Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 5.07

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“Wha…”

I unconsciously took a step back─nearly tumbling right down the stairs. If I’d gotten tangled up with Hachikuji, we might have swapped bodies along the way.

“Wh-Why are you here…”

He was supposed to be dead.

His body smacked by Yotsugi Ononoki’s Unlimited Rulebook─earning him a death so complete that not a single chunk of his flesh remained in the world of the living.

I was shocked into silence.

When I thought about it, though, my reaction didn’t make sense.

I was overreacting.

We were in hell.

He was dead, yes, but so was I. It was absolutely natural for him to be here─we were meeting again in the afterlife.

I did wonder why an expert like him was all the way down here in Avīci, but he was an outsider, excluded even from Miss Gaen’s network… And personally, when I thought about what the guy did to Kanbaru, Tsukihi, and Karen, I couldn’t help but think that Avīci was too lukewarm for him.

What was it, then?

Why did it feel wrong?

Being reunited with him felt wrong in an utterly different way from running into Hachikuji in the depths of hell─wrong, or like a puzzle piece fitting in a place you never expected, a strangely convincing (?) feeling…

No, ultimately, it didn’t make any sense at all.

“Why that look, Araragi? I do appreciate how expressive you are… While a lot did happen between us, that was back when we were alive. Water under the bridge,” Tadatsuru said breezily.

He seemed the most different from how I remembered him back when I was alive─given how tense the situation and circumstances were back then, maybe a different impression was inevitable, but wasn’t our current predicament down in the depths of hell no less dire?

Why was he─oh.

That’s what I wanted to know.

Why was he acting so accustomed?

In the world of the living, too, I’d met and faced off against him at Kita-Shirahebi (though it may have already been newly built)─but why did he seem so much more natural now as he sat there on the offering box? Not that it was a good idea, given how close it was to falling apart…

“Why don’t the two of us get along? We’ve both been sent to hell, after all. Heh, just a little joke there,” he said, relaxed enough to crack wise.

A joke? What did he mean, a joke?

What about his words just now were a joke?

How much of it was a joke?

Okay, everything he said sounded like a mean joke… He used to belong to the same university club as Oshino and Kaiki, so who knows, maybe he was endowed with a comedic mind.

I could do without his, here in hell─but as someone who’d conversed with Oshino and Kaiki, I knew I had nothing to gain by pressing him for details. I had to turn to the fifth grader standing by my side.

“Hey, Hachikuji.”

“What might it be, Mister Aaaaagi?”

“I like the simplicity, but you shouldn’t call people things that sound like hastily entered RPG hero names. My name is Araragi.”

“I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”

“No, you did it on purpose…”

“A skip from the young.”

“Or maybe not?!”

“A slip of the slip.”

“You’re not putting any thought into that one either?! But tell me what’s going on. Why is he here─why is Tadatsuru Teori there? You weren’t calling this guy she, were you?”

“No, no, you were right, it’s Miss Izuko Gaen. Don’t worry, our hearts were one on that point.”

“Then why?”

I looked at Tadatsuru again.

He almost seemed to be smiling on our conversation, or maybe my confusion. It was a look I didn’t remember seeing on him before.

Just as Kaiki was an expert who acted only in the service of money, you could say Tadatsuru acted only in the service of “aesthetic curiosity.” Was he finding beauty in my panic, Hachikuji’s composure, and our interaction, or what?

“You were right to think that Miss Gaen was the august self. But─”

“There you go acting reverent again.”

“The grand intent of her august self, or rather, intentions were conveyed to me by Mister Teori over there.”

“C-Conveyed.”

A game of telephone.

She’d used the phrase earlier─so that’s what she meant?

Huh? That seemed a little… Did that timeline make sense? No, not just the timeline. This put a fundamental kink in all sorts of other lines.

Miss Gaen’s network didn’t include Tadatsuru, so why was he relaying her message to Hachikuji?

“Again, Araragi, why that look? I don’t know everything, unlike my senior, and can’t clear everything up for you, but at least I can give you a rundown of what I do understand. You may see us as alike, but I’m a bit more generous than Oshino or Kaiki─so long as my own interests aren’t involved.”

“Aren’t they in this case?” Coming from Tadatsuru, his familiar, even accommodating tone only made me more suspicious─but I retook the step I’d ceded, as if to protect Hachikuji. “You’re an expert who specializes in exterminating immortal aberrations─right? I’m unforgivable to you just by existing. You see me as something like a pest.”

“A pest? You’re being a little too self-deprecating there. But if you’ll allow me, you’re in the right ballpark─still, Araragi. If that’s what’s worrying you, there’s no need to feel that way now.”

“Huh?”

“Because now─there’s nothing vampiric about you. In both senses.”

You’re a regular human. Thrown into hell. A regular human, Tadatsuru said.

“Any vampirism─has been subtracted from you.”

“Subtracted…”

Ah… Now it made sense.

That’s what Hachikuji meant earlier. Not just multiplication and division, but subtraction too was in play…

The value being subtracted─was my vampirism.

