Monogatari Series - Volume 12 - Chapter 1.05

005

Honestly, Ononoki’s, what, special move? She uses it quite a lot so I don’t think it’s a secret technique… Anyway, I don’t really understand her Unlimited Rulebook ability or skill and how it works.

I’ve heard that she’s a tsukumogami, or an artifact spirit, and what’s more, the tsukumogami of a corpse, but that, too (or being a tsukumogami in the first place), is something I don’t really understand.

Her offensive power, I’m well acquainted with.

The Araragi residence’s front entrance ended up needing to be rebuilt thanks to her offensive, or even destructive power, so I don’t need to take anyone’s word for that. It’s the reason I vaguely assumed that Ononoki was a shikigami, or familiar, specializing in offense─but now.

Now that we’d safely escaped, I have no choice but to say, to my surprise, that I was mistaken.

Come to think of it, the onmyoji she serves, namely Yozuru Kagenui, is a ridiculously offensive fighter─so why would her partner, Ononoki, be specialized entirely in offense? Who would put together a team that lopsided?

If anything, the Unlimited Rulebook might be a skill for escaping─I couldn’t get away from that Darkness for all I’d pedaled my bike, but she made a perfect getaway literally burdened by the two of us.

To explain what she actually did, though, she just seemed to jump as hard as she could using both of her legs…

“No, kind monster sir, that’s correct. While I gave it a cool name like the Disengagement Edition, we simply ran away.”

“Simply…”

“However, we did so vertically. Since you’d proved that horizontal flight was meaningless…I thought it might have trouble dealing with up-and-down movements… Looks like I nailed it.”

“…”

I felt somehow bamboozled, but at the end of the day, we’d gotten away and that’s all that mattered.

So─if you’re wondering where we escaped to, we were now in a place with a lot of memories for me ever since spring break, a hidden base of sorts where I once staged a lethal battle with Ononoki and her master, Kagenui. In other words, the abandoned cram school.

We were on the ruins’ fourth floor.

One of its three classrooms was serving as our resting spot. Finding rest in ruins might sound strange…but having gotten away from that Darkness, there was no reason for us not to feel relieved.

Hachikuji was still passed out.

Placing her on the floor would be crude even under the circumstances, so I put some nearby desks together to make a bed just like Oshino used to and laid her there.

While Hachikuji was grown for a fifth grader, she was still an elementary schooler. Three desks put together was enough.

Having put my shirt over her in place of a blanket then balled up my jeans for her to use as a pillow, I was in nothing but my underpants now.

Hmm.

It was out of consideration for Hachikuji’s wellbeing, so why did I just look like a pervert?

Frankly, I could live without being branded an exhibitionist on top of everything else…

“You’re quite muscular, kind monster sir,” Ononoki said.

Once we’d settled down.

“Yep, those are good muscles.”

“…”

“Good muscles. You must work out, because those are good muscles. It was hard to tell from over your clothes, but those are some good muscles.”

“…”

She was praising my muscles… But it’s not like I worked out, it was just one of the effects of turning into a vampire over spring break…

“How about staying undressed from now on? You should show off your muscles more, kind monster sir. I think you have a fine ottermode physique.”

“Can we, uh, talk about something other than muscles?”

“Come on, don’t be like that, how about some poses? As a way to thank me for saving you.”

“Little girl’s trying to guilt-trip me, huh?”

“If you showed me an abs and thighs pose, I might not mind sharing the secret of my Unlimited Rulebook.”

“Isn’t that a pretty important secret?!”

The kid was a mess.

Though again, it reminded me of Senjogahara.

…Except she never reacted to my muscles. Someone getting this into them was troubling, but no reaction at all was, in its own way, sad.

“Yeah, I can’t deny that I’m interested in the Unlimited Rulebook…”

Given Kagenui’s specialty, there was no guarantee that we would never fight again… Though it did seem like she wasn’t in town at the moment.

“But what I really want to know about right now is that Darkness. Do you really not have any idea, Ononoki?”

“I said I don’t know…”

She came to touch my abs as she spoke. She did it so casually that I nearly overlooked it, but this was outright groping.

