Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.27

027

Or so I say, but it wasn’t the destination Ms. Toé gave me, Naoetsu High, where I faced this terror.

It happened at an earlier stage.

After Ononoki transported me back to the Araragi residence so I could drop in, I bumped into this dreadful situation in my, or rather, Koyomi and Sodachi’s room.

It felt like trying to pick the right gear and stocking back up on recovery items before a big boss fight but instead getting attacked by the arms shop owner and getting a game over. Now, let me tell you this in advance: If you’re one of those Oikura fans who loves to see terrible things happen to her, sorry but she wasn’t there.

Fortunately, she was out shopping with Karen and Tsukihi─the Araragi residence was empty, and it was going well at first.

Smooth sailing.

The problem occurred when I opened my room closet to change into the outfit that my stealth mission at Naoetsu High demanded─my second in a row after infiltrating the Kanbaru estate. In other words, when I tried to get my school uniform.

It wasn’t there.

Hm, had it already been thrown out? That seemed impossible…

Maybe it was in Oikura’s closet? We were family living in the same room, but I couldn’t open it without even asking…so I checked every piece of clothing hanging in my own, one at a time, until at last─I found it.

No, not my school uniform.

Well─when I use that term, I picture the outfit I wore for three years, that tight-collared jacket and trousers, and maybe I just wasn’t accustomed to describing it as such, but it was one in its own way. At least, it was a uniform you wore to school, and calling it a school uniform was totally proper.

A sailor-style blouse. A skirt.

What a girl calls a school uniform─the hard problem that arose here wasn’t one of nomenclature.

“Oh. Oh. Oh.”

I see.

You see?

If this world was inside out rather than flipped around sideways─if Koyomi Araragi lived here as Ogi Oshino, just as Tsubasa Hanekawa had become Black Hanekawa, this made sense. My school uniform would be a girl’s rather than a boy’s.

I’ve heard about new major leaguers finding cosplay outfits in their lockers as a form of hazing, and I guess this was the land of mirrors doing the same to me, an outsider. I hadn’t noticed because I’d been wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie, which is to say my usual outfit, but now it seemed certain that in this world Koyomi Araragi was Ogi Oshino.

Perhaps sharing a room with Oikura, and Ms. Toé not hesitating to bathe with me, were manifestations of the same inconsistency, or maybe incoherency… Okay, in Ms. Toé’s case, I guess it was just a matter of personality, but Oikura’s overfriendly openness made a little more sense if she’d been interacting with another girl.

She did chase me out of the room to get changed, but also jokingly invited me to take a bath with her on the first day.

“Nkk…”

I gritted my teeth.

Did I have no choice? The one thing I’d managed to avoid the entire series…the red line that I drew. There might’ve been little girls and mature ladies and the brushing of teeth, all sorts of stuff, but had I gotten carried away? I wasn’t the type, it just wasn’t me, and I’d thought I was all talk. That I was different from those other protagonists, the nonsense-users, the sister-obsessed middle schoolers, the swordless swordsmen, and the legendary heroes…

But I, too, was on team comic relief.

Okay, then, best not to brood over this.

Let’s hurry up and get this on. Let’s hurry up and get this going. We’re already eating pretty far into our page count. At times like these, the greatest form of resistance is not resisting at all.

I began putting on the Naoetsu High girl’s uniform─I really didn’t get how consistency worked in this instance because Ogi and I should’ve worn completely different sizes, even if I’m on the small side. Yet the uniform fit so well it seemed tailor-made for me.

Maybe it had been.

Having come into contact with girls’ clothes more than once during my adventures, fortuitously, I wasn’t clueless about how you put them on. Since dressing someone else was indeed flipped left-right compared to wearing them yourself, after some effort it came together.

I was lucky that Ogi preferred to wear stockings─I lacked the fashion sense to care too much, but going out with bare legs was one of my few hang-ups. Nothing more undignified in a man.

All right, changed and ready to go. My plan had been to hop into my uniform and turn right back, but I’d ended up spending more time than I expected─I skipped down the steps two at a time and exited our house.

