Monogatari Series - Volume 14 - Chapter 1.12

012

Yotsugi Ononoki’s finishing move.

The finishing move of the shikigami employed by expert and violent onmyoji Yozuru Kagenui was known as the “Unlimited Rulebook” (rules consisting mostly of exceptions)─I don’t know the origin of that bizarre name, but this no ifs, ands, or buts secret technique involved instantly and explosively enlarging one part of the body to attack the target, an extremely up-close-and-personal melee offense of unlimited power incongruous with Ononoki’s outward appearance.

Though even if it didn’t seem appropriate for a tween girl, it was appropriate enough for Ms. Kagenui’s shikigami… The amazing thing about the move was that it was possible to use it for defense as well as offense. Well, defense might not be the proper term─more like evasive action.

If need be, one could use the reaction, the recoil from instantly and explosively enlarging one’s body to travel at high speed in any direction─forward or backward or right or left, even up. If you could stand on the ceiling, I imagine it would be possible to use it to travel straight down as well.

So really you could just call it “movement” instead of “evasive action.”

To put it in RPG terms, it was simultaneously both a ranged attack and a movement spell─what I’m getting at, in other words, is that even as the crow flies it was a fair distance to Kanbaru’s house from the vacant land, er, wasteland where the ruins of the cram school had formerly stood, but with Ononoki’s power, we could make the trip in just a few seconds.

Shinobu, however, grumbled, “At the height of my power, I too could accomplish such a feat.”

Which was an understatement, to say the least. At the height of her power, when she was known as a legendary vampire, Shinobu could circle the globe seven and a half times in a single second. But unfortunately, she was at present not a legendary vampire at the height of her powers, but an eight-year-old girl at the nadir of her powers, so she was forced to sink into my shadow and ride along.

I wrapped my arms tight around Ononoki’s waist, squeezed my eyes shut, and seconds later─I was standing in front of Kanbaru’s night-enshrouded home.

“Shall we, kind monster sir?”

“No…hang on…a sec…please.”

Ononoki was definitely a pro; she was ready for action the second we landed, but the pertinent question was whether or not I was up to it. And I wasn’t.

It stood to reason. We’d taken an aerial shortcut, blasting off like a rocket, but the motion itself wasn’t the problem; I was in no shape to handle the changes in atmospheric pressure and oxygen level.

I was dizzy, and couldn’t catch my breath.

Altitude sickness mode, I was surprised I didn’t pass out.

Though I guess I should’ve been glad just to arrive in one piece.

It probably would’ve been even worse if I wasn’t already partially vampirified─though if it’d been through Shinobu’s power instead of my own like the last time I experienced this kind of movement, the whole thing would’ve been no big deal.

“…Urk.”

Yup.

At the time I hadn’t thought I was relying so flagrantly on that power, which is to say I’d suffered from a certain lack of self-awareness, but now that I’d been told all of a sudden that I could never use it again─I was painfully aware of what I had lost.

Even though it didn’t actually mean that I’d lost anything, and in fact, I’d been steadily losing some vital part of my humanity every time I did it.

“You okay, kind monster sir?”

Ononoki hurried over to me, seeming totally unconcerned.

Being a corpse and all, differences in air pressure or the oxygen level naturally had no effect on her.

“Do you need me to give you mouth-to-mouth?”

“Um… I’m in no condition for that kind of joke right now…”

Hmm.

I hate to say it, but if I, Koyomi Araragi, was in no condition for that kind of joke, then I must’ve been in terrible shape indeed.

But I couldn’t huddle there forever─no point in staying hunched over on the ground. Whatever my condition, this was no time for huddling or hunching.

“Shinobu… Sorry, but let me lean on you.”

“If it must be so,” she replied, appearing from where she lurked in my shadow.

Sinuously.

I started to wonder where she’d been while Ononoki and I were gliding through the sky, since I wasn’t casting even the faintest shadow on the ground while we were airborne; as I considered such trivial questions, Shinobu threw my arm around her neck and propped me up.

It was night, so her little girl’s body had that much strength, at least.

A little-girl power character and a tween-girl power character.

“Now…Ononoki. I’m sorry but I’ve got another job for you.”

“You’re a real taskmaster. Giving me plenty to do, aren’t you, kind monster sir. Well, we’ve got Big Sis’s approval this time, so I’ll help out any way I can. But won’t it kill you if we jump that high again?”

“No no no, no one’s saying anything about that… Listen, Kanbaru doesn’t live alone, you get me?”

Her place is a bit of a mansion.

A real mansion, in the traditional style.

It’s surrounded by a high wall, and you can tell at a glance that they’re a wealthy family─there’s even a grand gate. You can’t see it from outside, but they’ve also got a stately rock garden with a koi pond and everything. What do you call that kind of garden, karesansui or something?

Whatever, the point is, it’s sprawling.

Sprawlingly sprawling.

Maybe that’s not the appropriate term to use for such a noble home, but sprawling is the only word I can come up with─and the only people who live there are Suruga and her grandparents, just the three of them with all that space.

