by Nisioisin
What was going on here?
The situation was only getting worse and worse.
“But maybe it means the opposite happened to Shinobu, and she’s more vampiric now? Now that our link is cut, she’d be relatively more─”
“No, she’s probably less vampiric herself, just like you. That’s the way your relationship works─though if you’d lost your life instead of your powers, kind monster sir, she’d probably be back to her peak state.”
Right.
That’s how it worked.
In other words, it wasn’t only my situation that was worse. She was in just as much trouble─all we could say now was that she still existed, and there was no telling when she might disappear.
But stay calm.
It wasn’t like this was over yet.
The tale─was still on.
“I do think it’s the correct decision to hurry to the vampire, considering the emergency that is your link being severed. It’s also the correct decision to climb down the mountain. It’s not like there are any places that are safe from the Darkness, anyway,” Ononoki concluded. “However, you’re going to have to rely on your own two legs.”
And so─that’s what we did.
We weren’t at all equipped for climbing down a mountain, and doing so was no easy task─though saying “it was no walk in the park” might be a little too affected.
We indeed were traveling in a downward direction, but in the dead center of a mountain range, if that’s where we were, up or down didn’t always matter.
As an aberration, Ononoki wouldn’t get tired from climbing up and down, but I couldn’t say the same for myself─nor could Hachikuji. Although she was an aberration, she wasn’t a combat model like Ononoki. While her vitality was a different story, her stamina wasn’t much different from a regular ten year old’s.
Well, it did feel kind of inconsistent that she could survive high-speed mid-air travel but not a hike… Maybe she was one of those characters whose stats doubled when her health was flashing red?
“Hey, Hachikuji. You walk in front.”
“Huh?” My words were utterly unexpected to judge from her expression, or maybe more like utterly unpleasant. “What are you talking about, you worthless piece of garbage?”
“‘Worthless piece of garbage,’ huh. You know, you don’t actually get to hear that phrase too often in real life.”
“Shouldn’t the man walk in front on a mountain path as dangerous as this? I read that in Rurouni Kenshin.”
“Why is a manga your source?”
“Well, I’m something of a wanderer myself,” Hachikuji said with an air of self-satisfaction.
True, she was a lost tribe.
“My reverse-edge sword thirsts for blood tonight!”
“There was no such line, I’m pretty sure…”
What kind of reverse-edge sword was that?
Then again, its strike would probably still draw blood.
“Why that expression, Mister Araragi? Are you the kind of boor who reads a manga and thinks yourself clever for complaining, That guy claims to have vowed never to kill again, but if you hit someone in the head with a metal rod, they’re going to die, reverse-edge or not!”
“Come on, my mind hadn’t gone that far,” I shrugged. “I just thought that as the smallest of us, it’d be better if you walked in front. I have a big stride so we might even get separated if I took the lead…”
My thinking was that if I walked behind Hachikuji, I could step in if something happened. Unfortunately, though, she didn’t seem to be a fan of the idea.
In fact, she might have felt like a canary in a coal mine.
“When you walk with a woman on a sidewalk, you stand closer to the street,” Ononoki commented quietly. “You open doors for her, then you wait until she passes through to close them. Naturally, you don’t let her hold anything, and you don’t sit before her, either. When you climb stairs, you stand behind her, and when you go down them, you stand in front… So maybe you should be the one standing in the very front when we go down a mountain, kind monster sir.”
“…”
I’d been schooled by a familiar on how to be a gentleman.
It had come from someone who normally let her master, Kagenui, ride on top of her shoulders as they roamed around…
Hm?
Hold on, what did she just say?
“It’s recommended for men to stick behind a woman when you’re climbing upstairs? Even if she’s wearing a skirt?”
“…”
“…”
Hachikuji and Ononoki held down their skirts at the same time─how upsetting. I’d asked a simple question.
“Kind monster sir. It’s so that the gentleman can use his broad embrace to catch the lady if she is to slip that he stands behind her on the stairs.”
“Yeah, I know. In fact, I caught a girl falling down the stairs just half a year ago.”
“Hearing that makes me think that you must have had some kind of ulterior motive from the start…”
“Hmph, I wonder if I ought to tell on you about this to Miss Senjogahara…”
Both the tween girl and the young girl were piling baseless accusations on me.
Hmph.
It looked like this would require further explanation.
It wasn’t manly to offer excuses, but it would be a great loss to these girls if they continued to misunderstand just how much of a gentleman I was. I needed to tell them, out of kindness.
