Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 7.08

008

I realized that some time had passed.

I wasn’t sure if this passage was also a part of Miss Gaen’s plan. Although the situation steadily moved toward a resolution, and the truth was being revealed, I couldn’t help but feel the opposite─that the situation was only deteriorating, the truth receding further into the depths.

A monster.

An ordinary─monster.

If we’re going to nitpick, I don’t think anything counts as ordinary once it’s monstrous, but maybe the adjective was warranted amidst a grand assembly of irregularities: the complete form of legendary vampire Shinobu Oshino, man-made aberration Yotsugi Ononoki, and soon-to-be god Mayoi Hachikuji.

“Ogi’s─an aberration?”

Well.

Once I heard the words out loud, maybe that wasn’t so unnatural? Not that I had the right to say anything, having half-assumed that her true form was the Darkness…but her too-elusive appearances and disappearances did have a supernatural quality to them.

Since I’d already suspected that she was the Darkness, wondering if she was an aberration was hardly improper.

Monster… It felt like our tale was returning to its origins, after all this time.

Sure, you shouldn’t forget your roots, but a monster, or an aberration, transferring into Naoetsu High? Going to school, taking classes, and studying?

“Hold on, Koyomin. It’s not as if you’ve seen her going to school, taking classes, or studying─it’s just that most of your contact with her is centered around school.”

“…”

Fine, fine.

But wait, this called for a fundamental change in how I thought about the situation, and I needed to regain my composure. If I could, I’d go home, sleep on it, and come back─but knew that wasn’t happening.

I tried to remember.

All of my exchanges with Ogi─but my memories didn’t lead anywhere, I found no route to follow.

The harder I tried to recall them, the hazier they grew.

Not just now, either─this always happened with her. Speaking with Ogi muddled my memories. Remembering things I didn’t want to remember, forgetting things I ought to be thinking about, finding memories that never existed planted in my mind.

Almost as if─some kind of supernatural force was involved, but…

“Even if Ogi is an aberration, isn’t her identity too unclear? It’s like we should just call her the Darkness and be done with it. What basis do you have for calling her a monster?”

“Well, what basis do you have for calling her Ogi?”

“?”

Did I sound too familiar calling her by her first name? Was I the one who needed to reconsider how I spoke about her, and to stop being so chummy─when it was clear that she was our opponent? That said, it’s not like you can suddenly start calling someone by another name.

─Hitagi.

Ack. I remembered the night before, and felt more bashful than amused.

“What are you blushing for? Gross.”

Ononoki never let a blunder like that get away from her. A nasty personality, through and through.

Come to think of it, calling the shikigami by her first name was odd, too…but that didn’t seem to be Miss Gaen’s point.

“You’re calling her Ogi because she introduced herself as Ogi Oshino, and you just accepted it,” the expert continued─loud and clear.

“…She gave me a fake name?”

“Nah, a false name, pseudonym─it wouldn’t even qualify as those. It’s as slapdash as a name can get, like something invented on the spot. What you should’ve done when she gave that name, Koyomin, was laugh. Me, I’d have burst out in hysterics.”

“…”

So said Miss Gaen, but I had no clue what was so funny about the name. If she thought it was eccentric, what about Mèmè Oshino, who shared her surname? Not to mention Shinobu Oshino, whose given name deliberately repeated the first character of that surname? It was almost witty…

“Your instincts are uncharacteristically dull today, Mister Araragi,” Hachikuji stepped in to take over the explaining duties. Who knew she saw me as a character with sharp instincts, but right, maybe I ought to have noticed a little sooner.

After all, she and I had been at each other’s throats about names.

Still, calling me out when most of her info on Ogi came from our current discussion showed what a seasoned veteran Hachikuji was on the topic.

“My sense is that Miss Kanbaru introduced this Miss Ogi Oshino individual to you, correct? As a fan of the former star of the basketball team?”

“Yeah…that’s how it happened.”

“A fan. Like an ogi, a folding fan.”

I almost passed out at how trivial it was.

Yes, nothing as grand as an alias─and more of a blithe user name, like AAAA or CCCC or 1234, an offhanded, indifferent handle that I should have identified as a lie the moment I heard it.

The audacity of it, I guess, was nothing less than grand.

“But then what about her last name, Oshino… Oh, wait, the part about being his niece is a lie, too?”

