Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 3.02

002

Come to think of it, this may have been my first time since August doing anything with Hanekawa─which of course isn’t to say that we’d done nothing at all together for the previous two months or so, we were class president and vice president, but it really had been quite a while since we last did something big together as a two-man cell.

An event.

An incident, you could even say.

Still, it wasn’t all fun and games─unfortunately, I wasn’t in a state of mind to let me get flustered over working alongside Tsubasa Hanekawa, class president among class presidents, a grand figure whose name will surely be remembered throughout history.

This was because my gait was so extremely heavy that it now seemed fettered by something resembling Saturn’s gravity─for you see, our two-man cell’s goal, the “something big” we needed to come upon…

My pace as I walked toward it was just as heavy, just as weighty as my mood.

“So─did you figure it out, Araragi?” asked Hanekawa.

Like she’d finally asked a question she’d been waiting for the perfect time to spring.

Classes had finished for the day, we had left Naoetsu High, and we were on our way together─but not on the road back to my home or Hanekawa’s.

“Why did Miss Oikura know your parents’ profession?”

“Mmh… Uh,” I muttered with a vague nod.

Most people would probably see this as trying to gloss over something you didn’t know─in fact, it was the complete opposite. There are also things that people try to gloss over because they do know, because they understand─but while it had only been an unconscious reaction, what could be more meaningless than lying or glossing over something in the face of Tsubasa Hanekawa?

“I figured it out,” I drooped my head and said. “I checked with Sengoku, so I’m sure of it.”

“Um, why are you hanging your head when you did?”

“My head’s like a fruit, the riper it is, the more it sags.”

“I see… You kind of seem out of it today. You look like someone who visits a friend at a hospital only to show up looking sicker than them. What’s the matter with you?”

“…”

A hospital visit, huh.

Then again, that was the kind of gentle, roundabout rephrasing of reality that I knew Hanekawa for. Were you to give a cold and precise account of the truth, this was more like a home visit─by a class president and vice president. Though we’d never conducted one of these in our half-year since taking office, we had no choice.

I say that because I wasn’t blameless regarding this situation─or rather, the trained eye would have no option but to place the responsibility for it entirely on me. The girl being visited had to place all the blame on me, in particular─and knowing this made my steps heavy.

Like I was on Saturn.

In fact, I’d been feeling so uncomfortably out of place for the last few days that it really felt like I’d been taken to another planet─and told that it was in fact my birthplace, awkwardly enough.

“It’d make anyone want to hang their head. I wasn’t able to remember no matter how hard I tried, but then it came right back to me once I did what you suggested. You really do know everything, Hanekawa.”

“I don’t know everything. I only know what I know,” she answered casually. This much was business as usual, but then she added, “I can’t say I know everything when I don’t know what Ogi knows.”

“…”

Ogi.

Ogi Oshino.

“Are we okay?” asked Hanekawa. “She’s not tailing us, is she?”

“Tailing us… What, do you think she’s an assassin or something?” I replied, half-dumbfounded, but Hanekawa wasn’t kidding, and she stopped to look behind her. She’d waited until we stood at a point with few blind spots─she did live here, but still, this class president had no need for a map app.

“An assassin? Do you mean a detective?”

Had Ogi, a transfer student with little knowledge of the area, been tailing us, it should have been easy to find her by turning around here and straining our eyes─but even Hanekawa couldn’t spot our unseen tail, our unseen detective.

She wasn’t satisfied, though. “Hmm, I would have preferred it if she’d come along with us─in this case, at least. I could’ve given her the slip.”

“Aren’t you acting a little paranoid?”

“No, but think about it. Even if she isn’t tailing us, she might have gone ahead of us. It’s clear where we’re headed, so taking the time to look up the location would be the less risky move─making it the more annoying and harder-to-defend-against scenario. It’s not easy to look up another student’s address these days, but not impossible… I don’t think I’m being paranoid.”

