Monogatari Series - Volume 18 - Chapter 1.13

013

The left half a monkey, and the right half a crab.

There’s a Japanese folktale about the crab and the monkey, but this wasn’t how that went.

If anything was only possible in the world of the printed word, this seemed to be it─I didn’t have the first clue how the two halves were connected.

It seemed false, even when it actually stood there before my eyes.

I couldn’t accept what they saw.

I only got a sense, nothing else.

Of a hostility or malice toward us coming from the crab-monkey─like a well-honed impulse of aggression.

It conveyed that, and nothing else.

When I say us, though, it seemed to be limited to me and Shinobu─the high school girl known as Suruga Kanbaru seemed to be spared its consideration.

You could say it disregarded her, or that it ignored her. It was one thing when a golden-haired, golden-eyed little girl did it, but my junior wasn’t so perverted that she took joy in being ostracized by a monster this evidently dangerous.

Of course, she wasn’t the type to celebrate her good luck because it didn’t bother with her, either─if anything, she was the type to be infuriated. Readying her left arm to take a fighting stance before Shinobu or I did was proof enough.

Thinking back to everything that happened at the park that night, Kanbaru’s immediate battle-readiness might’ve been far scarier than even this aberrational phenomenon that had come chasing after Shinobu.

She showed none of the pacifism you expect from kids these days.

Well, it’s not like I was expecting some kind of generic reaction out of Suruga Kanbaru, a girl who heroically stood up even to the armored warrior, just because she was confronted with a monster out of a creature feature. But did she just not feel scared or hesitant in the face of danger?

She had to─national-level star athlete or not, she was only a high school student, and it’s not as if she was an expert on aberrations.

But this junior of mine lived her life ready to overcome those nerves─it’s how she’s survived.

Since back in elementary school.

When she made a wish to a monkey and received her reward.

“I’ll go from the right. You go from the left, senpai.”

“Uh, yeah…”

She even gave precise instructions.

It kind of felt like I was the junior now. Maybe I should be glad she was counting on me in a fight?

“Let’s go!”

“Y-Yes!”

Reduced to replying with a polite yes─but that aside, while Kanbaru attempted to make the first move just as she had with the armored warrior, her plans this time were thwarted.

This was foreshadowed.

When we attempted to escape from the fire, Kanbaru noted that she often mixed up her left and right because she was a lefty─and in fact mixed up her right foot with her left as we tried to get going.

Since it was her feet she mixed up, it wasn’t a serious error then, but this time it was direction─Kanbaru and I started moving simultaneously on her signal, but we crashed into each other after one step. I tried to attack it from the right, and so did Kanbaru, causing a traffic accident.

Because of her ability to reach top speed after one step thanks to her powerful legs, she created what you might stylishly call a jackknife─I fell as well, caught up in the crash. While Kanbaru’s natural athleticism allowed her to do a somersault and get right back up, my body slammed to the ground in an unsightly display. Despite smacking the dirt with my left arm in a sort of judo front fall, the only effect was my hand hurting from some pebbles.

A judo fall?

Who was I trying to impress here?

Kanbaru, who had mixed up her left and right, was entirely to blame, but it felt as a whole like we’d just proven how amateur and inexperienced we were when it came to fighting together─I suppose tag-team matches do require a lot of technique.

Even Suruga Kanbaru, who exerted her captaincy on the basketball court, was no exception… It made me realize again just how important my link to Shinobu was when it came to fighting as a pair.

Speaking of Shinobu, I looked back to find her sitting on the swing for some reason. There was nothing ordinary about Kanbaru, who readied herself for a fight as soon as she encountered danger, but why would someone start amusing herself on a plaything the moment an aberration chasing after her appeared? That wasn’t just out of the ordinary, it was lacking in common sense.

She wasn’t thinking of acting like a little girl to get out of this, was she? It might not be on the level of a monkey-crab, but a golden-haired, golden-eyed little girl creaking back and forth on a swing in a park in the middle of the night easily qualified as horror.

As I let myself be distracted by Shinobu playing on a swing, Kanbaru went back on the move─not waiting for me to return to my feet. I felt abandoned, but what happened in reality was that Kanbaru went to face this creature on her own. In fact, you could say she was defending my prostrate figure─because the fused monkey-crab aberration wasn’t just standing there absentmindedly while we tripped over each other.

