by Nisioisin
She was so clearly taking her anger out on me. What was this if not harassment…
“Nay, rather than this situation, which is to say the three of us here, I think I’d like to hear ye choose among me, the tsundere girl, and the cat class president.”
“~~~~~~~~~~,” I shook my head back and forth.
You can’t ask that! Didn’t she know it would be all over for us?!
We’d end up in a quagmire!
She’d taken the triangle I’d successfully created through clever shifts in how I liked each of the three and put them all together in the same sentence… I was in big trouble now.
“Forget about that, Ononoki, what did you think about what Shinobu had to say? I know you told me you have no clue what the Darkness might be, but maybe you made some connections when you heard her story?”
“Forget about that? Is the person you like most a topic you can forget that easily, kind monster sir?”
Ononoki wasn’t playing along.
Shinobu was one thing, but I couldn’t recall ever earning Ononoki’s ire, any reason she’d want to vent her anger at me…
She was doing it entirely to amuse herself.
“Mnnn─”
And then.
While I wasn’t exactly surrounded on all sides, I was hemmed in on two sides, front and back, but a voice from a different side spoke up to rescue me.
Well, it was more like someone talking in her sleep.
“─nnn. Where…”
…am I─she said.
Mayoi Hachikuji did.
At long last─she’d woken up.
023
“Hachikujiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”
I charged into Hachikuji after giving myself an Unlimited Rulebook Disengagement Edition-level rocket start.
I ended up tackling her, or rather, I aimed a little too low and hit her bed made out of desks─even so, that only sent her flying off of her bed and ultimately onto my sliding body, and it all worked out in the end.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!” she shrieked.
It had been so, so long.
It was almost as if I was listening to a relaxing piece of classical music.
“Great, you’re awake! I was so worried that you might’ve taken a nasty hit or that something you could never recover from had happened because you weren’t getting up at all! I was doing so much soul-searching, thinking about how we never should have ridden two to a bicycle even if we were trying to get away! I was planning on watching every next-episode preview from Carrangers, the fighting traffic-safety squad! Oh, but I’m so glad that you’re awake now!”
“AAAGH!”
“C’mon, lemme touch you more, lemme lick you more, lemme slurp you up more!”
“AAAGH! AAAGH! AAAGH!”
Grah!
Then, for the first time in a while, Hachikuji bit me.
Not just Hachikuji, actually. A vampire and a tsukumogami bit me too.
I was being bitten from three directions, by a young girl, a little girl, and a tween girl.
What utter bliss.
“Grah! Grah! Grah!”
“What art thou doing, fool, acting in such a brazen manner before my very eyes!”
“I just, um, felt like it.”
It was a beatdown. Punches and kicks rained down on me.
You could call it a mild case of mob violence. Or a severe one, even.
“W-Wait, you three! I understand how you feel, but calm down! Is right now really the time for this?!”
Of all the people they could have heard the words from.
I was probably the one person they didn’t want to hear saying them.
“Phew…” I took a deep breath. “It had been so long since I got to act that way that I lost control of myself. I was on a total rampage, almost like I was a member of the Blastasaurus Rampage Rangers.”
“How dare ye speak the name now,” Shinobu scolded me.
Did we have another fan of ranger shows?
“Yeah, don’t you utter that name. That’s righty-tighty,” Ononoki scolded me too. For some reason, it involved using a weird phrase.
It really made me feel like I was speaking to children.
“Anyway, Hachikuji. Are you really okay? It didn’t feel like it when I was palpating you just now…”
“What are you, a doctor?” Hachikuji asked as she straightened herself out.
It didn’t take any time at all for her to return her clothes to the state they were in before I made them come loose, but it looked like she didn’t have any spare bands, and her hair, which had come partly undone as we escaped on my bicycle, remained disheveled.
If anything, she should have just undone her other pigtail to balance things out… Was she picky about her antennae’s design?
“I’m okay. No problem at all. All clear, all lights green, perfecto,” Hachikuji said─taking her backpack from where it was on the floor (you weren’t expecting her to wear it while she slept, right?) and popping it up onto her shoulders. “I never thought that unknown thing was a problem to begin with, Mister Araragi.”
“…”
Given just how agitated she was while we were being chased, she was acting awfully composed─her attitude felt like it took its own kind of courage.
