Monogatari Series - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.38

038

“I’m the death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire, Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster. You may approach.”

It seemed she’d managed to get up, for she was now sitting down on a stone in the rock garden of the Japanese mansion. She greeted me with quite the ghastly smile, not caring about the white clothing that had fallen open when she’d broken the seals earlier. I’d thought this earlier when they were exchanging their roar of laughter, but it seemed the characteristic smile of Shinobu, or Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, was apparently something that was inherited from her progenitor who birthed and named her.

Or perhaps, since they were both golden-haired and golden-eyed, their impressions were similar… However, though they were both little girls, though they had the same expressions, it probably wasn’t just my imagination that led me to feel that she didn’t resemble Shinobu all that much.

Rather than not resembling Shinobu.

I suppose you could say she resembled Shinobu from the past.

That was how easygoing and worldly this vampire had become over the past year—and Suicidemaster must have felt it as well.

“N-nice to meet you. I am Araragi Koyomi. Erm…”

How was I supposed to introduce myself?

Even though I didn’t have to pretend to be a slave, it didn’t mean I should be honest and explain the situation as-is—it surely wasn’t just putting on airs when Shinobu had feared that I might be blown to death if she learned of the situation in which Shinobu had been sealed in my shadow and turned into a slave.

How much of it had Shinobu explained in that foreign language of hers…? In the first place, did she understand it if I introduced myself in Japanese? Judging from her own introduction, she seemed pretty proficient at it…

“I didn’t live such a long life for nothing. I’ve learned most languages by now.”

Ooh.

That was something I wanted to tell Meniko about.

“Conversing with your food is one of the fundamentals of a good meal.”

…I definitely couldn’t tell her about that.

And please don’t say something that made you even more suspicious—even though there was some distance, Gaen-san, the administrator of the specialists, was still over there, sitting on the porch of the mansion with Hachikuji.

The value system of food, huh?

Well, even though humans can live just fine on a vegetarian diet, they still go through the trouble of raising and eating meat not “to live” but “because it tastes good”, so I couldn’t exactly say anything haughtily.

Taking the wrong logic would probably lead us to the conclusion that plants, living off of photosynthesis with sunlight and water, lead the most ethically noble lifestyle.

But, you know, something about her character seemed chic compared to her juvenile appearance. It was pretty dashing the way she wore her white clothing like a gown or a robe, and, well, at the age of six, she wasn’t that different from a boy of the same age.

The genuine vampire, the ancient vampire.

What a dandy.

With that in mind, her open white clothing seemed more like a cape than a gown or robe—the little girl held a charisma that made me want to kneel, in a way different from how I felt with “Princess Acerola”.

“No need to humble yourself. I won’t bite you.”

What a fancy figure of speech.

On top of that, the way she said “you”10 was a nice touch. I wasn’t offended at all—this little girl was like a cluster of dandyism. I’d thought of myself as an expert on little girls, but it seemed there was a type like this, too.

“I called you here to give you my thanks—well, not just that, but first, my thanks.”

“Th-thanks…?”

“For several things. First off, for reviving me after I’d died—and, even before that, for reviving my former thrall, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.”

I give you my thanks.

Said the little girl, bowing her head—even the way she lowered her head was cool. If she was like this in the form of a little girl, how much charisma could she have had in her heyday?

Or rather, if she so straightforwardly thanked me like this, then it felt like I was beaten to the punch—she’d splendidly gotten the drop on me.

Even though I’d approached this face-to-face meeting with suspicions in mind—and when I looked to Shinobu for help…

“Well, I’ve more or less told her everything.”

That was her curt response.

No, rather than curt, Shinobu herself seemed to be a bit bewildered.

“However, it was a bit meaningless. I myself haven’t exactly grasped the full extent of the situation. At this point, I figured it would be better to have you participate, my master, rather than just talking between us two.”

At any rate, she’s denied the suspicion of being the culprit behind the serial vampirism incidents, said Shinobu, as if tacking that on at the end—but was that something you should just tack on?

That’s like the crux of the crux of things.

Despite my disorientation, Suicidemaster continued.

“Though she was a thrall, Princess Acerola—Kissshot—soon became manager of her own branch. She became independent from me. It’s kind of uncool to come crashing in like this as if I were her guardian, but I couldn’t stay in hiding when I heard a rumor that she had been exterminated in this country. I just wanted to make sure that she was okay—although she doesn’t exactly look okay, but I’m glad she’s still alive. In any case, I’m glad I could see her again.”

“Uh-huh—”

After six hundred years of no communication, it seemed like a fitting reason for her to come see her with this timing—but with her answering my question before I could ask it, she’d beaten me to the punch again.

Two moves in a row.

That wasn’t exactly fair, was it?

In any case, Suicidemaster said that she was worried about Shinobu’s safety and came all the way to this country, beating her old bones, to see how she was doing.

It wasn’t that she came to dine on Shinobu as gourmet food at all—

“Hmph. I’d thought you’d died, too.”

