. You must have tons of things to talk about.”
“Nothing in particular,” Kissshot said. “All of these years, I have been battling the likes of those three─and before I knew it, I’d become a legend. True, a man like that boy is rare─”
“By ‘boy’…you mean Oshino.”
“To steal away my heart unnoticed is quite the feat. I’ve no memories of ever being inattentive─I don’t so much as know when the two of us crossed paths.”
“Who is he, exactly?”
“A good question. But even I shiver at the thought of what would have been had the boy decided to devote himself wholly to the hunting of vampires. Thankfully, he is an opportunist who only tries to secure himself a middle ground.”
“An opportunist…”
Part of me thought it was a nasty thing to call him, but it also seemed like a surprisingly fitting title. So much so that I could see Oshino gleefully taking it on if I told him.
“Which is why these events have been a reasonably stimulating experience for me─but mostly it has been five hundred years of boredom… Let me see. If there is anything for me to speak of, that man would be it.”
“‘That man’?”
“Thou art the second thrall I have created, as I trust I have told thee. This would be about my first thrall.”
“Your first…”
Um, how long ago did she say that was? Four hundred years?
“Yeah, you did mention it. Something about it being your second time, and the first in four hundred years─like you were some team getting to the World Series.”
“The World Series?”
“Er, never mind. Just trying to find an example. Anyway, what was that first thrall of yours like? I’m interested.”
“Very well, then I shall tell.”
“Was he like me?”
“? Why do ye think so?”
“Er, because─”
I hadn’t told her this yet. Oshino was gone, so I guess it’d be fine.
“Oshino actually taught me something. He said that vampires suck blood for one of two reasons, and that you don’t necessarily become a thrall when your blood is sucked.”
“Mmf.” Kissshot knit her brows. “…Don’t be mistaken. It was not as if I wanted to spare thy life─I simply needed a thrall and used thee to collect my limbs. I suppose I can reveal this now, but had I told thee, ye might not have obeyed me, so I lied.”
“Oshino also said that you’d probably say that.”
“……”
Kissshot fell silent. And remained silent.
Was it because I was right on the mark, or was it because I’d missed it? I didn’t know which.
“W-Well, anyway, that’s why I thought he might be like me─after all, we’re the only two you chose to be your thralls.”
As I tried to backtrack, thinking that maybe I should’ve kept mum after all, Kissshot refuted my hypothesis. “The only trait I’d say ye share with him is thy race. He was a warrior─a warrior so mighty I could entrust my back to him.”
“Huh… Well, I couldn’t be entrusted with that, I suppose.”
Entrust me? Maybe with her keys or something.
Nah, not even her keys.
“Hey, that was four hundred years ago. Unlike now, all the men were warriors, basically.”
“Thy view of history is quite prejudiced and warped, I must say.”
“Guh.”
I do suck at world history.
“I mean, you know how I am. I’m not good at…” I said, fishing for the English word, “at thinking hysterically.”
“I was not aware that ‘in a historical manner’ was the subtle connotation of that word.”
Now she knew that I sucked at English, too.
“Be that as it may, this country has grown quite peaceful since I last visited long ago─as if it has been cut off from the rest of the world.”
“Well, excuse us for being so blissfully civilian.”
I didn’t see it as a bad thing, but it was certainly true that I was no warrior.
No matter how much I tried to mimic the heroes of those superpowered school action titles, I was just a regular person. Whatever skills I may have gained as a vampire, it was like a middle schooler getting his hands on a butterfly knife.
Kissshot must have felt let down.
Especially if the first person was so incredible.
“Well, whether you made me into your thrall out of consideration for my life, or if you did it so that I’d collect your limbs, in the end, it was just an emergency measure… I guess there’d be no reason for me and that first person to have anything in common. But you did say that we were the same race, right?”
“Indeed.”
“So, what, he was Asian? Surely not Japanese, though. Continental Asian?”
“No, a Japanese,” she said unexpectedly. “I was gallivanting around the world, my youth getting the better of me, and I met the man here in this country. And that is when I learned Japanese as well─though much seems to have changed with the language since then.”
“Japan four hundred years ago…”
That would be the Edo Period? I think?
I suck at Japanese history, too.
Well, I’m bad at everything other than math.
“So he wasn’t a warrior, he was a samurai…”
“Hm? Ah, perhaps he was.” Kissshot nodded. “Either way, he was strong.”
“Huh─but in that case, you should’ve gotten him to help you this time around, too. If he’s your thrall, that would make him like another one of your servants, right? Then you wouldn’t have had to take the risk with me and─”
“It wasn’t possible. He is already dead,” Kissshot said as if to cut me off.
Actually, she did cut me off.
“That too happened in the distant past… Remember I said that I sometimes wield a sword in battle?”
“Hm?”
She did?
Wait, that’s right, we’d been talking about Dramaturgy’s great-swords then. She could use her power to generate matter to create a sword, or something.
I’d completely forgotten. Still, I was glad I remembered without messing around in my brain.
“The sword is a keepsake from him.”
With those words, Kissshot flattened the fingers on her right hand and thrust them into her own stomach. Her hand pierced her dress, and her nails dug straight into her innards.