So what, you say? Well, if we attempted a frontal assault through the front gate and ran into her grandmother or grandfather, it’d definitely count as trespassing─and while marching up to the front door and ringing the doorbell merited some small measure of consideration, it was a tough sell at that hour. Such boorishness would be just as bad as trespassing.

So I hoped to find a shortcut to Kanbaru’s room that avoided both the front door and an affront to her family─and shortcuts were Ononoki’s specialty.

I wasn’t envisioning jumping thousands of feet through the air, I figured we could just leap the wall encircling the mansion.

“Well…we didn’t end up having time for the test, but how vampiricized do you think you are right now, kind monster sir? You’ve got a healing factor, though it seems to be incredibly weak, but what about your physical strength─it’s nighttime, don’t you think if you really put your mind to it, you could jump over this wall?”

“It has nothing to do with whether or not I put my mind to it. There’s bound to be an alarm on a place like this. If I blew it and accidentally touched the wall or something, I’d set it off.”

“So what if you did… If what Ms. Kagenui, or really Ms. Gaen, said was true, then the inside of this house is already a warzone, or the aftermath of one anyway. It’s a totally appropriate time for alarms to be going off.”

“…”

No.

Ononoki was talking like she knew what was going on─if what Ms. Gaen said was true─but unless she really, literally had a telepathic connection with Ms. Kagenui, I didn’t think she actually had a grasp on what was going on at the Kanbaru residence. So how could she talk so confidently about it?

And yet Ms. Kagenui had been very persistent─Hurry up already, you’ll find out when you get there, so…

It didn’t seem like she’d said “there’s not a moment to lose” just to encourage us to hurry, she meant it literally─she didn’t even take the time to explain the situation properly.

I imagine she hadn’t accompanied us because, however un-human her violent capabilities, her body couldn’t withstand the shortcut. Though the fact that she used Google Maps to show Ononoki the location of Kanbaru’s house was a pretty contemporary, that is, an all-too-human form of wisdom.

“Okay. Hold tight, monstieur.”

“Uh huh.”

“And it’s not that kind of joke.”

“Any way you want it.”

“You too, Big Sis Shinobu.”

“I decline to hold tight to the likes of thee,” Shinobu brushed away Ononoki’s offer and sunk into my shadow. My partner’s determination to be hostile to Ononoki was unrelentingly deep-seated.

“Ready for takeoff.”

“Do it.”

“Unlimited Rulebook.”

I felt like she didn’t need to be quite so diligent about announcing the name of the skill, since if she made a little jump like that at full power she’d almost certainly overshoot the mark─but I didn’t even get a chance to finish this train of thought before Ononoki and I had successfully infiltrated the Kanbaru family’s courtyard.

Just like Lupin the Third.

“Just like Lupin the Third,” said Ononoki.

Boy are we in sync, I thought. But when she added, “I mean, it’s like we’re sneaking into some little cutie-pie’s boudoir,” I was instead floored by our low synchronization rate.

How could we have such different images of Lupin the Third?

“Not sure how I feel about the term ‘little cutie-pie’… Plus I don’t think Lupin the Third does that nowadays. Anyway, we’ve got to hurry to Kanbaru’s room. Su casa es mi casa.”

I may have been overstating the case, but I was confident that I knew Kanbaru’s bedroom better than she did.

I was confident that I knew it inside and out.

After all, despite the fact that it was exam-prep season, despite the fact that it was crunch time, I still came to tidy up Kanbaru’s room twice a month. Her room was a smorgasbord of mess, like it had a rewind function so that no matter how much cleaning I did it was buried in crap again in short order. I knew where every single thing in that room was.

I’d sent my two little sisters to Kanbaru’s place largely because I’d been there just the other day to clean her room. Under normal conditions, I’d never have let my adorable little sisters anywhere near it─not without a lifeguard. They’d drown in garbage.

With my arm still over Ononoki’s shoulder, I tiptoed across the grounds─thanks to her unexpected and unwelcome comment, I felt like I actually was sneaking into my junior’s boudoir, but anyway, I took off my shoes and stepped into the hallway─the security in these old Japanese manors was far too lax. They ought to do something about it, I thought, conveniently disregarding the fact that I was the one breaking in.

I carefully slid open the screen to Kanbaru’s room.

Well, not so carefully, more like to hell with it, but─sure enough!

“…”

There was nothing there worthy of a sure enough.

What an anticlimax.

It was just as Ms. Kagenui said─we’d only gone there to confirm her suspicions, pretty much. Kanbaru’s room was like an empty husk, nothing there but two vacant futons lined up side by side.

“It’s weird that there aren’t three, though,” I muttered.

Why only two futons for three people?

What exactly had been going on here?

It’s not like I didn’t have my suspicions, I had plenty of them and they were massive, but in any case, now was the time for action─even though it seemed deserted, I crept into the room, careful not to make a sound.

And checked the futons.

Feels like a cliché from a detective show, but they were still warm.

