Kabukimonogatari

by Nisioisin

  “I told thee. Fundamentally, ’tis thee who adjusts the coordinates. I lack a sense of time─so our destination rests to some degree with thee. Come to think of it, it occurs to me now that our eleven-year mishap was not due to my failure, nor to the workings of the gods, but perhaps due to the fact that thou wert daydreaming of the contents of that lost lass’s skirt when we jumped.”

  “Ahh.”

  That certainly seemed possible.

  Though I was positively not daydreaming about the contents of her skirt.

  Nonetheless, I might have been thinking about Hachikuji in a slightly more earnest way.

  “So if I can just keep my head, there’s no chance of the time warp failing, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Nay, I cannot guarantee it. I work the pedals, while thou hast thine hands upon the wheel, so ’tis pointless to try and lay blame at either doorstep─if I press too hard upon the gas, or if thou dost not steer true, ’tis entirely possible that we might fetch up in the age of the dinosaurs. If thou art fearful of such a risk, then ’tis better we do not attempt the time warp at all.”

  Just as the Aloha brat warned.

  At this late date, she says this.

  At this far-too-late date.

  But even Oshino, even that disagreeable older dude who sees through everything, couldn’t have foreseen this situation.

  It’s not like he’s Nostradamus.

  “Well, Shinobu, what I wanted to say is that we should do the time warp even so.”

  “What, hast thy spirit of adventure suddenly awakened?”

  “No, but if we fail, and aren’t able to go back to June fourteenth, then so be it─whether it’s July seventh, Senjogahara’s birthday, or any other date, things can’t get any worse than they already are.”

  “Hm.”

  “And even if we arrive sometime earlier than June fourteenth, that’s fine─we can just go about our business, bide our time, and June fourteenth will arrive eventually.”

  “…Hath that miso soup you call a brain fermented like soy sauce?”

  “I have no desire to come up with a retort to such a snobbish line, but if you’ve got soy sauce on the brain, don’t forget that miso’s fermented as well.”

  “What? How can something so delicious be putrescent?!”

  “You’re really zero-percent foreign other than your hair color, huh? And, while we’re at it, soy sauce is delicious too.”

  “’Tis not disgusting, to be sure, but as beverages go ’tis overly salty.”

  “Soy sauce isn’t a beverage!”

  “I drink it straight from the bottle.”

  “You’ll die!”

  “So, is that soup inside thy head miso? Or is it soy sauce?”

  “It’s miso.”

  “Then heed me. A week or two, or even a month or two, of playing catch-up would likely be fine, but we cannot be assured of such an interval. In our attempt to travel back but a single day, we leapt back eleven years, did we not? The calculation is not so straightforward, but were we to apply the same ratio to this attempt, we would end up 680 years in the past, when even I had yet to be born. We cannot afford to approach the problem without regard for success or failure. ’Twill not do to endlessly repeat this coming and going from present to past and back again every time we leap. History will be too much altered in the process, putting it beyond our reach to intervene.”

  “But whether it’s 680 years or five hundred million years, what’s the difference? Obviously I’m exaggerating to make a point but─look, Shinobu, we’re both immortal, right?”

  “Mm.”

  “So we could watch over all of history─we don’t even know if covering the night of June fourteenth will be enough. I’m not being loosey-goosey about this, I’m saying let’s leap into the past prepared to supervise broad swathes of history!”

  “Thine ambitions hath taken on massive proportions…”

  Shinobu seemed dumbfounded, but, well, I was talking about big-deal stuff, so what can you do.

  The truth was that, in my heart of hearts, one night of not being able to use paper money, not being able to use coins, sleeping in a drainpipe, and all the rest of it had been plenty for me─but things had changed, and now that wasn’t going to cut it.

  If, for the sake of argument, we were able to jump precisely to our estimated X-Day, then over the course of the subsequent two months─or if we failed, the subsequent however many years─we would correct history.

  If history wasn’t going to correct itself─then we had no choice but to take charge of the task ourselves.

  “I don’t have some laudable notion about sacrificing myself for the greater good, I’m just talking about giving it my best shot for a while so I can see Senjogahara and Hanekawa again─so I can see my sisters, and my parents, again. Call that my summer homework.”

  With that determination.

  With that lame attempt at delivering my big heroic speech, Shinobu and I set off again for the hill on which Kita-Shirahebi Shrine stood.

  By the way, when we returned to this era, my granny bike hadn’t been parked at the foot (I thought, then, that this time it had been stolen for sure, but in this timeline I hadn’t gone to the shrine on the night of August twentieth to time slip in the first place, so of course it wasn’t parked there), but it wasn’t at my house, either.

