Monogatari Series - Volume 21 - Chapter 0.09

009

What awaited me was something quite unexpected.

No, everything since this morning has been full of surprises, sometimes even overwhelming (parents giving me a time limit → Ononoki-chan’s morning visit → shikigami experimentation → success → escape → pursuit → near accident → pursuit → entering school), but things were yet to take another about-face.

Not once, but twice.

Doesn’t doing that twice get you back to where you started? That makes it no longer an accident — the situation begs to differ, though.

First of all, the one who escaped into school was not the first — Gentle Nadeko, but the second — Fawning Nadeko. That was what surprised me.

Because in my sketchbook, I was sure I had Fawning Nadeko wearing a cute camisole.

It seems she has changed clothes.

Her fringes were still pulled back with that headband… but there were not that many ways of getting a school uniform.

She probably exchanged them somewhere with Gentle Nadeko after the escape — turns out Sengoku Nadekos can work with each other.

Whatever happened to my self-hatred?

But then again, amongst all five Sengoku Nadekos, Gentle Nadeko and Fawning Nadeko can be said to be the closest to each other.

They were closely-knit in their timelines, after all.

They may have different hairstyles, but once the headband comes off, Fawning Nadeko and Gentle Nadeko have basically the same design, and look near-identical to each other.

And here’s the main point, Fawning Nadeko’s overbearing personality would easily convince (or coerce) the gloomy Gentle Nadeko to swap clothes with her — if they can catch both myself and Ononoki-chan out, then this scheme does not seem too far-fetched or disadvantageous for Gentle Nadeko.

For me at my most timid to wear a camisole is a pitiful sight, but I will save that for later — one should now focus on the Sengoku Nadeko at hand, that is, Fawning Nadeko.

Which brings me to my second unpleasant surprise.

The actions this Fawning Nadeko undertook in school was a problem — a problematic action.

Not long after circling around with Ougi-san in the middle school, the bell rang — it was recess.

This was not good.

As teachers and students finish their classes, they might see us — and the very last thing I want is to be seen by Mr Sasayabu.

It would be me who gets caught.

The only person I can rely on now is Ougi-san, but in a scenario like that, it would not prove surprising if a person like that betrayed me on the spot.

He would vanish into thin air.

So I have to make haste on the few clues we have — hmmm, normally, for ‘me then’, I would go directly to the class I am in, wouldn’t I.

But the class I was in in second year was already no more. Then…

‘Sengoku-chan, I would very much avoid dissociating and referring to your shikigami as “me then” — after all, shikigami are like infants, not a year-old Sengoku Nadeko brought in via a time machine.’

Ougi-san advised.

It was good advice, too.

Yes, these were drawings that this year’s me did on this day — when one looks at it that way, they were as current as current me.

My agents, my body doubles.

It is the same as that old answer manga artist sometimes give in interviews, that ‘the characters are all parts of the author’. More than that, sometimes ‘the characters move on their own’ as well…

Then, even if she went to the classroom, it probably was not as a second year, but based on current me, as a third year?

An infant, huh.

Well, in the end, a drawing’s a drawing; it probably cannot think for itself… as my room descended into a battlefield, they seemed to act out of instinct.

Having an ego but not a self?

Or perhaps characteristics…

Then instead of infants, perhaps a better metaphor would be artificial intelligence programmes — I heard the most recent AIs were miles cleverer than myself; but with no other leads, I guess it was time to head to the year three students’ classrooms.

Speaking of, whilst I knew I was a third-year student according to the documents, without having had the feeling of advancing another year, I entered the third-year classroom block with trepidation.

Trembling. Uhh, what class was I in?

‘Class 5’

Ougi-san stated.

How did he know?

‘Ahh, this isn’t me being mysterious like I usually am, I’ve just heard it from Kanbaru-senpai. That girl worries about you a lot.’

I see.

‘Being mysterious like I usually am’ was a line that glided off the top of my head, but even so, how that nugget of knowledge managed to make its way to Ougi-san was quite a feat on its own. The same can be said for Kanbaru-san too, whose knowledge about what class I was in feels almost stalker-ish, though I was grateful.

It turned out to be a big help for me today.

‘Though I did tell her to stop caring like how someone counts the age of some already-dead child.’

‘She’s not dead, she’s still living. Five of them.’

Class 5, huh.

We sneaked along the corridor — I say sneaked, my very short hair meant my face was in full view even if I looked down. Ougi-san, meanwhile, stood tall and proud as an outsider — suspiciously tall and proud.

I got the feeling that the students we did walk past seemed to actively avoid us — some of them might have been classmates of old, though they probably would not recognise me in this hairstyle and the sweatshirt.

In their heads, all they probably did was stay away from a weird duo.

If the truth got out, they would definitely be surprised — though only the looks had changed. No substantial growth.

Then again, speaking of surprised, the sight that greeted me in the classroom of year 3, class 5 gave me one all right. Nobody else in the school would be as surprised as I am, wondering if they were seeing things — but there it was, in the middle of the classroom.

Fawning Nadeko with her headband was in the classroom, chatting and kidding away almost uncannily with my classmates I do not know.