Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.02

002

If any of you’ve experienced being locked in an enigmatic classroom alone with an underclassman you’re meeting for the first time and an hour has already passed, I would’ve loved to ask you for advice─of course, my phone seemed to be out of service, and the room appeared to block any wi-fi signal as well. Even seeking outside advice appeared to be beyond me.

“No good, Araragi-senpai─” she said.

Ogi trotted over to me with tiny steps as I frantically used the full strength of my hands and feet to try and open the classroom’s front door.

“Oh, um, I don’t mean that you’re no good. I tried a lot of different things, but neither large window nor high window budged an inch, is what I’m trying to say.”

“…How’d I ever misinterpret it as ‘no-good Araragi-senpai’ in this situation?”

What kind of an aside was that?

“No good, either,” I said, slightly upset.

“No good, huh? That’s what I thought.”

“You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you? Trying to make me sound no good.”

Oh, not even a smidge─Ogi denied with the smile of someone playing dumb. Then again, despite her full, bright smile, she didn’t seem to me like someone who liked jokes too much. I decided to believe her for the time being.

From the moment we learned that we were apparently locked in there, Ogi and I had divided up the labor and attempted every escape method possible─me trying the regular entrances and exits, which is to say the doors at the front and back, while she investigated the windows.

“It isn’t like they’re locked… It’s like they’ve been fixed in place with glue or something,” I gave my thoughts on the matter, stretching my numbed arms around and around, after close to an hour in combat with the doors. As a senior, it was a little embarrassing to have spent a full hour to come to an “or something” conclusion, but facts were facts.

Meanwhile, Ogi─a Naoetsu High novice, a freshman and transfer student─shared her own better-informed findings with a soft smile.

“Right, as stated above, the windows are not budging one inch. Regarding any locks, the crescent ones installed on the windows are mobile. You can engage and disengage them freely─they can even be locked once engaged. The all-important window frame is immobile, though. When the crescent locks are engaged, of course, but also when they aren’t─as if they’ve been fixed in place with glue ‘or something,’ as you put it.”

“…”

By imitating my childish expression at the end, was she deferring to me, as her senior, or trying to insult me? Debatable.

“Every window, without exception?”

“Yes. Of course I gave each one a try. I’d never use a sample survey to cut corners─the large windows, the high windows, the hallway windows, the gym-side windows.”

They don’t move, she reported.

“The gym-side windows…” I muttered, turning to look in that direction. To be honest, it wasn’t the fact we were locked in, but that side, that direction, that was the real problem.

True, there was nothing visibly off about it─there was no world of demons on the other side of the window, no pack of dinosaurs or sea of flames. All I saw was a plain gym─Naoetsu High’s regular old gym. The basketball team that Kanbaru retired from was probably busy at work inside─well, I couldn’t hear any sounds coming from it, but maybe any external noise had been shut out from the classroom?

The ban on entering and exiting was comprehensive if it included sound, but even that didn’t seem to be a problem─not compared to what I saw on the other side of the window. No, like I said, the gym was just a plain gym.

Nothing unusual about the sight─except, we shouldn’t have been able to see the gym given the angle of the school building we were in.

“Normally, we should be seeing the school field from here.”

Yes, this building that Ogi and I had walked to stood parallel to the athletic field─we should’ve been able to espy the baseball team or the track team from where we were, not the indoor basketball team.

“…”

I felt like sticking my body out of the window, turning my head to look about, and getting a better understanding of what I was seeing outside, but even that was out of the question since the windows didn’t so much as open. All I could do was get an unnatural, uncanny feeling from our regular old gym.

Or maybe I was confused? Could I have come to a building facing the gym by accident, instead of the building facing the athletic grounds? No, I’d never make such an awful mistake, not when I was trying to show off to an underclassman I was meeting for the first time.

To begin with, the way we could see the gym from the window was unnatural. We were supposed to be on the third floor. Unless we were on the fifth floor, or at least the fourth, the roof shouldn’t have been visible─if I’d brought us to the wrong building, though, it was certainly possible we were on the wrong floor…

But even if seeing something that shouldn’t have been there was due to some mishap, it didn’t change the fact that Ogi and I were currently shut in a room.

Still, apart from sticking my body out of a window, was there no way of figuring out what floor we were on? Just as I was spinning my wheels─

“Then maybe it’s about time,” Ogi said.

“About time? For what?”

“To take to─more extreme measures. I mean, both you and I are going to starve if we don’t do something. We’ll starve and wither and die.”

“Yeah, I guess…”

Starving to death sounded a bit exaggerated at this point in time, but it was an inevitability if we continued to be stuck there. I mean, I felt confident that I could endure a little hunger, but the same couldn’t be said about Ogi, who was still in the middle of her growth spurt.

