Monogatari Series - Volume 25 - Chapter 9.02

002 

Without much room to make a decision, I broke into a run down the right path. Since the foolish option of cowering in place was out of the question, then I was convinced that this was the wisest path out of the three-way intersection. 

However, this judgment seemed to go against common sense. Instinctively, it did not seem like a particularly preferable way to go. The reason being that, the one approaching me from the right path, Tamamo-chan, was the unique member of the three-man cell of rangers that was very obviously and very visibly brandishing weapons. 

In both hands, she was wielding knives unbefitting of her physique, that you could mistake for hatchets or even axes. 

Normally, I’d say you’d be crazy to deliberately choose such a terrifying path that involved encountering such a terrifying girl, but right now, you could hardly call this a normal situation—with that in mind, I placed a great amount of importance on the fact that Tamamochan did not seem used to those two knives of hers. 

Indeed, those knives looked truly brutal. 

However, when I focused, not on her hands, but on her legs. 

Tamamo-chan’s movements seemed extremely erratic—whether you described it as a staggering gait, or as if she were a fawn that had just been born, she was walking as if she were drunk, swaying back and forth as she moved forward, like Yajirobe. 

She was surely being swung around by the weight of her knives, which was why she couldn’t walk straight. It was as the saying went: too much was as bad as too little. It would be like a beginner that thought, “The most expensive one is obviously the best one”, and ended up buying a computer that was uselessly high-spec. 

By not being fooled by her intimidating appearance, seeing through her true nature, and deliberately rushing down the path that looked the most dangerous—I surely resembled a hero that had managed to overcome a great number of battles. 

Speaking of her appearance, Tamamo-chan, like a normal high schooler, was wearing a track suit. However, very much unlike a normal high schooler, her track suit was in tatters—I assumed that she was so unused to her knives that she ended up cutting her own clothes (and her cropped hairstyle was probably for the same reason), but what attracted my attention was not the fact that her track suit was in tatters, but that the design of her track suit was the bloomers kind—no, it’s not that I was focusing on her bloomers. 

Even if she was a high school girl, just what era was this high school girl from?—I happened to be someone who was incredibly strongwilled against those younger than me, but with that in mind, I couldn’t feel the intensity of a veteran emanating from Tamamo-chan at all, let alone the sense that she’d had many battles’ worth of experience… Really, bloomers? 

If you looked down at me from a bird’s-eye point of view, it might have looked as if I’d simply made a beeline for a high school girl in bloomers, which gave off a pretty problematic impression, but it wasn’t like I was planning to tackle her slim body just like that—not in the slightest. Even if she wasn’t used to them, knives were still knives. If we ended up grappling, then I wouldn’t necessarily be safe from getting slashed even at random—I couldn’t take that risk. Unlike when I was attacked at this intersection over spring break, I was no longer immortal now. 

I had no intention of sparing any effort in escaping from this predicament I’d fallen into, but neither did I plan to engage in battle with a high school girl that had undergone special training—the reason I went with this forward-bent dash was not in order to fight, but in order to avoid fighting. 

It was a stylish act of escapism. 

As Tamamo-chan’s footsteps unsteadily tottered left and right, I was planning on quickly slipping past around her. Doing so shouldn’t necessarily be impossible to achieve… If I made sure to stay wary of the edges of the knives, it should actually be rather easy. 

If a giant like Dramaturgy had been standing in my way, then there wouldn’t have been an opening on this straight road to slip past, but as for Tamamo-chan, she was much more petite than I was, and she was walking while colliding with the walls beside her, like some sort of automatic vacuum cleaner. With each collision, she’d change her trajectory, all the while drawing closer to me—if so, then when she tottered to the right, then it was simply a matter of heading for the left. 

Though it was a road, there was still width to it. That was all it was. “Swaaaaay… sway… sway.” 

See, even Tamamo-chan herself was murmuring her own onomatopoeia for how she tottered back and forth—that was proof that those massive weapons were too much for her. Together, those two knives surely weighed even more than Tamamo-chan herself, so it was a simple matter of universal gravitation—however, what I was making was a complete misunderstanding. 

And it wasn’t that those boorish knives weren’t all that heavy. 

It was that her weapons weren’t too much for her at all—if there was something that was too much for her, it would be her madness.  

“Sw! Ay!” 

