Monogatari Series - Volume 5 - Chapter 6.06

006

Originally I had planned to stay at Sengoku’s house until evening, but her mother came home unexpectedly a little after noon. Apparently there was some sort of trouble at her work. It was no business of mine. Sengoku, however, went into a panic.

“I-I kept it a secret that you were coming over,” she fretted. “Oh… Oh… I’m gonna get scolded. She’s gonna think I’m a pervert, dressed up like this.”

I had no idea what she meant by “pervert” there, but the important point was that she had kept my coming over a secret. There was a world of difference between “not having told” and “secret,” which meant that as far as Sengoku’s mother was concerned, I was “a male neighbor who snuck into the house while she was away.” There didn’t seem to be any way I could explain, so I slipped out of the house without Mrs. Sengoku seeing me, almost like an adulterer.

Luckily, Sengoku had hidden my shoes after I’d left them at the entrance…but I had to wonder if she’d been planning for such an eventuality all along.

Hmph.

I hadn’t planned on getting chased out, or running off, like that─I’d give Sengoku a call later to check up on her─but at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my purity as a boy might have been saved thanks to Mrs. Sengoku’s troubles at work…

It was just a feeling, and a silly one.

Anyway, I suddenly had more free time on my hands.

I wasn’t supposed to be home until evening, so I didn’t want to deal with Tsukihi asking me all sorts of questions if I returned early (I wasn’t in the mood to be laughed at by her once she heard why I was home). Besides, Karen probably wouldn’t be back until late, and if I wanted to verify what Sengoku had said, it’d be better if I waited until both of my sisters were there…

In which case.

“I wasn’t planning on calling until tomorrow…but hey.”

I stopped along the side of the road, beneath a streetlamp that was serving no purpose in the middle of the day, and pulled out my cell phone.

I was dialing a junior of mine at the school I attended, Naoetsu High.

Second-year Suruga Kanbaru.

Enter, stage right!

“I hope she’s not busy… I never can tell with her.”

It picked up on the fourth ring.

“Suruga Kanbaru speaking,” a voice came from the other end. She had a very masculine way of introducing herself. “Major armaments include an accelerator device.”

“I didn’t know you were a cyborg?!”

That made perfect sense!

When you thought about it, she even talked like a robot!

“Hmph. You must be my senior Araragi, judging from your voice and quipping.”

“Sure…”

Why was she still relying on my voice and straight-man ways? Learn how to use the contact list on your phone already.

“Kanbaru, what do you do when someone besides me calls?”

“Heh, not to worry. Very few have this number in the first place, and I can tell them all by their voice and quipping style.”

“…Do you never get to play the straight man?”

“I guess I’m queer through and through.”

“Fair enough.”

Well.

Despite her personality, Suruga Kanbaru was the biggest star in Naoetsu High history…a miracle sportswoman who’d led our flagging basketball team to the national finals. She was incredibly fast (rumored to run the fifty-meter dash in under five seconds) and used that speed to dominate the court and captivate crowds. Even now, after resigning as captain of the team a little early due to delicate circumstances, she was as popular as ever─and probably couldn’t afford to give her number out to just anyone.

The dilemma of stardom.

Maybe I ought to understand?

But stardom aside, as you might guess from the fact that she didn’t know how to use her phone’s contact list, Kanbaru wasn’t very good with tech. I doubted she made many calls on her end.

“Kanbaru, are you busy right now?”

“That is a vapid question. The debt of gratitude I owe you is so great that any request from you comes before all else. For instance, even if I were in the midst of a struggle to save the world, I’d rush to your side if you called for me, the world be damned.”

“………”

As gallant as ever…but could she please put the world first and me second? I mean, without the world, I’d die too.

“Actually, I’m not ‘calling for’ you. Can I just come to you?”

“What is this?”

“Um…you’re home now, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ah… Just a second. I’ll get naked right away.”

“Why?!”

Since when is that a prerequisite for chatting?!

Who starts taking their clothes off in the middle of a call?

“What are you saying? It’s none other than you that I’m conversing with. Even if we’re only on the phone, simple etiquette demands that I disrobe.”