“The situation is a little more complicated with the surname. Or maybe I should say roundabout… But yeah, she isn’t his niece. If you ask me, having been his senior, he has no niece─I don’t think. Mèmè’s a living, breathing human being, so I’m sure he has relatives in the biological sense, but as far as I know, that junior of mine is all alone in this world,” Miss Gaen declared.

“In that case, was she trying to gain our trust by claiming to be his niece? But why? What did she want so much that she’d come to us falsifying everything down to her background and the stuff she’s made of?”

Aberrations.

There’s a reason for every one.

Not intransigent like the Darkness.

So then, what necessity caused the aberration known as Ogi Oshino to appear at Naoetsu High─to throw my life into this much disarray?

“If Ogi Oshino isn’t Ogi Oshino, what is that girl? What’s─her true identity?”

I was being thoroughly disgraceful here, the type who knew only how to demand explanations, but I wasn’t going to be told that she was an aberration and leave it at that.

Please, convince me.

“Right now, her identity is the unidentifiable. Which is why the way to eliminate her is clear… The original plan was for the enchanted blade Kokorowatari to do the job, though it wouldn’t have been the appropriate method─more like expedient or rule-breaking. For an expert in my field, a greatsword that can slice up any aberration is a pretty big rules violation to begin with. What can you say, that’s Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade’s first thrall for you… How ironic that he was also the one to lead us to this twisted conclusion.”

“Your plan was to kill Ogi with the Aberration Slayer?”

“Come on, don’t glare at me like that─whose side are you on, anyway?”

It seemed to be a light-hearted quip, and not a knowing one, but her words made my heart leap. I felt like she’d pierced my strained nerves with needles.

Be that as it may, I couldn’t reply without reservation that I was on Miss Gaen’s side─even apart from that exchange with Ogi the night before.

“Cutting down an aberration with the Aberration Slayer. There shouldn’t be anything contradictory about that─it’s what an expert should do,” Miss Gaen said.

“Is that why you made Kokorowatari?”

When she wielded the sword to slice me into pieces at the shrine, I wondered why it was in her possession, but by now the method of its creation was clear to me. The first thrall Seishiro Shishirui’s armor─it had gone missing in August, and she’d reforged it.

I couldn’t pinpoint the source of this reasoning, but I was certain. Had she already been planning to use it on Ogi?

That’d be ridiculous. Aberration or transfer student, Ogi appeared before us in October, and Miss Gaen shouldn’t have had any reason to create the blade back in August.

At that point, Ogi hadn’t done anything to merit elimination…

“Don’t tell me that you know everything and made plans in your calendar in August to have this meeting today, on March fourteenth?”

“Of course not. School schedules don’t matter to someone my age.”

Her answer didn’t line up with my question. I wasn’t asking if she went by the calendar or academic year.

“Knowing everything,” she continued, “is different from being able to predict things. As sad as it makes me to let a friend down, I’m not so transcendent that I could foresee every future twist and turn during the events in August. A common misconception, but I’m just omniscient, not omnipotent.”

“But in that case─”

“I wasn’t thinking of killing Ogi Oshino, but I’d anticipated her appearance. I thought it possible─which is why I gathered the First’s armor. Just to prepare for the worst, of course.”

“Hmph, so sayeth the looter of a fire scene. Little wonder I was left feeling hungry,” Shinobu groused.

Every time she suddenly began speaking right next to my ear, I was jolted─and didn’t know what to do about the warmth of her breaths.

“Oh, come on, Miss Shinobu, haven’t I returned it to you?”

Judging by this response, the sword the legendary vampire had been using to play cricket earlier wasn’t her own version, but rather the replica created by Miss Gaen.

Shinobu had swallowed it as always, prior to putting her arms around me, but this meant two enchanted blades were inside her─or maybe three, including the Yumewatari she must’ve received as part of the set?

“Because,” Miss Gaen said, “I don’t need it now. If I can get Koyomin’s assistance, I don’t have to resort to extreme measures─as an expert in eliminating yokai, I can rid us of Ogi Oshino through honest means and the standard method.”

“What did you mean by anticipating her appearance?”

That intrigued me more than the precise nature of her honest means and standard method─if she’d anticipated Ogi’s appearance, was that really any different from planning on killing her all along?

“Ah, that was just experience speaking─Ogi Oshino is a kind of aberration I’ve seen before… Maybe I wouldn’t go that far, but something similar.”

