Monogatari Series - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.48

048

Higasa-chan, like Kanbaru, was on the side that ran for her transportation (what kind of a side was that?) so she didn’t have a bicycle, but one of the members of the OG association that had been called to the pajama party, Civia-chan the exchange student in a jersey, had visited the Higasa residence on her bicycle, so I was able to borrow that machine—plus, in terms of speed, you could say it was a Formula 1 car of the bicycle world, a roadracer.

And so, I returned to the Kanbaru residence and finally succeeded in laying eyes upon the golden-haired, golden-eyed high school girl who had been conversing with Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster in the Japanese garden of the Japanese mansion—Harimaze Kie.

I’d succeeded in laying eyes upon the walking dead that I’d been chasing for so long—yes.

It was Harimaze Kie. Not Kiseki Souwa.

Harimaze-chan, who’d been thought to be the first victim—the first mummy I’d seen at the Naoetsu General Hospital had been introduced to me as such.

A living corpse, dressed in a patient’s gown and tucked into a bed—it’s ridiculously simple once it becomes apparent that that mummy, that living corpse, was not Harimaze-chan’s mummy.

Rather, that mummy was actually.

The mummy of Kiseki-chan, who we’d thought was the main culprit in this serial vampirism incident—in other words, it was replacement.

No, in this case, would it be a substitute?

It wouldn’t be correct to say we simply assumed wrong. We were made to assume that—thanks to the golden-haired, golden-eyed high school girl, freshman at Naoetsu High, member of the girls’ basketball team, in front of me.

People who have become mummified get all dried up and have identical physiques and appearances—in a regimented club, even the hairstyles would all be similar, so to me, all the mummies looked the same.

If there was no bond as strong as that between Shinobu and Suicidemaster, there would be no way to differentiate between the mummies—you could even say all the mummies were unidentifiable.

And yet, how did we decide that that mummy was Harimaze-chan’s mummy? Because of her personal belongings—her uniform, her school bag, and even her cell phone.

It wasn’t just the “first mummy”, but the mummies of all the high school girls that we differentiated in that way. But was that correct?

In other words, if you make a mummy wear your own clothes, carry your own bag, and hold your own cell phone, you can make people think that mummy is you, right?

We had theorized that Kiseki-chan had stuffed her uniform and gym clothes into her personal locker to make herself look like a victim, but we had misjudged the situation from an even earlier stage. We were wrong from the very first step.

We—yes, even Gaen-san had been wrong.

The onee-san that knew everything.

This, however, was inevitable, in a way—Gaen-san was the administrator of the specialists and the leader in charge of the investigation, but she was only a specialist in the field of oddities.

A specialist of monstrous apparitions. A specialist of evil spirits.

A specialist of urban legends. A specialist of secondhand rumors.

A specialist of ghost stories, of oddity stories—in other words.

She was not a specialist of human crimes.

Her focus was on storytelling, so it wasn’t like she was trained to see through petty tricks like codes and word games—though I’d spent a year in what could only be described as a scene of carnage, I was not in law enforcement, but neither was Gaen-san.

If the police had been investigating this case, vampirism notwithstanding, it might have been easier than expected to identify it as Harimaze-chan’s crime—for example, if they did a normal DNA test, not anything regarding the vampire genes.

But for me, an amateur college student that wasn’t even an amateur detective, to find out at the last minute at the scene of a pajama party, I had to rely on a number of coincidences, accumulated theories, and a lucky guess.

The point in common between four out of the five girls—when I tried to think about what the four victims had in common, in a leap, I realized what three of them had in common.

I hadn’t found it particularly strange. Because I’d thought it was just a trend or a custom of the girls’ basketball team—the smartphone strap.

The strap with letters on it… I’d been aware that some members of the club had had them, and some members hadn’t.

However, it was true that, as the number of mummies increased, the ratio became skewed—specifically, out of the four mummies, only the first mummy’s cell phone didn’t have a strap on it, while all of the subsequent mummies’ cell phones did.

On the cell phone of the second mummy—Honnou Aburi-chan.