“Don’t make it sound like I’m the one who’s clueless! And you’re always looking for an excuse to strip!”

This was a new format, though.

With less and less rhyme or reason.

After Kanbaru got excited over the word “rebuff” the other day, I was seriously beginning to worry about her, but it looked like she’d gone and crossed the line.

“But,” she objected, “if I don’t seize every opportunity to get naked, how will I ever drive home that I’m a pervert?”

“You want to?!”

“Some heartless people out there are accusing me of being all talk and not being that pervy after all, and it’s been getting on my nerves. I can’t think of anything worse a person might say about me.”

“Nobody’s saying that!”

And, you know, don’t let such a thing get on your nerves!

Save your anger for bigger stuff!

“I act like a pervert when I’ve never been with a man,” Kanbaru admitted, “so I can’t blame people for being suspicious. But it’s not my fault, is it, that I don’t have a partner.”

“You really want me to answer that?!”

“Of course, they don’t know that it’s just a trifling detail and only a matter of time, since I now have a comrade as illustrious as yourself.”

“Don’t include me in your team of perverts!”

Especially not as some kind of forerunner!

There’s not a single aspect of perversion where I come out ahead of her!

“Just keep your clothes on,” I advised her.

“You wish, but aren’t you underestimating my speed? I’m already naked, sir.”

“Sir?!”

Too fast!!

Ah, right, during the summer she wore nothing but undies around the house… All she had to do was slip off two items, so I guess it wasn’t unbelievable… Wait, she was pretty much naked before she even started!

“Kanbaru, your level of perversion is beginning to exceed what I can handle!”

“Huh, how unlike my revered senior. I’m in my own room, at home. Shouldn’t I feel free to dress or undress as I see fit?”

“Hmph.”

She had a point… Her house rules were her domain.

At the Araragi residence too, chilling in just our underwear after taking a bath was considered okay, and even if we didn’t quite walk around in the nude, Karen and Tsukihi (and I) weren’t above doing so half-naked.

“You’re right, sorry… I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s not like you got buck-naked outside the house.”

“As long as you understand,” Kanbaru forgave me. “I enjoy shedding inhibitions, but outside my house? Very seldom.”

“You mean there are times?!”

“For instance, at the public bath.”

“Ngh…”

She was toying with me!

True, a public bath was outside the house!

“And with the basketball team…”

“You’re not tricking me again. It was in the showers, during summer basketball camp, right?”

“Oh, so close. You’re right about basketball camp. But I actually put together a session my first year where we were nude the entire time.”

“I hope they close down the whole club!”

“Haha, come on. Obviously I’m joking. If you believe that kind of nonsense, then maybe you really do have a dirtier mind than me.”

“Wh-What?!”

Ouch! Oh heavens above, punish this one for her sins!

Surprisingly, the heavens answered my prayer right away.

“U-Urk…”

I heard Kanbaru groan, and even the sound of her body sliding to the floor.

Something had happened.

“Kanbaru, what’s wrong?”

“I forgot to shut the door to my room… My grandma just walked past me down the hall…”

“……”

Ah, okay.

By the way, Kanbaru lived with her grandparents, and it was just the three of them.

They’d raised her since she was a preteen like their own precious daughter. She was grandpa and grandma’s special little girl.

“She looked at me like she was so disappointed and walked on without slowing her pace or saying a word…”

“Well, seeing her granddaughter talking on the phone in her birthday suit after all the loving care she lavished on you…”

Apparently, being naked in your own room wasn’t their house rule, just Kanbaru’s personal rule.

“Aaaa… Aaaah… I’m done for,” she lamented. “How am I ever going to show my face in front of her again?”

The blow had been too much. It wasn’t often I got a chance to see her in such a state─no, I couldn’t see her over the phone, but I had to visit her pronto. I might never enjoy the opportunity again.

“Um, Kanbaru, I hate to bother you while you’re in a state of shock, but could we get back to what we were talking about?”

“Uhh… Yes. I’m not sure I’ll have anything very interesting to say now, but will you still accept me? My senior Araragi.”