I hadn’t looked in the mirror. Why would I?

Thanks to having let my hair grow out, I’d seem way too earnest about this.

Once outside, I realized just how anxious girls’ clothes made me feel─and not just because this was my first time. I was left speechless by how defenseless a skirt left you.

A mere breeze could deal some damage to me. I had to respect girls if they went through high school in this kind of armor─and felt like apologizing to Hanekawa in particular.

But this was no time to be understanding Scottish culture. I straddled the BMX (and learned just how risky even getting on a bike seat was. I’d have never known otherwise─Ms. Toé was right about how knowing or not knowing wasn’t what mattered, the point was to understand), then started pedaling toward Naoetsu High.

I thought I wouldn’t ever, not anymore─would be an overstatement, but I didn’t think I’d be rushing my way to school like this anytime soon, certainly not after just one day. In a girl’s uniform was even more unexpected, but actually, this was no longer even my way to school.

That thought did make me a little melancholic. Whether I wore a boy’s uniform or a girl’s, whether I biked or walked─in any case, I was no longer a high school student.

I had no title. You might say I was therefore in another world, wherever I was, but getting lost in thought like this while I was biking wasn’t safe, so I focused on focusing.

Once I did, it felt a little strange─yes, strange. Not a little, quite strange.

It was odd. I’d accepted my uniform being a girl’s without much unease because if Koyomi Araragi existed in this world, he’d be Ogi. According to that logic, though, all of my clothes should’ve been feminine. Jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, pajamas, and the like are unisex─that had been my earlier rationalization, but I’d been overlooking the issue of underwear.

If all of my clothes really had changed, I should’ve noticed last night when I got out of the bath. As I put on Ogi’s panties, or when I wore a bra─how do you explain that?

Of course, you couldn’t expect too much logic out of this world. Why try to make honest sense out of it when I couldn’t be taking Ogi’s place to begin with? Still, this was intriguing.

Because─it was the other way around. Backwards.

The true nature of my odd feeling became clear when I considered the examples of Ononoki, Oikura, and Shinobu.

Ononoki thought something was off when I appeared before her from another world, and she modified herself to cope with it─yeah, the tween was just preposterous, but in any case, by doing so, she grew closer to the Ononoki I knew.

Oikura didn’t know I was a visitor from another world and treated me the same. The issues it caused seemed to torment her, and she could be inching toward the truth given her smarts.

Shinobu, too, said her memories of this world’s Koyomi Araragi were growing dim─her common sense was being replaced by mine.

That was the negative influence I had here, my effect on this world as an alien element─but wasn’t it strange, then, that a closet full of my clothes yesterday contained Ogi’s today?

Wasn’t the vector pointing the other way around? The direction of the change made sense if I’d worn Ogi’s underwear yesterday and my school jacket today, but when a jacket turned into a skirt─

“…”

It was too strange to overlook. Or so it seemed, but I also felt like contradictions on that level didn’t matter anymore.

Didn’t one way or the other.

I admit, a guy taking a bath with his junior’s mom and then fussing over these details has hardly any authority─I’d been failing to behave in a reasonable manner for some time now.

Yes, that.

In other words─at the same time as I was influencing this world, was it influencing me? Was I becoming Ogi?

Beyond just my clothes, was I, myself, turning into a…mean-spirited, or let’s say awful to deal with girl like her? It seemed ridiculous, but also completely possible─even the far more legitimate outcome.

Heat moves from hot to cold. Even if I had a strong influence on this world, just how much could a single drop of hot water affect an entire pool?

It’d get leveled out in no time. I’d turn into just another scoop of cold water.

Nothing but water.

I needed to do as Shinobu said and return to my world as soon as possible, literally asap.

Otherwise─I’d be lost.

I’d vanish.

Losing the part of me that should stay me no matter what.

I would go away.

Just as I lost my title when I graduated.

Koyomi Araragi would be erased.

And that─was the supreme, hair-raising terror.