by Nisioisin
“Hmm.”
“I’m not going to come out swinging,” I promised.
And with a hmm, thought about what to do next.
Be prudent.
Take your time and think.
The original plan was that I would casually tail Hachikuji as she headed for Mrs. Tsunade’s. Casually blending in with the crowd in the crosswalk, I would quite literally follow in her footsteps─in other words, I would act like I was in the secret service, but since the package (i.e., Hachikuji) had gotten this badly lost, we had no choice but to modify the plan.
Because if things kept on this way, it was entirely possible that Hachikuji wouldn’t reach the Tsunade residence even if she spent the entire day trying.
“…Hmm. What to do? Shinobu, do you think you could touch my hipbone? Maybe something will occur to me.”
“Thou art becoming that rarity, the high school bone fetishist.”
“Mm, I’ve got it.”
Leaving aside whether or not she actually touched my hipbone, I devised a new plan. Actually, it had already been in sight, in that I was brooding.
It was just a matter of getting up the nerve.
I left the shelter of the tree and began walking towards the sign with the residential map─that is, towards Hachikuji.
“What dost thou intend?”
“What don’t I intend? I’m going to guide her to Mrs. Tsunade’s house.”
“How now? You intend to make contact?”
“No other choice. If she keeps wandering and stays lost, the likelihood of an accident goes through the roof. There a problem with that?”
“I think not. While I have no counsel to offer thee, neither have I a warning. Then again, to be on the safe side, perhaps thou shouldst not give thy name. There is already a Koyomi Araragi in this time period, after all.”
“Right. Then for now call me Muscle Ogata. Just for the time being, of course.”
“First thy bone fetish, now this powerful longing for muscles─thy proclivities are approaching far domains incomprehensible to ordinary folk.”
Maybe I was past approaching and all the way there.
Dreadful.
Meeting an unknown Hachikuji made me terribly anxious, but since I’d already done it once, I thought I could do a better job this time.
I was not going to come out swinging, of course.
I was confident I could properly guide her.
Let all behold the mature me.
So, muffling my footsteps (?), walking on tiptoe (?!), being as discreet as possible so the target wouldn’t notice (!!), I approached Hachikuji from behind.
Single-mindedly and repeatedly comparing the sign to the note in her hand but still having a hard time making heads or tails of it, seemingly at the height of confusion─Hachikuji didn’t notice me as luck would have it…and I.
I came up behind her and flipped up her skirt with all my might.
It covered up the entire top half of her body, backpack and all.
“Agghh!”
Naturally, Hachikuji let out a scream.
The scream stirred a certain nostalgia in me─but without turning around, she dashed off at full speed, her skirt still over her head.
A child’s dash.
But a child whose leg-strength was, I expect, well above the national average for fifth graders.
“Oops!”
“’Tis not a question of oops.”
“Crap! What the hell! If I were the protagonist of a manga, what, I would be Ryo Saeba?!”
“Thou art putting a most positive spin on things. I rather think thou wouldst be Ataru Moroboshi,” Shinobu retorted. She really seemed partial to Shogakukan. “And I do not wish to sound critical, but Ryo Saeba is a name only a middle school boy would think cool.”
“That sounds so critical and nothing but! Damn, was that ‘the compulsion of history’ getting in the way of me rescuing Hachikuji?!”
“At the moment, it could only be called ‘reaping what you sow’…”
Ignoring Shinobu’s overly correct riposte, and cursing the heartlessness of fate.
I chased after Hachikuji.
However fast the girl might be, there was no way she could outrun a vampire─in the space of a moment I caught sight of her.
It looked like I would reach her right upon leaving the park─and once I did, I’d have to begin by persuading her that I wasn’t sketchy.
A herculean act of persuasion…
Hang on a second, though. When I flipped up her skirt, Hachikuji took off like a frightened rabbit without so much as a backward glance, so she wouldn’t recognize me─if I could somehow get ahead of her, then, and enter the scene as though I’d had nothing to do with it, I could maybe repair my earlier mistake.
While I was contriving this scheme, I slowed my pace a bit until─
“Ack!”
Something totally unforeseen happened.
Hachikuji, having raced out of the park─just kept on racing right into the street.
Into a crosswalk.
But─the signal was red.
Red.
The color that means stop.