She really was down in the dumps.

Hang in there. Don’t worry, you’re super-charming right now.

“My tutoring for today got cancelled,” I told her. “I promised to help you clean up your room tomorrow, but mind if I headed over today instead?”

As the former captain of the basketball team, Kanbaru tended to be thoughtful, but she was surprisingly lax when it came to her own affairs (like how she forgot to close the door just now). Despite her interest in self-discipline, she was also a slovenly mess. In short, her room was a pigsty.

It went beyond just clutter. It was so bad that if her fans ever had a peek, they might actually faint. In fact, I almost did the first time I was invited to her room (Japanese-style, large at twelve mats). Her futon hadn’t been cleared away, clothes were littered all over the floor, books stood and fell in great piles, mysterious cardboard boxes hogged every corner and─worst headache of all─there was no wastebasket in the room: just plastic bag upon plastic bag of unsorted trash tumbling where they may.

It wasn’t clutter, just plain filth.

Couldn’t she at least take out the garbage?

As spacious as the room was, the only area left open was atop the futon. Yet pens and notebooks and other stationery had found their way under it, too. How could she sleep like that?

And so on.

Unable to relax, I’d set about cleaning up her room almost as soon as I’d arrived, and since then, it’s fallen to me to clean her room twice per month.

On the fifteenth and thirtieth, that’s what I did.

Every two weeks, Kanbaru meticulously─or perhaps obligingly─managed to return her room almost to its original disaster state. Anyone could make a mess, but it took a certain talent to make her kind. She could hurt herself lying around naked in that room, for real.

“Ah… Of course I don’t mind,” she replied. “I’m so grateful for your help, I would never presume to complain. I can adjust my schedule to fit yours, anytime.”

She still sounded weak.

Long story short, Kanbaru agreed.

I said I’d be right over and hung up─depressed as she might be, it wouldn’t take long for her, ever the optimist, to get back on her feet. If I didn’t hurry, I’d miss my chance to witness her down in the dumps. Unlike Sengoku’s house, Kanbaru’s was kind of far. Speedy Kanbaru, with her under-five-seconds dash (or so-called accelerator device) could probably travel the distance in a flash, but my own legs, unfortunately, were plain average now that I was no longer a vampire. I’d swing by home to pick up the granny bike parked outside in the yard, but to avoid Tsukihi peppering me with questions, not go inside.

While I used to have two bikes, one for going to school and one for private use, my mountain bike for private use had been wrecked in a certain accident. All I had left now was the granny bike that I used to ride to and from school.

I didn’t know when I was going to be able to buy a new bike.

It’s not that there wasn’t a particular one I wanted, but I had a feeling that even if I did buy it, it’d break (get broken) in no time…

At any rate, I took off toward Kanbaru’s.

I didn’t have a second to waste.

I was dying to see Miss Kanbaru down in the dumps.

I spotted something strange out of the corner of my eyes, however, that forced me to stop.

“……”

A middle schooler dressed in a jersey was walking (?) upside down on her hands on the exterior wall of some residence.

Her ponytail twitched back and forth as she moved.

It was Karen Araragi.

“……”

Handstands… She was still doing it even after grade school.

Was it to train her arms?

Yikes. Hachikuji was right.

Someone beyond a certain size doing a handstand outside of a gym felt so wrong…

She strutted─

Not noticing me, and relying solely on her arm strength, Karen leapt from the wall she was on to the next-door neighbor’s wall.

“Hiya!” Sneaking up on my bike, I proceeded to lightly clothesline her across both elbows.

“A-Aaah!”

Maybe I was her better when it came to our senses of balance. Karen lost hers, even though this was hardly a low kick to the face, and tumbled off the wall.

I’d have loved to see her hit her head, frankly, but thanks to a martial artist’s superior athleticism, she flipped over during the mere three-foot fall and stuck a perfect landing.

She landed facing me, so our eyes met.

“Ah, Koyomi. I thought you were a hostile.”

“You have those?”

“Don’t they say the moment a man steps outside his house, he has seven enemies?”

“You’re not a man, you’re a little girl.”