They can’t have got far may or may not have been the appropriate follow-up, but someone had definitely been lying on these futons until very recently─next I smelled the pillows. The pillow on one of the futons bore the lingering scent of Karen and Tsukihi, while the pillow on the other bore the lingering scent of Kanbaru─all three of them had been there until very recently indeed.

It did comfort me somewhat that the combination had been Kanbaru on one and Karen + Tsukihi on the other─and then I saw it.

As I gazed all around the room, I saw something that hadn’t been there the other day when I came to clean.

“…”

A paper crane.

Since Kanbaru’s room was in the Japanese style, it had a grand tokonoma alcove─usually heaped with drifts of garbage. But in the spic-and-span alcove, which, if I may be permitted a small toot on my own horn, was only empty because I’d taken the trouble to clear it out, sat a paper crane, like a traditional decoration.

A paper crane is, it goes without saying, a representative form of origami─I bet there’s not a single Japanese person who’s never folded one, and yet.

And yet─a paper crane?

“What is it, kind monster sir?”

“Look at this.”

Ononoki came up beside me and I pointed at my discovery─maybe I was being overly cautious, but I didn’t want to be too hasty about touching it.

“…”

“You’re probably thinking, It’s nothing but a paper crane, what’s the big deal, but Kanbaru’s not the type of person to decorate her room with something like this. That’s not the type of person she is. I mean, she doesn’t have an inkling about decorating the tokonoma in the first place, she just thinks of it as a convenient place to put stuff. A stack of pervy books would be one thing, but something as refined as this?”

“Yeah, refined,” echoed Ononoki, shaking her head─expressionlessly, which really made her seem like a doll.

The kind with a spring in its neck, that wobbles when you touch it.

I seriously wanted to touch it.

“It certainly is a ve-ry fine example─anyway, go on, monstieur, pick it up.”

“Huh? But…what if it’s some kind of clue?”

“It’s okay, kind monster sir, if it’s what I think it is─me, I’m a shikigami, or a corpse, so if I touched it I’m pretty sure nothing would happen, but you’re still human…”

“All right.”

That still bothered me, but this was no time for a Q&A─with Kanbaru and my sisters missing, nothing had changed. It was a race against time, there wasn’t a moment to lose.

I picked up the paper crane.

Treating it as if it were some kind of explosive device─

A small, perfectly white paper crane.

“Ick!!”

I shrieked─not in surprise, but because it freaked me out.

The second I picked it up─I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding, I’m honestly just putting the facts down on paper here exactly as they occurred─the lone paper crane suddenly became a string of a thousand.

It was like─a string of cranes had been planted in the floor of the alcove, and the single visible one was the bud, so that when I pulled it up I uprooted the whole thing.

A string of paper cranes.

Pretty banal, really, something everybody’s familiar with─mostly as something you make for a friend or family member who’s in the hospital. Coming out of nowhere, appearing suddenly and unexpectedly like that, though, it almost made me piss my pants.

I think it’s one of the elemental fears of humankind─a dense swarm of tiny things wriggling around is creepy, even if they’re inorganic.

Maybe it’s even more basic than that, and we’re just scared of anything innumerable─but anyway, I trembled at their abundance. I didn’t let go of the one I was holding, at least.

“H-Hey, Ononoki─”

“Just as I thought.”

“J-Just as you thought? If this is what you were expecting, why the hell didn’t you warn me─that it was going to turn into a whole string of them!”

“Well, I wondered if you’d be startled.”

“…”

I was doubly infuriated by the thought that I had Kaiki to thank for this aspect of her personality.

What if my shriek had woken up Kanbaru’s grandparents? No, I mean, really.

Under the circumstances, they’d think I was a kidnapper.

There was no way I’d be able to talk my way out of this one.

Still holding the string of cranes out before me like a lantern, I turned to Ononoki.

“Well? What was just as you expected?”

“I know who’s behind this. An acquaintance of Big Sis’s and mine. This is a message─in Lupin the Third terms, it’s like a calling card, advance notice of a crime.”

“A calling card… Wait, is this a kidnapping then? Yeah, it’s been carried out─”

Or no?

Maybe the kidnapping itself wasn’t the point, maybe there was something else─though that didn’t provide any consolation, nor alter the fact that Kanbaru, Karen, and Tsukihi were gone.

But─a calling card?

“That bastard loves this kind of parlor trick─he loves to scare people with malicious little pranks. Unbelievable, what a creep. But at least this time it’s blatantly obvious why the message was delivered in the form of a crane.”

“It…is?”

“It’s a bird,” Ononoki explained. “The shape of a bird─a phoenix. In other words, this flock of cranes, birds who are said to live for a thousand years, implies your sister Tsukihi.”

“Hunh?”

“Come on, monstieur. We’ve succeeded in our reconnaissance mission, our work here is done. Let’s head back to Big Sis─we need her to analyze that string of cranes. If our acquaintance is involved, I’m honestly not sure how involved Big Sis is going to want to get…but I’m pretty sure she’ll help that much, at least.”