Monogatari Series - Volume 28 - Chapter 1.16

016

Because it left the strongest impression, Kanbaru’s left hand had immediately come to mind, but that wasn’t what I should’ve been reminded of—I never thought this was how I would realize how much that junior of mine, who hadn’t been able to experience a graduation ceremony or an entrance ceremony, weighed on my mind.

But it was about Kanbaru’s juniors.

One year ago—yet another vampire incident had occurred in my hometown, regarding Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster’s visit to Japan.

A vampire legend.

I could also say it was the event that sadly led to the breaking of ties between me and Gaen-san, but it would derail my train of thought if I focused on that, so let’s forget about it for a moment… While swallowing back my tears. Anyway, in my alma mater, Naoetsu High, the members of the girls’ basketball team had been discovered one by one in mummified states.

All the blood had been sucked from their bodies.

Only air flowed through their blood vessels. The mummification made them so dry that it felt like they would crumble at a single touch, and yet they remained alive—as though they were immortal oddities.

Failures of vampirification—that was how Gaen-san had described it.

The ultimate fate of those who could not become thralls.

However, if it hadn’t been for that, then the measures taken against Suicidemaster would not have ended with just deportation… Though there had not been any deaths, the turmoil surrounding the girls’ basketball team would continue to linger, but that was another story. For now, the focal point was that “mummification”.

Mummies created from Suicidemaster’s “failures” or “mistakes”... And, on the other hand, the dried-up corpses of the vampires that had contracted the anti-vampire virus, with Suicidemaster at the center.

At that time, Suicidemaster herself had turned into a mummy through some form of cryptobiosis.

Like a dried rag—a wrung-out rag.

What did that mean? Was I, once again, ignoring the many differences between the two cases to only pick up on the similarities that stood out? Was I merely making simplistic connections through the extent of my own knowledge and conflating it with actual deduction?

Was I just playing at being a detective?

I didn’t know.

However, unlike an invisible curse of a witch or an imperceptible epidemic, this was something I could confirm with my own two eyes.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I’d gotten a good look at the mummies of those high school girls, after all.

And the mummies of the vampires that had not perished were piled up in the “Corpse Castle”—being something like grave-robbing, the idea naturally didn’t feel pleasant to me, but it wasn’t something I could simply avoid doing because of how I felt. “I can’t do it, because I don’t feel well,” could not be forgiven.

To say the same thing as Kagenui-san.

I had come to Europe for work.

…No, that was showing off a little too much. How could I call this work, when I hadn’t even worked a part-time job before? I’d never earned a single yen in my life… Thinking about it now, I found myself having immense respect for Hitagi, who had paid off Oshino’s labor fees all by herself.

If you were living on your own with money from your parents, did that really count as living on your own?

Needless to say, my guilty conscience was hard at work… If I continued to be bothered by it, I might make an error in judgment, and obsessing over the idea that everything was my fault made me into an excessively self-conscious person. But still, I couldn’t bear the possibility that my carelessness from a year ago had led to the spread of the pandemic affecting the endangered species of vampires.

This wasn’t something Ononoki-chan could easily back me up on.

I didn’t want to believe that the turmoil within the girls’ basketball team, a coup d’etat of sorts, for which Kanbaru and Higasa-chan had worked so hard to resolve, had resulted in unintended repercussions in this ruined country.

Getting back at the enemies in Edo by attacking Nagasaki114—but it was nothing like that.

In the first place, this was Europe.

It didn’t matter how many ties Nagasaki had to the Netherlands.

“Okay. If that’s all it is. Basically, you just want to compare the appearance of the vampire mummies entombed in the ‘Corpse Castle’ with the high school girl mummies you saw a year ago? That’s something I don’t even need to confer with onee-chan about. I’ll allow it using my own judgement.”

Saying that, Ononoki-chan assumed a banzai pose—why was it only here that she made these careless promises? What authority did she even have? Oh, I get it. Because Ononoki-chan herself was a corpse, she must not be particularly repulsed by the thought of gravedigging or grave-robbing…

If anything, it was her area of expertise.

