Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.29

029

I arrived at Naoetsu High, parked the BMX in the bike lot, and entered its grounds. The air about this place felt completely different.

Not just because everything had been flipped around─there was a gentle sense of rejection, as though I were never meant to come here.

Maybe it had to do with my own mindset?

I started getting the sense that maybe this was what it meant to graduate. I’d felt refreshed in a way after graduating, but coming back here, it was almost like I’d been shoved through the place and extruded out the other end.

I’d had similar thoughts visiting my middle school with Ogi, but all it took was a day’s time to feel this way. It wasn’t sorrow, nor emptiness, but I think it did come down to my emotions.

Ruminating, I entered the school’s halls─Ms. Toé had only written “NAOETSUHIGH” on my back.

Those coordinates were fairly specific, but the Naoetsu High campus was by no means small, so it was hard to decide where to go next─or so I say, but I knew I needed to head to my last classroom first. The one where I spent my days with Hitagi Senjogahara and Tsubasa Hanekawa.

I didn’t know what, or who, would be there, but I climbed the stairs until I arrived at the top floor.

Fortunately, I didn’t run into anyone. Classes were done for the day, and the students had filed out. As for the Rainy Devil, or Suruga Kanbaru, she probably hadn’t even been here─was she okay in this world? Did she ever come to school? Then again, according to Ms. Toé, those loose ends didn’t necessarily have to meet.

This all ran through my mind as I opened the door to a classroom that was so fresh in my memory it didn’t even feel nostalgic─and to cut to the chase, I found nothing. The tidied classroom’s air just made me feel even more out of place, and naturally, no one else was there, either.

“…”

A swing and a miss? No, Ms. Toé had pointed this way, and it didn’t make sense for there to be nothing─did I need to go somewhere else? To another classroom I’d used? How about the gym, or the teachers’ room where I’d gotten on my hands and knees? Maybe the athletic field that had hosted more than one battle with an aberration… I could think of a number of places, but none of them stood out.

None of them fit. Ms. Toé never said it’d be a spot I knew well, of course, but given what she must’ve meant by finding my partner, she did seem to hint at some place connected to Koyomi Araragi… That said, the classrooms I’d used during my first and second years didn’t seem likely─I had even less of a connection to them, a year or two having passed since I’d stopped using them to hand them down to my juniors. If this classroom wasn’t it, it couldn’t be those either…

Could it be the athletic field, after all? It was linked to aberrations.

Or maybe the P.E. shed. That was more linked to Hanekawa than to aberrations, though…and I felt vaguely awkward about searching it so soon.

And then─I struck upon a different possibility altogether.

If we were talking about my connections to a place, there was a classroom with a deeper tie to me than the one where I spent my senior year. The cause of my time as a high schooler being not all too spectacular, a place where time stopped.

If that was it, I knew for certain who would be there─it felt like I’d just been slapped in the face with the answer.

That happened often with the math puzzles Oikura loved so much. They looked difficult, even impossible, but you figured them out the moment you realized the questioner’s intent. That kind of feeling.

Of course.

That’s all I could say.

I left the classroom─that was no longer mine.