Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.16

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Its method was more primitive and strong-handed than I was thinking.

The Iie-chan doll did not puncture my New Beetle’s tires knowing that it was my car. Rather, it punctured the tires of every car in the parking lot—an indiscriminate brute force operation.

I hadn’t checked, but maybe even bicycles had suffered the same fate?

It wasn’t the work of an intellectual criminal.

However, I could still feel its growth in how it limited the destruction to only the tires—it certainly wasn’t as if the Iie-chan doll had grown desperate and was rampaging in hysterics.

It was sloppy, but it was focused.

But still, in order to slash open the rubber of a car’s tires, I felt like it would take more force than twisting the rods of an iron cage… Could it be growing in terms of power on top of its learning ability?

Or, more reasonably, it may have just used the knife—but where did that fruit knife go? Was it being carried around wrapped in that blanket right about now…? Like how vicious criminals carried their blades.

Anyway, after my New Beetle was destroyed, I promptly hotwired the neighboring car and accelerated straight to full throttle—or not. No such development occurred. It ended without me having to become a car thief… But this was no longer the time to be talking about destroying evidence and other small things.

I was no longer in a situation that could be easily contained without asking for help from Gaen-san—now that a moving doll and a flying blanket had appeared, which could only be construed as oddities, and a large-scale destructive act (involving all the residents of this apartment building) had been carried out at this open parking lot, not behind closed doors.

It hadn’t caused a commotion just yet, but there could have been a witness. And even if I wanted to use Shinobu’s matter-creation skill to fix all the car tires, I had no way of knowing what kind of tires they originally had…

As for the casualties…

I’d had my neck strangled and my entire self thrown into a cage, but maybe I would avoid mentioning that… The theory that abused children become abusive parents had been raised by none other than Associate Professor Iesumi herself, but what in the world might happen to a doll that was abused and stabbed in the back by humans?

Did it just run away, or did it opt to get revenge against its “abusive parent” and “murderous parent”—either way, I’d better get out of here, too, for now.

I didn’t want anyone to catch me here and misinterpret this situation as some college student taking pride in their vandalism… But what should I do now?

Move indoors or into a shadow and bring out Shinobu? Make a call to Kanbaru or Ougi-kun and ask for help? That was what I’d thought of while I was still in the cage… But after having been given the runaround by the Iie-chan doll and having my precious car destroyed, I’d cooled off a bit and changed my mind.

It wasn’t that I was so stupefied by the extent of the damage that I lost my motivation… If anything, I felt more and more like I had to do something about it.

And because of that feeling, I thought of a more appropriate person to ask for help than Shinobu, or the Kanbaru/Ougi-kun pair… In my high school days, I’d relied too much on Shinobu to the extent that I’d ended up going to hell, so I should take care not to drag that young girl out as long as there wasn’t a battle about to unfold.

As for Kanbaru and Ougi-kun, while they may be connected to oddities (or even an oddity himself), that didn’t necessarily mean they were professionals… I didn’t want to involve them in a mission where their lives could be in danger. Plus, they’d managed to come this far to the point of having a big senior-junior social—but towards the beginning of the year, the situation had been quite vicious… I didn’t want to disturb them. Kanbaru had her own battles to fight.

So, even while knowing the risk of being rebuked and perhaps even killed for acting of my own accord, it was once again time for me to rely on a professional.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

A doll for a doll… And for an oddity, a specialist.

Ononoki-chan may ultimately be a specialist in immortal oddities, but it was hard to say that the Iie-chan doll was simply a “replacement child” at this point—if you thought of that blanket as a kind of reincarnation of Iie-chan, then it would just barely be included in the area of expertise of that tween girl, right?

Even discounting the risk of being killed, it was honestly not very wise to create a new debt to a professional, so it was a little hard to go to a specialist for help… However, when I realized I would have to rely on Ononoki-chan to act as a bridge to Gaen-san (who’d currently cut contact with me) in order to take care of the mess in the parking lot, I found my resolve.

Then, the next problem.

Where might Ononoki-chan be right now?

I thought I’d been lucky when I didn’t find her riding in the back seat of my car, but now that this happened, I almost wished she would take up permanent residence there. If she wasn’t working, then maybe she’d gone back to Tsukihi’s room by now? If that’s the case, I would have to take public transportation back home—but wait.

What if.

This was a total shot in the dark—but what if she was at the home of her good friend Nadekou, Sengoku Nadeko?