Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.27

027

Thrall-making. Familiar.

The process of embedding a part of your own body into a doll to make it an alter ego—simply put, that’s all it was, but it was still frightening.

Fear prevailed over amazement.31

Rather than devoting one’s heart and soul, it was more like devoting one’s flesh and blood.32

Since her design was that of a tween girl, I never thought that Ononoki-chan’s appearance was scary, but now that she was speaking to me with one eye hollowed out yet still expressionless as ever, it was kind of horrifying.

It was both expressionless and not expressionless at the same time.

Although, it was probably more normal to be afraid of the little bear doll that was moving bizarrely like a marionette in Ononoki-chan’s palm… No, don’t get confused. A little bear doll with an eyeball embedded in it was plenty scary.

It was scary enough that I could even faint right here.

I’d noticed that the little bear doll had been old and both eyes were missing, but I didn’t expect Ononoki-chan would try to “repair” the missing parts in such a way…

She’d created a bug-eyed monster, hadn’t she.

“A-at this point, we really won’t be able to make an anime out of this… Of course I wouldn’t be able to participate in the ritual.”

“Weren’t you an eyeball fanatic, oni onii-chan? You’re pretending to be scared, but really, your heart’s skipping a beat at this eye socket, isn’t it?”

“Don’t try to push a preference worse than lolicon onto me. Eh? Did it really have to be an eyeball? Isn’t it normal to use something like hair for making an alter ego?”

“Well, I’m not Sun Wukong. That would have been fine, too, but the centerpiece of this mission was to have the familiar guide us, so I figured using an eyeball was a good idea.”33

“That’s not a funny joke. What makes you think you can get a laugh out of me right now?”

“Your viewpoint.”

“It wasn’t my viewpoint that was wrong. It’s my judgment. It was a terrible misjudgment to leave this to you.”

“‘The eyes, huh’34, you say? Well, that’s what you get from just five thousand yen.”

I’d thought for sure that it was a clever line, but it turned out she was cutting corners because of her fees… It was hard to come across a buyer’s remorse as bad as this. As for “the eyes, huh,” she was skimping on even the gags.

Well, in terms of pupils, I suppose holes were naturally a part of eyes…

“Damn, if it was going to be like this, I should’ve crowdfunded one yen from every person in Japan and paid one hundred million yen…”

“Don’t talk about elementary school fantasies as if they’re modern management techniques.”

“But… Ononoki-chan, putting aside gags and fees35, are you really okay? With that eye socket. Is that something you can fix later?”

“I don’t need your concern. I’m a corpse, after all. This level of damage doesn’t even hurt or itch. Feel free to shower me with thunderous applause. Or you can just rain down kisses upon this eye socket.”

“Don’t try to test my affections.”

“Not to mention, I’ve been in a worse state when I played around with Nadekou.”

“Really, what the hell are you doing with Sengoku?”

“It’ll go back to normal if I put it back. In the worst-case scenario, if it doesn’t go back, I can just become an eyepatch character.”

“Don’t try to change your character after all this time! You’re already decked out just as you are, Ononoki-chan!”

“It’s nice to hear that, but don’t think that what you see now is all of me. I had an eyepatch during the war, you see.”

“At the Battle of Waterloo?”

“Non. During the Ononoki War.”

“There was a war with your name on it!?”

They probably wouldn’t teach that in history class.

If it wasn’t an irreversible change, then it made me a little relieved, but from now on, I had to make sure I didn’t make any careless requests to Ononoki-chan.

She wasn’t afraid to hurt herself.

I’d totally forgotten about what I was thinking about… Something about a seat? Or a sheet? Maybe a cooling sheet? I certainly wanted to cool myself down.

Well, to take my eyes off of Ononoki-chan for a second… Not as a gag—literally, take my eyes off of Ononoki-chan.

And look at the little bear doll that was infused with a soul through a horrible, squirming ritual.

Rather than a familiar, it felt more like some sort of talisman… Huh? At some point, it disappeared from Ononoki-chan’s hand?

When I looked, I saw that the little bear doll with the eyeball had jumped off while we were fiercely clashing, and that it had begun lumbering along the lines atop the asphalt of the parking lot… It looked like it was about to fall over, and when I thought it would, it held its head high and regained its balance.

Even its movements were frightening…

It felt like some new life form that human arrogance created from scratch through genetic experimentation… Of course making something like this would be forbidden. I would have to accept whatever punishment Gaen-san threw my way… Whoa, it came this way.

“Shall we give it a name? I might even get attached to it. This is something I just thought of, but how about Koyomi?”

“You should at least give it a name related to Associate Professor Iesumi, or even a name related to yourself.”

“You sure are noisy, Koyomi #2.”

“I’m #2?”

“Make way for Koyomi, Koyomi #2. Otherwise I’ll demote you to #3. The navigation has already begun.”

Huh… So it wasn’t just wandering aimlessly, but already trying to return to its original owner…

At first I wasn’t sure if it would work, but if the flying blanket was headed to Associate Professor Iesumi for revenge on its abuse, then it wouldn’t be strange if this little bear doll had the same latent directionality… Rather, this doll was the only one here that was doing its job as instructed.

Look what Ononoki-chan and I have become.

“But isn’t it bad that it’s going so smoothly? I mean, it’s a little bear doll with an eyeball, walking around in public where anyone can see.”

“It’s going smoothly, so we can gouge out some eyes for the trivial stuff.”

“Gouge out some eyes for the trivial stuff!? You mean turn our eyes away from the trivial stuff, right?”

“I’ll gouge out the eyes of anyone who sees it.”