  Hmmm.

  Maybe the me in this timeline didn’t ride a bike─could history have been altered in such banal ways?

  Well, with the world in ruins and all, maybe one bike wasn’t such a big deal, even if it was my beloved machine. I continued on to the shrine.

  Carrying Shinobu in a koala embrace, out of habit as much as anything, since with night fast approaching she wasn’t feeble enough to be tired simply from walking.

  Through a town with no one left to hassle us about it anyway, no middle school girls, no police officers.

  Not that this is a revelation or anything, but a world without people gets exceedingly dark come evening─just as the daytime sky is an exceedingly clear blue.

  Probably, when night fell.

  We would be able to see the whole sky filled with stars.

  It reminded me of going to the observatory with Senjogahara that time─

  ……

  Hmm.

  What about that?

  Did that happen in this timeline?

  Or was I too late?

  I didn’t remember the exact date, but wasn’t it in June?

  “True, with our vampiric levels elevated, we could stargaze to our hearts’ content even if the town was filled with lights and the air pollution hadn’t cleared up. And I’m pretty handy at mountain climbing.”

  “’Tis more of a foot thing.”

  And so on.

  I guess we were feeling the leeway to make such jokes because we were getting pumped up, or rather, incautious.

  I’ve made it seem as though we decided what to do calmly, rationally, but in reality Shinobu and I enthusiastically high-fived and fist-bumped each other over and over again when we hit upon the excellent idea we were about to carry out (a scene I definitely cannot let you see, dear readers). But then.

  When we reached the end of the now-thoroughly-familiar climb and arrived at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine.

  “…”

  All at once Shinobu’s face clouded over.

  Like an overcast sky not a single ray of light can pierce.

  As far as I could tell from her expression, I didn’t need to go to the trouble of asking─it might have been kinder not to ask─but grasping for a last glimmer of hope, I did: “What’s wrong?”

  “Well…” Shinobu leapt down from my arms and alighted on the ground. “Not a shred of energy remains here.”

  “Oh.”

  My despondency and despair had already played out a few seconds earlier, hence the extremely curt response─

  But I wasn’t about to accept it.

  Shinobu and I had thought this through from every angle and
reasoned that since no time slip had been carried out, the energy should remain totally intact.

  “The cause is…aye.”

  Perhaps ’tis that, said Shinobu, quickly finding what she was looking for─and pointing off in its direction.

  I didn’t see what she was pointing out, but she took off briskly toward it, so I had no choice but to follow after her despite my confusion.

  I had to wonder who was trapped in whose shadow here─though if we’re splitting hairs, with her vampiric levels advanced so very close to full, Shinobu could in fact leave my shadow for short periods of time (like I was the charger, and she was the cordless phone).

  As we walked up the path and approached the main hall, I saw what Shinobu was talking about.

  That dilapidated main hall.

  No─the single talisman pasted there.

  “What? Isn’t that…”

  I looked at the talisman─at first glance I wasn’t sure, but after studying it carefully, I cocked my head.

  I remembered, of course. How could I not? Oshino had asked me, or more precisely me and Kanbaru, to post a talisman there─in order to prevent the Great Yokai War, too big of a responsibility for me to bear, to be perfectly honest.

  So I remembered it all too well.

  I remembered it, and the subsequent incident with Sengoku, all too well.

  However─

  “It’s a different one.”

  Not that I was much good at distinguishing talismans written in that kind of illegible cursive…

  But to begin with, it was a different color.

  The talisman I had pasted on the hall had been written in red India ink─but the one pasted there now was in black India ink.

  “I mean, I don’t even know if you can call it ‘India ink’ if it’s red, but…what’s going on here?”

  “I too received only a partial initiation into such things from that Aloha brat…but ’tis less a question of differing type than one of differing effect. The talisman given thee by the Aloha brat in the unchanged timeline differs from that given thee in this changed timeline. So not only the fate of the world itself hangs in the balance of history, but many trivial details such as this.”

  “Huh…”

  “Though ’tis hardly trivial as far as we are concerned. The talisman that thou didst place had the effect of dispersing spiritual energy, while the talisman before us now is meant to absorb it.”

  “A-Absorb?”

  “’Tis several levels of efficacy greater than the one entrusted to thee. In terms of preventing the Great Yokai War, the effect is the same, yet…”

  “Right.”

  Yet it wasn’t the same at all for us.