Although, because we were dealing with mummies, it felt more like being tomb raiders for the Pyramids—even if they were vampires (or the corpses of them), I felt like a different kind of curse would befall me.

The saying that good deeds should be done quickly didn’t necessarily apply here, but in any case, we returned to the “Corpse Castle” in the “Corpse Kingdom” via Ononoki-chan’s “Unlimited Rulebook”—in the middle of the night, the exterior gave off a different impression, but I didn’t have the time to be impressed by its stateliness.

In spite of my airsickness, I crossed the drawbridge and made for the Corpse Castle’s hall of corpses, ending up before the messy heap of coffins—in its own way, this was also more impressive when viewed at night.

Since they were all coffins of vampires, I found myself imagining the lids of all of those coffins being opened from the inside and the vampires coming out to attack me all at once—even though my body had been strengthened at the moment, there was no way I could survive being mobbed by a horde of true vampires, so I couldn’t keep myself from trembling with fear on the inside.

Of course, there was no electricity in the “Corpse Castle”, so the inside of this room, where the stars couldn’t reach, wasn’t just dark, but pitch-black. But my present condition was such that I was capable of seeing anyway… That’s how it was, when Shinobu was thirteen years old. Moreover, it was like this even when she was asleep.

Maybe it would have been better to wake her up?

No, it wasn’t like she had actually seen the mummies of the high school girls… Since there was no one to fact-check my comparisons, this was not the time for me to bring in my preconceived notions.

In other words, a double-blind trial.

“As you can see, the coffins have been nailed shut with silver nails, so on the off chance that any of the patients came back to life, they wouldn’t be able to leave by themselves.”

That was what Ononoki-chan said, but if they were silver nails, then even I would have a hard time wrenching the lids open—my physical strength may have gone up from my vampirism, but oddities were powerless before those kinds of regulations.

It was time to rely on Ononoki-chan’s power.

“That’s fine with me, but if you end up deciding that the mummies of the high school girls and the remains of the vampires have the same essence, then what does that mean? Since I needed to go to the North Pole to pick onee-chan up at the time, I also never got a chance to see the high school girl mummies—and that means neither did onee-chan. Would that mean that the main offender of this anti-vampire virus pandemic is Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster?”

“No, I don’t think we can simply conclude that… In terms of how strong my suspicion is, I’d say it’s even weaker than the Shinobu mastermind theory.”

After all, she herself was infected.

Like how the allure of “Princess Beauty” had no effect on herself, if Suicidemaster really was the main offender, then she herself should never be infected no matter what.

“It does bother me that, despite a fatality rate of almost one hundred percent, she’s still alive, but it’s clear that that life is about to come to an end. It’s less that she’s living and more that she’s dying. Just that Kagenui-san and the others forcibly prolonged her life partway through—”

“She gave her consent. But also, in the world of witchcraft, there’s also the concept of curses being returned to the caster. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her, oni onii-chan, but—”

“Sengoku Nadeko, right?”

In the heat of the moment, I’d said her full name, but just doing so really hit close to home… In its own way, it was a curse with a lasting effect—the binding spell of a snake. It might last for a lifetime.

But anyway.

“It’s not like I’ve thought of any conclusions in advance. Even if the vampires looked to be in the same condition as the mummies I saw a year ago, that won’t be any more useful in curbing the disease, and it might even lead us to a more tragic, hopeless conclusion. But now that I’ve thought of it, I can’t just go without confirming it.”

“That’s true. No objections to that.”

Ononoki-chan seemed to want to object to some other things, but she quickly put her hands on a nearby coffin—because she was a corpse, she didn’t hold any unnecessary fear towards corpses, but at the same time, it seemed she didn’t hold any unnecessary reverence, either.115

Then, she revealed the contents—and sure enough.

“Um… Huh?”

“‘Huh’? What do you mean by ‘Huh?’, oni onii-chan?”

“I mean, huh, I’m not quite sure…”

I was bewildered.

