Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 7.07

007

Please don’t think that my qualms vanished the moment I heard I’d be playing with Hachikuji. I’ll admit, though, that I was stunned silent by her moving words.

Miss Gaen was not one to waste such opportunities.

“Anyway, we’ve cleared one of the hurdles. Mayoi Hachikuji just needs to swallow this amulet and Kita-Shirahebi Shrine’s new god will be born,” she proceeded to wrap up the discussion about the first requirement─um, wasn’t she being too facile about an important point? “Ah, well, in Mayoi’s case, maybe I should say chew up and digest rather than swallow.”

“My issue isn’t with your precise wording…” I didn’t want us to settle on a conclusion when the situation remained so hazy. At the same time, I knew that nothing could fully satisfy me here.

“If you want to let the Darkness swallow her up, I’ll leave that decision to you, Koyomin─it’s just a question of means to me. This is the one time where you can’t take her place, though.”

“Indeed…and while I will but do as ye conclude, surely ’twould weigh on thy conscience to have brought thy favorite child back from hell only to have her swallowed up by the Darkness,” Shinobu chimed in, wrapping her legs around me in addition to her arms. It was as if she’d decided to sit cross-legged around my body, which was wanting in manners for an adult─at least usually, but the pose looked handsome and cool when Shinobu did it, unfairly enough.

I bet I never looked that stylish holding her in my arms.

Anyway, being rebuked by her made it only harder for me to argue─in fact, I’d lost my grounds for objecting now. Shinobu and Sengoku had failed as gods for a reason, while the new unit had no shortcomings according to the lecture of an expert, Miss Gaen.

“Yes, kind monster sir. Get your damn act together. You think whining and complaining about what other people want to do makes you so cool? Keep your mouth shut if you don’t have an alternative. Is dragging down the doers all you can do?”

“Hold on, Ononoki. I can come up with plenty of arguments when it comes to you.”

Such a nasty tone. She reminded me of an angry Tsukihi.

Mellowing a bit, she asked me, “Didn’t we go over this more than enough in August?” With Miss Gaen’s arms around her (looking like a ventriloquist dummy, given that she was a doll), Ononoki continued, “She could get swallowed up by the Darkness while we’re squiggling and squabbling.”

“Oh…by the way.”

It wasn’t so much Ononoki badmouthing me, but Miss Gaen, Shinobu, and her speaking in succession that made me come up with a rebuttal. Or rather, I’d been thinking about it for a while but hadn’t had a good time to bring it up. I’d kept my earlier run-in with Ogi in front of my home secret, and kept quiet about it as a result, but maybe I should’ve informed everyone about it sooner.

If only to ascertain its veracity.

Though it was late in the game─no, maybe this was actually the best possible timing since Miss Gaen was trying to pivot to the second requirement, namely Ogi Oshino…

“Miss Gaen.”

“What is it, Koyomin?”

“It’s, um…about the Darkness. We might be terribly mistaken about something,” I said, my voice subdued. “It could be that─Ogi Oshino isn’t the Darkness.”

“I know.”

An instant reply.

My subdued tone for naught.

I’d even used italics like a fool.

Instead of striking out swinging, I was getting called out on a bunted foul─did cricket have a similar rule?

“Get out of here.”

This unpretentious expression of disbelief came from Ononoki. Since she and Miss Gaen didn’t act as one, I suppose their views didn’t always match up.

“Seriously? Damn. I’d been so convinced I foreshadowed all kinds of stuff assuming that was the case.”

“…”

Who asked you to? Don’t be foreshadowing like it’s your mission, okay? What an annoying character trait, what an annoying character.

As for Shinobu, she stayed silent.

She seemed to belong to the camp who’d known… Maybe she wasn’t saying anything out of caution to avoid revealing her position inadvertently.

Hachikuji, never knowing much about Ogi, who transferred into Naoetsu High after she’d passed on─sat there blankly like she didn’t care either way.

“Why did you think Ogi Oshino is the Darkness in the first place?” Miss Gaen asked me.

“Well, I mean…”

“Oh, sorry, don’t get me wrong, Koyomin. I wasn’t trying to fault or laugh at you with that. If anything, it was only natural to think so,” Miss Gaen said, quite naturally herself─as though this turn in our conversation had also been part of her calculations. But how could she predict this, too, without listening in on my earlier conversation with Ogi?