So that’s what she meant. She had a wealth of experience as the big boss of the experts in her field, and what would be a bolt from the blue for me was just another notch in her belt.

Or so I thought, but no.

“I encountered it back when I was in elementary school─so this case kind of takes me back, if you don’t mind.”

“In elementary school?” I couldn’t picture her as a Lolita, but then, she couldn’t always have been a big boss. Or the lady who knows everything.

“Yeah. To be specific, I wasn’t the one to experience it, my older sister did─Toé Gaen. The mother of Suruga Kanbaru, whom you know so well.”

As her little sister I had a front-row seat to her experience, and that might’ve been the origin of the rest of my life, Miss Gaen recollected with genuine nostalgia in her voice.

“My sister─came across an unidentifiable aberration… By the way, Koyomin. Just how much do you know about my older sister?”

“Um, no real details. Just that she left Kanbaru the Monkey’s Paw, really…”

Kanbaru and I never really sweated the serious stuff and just talked about stupid things. Her mom eloped with the Kanbarus’ only son, gave birth to Kanbaru, and later died in a traffic accident─was that how it went?

I’d heard vague facts but couldn’t tell you what kind of person she actually was. Maybe her personality had been similar to Kanbaru’s─not that I wanted to imagine it…

“‘If you can’t become medicine, then make yourself into poison. Or else you’re nothing but plain water,’” Miss Gaen recited, adapting her voice. “She was the type to say something like that to her little sister. And well, honestly, I had trouble dealing with her.”

Trouble dealing with family.

I felt as though I’d come in contact with Miss Gaen’s human side for the first time─someone who’d speak such a line was kinda scary even to hear about. Yet just as I silently agreed with her…

“She was like you in a way, Koyomin,” Miss Gaen showed just how smart I was for doing so. “Though my sister wasn’t a demon, she was like a demon. I’m not saying she’s like you because you were a bloodsucking demon, but even as an elementary schooler, I thought she was crazy. I knew all too well that she was a dangerous character. How do I put it? She wasn’t a monster, but she was monstrous.”

“…”

“Hard on herself, and hard on others. The more unforgiving she was, the better. That’s the kind of person she was─well, ask Suruga for details next time you see her, if you get the chance. She was a child when she lost her mother, but she must’ve felt something of it, as her daughter─but I’m getting off topic. I’m not trying to explain my sister’s personality to you here. Just saying that I associate you with her.”

Hard on myself and hard on others?

Wait, that was my personality?

I’ll admit I was tickled that Hachikuji had the most puzzled expression out of us all, but Miss Gaen spoke no more on the subject. Instead…

“Which is exactly why, Koyomin,” she went on, “exactly why I anticipated that you might someday go down the same path─maybe I should say I feared it. From the time I worked with you in August, in fact. Sooner or later, you might be met with the same kind of aberration─and my fears hit the mark… That’s why I always keep my guard up.”

“Your guard, huh.” My nerves would fray if I lived with my guard up that high all the time─but maybe keeping it so low had made my current predicament inevitable. “Just for reference, what did you do then? You didn’t have Kokorowatari with you.”

“Yeah, well, I took an orthodox approach. And I’d like to resume it now─you’re going to do what my sister did, Koyomin.”

“I am? Not you?”

“You’re the only one who can do it.” Miss Gaen nodded forcefully. “There’d be no point in me doing it. Or Miss Shinobu─this method would be pointless for anyone else, even Mèmè or Yozuru. You’re the only one who can do it, and you’re the one who has to do it.”

You have to do it. You and you alone, Miss Gaen said, emphasizing alone.

“Because people get saved on their own, or whatever?” I asked.

“That was Mèmè’s policy, right? It’s not mine, but…it does resonate in this case. Yes, you could say there’s nothing at all I can do to help you.”

“…”

Face off against Ogi, one-on-one, Miss Gaen seemed to be urging, but how could I react with anything but bewilderment to her springing that on me?

My duel against Seishiro Shishirui.

That, I understood─and I’d spent the last year facing off against all kinds, in lethal combat, again and again. I hate to brag, but the way I saw my situation, running through a hailstorm of bullets and making it out alive was no exaggeration. If I were to start the count with my spring-break death match with an earlier iteration of Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, the bewitching beauty with her arms around me, fingers beginning to crawl along my ribs─I’d lose count by the time I reached the end of all the fatal encounters I’d endured.

