Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 7.06

006

It goes without saying that Mayoi Hachikuji and Yotsugi Ononoki had no goals of their own in this meeting─how could they? Hachikuji was an utter bystander, someone I’d dragged into the situation, if you wanted to put it that way, whom I’d brought with me from hell against her will. As far as Ononoki, forget about a doll like her having a sense of purpose, I didn’t know if she sensed anything at all.

I suppose that as far as Hachikuji goes, you could say that I wanted to help her escape from her position between a rock and a hard place. It’s not like she could go back to hell, but she couldn’t stay either. She had nowhere to go.

Though I say this as if her problems had nothing to do with me, most of the responsibility for her situation did rest on my shoulders…

“So, now that we all know where we stand, let me explain what exactly we’ll be doing next. The minimum required to fulfill your goals, Koyomin, and my goals, as well as Miss Shinobu’s goals and Mayoi’s goals all at the same time.”

Miss Gaen said this as if she had some kind of fixed process in mind, but I found it hard to believe that any such requirements existed─though the way she said minimum required did make it seem like there may be more requirements out there…

“We have two minimum requirements. One is to install a new god at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─the other is the elimination of Ogi Oshino.”

Elimination.

Hearing the word said out loud so clearly made me a little bit nervous─I tried to be careful about not showing those nerves on my face, but Shinobu may have figured it out via osteophony as she held me in her arms.

Please save me.

Ogi’s earlier words may have come across to her.

If we focused on Shinobu in this situation, though, the issue wasn’t the second requirement. The first was the most pressing.

“Miss Gaen. If you’re trying to say we should make Shinobu the god of the shrine, then─”

“Yes, that was the plan. That’s why my original plan was to have you leave once you came back to life─but the situation changed when you brought Mayoi Hachikuji back from hell with you. There’s no longer any need to install Miss Shinobu at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, though this did come about half by force─because in a sense, an even more suitable substitute for a god than Miss Shinobu─no, because a successor to a god has appeared.”

“A successor to a god?”

“I’m talking about Mayoi.”

With that.

Miss Gaen pointed at the pigtailed girl who hadn’t been participating much in the conversation─yet despite being pointed at, Hachikuji remained calm.

In other words.

They’d already─come to a deal.

But I was hearing this for the first time. Of course this shocked me─Hachikuji?

Mayoi Hachikuji─at that shrine?

“N-No! Th-That’d be even worse! I mean, Hachikuji is…”

“She’s what?” urged Miss Gaen, but I had no words─I began knowing that we couldn’t do it, that it was impossible, but pressed for a specific reason why we couldn’t, why it was impossible, no answer came forth.

It was so unexpected that I’d reacted without thinking… Well, maybe I couldn’t think of a reason to be against it, but I still couldn’t think of a reason to be for it, either.

Not because I’d become overly conservative, afraid of losing anything─as far as I knew. Not because the experience of losing Hachikuji once had carved itself into me.

I didn’t think Shinobu was too attached to Hachikuji, but in reality, this was a discussion about her potential successor.

It seemed she couldn’t stay uninterested.

“The waif may be qualified,” she inserted herself into the conversation, still concealing her stance on the matter. “We cannot deny that the lost girl has performed a miracle, having returned from hell.”

That was true.

What’s more of a miracle than resurrection? If the requirement to be a god is the performance of miracles, we could say that Hachikuji met it.

But in that case, I met the requirement as well, and so did Ononoki─not that I could ever imagine myself or Ononoki becoming a god, but the same went for Hachikuji…

“No, it’s not the same,” Miss Gaen said. “When it comes to Mayoi Hachikuji as compared to you or Yotsugi, while you did all come back to life, the conditions are different─you came back with a physical body, but she’s a spirit.”

“Are you saying you can’t become a god if you have a physical body?”

“No. As we can see from Nadeko Sengoku. There are such things as gods incarnate─the difference here is that Mayoi will be swallowed up by the Darkness unless she becomes a god.”

Right.

She’d chosen to pass on to the afterlife in the first place because she’d been chased by the Darkness─and while it’d be one thing if she’d come back to life with a body, continuing to remain in our world as a spirit meant she’d inevitably find herself chased.

In other words, Miss Gaen said, there were three choices.

“1: Go back to hell. 2: Be engulfed by the Darkness. 3: Become a god─that’s it. Okay, become a god is a little overblown. In reality, she’s just changing jobs as an aberration. All aberrations are like gods. This also makes her situation different from deifying you or Yotsugi. Enshrining her at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─would permit Mayoi Hachikuji to continue existing in this world.”

She’d receive citizenship. She’d receive residency, in other words.

“So for the most part, it’d be nothing but positive for little Hachikuji… She will of course have to do some work, but if she can manage the air pocket there, that’ll be more than enough prevention. I wouldn’t think of asking for anything more, I wouldn’t demand anything unreasonable.”

“That seems to be the case,” Hachikuji said curtly.

From what her expression told me, she’d agreed to it on an informal basis and had no plans to change her opinion, either─and it’d be hard for me to complain if she felt fine with it.