I’d been able to view the high school girl mummies up close and personal, and I’d even touched the wrist of one to check for its pulse, so I figured I’d be able to spot the differences if there were any… But now that the vampire mummies were right in front of me, I was baffled.

Because they looked completely different.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t differentiate between them, but rather, there was no need to differentiate between them at all.

The high school girl mummies had really been completely mummified, but now, I came to realize that they’d still more or less retained their original form—I see, since those dried-out high school girls’ hearts were still working, and since air still flowed in their blood vessels, it had actually increased their volume.

In comparison, the mummies in these coffins looked like even their blood vessels had deflated, giving off the impression that they’d overall shrunk—I wasn’t sure if this was an acceptable way to word it, but they gave off a stronger impression of being corpses.

Because that impression was so strong, it conversely made it harder for me to see them as corpses.

They seemed more like museum exhibits.

Though the idea of gravedigging was as unpleasant as ever, now that I’d made it this far, I had to look at things calmly—this was clearly different from when I’d seen the mummies of the high school girls.

I couldn’t exactly compare them by lining them up together, so it would have been difficult to point out the differences one by one, but my first impression was that they were so different that that wouldn’t be necessary.

If they were this different, then I couldn’t help but think, was I being tricked or something? Was it a bad idea to make the decision off of this one coffin alone?

“Ah, that’s right. Ononoki-chan, about this vampire’s mummy… Do you happen to have their profile?”

“Skyrumble Triplealps Fondants. No alias. They were about a hundred and twenty years old.”

“Their sex?”

“Male… Ah, I see,”

said Ononoki-chan, stepping away from the coffin she’d wrenched open.

“If you’re going to compare against the mummies of high school girls, you’d need to look at the mummy of a Draculina, or it wouldn’t meet the conditions for a double-blind trial. Moreover, one with the outward appearance of a high school girl… In that case, let me introduce you to Dankebitte III.”

Dankebitte III?

Was she a German vampire…? Though the coffin heap looked as though it had been piled up haphazardly, perhaps it had been properly subdivided into zones based on region, sex, and possibly symptoms shown.

It made it seem all the more like a museum.

“Full name unknown, alias ‘the regretful, grateful vampire’.116 Like a two-star vampire.”

“Do all aliases follow that sort of pattern?”

“A vampire girl with an outward appearance of somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. Although, even if I say ‘girl’, fifteen years old would be way outside your strike zone, oni onii-chan.”

“A curveball like that is a dead ball now that I’m twenty. It’s like a dangerous ball aiming straight for my head.”

“Her true age is about fifty-four years old. There were a lot of expectations for her as part of the new generation of vampires, but she didn’t last long against the illness. As soon as she was infected, the symptoms were acute.”

As she indifferently gave the details as though reciting the contents of an autopsy report, she tore off the lid of said coffin with all her might—even for human skeletons, it was apparently possible to differentiate by sex based on just the skeleton.

So, I’d thought that if I was going to compare with the mummies of high school girls, I should at least look at a female vampire, and it was just as Ononoki-chan had pointed out. However—I wasn’t exactly a researcher of Egyptian history.

In university, my efforts were all concentrated on mathematics.

To be honest, I couldn’t see any differences between Dankebitte III’s mummy and Skyrumble’s mummy… And that meant that I didn’t see any similarities between Dankebitte III and the high school girls.

So my assumption had been completely off-base.

Another misunderstanding, as always.

It was a close call. If I’d made the request to Kagenui-san in order to verify this hypothesis, I would’ve ended up being extremely embarrassed—seeing as I’d gone as far as gravedigging, this conclusion was pretty hard to bear, but obviously, mummies came in all shapes and sizes.

“That’s for sure, I’m a corpse doll, so you could consider me a zombie or a mummy if you wanted to, and there’s even the profoundly mysterious phenomenon of corpse wax that exists in this world. Incidentally, what’s it like if you compare these to the mummy of the ‘monkey’s paw’ owned by Kanbaru Suruga?”