“I can’t turn my eyes away from that. I’m going to tell Kagenui-san.”

“It’s something onee-chan often says, though. Come on, oni onii-chan, don’t be silly. Just pretend you’re Geppetto.”

“You’re assigning me one of the hardest acts of all… So basically, I have to act like I’m controlling a marionette with piano wire, right?”

“That’s right. The setting is that we’re both new members of a circus club. I skipped a grade, and my specialty is riding the trapeze.”

“If you’re going to pay that much attention to the setting, you should’ve planned things out a little more carefully from the beginning. We’re being way too haphazard.”

“Speaking of haphazard, here. I found some mineral water in the trunk. I guess it’s for emergencies in case of a disaster, but the fact that it’s carbonated water does feel like a sensei from Europe. Hold onto it.”

“? I’m not really thirsty, though?”

“Pour it on the bear if it starts going wild.”

She was pretty hard on it after giving it a name, especially my name… She wasn’t getting attached to it at all.

“Even if we do successfully find her, I’ll feel morally responsible if the bear ends up finishing off that intellectual sensei.”

“You wouldn’t just be morally responsible, you’d be completely responsible!”

Once again, I realized how forbidden this all really was.

Although it already looked that way from the bear doll’s wobbly movements.

Originally, with the size of the little bear doll being what it was, it wasn’t exactly designed to be able to stand upright, let alone walk, and the eyeball attached to its head made its balance even worse…

“Employing a familiar is kind of like taking care of an animal. It’s the owner’s responsibility to take care of it, up to the point of killing it, right?”

“For a moment, I thought you were going to give me a lecture on taking responsibility for life or something, so I was going ‘ugh’ in my head, but Ononoki-chan, that’s not quite right.”

But true, “the weakness being water” was something I’d figured out a little while ago… So this familiar was no exception.

But this weakness didn’t seem to matter to Ononoki-chan, who opened the lid of her own plastic bottle and gulped down the water—she must’ve gotten tired out from the ritual.

“Pwaah. Well, it’s not chilly at all. Lukewarm carbonated water sure is peculiar.”

“Well, it was in the trunk after all… Ononoki-chan, I thought about this when you blew away that father doll, but you’re pretty cold to dolls despite being a doll, huh.”

“Are you saying I’m the one who’s chilly? But I’m not chilly, and I wouldn’t say that.36 It’s not despite being a doll, but because I’m a doll. I don’t even have normal empathy. No naive feelings of hating something similar to me. Did I act in a way that made you misunderstand? A doll is a doll. Isn’t empathizing with dolls the domain of humans? For oni onii-chan, and for the intellectual sensei.”

“……”

I was flustered just by the sight of Ononoki-chan’s eye socket, so it was hard to argue back. Empathy, huh…

“Are those thoughts what causes doll oddities to be formed?”

“Who knows. I don’t think onee-chan and the others put that much thought into bringing me back to life—come on, if you don’t keep up, we’ll lose track of the bear.”

“Ah.”

I had thought it was just wandering around aimlessly, but I realized that the eyeball-attached little bear doll was slowly tottering forward, as if in a game of “Red Light, Green Light”… There was no way it could’ve made it that far at the speed it was waddling, but was it speeding up whenever I didn’t have my eyes on it?

But, if it wasn’t going to move at that speed, then the sun was definitely going to set on us… Especially since its stride was short, and it didn’t seem to be able to fly like the Iie-chan doll.

“Right, I kept its functionality to a minimum. Like I said, it’s a weakened version of the virus. You don’t want it to go out of control or make more companions, right? It doesn’t have any will or any feelings. If you want to think of it like this, it’s basically a radio-controlled car.”

“Then, instead of just following behind it, we should try to keep figuring out where Associate Professor Iesumi disappeared to.”

It was better to think of it like a compass, not a state-of-the-art navigation system… The theory that it began to maneuver at high speeds when we looked away was intriguing, but we wouldn’t be able to recover if we inadvertently let it run off into the wild.

Hm… Huh?

But, where was it going?

If it went that way, it would run into the school building… Was its intelligence suppressed to the point that it couldn’t even avoid walls? In that case, it was a bit pitiful, but when I thought about how this sort of compassion was what put the world in danger, I suffered from a dilemma that I didn’t need to suffer from—and then.

At that point, my cell phone rang.

I received a message. Actually, two messages, at almost the exact same time.

Holding the plastic bottle in my other hand, I pulled out my cell phone and checked the senders of the text messages, making sure not to take my eyes off of the eyeball-attached little bear doll.

It seemed there was good news and bad news—in other words, the senders of the two messages were Hamukai Meniko and Araragi Tsukihi.

When I checked the bad news (in other words, the message from Tsukihi), the star-laden message said that the hike ended with no bodies being found, so she really was going to go visit Nadeko-chan’s house now, because she didn’t want to lie to her best friend.

Sengoku.

I had nothing but apologies to offer you.

And now for the good news—no, based on the content, maybe I should classify this as bad news as well.

“Araragi-chaaan! I finished deciphering that thing you sent meee! Sorry it took me so looong! Full text belooow.”

Even in text, her usual lax attitude came through. But below that, the message read,

“(* It contains some grotesque expressions, so prepare yourseeelf.)”

I couldn’t help but think that the line of text was unusually unsettling for Meniko.

“……”

“What’s the matter? Oni onii-chan. Did you get some kind of weird text?”

In response to Ononoki-chan’s natural question that arose when I suddenly stopped in my tracks…

“It’s a testament,”

I responded frankly.

“What arrived was sensei‘s testament.”

“? ‘An’ya Kokoro‘?”