by Nisioisin
“…”
“In fact, kind monster sir─don’t you think it’s about time you pulled that Aberration Slayer out of your shadow?” asked Ononoki. “Either she doesn’t want to talk to me or she’s sound asleep, because she hasn’t come out at all ever since we landed─I doubt the acceleration knocked her out too.”
“Wait, Shinobu?”
What?
Now that Ononoki mentioned it, my partner wasn’t around─no, I’d noticed from the start that she wasn’t. That’s why I naturally assumed that she was in my shadow─unlike Ononoki and Hachikuji, Shinobu and I couldn’t be separated.
Our shadows.
Our hearts─our very being connected us.
We couldn’t part ways─in other words, if we didn’t see Shinobu, the natural, logical conclusion was that she was hiding in my shadow─but.
But when I thought about it, that didn’t make sense.
Because right now─it was night.
Not exactly the middle of the night, since it was close to dawn, but unmistakably an hour you’d classify as night─there wasn’t a hint of the sun’s rays.
So then why?
“Why isn’t Shinobu─awake?”
“Why? Don’t ask me, kind monster sir,” answered Ononoki, sounding confused despite her emotionless expression. She had to have wondered, too, for her part─and now that I’d asked, her suspicion that something was off was deepening. “I mean, what am I supposed to say? It’s probably because she hates me─”
“I realize that you and Shinobu don’t get along, and she certainly doesn’t like you, but that’s not enough of a reason for her to literally hide in my shadow at such a critical time… That’s not the kind of person she is.”
“So you trust her,” Ononoki noted with a sarcastic overtone.
That was her only rebuttal, though.
It seemed like even she had no choice but to recognize how, well, magnanimous Shinobu was. Hence the sarcasm, I suppose.
“In that case… What could it be?” she asked. “I thought it was impossible, but could she really have fainted inside your shadow? Or maybe she got seriously injured somehow…”
Right now she can’t regenerate the way she did when we fought, yes? Ononoki checked with me─and she was right, but still.
“Can you even get seriously injured while you’re in someone’s shadow? It’s like she’s in a dimension of her own in there. She shouldn’t be affected by those kinds of physical shocks…” I mused, touching my shadow.
It was a dim, moonlit shadow, but there was no mistaking it for anyone’s but my own─that was where Shinobu should be. It’d be strange if she wasn’t─
“You can’t enter your shadow, kind monster sir?”
“Unfortunately, no… But.”
I patted it all around and got no reaction in return─the anxiety and impatience I felt should’ve been communicated to Shinobu through my shadow, too, but she wasn’t reacting to that either.
Despite her reacts being incomparably better than they’d been four hundred years ago.
Which meant… What did it mean?
“Ononoki? You know what this means. I’m just going to have to kiss you.”
“How did it come to mean that?”
“Our only choice is to reach her by making my heart pound, like yesterday. We’re gonna have to kiss─a big sloppy French one!”
“If you say so…though I’d rather not.”
Not really, Ononoki demurred.
She didn’t wanna─how sad.
But there was no other way.
No matter how much she didn’t wanna, my only option was to steal a kiss from Ononoki!
“Um.”
Just as I tried to grab onto Ononoki’s small frame, Hachikuji popped out from under the trees to show her face.
“Mister Araragi.”
Oh.
She seemed to be asleep just a moment ago, but it looked like she was awake─had Ononoki and I been too loud?
I’d been trying my best to keep my voice low…
“What is it, Hachikuji? Jealous?” I said, looking in her direction. “In that case, I’d be fine kissing you instead. You might’ve spoken up sooner.”
“Please die, Mister Araragi. Sorry, I meant to say please wait, Mister Araragi.”
“Wait for what? Are you taking responsibility for the character I am and committing suicide?”
Out of confusion, I was saying and doing things that didn’t make any sense, but I’d have you know, at least I was aware of that.
I was concerned if I could take back any of it.
“Um, er─I’m sorry I went to sleep during such a crisis,” Hachikuji said, as if she really regretted it, and felt guilty about it.
But what was she supposed to do?
It’s not like I could criticize her after being unconscious for all that time.
“It’s fine. You slept, that’s all. Anyway, Hachikuji, why do I need to wait to kiss Ononoki?”
“No─Mister Araragi. There are a countless number of reasons why, but before that, or more importantly, regarding Miss Shinobu…”
Hachikuji approached me as she spoke. She must have called out to me right after waking up because she didn’t have her backpack on.
