Monogatari Series - Volume 25 - Chapter 11.04

004 

If I remembered correctly, they called them switch tricks. 

Whoever had done it had clearly gone for a literal interpretation of the phrase, “exchange the hostage for the money”, and while they hadn’t quite had an entire crowd of people as an audience, they did have multiple people actively watching the area at all times, so to perform the swap in the manner that they did was a truly spectacular magic trick. “But couldn’t they have done that thing? Y’know, being the Tokinomiya Hospital and all. Couldn’t they have just used their hypnosis skill or whatever on everyone watching the case, then done whatever they wanted?” 

“Oniisan, you sure know a lot about the Tokinomiya Hospital, huh.” 

“I’m a pro, after all.” 

That was a lie. I wasn’t anything close to a pro. 

I’d only heard about them from Mutou, so I didn’t really understand—in fact, it’s probably better to not understand them. 

“Well, I’m afraid that the pro is wrong. Not even the Tokinomiya 

Hospital can hypnotize all of the people that were keeping watch—mind manipulation abilities are not something that can be used on a random number of people at once.” Hmm. 

So the skill wasn’t as powerful as an outsider like myself would assume. In that case, perhaps it was best to assume they used a completely different trick to make the swap? 

In any case, once the 50 million yen was stolen from the case, even if Houko-chan was returned safely, it would be marked as a victory for the abductor. Wait, no, if the objective for the Tokinomiya Hospital was to make the “undefeated-for-life taste defeat”, then the whole abduction plot had no winner at all. 

In which case, since Houko-chan was safely returned, the residents of the Antique Apartment might be the ones closest to being called winners. 

“Yep, after all, 50 million yen is chump change!” 

“I can’t agree with that statement, but if the money was a paltry sum to the person from whom it was stolen, then I don’t suppose they would care if it was taken.” 

Those who laughed at 50 million yen would cry at 50 million yen.  

... And I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t laugh about 50 million yen, and I was certain that anyone would cry over it. 

“For the Tokinomiya Hospital side, they must have also known that they needed to return Houko-chan or else they might face a terrifying comeuppance. They’re a group that can do those kinds of potential loss calculations.” 

“Unlike the Zerozaki Clan.” 

“Yes, unlike the Zerozaki Clan. ... But just because Houko-chan had been returned safely didn’t mean it was time to celebrate. They couldn’t just leave the case and return home to the apartment and resume their lives. Even if the residents of the Antique Apartment lacked the skills to hunt down the abductors, it was still unsettling to not know what had happened—if they could at least know what occurred, they could be satisfied.” 

Which is how Rizumu-chan came to be on the case. 

“Yep!” Rizumu-chan firmly agreed. 

So what remained was more of a mystery than a question, and when it came to a mystery, you couldn’t ask for better than a great detective. I didn’t know what connected the residents of the Antique Apartment to the Niounomiya Troupe (it seemed like it was an unclear thing even in their worldview), but that explained how it was that Rizumu-chan came to be here at the North Shirahebi Shrine after everything had already happened. 

It also told me what I needed to do. 

I had to solve the switch trick. 

“Alright, well, I’ll take this home with me and think it over, then I’ll consult with the higher-ups, and once we’ve reached a conclusion, we’ll have the solution delivered to you by mail. It’s been a pleasure working with you.” 

“Stop trying to streamline it! Don’t go home! Solve it here!” 

I tried to polish my bureaucratic tone, but she still complained about it. 

So she wanted me to solve it here... Even though I’m neither a fast detective, nor a great detective. 

“If you think about it in normal terms, then someone slipped in without being spotted by the watchers and quietly swapped out the cases.” 

If they had opened the case, removed the money, and then placed the sleeping girl inside, it would have taken too much time. It didn’t seem possible for them to have used such a drawn-out method, which meant they would have most likely swapped the cases in one quick motion. 

The difficulty would decrease if they switched cases. But even then... 

“It just doesn’t seem likely that someone could have escaped the notice of every person who was there.” 

“Yeah. I guess, for reference, how many people were there to keep watch?” 

“Including the residents of the apartment building, about 20 people!” 

“That’s a popular thirteen-year-old.” 