“Your muscles are the only thing I know about, kind monster sir.”

“What do you know about my muscles…”

“What don’t I know?”

When Ononoki asserted this with her blank look, she was surprisingly convincing.

Maybe she did find out, somehow.

It could even be that… Wait, find what out?

Geez, there’s no secret to my muscles.

“Well, what about you, kind monster sir? Do you have any idea… Do you have any I-dea?”

“Emphasize it as you might, that’s not a very good pun or play on words… No, no idea.”

Maybe I did, though.

I had too good of an idea.

You could even say my whole life was the idea.

That said…if you were to ask what it might be in particular, I’d have to throw up my hands.

Every aberration has its reasons, sure, but was that unreasonable, unidentifiable Darkness even describable as an aberration?

Unreasonable, unidentifiable─and of unknown cause.

“I dunno,” I said. “It’s not like I’m an expert on aberrations… I’m just a dime-a-dozen pseudo-vampiric high schooler.”

“I don’t think there are even a dozen of those…”

“In fact, thinking back on all the aberrations I’ve dealt with─”

A vampire.

A cat.

A crab.

A snail.

A monkey.

A snake.

A bee─and a bird.

Also, a corpse.

“─There’s something different about it. I’ve never seen an aberration as abstract as darkness itself. What kind of aberrational phenomenon is it supposed to be?”

That there was any in the middle of the day already felt odd. Well, aberrations appearing only at night, during the witching hour and so on, might just be a preconception, but for it to be that clear?

No, clear it wasn’t…not when it couldn’t be seen.

“Darkness,” Ononoki mumbled, like she was talking to herself. “True, it must be Darkness…”

“Hm? What?”

“Well… How do I put this? I hope what we’re up against really is Darkness. That it’s just Darkness…”

Ononoki remained expressionless, like she felt nothing, but also like she might be finding our situation simply tedious.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “That thing is Darkness, no matter how you look at it.”

“But you can’t look at it, can you? That black mass is much more likely to be just a phenomenon accompanying an aberration.”

“Oh, okay…”

“If we start saying that, though, we can’t be sure if we’re even ‘up against’ it. Maybe it wasn’t in order to come after you that it appeared, kind monster sir…just as a typhoon or a storm or any other meteorological phenomenon isn’t going after a person.”

“But then, that thing was obviously after me and Hachikuji.”

“Right…”

Ononoki sounded so indecisive.

“No good,” she said, seeming to realize this herself. “I’m just too captivated by your muscles to get my thoughts straight.”

“It’s fine that you’re having trouble getting your thoughts straight, but could you go find a different reason?”

“My sister might know something…but I can’t get in contact with her right now.”

It goes without saying that by “sister” Ononoki meant Yozuru Kagenui─the violent onmyoji.

Indeed, being an expert, and also an old acquaintance of Oshino, she might possess some knowledge about that object (if it even was one).

She might…but actually, I was more relieved than anything to hear that Ononoki couldn’t contact her.

Kagenui is one of those types I’d rather not deal with for the rest of my life, although things probably won’t go that way.

“Where is she, by the way, and what’s she doing? It must be work, right?”

“Yes, it’s work, and of course the details are a secret. Why are you being so nosy? The nerve.”

“I wasn’t asking to be nosy…” I was only trying to be polite, but the onmyoji community took confidentiality much more seriously than I’d expected.

“If you really want to know, you could offer me those muscles.”

“Yikes, offer them like how?”

“Gouge some out and feed it to me.”

“Talk about scarring.” It seemed like we were on the same page, but we weren’t. “Whatever, it’s not like it’s a problem if we can’t get in touch with her. We’ll figure it out once night falls, anyway.”

“Why is that? Do you suddenly become bright after dark?”

“No, I don’t come with such a useful function… It’s just when Shinobu wakes up.”

Ononoki visibly grimaced when she heard the name. A normally expressionless face twisting into a grimace really underscored the level of disgust.

It was hard to blame her, though.

Once upon a time, in this very abandoned cram school, Ononoki nearly got murdered by Shinobu─no, that’s not a good way to put it.