“She’s not in your shadow at the moment, correct?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that she isn’t…”
Whether Shinobu was asleep or unconscious…
She was bound to my shadow, after all─but maybe there were exceptions? In fact, she did temporarily leave my shadow when she fought Ononoki.
But she’d regained most of her power as a vampire then, so─
“Kind monster sir. Allow me,” Ononoki followed up on Hachikuji’s words─and touched my shadow the way I had moments earlier.
Closing her eyes─she seemed to be feeling for something.
“Ononoki─”
“Be quiet. I’m checking right now─searching,” she shut me down, focusing on her palms as they touched my shadow, with her eyes still closed─but even I wasn’t optimistic enough to believe that she was waiting for a kiss.
I simply waited.
For Ononoki to come to a conclusion.
Her conclusion─an answer I felt I could foresee.
“She’s not there…” Ononoki uttered at last.
In her affectless voice.
“She’s not there.”
026
“I saw it happen as I was being carried by you, Mister Araragi─the Darkness appeared where your shadow should have been,” Hachikuji said.
She had joined me and Ononoki in crouching around my shadow.
“Could it be possible that Miss Shinobu was swallowed up by this Darkness? It probably didn’t, but is it at least possible?”
“…”
The Darkness had touched my shadow?
I never noticed that─or maybe I had forgotten thanks to the impact that followed… But could that really happen?
It wasn’t like it touched her directly, right?
It was absurd to think that the Darkness could engulf the contents of my shadow by simply touching it─but I needed to think carefully about this, to really think. Weren’t we up against an absurdity?
A mysterious phenomenon that we couldn’t even place─that’s what we were up against.
So in that case.
“Shinobu got swallowed up…by that Darkness? No way…”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Ononoki said, just as I gulped, confronting the cruel possibility thrust in front of me─there wasn’t any particular emotion in her words. To put it another way, they didn’t contain any note of consolation or consideration─which is what made them convincing. “If it really engulfed the Aberration Slayer─then you would have lost your vampiric nature entirely, kind monster sir. You should have returned to being a regular human─but you haven’t.”
“I haven’t… Wait, but can we really say for sure that I haven’t lost my vampiric nature? Oh, I guess─you can, Ononok
i.”
She’d figured out I was a vampire the first time we met─and had called me “kind monster sir.”
As a shikigami─as an aberration.
She had the ability to figure that out─just as she figured out that Shinobu wasn’t in my shadow.
“Well, there’s a way even you can be sure, kind monster sir─you can see Miss Hachikuji right now, can’t you?”
“Oh…”
“Miss Hachikuji is an aberration, and if you can clearly make her out, that means you haven’t lost your aberrational nature─it means you haven’t lost your vampiric nature.”
Hearing this, I looked at Hachikuji again.
I could see her.
I saw her─she was definitely there.
Which meant─I was still a vampire─I guess? Which in turn meant that the Darkness hadn’t engulfed Shinobu─
“But seeing her isn’t enough for me to be sure. I’ll have to touch her to be certain.”
“Stop messing around and die, Mister Araragi. Sorry, stop messing around, Mister Araragi.”
“You’ve been asking me to die a lot today, you know that?”
“In fact, you put your hands all over me while I was sleeping over there under the shade, didn’t you?”
“She knows!”
This wasn’t good!
Crap, I couldn’t think of an excuse!
“I just thought of it as a bug clinging to my body. It was too much trouble to bother doing anything about it…”
“That’s all I am to you?”
She wasn’t even treating me as a pervert.
I’d lost to her drowsiness.
Being on the same level as a bug─was pretty thrilling.
“In other words, the Aberration Slayer is fine─no, I’m not sure if she’s fine, but at least, she hasn’t ‘disappeared’…or as she put it, been ‘spirited away.’”
“I see…”
A wave of relief hit me.
My mental state turned around entirely within the blink of an eye─but what was so cruel was that it did nothing to confirm whether or not Shinobu was okay, just like Ononoki said.
Because the fact was still that she wasn’t in my shadow now.
“The Aberration Slayer hasn’t disappeared…but, kind monster sir, I think it would be best for you to consider the link between you and her severed.”
“Our link’s been severed?”
“It might be more precise to say that your link has disappeared─because it overlapped with the Darkness.”
You might say it stepped on your shadow as a child at play might, Ononoki put it poetically by her standards.
