Monogatari Series - Volume 18 - Chapter 1.16

016

This falsehood was so blatant that it left me dumbstruck─it’s not as if I’m so honest that I deserve the title truth-teller, but I was at a loss to learn that anyone could tell such a bold, bald-faced lie.

What?

Now that I thought about it, she’d told me in so many words to keep it secret. Still, wasn’t she afraid I might have shared her background with Kanbaru, having asked her to come all this way?

I could even have let her name slip out of my mouth by accident. But then, she was a senior of that ominous swindler Deishu Kaiki, wasn’t she?

Boss to a great liar who perpetrated an unimaginably large con game on this town, a man who once tricked even Hitagi Senjogahara─to hope for sincerity from her way of life was a mistake from the start.

Still, her dirty trick, which made me an accomplice to her lie, seemed even meaner in a way than anything Kaiki would do─but that’s how it was. I just had to play along.

I didn’t have the mental fortitude to speak up here and say: No, we both know that’s not true. Your last name is Gaen, isn’t it?

Miss Gaen must have discerned this fact in advance, of course─she looked at me with a sunny smile that seemed to contain a wordless message: You get it, don’t you?

“Ah…so the Hawaiian-shirted boy had a younger sister. Now that ye mention it, I see the resemblance.”

“…”

She’d fooled Shinobu too.

Of course, as another species, Shinobu wasn’t able to distinguish between individual humans very well to begin with. Forget any resemblance, I sometimes doubted whether she could tell the difference between men and women.

She never remembered any names or faces─and didn’t even try.

“Ha ha ha. I get that a lot. Yes, I feel like I need to apologize for all the trouble my older brother seems to have caused you─”

Miss Gaen kept the act up perfectly.

Her tone was so natural that it made me, who knew the truth, wonder if there was something wrong with her head─the only explanation seemed to be that she sincerely believed she was Oshino’s little sister.

…The truth was that she was Oshino’s senior. If she was going to lie, shouldn’t she be calling herself his older sister?

Why little sister?

Why lie about her age for no good reason on top of it all?

“I’m Suruga Kanbaru.”

Whatever the case or the truth.

Kanbaru reciprocated after hearing Miss Gaen’s self-introduction.

“I’m employed as my senior Araragi’s sex slave.”

“Have you seriously been saying that to everyone you meet?!”

I managed to counter a lie this time─call it one of the benefits of being friends. But you could say Kanbaru’s problem was far more deeply rooted.

“Ha ha ha. Is that so, a sex slave? So nice to be young and free,” Miss Gaen showed understanding.

Her own niece was going down an awful path, but I guess you couldn’t act accordingly if you were claiming not to be her aunt…

Speaking of resemblances, though, Kanbaru and Miss Gaen, separated by fewer than three degrees of blood, looked nothing alike. Perhaps it was because I was so tight with my junior that I made a clear distinction, but at the very least, they didn’t seem to share a single part in common. I didn’t know what Kanbaru’s mother looked like, but maybe she just took more after her father?

Hold on, hold on… I was being too hostile.

I needed to give Miss Gaen the benefit of the doubt.

Shinobu and I, as well as Kanbaru herself, were seeking a full explanation of our current situation from this woman─it’d be a big problem if she was simply a pathological liar of a fabulist.

There had to be some reason (I needed there to be one).

A reason she had to hide her identity─thinking about this rationally, Kanbaru’s mother, Toé Gaen, had been estranged from the Kanbarus for whatever various reasons, so maybe she couldn’t use the Gaen family name?

Right, and it wasn’t as if Miss Gaen wanted to meet her long-lost niece. She just needed Kanbaru’s arm for some job… Calling herself Oshino’s relative enhanced her authority on the subject of aberrations, at least among us.

In that case, I couldn’t expose her lie after all… I needed to wait and see.

But if that was true, I had to be wary of Miss Gaen, this kind and cheerful lady─there was no telling when she might lie.

She presented herself as crisp and clear, but in reality, she was a total mess.

She was too much for naive high schoolers.

