Monogatari Series - Volume 12 - Chapter 1.27

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.

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 head, 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 Miss 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.

“Anyway, I don’t think it’s something we can figure out based on past cases, kind monster sir… After all, you’re a mockery of a vampire, not a real vampire. My personal view is that since you’re practically human, you shouldn’t have any trouble begetting a child.”

“Begetting…”

That word.

It sounded both indirect and very to the point.

“If it was with a human, I’m sure the child that’s born would be more human than you, at least… Oh, kind monster sir, I’m sorry.”

“Huh?” I tilted my head when Ononoki apologized to me out of the blue. Did she make some kind of faux pas just now?

“I was assuming that you’d have a family with a human woman, but that’s not necessarily going to be the case. There was the possibility that you’d have one with the Aberration Slayer. In that case─”

“Stop it. Talking about begetting a child with a little girl is enough to creep even me out.”

“Fine, then we’ll use my humble self as an example. Though it would be an instance of necrophilia.”

“Come on, you should be using Hachikuji as the example here.”

“Why would you be fine with me?!”

In any case, down the mountains we descended, loaded with unresolved anxieties─there was no sign of any town or village no matter how many hours we walked, even after dawn. But during one of our many breaks (I lost count of how many we took), we found ourselves blessed by a stroke of good luck: a single bar but a bar all the same of reception on my cell phone.

Of course, I knew that sometimes you could accidentally pick up some kind of signal when you were actually still out of service… I heard there were spots like that in the mountains, so while talking might be hard, I might at least manage to get out a text message if I tried enough times.

“You said we could get in touch with Kagenui by texting, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I forget, Ononoki. Do you carry a cell phone?”

“No… I don’t, just in case. I do remember her contact info, though.”

“…”

Carrying a cell phone just in case would make sense, but I didn’t quite understand why you wouldn’t carry one just in case… In other words, was she wary of dropping her phone or having it stolen?

If so, Ononoki lived in an even harsher world than I’d imagined─she couldn’t so much as walk around with a communication tool?

I wanted to continue down the line of thought if I could, but I didn’t have room for it─I just punched the string of letters and numbers Ononoki gave into my cell and thought about what a cold, uncaring person I am.

“What should the message say?”

“Make sure it includes our secret phrase… Oh, and the cipher saying you’ll wait for her reply. It’s probably better if you don’t include any specifics. She might not want to deal with us if she suspects that we’re in too much trouble.”

“Is she that hardhearted? If anything, I thought she was the type to come charging head-first into a dangerous situation.”

“That’s only when she’s dealing with immortal aberrations…”

Other times, Sis is just a regular person for the most part, Ononoki said. “And actually, it’d be dangerous if she came charging head-first. If my sister is too excited when she arrives, you might end up getting exterminated, kind monster sir─oh, or maybe not. You’re losing your power right now, aren’t you…”

“In any case, I’d rather not make any more enemies than I already have…”

I know I shouldn’t frame it this way, but while I was at it, I also sent messages to Senjogahara, Hanekawa, Karen, and Tsukihi to let them know that I was okay.

Though I wasn’t in reality, they’d feel at ease knowing that I was in a situation where I could text them, at least.

I didn’t want them to worry about me.

Heh. I’d become a considerate kind of guy.

Sending five texts in total took a bit of time, but I figured I’d think of it as a nice little break.

“Mister Araragi.”

“What, Hachikuji?”

“I realize it’s too late to be saying this, but the email you sent to Miss Hanekawa and the others read ‘Dot worry.’”

“Yeah, it is too late! Why didn’t you tell me earlier?!”

“I don’t know if you want them to worry or not, but the normal reaction to a message written that poorly would be to worry…”

“…”

Hmm.

It’s true that you’d be hard-pressed to call me an expert at using cell phones, but what an elementary blunder…

I turned off my phone, not to cut our conversation short or to avoid follow-up questions from Hanekawa and the others, but to preserve some of my valuable battery power. We then continued down the mountain, taking occasional breaks, and eventually reached the bottom the next morning.

August twenty-third, in other words.

Climbing down ended up taking more than a full day─and it was less like climbing all the way down the mountain and more like reaching a village within the mountains─in any case, we were wiped out.

It wasn’t just my legs that felt stiff, but my whole body.

Was this how branches always felt? Must be tough.

Since we had been hiking unsure when the Darkness might show up out of nowhere, our level of mental exhaustion was incredible as well─it never did, fortunately, but the fact that it didn’t meant that it might have appeared where Shinobu was, fomenting its own kind of anxiety.

“Well, kind monster sir, I guess the fact that we didn’t run into a bear or anything that deep in the mountains should be reason enough for celebration… How’s the reception on your cell phone?”

“I tried turning it on, but…hm, still not much. At least it’s not out of service.”

“I guess we got lucky earlier.”

“I don’t know about that. It looks like we haven’t gotten a reply from Kagenui.”

That I hadn’t gotten any from Hanekawa or the other girls was weighing on my mind as well… Were they mad after all? Maybe they assumed I was dead already.

“Hmm… In that case, it might just be better to go ahead and call her. We can bother one of the homes around here and ask to use their phone. If cell reception is weak here, they must have land lines.”

“Yeah…” I said, glancing at Hachikuji on my back─I was carrying her now after she’d run out of stamina and willpower halfway through.