“If a man has seven enemies, then a girl has seven times as many.”

“Hah.” In Karen’s case, that was probably true. Appalled, I said, “What are you doing anyways? How long are you going to keep training my sense of shame? It’s all muscle at this point. You’d have to be Ranma Saotome to traipse about doing acrobatics at your age. Don’t tell me you’d turn into a man if I splashed hot water on you.”

“Hyaha! How convenient, I’d only have one seventh as many enemies to deal with. Actually no, it’d be pretty boring…”

“What the hell, looking like that where people can see you… How tasteless can you be? Act a little more like a normal teenage girl. What if the neighbors start talking?”

“Huh? Am I just imagining things, or are we putting you aside here…”

“Not one bit,” I shot back. And really, I had nothing on my conscience. “Besides, a handstand is one thing, but trying to travel that way is totally insane… Maybe you were light enough back in grade school, but how much do you weigh now?”

“Never ask a lady.” Heheh, Karen put on airs. “Well, I stay as trim as I can. And if I make sure I don’t put on too much muscle, my weight stays ladylike. If you ever spot a girl at the arcade playing Dance Dance Revolution upside down, know that it’s your sister.”

“That girl would be no sister of mine.”

“Says the guy who used to play air hockey by himself.”

“That was a long time ago…”

Anyway…

Anyway.

Anyway!

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“Serving. Volunteering.”

Karen stood up and thrust out her chest.

Her smug look was infuriating. Just the sight of it made me want to punch her.

“Idiot,” I chided, “don’t be saying it in English like that makes you smart. Just the other day, you thought Descartes had something to do with à la carte.”

“So what, they’re both French.”

“True.”

“Anyway, why are you bothering me while we’re out? We look so much alike, people will know we’re related. You’re embarrassing me.”

“It’s not like I wanted to come up and talk to you. If you don’t want me to, stop behaving in ways that force me to.”

To be precise, I didn’t come up and talk to her so much as clothesline her.

“Still,” I said, “it’s perfect timing. There’s something I need to ask you.”

“There’s nothing I need you to ask me,” Karen countered like some snotty brat.

Hup, she tilted over into another handstand─and I shoved her legs back down the other way. She landed in an upside-down crab.

Doing the crab out in public was also pretty strange.

And it was steeply angled─almost grotesquely so.

Karen’s legs were way too long.

“Hey, that was dangerous,” she complained upside down. She could probably hold the position for half a day.

“What’s dangerous is whatever you two are up to. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

“I’ve been serving society, like I said.” Karen grinned, still upside down. It was kind of a funny image. “It’s got nothing to do with you, so why don’t you butt out?”

“If it really doesn’t, I’d be glad to…”

The charms.

I doubted Sengoku would get mixed up in it again, and the actual issue in her case had come about by chance─

Maybe I could just leave it alone.

Getting swept up in my sisters’ hijinks only to be left holding the bag was the usual course of things. The royal road, so to speak.

Perhaps not seeing that yet even at this late date, Karen had the gall to say, “We’re not gonna cause you trouble or anything. We’re not stupid, all right?”

She lifted her palms off the ground, using her head to hold her position, and gave me a double V-sign with her free hands. And this was the girl telling me she wasn’t stupid.

“Koyomi, what do you take me for?”

“I don’t know. What the hell are you?”

“The slayer of marching demons,” Karen replied in a sotto voice, “hell’s own guard dog…Dekamaster!”

“Talk about badass…”

It was probably the first time a girl doing the crab with her head ever uttered those words.

“Super cool, perfect,” she followed up with Dekablue Ranger’s signature line, apparently getting into it.

There was nothing cool about the pose she was in, though.

“I’m a girl on fire!”

“Then I hope you get incinerated.”

I had to hand it to her, though. Combining all those cool lines with a silly pose was a pretty good gag…

I know I could never pull it off.

Karen wasn’t a musclehead for nothing.

“I see, I see,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll make this part of my regular routine.”

“While you’re down there, why not try a few more? Anything’s fine, just as long as it sounds cool.”

“If you want to pass, you’re gonna have to defeat me first!”