Shinobu spoke bitterly, but she didn’t seem all that mad about it.

If it was true that she became manager of her own branch (a phrase that surely sounded strange because she was forcing herself to use Japanese, although it probably wasn’t a mistranslation), then it seemed likely that what existed between them wasn’t a master-servant relationship, but a friendship.

Friends that could talk to each other and laugh together on equal terms.

Thanks to my relationship with Meniko, I can more or less understand how important that is—there’s no room for doubt that I have friendships with Hanekawa, Hachikuji, and Kanbaru, but I couldn’t help but feel that our friendships were tied down by love and hate, or by advantages and disadvantages, or out of the obligations of this transient world.

The best example of this would be my childhood friend, Oikura, but even if our friendship were to end, there would still be the sense that we were inextricably linked.

But the strange thing about human relations is that it’s not really desirable to break off relations, like what happened with Sengoku.

“Well, that wasn’t the only reason. Even though I’d learned Japanese, I had never actually been to Japan, see. So I wanted to get a look at Mount Fuji.”

“What a blatant lie!”

Shinobu sounded as if she was amazed, but look—you told the same lie last year.

A parent-child relationship—a parent-child determination.

“……”

“So, I had a favor to ask of you, former thrall of the former Heartunderblade. I’ve already confirmed Kissshot’s safety, and I’d like to go back to my hideout right about now, but I heard there’s something fishy going on. So I was wondering, you think you can help me get out of this country?”

I wondered if she was thinking of the current situation as if she messed up the departure procedures for her destination. Well, that would be a pretty serious situation, too.

“‘Specially since there seems to be this scary lady glaring at me,” said Suicidemaster, glancing in Gaen-san’s direction—but she wasn’t a scary lady, but an onee-san that knew everything.

It made for quite the visualization of this interrogation.

“Oh yeah, speaking of scary ladies in this country—nah, that’s not important right now. So, how about it? Former thrall of the former Heartunderblade?”

I wasn’t sure about how she called me that.

I never thought that she would come ask me for help in fleeing the country… But if Gaen-san wasn’t making any move to interrupt, did that mean we should continue with this clumsy conversation?

“I gotta say, I’m pretty happy. Since that ‘Princess Beauty’ ended up finding her ideal prince and getting her happy ending. But now that I’m here, I figured I’d take this chance to see what that prince can do—how about it? Won’t you help me out for a bit?”

Won’t you help me out?

Araragi-kun was weak to those words.

The tragedy of my high school years could be said to have all started with those words, and in the end, even Ougi-chan took advantage of them.

However, since then, I’d grown just a little bit (specifically, about a year)—I knew that there were things I could do and things I couldn’t.

Even if my girlfriend called me a prince, I knew for sure that I wasn’t one.

“Don’t say something so embarrassing!”

Shinobu was acting bashful with an unusual level of excitement. What’s with that casual language?

Where’d your usual character go off to?

“…A friend of Shinobu’s is a friend of mine, so I’m willing to help—but before that, there’s something I’d like to make clear. There’s something that I absolutely need to make clear—”

She’d called it fishy, but she surely wasn’t so uninvolved as to describe it like that—how should I ask this?

If she’d already denied the charges to Shinobu, then it would be pointless to ask her the same thing—should I change my approach, then?

She may have already talked to Shinobu about this, too…

“Suicidemaster. How did you end up turning into a mummy and getting buried in the dirt? An existence as great as yourself.”

I didn’t really know Suicidemaster well enough to describe her as a great existence (I’d only just heard of her yesterday), but as the progenitor who birthed and named the King of Oddities, it was enough to make me revere her.

Fundamentally…

“Ka ka. I can’t say I know how I ended up in the dirt. I figure someone went and buried me on their own.”

“Someone…”

“Turning into a mummy? That’s a bit easier to explain. I haven’t told Kissshot about that yet, either.”

Was that so? I looked to Shinobu to confirm, and she responded, “Ah, yes, that’s right.” Maybe you’d gotten a bit too excited, but if you take such a lazy approach to this interrogation, which was the original goal, then that would be bothersome.

But, well, I guess it was to be expected.

As vampires, where death was a regular occurrence and life was of little importance, the question of “why were you dead” could possibly be too fundamental to be discussed.

Like her catchphrase, “Somehow or other, it seems I’ve died again”—or perhaps like the nickname, death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire—for Suicidemaster, dying was not at all anything major.

That was how I understood it, but.

“Despite having lived for a thousand years, that may have been the first time I died like that, as far as I can remember.”

I couldn’t help but react to that comment—that was pretty major.

“Wh-what do you mean? What—what was the cause of death?”

Asking the victim directly about their cause of death was what you’d only see in spirit medium-like mysteries, but as I acted that out in real life, Suicidemaster responded pompously.

“Food poisoning.”

“F—food poisoning?”

“Yeah. I ate something weird. Let’s see, in Japanese…”

Said Suicidemaster.

“I guess you would call that type of food, a high school girl?”