On the cell phone of the third mummy—Kuchimoto Kyoumi-chan.

On the cell phone of the fourth mummy—Kanguu Misago-chan.

When the second mummy had been discovered, it had been a 1:1 ratio, and when the third mummy had been discovered in that shack, it had been 1:2—not particularly unnatural.

When the fourth mummy was discovered, and the phone with the message left on it had a strap, then even when the ratio became 1:3, you could say that level of skew could be expected—but if Kiseki-chan’s cell phone, which was found in her personal locker, also had the corresponding strap attached, then the situation would be different indeed.

1:4.

A commonality among four out of five—however, in this case, the odd one out was not Kiseki-chan, who was supposed to be the culprit, but Harimaze-chan, who was supposed to be the first victim.

Of course, at that point, it was just an assumption. No, it was nothing but an assumption—if Kiseki-chan’s cell phone was found to not have a strap, the ratio would be 2:3, which would correct the bias.

However, once I realized this possibility, I couldn’t help but think about the possibility that the only high school girl who didn’t have a strap was attacking high school girls who did have straps.

And, after thinking about it, even someone at my level of talent could easily deduce that their personal belongings had been switched.

We were already familiar with codes and other diversions, after all—but, to be fair, since the strap thing was just an inference, it was equally possible for any of the mummies to have been replaced.

The probability that Kiseki-chan was the culprit was the same as the probability that Harimaze-chan’s mummy was actually Kiseki-chan’s mummy, and that probability was the same as the probability that the mummy of either Honnou-chan, Kuchimoto-chan, or Kanguu-chan was actually Kiseki-chan’s mummy.

But the key was the code that Meniko solved—the “B777Q” code.

“D/V/S”.

It was a false living message, meant to pin the crime on Suicidemaster… Unlike the mummy replacement, which was essentially an attempt to hide her own disappearance, this was clearly a cover-up made with Gaen-san’s investigation team in mind.

In other words, from that point on, the information possessed by the investigation team had already been leaked—but it was unlikely that a traitor existed within Gaen-san’s team. If there were, it would probably be me… But by the time I got involved, the flashcards had already been placed in that shack.

Then, how exactly had the culprit come to perceive the existence of Gaen-san and her team? The existence of those that pursued oddities?

My conversation with Meniko ended up being a hint… My conversation on the level of idle chatter, unrelated to the hint at all.

Cell phones were like a part of our brains, she’d said—so what if one’s cell phone, together with the school uniform and school bag, was made by the culprit to be held by the mummy?

In that case.

You could say—it was like installing the mummy with your eyes, ears, and brain.

Or, a surveillance camera and a listening device.

Just like how I was told to keep an eye on Shinobu overnight—the culprit was able to figure out how the mummy that replaced her would be treated.

There are plenty of apps like that, that continue to run in the background even when the phone is locked. To receive the audio and video, she could use Kiseki-chan’s cell phone instead—before Kiseki-chan was completely turned into a mummy, the culprit could unlock her phone with her fingerprint, and download the necessary app.

By analyzing the cell phone in various ways, Gaen-san had nearly gotten swallowed up in the darkness of the high school girls, but if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you—and maybe those words should have been taken more literally.

It was a very modern trick.

And without knowing it, we had had conversations and meetings in the hospital where the mummy and her belongings had been placed, and that was how our internal investigation was getting leaked.

As a result, she left the “D/V/S” code for the specialists, and after learning that we’d gotten our hands on the list of girls’ basketball team members, she left the “F/C” code—and the important point was that the former could not have been done if the app had been set up at the discovery of the first mummy, ignoring the hospital’s rule against cell phone use.

If the mummy that was thought to be Harimaze Kie did not have the cell phone thought to be the cause of the leak, then the culprit would not be able to leave a cipher for Kuchimoto Kyoumi’s mummy, who was second in the attack order.

At this point, it was almost certain that the replaced mummy was the one assumed to belong to Harimaze Kie.

However, this perfunctory identification led to one point of concern—because what was more important was that if the cell phone wasn’t charged often, it would soon run out of battery. And Gaen-san and the others had no particular reason to keep the password-locked cell phones charged.