Though it should have been onomatopoeia to express her precarious tottering, she’d suddenly shrieked it at full force—and all of a sudden, Tamamo-chan moved deftly, leaping in front of me where I’d been trying to slip past her. 

She’d moved like she was in a sidestepping exercise test. No, it was like teleportation. 

She was actually using the weight of the knives and her own lightness to her advantage. 

She came after me as if she were falling over against the wall on my side—if I had turned my eyes away for an instant in fear of the knives’ sharpness, I would absolutely have gotten stabbed right then. 

I twisted backwards to dodge the blades. If Tamamo-chan’s movements were from a sidestepping exercise test, then my movements would be the exercise in which you “turned your torso to elongate your spine”—it wasn’t the kind of stretch you wanted to suddenly do after dashing at full force, and doing so would absolutely hurt your lower back, but I couldn’t just let my heart get stabbed in order to preserve my lower back. 

Your back couldn’t replace your internal organs. 

As a result, the knife in her right hand stabbed into a telephone pole in my place. The knife went in deep, up to the hilt, into the pole—eh? No way, were telephone poles constructed out of something that could be stabbed into like that? 

Although I’d never once thought about what the inside of a telephone pole was made up of… 

“I got you now—” 

With an absent-minded, practically monotonous tone of voice, 

Tamamo-chan spoke as if the telephone pole had been her target from 

the beginning—in fact, she hadn’t once turned to look at me, who’d stopped in place. She was still facing away from me. 

“My—name is, Saijou Tamamo-chan. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes. Saisaisaisaisaisaisaijou Tamamo, Saijou Tamamo. Yesyesyesyes. I am Tamamo. Tamamo I am.” “……” 

Yikes. What was with this girl? 

Had I, perhaps, taken the worst possible path I could’ve taken? 

Putting aside her two knives… Had Saijou Tamamo actually been someone to properly fear? 

“Wait… Hold on. Tamamo-chan. Let’s talk.” 

“Right, let’s talk killing. Kill talking. Killer king. King is me. No. 

King Hagihara is senpai—I am.” Wow. 

Hohey. 

And, while I could only think of such a dull thing to say (if anything, I was probably saying “pawn”  instead), Tamamo-chan pulled her knife out of the telephone pole with a twisting motion—and that “pulling motion” became one and the same as a “motion to stab me”. 

Like something straight out of the art of iai,  she made to slash at me in a single movement. 

If she had been using a Japanese sword, then perhaps it could have been considered the kesagiri motion, but with that boorish knife of hers, it felt more like she was chopping wood. 

To be honest, rather than the blades themselves, I was more afraid of her ability to slash at me without hesitation—without any emotion whatsoever, she was moving to cut me in half as if it were as natural as breathing. 

It wasn’t even bending backwards—I ended up doing some form of backflip in order to dodge that knife. You might think that a dodge like 

that was trying too hard to be cool, and that it was exaggerated and irrational, but in order to face Tamamo-chan, who moved in eccentric ways, I had no choice to use eccentric movements as well. 

Though I’d succeeded in dodging her attack, I messed up my landing. So if I wanted to score myself, I’d give it 50 points out of 100, but at this point it wasn’t all that different from 0 points—if the saying went 50 of one and half of 100 of the other, this was more like 50 of one and 0 of the other. I may as well come up with a new saying that went, if you only go halfway, that’s basically the same as standing still—but was I really busying myself with coming up with a new saying here? 

“Swaaaaay, sway, sway. Swayswayswayswaysway—” 

Of course, I’d collapsed onto the asphalt by then (since I’d messed up a backflip, I was more than fortunate that I didn’t break my neck), so I’d expected either of her two knives to come swinging down at me next, but Tamamo-chan’s next attack was, for some reason, directed at the telephone pole again. 

Did she have some sort of grudge against the pole? Jeez, this girl. 

Taking the hilt of her knife, she loudly and violently bashed it into the telephone pole again and again. 

… I didn’t understand the meaning behind her actions, but I began to think that I might be able to slip around her like this, and slowly started to crawl away—and just then, Tamamo-chan turned her eyes towards me. 

No, her eyes weren’t facing me at all. If anything, they were just wide open.  

Though her head had turned towards me, her line of sight was following a completely different vector, and the movements of her legs and her arms were all over the place. Her form lacked any sense or reason, but somehow, the tip of her knife was extremely accurate in heading for me. 

