Monogatari Series - Volume 28 - Chapter 1.08

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Of course, I rejected her idea, and it was decided that I would be going with her to Europe. It finally felt like we’d taken a step forward in the conversation. Well, it was really my bad—it was almost cowardly of me to have Shinobu decide on everything while talking about how we were of one mind.

If we were acting as a pair, we had to decide as a pair.

Because there were two of us.

It might not sound all that convincing coming from someone who acted of his own accord to do some crazy things back in high school, but if this was my atonement, then I would need to make up for that part of me as well, or I wouldn’t be able to say this was a new behavioral pattern for me.

This would be our new normal.

For the record, her proposal was not one that completely lacked merit, so instead of just mentioning it was rejected and tabling it there, I figured I’d share it openly—and in all honesty, it did serve as a useful reference in planning our future actions.

The core of the rejected plan was that we would break off our pairing.

According to Shinobu, the biggest reason we were caught in this inescapable double bind was that the King of Oddities was bound to my shadow, aka bondage in the literal sense.

If she wanted to go somewhere, if she wanted to do something, or perhaps if she didn’t want to go somewhere, if she wanted to restrain herself, if she wanted to cross prefectural or even national borders, the two of us essentially had to operate in tandem—avoiding the “Cs” was an exceedingly difficult mission when it came to Shinobu and me.

As such, when Shinobu devised her plan to return to her home country, she had no choice but to invite me—it was most certainly not because she wanted to make me her henchman that she wanted to take me along on this trip that threw caution to the wind.

Well, to use a metaphor, Shinobu was basically a prisoner chained to an iron ball that was shaped like me, and in that sense, it was like she was being requested to limit her behavior, not just during the pandemic, but even in normal times.

Or was it less of a request and more of an order?

If she broke it, she would have to pay a fine. A heartbreaking one.

Opinions were surely divided on which of our restrictions were worse—Kagenui-san, who had already made it to Europe, being “unable to walk on the surface of the Earth”, or ours. Incidentally, Kagenui-san was avoiding that curse by utilizing her shikigami tween girl as a “means of transportation” (though the idea of “utilizing” a “corpse doll” did not have a good ring to it).

As someone who did not want to bring attention to himself, it wasn’t exactly a method of avoidance I could use myself.

However, this time around, while we were putting together the roadmap for our trip to the Acerola Kingdom (temp.), we were being allowed to borrow the services of that “means of transportation”, but alas, the seats could not be reserved individually.

Like a package tour that could only be applied for as a pair—however, just like how you could apply for those package tours by yourself if you paid double the fee (though in reality it’s more like 1.5 times the amount), we weren’t necessarily incapable of canceling our strong bonds (or binds?).

As long as we took on the risk of doing so.

The thought of taking on any more risks made me dizzy, as though I were standing on one leg with my eyes closed, but basically, we would be temporarily breaking off our pairing.

It was a bit of a secret trick, but it wasn’t some crazy rule-breaking method that was suddenly coming up after all this time. We’d done so before in the past as many as twice.

Two prior offenses.

We were outlaws that couldn’t be absolved by paying fines.

Although, rather than us having done so ourselves, it was more like the cancellation was forced onto the two of us… The first time was when we were chased by the “Darkness”.

When my shadow had been swallowed up by that mass of black that wasn’t quite an oddity, the strong binding that should have been impossible to unravel was forcibly broken off—for the sake of metaphor, it was as though a computer had been rebooted, and for a short while, Shinobu and I had the rare experience of acting separately.

From what I heard, she’d even run into Black Hanekawa… Seriously?

It made me jealous.

“You can say you were jealous, but at the time, that cat was not just in her underwear, you know?”

“What a terrible misunderstanding you’re having. That’s not the reason I’m jealous.”

It would be a pain if she pressed me with the question of for what reason I was jealous, so to explain the second example, our pairing had been broken the second time at the hands of Gaen-san.

She had, in fact, gone through the formal procedure of doing so, and though that made it sound like a traditional ritual had been solemnly performed, what actually happened was the scene of a slaughter where my body was hacked into pieces by a Japanese sword.

And though I was hacked to pieces, it was not a hack job.60

I had been given the death penalty.