“Why was it natural…to think so?”

“I’ll explain what I mean later,” replied Miss Gaen, prioritizing her arrangements.

“What I need to know beforehand is─at what point you arrived at the notion. Depending on your answer, we might want to modify our measures… I have a pretty good idea, though.”

“There was no specific point. Hearing and seeing how she spoke and acted, it just came to me… She was looking for Hachikuji and all. Then there’s Sengoku, and Tadatsuru…”

And the very start of it, Ogi Oshino’s initial case.

The chain of events surrounding Sodachi Oikura after I met the transfer student for the first time was─almost blatant, if you will.

No, but it wasn’t through accumulating info that way, it was intuitive─just take her tar-black vibes.

The Darkness itself, wouldn’t you say?

A deep darkness insisting on the rules.

An inky darkness revering balance.

“But if we’re saying it was only natural for me to think so─was she actively trying to make me? To mislead me?”

It seemed possible. Ogi would do that. As nothing more than a prank, too.

Not that she’d ask Tadatsuru to hunt us down as a prank─

“Nope, that’s not it.” Miss Gaen shook her head at my assessment, however. Once again. “Well, actually, it might’ve been her own understanding at first─and she does continue to charge herself with that duty. Ogi Oshino may not be the Darkness itself, but is doing its work.”

Bearing the same role, she rephrased.

“The same role as the Darkness…”

The “natural phenomenon” that once assaulted Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, worshiped as a false god─and Mayoi Hachikuji, who stayed in this world despite losing her reason to exist.

The Darkness.

A.k.a. a black hole, dark matter─a phenomenon, or concept, that clamped down on aberrations that strayed from their path.

When it visited Hachikuji in August, I didn’t have the time to think about it in depth, panic being my foremost reaction─but I did my best later and came to the conclusion that it was by no means a natural enemy, or the punitive body, of aberrations.

The rules of our world.

Like gravity or action-and-reaction, natural selection or survival of the fittest, math formulas or any of those kinds of laws─to be obeyed, and not to be defied, but without some sort of thing to the floating black thing.

Yes.

That’s what I believed─until I met Ogi Oshino.

Who did exist.

And yet, mistaken as always, jumping to conclusions and spinning in place, I ended up as far off the mark as possible.

“Oh, don’t be so down on yourself─what did I just tell you? Ogi Oshino took on the Darkness’ role, so you weren’t terribly off the mark thinking she was it. But to get everything straight just in case,” Miss Gaen said, turning to Hachikuji, “the Darkness that might revisit this town if we left you in your current state, that we were fretting about earlier, is the genuine Darkness─which attacked Heartunderblade, and you in August. The authentic, veritable Darkness. Meanwhile, even if we enshrined you at Kita-Shirahebi and made you its god, you could still come under attack─from Ogi Oshino, in the role of the Darkness.”

Miss Gaen turned from Hachikuji to me again, but stare at me though she might, this turn in the conversation was so sudden I couldn’t react right away. The best I could do was echo her.

“We could enshrine her─and she’d attack?”

Huh?

Only after tracing the words did it sink in─and I had to wonder what the hell was going on. We’d been talking about enshrining and deifying her to stave off the Darkness, even though it hadn’t been Miss Gaen’s goal, but what was the point if Hachikuji was still going to be attacked?

What was it all for, then?

We wouldn’t be able to play together─

“Well, that’s why I said two minimum requirements─enshrining Mayoi as a god isn’t enough on its own. That’s half of it, but there’s the other half: we aren’t getting anywhere until we eliminate Ogi Oshino.”

“You keep on using that word, eliminate…” I said, unable to take it anymore.

Maybe she was just using a customary term without meaning anything by it, but I had trouble putting up with such talk about my junior, a girl at that, even if she was opposed to us, whether or not she was the Darkness.

─Could you side with me?

─Please save me.

It wasn’t that her plea swayed me. It was a matter of word choice.

“Could you please not?” I requested. “You’re making it sound like Ogi’s just some aberration.”

“Well, but she is,” came another immediate reply, “an ordinary─monster.”