Monogatari Series - Volume 25 - Chapter 13.01

Chapter Hero- Kuu Invisible

001 

Sorakara Kuu was a commanding officer in the airborne troops of the Earth Eradication Army. Considering that he had earned such a title at the young age of fourteen, it was impossible for an altogether ordinary nineteen-year-old first-year university student not to have a bit of an inferiority complex. And of course he wasn’t simply an officer; oh no, he was also the hero who saved all of humanity, so that inferiority complex was really kicking into overdrive. After all, the most that I’d ever managed to achieve was saving a single vampire girl who’d had her limbs cut off, and even that had proven nearly too difficult for me. 

However, if we discarded our achievements and our histories to focus instead on who we were as people, then I believed there were commonalities between myself and this hero. 

A boy with no emotions. 

A boy who wasn’t deeply moved by anything. 

A boy who was always cool, who never got hot under the collar, and who didn’t feel or react in any way no matter what adversity or challenge he may face. A boy who operated with the cold efficiency of a machine. 

Wow, jeez… It was like looking into a mirror, right? With a character background like that, he may as well be named Araragi Koyomi, am I right? But wait, so that description wasn’t me? Who was it? Oh, it’s Sorakara Kuu? Jeez, I couldn’t hide how surprised I was to see my character overlap so much with someone else. 

When I was younger, people often said that I was too cold. His description reminded me of the time when I would often say “I don’t need friends; they’d lower my intensity as a human” as an explanation for my actions. 

When I looked a bit deeper into his story, I learned that he was accompanied by an innocent little girl named Shisui Kanzume and that the unit that he led is filled with girls who have one or two quirks each. There were other things as well that I couldn’t help but see as commonalities between us. 

All of that is to say that a part of me thought that maybe, just maybe, if we were to meet, we could overcome the age gap and actually get along fairly well. Maybe that was naive of me. 

The fact that I had that expectation was proof enough that we were not all that similar, and of course that expectation was quickly crushed into dust. Why? Because, as I said before, he is a hero and I am not. Even if we have similar backgrounds, no amount of forced familiarity in the face of an overwhelming inferiority complex was going to be able to fill that gap. 

If anything was going to fill that gap, it would be my dead body cut up into a million tiny pieces.