No matter how strict the pairing was, it would naturally be broken when I died… To use the same computer metaphor, it would be like destroying its motherboard.

It was a miracle that repair was even possible.

In both cases, we’d asked Gaen-san for help with reinstating the pairing, and we’d stayed that way up until now… But wait, what about that time I went to heaven? I definitely did something like dying back then, but apparently the pairing hadn’t actually been broken?

Honestly, that case was so far beyond my understanding that I couldn’t say anything for certain.

Well, they may have been a bit unorthodox, but in any case, all I wanted to say was that it was not the case that there were no back channels available to us if we wanted to break off the pairing we were bound by—if we could accomplish that, it would be possible for Shinobu to return to her home country on her own, and that was the theoretical plan that she had polished while she had been crouching.

As you may have guessed, the goal of her plan was purely for the sake of my own safety. It did not alter the level of risk to Shinobu herself in the slightest—there was no change to the theme of a vampire marching into a danger zone for vampires.

To march into a pandemic alone.

Without even any protective gear.

The amount of risk that was mitigated by reducing the number of people on the move, in this case, was completely mitigated. If anything, it would increase my anxiety.

“There’s no way anyone would allow that. Obviously, I wouldn’t allow it, but there’s no way Gaen-san and Kagenui-san would allow it, either.”

If anything, as a specialist in immortal oddities, Kagenui-san was likely to be the number one person against the idea.

I had no doubt that Shinobu was simply concerned for my safety, but the result was essentially freeing this prisoner from the iron ball she was chained to—if, unlike the prior cases, the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded vampire were to break off the pairing of her own volition, it would cause a crisis that was completely separate from the pandemic.

Perhaps specialists across the world would assemble in response.

It would be dreadful to reunite with Oshino under such a scenario.

Shinobu (and I) were afforded protection not for the reason that she had been rehabilitated, but for no other reason that Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade had been rendered powerless and deemed of little importance.

And thus, a golden-haired young girl of little importance.

Kagenui-san would probably be overjoyed at the revival of the immortal oddity, and move to mercilessly pulverize her—I doubt she would listen to any of our excuses.

Undead men tell no tales.61

And if we were to reach that point, it was unlikely that the onee-san that knew everything would be all that willing to restore the pairing that we’d broken.

I don’t know the two of you at all, was probably what she would say.

We’d never be able to regain our footing if we heard something like that from Gaen-san.

“I see… I did not consider things from that aspect. My imagination went only as far as the scene of hacking you to pieces with the Demon Blade ‘Kokorowatari’.”

“It ended up being a huge disaster when you did that last time, didn’t it?”

Though it did allow me to meet “Princess Beauty” in heaven.

After recalling it for a bit, I decided I probably wanted to avoid meeting “her” a second time… Shinobu wasn’t necessarily an idiot, but as someone who was once the strongest, greatest oddity, it seemed she wasn’t really suited to coming up with plans.

She would end up resorting to plans involving brute force, befitting her family name of Oshino.62

Well, the root of the Oshino family name, Oshino Meme, was not at all the type to use brute force, so this wordplay wasn’t really valid—but really, what sort of plan might Oshino come up with at a time like this?

How would he find a way to keep the balance and maintain neutrality?

“That Hawaiian-shirt brat was always carrying a high level of risk, even before the pandemic, was he not? I do not know if he had any underlying conditions, but if he lived such an unhealthy and slovenly lifestyle, he would surely catch some other disease.”

Perhaps Shinobu was recalling the short time she had spent bound, not to my shadow, but to the ruins of the cram school that Oshino had made his headquarters, as she spat those words with a bitter expression—I had never once heard her speak of those memories fondly, had I.

If being bound to my shadow was preferable, what sort of glamping had Oshino been doing in those ruins?

But, some other disease, huh?

“They say that, once hand-washing and masks were fully enforced, it resulted in a lower incidence of the flu, too… On the other hand, if you were like Hanekawa in an area that was already in dangerous conflict even in normal times, you would have to prioritize the more pressing matter of evacuation over disease control.”

If you were unwilling to go to the hospital for a serious illness because you were afraid of closeness, then that was putting the cart before the horse, and something that should be avoided just as much as closeness. And, in much the same way, even if Shinobu wanted to cancel our pairing because she wanted to visit her sworn friend no matter what, it was not something I could consent to.

