Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 6.06

006

“All right then, hello there, Araragi-senpai. It’s me, Ogi Oshino. So, let’s learn about constellations today,” Ogi said with a smile. She used the laser pointer in her hand to make indications on a sky full of stars projected on a hemispheric dome. Though I found it suspicious that she, a first-year at Naoetsu High, soon to be second-year, would be working at this planetarium as an employee of its science museum, I soon realized I was in a dream.

Senjogahara had pulled off an impressive parallel parking job in the museum’s lot without relying on any advanced automotive features, and we made it to the attached planetarium without incident, but my exhaustion from the previous day must have reared its head─I’d also woken up early. I realize it’s wholly unbecoming for a boy on a date, but I must’ve nodded off in the structure’s pitch darkness.

Since we were in a planetarium, you could say I’d nodded off into space─no, sorry, I continued to be sleepy in my dream and wasn’t coming up with anything clever.

“Please don’t fall asleep, Araragi-senpai. I’ll throw my chalk at you if you do. And since I don’t have any chalk, I’ll throw my laser pointer at you if you do.”

Please don’t. I’d lose consciousness and wake up if she hit me with something like that…

“Ha haa. And then you’d have a thought once you wake up. Is the date you’re on with Miss Senjogahara reality, or were those moments you spent cuddling with me just now the real world? Yes, it’d be what you’d call a butterfly dream, where you can’t tell whether you’re human or insect.”

Even in dreams, Ogi still fired on all cylinders.

“Now then, let us deepen our insights.”

If you asked me if this was dream or reality, it must have still been reality─they must have been discussing something similar in the real- world planetarium.

And because I could hear it in my shallow sleep, it affected my dream─well, in that case, Ogi’s commentary might provide me with enough to at least think of an excuse for Senjogahara once I woke up.

“As you know, there are eighty-eight constellations visible in the sky from Earth─a fact you’re familiar with thanks to Saint Seiya. Can you name them all?”

Come on, don’t be ridiculous. All eighty-eight haven’t even shown up in Saint Seiya yet.

“Indeed. And the southern constellations would be tough for someone living in Japan like yourself─though my rival Miss Hanekawa might just be looking at them from Australia or so right about now,” Ogi said, sounding amused.

Despite her smile, she wasn’t trying to hide anymore that Hanekawa was her rival.

“The constellations in the Southern Hemisphere really are interesting. They have so many you’ve never heard of. Like a chameleon.”

A chameleon? Yeah, pretty amazing…

“As well as Pictor, an easel, and Vela, a ship’s sail.”

Ogi pointed at each constellation with her laser─like a regular navigator. Perhaps these kinds of lectures were always her strong point─perhaps she enjoyed explaining things to people.

But no, if this was a dream, it was just that I unconsciously thought those things about Ogi…

These unusual constellations─well, they would be commonplace in the Southern Hemisphere, but the names of these groupings of stars I had little to no knowledge of came pouring forth from Ogi’s mouth, until─

“Then there’s Hydrus, the water snake,” she said.

A water snake.

An aquatic─serpent.

“As opposed to Hydra, the sea snake─you do know about Hydra, don’t you? It’s the largest of all eighty-eight constellations.”

The dome’s starry sky underwent a total change.

Changing into a sky I’d seen before.

Ogi pointed to Hydra.

“The question of how one measures the size of a constellation is a difficult one, of course. It does start to fall apart once you look at them in three dimensions. Still, the presence of Hydra here does remind one of Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, does it not?”

Descriptions of aberrations began mixing into her descriptions of the constellations.

I found it hard to believe this had any link to the real world─a planetarium attached to a science museum wouldn’t casually bring up the name of the vampire I knew so well, the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded legend who’d returned to her full form the day before.

Was it another unconscious impression of Ogi? That she’d bring it up here? In that sense, you could say my dream’s link to reality had only strengthened─

“And while we may call Hydra the sea serpent constellation, its classical name references the mythical beast─do you know about the Hydra? A monster that regenerates again and again, no matter how many times you cut at it. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call it immortal. Similar to the legend of the Yamata no Orochi in Japan─though it was the famed and heroic Heracles who rid the world of the Hydra, not Susano’o-no-Mikoto.”