It seemed that, like a sensor, she acted on reflex to anything that moved—that must have been why, instead of going for me on the ground, she’d gone for the telephone pole that was wavering unsteadily, its balance having been disrupted. 

My goodness. 

To think that lying on the ground and not getting back up was actually the right thing to do. 

In my crawling position, I had no other way to dodge but to roll over on the ground—my choices were getting more and more limited, and my survival skills were becoming more and more pathetic. 

This time, the knife that swung down towards me stabbed into the asphalt. 

Was this world made out of tofu? 

However, the tofu this time was on my side. In other words, the weight of the knife had actually turned against Tamamo-chan—she was unable to pull the knife that had gotten stuck vertically into the ground. 

“One knife is enough.” 

However, Tamamo-chan was not just quick in her movements but also in giving up. Without exerting any more effort in trying to pull it out, she let go of the knife’s hilt, and switched over to the task of killing me using her remaining knife—it was true that, in order to kill me, a single knife would be sufficient (although the joke of one knife being enough was unfortunately very funny.  I felt like I wanted to use it myself in the future, if I managed to survive). 

However, that opening had given me enough time to stand back up. It may sound like a bit of a surprise to hear this, but I was, at the very least, capable of getting back up. 

Of course, even that movement of standing up made Tamamo-chan react. 

As if she were being magnetically drawn in, she instantaneously leapt towards my chest. I wouldn’t deny the fact that every man more or less had the desire for a girl in an exposed track suit to leap towards his chest, but when that girl was carrying knives, the story changed quite a bit—Tamamo-chan was rather like a Venus flytrap, as she wouldn’t react if I didn’t move, but not moving when a knife was pointed at you was effectively impossible. 

However, since I’d managed to understand that property of hers, it didn’t seem right to turn my back on Tamamo-chan and run away from her at full speed—the faster I moved, she was sure to move even faster. 

The result ended up being that I stood in the same place and evaded Tamamo-chan’s knife with the smallest possible movement—of course, performing such a boxer-like achievement was pretty much impossible for a mere high schooler like me, so my uniform slowly began to tear into pieces. My outfit was turning into a matching set with Tamamo-chan’s. It almost looked like we were good friends. What could we do as a pair? 

Rather than dodging by the skin of my teeth, I was dodging by the skin of my neck. 

If there was some small salvation in all of this, it would be that her attacks were only coming from her knife—she wasn’t hitting me with her bare hand or kicking me with her gym shoes. Without any headbutting or elbowing, either, she fully stuck to her fencing style. 

In a way, her apparent pathological obsession with knives seemed to be my best chance to win—a chance to win against that madness of hers.  

As long as I kept my eyes on her knife, I could just barely dodge it. 

After that hellish spring break, I’d forfeited that immortal vampirism that I’d possessed, but its vestiges still obstinately 

remained in me—in the human known as Araragi Koyomi, a demon had settled in. 

Though my immortal powers were unreliable, I had confidence in my eyesight. 

And my kinetic vision was no exception. 

Tamamo-chan’s illogical, irregular, and erratic movements gave her a form that was incredibly difficult to read, but fortunately, I was an extreme amateur when it came to martial arts, which meant that I wasn’t led along by the preconceptions of those sorts of formalities. 

When she was waving both knives around, it felt like I absolutely couldn’t take my eyes off for even a second, but with one knife, I had some leeway—and I could use that “leeway” in order to search for my next escape route. 

“Shred shred—shred shred—shredded wheat.” 

However, despite none of her repeated attacks landing a single hit, it seemed Tamamo-chan didn’t feel any stress at all. Since she was a soldier, so to speak, I would have preferred if she did get irritated, and perhaps even get bored with trying to kill an amateur like me… If she would just get irritated, then perhaps that could even serve as a weak point for me… 

Why wouldn’t she get irritated? 

“Shredded wheat, put it in a bag. Take the bag and cut it up. Cut it up and the insides spill out. Spill out, like your insides—” 

… It sounded like she was singing some insane cursed nursery rhyme, but she wasn’t irritated at all—however, even if she wasn’t irritated, it seemed Tamamo-chan actually found it surprising. 

Surprising why I hadn’t gotten “shredded” yet. 