In fact, if it worked, the idea did a perfect job of smoothing over my thoughtless deed, namely kidnapping Hachikuji out of hell. I ought to be grateful, and had no right to complain… Even then, I couldn’t help but be the voice of prudence when it came to Hachikuji.

Maybe the concept of Hachikuji, the young girl, just didn’t match up with the concept of god in my mind─oh, but speaking of not matching.

“B-But isn’t that a shrine that worships snakes? Wouldn’t it cause another distortion in the way of things if it housed Hachikuji, a snail aberration?”

“And that is the miracle so great that I can’t even believe you made it happen by accident, Koyomin─without it, even I may not have thought of installing her as a god. Becoming Kita-Shirahebi Shrine’s deity requires a reason, even if it’s nothing more than a sophistic stretch─just as they brought the lake shrine to the mountains by way of a serpentine connection, or the way Heartunderblade claimed to be its false god by way of a shared immortality. We needed a reason on that level, or perhaps on an even higher one.”

“R-Right? So─”

“Snails,” Miss Gaen said. “They’re backwards compatible with snakes.”

“What?”

“Er, that wording might be too self-serving─but Koyomin, you must have heard of sansukumi before, right? It’s hardly expert knowledge.”

“Sansukumi?”

The original form of rock-paper-scissors?

The very basics of it, sure.

“With the snake, the frog─and the slug, right?”

The snake eats the frog, the frog eats the slug, and the slug feeds off the snake. It could also be used to describe a trilemma─a slug?

That sounded somehow familiar.

“Oh, right. Namekuji tofu─the Slug Tofu. The fake aberration Kaiki used on Sengoku…”

“That’s right. An aberration that’s effective against snakes─a slug.”

Slugs and snails are closely related species, Miss Gaen added.

“Oh.”

Right, what a blind spot─I should have realized what she was trying to say from the moment she brought up sansukumi. Snails have shells, while slugs don’t─slugs are pretty much snails who’ve devolved their shells away.

In that case, far from having nothing to do with snakes.

Snails─could suppress snakes.

Instead of going wild like Sengoku, instead of being swallowed up by a snake, she could be the one to engulf the snake.

“I see. Call me Mayoi Namekuji,” Hachikuji nodded along. The pun was almost too good to be true.

“Now, of course,” Miss Gaen said, “it’d be best if a snake took over for a snake…but in a sense, this is even more ideal. In other words─we’re spiraling around the solution the opposite way.”

“…”

When she put it like that, even meeting Hachikuji at this park─the former site of Shirohebi Shrine, predecessor to Kita-Shirahebi─seemed fated. Though this too had to be a stretch.

Still, wasn’t it a multitude of acrobatic stretches, one contortionist experience after the other, that brought us to where we were, by some sort of miracle?

“Speaking as an expert, if I had to point out a flaw, the ji in Hachikuji’s name indicates a Buddhist temple, while she’d be residing in a Shinto shrine…but let’s overlook that in the spirit of Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. It’s not like we could change her name… Her family name was once Tsunade, rope hand, wasn’t it.”

Despite her laidback demeanor, Miss Gaen was surprisingly detail-oriented when it came to work─she must’ve turned over and thought through every side of any problem an amateur like me could come up with.

Also, she’d said residing─it would be Hachikuji’s residence. The word choice was no doubt another attempt to persuade me, but how could I not be taken in?

Whether a shrine or a temple.

For Mayoi Hachikuji, lost on the streets for eleven years─treated to the mysterious misfortune of having to stack up stones by the side of a river─it was such a massive and clear saving grace to have a place she could call home, live in, return to.

Miss Gaen had framed it as a multiple-choice question with three answers, but there was no other choice.

Nor did we have time to search for a fourth. I could go on and on for as long as I wanted and nothing productive would come out of it─but.

“Are you really okay about this, Hachikuji?”

I had to make sure.

I’d been speaking with Miss Gaen this whole time and not asking Hachikuji herself─but I couldn’t not ask.

“Yes, I am. A god─I feel like I’m walking on clouds.”

In the lap and arms of a beautiful blond, my position may not have seemed the most serious in the world, but I’d tried to give my question some sincere weight; yet Hachikuji’s response was light and offhanded.

Walking on clouds…

“I’m godly. A slip of the tongue.”

“Stop it, you’re making this sound like a joke. Don’t take something as serious as this on as a joke.”

“A posthumous two-rank promotion is nothing compared to this.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure you don’t get it…”

Her response was justifying my concern.

True, it’s not like I got what was going on, but I knew of two examples where being trapped in that manner led to cruel situations.

Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.

Nadeko Sengoku.

And frankly, I didn’t want to add Mayoi Hachikuji to the list, no matter how much they told me there was no other solution.

“Oh, but I do,” she still said, confident to the point of conceit.

“Are you sure? You understand the responsibility and meaning, the weight and role of becoming a god?”

“Well, no, those things, not at all.”

“No?!”

“However,” she perked up.

It was such a trademark Hachikuji smile.

“What I do understand is that it means I’ll get to play with you.”