No matter how many of its heads Heracles cut off, the serpent continued to grow new ones from where they were severed─Ogi said.

Sounding amused.

Miss Kagenui was familiar with how to defeat immortal aberrations, but what exactly did the heroic Heracles do to slay the sea snake─to slay the Hydra? It can’t be that the battle ended in vain without him ever defeating it.

“No, it’s defeated in a very orthodox way. Though I doubt you could defeat Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade by doing this─he cut off each of the Hydra’s nine heads in order, then burned the wounds with fire to block them off and prevent them from growing back. He cut off all of its heads one by one─and thus Heracles defeated the sea serpent.”

An orthodox method indeed.

Burn the wounds with flame.

Ogi said it wouldn’t work on Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade─and maybe it wouldn’t, but using fire to burn a vampire did seem like a sound approach.

Immortal monsters.

Need to be fought with fire.

Just as I was sent to Avīci, the hell where nothing but flames surround you on every side…

“Perhaps only a legendary hero can defeat a legendary vampire─but I digress,” Ogi continued. “When Heracles fought this sea snake, Cancer the crab attacked him as well, fighting on the side of the serpent and snipping at Heracles with its big claws.”

Cancer─the crab?

“But the giant crab might as well have been a louse, not so much as tickling Heracles before being defeated in return. Crushed underfoot─and they say the impact turned the crab flat or something. Of course, the crab was praised for its heroism for facing Heracles, and a goddess placed it in the sky as a constellation, so that its name would be remembered.”

Ogi pointed all around Cancer as she spoke.

One of the great things about planetariums must be their flexibility in situations like these─you can only see so many constellations in an actual starry sky, or over the course of a season, but the flip of a switch can show you anything you want, whether the south or north sky, summer or winter constellations, or the stars at dusk or dawn.

“Its attitude of taking on a frightful enemy with modest weapons is like Miss Senjogahara encapsulated─you ought to tell this story to her once you wake up and show her just how great of a boyfriend you are.”

I didn’t know about that last part…

The story was an interesting one, but Senjogahara wouldn’t be happy to hear about a crab getting crushed underfoot…

I didn’t know to what extent my dream and the real-life planetarium were connected, but if she was hearing this commentary on Cancer in the waking world, how did she feel? Not that she liked crabs or had any strong emotional attachment to them just because she’d been in the grips of a crab aberration.

But as someone born on July seventh.

Senjogahara─was a Cancer.

I would of course call it a stretch to read any sort of meaning into that─as far as I could recall, she’d never once allied herself with Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade…which is to say Shinobu Oshino.

In fact, Senjogahara had been the only one who didn’t want to go looking for Shinobu when she went missing─her stance of disliking children remained the same, whether reformed or not.

Even if she were to come across Shinobu fighting for her life, I couldn’t imagine Senjogahara risking a trampling just to lend her support…

“You’re right─I’m not too familiar with the situation, but when Miss Senjogahara put herself on the line to protect you from Sengoku, she did so because it was you. The former Heartunderblade was just a bonus,” Ogi nodded. “It is interesting to consider─who would win if the then-snake god, Nadeko Sengoku when she reigned over Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, faced off against the fully restored Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade. The odds are in favor of the Aberration Slayer, who has the power to end the entire world, but a snake god would be every bit as immortal─though this was a land and not sea serpent.”

Snake vs. sea serpent.

A deeply poisonous scenario if they both possessed venom… While Ogi spoke of it like a dream matchup, I could only see it turning into a fruitless mudslinging match between immortals.

An eternal, snake-eat-snake competition.

“Indeed. And while it’s not Hydra, Serpens is another constellation that symbolizes immortality─” Ogi said as the dome’s night sky shifted again.

Her laser pointer indicated the constellation of Serpens.

“After all, it can be said to have a certain peculiarity that is unique among the eighty-eight. Do you know what it might be?”

I don’t─

I replied.

Come to think of it, if this was a dream, it was odd for Ogi to be expounding facts that I didn’t know─and the discussion seemed to be a little too much about aberrations to be something I was getting from the real-life planetarium by way of sleep learning.

Was that the talk we’d attended?

Serpens’ characteristics─I couldn’t see Ogi choosing planetary science as an elective, but did she still know the answer?

“I don’t know anything,” she said with a dark smile. “You’re the one who knows. Really, you should be aware of it. See, just like this.”