“Still, Mister Araragi, allow me to thank you.”
“C’mon, I know that friends ought to respect each other more than anyone else, but there’s no need to be so formal with me,” I said, giving her a thumbs up. “Holding you in my arms right after you wake up is something like my calling.”
“No, I’m not talking about that hug. I wanted to thank you for taking me with you and not abandoning me… I’d been convinced that you’d try to shake me off and escape all on your own in a situation like that.”
“Sheesh, she’s got zero trust in me!”
What a shock, seriously…
That’s how little Hachikuji believed in me? But when I thought about it, she really hadn’t gotten the chance to see me do much of anything cool.
In fact, it seemed like all she ever saw was me acting like a loser…I felt as though she was the biggest victim of my loserdom out of anyone, like just now, for example.
“Plus,” Hachikuji added, “I’m happy that you didn’t ignore that traffic light─it was out of consideration for me, wasn’t it?”
“Hachikuji…”
“I really wouldn’t have minded, though. I’m not that neurotic.”
“I’m so disappointed in you!”
Why did she always have to have a punch line ready?
Of course, it was thanks to the ridiculous turn I tried to make that we slid right toward Ononoki as she wandered around town. When I thought about how we were brought together by fate, it seemed like maybe I’d made the right decision to obey that traffic light after all─wait, no.
I’d ignored that light, as it turned out.
Then came the divine punishment.
“All right, everyone. Now that I’ve woken up, why don’t we change gears. Miss Shinobu, Miss Ononoki? Though I treasure your individuality, we’re going to need to work in lockstep this time. Our ability to operate as a team is going to be tested today.”
“O-Okay…”
“Yeah…”
Hachikuji was taking the lead for some reason, and for some reason the other two were following.
What was going on with them?
They say just taking leadership first is the best move in any chaotic situation, and in that light, Hachikuji had done well for herself.
She’d been characterized at the outset as shy, or rather, poor at communicating in general, but maybe that didn’t apply when she was talking to other aberrations.
“Then, Codename: Gold,” she said. “I’d like you to give me a status report.”
“Aye, ma’
am─hey. Know when to quit,” Shinobu came back to her senses.
Hachikuji’s brief reign ended.
“Don’t make me eat thee.”
“Hah. You think you would be able to eat me?” Despite her reign being over, Hachikuji remained confident. It totally came across like she was hiding her true power. “You know that I’m extremely toxic. I might even give you food poisoning.”
“…?”
Shinobu looked dubious.
Like she wasn’t able to respond.
Maybe she was wary that Hachikuji might have a leucochloridium inside her.
I didn’t know why Hachikuji was able to still act so confident, but her over-arrogant attitude was, in a way, the ultimate protection.
Maybe that was how she defended herself.
“Kind monster sir. About what we were saying earlier.”
And then.
Ononoki walked away from the little skit to tug on my sleeve. What a shy little thing, she oughta just get my attention with a kiss the way she did before.
“Hm? Earlier?” I asked.
“About any clues I might have─you were thinking that I might have remembered something new after hearing that geriatric’s story.”
“Ononoki… I’m sorry, but really, could you please put a rest to calling Shinobu that?” I insisted, unable to just let it pass. Once or twice was one thing, but hearing it over and over was rough. “People are starting to move away from using that term, to begin with.”
“Then what should I call her?”
“Kind monster ma’am, or something?”
I tried to come up with a title that lined up with mine, but in terms of appearance, Ononoki looked older than Shinobu.
Shinobu = eight years old.
Hachikuji = ten years old.
Ononoki = twelve years old.
Or thereabouts… So “kind monster missy”? No, while I didn’t like Shinobu being treated as elderly, her being treated like a kid felt a little weird, too.
If we ignored appearances, Shinobu was nearly 600 years old, and Ononoki was a newborn─
“Then just go with Aberration Slayer,” I concluded.
“The former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade” was also an option and would have been easier to get, but it was a little too long… It might double our page count.
“Phew,” Ononoki sighed audibly. So clearly on purpose. “Fine, then. I guess I’ll do it to keep you from losing face.”
“…”
Again, why did she make every little thing sound like a big favor?
Was this about the tsukumogami attitude of not letting anything go to waste?