“If you’re not being paranoid, then you’re overestimating Ogi. Yes, she’s Oshino’s niece, so she does seem reasonably smart, but she’s still a child, or you know, a freshman. Charmingly innocent. It’s my duty as her senior to keep her from becoming like Oshino, as well as my way of repaying him.”

“Your way of repaying him… Well, that is a wonderful mindset.”

Hanekawa began walking again.

Her tone had been relatively harsh, considering she’d complimented me.

“How admirable,” she continued. “And here I was thinking that you’d gotten obsessed with yet another cute little underclassman who’d appeared on the scene.”

“What do you mean, yet another…”

“Weren’t you acting in a similar way with Miss Kanbaru? If that really is your mindset, I’d like you to stop giving off the impression that you’re preoccupied with an underclassman just as our class is going through all these problems.”

“I’ll take that to heart.”

“Good.”

I don’t know if you’d call it being serious or being stuffy.

But this part about her never changed.

No, maybe it had.

Either way, Tsubasa Hanekawa was clearly no big fan of Ogi’s─but it was true that our transfer student didn’t have the most approachable personality.

And she was awfully enigmatic.

Even if you conceded all of that, though, you had to admit that she was far more approachable than Oikura was now─

“Just to make sure,” Hanekawa said. “You’d forgotten about your time in middle school with Miss Oikura until you accompanied Ogi on her fieldwork, correct?”

“Hm? Actually, no, it’s the other way around, she accompanied me on my fieldwork. She came along with me for the most part─she just helped me remember Oikura. Yeah, I guess I feel bad about troubling Ogi when I think of it that way. I shouldn’t carelessly get my juniors involved in my personal business. I’ll have to make it up to her later.”

“Hm. Hmmm. You’re not understanding me for some reason. Maybe I’m not putting it the right way?” Hanekawa tilted her head. “From my perspective, she’s as dangerous as they get.”

“Dangerous? Are you talking about Oikura?”

“See? We’re talking past each other. It’s almost like you’re intentionally avoiding my point─but whatever. It probably just means we can’t talk about it yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m saying there are limits to what a person can do─but that’s exactly why we need to do everything we can. It’s easier to walk along the edges of your limits when you can see them.”

It was a superhuman thing to say─and extremely human at the same time. I say this because the old Hanekawa wouldn’t have thought twice about stepping over those lines.

I think it goes without saying, of course, that her way of trying to get as close as possible to the kinds of lines that most people avoid showed her mental fortitude. Then again, you’re not going to set a goal of taking a post-graduation trip around the world without that kind of inner toughness.

I sincerely respected her.

That made it all the more disappointing to see her in the grips of a line of reasoning so far off the mark.

I might need to talk to her about it before we arrived at our destination. I needed to put aside any personal feelings born out of my adoration of Hanekawa, because I didn’t want the situation to get any more complicated.

“Hanekawa. If you think that Ogi feels hostility toward Oikura, you’re wrong. The two haven’t even met. Though, hearing my story, her eccentricity might’ve aroused interest─”

“That’s not what I’m worried about. No part of me whatsoever is concerned about whether or not Ogi has Miss Oikura in her sights. What I am worried about is─”

“Is?”

“You─Araragi.”

Something you don’t understand well might have you in its sights─Hanekawa warned.

“Something I don’t understand?”

“Or maybe─something unwelcome.”

True, you couldn’t deny that Ogi was unfathomable─and she certainly had me in her sights.

But what was Hanekawa saying?

What was she saying─and what did she want to say?

What couldn’t she say?

“To be honest, I don’t know if you can defend against it all.”

“Defend against…”

“You call what happened during spring break hell─but your ordeals might have only begun.”

My ordeals.

No, no way, Hanekawa was going through far more of an ordeal. Our ill-fated class president, not me, I thought, when─

We’d been busy rambling back and forth, but class president Tsubasa Hanekawa and vice president Koyomi Araragi reached their destination: Sodachi Oikura’s current address.