Well, of course, there was no way she could know that I was using my vampire sight to dodge her knife—and even if I did tell her, I doubted she’d be able to understand. In the first place, it was hard to believe that a person would so relentlessly try to cut up a regular human being as if doing papercraft, let alone a vampire… 

“If your belly hurts, then I’ll rub it—rub rub stab stab—swaaaaay, swaysway.” 

I was the one who’d suggested we talk, but I should probably stop being led astray by Tamamo-chan’s words (singing) now… In any case, I was going to just do my best to keep my eyes on the knife. 

And as I thought so, I realized. 

I’d assumed in the beginning that my eyes had gotten used to it, but that wasn’t it at all—Tamamo-chan’s movements that had been keen in all senses of the word had started to slow down in pace, little by little. 

Through my eyesight, I noticed her fatigue. 

Of course, a swinging motion was a great way to utilize the weight of the knife for the greatest effect, but it wasn’t like she had arms the size of logs like Dramaturgy had—they were thin arms that were like withered trees. 

Being eccentric, erratic, and unexpected had a nice ring to it (or did it?), but there was no way that keeping up those illogical and inefficient movements wouldn’t tire her out physically. All right! By managing to hold out, I earned another opportunity—as soon as her movements got just a bit slower, I would find the right timing and dash away at full speed… And then. 

As soon as I’d spotted a faint glimmer of hope together with Tamamo-chan’s fatigue, I’d lost sight of something else in turn—the knife, that I should have been following with my eyes without a single blink, suddenly disappeared from my field of vision. 

“I might swish around and I might slash around—if you cut it close, then it’ll be too close to call—and then, I my kill around—” 

With her gaze fixed on who knows where, she thrust her nowempty right hand in a V sign into the air, twisted her torso, raised her right foot behind her, stood on her left foot on tiptoes, and, with her left hand— 

Tamamo-chan’s left hand was spun behind her back. 

Her body’s incoherent movements seemed way too erratic to just be a simple misdirection, but Tamamo-chan should have been holding her knife in that hand… Aha, so was she trying to confuse me for a moment by hiding her knife in my blind spot? But there was no use. As soon as she took the knife out of my blind spot, I’d be able to keep following it. 

Or perhaps, was she switching the knife over from her tired left arm to her unused right arm behind her back—but that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. 

I should have been paying more attention to her nursery rhymes. 

I my kill around— 

It wasn’t close to proper English grammar in the slightest, but she had done exactly as she’d said—before she could tear me to shreds, she went around and stabbed herself in the back. 

And, after piercing through her flimsy torso that was barely there, the tip of the knife protruded out of Tamamo-chan’s stomach—and pierced straight into my stomach. 

It plunged right in. And then it tore me to shreds. 

With the edge of the knife, she carved a Z into my stomach. Well, no, if the letter carved into my stomach was a Z, then she would be carving an S into her own stomach—in any case, she was cutting up her own bowels along with mine. 

It seemed that for her, the saying, “Your back couldn’t replace your internal organs”, had no meaning. 

Through her own back, she’d pierced my guts. 

If my belly hurts, she’ll stab it. 

It wasn’t that she was going to bring the knife out from the blind spot behind her, but that she was going to bring the knife out through her stomach—and not even a vampire’s eyesight would be able to see that. 

No. I’d seen the outcome of this battle from the beginning. I’d seen my own death, too. 

The moment I chose the path on the right— 

“… But, wait a minute, aren’t you gonna die, too? What’s going on with your spine?” 

“It’s fiiine. When people die, it’s not because their spine breaks, it’s because their heart breaks.” 

Feeling just the slightest bit happy that I was able to hold a proper conversation with this girl in bloomers at the very end, then with a snip, with a snap, I had no other choice but to die here. 
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3  Araragi switches 凶器 (kyouki, “weapon”) with 狂気 (kyouki, “madness”). 
4  Araragi associates the sound he made to 歩兵 (hohei, “pawn”). 
5  Iaido, or iai, is a Japanese martial art that emphasizes being aware and capable of quickly drawing the sword and responding to a sudden attack. 
6  Araragi compares 向いて (muite, “facing”) with 剥いて (muite, “wide open”). 
7  The words ナイフ (naifu, “knife”) and イナッフ (inaffu, “enough”) have somewhat similar pronunciations. 
8  勝機 (shouki, “chance to win”) is pronounced the same way as 正気 (shouki, “sanity”), which runs counter to “madness”.