Shinobu was clearly playing around then.

She just toyed with Ononoki─of course it’d make her resentful, of course she’d hate her.

In any case, I pretended not to notice her reaction and continued. “Appearances aside, she’s the king of aberrations─she’d be well-versed on the subject even if it weren’t for a months-long elite education at the hands of Mèmè Oshino, a pro just like Kagenui. Shinobu’s an even greater expert than the experts, in other words. She has to know something about that Darkness. Which is why we’re bound to learn what it really is once she wakes up.”

“…Keh,” spat Ononoki, not hiding her displeasure.

She had a lot to learn as a human being, I thought─no wonder, she was an aberration. Since she used to be human, maybe it was more accurate to say she’d learned to be too aberrational.

“I’m not buying the knowledge of a geriatric like her.”

“Don’t call Shinobu geriatric,” I scolded.

“And ‘once she wakes up’? Are you saying that wicked woman is asleep right now? Unbelievable… To think she’d be napping while her master is fighting for his life.”

“I’m not really her master…”

But when it came to that part of our relationship, things got hard to explain. At the very least, it was extremely difficult to convince someone like Ononoki who had a perfect, or a logically consistent master-servant relationship… Maybe the smart choice was to give up on trying from the start.

“What, are you not that vampire’s master, kind monster sir?”

“No, no, I am. I’m so much her master that it’s almost like I’m not. She’s constantly there, waiting upon me.”

“…”

Ononoki looked at me like I was some sort of dangerous character.

Yeah, I could see why.

“It’s not like I can stop her from napping… Something tiring happened to her the other day. She’s probably sound asleep right now.”

“Hm. So even a vampire like her gets tired… That’s surprising.”

Well, Shinobu, too, would get tired after traveling through time again and again. It might’ve been a different story had it been her at her peak…

“I don’t think a half day’s worth of sleep will be enough to recover from all of that fatigue…” I said. “But either way, all that needs to happen is for her to wake up and then everything will be solved. No matter what that Darkness is.”

“I wouldn’t be overconfident if I were you. Whatever elite schooling that vampire received, there’s no one in the world who knows everything about every aberration.”

That also goes for my sister and Mèmè Oshino─added Ononoki. While it sounded like her opinion owed in part to her dislike for Shinobu, I could see some sense in it.

If aberrations are something birthed by human cognition, then an infinite number of them could be born into eternity.

“True,” I conceded, “there’s no guarantee that Shinobu knows what the Darkness is… But Ononoki, it doesn’t matter even if she doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because she eats aberrations─regardless of the identity of that unidentifiable thing, she can just gulp it down. We’ll take emergency measures to escape this crisis for now, and we’ll ask Hanekawa or someone later about the mystery behind the Darkness.”

“Hane-kawa? Who’s that?”

“Someone who knows everything.”

In fact, I might have called Hanekawa right then and there, but having skipped our start-of-school ceremony made me reluctant.

I could almost hear her reply: Okay, I’ll tell you, and you can even touch my breasts as much as you want, but could you please never talk to me again?

“I don’t know about that,” Ononoki said. I thought she was talking about my fantasy, but I was wrong. “I don’t know about relying on someone for everything like that.”

“I don’t think I rely on her for everything.”

“You mean you’re supporting each other? They say no man is an island─but you’re no man at all, are you, kind monster sir?”

“…”

“Nor is that vampire, of course… I ought to warn you, the only person you can count on when it really matters is yourself.”

Though it’s not for me to say when I went and saved you, qualified Ononoki.

True, I had no idea know what would’ve happened to me if it weren’t for her, so it did feel like a ridiculous self-contradiction.

“By the by, I, Yotsugi Ononoki, shouldn’t be here doing this,” her tone suddenly turned expository as she stood up. “I told you yesterday that I’m in this town for work, remember?”

“Did you?”

Yeah, I didn’t remember.

So much happened afterwards… I’m not exaggerating, it was so much. You could even say my current situation wasn’t too bad compared to that experience…

Seeing how I found myself in this situation immediately after resolving that one, I did seem to be living a jam-packed life.

What did I ever do?