Sheesh. What a softie.
But it’s just who I am.
“Listen up, you two. Yes, my heart does start pounding just looking at a woman wearing a skirt, but I don’t necessarily want to see what’s under it. In fact, just getting to see the way her skirt swings and flutters in the air is more than enough. Compared to the skirt itself, what’s under it is just icing on the cake. In fact, I might even look away if I saw under a girl’s skirt.”
“Please walk in front.”
“Please walk in front and get bitten by a snake.”
The tween girl and the young girl disappeared from my sight.
I couldn’t believe it…
I’d told them the truth to clear up a misunderstanding, only to do more damage to our relationship. Perhaps I ought to have let them have their wrong idea.
Well, they at least understood just how much of a man I was, in a way…
Though you do also hear that mountain snakes don’t bite the lead hiker, they go for the second person in line…
Or that bringing up the rear is the riskiest.
Maybe it just means that no position is safe when you’re marching through the mountains.
Or that if you want to be a chivalrous gentleman, you shouldn’t be bringing ladies deep into the mountains to begin with…
“Mister Araragi, I’d wondered if turning into a vampire had made you more of a pervert, but it seems that had nothing to do with it, now that I see you acting this way even after your link has been cut,” Hachikuji said─out of my sight as she stood behind me. “It seems that you were just a plain old pervert.”
“Stop throwing the word around like that. Don’t be so quick to call someone a pervert. It’s almost like you’re making me out to be a pervert.”
“True, using ‘pervert’ too easily could rob it of its gravity, and it might even stop sounding like a big deal… But if someone like you really existed, Mister Araragi, wouldn’t it be a social issue?”
“I’m not fictional.”
“Speaking of perversion,” Ononoki said.
Was she really going to use that word as her jumping-off point? She was actually going to go from one perversion to the next?
She meant something else by the word, though.
“When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, is that a kind of perversion? What kind of phenomenon is it?”
“Huh?”
“Well, it’s as if one creature is evolving into a different creature… I’m really just talking off the top of my he
ad, though. It’s not like I know anything about biology…”
“Hm,” Hachikuji began in a solemn tone, “in terms of metamorphoses, I know that both complete and incomplete metamorphoses exist─so bringing it back to you, Mister Araragi, which would you be? Labeling you a complete pervert might be going a little too far.”
“If you want to talk about going too far, Miss Hachikuji, there’s also something called hypermetamorphosis, where one creature becomes something that’s more or less completely different… But I wonder, what happens to your identity as an organism in a case like that?”
“A hyper-pervert, you say. Yes, that seems to be just about the right term for Mister Araragi.”
It was hard to say if the young girl and the tween girl were talking past each other or not.
Actually, Hachikuji was just badmouthing me the whole time.
“What about a human becoming a vampire,” I interrupted them, finding no reason not to elbow my way into a conversation between a young girl and a tween girl. “Does that count?”
“Well, that’s more than a creature turning into another creature,” replied Ononoki. “It’s a creature turning into an aberration… Hmm, I wonder.”
“There’s no chrysalis stage, so it’d be an incomplete metamorphosis. I see, Mister Araragi, so you’re incomplete! Incomplete perversion, those words describe you so well!”
“…”
Could you shut up for a second, Hachikuji?
Rare as it was for me to feel that way about her.
“But it’s not just vampires. In general, all aberrations are born through a transformation. So maybe you could call it a kind of perversion,” Ononoki went on.
She wasn’t responding at all to Hachikuji.
Actually, it kind of felt like Ononoki was consistently failing to do so.
“When something transforms…”
“Yes,” Ononoki nodded. “When it turns aberrant. That’s why they’re aberrations, right?”
“…”
“We’re aberrations because we ‘aberrated’─it’s an aberration when a human becomes a ghost, I’m an aberrant corpse─and thoughts, foxes, and raccoons can all turn aberrant and end up as aberrations,” Ononoki said, seeming to cite every example she could think of. “Which is why you can say that a human turning into a vampire is an aberration─a deviation from its original form, a perversion. Again, a metomorphasis.”
“You mean me-ta-mor-pho-sis.”
“That’s what I said.”
I pronounced it right, Ononoki insisted.
She wasn’t even going to try to own up to her mistake.
“In that case,” I said.
It did seem a little silly to be discussing the topic in those steep mountains, a treasure trove of metamorphosing insects where shape-shifting foxes and raccoons seemed ready to pop out at any moment.