Ononoki had her backpack on.

Now that I was back to normal, walking around with someone on my back was pretty tough, even if that someone was a ten-year-old girl… Actually, I doubt I’d have been able to carry anyone on my back down a mountain unless she was a ten-year-old girl.

What exactly about that was normal?

I was living dangerously.

“Will a direct call reach Kagenui if she’s done with work by now?”

“Well, it will sometimes, and it won’t at others… It’s pretty random.”

“What do you mean, random?”

“My sister always says that it’s risky to fall into patterns as you go about your life.”

“…”

Wondering about that, I walked down the unpaved path into the village─only a little bit further. In fact, I was just glad there was a path at all. We’d been walking on dirt and stones until just moments earlier.

“Now that you mention it, Oshino didn’t establish any patterns in his life either─is that like some kind of shared rule amongst their old occult research club?”

Oshino and Kagenui had gone to college together where they belonged to the same club─it also counted Kaiki among its members.

How serious of a lineup could you get?

Of course, while they said they were researching the occult, it sounds like they just played Japanese chess all the time.

“But shogi seems to me like a game where established tactics are especially important… Maybe that’s just a preconception of mine?”

“Izuko Gaen, too,” Ononoki muttered. “Now that you mention it, she seems to have been a member as well.”

“What? Really? So she knows Oshino, too─Oshino and Kaiki… That’s kind of a strange connection.”

“I think I heard she was their senior. From my sister… She said Izuko Gaen was a mean-spirited senior.”

“She’s mean-spirited?”

I couldn’t believe it.

Wasn’t there a single person in that club with a decent personality?

“Yeah. I heard her personality was worse than my sister’s, worse than that Oshino guy’s, and worse than Kaiki’s.”

“Can someone like that be allowed to exist? Are you sure she’s not imaginary?”

If I was being honest, I didn’t want to ask such a person for help, now that I’d heard about her… I wished I hadn’t.

“Can we find a residential map? Probably not here. Where the heck am I?”

“You sound like Ryoga Hibiki saying that.”

“Why do you even know.”

“As weak as the signal is, you’re getting something, right? In that case, can’t you use your GPS to figure out where we are?”

“I don’t really know how that kind of thing works… I just know how to use my phone as a phone.”

“Yes, you do even mess up your texts. Dot worry.”

“You’d better not turn that into a running joke…”

But now, I wanted them to worry.

I hadn’t thought it would take this long to climb down the mountain… To be honest, I was starving for some Senjogahara, Hanekawa, and little sisters in my life.

Given our situation, I couldn’t quite lose myself in cheerful banter with Hachikuji, either… My only hope was Ononoki now.

But Ononoki was cold.

Cold as a corpse.

She was a frightening tween girl whose most fundamental skill was her ability to ignore things.

“Which house should we go to for a phone?”

“A lot of these homes don’t have door phones… Which is better, though, a home with a door phone, or knocking right on their front door… I guess you’d go with the latter if you were a salesman.”

Which was exactly why I felt so guilty.

The fact that I was planning this out made it seem like I was doing something wrong. Well, wrong might be an overstatement, but something devious…

No, this was quite frankly no time to be prevaricating… It didn’t matter who answered, I needed to sound sincere so they’d lend me their phone one way or another.

So I could be reunited with my partner.

My lifelong partner.

“Still, I’d prefer a home with a young girl, preferably in her teens… It’d make it easier to convince her.”

“What a monstrosity of a line, kind monster sir. It seems that the monstrous parts of you are still alive and well. Bravo, well done.”

We ended up picking a home more or less at random, one that kind of seemed like it had a nice entrance gate─I’d wanted to try the first home we reached, but we had to give up after their pet dog went wild barking at us.

The home didn’t have a door phone, so I knocked on the front door.

“Excuse me. I’m a traveler. Please give me something to eat… Sorry, no, um, could you please let me borrow your phone─”

I explained what I was doing there, nearly spilling how I truly felt (It was easier for me to get hungry now that my vampiric nature was fading. I’d gnawed on twigs in the mountains to keep my hunger at bay, though).

I continued to knock.

“Excuse me, I’m a traveler─”

I continued to knock, thinking about just how suspicious my introduction sounded.

“I’ll be right there~”

But no matter how suspicious my knocking, it couldn’t have been anywhere close to the suspicion I felt at hearing the terribly aloof reply.

It was a very young voice compared to the home’s appearance.

Very young, though not in its teens─but I wasn’t tired enough to start thinking that I’d come across an opportunity or something.

“Thanks for waiting!” the voice said before the door opened.

It rattled to the side on unsteady rails.

Just as I expected, I guess─the person there was young.

A woman in her late twenties─and she had a youthful sense of fashion, too.

She wore a baseball cap turned to the side, baggy jeans, an XL, no, XXL-or-so-sized shirt, and accessories all over her body, necklaces, rings, et cetera─I was kind of surprised that she wasn’t wearing sunglasses.

She didn’t match the home’s aged façade at all.

If you’ll forgive me for sounding rude, she looked really fishy.

“Um…”

“Actually, while I said ‘thanks for waiting,’ I guess I was the one doing the waiting─nice to meet you,” the peculiar woman remarked jokingly as she introduced herself with a smile. “I’m Izuko Gaen. The lady who knows everything.”