So it cast its shadow over mine?
“If my link to Shinobu was cut because it overlapped with my shadow…then what? So she isn’t bound to my shadow anymore? In which case…”
“In which case we probably left the Aberration Slayer behind─you were clinging to my body and Miss Hachikuji’s, but you were relying on your link to do the work with her.”
“This isn’t funny. So you’re saying I abandoned Shinobu there under a Darkness we don’t know anything about?”
I held my head in my hands─what had I done? Had I really left her behind in that dangerous of a situation?
I was overwhelmed with regret.
“Please calm down, Mister Araragi─don’t blame yourself. It’s just as Miss Ononoki said. You can still see me, which means that Miss Shinobu is still alive─the worst hasn’t happened.”
“You’re right… Yeah, that’s true.”
Hachikuji was right─while I’d left Shinobu there under the Darkness, she hadn’t been engulfed by it yet.
Even in the most pessimistic scenario, at least it was more likely that she hadn’t been swallowed up─so this was no time to be feeling discouraged.
I needed to hurry back to town and reunite with her.
I wanted to hurry and apologize to her.
I wanted to apologize to her for leaving her behind.
I wasn’t sure if I could get her back on my side with some Mister Donut─but I still wanted to apologize.
Most of all, I wanted to see her.
Shinobu and I had been together for so long, but now she wasn’t in my shadow─and I never imagined the fact would make me feel such a profound sense of loss.
Which was also why─I felt angry.
The Darkness was so unknown to me that I didn’t know what to think of it or how to deal with it─but real, tangible anger toward it was starting to bubble up in me.
Enmity was starting to rise up in me.
I was able to recognize it now. As an enemy.
I couldn’t forgive it.
I could not forgive it.
Because─Shinobu must be feeling the same way.
Without me─she must be suffering her own sense of loss.
The same feeling she had at the South Pole four hundred years ago─
Of solitude.
I knew she had to be feeling it again─how dare it.
How dare it make Shinobu feel like─
“Let’s climb down this mountain,” I said to the two. “I don’t know where this is, but if we’re in Japan then it shouldn’t take more than a day to get back to my town… We need to hurry and meet up with Shinobu.”
“I understand how you feel, kind monster sir─but don’t get impatient. I’m for climbing down this mountain, but we ought to contact my sister before trying to reunite with the Aberration Slayer.”
“Oh, right─I guess that’s right. We need to learn more about this Darkness at the same time…”
Agh. My anger was keeping my brain from working properly.
It was good for me to establish how I felt about the Darkness, but I couldn’t lose myself in that and get sloppy.
An order.
I needed to figure out─the best order to do this.
“Well, we’ll be using the Disengagement Edition of your Unlimited Rulebook to get out of here either way. Three quarters of Japan might be mountains, but the remaining quarter is towns. We’d eventually land somewhere with roads or train tracks if we used it a few times.”
“No…that’s not true, kind monster sir. Unfortunately, I can’t use the Disengagement Edition of my Unlimited Rulebook anymore.”
“Huh?”
I was bewildered by Ononoki’s response.
The fact that I was counting on her to get us down the mountain made her words feel that much more unexpected.
“Why… Are you out of juice or something? Can you only use it so many times a day?”
“That isn’t it. The skill consumes a reasonable amount of energy, but that’s not the problem since I was able to rest for a night.”
“Then why can’t you─”
“The problem is you, kind monster sir,” Ononoki said. “If your link with the Aberration Slayer has been severed, your vampiric nature should be that much weaker, even if it persists.”
At the very least.
You’re not immortal right now.
“That’s why you weren’t able to withstand our disengagement earlier. It was fairly strange to me at first, but now it makes sense. You certainly wouldn’t have blacked out had you still been linked to her, and you wouldn’t have been unconscious for twelve hours, either.”
“…”
“You’re weaker now, kind monster sir─this isn’t just about the Disengagement Edition. You’ll have to refrain from the kind of nonsense you’ve been pulling for the past couple of months.”
027
I was weaker now.
That’s how Ononoki put it, but she wasn’t exactly right─she should have said that I was returning to normal, not that I was weaker.
I hadn’t lost my vampiric nature, but it was waning─and while my immortality wasn’t gone either, it too waned.
What an effect the removal of our link was having─well, it made perfect sense when you thought about it, but this “perfect sense” wasn’t good news in any sense of the phrase.
&nb
sp;