“Could you call it a perversion when Shinobu, a vampire, became a god?”
“Hm?”
“Well, like we were saying.” I decided to go into further detail because Ononoki didn’t seem to take my point. “Would one aberration turning into another count, is what I want to ask… I guess it’s all semantics, though.”
“Well, that does happen. They say yokai shift forms all the time─but.”
But, Ononoki said.
“I wonder. Would it count as a perversion in the Aberration Slayer’s case?”
“Huh?”
“Well, it’s not as if she had become a god four hundred years ago─she was worshipped as a god, but at the end of the day, she continued to be a demon.”
“…”
“Yes, she lived as a demon─and continued to be a demon.”
The tale of a demon that the Aberration Slayer told remained a demon’s─it wasn’t of a god.
That’s what Ononoki said.
“Hm.”
Well, sure.
You could put it that way, of course you could… For whatever reason, it felt like her obvious statement was in fact pretty important.
But I didn’t know why…
“By the way, Hachikuji, what about snails? Are snails perverts?”
“Could you not treat me like I’m some sort of expert on snails?”
“…”
I tilted my head in confusion at Hachikuji’s reply.
Our conversations were strangely awkward today.
Asking her if snails were perverts was such an obvious attempt to make her seem like a pervert too and should have been a decent setup, but she didn’t bite.
I’d been hoping to advance our banter about perversion with Hachikuji.
Maybe this mountain really was proving to be quite a hike for her.
She was a ghost that haunted streets, and maybe mountain paths were unanticipated…not that this area even had paths.
“Snails have shells from the time they hatch from their eggs…I don’t think you could say that they change in form,” Ononoki replied to my question in the end, and in the most straight-laced manner possible.
“What? Snails are born from eggs? Oh, but I guess so. They’re shellfish, after all.”
“How did you think they multiplied?”
“I just thought they must divide or something… I mean, they’re molluscs.”
“You know that molluscs lay eggs, too… Have you never eaten octopus eggs, kind monster sir?”
“Octopus eggs aren’t exactly a common dish…”
Still. Ah.
Yeah, that made sense.
It was simpler creatures that multiplied through division, like hydras.
Not to allude to the story of her first thrall or anything…
“They apparently discovered fossils of a pregnant dinosaur, and it just means that organisms multiply in a lot of different ways,” Ononoki said.
“How about this.”
“Hm?”
“Well, even with my link to Shinobu severed, we know for sure that I’m showing the aftereffects of becoming a vampire… In other words, you could still describe my state as ‘not human.’ What if, one day, I start a family in this state and become a father? What of the kid?”
“…”
Ononoki stayed quiet for a long moment after my question. “Really?” she asked. “Our situation couldn’t be any more serious, and you’re worried about what’s going to happen if you engaged in intercourse with a woman? You’ve got a filthy mind.”
“No! I just skipped over all of that stuff! I’m going straight to the cute part, or rather the totally serious part, aren’t I?! Like what to name the child.”
“It was a serious query about a series of events sans sleaze?” asked Hachikuji.
She’d rejoined the conversation now that we were off the topic of snails.
I was impressed. Her enunciation was so clear that I didn’t have to think twice about the sentence.
“As I said earlier, humans and vampires are organism and aberration. Their entire biology is different…so I wonder. That might be close to asking if it’s possible to have a half-dog, half-human. No, given that vampires aren’t even organisms, it might be closer to a half-television, half-human.”
Ononoki was kind enough to tilt her head and ponder my question.
“Then it’s impossible” was her answer, however. “If you simply need to reproduce and leave behind offspring, kind monster sir, you may have to turn the woman into a vampire… No, hold on, vampires reproduce in the first place through vampirism… So maybe you can’t even if you’re both vampires? But I’m sure there are legends about vampire parents and children, vampire siblings─”
“Actually, at the risk of answering my own question, I did meet a half-vampire man, now that I think about it.” It came back to me; while not quite Shinobu’s story of her past, it was a memory I didn’t care to recall. “Doesn’t that mean he’s half-vampire, half-human?”
“I see. Then maybe it depends on which side is the vampire, the male or the female… If you simply have to know, then I think you should just ask M
iss Gaen that as well.”
“Er, I’m in no particular rush about it…”
It was just a thought that had popped into my head.
I wasn’t more interested in it than I was in the Darkness, at least… Even if that were an issue for me, it wouldn’t come up for a while.
