Monogatari Series - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.11

011

“You aren’t hiding something from me, are you?”

A little girl with golden hair and golden eyes.

The mere shadow of a vampire, or perhaps the dregs of a vampire—in the past, she’d been feared as the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded vampire, the king of oddities, a monster among monsters that lived for nearly six hundred years, by the name of Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade. But her current, completely changed form was now that of Oshino Shinobu, and that was the question she posed in Koyomi’s room in the Araragi house.

“Oi, oi, what are you saying all of a sudden, Shinobu-chan? If you’re going to doubt me like that, then our relationship of mutual dependence would be over.”

“As if! We’re in too deep. As you can see, I’m bound to your shadow as if I’ve been nailed to it, tightly and firmly.”

“Now, now. Look, Shinobu-chan. It’s the donuts that you love so much, see? It’s the Golden Chocolate, see?”

“That makes you even more suspicious, my master. Don’t speak with such a wheedling voice. There’s clearly something you’re trying to gloss over.”

She was sharp. Like a fang.

During spring break when I was seventeen years old, the legendary vampire, who had bitten down upon the nape of my neck and enslaved me, had been bitten back by me and enslaved in return—she had become the legendary slave.

However, despite saying stuff like “my master”, she did not seem to want to follow my orders at all. This slave was not at all convinced by my well-reasoned and impeccable attitude, but rather seemed to have deepened her doubts.

Shit, Gaen-san sure was asking a lot from me.

Hiding something from Shinobu was harder than hiding something from my parents—she and I had an inseparable bond, with two hearts beating as one.

If anything, it might have been easier to run headfirst into dazzling battles against vampires, just like my spring break at seventeen, but with a pacifist specialist and moderate strategist at the helm, it didn’t seem like we could take the simple approach.

I had to hold Shinobu back until the sun rose again.

I didn’t know why I had to do such a thing—I’d asked her during the daytime, “What should we tell Shinobu about this case?” And the answer that Gaen-san came up with while she slept was not to ask for her cooperation, but rather the strategy of keeping her at a distance.

She was totally just being excluded!

Even though we weren’t on the topic of the girls’ basketball team, it seemed that bullying was still a thing even among evil spirits… Haah, poor thing.

“Don’t look at me with such a pitying gaze. Don’t send your feelings of pity at me! What in the world happened during the day? Who did you meet?”

“Oi, oi, Shinobu. Do you really think I would do something like going around and seeing other people?”

“I do. You should at least go out and see people!”

“Now, now. Look, it’s the Half & Half from Mister Donut.”

“Even if you try to sidestep the matter with something like that… Eh? Half of it is a Pon de Ring, and the other half is an Old Fashioned? It’s like a donut from my dreams! Panaino!”

With a sidelong glance at Shinobu who began chewing, I measured the time remaining until sunrise—right now, it was 10 pm, so there was still about 7 hours.

I wondered if I could make it.

Ultimately, since Shinobu was bound to my shadow, it was possible to keep her confined as long as I stubbornly stayed put, but it didn’t feel right to force her to just stand by.

Even if it was a request from Gaen-san, who I was much obliged to, I didn’t want to do anything that could create a crack in my relationship with Shinobu from here on out.

Since we were in so deep, that was something I wanted to continue.

“That’s right, Shinobu. There’s something about that deeply memorable spring break that I’ve always wanted to ask about.”

“If it’s something you’ve been wanting to ask for a year and a half, why did you not ask it sooner…?”

Shinobu knit her eyebrows in confusion, but it wasn’t like I could tell her that it was a question I had just thought up for the sake of stalling for time.

“During that spring break, you sucked out my blood and turned me into an immortal vampire. You remember, right? With you on the verge of death, I said something like, ‘Dying like this suits me pretty well, so this isn’t so bad,’ and chuckled nihilistically before offering up the nape of my neck…”

“Is something wrong with your memory? Did you use it all up studying for exams?”

The truth was that I was crying when it happened.

But, putting aside whether I was laughing or crying, at that point, I’d turned into a vampire… That was what had happened, but I’d learned from Gaen-san at the hospital that there’d been plenty of potential for that to have failed.

It was actually more likely for the creation of a vampire’s thrall to fail, she’d said—and with three mummified high school girls having been verified, it was a fact that I fully understood, to the point that it sent chills down my spine.

And in that case, what I’d suddenly become curious about was…

“What would have happened if, at that time, my vampire transformation had failed? In the first place, what meaning does a failure hold to the vampire master?”

“Ka ka. So the time has finally come to speak of that, then.”