“So,” she began, “if you’ll allow me to state the conclusion I came to after coincidentally hearing that Aberration Slayer’s story─”
“Oh, so you thought of something?” I said, but wasn’t particularly hopeful─Shinobu’s story helped us to establish a standpoint, but it didn’t change the fact that we had no idea what the Darkness was.
If anything, mysteries only begat mysteries─you could say that things were twice as mysterious now.
Yet more hopelessly, even Shinobu at the height of her power had had no choice but to run (though I’m sure she wouldn’t admit it)─only.
Only our despair grew, it was that sort of predicament.
While the danger hadn’t quite sunk in for me yet because of the gorgeous situation I found myself in, surrounded by three young ladies, I found myself facing the biggest crisis so far in my life─
“You’re not going to present us with a convenient development like having figured out what that Darkness is, are you?”
“I am. I’ve figured it out for the most part,” Ononoki rattled off the words. She went and said them.
“Huh? Sorry, what was that, Ononoki?”
“Do you mean Miss Ononoki?”
“…”
This is why I could never get a read on her personality…
How exactly did she want to position herself when it came to me?
“I think there’s a certain attitude you ought to take when you’re begging someone to teach you something, kind monster sir.”
“My attitude… What, are you saying you want me to bow my head and beg?”
“I’m saying you need to be rubbing your head against the floor.”
“Kick.”
I kicked a tween girl.
I kicked a tween girl in the stomach.
While she was a sturdy little aberration, it seemed to do a decent amount of damage, possibly because it caught her by surprise. Ononoki fell and curled into a ball.
“Urgh… Grrghh…”
She even started to let out an awful groan. The girl’s nerve.
You’d better not think I was going to feel guilty.
We’re talking about someone who’s terrorized Mayoi Hachikuji numerous times.
“If you’ve realized something, then hurry up and spit it out. I can’t afford a single moment’s delay.”
“Okay, I get it already. Okay, okay,” Ononoki said, standing back up. She held the palm of her hand out toward me and sued for a cease-fire. “I get it, so please, no more violence.”
“…”
It was a normal, honest request.
Her low resistance in the face of violence said something about how Kagenui usually treated her.
“To cut to the chase, kind monster sir, this is pretty bad.”
“Yeah, I was well aware of the fact that things are bad… In fact, I know that all too well. That’s why we’re in a fix to begin with…”
“That’s not an aberration. It’s something else,” Ononoki told me. “That’s why the Aberration Slayer─and Aberration Slayer I or whatever he was called─couldn’t handle it. Of course they couldn’t, it was acting under a different set of rules.”
And of course you can’t handle it either, kind monster sir.
Something about Ononoki’s words made it sound like she didn’t care.
No, that was always a facet of who she was. Maybe I was being a little too sensitive in considering that a change.
Still─not an aberration?
That was a possibility we had considered from fairly early on─and one that was somewhat supported by Shinobu’s story─but I didn’t understand what it meant for us when she stated it so definitively.
Just like the Darkness itself.
I didn’t get it.
“If it’s not an aberration─then what is it?” I asked. “Isn’t that the real question? What exactly is─that Darkness?”
“I don’t know its exact name─but I do know someone who does. I only have secondhand information about it, which is why I didn’t have any clue at first─but when I heard the Aberration Slayer’s story, I made the tiniest little connection.”
“The tiniest little─connection.”
If Ononoki had heard this information second-hand, that must mean directly from Kagenui─but who had Kagenui heard it from?
If we could talk to whoever that was.
We might not be able to resolve our situation, but we’d at least be able to move forward─wouldn’t we?
“Who is it? Who knows what that Darkness is? This tiny little connection you’re talking about─who does it connect to?”
“Izuko Gaen,” the name came out of Ononoki’s mouth. “She knows─everything.”
024
Gaen.
But before I could search my mind for any memories related to that name, it appeared. Right there.
It “was” right there.
That─Darkness was right there.
In the very center of the abandoned classroom, which we were using as our sanctuary.
The desks I’d tied together to make a bed for Hachikuji had been there just a moment earlier─I was sure of it.
But they were gone.
Gone without a trace─there was only darkness there now.
Deep and black, it was impossible to gauge its distance─present but unclear as to where, seen, wit
hout being seen.
