Monogatari Series - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.27

027

I’m sorry to say this after having been the one to call her in, but if I’d known in advance that the famous Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster was involved, then I wouldn’t have called that living bomb here at all—was what Gaen-san had lamented, which I recalled as I gripped the steering wheel of my New Beetle, heading for Manase University.

“That lady must have been looking for an opportunity to bring back her cute junior from the North Pole, is what I feel,” said Shinobu, appearing in the passenger seat.

She appeared in the child seat that had been placed there.

Since Shinobu was a mere shadow of a former vampire, while she wasn’t exactly at her best in the sunlight, it wasn’t like it could completely stop her in her tracks… She wasn’t strictly nocturnal, just more of a night person.

With a strong will, she was capable of appearing even in the daytime… In other words, if she was out and about in the daytime, that means she currently had a strong will.

“What is it, Shinobu. Weren’t you asleep?”

I tried probing into her intentions.

“I’ll go to sleep soon. Before that, I figured that you had something you wanted to ask me, my master.”

She’d seen right through me, as if this were a competition with Gaen-san.

No, perhaps this was our empathic link—from our master-servant relationship.

Our deeply entrenched relationship.

“Well, I was just thinking that you were being pretty cooperative. Cooperative not just towards me, but towards Gaen-san as well. Even though you refused to cooperate last time.”

Rather than just refusing to cooperate, she’d gone and run away. Completely rebellious—I’d already explained that this time she’d been kept out of the loop because Gaen-san had been wary of her doing the same thing again.

“What’s with the change of heart? Can I just understand it as you having grown up a bit since that incident? Grown up to the point that I shouldn’t have bought that child seat?”

“The size was never right from the beginning! It feels like my entire body is being bound like feet. Yes, well, it’s fine to think of it like that. I’ve grown up a bit. I learned that, at that time, I should’ve just listened to you and that administrator from the very beginning.”

I’d be happy if it was true, and it probably wasn’t all lies, but something didn’t quite add up.

“You and I are in the same boat, two hearts beating as one. With you having changed, I’ve changed a bit as well. The me that had a high schooler as a partner and the me that had a college student as a partner may as well be different people.”

“It’s true that before, you used to sit in the front basket of my bicycle, and now you’re sitting in a child seat.”

“You can’t really call that growth… No, well, that’s fine, too.”

Was it fine?

It did feel like she’d mellowed out a little by not being stubborn at these times, but for whatever reason it felt like she’d gotten harder to handle.

Like she was just nodding along.

Sloppily.

“Hey, Shinobu. You’re not thinking about anything weird, right?”

“Weird? Of course I am. Do you think there’d be someone who could preserve their sanity after being placed in a child seat when they’re 599 years old?”

“You’re not thinking about something admirable like, getting yourself eaten by Suicidemaster or anything?”

Just as I had done during that spring break when I was seventeen.

Or perhaps, just as Princess Acerola had done for Suicidemaster at the time, six hundred years ago—

“Ka ka. I was wondering what you were going to say, but that came as a shock. I’ve never even thought about doing something like that, right up until this very moment—you’re the one thinking about something weird, my master. What I was thinking was, if we put you in girls’ clothes and fed you to Suicidemaster, would that make her better, or would it just make her regress further, becoming around four years old?”

“Why would she turn four years old after eating me. And don’t put me in girls’ clothes. Once was enough.”

“Enough to become a habit?”

“I haven’t done it once since then!”

Without that onee-san to keep things on track, the conversation kept straying.

Such sloppy chatter.

“As soon as that code pointed to Suicidemaster’s involvement, you should’ve relied on me from the beginning. If you did that, then we might have been able to settle this last night. You’d better reflect on yourself—you’ve forgotten your promise not to keep secrets about oddities from me.”

“If my memory serves me right, that promise was something I made to my girlfriend…”

Hmm.

It was hard to keep the conversation going smoothly if she kept making me laugh… Well, it wasn’t just Shinobu’s fault.

It was at least better than when she didn’t even talk to me, but after having had so many meaningless conversations with Shinobu, it was difficult to have a serious conversation with her.

If I were to speak without any fear of being misunderstood—if Shinobu were to follow the precedent set by me and decide to be eaten by Suicidemaster, who was reaching the limit of being a little girl, then I might even say that I’d prefer if she betrayed humans and joined the culprit of the serial bloodsucking incidents. But it was nearly impossible to say that without any fear of being misunderstood.

I wasn’t as fastidious as I was in high school, either.

I couldn’t just dismiss the act of a vampire attacking a human as something that was evil—I could no longer tell a dying vampire to die for eating people, as I did back then.

After getting to tolerate the existence of Ononoki-chan, a line like that would make me grit my teeth, if not make me want to pull my tongue out.