But it was because of these experiences that I couldn’t get my head around what Miss Gaen meant by facing off against Ogi─her words felt hollow, like a funny story whose punch line I couldn’t make out.

Duel… Settle things… Lethal… All very impressive, but in this case quite devoid of substance.

“Huh. Would you compare it to being shown a five-minute anime short with a full-length opening and ending, Mister Araragi? Like the actual episode is only a minute long?”

“Please, Miss Hachikuji. Not right now.”

A surprisingly lucid metaphor, but that’s not what we were talking about.

My unease must have stemmed from the fact that whatever Ogi’s identity, she didn’t strike me as a fighting freshman. She was plenty mysterious, but cleaving a cute high school girl in half with a greatsword in order to dispatch her just seemed so criminal.

“Like I said,” Miss Gaen corrected me, “we aren’t relying on the sword. That plan is dead─we don’t have to use it thanks to you. Even I’d hesitate to slice through anything in the shape of a high school girl, or really a human in general.”

“…”

But you did. Despite my human shape, you mercilessly shredded me into so many pieces that I was no longer recognizable─at a shrine too, on holy ground, didn’t you?

I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to be clever or sincere, but no point in litigating the past now. I was curious as to why the old plan was dead thanks to me, but what I really needed to know was our operative plan, which I’d missed out on hearing. Especially if I had to carry it out on my own─there are things I can and cannot do, okay?

In fact, the list of things I could do was the shorter of the two. Even if she reminded me that she was hustling for the sake of Hachikuji and Shinobu, I couldn’t agree to anything that rivaled using a greatsword to kill Ogi.

“I’m not asking you to do anything of the sort. In fact, it’s as easy as can be. Anyone could, as far as doing it goes─it’s just that you have to do it for it to be effective.”

“This is starting to sound like a big deal. You’re acting like it’s nothing serious, but aren’t you trying to trick me into doing something pretty tough?”

“What do you mean. We’ll just have you do what my older sister did ten-plus years ago.”

“Again, you’re acting like it’s no big deal, but you just told me how larger-than-life she was. Hard on herself, hard on others, like a demon─I can’t imagine pulling off whatever this outrageous person did.”

“Oh, no, in a way, it’d be easier for you than it was for my sister. After all, you’re the kind of boy who’d throw his life away to save a vampire on the brink of death.”

“…”

What did that have to do with this? Why bring up the time I helped Shinobu during spring break?

Was she going to tell me to save Ogi, another aberration, as I did back then? That was almost…

─Please save me.

The exact thing she’d begged for.

Miss Gaen would never go for that, though, having little to do with that sort of naïveté. I couldn’t let her laidback, sisterly demeanor fool me.

Her policy as an expert was to seek only the optimal solution, to the point of severity.

True, from what I understood, she attended to Nadeko Sengoku’s case when she became the god of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, but that was only because Sengoku was deemed unfit.

“You see, at the end of the day, the threat of Ogi Oshino, the unidentified aberration─is that she’s unidentified. Nothing else.”

Miss Gaen opened her mouth again, to tell me what I needed to do.

“She’ll crumble if you reveal that identity.”

“Crumble?”

“You could also call it annihilation, in the particle physics sense─but what’s important here is that she’s a fake who’s just pretending and falsifying herself. Believe it or not, she’s a big fat liar. And when that lie is laid bare─I think Miss Shinobu and Mayoi know quite well what happens then.”

They did.

And so did I.

“The Darkness─”

“─The Darkness─”

“─The Darkness.”

The three of us spoke as one.

“Right. The Darkness consumes any aberration that misrepresents its nature─when she’s misrepresenting herself to be the Darkness itself, all the more so. The punishment will be as harsh as it gets for her rules violation. She’s reaping what she sowed, for all the ways she’s behaved around you for the last six months, Koyomin. This time, she’ll be on the receiving end of all the ferocity she lavished on you.”

Miss Gaen smirked. Her expression was wicked, not befitting an amiable lady like her─but more than any sort of just desserts, it felt to me like the last act of a farce.

Like the end of a fairy tale.

Her identity is revealed.

And that alone would make Ogi Oshino’s existence come to an end─if her core principle was unidentifiability, of course that would be her vulnerability.

