Monogatari Series - Volume 16 - Chapter 11.01

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Chapter 11- Koyomi Nothing

001

When I say that Yozuru Kagenui doesn’t walk down any road, it’s neither a metaphor nor some impressionistic, high-concept declaration─she literally never sets foot on the ground, every day of her life governed by that constraint.

Which, on its own, makes it sound like a children’s game.

Living, proceeding, almost as if she were playing a one-woman game of king of the hill─where the ground is an ocean or the abyss, and you can only walk on raised things like stone steps or concrete walls. The first time I encountered her, she was standing on top of a mailbox.

Well, it might be a game if an elementary school student were the one doing it, but she’s a grown woman, so it comes off as pretty damn eccentric─not to mention the fact that elementary school students can play that kind of game because they weigh so little, whereas it’s actually pretty difficult for a grown-up. By now I’m sure I don’t need to tell how impressive her physical prowess is, but I find myself wondering if that prowess might actually be the result of the daily conditioning this eccentricity affords her.

However you dress it up, though, eccentric is eccentric─a little too eccentric to touch upon, so I’ve never asked her about it directly.

But as far as I can tell from what I’ve picked up here and there in our conversations, and from a certain origami enthusiast, there does seem to be a real reason─or at least, it’s clear she’s not just doing it for the physical conditioning, nor as a game.

Of course, even if there is a reason, I doubt anyone could uphold such a norm without some real drive.

As her enemy.

Or as someone who’s battled her head-on, battled and been driven through like that norm─well, well well well, I can safely say no one else is as scary as she is.

I’ve met quite a few experts in her field, Oshino included, but I have to say Yozuru Kagenui is the scariest of them all.

I’m terrified of her.

So much scarier than an aberration.

So much stronger than a demon.

An onmyoji who drives out aberrations by beating them up has to be rarer than an aberration─then again, it’s precisely because she’s that kind of person that her behavioral principle is so straightforward and easy to understand, while at the same time being irregular.

The randomness of never walking on the road is perhaps symbolic of her irregularity.

That reminds me, she told me once that she specializes in immortal aberrations because “with them, there’s no such thing as going too far,” but I wonder. Can I take those words at face value?

While her methodology may be easier to understand than Oshino’s or Kaiki’s, she’s the most antisocial of the whole bunch, the biggest misfit─there’s something I’d be curious to ask her, a human being who nonetheless dwells in a darkness darker than an aberration’s.