It was the assertion of a seventeen-year-old youth that could only have said it at that time, at that timing—but if you were to ask if I had a different answer now, then that wasn’t the case either.

Hanekawa, who’d been seventeen years old at the time, had said that being afraid of vampires eating humans was like saying you felt sorry for cows or pigs—the middle-aged Oshino had said it was the same as being disillusioned by a kitty eating a mouse.

Well, that was probably true.

However, Princess Acerola’s opinion in heaven added another layer to it—she’d said that the relativization of talking about vampires as the same as lions or bears was not quite correct.

To arrive at such a state of mind… It was impossible for a college freshman like me.

Compared to those days, I’d become much more mature, for better or for worse, but I would never become a sage or a hero.

It would probably be impossible in my lifetime.

“Well, don’t worry about it too much, Shinobu. When Suicidemaster-chan wakes up, the first thing we can do is recommend Mister Donut. She might get a taste for sweets.”

“That in itself would destroy the ecosystem.”

“I know, why don’t we ask Oikura to make some home cooking? Oikura’s lived by herself for a long time, so her cooking is surprisingly really good. Even Hitagi-san was jealous.”

“Wasn’t that tsundere girl actually jealous about something else?”

She shrewdly pointed it out. How piercing.

Well, Shinobu had gotten hooked on Mister Donut after she’d become a vampire no longer… But, wasn’t it worth trying, as long as it didn’t do any harm?

Even koalas eating the highly toxic eucalyptus leaves was a matter of survival—though perhaps different from humans eating fugu fish.

“I bet the fugu fish was shocked, though. It was probably thinking, ‘Eh? There are people who would eat me!?’ …Well, you’ve made me think that I’d like to try that crazy girl’s home cooking someday. Really, any dish prepared by a monster might be palatable to an oddity such as myself.”

You’re being described in a pretty cruel way, my childhood friend.

You’ve been recognized by the king of oddities as a real monster.

“…Even if Suicidemaster wasn’t the culprit behind the serial bloodsucking this time, and even if she successfully regains consciousness this evening, will she eventually end up getting exterminated by the specialists? Even if she’s not certified harmless, she doesn’t have a bounty on her head like you, right?”

“That may be the case, but if we put that violent onmyouji in the mix, then it becomes a different story. That girl wields her fist with justice.”

“…If you insist, I can steer the conversation towards certifying Suicidemaster as harmless, you know?”

If I gave up on that promise of noninterference until my college graduation, then I was sure Gaen-san would be willing to listen to that level of recklessness—of course, that would only work as long as she was completely innocent in the current case.

I knew it wasn’t exactly easy to certify an oddity as harmless, but if you asked me, there was room for it this time—after all, Suicidemaster has caused almost no damage since she took “Princess Beauty” as her thrall six hundred years ago.

That was the difference between her and Shishirui Seishirou, who’d been causing actual damage to the town in real time… At that point, that had just been a completely different risk level from lions and bears and cows and pigs and kitties, without even needing Princess Acerola to point it out for me.

It was like a virus on the level of a biohazard.

It needed to be addressed before it could be discussed.

In contrast, it wasn’t clear how much damage that gourmet vampire had caused in the past, but it was six hundred years ago.

According to Japan’s Criminal Procedure Code, the statute of limitations for any murder case had certainly passed—not that there was any law in this world that governed crimes committed six hundred years ago.

It wasn’t a situation where we had no choice but to exterminate her.

And this was just a coincidence, but like Shinobu, she met the condition that she was in the form of a little girl—at least on the surface, didn’t she meet all the requirements to be certified as harmless?

“Ka ka. Do you want to try sealing Suicidemaster in your shadow, too? If you’re going to rear two little girls in your shadow, then finally your fervent desire to create a harem would no longer be a dream.”

Don’t call it my fervent desire.

The Araragi Harem will never exist, past, present, and future—and don’t say that I’d be rearing little girls.

If I’m not careful with my words, I could say this situation was parasitic.

“Give up. That one is not a human-turned-vampire like me, but a genuine, born vampire. Just as you have tried to remain human, she will surely try to remain a vampire—and to a true vampire, being certified as harmless would be an insult.”

To be feared, shunned, and dreaded—that was an oddity.

Uncertain and odd.

“More importantly, there’s something else that I absolutely needed to tell you, my master. For that reason, I put up with my drowsiness and came to fit myself tightly in this child seat.”

“Thinking about it, if you really didn’t like it, you could’ve easily just appeared in the back seat. But what is it, the thing you absolutely needed to tell me?”

“Well,” said Shinobu, before pausing.

And then, she spoke, as if having resolved herself.

“When we interrogate Suicidemaster, I would like to show off in front of my old pal for our reunion after six hundred years. So for just this one night, instead of me being your slave, can we have it so that you are acting as my slave?”