Monogatari Series - Volume 18 - Chapter 1.11

011

Taking the streets means taking the wrong streets.

Take not a street but a path less traveled─Kanbaru’s proposal could be made to sound like some old-fashioned saying if you worded it the right way, but it wasn’t as simple as that.

Really, I’d have felt more worried if we made our way through the crisis with what seemed like the answer to a trick question. I nearly breathed a sigh of relief when it didn’t go well─but to cut to the chase, we did reach the park where we’d agreed to meet Miss Gaen.

It only took more time than we expected─no, I should be honest and say that I slowed Kanbaru down. I didn’t have the balance needed to walk atop a concrete wall. Though my lovable little sister, Mlle. Karen Araragi, possessed the unique ability to travel any path upside-down on her hands, more fortunately than unfortunately, I did not─especially now that I was back to default settings, having lost my vampiric skills. In the end, Kanbaru had to help me along, not only in getting up to the wall but all the way, as I staggered and trembled like I was on a balance beam.

I had to walk while a younger girl led me by the hand.

I didn’t have a shred of my dignity as a senior left.

My lack of dignity was boundless.

Even apart from that, it’s not as if privately owned walls stretch on forever. We couldn’t expect them to go in a straight line to the park in question.

Ononoki’s master, the violent onmyoji known as Yozuru Kagenui, had an odd rule of never walking on the ground, moving by hopping from one wall or mailbox or fence or, in fact, electric pole to the next, and the two of us now found ourselves in a similar situation. Well, Miss Kagenui would laugh if she heard me call our situations similar, given how many times I fell to the ground.

We were forcing it, or powering through, via a method that was a far cry from the neat and tidy plan once proposed by Oshino and executed by Senjogahara─but not walking on the street did prove to be a valid way of escaping this labyrinth. It did feel like we were cheating, as if we’d completed a two-dimensional maze by going along its lines instead of the white space between them, but as someone who hadn’t come up with a solution back in May or now, all I could really do was admire Kanbaru. Not to mention, the plan sounded fairly viable if you likened it to avoiding the center of a Shinto shrine’s main path, a lane reserved for the gods.

Of course, we could only do this because it was the middle of the night. There’s no way we could have used the method back in May, this was textbook suspicious behavior… Hachikuji was one thing, but I could harness the full powers of my imagination and still fail to picture Senjogahara walking atop a concrete wall.

To go into more detail, it seemed that gutters and empty lots didn’t count as streets, just as the top of walls didn’t. Even crossing a road was fine, as long as you didn’t go down it. Learning these lessons, which would probably never be of use again, the two of us arrived at the park at last at around three in the morning.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure if Kanbaru had done the kind of work that Miss Gaen had in mind, but it certainly wouldn’t have worked without my junior’s athleticism, even if we didn’t need to be quite at Miss Kagenui’s level─I fell again and again, in fact. But in the end, we did arrive at our destination without any help from the woman waiting there for us.

Naturally, I wasn’t entirely happy about it.

No, not because I hurt my arm falling from the wall or anything (I got off with just a few scratches)─there were two separate reasons.

First, while we’d escaped our nonsensical situation thanks to Kanbaru, we never figured out exactly why we’d gotten lost in the first place─we’d pulled through, but nothing more. If it was the doing of that armored warrior, we had no idea why it had done such a thing. Its very identity and goals were still unclear to us…and we’d only gotten out of the way of a ball thrown in our direction. It’s not as if we’d caught it or analyzed it. Yes, we solved it as a simple problem, but we barely touched it as a complex one─so I couldn’t be just glad.

But the second reason I couldn’t be was far more vital. Without it, I wouldn’t be so greedy as to complain about the first, as though all I wanted was to analyze the situation, in spite of us being amateurs.

In other words─as long as a professional could enlighten us…

“…”

She wasn’t there.

The all-important professional, Izuko Gaen, wasn’t at the park where we’d promised to meet.

“Hm?”

Had she left because we’d taken forever? Did she just decide to go home? But where would she go home to? She was hardly rustic, and was a lady too─it’s not as if she’d sleep rough like Oshino… But there weren’t any hotels around here. Did she go to the town over?

There was of course a fairly good chance that she’d convinced a family in the area to let her stay the night, given her friendly demeanor…

“Hold on, no way,” I fumed. “Am I really having the ladder pulled out from under me here?”

I looked over at Kanbaru to find her with burning eyes. Uh oh, Kanbaru’s “senpai tricked me to take me to an empty park in the middle of the night” theory was starting to look realistic.

Miss Gaen needed to be here, for the sake of my honor…but a glance around the area showed it to be deserted.

No, stop. Calm down.

