Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.03

003

It all started on a late October day, exactly half a year after I was attacked by a golden-haired, golden-eyed vampire during spring break. Just as I was about to have lunch at my homeroom desk, my lovable junior Suruga Kanbaru came to visit.

“Hey there, Araragi-senpai! It’s me, Suruga Kanbaru!”

She was as energetic as ever.

“So you’re alone! All alone, huh?!”

She was also as rude as ever.

“I don’t know if I’d say alone,” I struggled to come up with an excuse. Well, part of me was simply overwhelmed and shrank in the face of all her positive energy. “Senjogahara and Hanekawa have gotten really chummy ever since second term started… Now they won’t eat with me.”

They were on a lunch date, no doubt. It was a rare case of female friendship overcoming romance.

“Huh. Then why not eat with some of your other friends? There’s nothing sadder than lunching alone,” pressed Kanbaru, with no consideration whatsoever. I didn’t dispute her point, but it’s also true that humans need to eat to survive─even if they don’t have any friends. Sadness, desolation, they’re a part of life, aren’t they?

Still, I couldn’t believe her. She’d walked into a third-year classroom undaunted─as if she might even grab an open seat without asking. Retired or not, it was indeed the kind of move you’d expect from a former star the entire school over.

“But I’m here with some good news for my sad little senior.”

“Good news? Interesting, tell me more. I love good news.”

I wasn’t that interested, but any topic was preferable to how sad I was eating lunch on my own─whether it was international relations, talk about the IT industry, good news, or bad news.

“Okay. There’s actually a girl I want to introduce you to,” Kanbaru said, pointing her left hand, wrapped again and again in a bandage, toward the entrance─where a petite girl stood in the hallway, half her body peeking inside.

“…”

Kanbaru wanted to introduce me to…that girl? Who could it be, I’d never seen her before─no, of course I hadn’t if she wanted to introduce us. A junior from her time on the basketball team? But why would Kanbaru want to introduce me to the girl, a stranger? Looking at her, I got the feeling she was a first-year… She was too far for me to see her class pin, though.

“Cute, right?” Kanbaru said, as if that dispelled any and all doubts─but sure, that’s actually kind of how the world works.

“I know it’s pretty risky to introduce you to a cute girl, but what was I supposed to do? She asked me to introduce you herself. It was a bitter decision! Phew, good thing Senjogahara-senpai and Hanekawa-senpai happen to be out.”

“How exactly do you see me?”

“As being closer to human than beast.”

“Correct, but…”

It almost seemed like she’d timed her visit. Senjogahara and Hanekawa weren’t around, just so happening to be somewhere else today, but they had lunch in our classroom more often than not (in which case I was still excluded). Kanbaru couldn’t have been waiting for this moment, though─could she?

In any case, introduce me to a girl?

As you know, I don’t have the most social of personalities and am not a big fan of meeting new people, whatever their age or gender, but I didn’t expect the hyper-social Kanbaru, who loved meeting people she didn’t know, to understand the subtleties at play here.

If I told her, Sorry, I’m not great at meeting people for the first time, I’d simply be met with, Ah! Then let’s work on getting better at it!

Of course, I had “introduced” Kanbaru to someone two months earlier. I was more of an intermediary than an introducer, but I still felt guilty about bringing a rather dangerous individual into her life, even if I’d had no choice. And in fact, I’d also introduced her to my violent little sister Karen before that. So if Kanbaru wanted to introduce me to someone, I had to oblige her, whoever it might be. Seriously, her network of friends was so vast that it could be anyone.

Not that the girl waiting for Kanbaru’s cue outside the classroom looked shady, but there was something…indescribable about her.

“Don’t worry, my senior. Everything is going to be okay.” Kanbaru grinned as if she’d detected my unease. “I made sure she took off her underwear.”

“Go back to wherever it is you came from, and stay there!”

“Please, relax. I know I said I made her take off her underwear, but I’m just talking about her panties. She still has her bra on. You’re the type who likes to take a girl’s bra off himself, yes?”

“You come into our third-year classroom to say this?! I don’t belong to any type or team!”

Given Kanbaru’s fame at our school, the other students were already paying attention to our conversation─finding it odd that we were having one. Fortunately, no one around us seemed to have heard any of her perverted words─only my verbal abuse aimed at her. All I had to suffer through were the pointed looks of criticism for daring to act like her senior. In other words, it wasn’t at all fortunate for me, but it was at least more fortunate than the world discovering how much of a freak Kanbaru is.

“Huh? So you even want to take her panties off yourself? What a man. When it comes to girls, you really want to take the situation by the collar. Oh, but I don’t mean that in a BDSM way.”

“Yeah, I wish I could put a collar on you, and I don’t mean that in a BDSM way either.”

What I really wanted to put on her was a bell. But this was just Kanbaru’s idea of a joke, her way of saying hello. I’d gotten used to it by now.

“And, what’s with the girl? What’s her true identity? You want to introduce her to me? I’m not someone worth being introduced to. Do you know what Koyomi Araragi’s catchphrase is? The man who always has to introduce himself.”

“What a sad catchphrase. It’s not even catchy. Listen, she says she wants advice─from you. That’s why I want you to meet her.”

“Advice, from me? Hold on, now it’s really getting ridiculous. Do you know how often people give the advice, ‘No matter who you ask for advice, just don’t ask Araragi’?”

“Really? People around here are giving that kind of advice? I’ll beat them up if they are.”

“Stop, stop, stop! I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” I found myself having to talk down Kanbaru, who was glaring at my classmates with an uncivil air about her. From their perspective, it must have looked like I was refusing to let the star athlete cut our conversation short and leave (further plummeting my favorability rating), but listen─I saved all of you. It was all the more urgent since she’d proved a couple of months ago that her left hand still had the power to beat anyone up.

“So, u-um, what’s this about advice? I-I mean, I’m the Fire Sisters’ big brother after all, I’ve been known to give advice. I don’t mind one bit, she does have an introduction from you.”

“I haven’t heard the details myself, but it seems like it has something to do with aberrations.”

“Wha…”

With aberrations?

Kanbaru saw my uneasy expression and said, “Yeah, it seems like she knows about them. She knew about my left hand, too, and about your blood. She said─her uncle told her.”

“Her uncle…”

“She’s a first-year who just transferred into this school. I was shocked to hear it, but apparently she’s Mister Oshino’s niece. Her name’s Ogi Oshino.”

I turned my still-uneasy face to her for another look─to look at half of Ogi Oshino. That’s when our eyes met for the first time.

Her eyes were black─like they could suck you in.