Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 6.06

006

The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.

Well, the fact that I didn’t set Hanekawa up for her usual catchphrase is already a hell of a twist ending, but anyway, here’s what happened. Cutting straight to the conclusion, the old tree Karen wanted to protect didn’t get chopped down.

And naturally I don’t mean that it got punched or kicked over, either─it’s alive and well even as we speak. I can’t guarantee it’ll be there forever─but for now, it does seem to have weathered the storm.

As for what we did:

“A pandemic or a panic will come to an end─when it gets to where it’s going.”

It’ll stop when it reaches its goal.

Basically, when any kind of virus has spread so widely that it can’t spread any further, there’s nothing else for it to infect, so the outbreak ends of its own accord.

That’s how the food chain remains stable─though in this case, of course, we couldn’t actually let it get to where it was going since “the end of the line” for this particular pandemic was the old tree’s disposal.

“So what we have to do is move the goal posts─at this stage, everyone thinks the tree is ‘freaky,’ right? Or one step up, ‘scary’─that’s where the general awareness level is at, right? ‘Freaked out,’ ‘terrified’─we just have to move them one stage further up the ladder. That’s where we need to put the goal.”

“One stage further…”

“Which would be awe, I guess?”

Awe. Not just fear.

Fearful─reverence.

The next day, this is what Karen told her fellow disciples.

That aged tree was like the ones used in the construction of our sacred dojo─and apparently it was planted in the rear courtyard as the dojo’s guardian deity.

Which explains─the mysterious phenomenon we all experienced.

That was how she explained it to them.

That was how she spun it to them.

“Having watched unseen over the disciples of this dojo for many decades, a god of the martial arts finally revealed itself, its energy expended. To cut it down would be unthinkable─”

She adopted Hanekawa’s fairy tale pretty much as-is─Karen, of course, isn’t the kind of person who’d lie to anyone except her big brother, so first I had to dupe her.

She also isn’t the type to believe in aberrations, but a few months previously she’d experienced some weird shit, and apparently the spiritual frame story of an “invisible martial arts guardian deity” was relatively easy for her, as a martial artist, to accept.

As for the other students of the dojo, including the ones who’d only been swept along─“the truth of the matter” had been brought to light without negating their opinions and feelings, it even extrapolated from them, so that was the end of the line for the panic, or to put it another way, nothing more happened.

And─

If that was the truth, they’d never dream of harming the tree.

This fiction was not going to fool Karen’s sensei, the master of the dojo, of course. It stands to reason, though there’s no way of knowing for sure, that the lumber used to build the dojo didn’t come from the same kind of tree as our aged friend.

“But I somehow doubt that’ll come up─their sensei won’t want to spoil the mood. After all, Karen will have convinced everyone like she promised.”

Apparently, that was indeed how it went.

I guess Hanekawa’s view that the sensei, who had a dojo to run, wasn’t foolish enough to rekindle a panic that had finally abated, was on point─and so.

For the moment, the tree’s life has been prolonged─Karen, taking responsibility, protected this tree she had “found.”

“I do feel bad about lying, though…”

Having leaned on Hanekawa’s wisdom, I was in no position to bolster her spirits when she said this, but I couldn’t help trying to console her.

“It wasn’t necessarily a lie.”

“Hunh?”

“For all we know, that tree might be an aberration. I don’t know if it’s a guardian deity, but…maybe it was an aberration that no one was aware of because it was hiding its presence all along. And the dojo being built from the same kind of wood isn’t out of the question. It’s statistically possible.”

“Haha. Sure, a statistically negligible possibility.”

“Statistically negligible possibilities are still possible. And…”

Well.

Even if I meant it by way of consolation, the next thing I said might’ve gone too far.

“Thanks to the way we spun it, that tree might actually have become an aberration. One to watch over the disciples as they train.”