If you mobilized a group of all of my acquaintances, you wouldn’t manage to assemble that many people. If I were kidnapped, I probably couldn’t count on very many people coming to help me—but even if there had only been a few people keeping watch, the Tokinomiya Hospital wouldn’t have a means of knowing exactly how many, and so avoiding the notice of “everyone” would be difficult. 

After all, the watchers were hidden. 

Even if they could evade notice, there wasn’t a reason for them to do so. 

They didn’t have to use a switch trick. If they retrieved the contents of the case, then they could have returned Houko-chan at another time; there was no need to take the money and return the girl at the same time. 

Or was there? 

But looking at the fact that they gave them an attaché case in which to place the money... There was an implication that the perpetrator would find it convenient for the ransom money to be placed inside of the case, and that gave weight to the “secretly swapped the cases” hypothesis. It was hard to get away from that idea. 

In which case... No, something was strange. 

It was odd. 

If they wanted to swap the cases more easily, then why would they specify that the case be left on top of the offertory box? They could have chosen a place like under the floorboards of the shrine building or at the base of a nearby tree. If the perpetrator was able to specify the drop point, then why did they need to go out of their way to pick a location that would make the task more difficult? 

Need... 

If this really was a magic trick, then there was a purpose in choosing a location that made the watchers think, “It will be impossible for them to swap the cases without us noticing”. It was like Rizumu-chan said, “a performance”. But the only place where it was actually “impossible for them to swap” was on top of the offering box. 

It would be a mistake to assume that it had been impossible at all times. 

“That’s it. What if they had swapped the cases at some earlier point? If the cases were swapped at some point during the travel from the Antique Apartment to the North Shirahebi Shrine, then the case placed on the box would have contained a thirteen-year-old girl from the start...” 

But even as I said it, I realized the flaw in that explanation. 50 million yen and a thirteen-year-old girl have entirely different weights. As soon as the swap happened, anyone picking up the case would have noticed that something had changed. Unfortunately, I am a peasant, so I could not say that I had experience with the weight of 50 million yen, but I had read in a manga that 100 million yen weighs about 10 kilograms or something. Thirteen-year-old girls were my specialty, so I felt fairly confident in saying they tend to weigh more than 10 kilograms. 

However, it was possible that I had been premature in retracting my theory. 

“I had thought about that too. But the attaché case is so tough it’s like a portable safe, so with the weight of the case, it’s possible that the weight of 50 million yen versus the weight of a young girl might not be all that noticeable after all!” 

“The case was that heavy?” 

“If it was normal duralumin, it would be easily broken in a worldview like ours!” 

Huh. That explanation may have held water. 

So it sounded like I would be better off not thinking of this attaché case as an attaché case at all. I needed to update my hypothesis. So they were essentially carrying around a safe, and carrying a safe all the way up a mountain to the shrine sounded like a truly agonizing task. 

“Mhm. They needed several people just to carry it!” 

“If it’s that big and heavy, then swapping the case sounds even more impossible... No, wait. Even if there wasn’t an opening on the surface, there could have been some kind of contraption, right? After all, the perpetrators are the ones who prepared the case.” 

“What kind of contraption?” 

“Like...” 

I wasn’t so confident in my ability as to think that I could come up with a hypothesis on the spot, but something did pop into my mind. What about a false bottom? In other words, Houko-chan was there inside of the case from the start... If they did that, then at the very least they would save themselves the task of having to bring her to the shrine and place her in the case. 

If the safe was that heavy, then even if it contained the 50 million yen and the thirteen-year-old at the same time, it was unlikely that anyone aside from myself or Oshino would be able to feel the difference in weight. 

... The issue that remained was: what was the point of such a contraption? 

If we were talking about it as a magic trick, then a contraption of that kind was a classic, but since this was a child abduction... What was the purpose of it? Unless they just wanted to have fun? 

Was it something to do with the Antique Apartment's residents? Or was the ultimate goal of the trick to surprise that “undefeated-for-life” guy? If that's what they wanted there was no need to worry about the risk... But honestly, that substitution felt weak as a show. 

Instead of calling that trick and false bottom a surprise, they'd just be reasonable. 

Keeping the effort minimal, making it look effortless—the 50 million yen was properly plundered after all, it's not like the Tokinomiya Hospital was getting into show business or anything. 

