Monogatari Series - Volume 6 - Chapter 7.09

009

Not that that means anything since there are no immortal creatures in this world, the tardigrade perhaps, he ended on a deflating note, and that was the full extent of the info I gained from Deishu Kaiki, the con artist.

It was hard to say if it was of any use─at least, I had my doubts that I’d gotten my money’s worth.

Specializing in immortal aberrations.

Guillotine Cutter from spring break was an authority specializing in vampires─was it like that? Was it also like Deishu Kaiki being an expert on fake aberrations?

I couldn’t say.

Hmm. In that sense, despite his clowning, the expert we knew best, Mèmè Oshino, actually had an almost ridiculously broad scope.

Just who had we been dealing with?

In any case, now that we were done, I had no reason to remain sitting with Kaiki. It’s not like we were best buds ready to chat away, and even if we were, trading gossip, let alone barbs, with a guy who played dirty and was so settled in his ways wouldn’t be very fun.

A comic-relief segment with him was out of the question.

Getting up, tray and all, and returning to my original table, I noticed just in time, precariously enough.

“Oh, right,” I called out to Kaiki, “you can keep my wallet and money, but there’s one thing that I want back.”

“…? That you want back? Would it be a credit card?”

“Why would I have one? I’m just a high school student. A photo… There’s a photo in there.”

“Ah.”

Kaiki reached into his breast pocket and pulled out my (scratch that, no longer my) wallet, opened it, and removed a photo─when he saw who it was of, he furrowed his brow a little.

Whether or not that was his poker face, I couldn’t tell you.

“Senjogahara… So she cut her hair.”

“Mm… Yeah, well.”

The picture in my wallet was of Hitagi Senjogahara.

The photograph had been taken recently─with the digital camera I’d unearthed in Kanbaru’s room at the end of last month.

This was a printout.

Maybe I had talent, and it was such a great pic that I’d stuck it in my wallet like a lucky charm for exam-takers─doing so might have been somewhat old-fashioned for a high-school boy in this day and age, but I still sure as hell didn’t want to let Kaiki have it.

I simply didn’t want to part with it in the first place. No amount of information could make up for it.

“Hah…what a broad, insipid grin,” lamented Kaiki. “When people lose their spark, they truly do lose it─I knew her back when she shone, and to me this looks like a completely different person. There is no shadow nor a trace of who she once was.”

I thought he might demand my last two thousand yen in exchange─but unexpectedly, he handed back the photo without ado.

Without trying to bargain, seeming genuinely uninterested, like he couldn’t begin to find any value in it─he returned it to my hands.

“As far as I’m concerned, this is a very regrettable development,” he opined. “I don’t know what to say other than I am disappointed. A cheerful Hitagi Senjogahara is worthless. To be cursed not to know your own worth, or to be cursed not to know your own worthlessness. Which to choose, if we must, is a question we bear all-life long─but children ought to grow and mature, so a man as old and finished as I am might keep such comments to himself.”

Old and finished─that was Deishu Kaiki’s own appraisal of himself.

True, to someone his age, Senjogahara and I probably seemed like kids who’d just started out.

And further─I gathered that Deishu Kaiki and Hitagi Senjogahara’s relationship was a little more complicated than that of conman and victim. If not, there was no way that her reunion and confrontation with him could offer such definite closure.

It wouldn’t have served as such a detox.

But regardless of what I did or did not gather, I shouldn’t pry into my girlfriend’s past─I didn’t need to be told by the likes of Kaiki that kids should have their faces turned toward tomorrow rather than yesterday.

Not finished, but starting out.

Now then.

As for the immediate future─I obviously needed to be thinking about Kagenui and Ononoki.

Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki.

I’d learned that the two indeed formed a pair…a two-man cell.

And I’d also learned─that they were indeed experts.

So they hadn’t called me a fiendish monster for my awful behavior toward Karen and Hachikuji, after all. They were referring to the modicum of vampirism remaining in me.

In a sense, I was being permitted to keep treating Karen and Hachikuji in the same way.

That was encouraging.

Obtaining the info I’d been seeking, however, didn’t mean that anything was actually settled─in fact, it seemed to have enlarged the problem.

The plot thickened.

Ghostbusters specializing in immortal aberrations.

Immortal, immortal…

Vampire.

Kaiki insisted that such things didn’t exist. Broadly speaking, his denial made perfect sense, but strictly speaking, there were creatures in this town right now to whom the term did apply─two of them.

Shinobu Oshino and Koyomi Araragi, needless to say.

“Wherever there be immortals, so too one finds their quellers─in myth and legend, immortal beasts, even gods, appear in legion. Immortal though they may be, these aberrations are frequently slayed. If immortals exist, then so do─their killers. That is what those two are,” Shinobu said as we returned home from Mister Donut.

We were riding two to a bike, which I’d avoided doing with Karen.

I would rather Shinobu hide in my shadow while we traveled, but now that her stomach was full, I might as well feast my eyes on the daytime world, she decided all on her own, and I lacked the means to check her wayward desire.

Well, I had the means but wasn’t going to.

Shinobu looked to be about eight. If we claimed she was only six, people would believe us─even though she was actually five hundred years old.

So riding two to a bike with her wasn’t (at least appearance-wise) illegal, but that was only if she sat nicely on the rear rack. Instead…

“Mm. It would be much easier to converse from here.”

Shinobu had fit herself snugly into the front basket.

She was facing me as I pedaled, her butt wedged into the basket and her legs propped on either handlebar. It seemed she didn’t quite understand bicycles.