“But more extreme measures?”

When I turned to ask her what she meant, I saw there was no reason to─it was clear as day. Ogi was holding up, with both arms, one of the many desks that lined the classroom. As if it was cleaning time and they needed to be moved, so that the floor could be wiped down─but she wanted to do the complete opposite, to make a mess.

“One, two…”

On her own count, Ogi tossed the desk at the window. Not the hallway window, but the gym-side one (which should have been facing the athletic grounds). The hallway window was too dangerous, in case someone was walking on the other side, she told me later, but I don’t see much of a difference in risk between that and hurling it out of the building. In fact, the added potential energy (whether we were on the third floor or the fifth) could make both the broken glass and the flying desk that much more dangerous─but such fears turned out to be groundless.

The desk that Ogi threw at the window, which is to say at the glass, oh-so-naturally bounced off it like a Super Ball off a hard wall, expelling the contents─textbooks, notebooks, pencil case─onto the classroom floor. It seemed the owner wasn’t much for taking homework home, and the jumble could only be described as a pitiful sight. As for the desk, it came to a rest upside down, but not before a number of bounces.

There wasn’t a single scratch on the glass.

On that same note, the desk that came bouncing back, as well as its scattered contents, wasn’t destroyed or cracked. The “extreme measure” Ogi had taken─resulted in no results whatsoever.

“Maybe you could’ve thrown a desk that didn’t have anything in it? Considering the aftermath,” I nitpicked─but really, if we were going to go there, did she have to force herself to toss a desk? Wasn’t, uh, a chair easier to hold? This was glass she was trying to break, so even if using her bare hands was out of the question, why would a slender-armed girl like her, by no means well-built, choose a desk─but my doubts were soon addressed.

Which is to say, Ogi picked up a ballpoint pen (which was once inside a pencil case) from among the stuff scattered on the floor. With it in hand, she walked toward the blackboard. As if tossing not a chair but a packed desk at the window had killed two birds with one stone, and she’d saved herself the trouble of extracting the pen. Call it rational, or lazy─but as my doubt was addressed, a new one popped up. What exactly was she going to do with the pen? A click drew my attention, and it seemed she’d extended its tip, but you wrote on blackboards with chalk, not with─

“!”

I didn’t even have time to stop her. She scraped the blackboard with the ballpoint pen. Across the classroom, more sealed than usual, that awful screeching noise that torments the nerves worse than any other─didn’t spread.

There was no sound.

It didn’t seem like she’d held back, she’d slashed as if she were wielding a katana, yet no marks were left behind on the blackboard, not even the pen’s ink. I almost began to think that my eyes had been tricked into thinking she’d scratched it while she’d whiffed somehow.

“…No good. Hmm.”

“Wh-What were you trying to do there, Ogi?”

“Well, since I couldn’t destroy the window with a strike, I thought I’d try to shatter it using acoustic resonance,” she casually informed me. So this girl nonchalantly attempted something as advanced as destroy a window through sonic force─but she’d failed. And as if she’d accounted for this from the start, her expression stayed nonchalant as she tossed the pen to the floor.

Throwing a desk to try to break a window and to procure a ballpoint pen at the same time might be rational, but leaving such a mess in the process is surely irrational, I thought, tidying up the area to return the classroom to its original state. Ah, but then, wasn’t it rational in its own way to make such a big mess that I’d want to clean up, just as I was doing?

“Hm?”

As I gathered the textbooks and placed them inside the desk that I’d flipped back up, I caught a glimpse of the name written on them in sharpie: Fukado, Class 1-3.

So this was a first-year classroom? It had to be since that’s what it said… I hadn’t looked closely at the sign upon entering; in fact, I didn’t even recall if there was a sign to begin with. But wait─Fukado? Fukado… Well, I guess it was a common enough name?

“I’m sorry to interrupt you when you’re busy at work, but could you please come over this way?”

Ogi’s voice derailed my train of thought. I wanted to tell her I was busy tidying up the mess she’d made, but I stopped picking up for a moment anyway and began walking toward the front door─which I’d been battling until moments earlier, and where Ogi had moved without me noticing.

“Oh, no, no─back up a step, please. A little to the right, no, too much, to the left. Hmm, back half a step. Okay, now puff out your chest a little.”

…Her instructions were so detailed. I didn’t have a clue as to what she was trying to do, or why she was trying to do it─because I was assuming she’d decided to give her violent approaches toward the classroom a rest after throwing a desk at a window and scraping the blackboard. But no, she had another trick to try. And it was one hell of a violent one.

Just as I thought she was bending her knees low, Ogi unleashed a powerful elbow thrust into my solar plexus─ripping straight through me before my reflexes could spring into action.

“Ghaak!”