“Funnier than I expected!”

“How about the opposite? You go, I’ll hold the line!”

“Ahahahahaha!”

I burst out laughing.

This was a rare treat.

But, uh, oops.

I was playing with my sister and having fun, which wasn’t my intention.

Despite our banter, somehow I hadn’t obtained a shred of the info I was after─but as for why she was loitering around here, I could guess without her help.

Kiyokaze Public Middle School─which Senjogahara, Kanbaru, and also Hanekawa had attended─was located nearby. If Karen was investigating charms circulating among junior-high kids, this was an important area in that search.

Hm.

“Hup!” Karen made a huge performance out of straightening out of her crab pose, purposely doing another handstand (balancing on her head) before getting back up on her two feet.

A natural-born performer, she was.

Or to put it another way, a regular attention hog.

“Anyway, Koyomi, I’m kinda busy right now. I got a lot on my plate. If you wanna talk, do it with both me and Tsukihi at home tonight. Can it wait until then?”

“……”

Hm.

Well, I was in a rush, too. I wanted to get to Kanbaru’s house as soon as possible.

Not stand around wasting time on my sister’s antics.

I hadn’t planned on talking to them until that night, anyways─and it’s not like we could have a very serious discussion where we were.

“Should I really be leaving you alone?” I asked Karen just to make sure.

“Of course. The whole thing will be over soon, anyways.”

“Huh…”

“No one can stand in our way, y’know?”

“I hope someone sticks a knife in your kidney.”

“By the way, how was Tsukihi? She’s still home, isn’t she? Did you see her?”

“She was just watching TV.”

But who knows what she was doing at the moment.

She’d promised she was going to mind the fort, but maybe she’d snuck out afterward as part of some Fire Sisters scheme…

Just then, a cell phone began to ring in Karen’s jersey pocket.

The Enter the Dragon theme song.

Subtlety: not her forte.

As much as I hate to give my sister props, though, she (flat-out) refuses to decorate her phone with straps and such, and I find that pretty manly and neat (even if she’s a girl).

Tsukihi’s phone, on the other hand, is encrusted with that stuff.

They hadn’t owned phones when they entered middle school, but my parents, unable to buck the trend (or more likely, coming to the conclusion that Karen and Tsukihi not having a means of contact was the graver risk), decided to lift the ban just this summer vacation. My sisters were already pros with the devices.

They really were good at everything.

Meanwhile, I still didn’t understand half of the functions.

“Hello… Oh. Yeah─”

Ignoring the fact that her older brother was talking to her, Karen answered, turning her back to me as though to escape notice.

She began speaking in a hushed tone.

I couldn’t quite hear what she was whispering. I couldn’t even tell if it was some new intel related to her public service or a totally private conversation─not that I was going to eavesdrop to find out.

I’m not Tsukihi.

Karen talked for about a minute before hanging up.

Then she turned toward me.

There was a hint of seriousness in her expression.

It was a handsome look.

“Okay, Koyomi.”

“Huh?”

“Everything’s fine. The whole thing will be over soon.”

“Oh. Uh huh…”

I could only reply vaguely.

I guess she’d received some new intel, after all?

“When we fill you in later tonight,” Karen said, “it will be to regale you with our heroic deeds. Hyahaha!”

“Whatever. You’re almost out of middle school and still walking around upside down, and that’s what I learned to my great misfortune today.”

“That’ll do. Hasta la vista!”

Probably so I wouldn’t interrogate her anymore, she cut our conversation short and disappeared from sight.

Incidentally, she did so by tumbling.

She vanished rolling away at a furious pace.

What a nutty, breakneck move when she wasn’t working with mats or anything… Her deal seemed entirely distinct from Kanbaru’s athleticism.

While Kanbaru was fast and had great reflexes, I doubted she could perform Karen’s acrobatics with a straight face─in fact, Kanbaru wouldn’t attempt anything so risky in the first place.

I suppose that was the difference between martial arts and competitive sports?

Ah, right, Kanbaru.

I had to get to her place, fast.

Not quite pushing my sister out of mind, but tucking her in the back, I began pedaling again.