With that, the light from Ogi’s laser pointer swung to both sides─from east to west, to use cardinal directions.

“Serpens exists while being divided into east and west, yet it’s a single constellation. As a serpent─it’s been chopped in two,” she said. “It exists in separate parts, its upper half to the west, and its lower half to the east─which is to say that just by looking at it, you can tell it’s immortal. Just think, it lives despite its body being split in two… Then again, it seems you often find your own body split in two.”

Forget split in two, I was chopped to pieces just yesterday─but putting that aside, not only was this my first time hearing that Serpens existed in the sky as two disconnected pieces, the fact shocked me.

Why had it been placed there in the sky in that shape? Could there be another story behind it, just as for Cancer? Something like a legend of a snake being chopped in two, like the flattened crab─

“Yes,” said Ogi, as if in reply. “In fact, another constellation exists in the sky between those two separated parts─and I’m certain you’re familiar with this one. Ophiuchus.”

The serpent-bearer.

Right, one of the thirteen constellations.

I vividly remembered the time when I discussed it with Kanbaru and she burst out laughing─in fact, the memory was still fresh. Kanbaru still brought it up as a way to annoy me.

“As a whole, the serpent-bearer is shown to hold the upper and lower parts of the snake in his left and right arms─to explain the detailed backstory in a mythical kind of way, it seems that the constellation of the serpent-bearer cut into Serpens’ original location. Something I’m sure the serpent found quite annoying.”

True, it made him seem more like someone who’d painted over and killed a serpent than someone bearing one.

But no, the serpent was immortal because that wasn’t enough to kill it─a creature so mystical that it would be worshiped as a god.

A creature and a creeper.

In that sense, while I may have been in the dark about what made Serpens special, which is to say its division into east and west, I did know a little about the serpent-bearer─right, wasn’t it supposed to be Asclepius, the great and famed doctor?

“That’s right. I’d expect no less out of someone as learned as you,” Ogi said with a tinge of sarcasm, but it seemed I wasn’t mistaken. “While he may be called the serpent-bearer, if anything, you could say that Asclepius learned from the serpent─as he began down the path of medicine after witnessing the drama of a dying snake coming back to life.”

Huh. I didn’t know that part.

“But─this would come to haunt him as well. In a stroke of bad luck, you might say─or maybe he was crushed to death by his own talents. Asclepius’ medical abilities grew and grew to the point where he could even bring the dead back to life. Reviving the dead is the ultimate form of regenerative medicine─but it was a step too far.”

He went too far, Ogi repeated the essential point.

“He broke the rules. I guess you could say he violated a universal law… It earned him the anger of Hades, king of the underworld, who struck Asclepius with lightning and quite literally sent him into the heavens. Perhaps you could say that seeing an immortal snake is what caused him to lose his own life. It almost sounds like the fruit of knowledge…”

The fruit of knowledge.

Neither was exactly a happy outcome: being expelled from paradise, getting turned into a constellation…

In terms of what a doctor was for, however, I didn’t see regenerative medicine as any kind of violation of a universal law─what could have made Hades, king of the underworld, so mad?

Then again, as someone who’d just managed to come back from hell, I did see aberrational and medical immortality as separate…

“Well, the underworld would empty out if every dead person came back to life─there wasn’t anyone in your hell either, was there? But I wouldn’t call it hell if it’s abandoned, I’d call it a ghost town.”

Sure, Asclepius, victim of that lightning bolt, might not have been immortal himself, but the act of bringing a human back to life─the act of mass-producing immortality is quite the sin.

Ogi then made another comment, as if it had just come to mind.

“Yotsugi Ononoki, too. She’s someone who came back to life after death─but in retaliation, everyone involved in bringing her back was struck by a curse.”

Huh? What was she talking about?

A curse?

I felt like Tadatsuru had mentioned Miss Kagenui not walking on the ground as being a kind of curse…

“You could of course debate which is worse, a lightning bolt or a curse─but it does make me wonder. What kind of punishment is going to come to Miss Gaen for bringing you back from hell? You may not be happy with the way things now stand, with you acting just as she wants, but keep in mind that it’s not as if she’s avoiding all risk herself.”

Why would Ogi say that? Why was she defending Miss Gaen?