I, myself, didn’t feel any different. Nothing about my body seemed off, back in the world of the living or in hell─but if there was no law condemning all aberrations to hell, it meant nothing about me was vampiric now.

So─I was human.

Nothing but human, no longer subject to extermination by the expert hand of Tadatsuru Teori─so that’s what it was.

“…”

Of course, believing him, and carelessly approaching him, were a different matter.

While I didn’t understand what was going on, I knew for sure that he’d harmed my junior and my little sisters─

“It’s okay, Mister Araragi.” Hachikuji patted me from behind as if to soothe me. “I understand how you feel, but stopping here gets in the way of my tour. Please keep going. This is necessary in bringing you back to life as a human.”

“…”

“Otherwise, the subtraction will have been for nothing. I’d never be able to look Miss Ononoki in the eyes again.”

Why bring her up now, I wondered─but realized that while Hachikuji and I got along as well as we did, she was at her core a fairly shy girl.

Tadatsuru Teori.

If we were just going to talk─then maybe it was okay?

Either way, I’d get nowhere acting so tense… Even putting aside the tour, I couldn’t move forward unless I moved ahead.

“Stay behind me,” I warned Hachikuji.

Still protecting her, I walked the shrine’s path─come to think of it, a shrine in hell was yet another ridiculous setup.

If she’d come to get me at Tadatsuru’s request, then my chivalry was a little pointless, but I just had to.

“It’s almost like you’re a prince, Araragi. Riding not a white horse but a white snake, given the god enshrined here.”

Whether this was an attempt at wit or something else entirely, Hachikuji and I drew closer to him as he spoke.

In the meantime, I tried to recall more details about his profile. With my memory still fuzzy from the intense shock of being murdered, not to mention finding myself in hell, maybe it was futile─but I felt like I needed to remember what I could.

You go to war with the army you have.

That’s how humans are.

Tadatsuru Teori, an expert doll-user.

Who incorporated origami into his job.

Digging into his roots, he was a college clubmate of Kaiki and Oshino─a member of the occult research club, which also included Yozuru Kagenui and a university-aged Izuko Gaen, who must have headed it.

And as students, they created the “doll” known as Yotsugi Ononoki.

Using the corpse of a human who’d lived for a hundred years, they gave form to a tween shikigami─and how did the story go? Did he and Miss Kagenui come to an impasse over who owned the familiar?

Tadatsuru would go on to part ways with Miss Gaen as well─while all of them followed their own paths as experts, only his headed in a different direction…

He and I met as something strange began taking place in my body─when I began to grow vampiric on my own, and not under Shinobu’s influence…

After a fight, he was slain by the doll he created─you could call it chickens coming home to roost, but his death was so spectacular that words like “karma” didn’t do it justice.

It was a Hindenburgian crash that could finish off even a vampire, lesser ones at least, which is why meeting him again felt so bewildering.

Now I knew what characters in manga and stuff meant by that oft-used line, See you in hell!

This goes without saying, but it doesn’t feel too good when it actually happens to you.

Our reunion, however, was more complicated than mortal enemies meeting again in hell after their deaths─if Miss Gaen planned this, what was her intention, anyway?

Would the explanation he said he’d give me be honestly satisfying? You might be getting annoyed by now, but let me repeat, I was still plenty baffled that I was in hell.

Reluctant to speak with him up close, I stopped and maintained a distance of about five steps. Hachikuji halted too─seeing this, Tadatsuru began.

“Yotsugi─is she doing well? I hope killing me wasn’t too traumatic for her.”

“You’re one of her birth parents, you should know the answer to that. She doesn’t worry about anything─she just eats ice cream and stuff, like always.”

“Yes, I’m sure. I am one of her birth parents, of course…one of her creators, so I know. But I ask out of affection, not to pry into her affairs─I always find myself worried about her, even when there’s no need.”

I never did apprise her of the circumstances, after all─said Tadatsuru.

The circumstances?

“What circumstances…are those?”

“Well. She doesn’t need to be told, being a shikigami who simply follows orders. That’s her strength─her advantage. The same goes for Yozuru─though in that woman’s case, she simply doesn’t bother to consider the fine details. I suppose controlling the uncontrollable was where our senior was going to shine.”

“…Are you not going to explain these circumstances?”

Though Tadatsuru Teori’s demeanor was so proper that comparing him to someone as frivolous as Oshino was silly, my inability to read him did remind me of the Hawaiian-shirted expert.

I used to feel the same kind of constant irritation when I spoke with Oshino. We see the past through rose-colored glasses so I gave him high marks as an expert, but that particular memory was cast in the same harsh light.

“I will. If I don’t hurry up and bring you back to life, Miss Gaen might lose her temper─she is a scary one when she’s mad.”

“…”

“To put it bluntly, the true role I’d been assigned was precisely to be killed by Yotsugi in that way.”

Tadatsuru looked as earnest as could be.

“Being killed by her so I could come to hell first─so that I may handle the preparations to bring you back to life. That was my job as an expert.”