Monogatari Series - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.43

043

The ups and downs of realizing that the girl I’d been worried about was actually the vicious assailant of her teammates made for a bumpy ride for my weak mind, but if I were to give up everything now, I wouldn’t be able to say I’d grown since my spring break at seventeen or Golden Week at eighteen.

For now, let’s pretend that I’m a tough guy that can handle a full revolution on a roller coaster, and sort this out.

Kiseki Souwa.

If I remembered correctly, she was a second-year—of course, even though her name was on the list, she had already gone missing, so unlike the other members of the club, there was no confirmation of her safety. If anything, they were still out there looking for her mummy.

But they wouldn’t be able to find it.

If that mummy didn’t exist.

How do you account for the uniform, gym clothes, cell phone, and school bag stuffed into the personal locker in the girls’ locker room of the Naoetsu High gymnasium?

If she was the one who stuffed everything into the locker herself, then breaking into the school and into the girls’ locker room would be a piece of cake—she would use her own route and unlock her own door with her own hands.

If the information on our side of the investigation had been leaked, and if she knew that Gaen-san’s team was out looking for Kiseki-chan’s mummy, then she could have tried to disrupt the investigation by shoving those personal items into her own locker—even though there was no way to find the mummy itself because it wasn’t there, by shoving the uniform and gym clothes in at the same time, the search target pretended as if the damage had already been done.

By fabricating the assumption that she had already become a mummy, she would be able to move as she pleased—and in that case, that would apply to the two living messages, or signatures, that I had asked Meniko to decipher.

“D/V/S”. “F/C”.

Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster, and Fan Club—those interpretations of the code were probably right on the mark, but in the end, they were just fakes set up by Kiseki-chan.

When Kiseki-chan had her blood sucked by Suicidemaster, not like a moth to a flame but a high school girl to a vampire’s mouth, Suicidemaster would naturally have given her name—as she did to me, she would have given her name as “Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster”.

In other words, Kiseki-chan remembered the name of the vampire that attacked her—and, assuming she was the one to bury and hide Suicidemaster’s mummy in the mountains.

Her scheme was to blame her own vampiric activities on Suicidemaster.

Like a human.

As Shinobu was now, it seemed that being vampirified by Suicidemaster would lead you to “inherit” golden hair and golden eyes, so I could imagine that her appearance and atmosphere would have changed greatly from her human days.

When I was vampirified by Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, I didn’t gain golden hair and golden eyes, but my body had still become rather muscular even without any training.

We’d wondered whether or not the high school girl had left the school naked with both her uniform and gym clothes being stuffed into the locker, but if Kiseki-chan did in fact bury Suicidemaster’s mummy in the mountain, then that could be explained without a hitch.

The naked little girl’s mummy.

Hachikuji had said that the little girl’s mummy hadn’t been naked from the beginning.

When she was Suicidemaster, before becoming a mummy, she naturally had to have been wearing clothes—so where did those clothes go?

If they weren’t buried with her, then someone might be wearing them right now, after an adjustment to the size—someone who had buried Suicidemaster.

Taking the name of the death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire, pretending to be her, dressing up as her, and attacking her teammates—it was possible that Kuchimoto Kyoumi, who left that dying message on her flashcards, may have fallen for the fake and left the message “B777Q”, not realizing that the vampire who attacked her had been her teammate.

Or perhaps the message itself was a fake left by Kiseki-chan for the criminal investigation squad—at the very least, “F/C” was certainly that.

I couldn’t imagine how it happened, but when Kiseki-chan found out that suspicion was directed at the members of the girls’ basketball team, she tried to make the investigators look in a different direction.

In other words, Kanbaru Suruga’s fan club.

If she was a member of the girls’ basketball team, which was strongly influenced by Kanbaru, then there was no way she didn’t know about this organization—although it didn’t seem like she knew that the group had been disbanded without a trace.

At any rate, she tried to hide herself, hide her crime, try to pin the blame on others, make up evidence, et cetera—

All of these things were things that vampires were not likely to do, and such unnaturalness, more novel than innovative, made sense if you considered that she had just become a vampire.

Destruction of evidence, creation of an alibi, fabrication, disturbance—it was a rather human-like crime, by a vampire filled with humanity.

With this, disregarding the mummification of Suicidemaster herself, the mummification of the high school girls may not even be a failure.

In fact, I couldn’t help but think that it was Kiseki-chan’s revenge to put them in a half-dead state, neither alive nor dead—she could have taken the texture of Suicidemaster’s mummy as reference when she was burying it.

And if I wanted to, I could take it as a good sign that she didn’t want to fully kill off her friends from when she was human…

“After unraveling all the confusing parts, the problem was just a matter of order. Just like how the second and third mummies discovered were actually attacked by the vampire third and second, Kiseki Souwa, whom we’d assumed had become the fifth mummy, was actually the first victim—no, the zeroth victim.”

In other words, like this.

The order in which the mummies were discovered was:

–

The first mummy——Harimaze Kie

The second mummy——Honnou Aburi

The third mummy——Kuchimoto Kyoumi

(The little girl’s mummy——DVS)

The fourth mummy——Kanguu Misago

The fifth mummy (assumed)——Kiseki Souwa

–

However, the actual order of the victims was:

–

The zeroth victim——Kiseki Souwa (Culprit: DVS)

(The 0.5th victim——DVS (Food poisoning))

The first victim——Harimaze Kie (Culprit: Kiseki)

The second victim——Kuchimoto Kyoumi (Culprit: Kiseki)

The third victim——Honnou Aburi (Culprit: Kiseki)

The fourth victim——Kanguu Misago (Culprit: Kiseki)

–

That’s how it was.