“At the end of the day, that’s what aberrations are─which is why I called her an ordinary monster. The first aberration you met, Koyomin, was the vampire noble Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, and from there you experienced countless life-or-death battles and even met Yozuru Kagenui, an onmyoji with a nearly unmatched propensity for violence. That must’ve tainted your impression of aberrations─you see them as dangerous beings who must be fought, but at their most basic, they’re just metamorphoses. Something transformed into what it is not, like foxes and tanuki in folklore. Reveal their true identity and they will vanish, like a bugbear in a closet. It’s as simple as that.”

“…”

“When science sheds light on an aberrational phenomenon, it becomes nothing more than a superstition, right? Same thing. We experts might look like walking antiques to young’uns these days like you, but really, our job is to investigate urban legends and dissect every little part of them, no matter how boorish or unromantic that may be, in order to nullify them. There are still things out there that science can’t explain─isn’t what I’m saying here. Our line of business is about reducing the number of things out there that science can’t explain. We put food on the table by explaining the inexplicable in a way that anyone can understand. And in that sense, a profession like ours is going to vanish someday.”

It’s kind of like an octopus eating its own leg, Miss Gaen said self-mockingly─I recalled how Oshino also said early on that it’s uncivilized to be solving matters violently all the time.

─What a violent line of thought, Araragi.

─Something good happen to you?

He said that too.

I see. To put it in a way that matched up with Miss Gaen’s way of thinking, I wasn’t going one-on-one against Ogi─this was a unilateral elimination.

As far as the taste the idea left in my mouth, though… It was about as bad as cleaving a high school girl in two with a greatsword. Yet as bad as the aftertaste might be, it seemed like the best and most optimal plan for resolving our town’s situation.

“And is that how your sister got rid of an Ogi-like aberration─not the Darkness, but an imitation of it?”

“Yep, you got it. She was no expert, and she was about as old then as you are now, but she managed to figure a way out of her fix on her own. She really is─a strong person. Was a strong person,” Miss Gaen corrected herself and used the past tense. “I guess that means being the strongest person is no match for a car crash. Did that upset you, Mayoi?”

“Well…I have to admit automobiles are convenient. Modern society wouldn’t work without them,” deadpanned Mayoi Hachikuji, the young girl who lost her life eleven years ago because she got run over crossing on a green light.

Deadpanned… But come on, be traumatized or something.

“Koyomin. You called it an imitation, just now, of the Darkness─and that’s a perfect encapsulation, spur-of-the-moment or not. It’s easy to understand, it’s perfect. However. You’d be making a huge mistake if you also thought that it’s somehow inferior. Being an imitation and not the real thing actually makes it more annoying than the genuine article─as my disgrace of a junior, the scam artist Deishu Kaiki would say, the fake is more real than the real deal, because it wills itself to be real.”

“So, while the real Darkness wouldn’t show up if we made Hachikuji the god of Kita-Shirahebi, the fake one, the imitation Darkness, might… Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yup. The way I see it, an imitation Darkness is more dangerous than the Darkness itself, since it would never allow for such an opportunistic, convenient solution─an answer that leaves everyone happy must be cheating. That’d likely be her stance.”

“…”

“One way or another, we need to settle this tonight. The elimination of Ogi Oshino, the second condition for fulfilling both my professional duties and your wishes─when I said the first condition would be nullified otherwise, that’s what I meant.”

─Please save me.

─Could you side with me?

─Please save me.

I couldn’t help recalling those words, whatever her intentions were in speaking them.

Was she being sincere? Or were they the utterances of the unidentifiable, an imitation Darkness─either way, and even if she had ulterior motives, there seemed to be no way for me to honor her request.

Was I letting Miss Gaen talk me into a corner? Maybe I’d fallen for grownup rhetoric.

Whatever the case, an ending where Hachikuji was swallowed up.

More tragedy befalling those I held dear.

That─was something I couldn’t ignore. Far too much had happened in the last half-year.

One way or another.

Whether I wanted to or not─I.

I needed to get rid of Ogi Oshino.

No matter what kind of smile she wore─I had to.

I glanced back at Shinobu. She looked back at me with silent gold eyes.

I once rejected Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade’s plea.

Help me, she begged, and I answered─

I’m not helping you.

I couldn’t be her answer.

And that’d be my response to Ogi, too.

“I understand, I won’t help Ogi Oshino─so.” I summoned all my determination. “So please, Miss Gaen, tell me. Who is Ogi Oshino, the mysterious transfer student?”

“That kid’s true identity is…”

An immediate reply. To the bitter end─

Miss Gaen did know everything.

While I finally didn’t know a thing.