In other words, the leak of inside information would automatically come to a halt after a certain point—it could be argued that Kiseki-chan’s belongings, including her cell phone (which was the receiver), were shoved into her personal locker because the culprit could no longer obtain that personal information.

With that, she could also suggest that Kiseki-chan had been mummified, or perhaps that Kiseki-chan was actually the culprit, but really those items had fulfilled their purpose—it had probably been Kiseki-chan’s cell phone that ran out of juice first, since she was on the run and couldn’t keep it charged.

What that meant was, when it came to the information after that—about the fact that I’d chosen Kanbaru’s house as the location of Suicidemaster’s revival, and about the fact that for that reason Kanbaru had left her house—the culprit had been completely unaware.

So while I was just an amateur college student that wasn’t even an amateur detective, if you thought about it, the criminal was just an amateur vampire who’d only just become an oddity, as well as amateur criminal—it may have looked like she was doing well, but she had been constantly under pressure and making last-minute decisions, so of course she would make mistakes and misunderstandings.

There were many things that didn’t work out the way she wanted them to, and she probably didn’t expect a specialist like Gaen-san to exist in the first place—basically.

Even if she knew that the other members of the girls’ basketball team were under protection and decided to escalate the crime and aim at Kanbaru, the “cause” and “originator” of everything, instead of targeting the OG association at Higasa-chan’s house that we had left unguarded, she would naturally go for the Kanbaru residence.

The same Kanbaru residence that we had ended up leaving unguarded thanks to some strange deductions—the same Japanese mansion that we had left Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster and Hachikuji behind in.

That was where she would aim for.

However, all this was reasoning I’d managed to knead together using every means possible after the fact, and the reality was more just a flash of inspiration that I’d gotten for a moment, so how I was going to proceed from here and if I should turn back was a difficult decision that could not be made in an instant.

It was possible that everything was just my own misunderstanding and, as soon as I left Higasa-chan’s house, the vampire (which could be Kiseki-chan, or Harimaze-chan, or someone else) would end up encroaching—and I couldn’t deny the possibility that they were getting inside information in a completely different way.

What if the true culprit was watching Higasa-chan’s house with an eagle eye?

I couldn’t even use my cell phone to make sure Suicidemaster and Hachikuji were okay, like I’d done before I’d come here—as if a vampire and a god, not even high school girls, would have cell phones!

But I couldn’t defer my judgment.

I had no choice but to choose between staying in the Higasa residence or rushing over to the Kanbaru residence—and both choices could potentially backfire.

I didn’t have time to explain the situation to Kanbaru, nor did I have time to ask Gaen-san to make the decision. Even if that flash of inspiration had been instantaneous, it would take me thirty minutes to explain the whole thing, no matter how fast I spoke, and even the digest version would take eight pages of a novel.

In the end, I had to resort to an underhanded trick in order to prevent my decision backfiring—and that was to shamelessly depart from the front gate of the Higasa residence, still in women’s pajamas and twintails. A plan that could not even be called a plan.

In other words, if the inside information had been leaked as I’d deduced, then I should head to the Kanbaru residence, but if it was still being leaked, then they would know that I was still at the Higasa residence—so if a single “girl” in women’s pajamas and twintails left from that house, the culprit would think that I was still at the party. Not, by any means, the most elegant idea.

Normally, you wouldn’t even call this an idea.

It wasn’t even a gamble.

It wasn’t that I had considered it—it was that I hadn’t considered it.

In a way, it kind of made me feel like I was experiencing the joys of being a college student, as if I’d lost in some party game and was forced to take part in the punishment game of crossdressing and riding a road racer around town. But to start from the conclusion.

To start from the conclusion after that lengthy description, in the garden of the Kanbaru residence where I arrived, the golden-haired, golden-eyed vampire and the golden-haired, golden-eyed vampire.

The purebred vampire, and the former human.

The half naked little girl, and the half-naked high school girl were facing each other—I had no idea how it had come to pass, but at the very moment when the high school girl was about to bite the little girl, I managed to succeed in intervening.