Well, a lot, I guess.

And as far as the time travel, that was entirely me sticking my own head into it.

“You’re busy, huh, Ononoki?”

“Of course I am. Unlike you, I’m no happy-go-lucky fellow who needs to do nothing more than go to school and have fun. I have to work to live.”

“I wouldn’t say that all I need to do is go to school and have fun…”

“You didn’t even go to school today, did you?”

“Well… Stuff happened.”

“Stuff happens to everyone. Don’t make it sound like you’re some special victim.”

“…Okay.”

I got scolded by a tween girl.

And I didn’t have any excuse or retort, either.

Moreover, I was sitting there in just my underpants as a tween girl stood above me and took me to task.

Not bad at all. Scold me, scold me!

“I feel disgusted for some reason.” Seeming to sense something, Ononoki began to walk off.

When she passed by my side, she ground her feet in my shadow in an obviously intentional way. She did this, of course, knowing that Shinobu was snoring away inside of it.

This went deep…

“I’ll be going, then.”

“Then… What? Back home?”

“Not home, really… Back to work.”

“You’re not staying by my side for the rest of my life to protect me?”

“Where would you get that idea?”

“I’m joking. I do appreciate your protecting me even once. Actually, I haven’t thanked you, have I? Thanks. I promise to repay this favor to you somehow.”

“Muscles?”

“No, with something other than muscles…”

If she insisted, maybe I could gouge one pack out from my six and give it to her… It’d heal later, given my vampirism… But such an exchange seemed to run afoul of ethical and humanitarian considerations in various ways.

You know, like we couldn’t come back from crossing that line.

And anyway, wouldn’t my gift of muscles disappear once I healed?

“I’ve never actually been repaid by anyone promising to ‘return this favor somehow’ or ‘repay this debt without fail’… In fact, for someone like me, who might disappear from the world at any given moment, the standard for favors and debts is immediate repayment.”

“Immediate repayment… Then is there something I can do right now?”

I really did feel indebted to her.

Now that I thought about it, bragging to her about Shinobu, whom she disliked, after being saved like that might’ve been rude.

Could it have spoiled her mood and made her suddenly say she was leaving? Even if that wasn’t it and she really was leaving because she had work (asking what it might be certainly wouldn’t get me an answer), I still wanted to do what I could.

“Something you can do right now? Hmm. Well…”

“There’s only so much I can do, but tell me what you want. At least tell me.”

“Hm.”

Ononoki took a step back toward me for some reason.

She came back and stepped on my shadow.

…Could she stop doing that on purpose?

“Kind monster sir.”

“?”

“Look this way, smooch.”

She stole a kiss from me.

Out of nowhere.

It couldn’t be described with a cute expression like “she kissed me” and really felt like she’d stolen something. A surprise attack, like your wallet being taken without you even noticing─I’d been shown a brilliant magic trick.

Wait, I was the victim!

A victim!

“Wh-Whuddryuh…”

What’re you doing, I tried to ask, but I was tongue-tied.

I was just impressed that I didn’t manage to bite my tongue. Who knew, she might have even stolen that, too.

“Wuhddidih,” Ononoki played dumb, with no sign of guilt or shame. “Uh oh. Cheater, cheater! Kind monster sir, you’re scum.”

“?! ?!”

What was this kid saying?!

What was she saying with her expressionless face?!

I wasn’t positive, but it felt like she was saying something really scary!

“Trusting relationships, that sort of thing? Well, I just wanted to teach you how easily they can crumble. I guess I’ve done you another favor instead of being repaid… Why, with all those favors, you could hold a party. But I suppose I do feel a little better,” Ononoki said, turning her back on me as if I was a toy she’d lost interest in and tossed aside and not even bothered to put away.

It seemed like her “cheater” bit wasn’t about my relationship with Senjogahara, but rather, my ties with Shinobu.

So she was getting back at Shinobu…

Young girls are scary!

“Well,” said Ononoki, “do your best to survive this game you don’t know the rules to.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“Then what is it?”

With that, Yotsugi Ononoki left the ruins, and I wouldn’t say reluctantly. She’d gone back to work.