“Hmm… I mean, it was a monkey, so…”

Even if they were also primates, the skeletal differences had to go way beyond just the male-female distinction… Plus, I had never seen the full body of it. Apparently, last summer, Kanbaru had embarked upon a grand adventure with Ougi-kun to assemble the remaining mummy parts… But it probably wasn’t necessary to go on another outing to check with a video call.

“Just in case, how about you check a few more coffins? While we’re at it, we may as well go and completely crush the baseless hypothesis that you came up with, oni onii-chan.”

“When you put it that way, I get the feeling the possibility is already nonexistent… Well, it’s good to not cut corners, anyway. And I might come up with something else along the way.”

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth—and in order to proclaim that something was the truth, we first needed to eliminate everything that was impossible… Process of elimination and proof by contradiction were detective skills that took a surprising amount of time. I would even say they were rather inefficient. But I liked the fact that you could do something about it with enough willpower.

It wasn’t exactly random sampling, but I arbitrarily selected coffins from here and there in the pile, peeled off their lids using Ononoki-chan as something like a crowbar, and checked their contents—when I touched them just in case, there were no thriller-like developments where the coffin turned out to be mysteriously empty, or the mummy suddenly got up.

All of them were dead for sure.

Death from dehydration as a result of the contagion—and even in spite of the mummification, it was clear that they had suffered quite a bit.

“Pretty depressing, isn’t it? Oni onii-chan.”

“Yeah… I’m not trying to whine, but I think I’ve had enough. From what I’ve seen, my idea was completely off-base.”

“Understood. This marks the end of the coffin gacha.”

“That’s a really improper way to put it!”

I may not have been able to tear off the lids, but I was more than capable of helping out with the work of putting them back on.

Splitting up the work with Ononoki-chan, we began to return the coffins to their original states as I contemplated what to do next—well, I wasn’t a detective but a guinea pig, so there wasn’t actually any reason for me to be thinking about this… The ideas of a guinea pig may as well be the ideas of a hamster.117 I wasn’t a specialist, after all.

I was neither a specialist of infectious diseases nor a specialist of oddities.

If anything, I was a specialist of child abuse.

“Come to think of it… I dunno what all those immortal oddity specialists might be arguing about right now, but in the end, what do you plan on doing with all these mummies? It’s not like you can leave them entombed here forever… Since they’re vampires, is it okay to bury them?”

“Mm, right. As an emergency evacuation of sorts, we’ve gathered them all here in one place, but when it comes to funeral services, each country, region, and family has its own style, so we can’t really bundle them all together.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Rather than holding a funeral for them, vampires were monstrous apparitions that were meant to be exterminated, so despite there being coffins, maybe there shouldn’t be any graves…?

As for zombies, they had the image of rising from their graves, but that was less like a memorial service and more like the moment of their birth.

For all the coffins that Kagenui-san and the others had piled up, what were they going to do with them in the end? What would be the best way to hold a memorial service for these vampires?

Cremation? Burial at sea? Burial tree? Sky burial?

Recently, there have even been space burials…

But no matter how beautiful the stars were…

I’d considered what might happen if I were to die overseas, but when it came to these vampires that had actually died…

“That’s exactly why they have their various rituals. Well, actually, a vampire has a strong awareness of their own domain, so they don’t have communities. So it’d be more precise to say that each vampire has their own ritual. Isn’t there anything for you as a thrall? Some sort of custom.”

Did you not hear anything about it from Shinobu-nee-san?

When she said that, there was something that came to mind… I was hesitant to really call it a memorial service, but it was when Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade’s first thrall, Shishirui Seishirou, had perished.

Shinobu.

Had eaten him.

“...So you could say it’s pretty close to a sky burial. After Shishirui Seishirou was revived in the modern era, in order to ensure that he could no longer maintain his sense of self and that his life was completely extinguished from this world, Shinobu took him into herself—into her stomach, and into her heart. It was an energy drain, and it was an act of vampirism, but most importantly, I’d say it was a memorial service.”