  If this talisman had absorbed all the spiritual energy we needed for our time warp, then we couldn’t return to the past. Our great idea, all our enthusiasm, had been spectacularly upset by nothing more than a slip of paper.

  The glitch─was a glitch after all. There was no reproducing it.

  “I know I’m misplacing the blame and excusing myself,” I admitted, “but at the same time no one’s listening, so I’m just going to say whatever selfish thing I want to. What the hell, Oshino!”

  “Selfish, indeed… From the Aloha brat’s perspective, ’tis all the same which talisman be used. Likely he selected without much consideration, based merely on habit or the inclination of the moment, because it made no difference.”

  Yeah…that was probably true.

  However much I might blame Oshino, it was totally unreasonable to expect him to conserve the shrine’s amassed spiritual energy on the off chance that Shinobu and I might need to time slip somewhere down the line.

  No…

  Even if he did think of it… He was a balancer.

  He wouldn’t do that for us.

  “When thou art playing a two-disc DVD set, whether playest disc one first, or disc two, ’tis all the same.”

  “It’s not the same at all…”

  What if you played the special features disc first?

  Enough with the half-assed analogies.

  “But,” I said, “I don’t think he’s so irresponsible that he’d leave something this important to habit or whim. Something about this timeline must have necessitated doing it this way… Well, no point now in trying to figure out what.”

  “Aye.”

  “Okay… Nothing for it now but to throw some money into the offertory box and leave it to the gods.” It was a little too self-serving of me, given my earlier blasphemous remark that there was no god at a tumbledown shrine like this─but at this point, was there anything else I could do? “Hang on, if we take down this talisman and wait patiently, won’t that spiritual energy stuff eventually build up here again? After all, this spot is definitely an air pocket. The danger of a Great Yokai War will return, but beggars can’t be choosers─”

  “My lord!” Shinobu yelled.

  Trying to arrest the hand I carelessly extended toward the talisman─but she was too late.

  I touched the talisman─

  And was knocked back.

  We’re not talking about the snap of static electricity on a finger here, my entire body was blown backwards. I landed flat on my ass, and when I got back up and looked─

  “……nkk!”

  My fingertip was easily scorched.

  No─more like carbonized. It must have burned down to the nerves, instantly, because I felt absolutely no pain.

  The physical damage healed in a moment, of course, since I was currently in vampire form─but I couldn’t seem to recover from the shock.

  “Did I not tell thee? ’Tis a different type of talisman─ye…nay, any, including myself, who belong to the world of aberrations cannot so much as touch it, let alone remove it. As with a crucifix. We would be absorbed─consumed entirely.”

  “But wasn’t it me who put it here in the first place?”

  “Thou shouldst learn to listen until the end. To wit, thou quite likely didst come along on the journey, but the one actually entrusted with carrying the talisman hither must have been Monkey Girl─’twould be no problem for the lass, so long as she did not carry it in her left hand.”

  “…”

  Huh.

  So in this timeline, there was─a greater necessity to Kanbaru accompanying me? Maybe things happened differently with Sengoku, too. But.

  But in that case…

  “It’s not just Kanbaru, everyone is gone from this world, every single person. There’s no one in the entire world except for us, which means there’s no one who can remove this talisman…”

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, then our plan is dead in the water…”

  I wondered if instead of removing the talisman, we could settle this by taking the entire building somewhere else, but that’d be too easy. The efficacy of the talisman was probably suffusing the entire hall, so we couldn’t do anything rash.

  My carbonized fingertip made sure I kept that in mind.

  “What is more, ’twould be pointless to remove it. ’Twas because I arrived in all my glory that so much spiritual energy gathered in this place. Such power would have no way to gather here again.”

  “Yeah? So it’s hopeless.”

  “Hopeless indeed.”

  At this point, I started to suspect that Oshino had chosen this talisman out of spite to make things difficult for us after our time slip─not that he’d go so far as to get in the way of us trying to save the world from destruction just as a penalty for not heeding his warning.

  But if he was being strictly impartial, maybe it was the right thing to do?

  Even if we were trying to save the world.

  Would he say, You must not time slip?

  Balancer that he was.

  “I wonder if there are any other air pockets besides this one in Japan. Or should we update the term to ‘power pocket’?”

  “Though we search blindly, like as not we must.”

  And so.

  We intended to go on, even
in the face of a hopeless situation, to go on vainly struggling. We’d wander, not that we were Oshino or Hanekawa, not that we could go overseas, searching for a spot that might possess enough spiritual energy for a time slip─we hatched a concrete travel plan to head first to Mt. Osore in Aomori, or maybe to Mt. Fuji in Shizuoka─however.