And into the crosswalk─plunged a truck, slowing down not at all.
017
It’s a common trope in manga and elsewhere. When a child─or maybe it’s a cat? Or a dog?─is about to be hit by a car, some guardian angel races out into the street and thrusts them out of the way, only to be run over in their stead…
When I was a little younger, I too was moved by such episodes of devotion, with their heroic elements and embodiment of a certain type of self-sacrifice, but as one might expect, once I reached high school, I came to wonder whether such a feat might not in fact be physically impossible.
In reality, no human can run faster than a car for even a moment, so there’s no way they could react by the time they’ve realized what’s about to happen.
And animal bodies, be they child or pet, are constructed with an exquisite sense of balance, so even if you got a hand on them, they wouldn’t necessarily comply with your desire for them to go flying out of harm’s way. To put it another way, don’t take gravity lightly.
In which case, both the person who is doing the saving and the person who is being saved would get hit, so what would be the point?
There’s also the notion of wrapping your own body around theirs to protect them instead of trying to thrust them out of the way. But the impact from being hit by a car is too much for any human body to cushion. Don’t believe me? Just try listening to the appalling sound a car accident makes.
And if things go poorly, the one being protected is going to end up doing the cushioning.
Ultimately, the issue is the out-of-spec power and surprising girth of a car─however.
However, this was different.
I was a vampire whose power and speed surpassed any automobile’s.
I had enhanced my vampiric level simply for the sake of a smooth stakeout, in other words to turn Shinobu into a middle schooler, but─here it worked to my advantage.
I ran at Hachikuji who, dead center in the crosswalk, didn’t notice the truck bearing down on her─and thrust her out of the way.
With a Hie! she went flying, helpless in the face of my vampiric strength, and all the way to the far side of the crosswalk─there was no equal and opposite reaction to stop me, so my excessive dash power carried me to the far side of the street a split second after her.
Where I smashed my face into the ground.
The truck grazed the heels of my shoes─
Never slackening its pace as it went by.
Sounding its piercing horn for all it was worth.
From the driver’s perspective, an elementary schooler and a high schooler had come flying out in front of him while he was going through a green light at a perfectly legal speed, so that was probably all we could hope for.
I hadn’t been thinking that carefully about it, but since I was a vampire, I probably would have been fin
e if I’d been hit─a body that can withstand the supernatural violence of Kagenui’s onslaught isn’t going to be destroyed by anything so measly as a truck─but then again, if it hurt this much just to smash my face into the ground, once again I’d done an outrageously risky thing without thinking it through.
Being hit by a truck… I could have died from the pain alone.
A traffic accident.
Fearsome.
“Art thou alright?” asked a voice in the ground.
Or, more precisely, a voice in my shadow.
Shinobu seemed to have made a split-second decision to sink back into it so as not to interfere with my acrobatics─this state of perfect coordination being perhaps one of the few fruits of our battle with Kagenui.
“Yeah…I’m fine…”
“Enough of thy daredevil behavior. Vampires have great powers of regeneration, but that meaneth not that we feel no pain.”
“I realize that, thanks… I’m experiencing it as we speak… But I can’t lose consciousness…”
I couldn’t pass out now.
If I did, it’d all have been for nothing.
“Shinobu…say something to pep me up.”
“Naughty? Not naughty?”
“Naughty.”
“If thou dost not pass out, I shall deign to massage the soles of thy feet with my little girl’s ankle.”
“Gwohhhhhhhh!”
I held on to my consciousness with every ounce of resolve I could muster.
I clenched my teeth, I chewed my tongue and cheeks, and the pain somehow helped me keep my wits about me.
It will be mine!
I swear it will be mine!
“Um─are you all right?” I was asked once again─but this time it wasn’t Shinobu’s voice, and it didn’t come from the ground. I was startled.
And looked up.
“Yeah…I’m fine,” I answered─just as I had done Shinobu.
Answered the person crouching next to me in apparent concern as I lay fallen on the ground─answered Mayoi Hachikuji.
Answered.
To that lost young lady.
With pigtails and a backpack.
“…Are you all right?”
“Y-Yes, thank you. This is all because I ran out when the signal was red.”
“…”
As far as I could tell.
Even though she had run out recklessly, heedlessly, Hachikuji seemed not to have suffered any scrapes─the backpack she was carrying must have cushioned her fall.