“However, I get how you feel. You want to rush in headfirst without considering the risk to yourself—”

She had miscalculated the level of risk just a little bit, but still, I understood. Her feelings, and her resolve.

And her spirit.

Unlike me, she was not afraid of a high level of risk to herself. And, since it was even more dangerous for her than it was to me, I ultimately found it necessary to accompany her, if only for the sake of keeping her from making any rash decisions—I had to think more proactively, instead of just leaving everything up to her.

Of course, it wasn’t like I was all that careful myself, but still, it should be a decent tug-of-war between Shinobu’s gung-ho attitude and my timidness.

There was no way I would allow these bonds to be split.

For the rest of time.

“In that case, we had better not keep Ononoki-chan waiting and let her know our decision. We can borrow her wisdom, too. Three heads are better than two, right?”

Of course, putting three heads together would create a close-contact situation before we could produce any results, but, well, two of those three were not even human, and the remaining one (aka me) was not necessarily human in the strictest sense, either.63

“Hmm. Could that corpse really come up with a good idea? She is a power-type character even more than I am, and she is a shikigami that was ousted from this house after performing some preposterous actions, is she not?”

You two sure were on bad terms.

You didn’t really have to make such a disgusted face.

“But if we don’t rely on Ononoki-chan, the trip itself will become an issue, y’know. We’ll need to bow our heads to her at least once, so we may as well get it out of the way early on…”

“I will need to bow my head…? Me…? To that corpse girl…?”

Grr, growled Shinobu.

It wasn’t so bad that she had to grind her teeth to the point of breaking her fangs… Despite her fall from King of Oddities to a golden-haired loli slave, it seemed her pride was as high as ever, though even that depended on the situation.

“It would really make it easier for me if you two could just chat it up and get along.”

“I do not care one bit about the guiding principles of your harem.”

“But really, I don’t really think anything about bowing my head to her, either.”

“That is something that gives me pause. It sounds to me as though you are lacking in not just your pride, but your sincerity, as well.”

Apologize for what you are lacking, she said to me.

Then, I would do as she said.

Speaking of which, there had been a time when I’d prostrated myself in order to borrow her demon blade.

“However, before we are to head downstairs, I think we should carry out our doping first. I would like to raise the age with which I present myself and make sure I have taken a position above that tween girl before I bow my head to her, or it will be a stain on my reputation.”

“I think being that petty would be a bigger stain on your reputation… You’ll just be making a fool of yourself.64 But I agree that we should do the bloodsucking first.”

It was how I would express, without using words, my resolve to cling to Ononoki-chan’s “Unlimited Rulebook”—though it was more like expressing the resolve to throw away the steering wheel during a game of chicken, but if I didn’t go that far, there was the chance that the tween girl with the professional mindset could talk me out of it.

The bloodsucking itself was something that occurred on a regular basis, so no special preparations were needed—after all, if I didn’t offer my blood from time to time, Shinobu would simply starve to death. In a sense, though it wasn’t the same as the gourmet Suicidemaster, Shinobu also had a pretty unbalanced diet.

The bite marks that had been left in the back of my neck would become the route taken by Shinobu’s bloodsucking (or, my blood donation to her)—so I pulled the clothes off of my upper body.

“I can just as easily suck your blood without you so provocatively stripping half-naked… ‘Tis an unnecessary fanservice scene.”

As she said that, she climbed onto my lap. For the sake of her “meal”, we could not avoid getting into a close-contact position—using partitions here would be unthinkable.

It was the same old routine as always.

The difference was the quantity of blood.

If I wanted to survive Ononoki-chan’s mighty leap, the tiny bit of immortality I possessed normally would lead to me being torn to shreds in the stratosphere. Because it was like clinging to a rocket, after all.

We had to boost it even further.

Because we overdid it in the past, it had become a huge ordeal towards the end of my high school years, and after learning my lesson and becoming a university student, we hadn’t performed any excess bloodsucking as far as I could remember. However, instead of trying to blindly avoid it, perhaps it was necessary to make an effort to control my constitution. Similar to how we would approach the coronavirus.

And as that immortality was boosted, the age that Shinobu appeared to be also changed.