Including the Half & Half, Shinobu had made short work of the donuts I’d prepared, and assumed quite the haughty attitude—I mean, it wasn’t like I was trying to touch upon such a grandiose secret.

“You sure have grown, my master. Not that you’d actually grow, considering you’re immortal!”

“Don’t just retort to your own joke. And let me grow! I’m not immortal anymore, anyway. Besides, what kind of growth have you shown in the past year?”

Rather than growth, it was more like regression.

Well, going from a beautiful lady to a cute little girl was a genuine regression…  But anyway, this question was made for a reason beyond just stalling for time.

If my vampire transformation had failed at the time.

Would I have become a mummy? And, before she was called Oshino Shinobu, would Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade have been able to survive?

For vampires, the act of sucking blood is like nutrients, but if a vampire were to fail at transforming their target into a vampire, would they simultaneously fail in gaining those nutrients?

During that spring break, the King of Oddities had certainly said this.

One whose blood is sucked by a vampire is turned into a vampire, without exception—there was no discretion, it was just a matter of eating it all up or leaving some behind.

In other words, in order to prevent the unnecessarily proliferation of thralls, they couldn’t leave any behind—would that just be indigestion?

In the end, were the high school girl mummies successes or failures—as the creator, were they failed products unworthy of signatures? It was hard to figure out.

Right now, the vampire that Gaen-san was chasing. With what purpose—or perhaps, with what motive—were they going after the Naoetsu High girls’ basketball team members? If we could figure that out, it would help establish a point of reference.

Even if it was temporary, I wanted an additional line.

If the motive was just an appetite for the sake of gaining nutrients, then it didn’t make sense for them to leave anything behind, even if it was just a skin-and-bones mummy. But if they were trying to increase the number of their thralls, then it was a series of failures that was rather disgraceful—what exactly was this vampire trying to do?

“To get straight to the point, if you had failed to become my thrall, my slave, then you would have turned into a zombie incapable of any thought. You remember, don’t you? That day, when we visited a different timeline and saw a bunch of living corpses.”

“Ah—yeah, we did.”

I see.

For those cases, the image I had of those immortal creatures was like a humid, rotten lump of flesh that was sticky and squishy, so I hadn’t connected them to these mummies in my mind, but now that she’d mentioned it, I had already known about the precedent.

It was surprising how such an intense and memorable experience could be overlooked when looking at it from a different angle—then, going off of the assumption that losing the ability to think and losing consciousness were similar, then those examples of failures… In that timeline, the “Oshino Shinobu from another route” was in a kind of despair, and had no purpose or motive.

Could this vampire also be in despair? A case of binge eating out of despair… Far from stoic forward-thinking or a smart sense of purpose, it could be a rampage of complete desperation.

Well, I didn’t know that many vampires to hypothesize a pattern… Like the number of friends I had in high school, I could count them on one hand.

And, as for the span of time I spent as a vampire (though it felt like an eternity to me), it had only lasted a mere two weeks, so I couldn’t be counted in that. So first, the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded vampire, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.

Then, there was the giant professional, Dramaturgy, who came to Japan as a vampire hunter of his own kind, in pursuit of the king of oddities… And yet another vampire hunter, the white-uniformed professional, Episode—well, strictly speaking he was just a half-vampire, but it was fine to include dhampirs in the count.

And finally, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade’s first thrall—Shishirui Seishirou…

Four people. Well, they weren’t exactly people, so I guess I should say four vampires? In any case, the sample size was a bit too small for me to use as a reference in analyzing the state of this vampire… Well, for a normal human, one encounter with a vampire in a lifetime would be more than enough, but with four vampires (five if you include this one) in a little over a year—Araragi Koyomi’s vampire life is truly bountiful, wouldn’t you say?

Although all of them were linked to Shinobu—Hm… Well, hold on.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

That’s right, that was certainly a glaring oversight…

If we were talking about links to Shinobu, then while I had never come in direct contact, I was certainly aware of the existence of yet another vampire.

Though I’d never met them.

I knew.

Though I’d overlooked it.

Without exaggerating—I can say that, if it weren’t for that vampire, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Because.

“Shinobu. Speaking of which, you’ve never told me about the vampire that turned you into a vampire—the vampire that’s essentially my origin.”

“Ka ka. So the time has finally come to speak of that, then.”

Shinobu repeated the same line as before, revealing the narrow range of lines that she could think of. And then,

“So the time has come to speak of the death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire—the one who birthed me and the one who gave me my name, Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster,” she said.

What did she just say?