It did take time for us to get here, but it was a mere three hours since my earlier call─she wouldn’t get impatient and leave over that. I didn’t see Miss Gaen as someone that restless. Sure, I couldn’t expect her to wait until the cows came home, but no, she was the type to wait and see things through.

She had to be hiding somewhere just to scare us. That was the kind of playful lady she was (, I hoped).

“My senior, normally people would just go home if you made them wait for three hours in the middle of the night.”

“A fair point, but it’s not as if we were coming here to meet her on a play date…”

It would be quite the late-night romp. A fisherman might even call this hour of the day the morning.

“Hmm…what kind of person could we be trying to meet? Oh, it’s okay, don’t tell me. My loyalty is being tested here.”

“It’s not, okay? If anything, what could I do to make you start doubting me a little more?”

One wrong turn and you’d be a stalker, I began to say before realizing that she’d been exactly that when she first appeared.

The girl rode a fine line in a whole lot of ways…

Anyhow, while I’d wanted Miss Gaen to explain the situation, if she wasn’t here, maybe I needed to go ahead and tell Kanbaru that it was her aunt that we were trying to see─or rather, given this outcome, if Miss Gaen wasn’t going to protect Kanbaru, I needed to see my junior home as I’d originally planned.

Ugh, as unreliable as you’d expect Oshino’s senior to be, I thought, dumbfounded, only to arrive at another possibility.

Right.

It’s not as if I had a monopoly on getting wrapped up in aberrational phenomena─could Miss Gaen have been visited by some sort of phenomenon, just as I’d gotten lost on the streets, leading to her absence?

If the phrase wrapped up sounds paranoid, so be it. Unlike Kanbaru and me, who’d been summoned as helpers, Miss Gaen was in town this time as part of her day job, her profession as an expert. In that sense, the probability that she’d encounter an aberration was higher for her than it was for us.

And just because she’s an expert doesn’t mean she can’t be the victim of aberrations. It’s not as if she can skate straight through every situation, no matter how serious, and come out unharmed─even Oshino was in awful shape after taking on Black Hanekawa, right?

True, I couldn’t lump in Miss Gaen, the big boss, with Oshino. But what if, while we were playing walk the balance beam on top of some walls and fences, Miss Gaen had gotten attacked in this park by that armored warrior, who forced her to retreat to a location where she now awaited my help?

The hypothetical lost all traces of reality around the time I got to the where she now awaited my help bit, but even apart from that, she was someone you had to worry so little about. The thought of something happening to her seemed so improbable, I might as well worry about a meteor falling from the sky and hitting her square in the head.

Still, having envisioned this, I couldn’t turn around and go home just because I couldn’t find her at first glance.

“Kanbaru. I want you to do something for me.”

“Bon appétit ♪”

“No, not that. I know it might be pointless, but I want us to split up and search every inch of the park.”

“Oh. You’re serious about your theory where this person waiting for us is hiding and trying to surprise us?”

“No.”

“The hide-and-seek theory, then.”

“Don’t put forward any new theories. Look for anyone who might have collapsed in the shade or a bush, I want to check for that─if you find something, just holler.”

“Okay. If I find something, I scream.”

“Don’t scream. You’ll get me arrested.”

“Well, you’ve captured my interest.”

With that reply, mildly clever for being on the spur, Kanbaru ran off─it seemed she’d made a full recovery from her erstwhile malaise. I of course wasn’t going to make my junior do all the work, and facing in the opposite direction─

“My senior! I found her!”

“…”

Was she trying to keep me from doing any of the work, or what?

I wasn’t getting any chances at all to show off.

In fact, Kanbaru had managed to sweep three quarters of the park before I could take a single step─she was to the front of me.

I looked at her despondently, only to find a swing. By which Kanbaru stood.

Hm?

Uh… For as loud as she called to me, it didn’t seem that Miss Gaen or anyone else was with her.

“No, no. See? Look closely,” Kanbaru said as she pointed─at the ground.

More precisely, just under the swing─and of all things, there lay a person, face-up.

Sound asleep right under a swing.

The reason I didn’t notice this figure playing with a swing in the most dangerous way on earth until Kanbaru pointed her finger was that it was far smaller than the one I was looking for─because it was about half of Miss Gaen’s size, no, even smaller.

Tiny might be more apt than small─not that I’m making excuses.

I ought to be ashamed that I didn’t notice at once. I should have noticed the golden-haired, golden-eyed little girl sooner than anyone, prior to all.

“Shi-Shinobu!”

“Zzz.”

Asleep. Can you believe it?

In any case, here in the park where we were supposed to meet up with Miss Gaen, I was finally reunited with the former vampire whose link to me had been severed due to a mishap─my soulmate, Shinobu Oshino.