Monogatari Series - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.30

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“Have you looked for the reverse order? You know, when representing the name of a Japanese person, there’s the pattern of ‘first/last name’ and ‘last/first name’.”

“Of course. There were none like that, either.”

Could Meniko’s solution have been wrong?

No, there was no way.

“I wonder if we should expand the range of possibilities. Should we include the third-years that have already retired as candidates?”

“Umm…”

It wasn’t impossible to ask Higasa-chan through Kanbaru for a list of the OG members, but I wasn’t sure. If we expanded it that far, it felt like the possibilities would be endless.

It didn’t seem too productive to force the solution into the initials ‘F C’ and look for a person that matched, either… Rare as the initials might be, it wasn’t like there was nobody with those initials.

“We did figure out that the victims were members of the girls’ basketball team using the straps as the hint, but like with ‘D/V/S’, maybe there’s a famous vampire with those initials?”

“The vampires here are from overseas, after all. It’s normal to add a middle name… It’s unnatural to have initials with just two letters.”

“Is that so…”

I’d ended up bothering Meniko with this (though she’d been happy about it) and I’d ended up skipping class (though I probably would have skipped class anyway), but it didn’t end up being that much of a hint… Well, even Oshino had said that fieldwork was a cycle of futility.

It was important not to dwell on it.

“By the way, Gaen-san. You don’t seem to be in that good of a mood, so is it possible that you received more unpleasant news while I was out?”

“Hm? Did it seem that way to you? I was trying to act calm about it, but this onee-san that knows everything must be losing face to receive your concern, Koyomin. Even though I want to be an onee-san you can always rely on.”

“No, no. Gaen-san, you’re always an older woman that I can rely on…”

“I’m not trying to be a dependable older woman. No, but anyway, Koyomin. Your worries were right on the mark. The contents of a high school girl’s cell phone weren’t something we should have looked at.”

And the fact that it hasn’t produced any good results so far is nearly breaking my heart, said Gaen-san as she laid eyes upon the mummy on the bed—the owner of the cell phone, Kanguu Misago-chan.

Having been made to wear a patient gown and laid to rest on the bed… I didn’t want to say I was getting familiar with the sight, but I was getting used to it.

When humans become nothing but skin and bones, it’s hard to distinguish between them—their height becomes ambiguous when laid down, and since they were in a sports club, their hair was fairly short, so it was hard to distinguish them that way, too.

Kanbaru had also had a short haircut when she’d been active… Don’t tell me it wasn’t just because they were in a sports club, but because they were following after Kanbaru…?

Everyone doing the same thing… Hm?

“Even so, this onee-san won’t be surprised any more. Seriously, after being shown the ugly side of human relations, I won’t even be scared of vampires.”

“Being shown? Gaen-san, you’re the one who went and looked at it yourself.”

“And I have nothing to say in response to that. They say you’re not supposed to check your partner’s phone, and that’s completely true. If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

What was in that phone, exactly?

Honestly, if she said it like that, it made me even more curious… However, it probably was better to not ask. For the sake of respecting their privacy, and for the sake of my own health… If Gaen-san ended up like that, I might even end up hospitalized as a result.

And if it wasn’t producing any good results, then all the more reason not to.

“Well, I suppose the girls’ basketball team is pretty unique. If this sort of thing was commonplace… Well, it’s not something I want to think about, as an adult. Their club activities are certainly strange. It felt like they were bullying themselves.”

“But aren’t all athletic clubs more or less like that? Even more so if you’re a powerhouse.”

Or rather, a former powerhouse. In the case of Naoetsu High.

Of course, that may have intensified that athletic mindset…

“Mm. I’ve always had a commander-like nature since I was in high school, but even then, I was still pretty incompatible with those sports-minded people.”

“So there was a time when you were a high school girl, Gaen-san.”

“It’s not like this onee-san was always an onee-san from the moment she was born. Or an older woman.”

“That wasn’t what I meant… But even so, the hardest person to imagine as a high school girl would probably be Kagenui-san.”

She didn’t seem like she would be in the liberal arts or the sciences, or in a cultural club or a sports club… What kind of high school girl would she have been?

“That girl was actually a surprisingly diligent student. Although I only knew her as a college student, not a high school student. She’s the only one from that trio to graduate without dropping out.”

Is that so.

Human beings really couldn’t be described one-sidedly, huh.

“Oh nooo. While I carelessly stepped into a colony of high school girls and got my feet stuck in a murky, bottomless swamp, Kagenui will probably arriiive!”

Even if you lament the word “arriiive” all cutely like that, that in itself seemed more lamentable.

Please remain a reliable older woman.

“It may be fine for me to think this way, but Gaen-san, aren’t you being a little too cautious regarding your junior? She may be a bit uncontrollable, but it’s not like she completely ignores the orders you give her, right?”

In the first place, Kagenui-san was coming all the way back from the North Pole because she was called by Gaen-san—plus, if she were truly uncontrollable, she would’ve ignored any sort of harmless certification and gotten rid of Shinobu and me.

Though she was infinitely violent, that was just a matter of the way she did things, and it should be possible to talk things out—she was a person of logic, too.

“That’s right. It’s true that, if I explain the circumstances, she might understand the reasoning behind why it’s not necessary to exterminate Suicidemaster. It might even be possible to certify her as harmless, with how much of a little girl she’s become.”

Even while stuck in a bottomless swamp of high school girls, it seemed she’d long since considered the things I’d thought of, with the way she spoke.

“Yes. In fact, as soon as I’d heard that Suicidemaster had broken through Hachikuji-chan’s mayoi-ushi barrier, those thoughts had already crossed my mind. It wasn’t that Suicidemaster had broken through the barrier with brute force, but simply that she had been weakened to the point that the barrier didn’t even react.”

“……”

Was that even possible?

It sounded pretty painful and distressing, considering that she was the progenitor who birthed and named the legendary oddity.

“Even in that state, she should still be able to suck the blood of high school girls, so just by being in this town, nothing has changed regarding her being the prime suspect. However, the reason she became a mummy might not be because she was attacked by someone, but because she’d weakened to the point that she entered cryptobiosis by herself.”

“In that case, would that mean she was the one to bury herself in the mountain?”

“Yes, it would be safer in the dirt, after all. The cryptobiotic-sleep, hibernation-sleep, dozing-sleep vampire. In that case, perhaps she was attempting to make her way back to Hachikuji-chan who was in charge of immigration control, and collapsed along the way. Well, we’re still just brute forcing the possibilities here—the strongest possibility is still that she grew so hungry that she attacked a high school girl, but for now, we can apply the principle of innocent until proven guilty. But the problem is, that won’t work on Kagenui.”

“…Why is that?”

She sure was stubborn in a weird way.

In a sense, she was pretty laid-back to even put her faith in someone like me, but right now, Gaen-san was being weirdly obstinate in regards to Kagenui-san.

“Well, this is just between us, but they share a bit of a past. The problem at hand, Suicidemaster, and the even bigger problem, Kagenui.”

“The problem—and the bigger problem.”

“Even if Suicidemaster happened to not be the culprit for this case, and even if it’s possible for her to be certified as harmless after not having harmed a human for the past six hundred years—even then, they share a past that makes it impossible to stop Kagenui. Though justice is the only thing that can put that unorthodox onmyouji in check, she’s very likely to move out of a personal grudge for this time alone.”

G—grudge?

That bundle of justice?

“If I make the wrong move, I may find myself having to excommunicate yet another junior. And I don’t want to do that.”