Monogatari Series - Volume 18 - Chapter 1.22

022

In the blink of an eye, the situation grew dramatically tense.

It was the middle of the day─the sun high, a blue-sky morning. Even if we were in a building, the encounter should have been impossible. The books I’d bought almost fell out of my hands.

I just barely held on, but─ridiculous.

How?

Hadn’t Miss Gaen assured us that we’d be safe until night? And if that’s who this boy was.

If this child was─him.

Then why did he look like a boy?

I never asked exactly how old he was, but judging by the story Shinobu told that day, I assumed the first Aberration Slayer was a man in his prime.

Are you telling me this fresh-faced boy wore that empty armor?

However, I soon came to a hypothesis that answered both of my doubts at once─and not because I’m sharp or have any distinguished powers of deduction.

I’m not Miss Gaen, nor am I Hanekawa.

But I just knew.

I knew because of a precedent.

The dregs of a legendary vampire nearly indifferent about moving around at any hour, in the form of a little girl─while this couldn’t be the same, had the armored warrior recovered to the point of taking human form, size aside?

In that case… In the time after he left that abandoned cram school in flames─just how much energy had he drained?

That armored warrior.

This boy.

“…”

“Hahahahaha.”

The boy Aberration Slayer turned his back to me and briskly started to walk off.

Perhaps this was out of common sense, and he didn’t want to cause a backup in front of the cash registers, but where had he learned that kind of common sense? Could it have been his energy drain? Absorbing not only physical energy and voice─but even knowledge?

“Let us leave. As First and Second─as fellow beings whose blood was sucked by the same vampire, let us two talk frankly. Ye must have something to say to me, no?”

Though I felt zero emotion coming from him the night before, whether he laughed or choked me during that appearance, he seemed different as a boy and I could see his expressions as he spoke.

Still, it seemed wrong to construe his relaxed attempt to invite me outside as innocence or guilelessness─just as Shinobu’s true nature was that of a six-hundred-year-old vampire, however old she may appear to be.

The first Aberration Slayer was a man in his prime─no.

A vampire over four hundred years old.

I needed to think of him as someone with the ability to absorb every customer and employee in the bookstore in the blink of an eye if he felt like it.

I didn’t say a word, but I didn’t disobey or defy him. I followed behind the boy Aberration Slayer and left the store.

His steps lively, mine languid.

I did feel pathetic, but there was nothing else I could do here─no matter what happened next, I didn’t want to involve any bystanders.

Calm down…

Don’t feel shaken─and don’t be too pessimistic, either.

I calmed my breathing.

True, the First appearing in the middle of the day, a time when Miss Gaen said it was safe, was a twist that I hadn’t been emotionally prepared for at all, but I shouldn’t despair.

Vampires are weak to the sun.

An absolute rule.

One that could not be broken, something set in stone─for him to be active like this under it, walking around on public streets, meant that the first Aberration Slayer, in his boyish form, should have nearly all of his abilities as a vampire unavailable to him.

Just as for Shinobu.

He should only have the kind of boyish strength that his appearance suggested─but was that really the case?

Even if it was, the first Aberration Slayer was no ordinary human─he’d been important enough to ride in on a palanquin.

A professional fighter of aberrations.

A warrior who donned armor and swung his great sword in battle. Could someone like me, an average high school student raised in a peaceful era who didn’t even play sports properly, put up a fight against him? I doubted I could even move around if I wore armor.

The First and the Second.

Shinobu said there was no point in making that kind of comparison.

Thou art the only one for me now, she’d said, but to what extent could I believe those words? How seriously could I take them?

“’Tis nothing to look so worried over, Second.”

And then.

The First spoke to me as if he saw through my concerns as he walked on, looking for a place suited to talking alone.

“’Tis not as if I’ll bite.”

“…”

“I am an expert. Though the age may have changed, I would not ignore another’s sign and seal,” the boy said, walking with both hands in his back pockets. True, I didn’t feel any of the hostility I sensed from the chimeric monkey-crab-snake aberration in the park.

He may have been telling the truth about wanting to speak freely with me─but a sign and seal? What did he mean? As in signing my name in calligraphy then literally pressing a personal seal over it?

My expression might have betrayed these doubts, because the first Aberration Slayer turned around, took a hand out of his pocket, and pointed at his own face.

The left side of his face.

Then it struck me─or rather, I remembered.

My face had Ononoki’s footprint on it─no, a whole night had passed. It must be gone by now, right? Or was it still there?

A stamp.

A mark.

That’s how Shinobu described it.

“This is my prey, keep thy hands off─that is what the mark means. A sign among experts. Thou art inviolable to me so long as ’tis there.”

Aye, as an expert. The boy Aberration Slayer turned back around─sticking his hand right back in his pocket as well.

“Without that mark…hah. As if I’d allow a vampire to remain alive for a single moment.”

“…”

Ononoki had abused me verbally as she ground her foot into my face… So this was her hidden intention. She was protecting me from experts by imprinting a mark of her territory on me─as a shikigami, she may not have had any intent or will, but her footprint was keeping me safe.