“Oh yeah, there was something like that. It’s a little gruesome, but from a cultural standpoint, it wouldn’t be incorrect to call it a memorial service—in particular, with vampires being unreliable, fleeting oddities who would perish in the light of the sun, allowing them to live on by taking them into one’s own body could really be considered an act of compassion.

Compassion—that was probably the case.

At the very least, it hadn’t been out of callousness.

However, I couldn’t forget that her consumption of Shishirui Seishirou had led to some other developments in the future—the exact cause and effect was uncertain, but when Shinobu ate her first thrall, it had had a considerable effect on me, her (former) second thrall, who was paired with her—

“...Then, if Suicidemaster were to die like this, would Shinobu go and eat her corpse?”

“I don’t see why not. They may not exactly have a master-servant relationship, but they were still sworn friends—there’s no reason why she would eat Shishirui Seishirou and not Suicidemaster. After all, even if it’s a custom held for thralls, it was likely a burial rite that was originally inherited from Suicidemaster.”

Was that how it was?

Then, conversely, on the off chance that Shinobu were to die instead, Suicidemaster would memorialize Shinobu by eating her… Especially so, as that vampire that was anorexic with an unbalanced diet would still be capable of eating Shinobu, if nothing else—er, well, it was a bit hard to accept.

I couldn’t help but feel an aversion to it—but I wouldn’t be able to stop it, either.

Though I may have accompanied Shinobu all the way to a place like this, I knew that I couldn’t do anything to interfere in their relationship.

But, now that Suicidemaster had been afflicted with that disease, she wouldn’t be able to consume Shinobu, either… Things were growing more and more complicated.

“It’s fine. There’s no need to worry. If you die right now, oni onii-chan, I’m sure Shinobu-nee-san will eat you up in just the same way.”

“Don’t talk about me dying right now as if it’s a done deal.”

There was nothing fine about that.

Or rather, it was imperative that I did not forget that, in a parallel timeline, the world had been brought to ruin because of that very thing happening.

Considering that meals were converted directly into energy, I felt that I’d come up with a good reason to stop Shinobu from eating Suicidemaster’s carcass.

“Right, there’s no way such a bone-dry Suicidemaster would have any energy left in her. If anything, if Shinobu-nee-san were to eat the carcass of her sworn friend, it would be a surefire way to contract the anti-vampire virus.”

In that case, I had two good reasons to stop her.

They weren’t necessarily the same as a carcass, but the consumption of meat and fish and the like was an exceedingly common way for epidemics to spread.

“Oni onii-chan, what about you? If Shinobu-nee-san were to die, would you be able to eat her?”

“Hold on, I’ve certainly thought before that she was a young girl that was cute enough to eat up, but ultimately that’s only when she’s alive.”

“Oni onii-chan, you should just die. From saying something so dumb.”

“Heh. But was the one struck dumb really me, or was it you, Ononoki-chan?”118

“We’re in the same boat.”

And in the same boat, neither of us will have graves made.

Wrapping things up with that statement, Ononoki-chan finished repairing the coffins—we’d gone and talked about how things were like this or like that, but in the end, each vampire essentially had their own way of burying the dead.

It was just their individuality, and their preference.

Realistically, though, it seemed like the world’s coalition of specialists would simply keep the remains of these rare existences known as vampires as research specimens for analysis… If I couldn’t interject into the “funeral service” of a vampire, then I shouldn’t interject into the “specialty” of a specialist, either.

Yes, yes.

I was an adult, after all.

“Then, as my own form of memorial service, maybe I’ll rearrange this heap of coffins to be a bit more organized. I’ve gotten a lot of practice with Kanbaru’s room, you see.”

“Leave it. This heap is pretty well-designed, for onee-chan.”

Spoken like someone who never cleaned up.

I couldn’t help but imagine that the former butler of the “Corpse Castle” would have fainted at the sight of this ballroom having been turned into a morgue—let’s see, was it Tropicalesque? Tropicalesque Homeawave Dogstrings?

The vampire who’d been killed by “Princess Beauty” in this castle.

…In that case, had Suicidemaster also memorialized him at the time by eating him?

"............”

Then, that meant…?