“In that case, everyone, let’s get straight to the matter at hand. Let’s talk business,” Izuko Gaen─Izuko Oshino said, with her arms outstretched. She may have done this to show how open she was being, but it only made me want to close myself off.

“First, let me hear about the adventure you three had on your way here─give me your tale in full. I love hearing about people’s lives, you see.”

“Um… Well, it’ll probably overlap a lot with the report you got from Ononoki.”

“That doesn’t bother me. The same story told from a different perspective is still a different tale─and that aside, there’s no emotion breathed into the stories that Yotsugi tells me. You can’t run through a list of facts and call that a tale.”

She seemed to be fixated on that term, tale─something she had in common with her junior Oshino, whose little sister she claimed to be.

Urban legends.

Whispers on the street.

Secondhand gossip.

I didn’t know if what we experienced that night lived up to any of those labels, but I did know our situation was already at a deadlock. It’d be pointless to try to gloss over things, so I told her about the night’s events, just as they happened.

I did conceal matters that needed to be concealed, given that Kanbaru was right behind me─but just as things happened whenever I could.

The armored warrior that appeared in the classroom of the abandoned cram school.

The ruins going up in flames. The message left to me.

Getting lost and being unable to arrive anywhere.

The chimerical monkey-crab-snake aberration.

Like with Kanbaru, Shinobu never tried to speak to Miss Gaen. An expert or Oshino’s senior (little sister in Shinobu’s understanding), she was a human all the same. This meant I also had to relate Shinobu’s story about her fight with a rain-controlling monkey.

I hadn’t learned the details about this battle but figured an outline would suffice if she’d already received a report from Ononoki, who was party to it.

Shinobu acting like royalty and not caring to speak to any humans other than me didn’t seem to bother Miss Gaen at all.

She seemed to enjoy listening to all thirty-or-so minutes of my story─all the way until the end.

“You really are used to telling stories, aren’t you, Koyomin? That was interesting. A real fine narrator of a man. A real fine man, too.”

Miss Gaen smiled and nodded.

I, with my simple personality, felt happy to be praised, but it wasn’t as if I’d told her in order to be praised. While I may have finished the tale of my adventures, I wasn’t ready to step down from the stage to her applause.

As I spoke, I was reminded of first term─the way I pedaled over to that abandoned cram school every time I encountered some new aberrational story, in order to consult with the expert Mèmè Oshino. It made me feel just a little sentimental, but it wasn’t as if I’d come here to consult with Miss Gaen about the night’s events.

No, I needed her to restore my link to Shinobu, and I needed to negotiate with her about protecting Kanbaru, but if you went all the way back to the start, I’d come to help Miss Gaen with her work.

I was here at her request.

We’d encountered so much trouble along our way, and even had our meeting spot changed at the last second─I wanted her to take responsibility for the mess.

“Ha ha ha. Don’t be so petty, Koyomin─does friendship not mean a thing to you? You’re going to lose friends acting that way, you know.”

“I don’t have enough friends to lose any,” I said, thinking at first that I’d spoken a cool line, before realizing it was kind of sad─the sky was starting to grow bright as I spoke.

At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to make it to school yet again─I was one thing, but as Kanbaru’s senior, I’d be ashamed if I forced her to skip school too.

Meanwhile, Shinobu looked sleepy.

She hadn’t lost all traces of being nocturnal, it seemed. She may have gotten some sleep under the swings, but maybe she felt drowsy again now that her tummy was full.

But then.

Miss Gaen went and said something─that pried her eyes open.

“Let me cut to the chase,” she began, her tone unconcerned, like this was unimportant. “That armored warrior is the first thrall created by Shinobu’s previous incarnation─Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, the legendary and high-born, iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire, aberration slayer and king of aberrations─when she sucked his blood. In other words, Koyomi Araragi, as someone Shinobu turned into her second thrall when she drank your blood over spring break, he’s sort of your senpai. And in the sense that he was the first Aberration Slayer, I guess that makes him Shinobu’s senpai too?”

“…”

“…”

“…”

Of course.