Asking that, of course, also forced me to wonder why Ogi knew about me going to hell and Miss Gaen bringing me back from it, but─

“Ha haa,” Ogi laughed, putting the laser pointer back in her pocket─and ambling over to my seat.

She then tried to sit next to me.

In reality, the planetarium was a close to sold-out affair for the morning session, but I was its only visitor in this dream─yet despite it being empty, Ogi was trying to sit right next to me.

“Ogi. If you’re going to sit, sit to my left.”

“Why?”

“That’s Senjogahara’s seat.”

“Oh? How romantic. No need to worry. I have no intention whatsoever of threatening the throne of the female lead. I think I could at least aim to become a little-sister character─but while Karen is one thing, I wouldn’t want to have to compete against Tsukihi,” Ogi said, sitting to my left as requested.

It seemed she was done with her time acting as a planetarium employee.

“By the way, what’s your sign?”

Perhaps that’s why she now came at me with what seemed more like plain small talk than any kind of celestial episode─and I admit, I have an easier time with more laidback topics.

“Hm… Um, I think it was either Taurus or Aries.”

“How vague.”

“That’s how it is if you’re not interested in horoscopes─I’m sure a surprising number of people out there don’t know their blood type, either.”

“Perhaps─do you not believe in fortune-telling much?”

“I don’t know… I used to always be negative about it, but accepting the existence of aberrations and hell, while denying the existence of fortunes, seems inconsistent…”

“Ha haa. To compare your situation to a mystery novel, it’d be like a book that’s okay with detectives who have superpowers but paradoxically refuses any supernatural phenomena.”

Ogi and her mystery analogies─but maybe her example was the easiest to understand.

“Knowing you, I bet when you were sent to hell you started thinking about the meaning of life being lessened by the existence of a world after death. Am I right?”

“I didn’t go that far, but…yes, I did think something similar. Still…”

“Yes, you were able to come back to life precisely because you didn’t think that, no? Well, fools do tend to cling on to life. To me, it just looks like you glossing over one mistake with an even bigger mistake,” Ogi said to my left as she looked up at the dome’s projected sky. “Not a covering up of shame, but a covering up of your mistakes.”

“…”

“Of course, it’s this cover-up that must have led Miss Gaen to send me an invitation─an obvious trap, but one I can’t help but react to. It’s as if she’s calling out to my very instincts. You can tell she’s an expert by the way she’s thought of so many things.”

Ogi giggled.

In the most high-school girlish way.

But she─her true identity.

Was as Tadatsuru Teori said.

As he taught me in the depths of hell.

The client who had asked him to slay me and Shinobu─

“Araragi-senpai. What do you think being right means?”

Now the topic strayed entirely from the starry sky─

As Ogi asked me the question.

No, this was of course nothing more than a conversation in a dream. It wasn’t as if I was really speaking with her─but what about the real her?

What did I know about Ogi Oshino?

Mèmè Oshino’s niece.

A lineage of experts.

A transfer student introduced to me by Suruga Kanbaru─

“No need to give it too much serious thought. The meaning of being right changes all the time, after all. You can claim that justice always prevails all you want, but in truth, it does lose a lot of the time. That said, the idea that might makes right is shallower than you’d expect. It all gets tricky because we use grand words like justice─we might be better off with something like justiness instead.”

I still didn’t get what she was saying.

I don’t normally live my life thinking about what’s just or justy, what’s wrong or mistaken─but I guess that’s exactly why I was in my current predicament.

Had I never failed to focus on deciding what is right, or what is wise, or what is beautiful or cool this whole time, the situation wouldn’t have gotten so complicated.

I didn’t think of it as a better outcome.

But I also thought─what if it had been?

“It’s hard to do the right thing,” Ogi said. “In particular, it’s very hard to only do the right thing─because doing the right thing means having to do things that are wrong, or not right, at the same time. Just flip through a newspaper and you’ll see all the examples you want of people resorting to injustice in the pursuit of justice─to play off the idea that justice always wins out in the end, I guess I’m saying that in order to win, you also have to lose at some point. There’s no such thing as a perfect record─”

Miss Gaen had said the same thing.

She’d compared it to the game of shogi─something about how even the greatest player can’t win a match against the most rank beginner without losing at least one piece.