When the age of her appearance changed, so too did her mental age—if she were to suck my blood dry without leaving a drop behind, then she would revert to her best condition of twenty-seven-years-old, the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded vampire. But of course, that would be going too far. It was a bit trivial, but one problem was that I would end up dying.

“It’s a risky kind of rehydration, huh. By the way, when we went into battle with Ononoki-chan, you went into a tracksuit mode that was around eighteen years old, right?”

By tracksuit mode, she had worn Karen’s fashion with a ponytail. Just before, I had gotten into the common situation of getting beaten up by Karen, and it apparently had a marked effect on Shinobu, who had been linked to me.

Marked, or perhaps, marked for defeat.65

“That does sound good. In that mode, both you and I should be able to withstand any high-altitude, high-speed movement. Not to mention, if there are to be any further anime adaptations, there will be no need for a new character design.”

“Is there any point in that level of forethought?”

Even if it were to happen, it would be ten or even twenty years into the future.

Didn’t you know how many volumes there were up to now?

“And I can’t even begin to imagine what the pandemic will be like in ten or twenty years from now.”

“Indeed. Humanity could even die out by then.”

“It’s terrifying that that might actually be a real possibility.”

If so, this novel was going to end up being a real happy-go-lucky one.

“Just to list them all for reference, we have had the ten-year-old mode with the bob cut, the twelve-year-old mode with long hair, and the seventeen-year-old mode with twintails.”

“Wasn’t there also a thirteen-year-old mode? Y’know, when you had braids and glasses to imitate Hanekawa. We can also call it middle schooler mode.”

“Right, right. How nostalgic.”

We’d gotten all excited over a weird topic.

Well, that was how things ended up when you’ve known someone for a long time.

It wasn’t as though we could simply pick and choose, but as expected, the matter of what level we should boost ourselves to was a difficult one. If we simply wanted to guarantee our safety during the flight, then there likely wouldn’t be any problem with the original suggestion of the eighteen-year-old mode, but depending on what we might encounter after we landed, it probably wasn’t something we should be deciding on so quickly.

If the level of vampirism was too low, we wouldn’t be able to avoid the risk of the novel coronavirus. But if it was too high, we’d be unable to defend against the pandemic that was targeting vampires.

Furthermore, this was for the sake of helping Kagenui-san with her work, and there was no point if we were completely powerless—though we weren’t professionals, I still wanted to put forth every effort when helping.

“Since I’m twenty years old now, maybe you should match with me and become twenty years old yourself. I bet we’d look pretty attractive. Or photogenic.”66

“If we boost it that far, we shall be exterminated by that Kagenui before we can even be exposed to the oddity pandemic. I am sure part of why they turned a blind eye to us back then was because I had designed myself to appear as a teenager. Eighteen years old is just barely safe.”

She made it sound more like camouflage.

Or was it like playing dead?67

Seeing as Shinobu’s true age was six hundred years old, it wasn’t so much deflating her age as it was inflating a red tide68—in reference to the innumerable dead plankton in the water.

“We could also go with the idea of filling in the gaps. We still haven’t seen the eleven-year-old and fourteen-year-old forms… And, for the rest of the teenage years, there’s also the sixteen-year-old and nineteen-year-old forms.”

My completionist tendency was starting to show, but it wasn’t really useful for something like that to manifest itself right now. Well, taking into account the various conditions, such as Shinobu’s wish to be older than Ononoki-chan (in appearance), the most legitimate conclusion would be greater than twelve years old but less than fourteen years old.

It would be legitimate to wonder what made that conclusion legitimate at all, but regardless, I figured we could take the average and go with thirteen years old.

It was a difference of five years.

From eight years old to thirteen years old—those five years were a tremendous length of time for a little girl.

And with that, it should minimize the side effects of the vampirism on my part—I hoped. If we were to repeat this many times, it would certainly not be the case, but the number was such that we could at least claim to have given consideration to the matter.

“Thirteen years old. It’s kind of a vague, half-baked age, but it feels like it’ll be barely within acceptable limits, as a temporary measure.”

“Saying that thirteen years old is barely within acceptable limits is not half-baked—at this point, it’s panaino!”69

With that, Shinobu opened her mouth wide and sunk her fangs into the back of my neck—this blood donation was neither non-essential nor non-urgent.