Since all of the mummies were vampire mummies, there wasn’t anything like an estimated time of death, so it would be hard to ascertain the time of the mummification for Kanguu-chan, who’d been submerged in the reservoir… But this was the truth behind the serial vampirism incidents that had taken place from the night before last, to last night.

“Oho, is that so. You think of some pretty clever things, both you guys and that high school girl.”

Suicidemaster spoke as if she was truly impressed—although it sounded, or at least seemed to sound, like she was making fun of me.

Well, to an ancient vampire who’d seen the fall of a country firsthand, was born in a castle called the “Castle of Corpses”, and bore witness to numerous wars, a discussion about five members of a high school club may seem like manual labor on a tiny, millimeter scale to her…

Moreover, while Suicidemaster was not the culprit behind the serial vampirism, she did confess to having started it all—she was the one responsible for the first bloodsucking.

Once again, a progenitor of vampires.

Like a plea bargain, she’d asked for help with the process of exiting the country, but unfortunately, this was not enough for her to get off scot-free.

It wasn’t enough—but what sort of verdict would be laid down in a case like this? I didn’t have the slightest idea.

Kiseki-chan had been the victim in the beginning, but if she became the main culprit afterwards—a composition in which the victim becomes the perpetrator.

“It kind of resembles Sengoku-san’s case, doesn’t it?” said Hachikuji.

An unnecessary comment.

“The kanji for Sengoku [千石] and Kiseki [木石] are pretty similar, too.”

That one was really unnecessary.

However, Sengoku’s case was different.

It wasn’t nearly as close as their kanji were.

A high school girl who unexpectedly acquires vampire superpowers makes full use of her power to relieve the anger of her “past life”—if anything, it was a more serious problem than the physiological phenomenon of vampire sucking blood, which was more similar to hunger.

If I had to say it, she was exerting the fury of a vampire while maintaining her human values… If she was careless, she could meet the conditions for the “Darkness”.

“It ended up not being really clear whose fault it is, right?”

Hachikuji murmured as if troubled, but it was pretty vague to begin with—it wasn’t something I could do anything about by taking on all the stigma myself, like I used to do in high school.

She was too much of a stranger for me to do that.

I wasn’t a politician. I couldn’t work that hard for someone I didn’t know.

It’s not easy to help a girl you’ve never met, never even brushed past—a girl you have no connection with.

“We can think about the rest later, but if there’s anything you need to do now…”

And, as if the composition’s polarity had been reversed, the one who brought up a plan of action to this deadlocked state was none other than Shinobu.

“Don’t you need to stop that vampirified high school girl, a distant little sister in my eyes? Even if the composition has been turned over on its head, what you need to do hasn’t changed much, I should say.”

That was true—however, the way you searched for a dried-out mummy was quite different from the way you searched for a glorious vampire with golden hair and golden eyes.

“If the King of Oddities takes charge, I’ll be put out of business. So, let’s say that the personnel currently assigned to search for the mummy will be assigned to search for Kiseki-chan—who do you think she’ll go after next, Koyomin?”

“Eh… Um, that’s, well, one of the girls’ basketball team members she had strife with… right? So, if we’re trying to anticipate it—”

That wasn’t it.

We’d already more or less anticipated everything—all of the members that were on the list were currently under protection.

There was no way that Kiseki-chan, who somehow got information about our investigation, didn’t know about that—she wouldn’t make the mistake of jumping into the web herself.

“What if she just gave up on the whole revenge thing and just went home to sleep? That’s what I would do.”

Suicidemaster made quite the crude statement with such a serious face—at this point, I had to wonder how I even suspected that this pompous little girl was actually a highly calculating criminal.

She was not highly calculating, just loud.

“Well, it’s true that Kiseki-chan is trying to avoid us. The diversionary tactics and cover-ups are evidence of that—in that case, she probably wouldn’t think of attacking a girls’ basketball team member even through the surveillance. To begin with, it’s pretty doubtful that there’s enough resentment pent up in her that she’d want to make everyone a mummy—I’m sure she had some good friends like normal,” said Gaen-san.

The four people that had been discovered as mummies were either the four people that she held the deepest resentment towards, or just the four people that were the easiest targets because they happened to be returning from school alone or had a lot of openings—was it possible she’d relieved all her frustration by attacking those four people?

But I couldn’t be optimistic. Rather, as a member of the investigation team, I should assume that the crime would escalate—just as an unreasonable diet leads to rebound, a teenager forced to be stoic in her club suddenly obtained superpowers like in manga, so it should escalate like an escalator—

“! This is hella dangerous, Gaen-san!”

I used a tone of voice I’d never used before—but no matter. I continued.

“Tonight, Kanbaru is having a pajama party at Higasa-chan’s house with her friends!”

I was making it sound as if Kanbaru’s pajama party was unhealthy, immoral, and outright reprehensible, but that wasn’t the point.

It was bad, however, that the retired third-year members of Naoetsu High’s girls’ basketball team, the OGs of the golden generation, were all in one place, as if they’d all been rounded up.

The golden generation that could even be called.

The mastermind behind the current state of club activities.

The most fitting prey—the main dish.