Monogatari Series - Volume 25 - Chapter 3.01

Chapter Rule- Nomi Rule

001 

Chinou Nomi is a magical girl fighting against a great evil. In this context, you can think of “magical girl” as the kind in children’s television series or anime, and you’d be mostly right. In reality, the magical girl I met was wearing a frivolous and voluminous costume and wielded a fancy magical stick. 

However, she wasn’t the kind of magical girl that appeared on television, and neither was she the kind of magical girl to appear in children-oriented anime. My honest impression was that she was an exceedingly dangerous girl whose existence in itself broke the rules. 

Her age was about that of a middle schooler, so in that sense, she was in the same generation as my two little sisters. However, her upbringing differed quite a bit. Thinking about it now, even from my perspective of having lived through a lot of mayhem ever since that hellish spring break, it’s clear that she lived in an abnormally harsh world. 

Otherwise, she wouldn’t have developed that bizarre personality, although that’s my biased interpretation. Well, for her, who belongs to an organization fighting to save humanity, the life of a guy like me, doing his best just to survive on a daily basis, must be lukewarm in comparison. 

Chinou Nomi—also known as the magical girl Giant Impact, came all the way from Shikoku to our town. The reason for that was certainly not tourism (in the first place, our city had no tourist attractions worth going out of one’s way to visit from so far away), but a part of her training to fight that great evil. 

Her training journey as a magical girl. 

Speaking of anime, that was anime-like too. 

Naturally, I was only able to describe her in such a simple way long after the fact. The me of that time had been constantly toyed with. 

No, if you took it as a ritual and not training, it might not differ much from all my diverse confrontations with oddities that happened at the ruins of the abandoned cram school or at the shrine atop the mountain. However, the magical girl Giant Impact was completely foreign to the gravity of facing such an initiation. 

If I were to describe the escape from a classroom we experienced together as a ritual, that girl would deny it bluntly. She would surely deny my human rights altogether. 

She’d say it was training. 

She’d say I was wrong, swaying her head. “This is a game, Koyomi-san.” Her words revived in my head. 

Revived, like a vampire. 

“It’s obvious you’ll never understand it, even if you spend your whole life trying, but in Shikoku, this is common—a common game. Nothing more than one of the numerous games occurring there.” 

I thought that saying I wouldn’t understand it in my whole life went a bit too far, but if it was really that common, then she and I truly lived in completely different worlds. 

Or rather. 

I should say, the worlds we’ll die in are different. 

In reality, she was raised in a culture where dying was a premise. I described her as being of middle school age, but she most likely didn’t go to middle school and wouldn’t live to reach high school age. 

If I was currently in lukewarm water, then she was inside a pool of sulfuric acid, not water. If I had one foot in the grave, then she was already inside the crematorium. 

If vampires burn due to the hellfire of the Sun. 

Then magical girls burn due to the hellfire of darkness. 

Then, what I won’t understand in my entire life might not be the game’s mechanism or its structure, but Chinou Nomi, that single human. 

Even if I spend my life. 

Even if I die, I won’t comprehend her.