Monogatari Series - Volume 25 - Chapter 14.03

003 

“Roulette is typically split into two styles: American and European. In our casino, we have one green space, which is European style. Which means that the odds of winning with red or white are not 50% because you can bet on neither as well.” In other words: 

①    Red = 18 of 37 

②    White = 18 of 37 

③    Green = 1 of 37 

But looking at these odds, I had to conclude that anyone who would bet on green in a game of chance like this wasn’t a gambler; they were a gambling addict. 

In my case, however, I was more of a math addict, so what I found most interesting about the whole thing was how they managed to divide a circle into 37 equal spaces. They must be very finely crafted to all be the same size, right? 

In any case, it didn’t matter which color I bet on because it would inevitably put me at a disadvantage. Getting it right wasn’t really winning so much as getting it wrong would mean losing. If I bet on red, then I had 18:19 odds against the dealer, Rai-kun. The advantage went to him. If I bet on white, then it was still 18:19 odds with the advantage going to Rai-kun. 

It wasn’t so unbalanced as to be impossible, but a disadvantage was a disadvantage. It was that slight advantage on the house side that made casinos. I would have to happily accept the disadvantage. After all, I’d been caught infiltrating the casino, so they could’ve been taking me out back and beating me to a pulp right now instead. 

An assistant inspector being beaten by a group of middle school kids… That was the making of a scandal all on its own. Instead, the mature middle school boy had challenged me to a game of all things. 

“Let’s have a bet, Assistant Inspector Araragi. If you win, my group of thugs and pretty girls will withdraw from this city after tonight and never return. If I win, then you will turn a blind eye for another two months.” 

Looking back on my own awkward middle school years, Rai-kun was behaving with such a level of maturity that it didn’t seem possible that he was so young. But that two-month time period… That was scary. Scary because it was the same length of time as my remaining probationary period. 

Creepy, right? 

I had assumed that they’d simply noticed that a grown man was dressed as a middle school girl and come to detain me, but that wasn’t the case—he knew my name when he stopped me, and now he made it clear that he knew quite a bit more about me than that. 

At that moment, what I felt most was not a desire to get out of the situation safely or a desire to protect the dignity of my little sister’s former school, but instead I felt that I couldn’t leave this smiling boy to do as he pleased. 

I was acutely aware of that feeling. 

I needed to do something immediately… 

This boy needed a lot more than simple guidance from an adult. 

And that’s how I came to be sitting at a roulette table alone with Raikun, who would be playing the role of dealer. Why roulette? Simply because it was the only game whose rules I understood. Even if I had a vague understanding of them as games, as means of gambling, I was ignorant… To be entirely honest, I didn’t even fully understand roulette. The colors had been changed from red and black to red and white, but aside from that, it didn’t seem to have any house rules. 

So the rules were simple: pick red, white, or green. 

I’d heard through my circles—which is to say, through urban legends—that roulette dealers can land the ball on any color or number that they want, so I couldn’t let my guard down just yet. I could’ve place my bet right then, but it would’ve been best to wait for the ball to be tossed and then announce my chosen color. At the moment I found myself drawn toward red, but maybe I was actually being guided there? Red is the color of blood. Blood. 

There was no telling how much Rai-kun knew about me, but if he was aware that I was a former vampire, then he might have tried to push the blood association so that I would choose red. 

Leading… 

If the other color was not white but instead the usual black, then I might have placed my bet there; if you said “darkness”, then I would’ve thought “Ougi”. If I were to place my bet without thinking, I’d have probably gone with that. 

Rai-kun, being the creator of this whole casino, was apparently well known among the visitors, as the area around the table had quickly turned into a viewing gallery… At the moment, nobody had noticed anything odd about me, but if I remained in the center of attention for too long, someone was bound to realize. Just the thought of being caught in this situation had me in a cold sweat. 

On that note, having middle school bunny girls wandering around nearby made it difficult to pay attention on its own. If Karen were here, she might have forgotten about her position as an officer and resorted to violence by now, which would’ve resulted in a great disgrace for her former school. 

“Have you decided, dear guest?” 

He hadn’t forgotten my title. He was aware of the many people watching and listening, so instead of calling me “Assistant Inspector Araragi” again, he instead only referred to me as a guest. It was that ability to adapt and take everything into consideration that made him terrifying. 

He was so abnormal as to seem like an aberration. 

And if I stopped to think about it, the fact that he had such a massive operation going on in this school with so many students coming and going, with only a mere rumor leaking out? That showed amazing control. If my sister hadn’t been a former student of this school and hadn’t been a legend in her own time, she wouldn’t have had the network of connections required to get word of this rumor to me. And even then, it was only a rumor. An urban legend. 

“Yes, I’ve decided. Spin it.” 

I hadn’t actually decided anything, but that’s what I said—I didn’t want to let this immeasurable middle school boy get ahead of me. 

Though… I didn’t suppose he was able to read minds. 

“Very well.” 

As soon as I nodded my head affirmatively, Rai-kun spun the wheel and let the ball in his right hand go flying. I had considered that with my vampiric vision I might have been able to see the spin and the path of the ball and project where it would land, but it didn’t work. 

Those vampiric aftereffects weren’t coming in handy as of late. I could just barely keep track of the two separate moving parts, but when it came to predicting which number the ball would land on, it was pure chaos theory. I would have better luck guessing than trying to cheat. With the cameras overhead and the watching crowd all around, I had no chance of trying to cheat by any other means. A police officer on an illegal investigation who also cheated—that was quite a pile of irredeemable qualities. 18 out of 37. 

I was at a disadvantage, but compared to the bloodbaths I’d been caught in before, these odds weren’t so bad. 