It wasn’t going to provide us with an easy target. It began moving as well, and toward us─but as half of it was a crab, it couldn’t go that fast the way it walked sideways. Its movements were so bizarre that I wanted to avert my eyes the moment they landed on it, though. Even if it didn’t have speed, it moved in an unpredictable way that left me mentally shaken.

Nevertheless, its form didn’t seem to produce a single ripple in Suruga Kanbaru’s iron-clad mind─she entered straight into the pocket of this aberration I hesitated to so much as approach. In what seemed like her next movement, she sent her wrapped left hand flying in a fist, the same fist that had scattered the armored warrior to pieces.

Though a jock, Kanbaru wasn’t learning karate like Karen. She didn’t let out a kiai shout as she swung, but I could tell even from a distance that she put everything she had into the blow.

But.

The thing blocked her fist.

With the right side of its monkey-crab body, the crab part─with its pincer.

“Mgh!”

If this were a game of rock-paper-scissors, it was a unique case of rock losing to scissors─but when you think about it, punching the exoskeleton of a crab wouldn’t have much effect.

Kanbaru had failed to think it through─if she was going to launch a solo attack, she should have aimed for its monkey side.

In any case, compared to the way it walked, the crab’s pincer was strangely agile─it seemed to have no weight at all as it blocked Kanbaru’s fist like a shield.

Then, the left side of the creature, the monkey half that Kanbaru should have aimed for, began to counter.

The monkey’s hand─went to scratch Kanbaru.

The claw that covered Shinobu’s body in wounds─missed Kanbaru by less than an inch as she twisted her body to let it by.

Less than an inch from her skin, not her clothes.

Her track jacket ripped.

Uh oh, Kanbaru wasn’t wearing a bra!

I forced my wounded body to stand─and it creaked. Not only did I suffer from the pain of getting twisted up and falling, I carried the damage from the blows I suffered while getting unlost, and from the armored warrior’s shoulder tackle.

I was reminded again that I’d been relying heavily on my vampiric immortality in my recent fights─but I could reflect on that later.

Regardless of what I was─undying or not, I had to help Kanbaru!

“Hold on, ye.”

A voice from the swings behind me─Shinobu, who for some reason was in spectator mode.

Hold on? At least half of that monkey-crab is after you. What’re you doing out there in the audience, I tried to get out all in one quick quip, but then…

“Use this.”

With that, Shinobu─tossed it my way.

Whatever might have been thrown my way, my reflex was to catch it─but at the last second I saw what it was…

“Waaaagh!”

I barely dodged it─without Kanbaru’s elegance, of course. I’d bothered to stand up, but now I was crawling on the ground again. If Kanbaru had evaded the monkey-crab’s claw attack by only a layer’s worth of clothes, this was only by my skin.

I evaded it.

Namely, a Japanese sword─a great katana.

Whose naked blade stuck out from the ground.

“Wh-What’re you doing?! Were you serious about flaying me?!”

“Are ye only able to handle things thrown thy way when ’tis remarks?” sneered Shinobu, shamelessly, still holding her follow-through there on the swing. Then…

“Use it,” she repeated.

That’s when─I recognized the katana.

The enchanted blade that Shinobu Oshino normally kept sheathed inside her small frame. Kokorowatari. An item used to eradicate monsters.

Also known as─the Aberration Slayer.

“…”

“No need for hesitation. It both is and is not an aberration─one of those ‘bad things’ that are not yet an aberration. No punishment will come to thee for cutting it down.”

True─that went without saying.

This was no time for me to hesitate. I grabbed the hilt of the great katana sticking straight out of the ground and pulled it out like the holy sword Excalibur.

It wasn’t that precious, of course.

In truth, the sword wasn’t the original, but said to be created from the flesh and blood of a certain individual…

─Yes, no armored warrior is complete─

─Without a blade─

─Indeed, it has been four hundred years since I lent it to her─

“Aaaaaaaaaaagh!”

Rousing myself with a scream, as if to shake off any uncertainty, I wielded the sword and ran─but I doubt as fast as I imagined.

It was heavy, after all.

And it was hard to use because of its length.

No wonder Shinobu was abandoning the front lines to play on a swing─how could she ever make good use of something this long with her little girl’s body?