Even if a false bottom was the method employed to get Houko-chan into the case, that still didn’t explain how they had managed to remove the 50 million yen from the case without being seen. So they weren’t seen, but they somehow removed five heavy bricks of bound paper bills? 

Even if it wasn’t that much weight, in terms of size, it was... Size? 

Size... Yes. That’s it. 

A thirteen-year-old girl and 50 million yen had different weights, yes, but they also had different sizes. A thirteen-year-old girl wasn’t going to weigh less than 50 million yen, and she was also not going to occupy less space. 

It was a rough approximation, but supposing that the 50 million yen took up a third of the space of the girl, then if you placed 50 million yen into a case with a false bottom containing said girl, then... Wouldn’t that obviously be too small a sum of money? 

I wasn’t talking about if it was too much or too little money to exchange for a human life—no, that’s not even remotely what I meant. I was referring to the size of the case provided in relation to the amount of money demanded. The case was simply too big. 

A large case could hold the same amount that fit in a small case, so if you had to choose, it was better to go too large instead of too small, but... In a case so ridiculously oversized as that one must have been, the money would have been bounced and bumped around the entire time it was in transit. Would they purposefully choose to use a case that would result in crumpled and damaged currency? 

But then... If they had held to the format of normal kidnapper demands, they would have insisted on used, non-sequential bills, so a bit of extra crumpling wouldn’t make that much of a difference. “Ah.” No. 

No no no no no. 

It didn’t matter what condition the money arrived in, but the same could not be said of Houko-chan, who was hidden at the bottom of the case. If the trick were to swap the money with a mannequin, then sure, the false bottom would work, but we’re talking about a living human being. 

A thirteen-year-old girl. 

Stuffed into a metal case and then hauled up a mountain by a group of men... There was no way that she’d come out of that case “unharmed”. She would have been bounced and tossed about inside the case the whole way up. 

Blunt trauma, scrapes, and bruises—there’s no way that she’d have been able to avoid being physically harmed, and if nothing else, when she was discovered inside of the case, it was impossible that she could be in a “peaceful sleep” after being transported in that fashion. It was guaranteed that she’d have woken up. 

Which meant that it was unrealistic for them to have used a false bottom as the trick. 

It might be best to assume that the switch must have happened here at the shrine—so I looked over at the offering box again. This time I didn’t simply glance at it, I looked at it intently. 

Did it come down to the Tokinomiya Hospital using their patented mind manipulation powers after all? I had been told that they couldn’t manipulate the minds of multiple people at one time, but that didn’t mean that it was impossible. 

Even if they couldn’t manipulate them all in an instant, if they simply took their time and went one by one... One...? “...” 

Or not. That’s it, they only needed one. 

In this scenario, they only needed one person—and with that, they could solve every problem. 

The problem, the question, and the mystery were all resolved. 

The case was solved. 

There was a way to safely transport her inside an oversized case without her being harmed. 

And the solution was the ultimate in simplicity while also serving a second purpose. 

It was more fueled by necessity than a desire to surprise anyone. 

“Rizumu-chan!” 

I turned back to Rizumu-chan to have her confirm or deny my hypothesis, but someone else was standing in her place. 

The mantle that she had worn was gone. 

Standing with his arms bound by a straitjacket was her “older brother”. 

His face was similar to that of his sister but also distinctly different in a way that couldn’t be explained away by simply his lack of glasses. Where Rizumu-chan had been naive and innocent, the person who had taken her place had a wicked, vicious smile on his face—he was the hitman “Niounomiya Izumu-kun”. 

“Gyahaha!” Izumu-kun laughed. “If I’ve come out, then that means that you’ve solved the mystery, oniisan? Which means it’s time to stop playing detective—from now on, it’s time for the slaughter, yes?” 

“...” 

“Slaughter time lasts for one hour of every day. So, tell me, oniisan, who is it that I should be killing?” 

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4  Based on the saying 一円を笑うものは一円に泣く (ichi-en wo warau mono ha ichi-en ni naku, “those who laugh at one yen cry at one yen”), meaning that someone who mocks a penny for being a worthless sum of money will cry at losing their last penny.