Even if she’d put on airs and made a big, atmospheric show out of her explanation, I doubt any of us would have been the least bit surprised. Even Kanbaru, neither connected to this matter nor too familiar with it, seemed to have fathomed as much.

I thought so.

That’s all you could say.

Nothing but yeah, that’s what I figured─yet at the same time, an urge to contradict her welled up in me.

I thought so and figured as much but still wanted to say: No, it can’t be, there’s no way.

That wasn’t the explanation I’d wanted to hear. I hadn’t climbed up a mountain in the night to be treated to commentary that a clueless outsider could give. I wanted an expert’s sharp insights to open our eyes.

Well.

I guess what she said─did accomplish that task.

“Um. Ye…” Out of all of us, Shinobu was the first to react─but she still spoke to me and not directly to Miss Gaen. “What an utter amateur she is. Is she truly that Hawaiian-shirted boy’s little sister?”

That was a lie.

It wasn’t true.

But Shinobu had to know what Miss Gaen was going to say─and she must have prepared a line for when she heard it.

Yet she didn’t argue directly with Miss Gaen─maybe this wasn’t a high-born vampire refusing to deal with humans so much as fear that her argument would be countered and defeated.

“Go and tell her, won’t ye? Smack her with the truth sadistically. Thou ought to right this utter amateur’s misunderstandings.”

“Uh… Right.”

Sadistically was asking for too much, but if Shinobu wouldn’t say it, that meant I had to─it wasn’t as if I could hand this off to Kanbaru. I turned back to Miss Gaen.

“B-But Miss G─” I stammered, almost using her real name.

“Izuko is fine,” she beat me to the punch.

First-name basis? Well, fine.

“Miss Izuko.”

“Didn’t I just say Izuko is fine?”

Drop the honorific? She wasn’t Oshino or anything.

“Miss Izuko. Shinobu’s first thrall should be dead─he should have died four hundred years ago. Shinobu herself saw it with her own eyes.”

“Yes, m-hm.”

“He leapt out into the sun as a vampire, throwing himself to his own death─”

Lamenting his misfortune as an expert exterminator of aberrations who found himself turned into a bloodsucker─opposing his own master despite being enthralled by her─bathing his entire body in the rays of the sun, nemesis of all vampires…

He burned up.

And turned to ashes─so.

“So he’s gone now─there’s no way he’s around. It’s impossible for that armored warrior to be Shinobu’s first thrall.”

“Why?”

“Huh? No, like I said─”

“Why? Why is that impossible?”

“…”

Getting asked this point-blank put me at a loss for an answer─I didn’t know how to reply, as if I’d been asked Why does one plus one equal two?

In my confusion, I gave a few replies that weren’t answers at all, like “Well, because he died,” and “Because that’s how it is, those are the rules”─but then from behind me.

Just as candidly.

Kanbaru spoke up.

“But if you’re going to say that, wasn’t he an undying vampire because he doesn’t die?”

“Huh?”

He doesn’t die, and because he doesn’t die─he’s undying?

No wait, that can’t be right… That’s not it, I mean, sunlight is a vampire’s absolute weakness… Just like garlic, or crosses, or silver bullets, so…

He burned…and turned to ashes, and…

Hm?

If we’re going to talk about characteristics, though…

Just like I discussed with Ononoki as we ate ice cream that day─a vampire’s immortality is on a different order from a ghost’s or a tsukumogami’s.

It’s not that they don’t die.

They’re undying because there is no death for them.

In other words─they’re not immortal because they come back to life.

They’re immortal─because they continue to live no matter what happens.

Vampires.

“Ah…could that mean…”

“That’s right, Miss Suruga Kanbaru─just the kind of brilliance I’d expect from someone who made the monkey’s paw work for her,” Miss Gaen said. “In other words, four hundred years after throwing himself to his death─after scorching his body, turning to ashes, and returning to nothing, the vampire has made an amazing return.”

He’d come back despite becoming nothing but ashes and bone.

No wonder the legendary vampire Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade chose him to be her first thrall, Miss Gaen remarked bluntly.