Who could have imagined the line I’m going to be the one to kill you, monstieur was sincere? It seemed like getting stepped on by tween girls was worth it after all.

So that’s what it was. Her lecture was also her way of being clever, shooing away any others with her shoe─could Miss Gaen have been talking about this mark when she said I was safe during the day? Thanks to Ononoki standing on my face? Had she predicted that the first Aberration Slayer, whose existence as an “expert” was strongest during the day, wouldn’t lay a hand on my marked self? And is that what she meant when she said that face of yours is all the proof anyone needs? If that was the case, she could have said something.

Wait, so when I bought Kanbaru’s books and my photo collections─having perfectly neutralized the two in my mind─there’d been a tween girl’s footprint on my face the whole time? That really altered the situation from my original intentions… I wondered what the clerk thought about me as I paid. When I thought about it, the track jacket I had on was pretty avant-garde, the way it was shredded. On top of that, I left with a mysterious young boy… How was I ever going back to that bookstore? It was the only major one in town, too…

In any case, even if his earlier comment─As if I would allow a vampire to remain alive for a single moment─was just banter, it was potent.

Those vampire hunters during spring break were the same way… Did this mean I shouldn’t see the first Aberration Slayer as an expert with a preventative approach like Miss Gaen, or with an investigatory focus like Oshino, but as being like that trio who specialized in exterminating aberrations?

But what about himself?

He was now one of those aberrations he needed to exterminate, a vampire.

He said he wouldn’t allow one to remain alive for a single moment─but it’s not as if finding fault with his words amounted to pointing out a contradiction.

Because this armored warrior who now took the form of a boy─in fact killed himself.

He committed suicide─and for four hundred years.

He continued to die.

“This place ought to be suitable for a relaxed conversation.”

After a bit of a walk, the boy Aberration Slayer stopped in an odd open plot. I didn’t know what it was for─experts really were skilled at finding these kinds of remote, inconspicuous places, whether it was the abandoned cram school or Kita-Shirahebi Shrine.

Maybe their eyes saw different things─Miss Gaen said something about geographic conditions earlier.

I followed him into the empty plot─thinking back on it, I may have been too careless. True, it was unlikely for any bystanders to get involved there, but it also meant no one would come to my rescue if push came to shove.

Maybe I felt emboldened by the sense that Ononoki was protecting me.

The boy Aberration Slayer plopped down on the ground in the utterly empty piece of land, a little too cramped to call a lot. He looked like nothing more than a scamp with no manners, but something about the way he acted made it seem like he was ready for anything. Maybe it was just my preconceived notions, but he reminded me of a martial artist prepared for a fight…

“Koyomi Araragi, was it?”

He spoke my name─just like that.

No surprise. He was the First, and he’d called Shinobu by the name Kissshot.

Calling me by name wasn’t the issue here, though.

How did he know my full name?

Did Kanbaru call me that in the abandoned cram school? No, it was always my senior or Araragi-senpai.

Even if he’d heard her using my last name, he couldn’t have learned my first name.

Did he do research on me? In just one night? No…

“Allow me to call thee Sir Araragi.”

“Um…sure. That’s fine with me.”

“In that case, Sir Araragi.”

I didn’t know where it came from, but the boy Aberration Slayer offered me a plastic bottle of tea with an innocent smile on his face─his own in the other hand.

“Do not worry, these goods are not stolen. I paid for them properly and purchased them at the vending machine over yonder. An act of hospitality on my part. I am a fighter, not a master of the tea ceremony, but I do believe in the spirit of treating every encounter as precious. For this will likely be the last time the two of us speak under such peaceful conditions.”

“…”

A plastic bottle of tea?

I mean, putting aside the stuff about tea ceremonies (my little sister is in a tea ceremony club, and even she hasn’t learned anything about tea in plastic bottles), why was the first Aberration Slayer, who’d been dying for four hundred years until his consciousness was restored just yesterday, able to handle a polyethylene terephthalate bottle like it was the most normal thing in the world?

The theory that he could absorb knowledge with his energy drain suddenly started to seem a lot more credible… And what was up with his clothes? If he hadn’t stolen the tea, he probably hadn’t stolen his clothes either… Sure, he could have figured out the money part somehow, but a vertically striped sweater?

He was also wearing the kind of rubber sandals that were only getting popular in the last few years… How did a human from four hundred years ago have such a modern sense of fashion?

Shouldn’t he be getting confused and mistaking cars for iron boars?

It was almost as if─he knew everything.

I took the bottle, though I felt anxious as I did so, and sat down to face him… So this would be the last time we spoke peacefully.

It could also be taken as his final attempt to negotiate─as an expert, at that.

That’s what I thought, but I was wrong.

We spoke, but about nothing as simple as a negotiation.

In gentle terms, a request.

In harsh terms, an order.

In fact, it was a declaration of war.

“I shall cut straight to the point, Sir Araragi,” he said.

Just like a blade.

“I would like ye to leave Kissshot.”