I had smashed my face into the face of the Earth, while Hachikuji had been cushioned by her backpack?
“’Tis simply the karmic reward you each have earned,” commented a voice from the ground.
Thanks for that.
By the way, only I could hear Shinobu’s voice.
“Well and good then. It seems the accident hath been successfully averted.”
Really?
It was unclear whether it was an event historically meant to happen as such or a contingency caused by my behavior (flipping the skirt) not historically meant to happen at all.
The signal had been red.
During Hachikuji’s accident, the signal had been green─plus she never said anything about it being a truck that hit her.
I was stumped…
This wasn’t even a question of a time paradox.
If it was the latter and I hadn’t managed to push her out of the way just now, Hachikuji would have gotten into an accident all because I’d traveled back in time─and thus the wheels of history spun and spun.
It was so complicated.
I didn’t want to think too hard about it.
For my desire to rescue Hachikuji itself to become the reason for her accident─I’m not trying to defend my actions, but calling it karma or “reaping what you sow” didn’t get us anywhere.
It was terrifying.
Right now, I was─making an enemy of fate.
Because if I hadn’t been in vampire form, I absolutely wouldn’t have been able to rescue Hachikuji.
“I’m sorry. Some creep was creepily chasing me, and I panicked. I didn’t think to look at the signal or anything…”
Hachikuji sounded truly apologetic.
Which made me feel apologetic.
That creep was me.
It was me creepily chasing her.
On the other hand, I was also relieved.
She didn’t seem to recognize me, after all.
“Oh yeah? A creep, huh, inexcusable… Well, the world’s full of weirdos, so you’ve got to watch out.”
I feigned innocence with all my being.
I could feel a painful stare coming from within my shadow but ignored that with all my being as well.
My vaunted vampiric healing having already eased the pain, I started to get up.
“Well, thankfully a man like me, the very picture of decency, just happened to be passing by.”
“Yes, it’s true…”
Hachikuji simply nodded.
Huh.
I thought maybe a retort was on the way, but nothing.
She seemed plain old remorseful.
Aha─obviously.
This Hachikuji.
The Hachikuji from this time─didn’t know me.
She chatted away with me in the present as amiably as you please, but at first she was quite shy around strangers.
And of course.
This was before she encountered a snail.
“I’m also a little bit lost, just at the moment─to tell the truth, I’m on my way to mother’s house, but I don’t know this area anymore.”
I’ve forgotten, confessed Hachikuji─in a tiny voice.
Like she was going to shrink away to nothing.
The note with her mother’s address on it crumpled in her fist.
On hearing this.
I stopped screwing around.
I said, “Well then.” Said it straight. “Here, let me look at that note.”
It was the exact same line I’d spoken to Hachikuji the first time we met.
018
In the end, I didn’t have anything you could really call a conversation with the Mayoi Hachikuji of that time, which is to say the living Mayoi Hachikuji─she kept mum the whole time I was guiding her to the Tsunade place.
She seemed anxious.
She seemed afraid.
Peering up at me, like she was appraising me.
Well, I wasn’t foolish enough to imagine that I might win her trust just by saving her from imminent death by truck─since nobody actually died─but unfortunately, the trip to the Tsunade residence wasn’t long enough for this “don’t-talk-to-strangers-mode” Hachikuji to relax around me.
“Thank you very much,” she said when we arrived, offering only the most formal expression of gratitude.
I’d be hard-pressed to say it sounded sincere, but then again, it’s probably unreasonable to expect more from a fifth grader.
“Sure. So long,” I told her.
And with a slight wave, doing my level best to seem like a cheerful, sociable, nice young man─I walked away from Hachikuji.
But then, I suppose it was what came next that was important for Hachikuji herself. Because between the time I departed, or more precisely, between the time I pretended to depart and went to keep an eye on her from behind a concrete wall, and the time she pressed the button on the intercom, another full hour elapsed, and─
“Yes?” the response came from the speaker.
It came. And I don’t know what happened after that.
Because once Mrs. Tsunade responded, I took off for real.
“What, canst thou not watch the touching reunion between parent and child?” asked Shinobu, puzzled. As though she didn’t understand where I was coming from.
“What, did you want to watch?”