By the way, the ball that was spinning at high speed around the track wasn’t white, but instead black. Since they had changed the colors of the roulette from black and red to white and red (which I believed had less to do with any association with darkness and more to do with making the roulette more gaudy), the black color had been repurposed for the ball. 

“The human psyche is a strange thing, isn’t it, Araragi-san? ‘I want to save money’ and ‘I want to spend money’ can be felt at the same time. ‘I want to lose weight’ and ‘I want to eat delicious food’ are a similar pair of opposites. We can dream of opposites at the same time.” 

I had been thinking of going red after all and had moved my hand to place the chip on that side when Rai-kun spoke at the perfect moment to interrupt me. 

“It’s less of a contradiction and more of a dilemma. An unresolved dichotomy. Which is why people will say, no matter what dream may come true, ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this’. They say that it’s better to do something and regret it later than to regret not doing something, but whenever we enact one decision, we are giving up on the opposite, and that regret is the same. 

“…” 

He was saying something complicated. If his goal was to confuse me and make me lose focus, then unfortunately for him, the attempt was a failure. The middle school bunny girls dancing on the stage were already doing a much better job at that than he was. 

“No, no, I’m simply saying that whether it be a game or in life, you cannot sum it all up in terms of two sides. Dualism is nothing but an easily-understood fiction. You can’t label things black and white—or, in this case, white and red. Winning and losing, good and evil, truth and lies—these are not things that are in conflict, but rather things that coexist.” 

“It’s impressive that you’re aware of that at your age. It took me almost all of my three years of high school to come to that conclusion.” 

I kept my voice low so that only Rai-kun could hear me and shrugged my shoulders—though with all of the noise, it may have been unnecessary. 

How odd. 

It wasn’t because he was the boss of the casino or because he was a criminal, but there was something about the very basis of who Rai-kun was that made me feel completely incompatible with him. If we had met as fellow students in school, then rather than being opposed to each other, I would say that we’d have nothing to do with each other at all. If we spent three years in the same class all through high school, we’d graduate having never once talked to each other. Was it his politelycondescending tone that irritated me so much? I was surrounded by people who were overly familiar, or if not that, were direct and outspoken. 

Compatibility, huh… 

“White.” 

I declared the color and placed the chip down on the white space. Strangely, the chip that I had been handed was the same color as the ball that was spinning around the roulette wheel—black. 

White and black: Black Hanekawa. 

I supposed that that too was an example of coexistence. Still… 

“Hey, Rai-kun. Having it both ways is nice and all, but it’s no good if it just means both sides fall together. That’s what I think.” 

“Oh? Is that the conclusion you’ve drawn from your additional four years of college, Araragi-san?” 

Rai-kun was also lowering his voice to speak with me now. Three years of high school and four years of college. 

“It’s not a conclusion. It continues to change. It changes in leaps and bounds. What I say and what I do alike.” 

I looked forward to it. 

What would I be doing a year from now? There was an infinite variety, just like the outcome of spinning a roulette. 

“No more bets.” 

Rai-kun returned to his normal volume, or actually, he spoke even more loudly now. He all but sang the words out as he put on the performance of a dealer. 

I know all about it. 

“That’s the cutoff. Please do not place your hands on the table. This game will not allow any additional changes beyond this point. So, if you don’t mind, would you care to explain your reasoning for betting on white?” 

“I didn’t have a reason.” 

Until just before I placed the bet, I had been leaning towards betting on red—or, while I was at it, if I bet on green and won with odds of 1 out of 37, I’d look extremely stylish, and the bunny girls would no doubt be all over me to praise me. I couldn’t deny that some part of my mind had toyed with that thought, which is exactly why gambling is terrifying. 

A person couldn’t help but want to risk it all on a nigh-impossible bet to try and pull victory from the jaws of defeat. And be praised by bunny girls. But no, I couldn’t let the charisma of some middle school girls put me into an overly-competitive mindset. 

I swear that my decision was not based on any association with Black Hanekawa; it was also not based on the color of her panties when we first met. 

If red was blood and black was darkness. 

White was bone. 

The things that I said and did changed constantly. I changed sides, I renovated, I alternated, and sometimes I even retreated—but I wanted to show that no matter what, the bones remained. It didn’t have to do with the original white ball for roulette being made from literal ivory. 

I wanted to show this mature-acting youngster what a big-boned adult looks like. 

... Or, then again, maybe he’d simply influenced my thinking by guiding the conversation, but that would be fine too. If victory and defeat coexist, then whether I won or lost, I would be doing something about what was happening inside of this gymnasium. 

Declaring my bet was a declaration of war. 

“White for bones, huh… Very interesting. That’s a foreign viewpoint for a youngster like me. White bones, huh.” 

“You think that’s the idea of an older person? Not just white bones, but fossils?” 

“It’s more of a monster than a fossil.  I was not wrong to choose this place as a playground—or perhaps it’s better to say that I chose this place as a mine?  In any case, this game of roulette that you chose by chance is truly well suited to you.” 

? 

As I pondered what that could mean, the roulette wheel began to slow down, and the ball did so as well, until they finally impacted each other and the ball began to bounce within the numbered spaces. 

It fell in the space of a certain number of a certain color, and at the same time Rai-kun said 

“You really are a happy-go-lucky person.” 

He said it in such a scathingly-polite voice that I did a double take. 

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1  Visual pun between 化石 (kaseki, “fossil”) and 化物 (bakemono, “monster”). 
2  Pun between 遊び場 (asobiba, “playground”) and 採掘場 (saikutsuba, 
“mine”).