Of course, she cut me into pieces immediately after, so it made me think that I myself was the loss in her eyes…

“Which is why, in order to be just, you must avoid doing what is just. If doing the right thing means making mistakes, you can only end up even.”

In that case, what were you supposed to do?

I certainly hadn’t done everything right─but I was strongly attracted to what’s right because of that.

Like Miss Kagenui, for example.

Or like the Fire Sisters.

I would be lying if I said I had no admiration whatsoever for people who believed in their own rightness and lived accordingly.

“Sure─but it’s not as if Miss Kagenui and the Fire Sisters are doing the right thing when they put that way of life into practice, even if they call it justice. Instead of doing the right thing in order to be right─”

They right wrongs.

Adjust the unjust.

That’s how they choose to live their lives.

What Ogi said was─an extension of the conversation I had in hell with Hachikuji.

An extension, and a case of extra innings.

“Or you could say that what they do─is smite, maybe upbraid. In other words, while the enemy of an enemy may not be an ally, becoming the enemy of evil does make you its antonym, appointing yourself as just. Though it does put you one wrong step away from a situation where you’re simply complaining about what you find distasteful─it does allow you to get drunk off a sense of justice.”

Drunk off a sense of justice, huh?

That if anything was the kind of thing I often said to the Fire Sisters…but it was true. Their acts of justice were often nothing more than eliminating “bad” guys, as best represented by that conman, or taking care of the aftermath of “bad” stuff.

Whether it was Karen or Tsukihi or Miss Kagenui, it would never cross my mind to describe their personalities as just─or right.

If anyone existed who was “right” in that sense, it was Tsubasa Hanekawa in her former days─which meant that Ogi was correct. Hanekawa had no choice but to create the aberration known as Black Hanekawa in order to maintain that sense of rightness.

In order to be right.

She had no choice but to make a mistake.

I may not have been able to right that wrong─in fact, I allowed Hanekawa’s mistake to persist, which meant─that after all, I wasn’t in the right back then.

As Ogi said.

“And I too seek the kind of rightness that comes from righting wrongs─my role is to eject those who break the rules.”

Break the rules. Eject.

The words began to remind me of something─but I couldn’t gather my thoughts, there in my dream.

They scattered─dispersed.

“Of course, I’m not a demon─neither a vampire nor one of hell’s devils. I wouldn’t eject someone over an illegal act, or two, and am prepared to hand out suspended sentences… The show’s almost over. I think you ought to wake up.”

Hearing this, I reflexively checked my watch.

I didn’t know how reliable a wristwatch was in a dream, but indeed, nearly thirty minutes had passed since the beginning of the show.

“Miss Senjogahara will be disappointed in you if you’re still dozing as the lights go up. She went to the trouble of putting this date together, so I wouldn’t blame her if she dumped you for sleeping during it. So come on, now, let’s wake up.”

Ogi reached out to me and gave my body a gentle shake─she was pretty quick to make physical contact with me for a girl, but it was out of consideration. She only wanted to wake me up, so I wasn’t going to lecture her.

“Enjoy the rest of your date with your lover─but, Araragi-senpai. Whenever you find yourself with time to kill, think about what being right means─and let’s talk about it when we meet in the real world.”

Okay, got it. If I remember after I wake up, of course─I answered her in my mind.

Then, as if to follow up─and while I expected no answer at all─I asked Ogi.

Still, what exactly are you, anyway?

“We’ll discuss that too when we meet again. I had a lot of fun playing around with you for the past few months, but I’m sad to say that I don’t exist in order to have fun. But if I were to say what I can here…”

I’m the cosmic rule.

Though Ogi’s answer was calm and casual, it was also immense.

A map of the universe.

The shape of an ogi, a folding fan.

A pitch-dark void─an uneven galaxy.

“Don’t think too much about that either. Now that you’ve been brought back from hell and are a full human being again, I may not have to involve myself with you too much─if everything goes well.”

So please, don’t fall for Miss Gaen’s sweet talk, warned Ogi.

“I’m sincerely hoping that you’ll make the right decision this time around when it comes to the now-whole Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade as well as Mayoi Hachikuji, who’s made her way back to this world despite having passed on to the next one─who has strayed once more─and choose to abandon them.”