With my chest puffed out just as instructed, my body acted like a spring, bending at a right angle before falling head over heels and collapsing on the spot. My head nearly hit the door, thanks to the sheer force─but only grazed it, and I lay cowering on the floor.

“Kha…k. Wh-What… Ogi, you…”

“Hm. No good after all,” she deadpanned, looking at me with scorn as I struggled to so much as breathe. She showed zero signs of guilt. “Well, I just thought I might be able to erode the door with stomach acid. You know, even if strikes and resonance don’t work, we might still be able to melt it away. Looks like that approach doesn’t get it done either, though. All we did was make the door filthy. Not that a couple of drops of your stomach acid would dissolve the entire thing, anyway─wipe it down for me later, okay?”

“…”

She’d aimed not for my solar plexus but my stomach─her goal had been to make me spew bile. The girl did some crazy things with that gentle expression of hers. Why did I have to get sucker-punched by a girl I was meeting for the first time? What had I done to deserve this?

“Oh, sorry. Did that hurt?” she asked so shamelessly that I couldn’t even be mad. In fact, it was almost refreshing─and to tell the truth, I was fortunate enough to be used to this level of violence, given my home environment.

What kind of domestic abusers did I live with to be used to getting punched in the stomach?

Forget this life, I must be dealing with karma from a previous one.

“Not really. It’s no big deal,” I tried to keep up appearances as I got up. Then again, while acting calm was one thing, if this was what I got for trying to impress an underclassman, it was probably about time I reconsidered my stance.

“Ah, I knew I could count on you. I wouldn’t have minded spewing my own stomach acid, but I thought it might be a little too extreme of a visual. You’re the type who’d rather hock up his own digestive juices than make a girl puke hers, so I saw fit to defer to you.”

“How very considerate… And yes, I’m the type who’d rather spit up his own stomach acid than cause a girl to do the same.”

This was far too specific as far as personality traits go, not to mention the bizarre underlying assumption that someone had to vomit, but I went along with Ogi’s conversation as she stood there, smiling. Whether it was the smile of someone relying on an upperclassman’s kindness, or of someone making a total fool of him, was once again hard to tell.

So unfathomable.

It really did make sense that she was his niece─despite looking nothing at all like him.

“In any case,” I said, “this means the windows and the doors can’t be destroyed. We of course don’t have any professional tools at our disposal, so I doubt we’d be able to plow through a wall, either.”

“If only we had some plastic explosives,” Ogi remarked─troublingly, since I could see her using a bomb without a second thought if she had access to one, considering how quick she’d been to elbow me. Of course, whether or not that would work was a different question─we might not come out of it unscathed, for one thing.

“Yikes. Looks like we’re in this for the long haul. The real threat here is driving ourselves crazy by struggling and failing to get out. Let’s just wait for someone on the outside to help us, Ogi─luckily, Kanbaru knows we’re here,” I said magisterially, in as bright and cheerful of a tone as I could manage.

I wasn’t as relaxed as that, to be honest, but I wanted to make this junior of mine feel safe and show her just how mature I was. From her perspective, just being locked in the same space as a boy she was meeting for the first time must have been worrying enough… In that light, her earlier elbow strike could be interpreted as a kind of threat, an expression of her apprehension.

Whatever the case, it felt like I was being tested as a man through my actions. Or that the wrong choice could lead to my downfall.

“I wonder.” Ogi sounded calm, not concerned at all─but might have been putting on a brave face just like me. “As a big fan of hers, I’d love it too if Kanbaru-senpai saved us─but I’m afraid our chances of anyone on the outside rescuing us are slim.”

“Hm? Why’s that? Two students suddenly disappearing after school─someone would have to notice that, even if it wasn’t Kanbaru. There’d be an uproar, among your classmates, and mine.”

Uproar might have been an exaggeration─my own classmates, at least, would treat my disappearance as nothing out of the ordinary. Including Senjogahara and Hanekawa. But in Ogi’s case, a fresh transfer going missing would get people talking.

“Plus,” I went on, “they’d know we never left school since we didn’t take our bags. Soon enough, someone would find us here─”

“You really do like depending on other people, don’t you? Even though─people just go and get saved on their own.”

“!”

“I’m sorry. That’s my uncle’s creed─not anything to do with you or me. That said, while counting on others isn’t such a bad thing, we mustn’t give up on trying to escape on our own just yet. I say that because…”

Ogi pointed─at the clock hanging above the blackboard. And I froze the moment I saw it.

The clock’s hands.

From the moment we’d entered the classroom─the hands of the clock hadn’t budged a single second or minute. We should have been locked in for over an hour by now─but not a second had passed inside the classroom.

“Do you think it’s out of batteries? Because I certainly don’t,” Ogi said, smirking.