“…”

Okay, no. I still couldn’t accept it.

Help out a little, dammit. Borrow a page from Ononoki.

It took about ten seconds to go from my position by Shinobu, someone used to using others in a different sense than Kanbaru, and arrive at the monkey-crab─all while Kanbaru continued to fight it.

Her track jacket was already in tatters.

The tears were so perfect, she might have been dodging by a layer’s worth on purpose, but no, even our pervert couldn’t pull off something that skilled─she showed no signs of noticing me as I came running from behind, great katana in hand.

The enchanted blade was meant to cut aberrations, not humans. Kanbaru wouldn’t suffer a scratch if I sliced straight through both her and the monkey-crab, but just because I knew this as a fact didn’t mean I could execute it.

I was like a dog-lover who doesn’t eat chocolate just because it’s poison to dogs.

The circumstances were different from that time a little while ago with the cat─wait, now that I mention it, wasn’t Shinobu’s earlier explanation about the “cat” missing something?

“Kanbaru, move!” I yelled as I swung─with the technique of a complete amateur, but despite what you might expect, katanas are made so that even noobs can use them well enough. They cut using their weight.

I worried that Kanbaru, absorbed in her battle, hadn’t heard me, but I needn’t have. There’s a move in basketball called the no-look pass, where you toss the ball without looking at your teammate, and in this case she pulled off the incredible feat of avoiding me as I came from behind with a sword without so much as turning around.

She couldn’t have known that I held a katana since she didn’t look back at me, but she’d have moved in the exact same way if she did. That’s how well she discerned the path of the enchanted blade Kokorowatari as it cut through the air.

Then, surely enough, the blade I swung─traced a line down the center of the monkey-crab’s body, slicing its body vertically.

The monkey-crab divided in two without any resistance, as if its body contained a perforated line─into left and right.

The left, monkey half.

And the right, crab half.

Quite literally split down the middle─I’d swung the blade a number of times before, but this outcome was the most decisive of them all. I’d split a whole in two in a hole in one.

Naturally, the complete lack of resistance, as if I had cut through a block of tofu, did come back to bite me as I met dirt for a third time─that part wasn’t a hole in one at all. I had to admit, falling over three times in a fight and still being alive was a bit of a miracle.

The sword stuck deep in the ground once more, as if I’d tried to split Earth itself. My muscles must have gotten stiff from gripping too hard, because I couldn’t pull my hands from the hilt. I sat there on my butt like I’d just tried to hit a pinata and failed.

“Ha… Haah… Haah…”

Perhaps the fight ending in a somewhat disappointing way was a given when I’d come to it with a cheat code of an item… Still, I couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief, coward that I am.

Being visited by a succession of aberrational phenomena over the course of one night was rare─and we may have been far from finished.

Far from finished─

“Watch out, my senior!”

─indeed.

Despite being split in two, the monkey-crab wasn’t finished─okay, the monkey-crab was. What wasn’t finished was its tail.

Its tail that I hadn’t seen until now.

A snake.

A twin-headed snake─bifurcated from the start, no need for anyone to split it─bared its fangs at both me and Kanbaru.

The yokai known as the Nue is said to have the head of a monkey and the tail of a snake… So this aberration wasn’t just a combination of a monkey and a crab, it had a snake stuck on too?

A snake.

Jagirinawa.

The venomous snake that attacked Nadeko Sengoku, friend to my little sister, Tsukihi Araragi─a cursed serpent whose poison nullified even the regenerative abilities of a vampire…

Kanbaru, who alerted me despite the snake’s fangs heading for her as well, didn’t avoid the attack this time.

The same went for me, of course. Or should that be as usual instead of this time?

With the trusty enchanted blade Kokorowatari almost entirely below ground─I wouldn’t be pulling it out swiftly the way I had moments earlier.

The snake’s beady eyes had us in their sights.

Then, a pair of fangs buried─

“Kakak. Not so bad.”

─no, got buried.

The monkey-crab, now monkey-crab-snake, was finished for good.

Shinobu Oshino had moved to stand in my shadow without me noticing. Grabbing, with her darling little hands, the head aimed at my neck as well as the one going for Kanbaru’s left arm, she mercilessly crushed the life out of them.

Then scored me:

“Sixty-two.”