Ignorance was a powerful thing─mere novices like the rest of us would never dream of such an outlandish riding style.

I name it the reverse ET.

That said… She’d simply been alive, not sealed up, for five hundred years, so even if her grasp of Japanese culture was weak, you’d think she’d have learned about bicycles somewhere along the line.

Maybe it had nothing to do with being a vampire, and she was just generally aloof.

It was a little difficult to steer (I had to lean forward to make sure my shadow stayed over the basket), but I could still pedal so that’s how we rode.

It wasn’t beyond the pale.

“An onmyoji who specializes in immortal aberrations, huh?” I said. “Yikes, their target must be you and me in that case.”

Not that Shinobu and I could currently be called immortal─but our bodies certainly encompassed an immortal factor, or fragments of immortality. Even if the vestiges only meant healing quickly or taking longer to get hungry, if they persisted, that probably was an immortal quality.

Come to think of it, according to the conman Deishu Kaiki, he’d chosen this town as the backdrop for his large-scale scam because a legendary vampire (Shinobu, in her previous form) had descended upon the area, making it conducive to occult-oriented work (Kaiki’s fraudulent activities).

Even if we weren’t his targets, you could say in a broad sense that our existence had lured him here. At the very least, it wasn’t for a wistful or sentimental reason like revisiting the town where his former mark Senjogahara lived.

“Hah, thee and me, their targets? There may be other possibilities, my master…”

Shinobu leaned back arrogantly in my front basket and folded her arms behind her head.

It was the wrong place to be acting like a big shot if her goal was career advancement.

She really was petite, though.

I bet she could slip right into my pocket.

“I’ve devoured nearly enough immortal aberrations in my time to make myself sick. I am a proper slayer of them, myself… Yet if we are to speak of it thus, aberrations do not live,” Shinobu blew up the whole premise.

“Ah. Right, if it’s not even alive, then how is it immortal? Or maybe, all aberrations are immortal in a way… Oshino said something to that effect, too. But semantics aside, Shinobu, when you say there are other possibilities, are you saying there might be another vampire in this town besides us?”

“Not necessarily a vampire─it would not be so odd, either. Or rather, it would be odd.”

Hmm. If we put aside the immortal part of it, then even in my immediate circle, there were actually a few people who were host to these aberrations.

For instance Suruga Kanbaru, who had a monkey residing in her left arm.

For instance Tsubasa Hanekawa, who had a cat residing in her psyche.

“I see. If someone I didn’t know were living with an aberration, that wouldn’t be so unnatural─well no, actually, it would be. Just how many aberrations could there be in one town?”

“Are there not eight million gods in this country? Around 170,000 per prefecture. Ten in one town would seem toward enough.”

“You can’t mix up gods and aberrations─”

…Or maybe you can.

An aberration pretty much equaled divinity in Japan, according to Oshino. Incomprehensible happenings were the gods’ doing, incomprehensible things were their form.

Right, he’d said so.

“Kaiki doesn’t even believe in vampires, but apparently it was a visit from a gold-class aberration like yourself that stirred up other ones in the area. I even hiked up to a shrine that was becoming their hangout─that’s how I met Sengoku again.”

Still.

Realistically speaking, it was probably best if we assumed that we were Kagenui and Ononoki’s target.

Coming after another hypothetical immortal and just happening to ask me for directions, by coincidence, seemed untenable.

It sounded like wishful thinking.

A hopeful outlook is a necessary and wise stance for humanity’s survival, but in this case, it didn’t seem like optimism would be in our best interests.

Being asked for directions was already far too convenient to be a coincidence.

Coincidence. By and large, a product of malice─for such a nasty guy, Deishu Kaiki did say nifty things.

I suppose that came from a life lived on the front line. He’d been under fire, but instead of turning into a fighter, he’d remained a fraud─and an expert.

An expert and an authority─and Kagenui, too, was an expert and an authority.

An onmyoji.

The aberration roller.

Hm? I seemed to recall Shinobu having some hang-up about the word onmyoji─unless she was just hiding her tracks due to her so-called rule?

“What is wrong, my lord? Are ye thinking?”

“Thinking… Yeah, you bet. Or worrying.” Well, it was no use asking her. Pressing her wouldn’t get me anywhere. Right now, it was better if I focused on what to do next. “Kagenui and Ononoki… Picking those ruins as their base does seem like something a colleague of Oshino’s would do. I probably need to attend to this sooner rather than later. In fact, I ought to go ahead and take action today─”

“Ho-ho. Time for another battle? I can feel my spleen tingling already.”

Shinobu was grinning, visibly amused.

I considered getting into an accident on purpose, maybe ramming us into a telephone pole, but if I did, neither Shinobu nor I would emerge unscathed.

Some immortal pair we were. We couldn’t even crash a bicycle safely.

“No battles. We’re going to talk, just talk,” I said.

According to Karen, her master would be an even match for Kagenui─and we had a bona-fide aberration in Ononoki.

These weren’t opponents I was eager to take on.

I didn’t belong to some warrior race. When I came back from the edge of death, there was no exponential burst of power.

“It’s what Oshino would call a negotiation─if they can be made to understood that you and I are harmless, we won’t get hunted,” I explained.

“Hunted, eh? Perhaps that is not what they are here to do.”

“Why are they here, then?”

“Who can say? I am simply diverting myself by toying with thy words. My job is to be the voice that asks, ‘Is it?’ Heh. But calm thyself. We are one in body and spirit and share a single fate. In the push, my strength is thine.”

“Good to know.”

Not that I planned to rely on her.

Even if I didn’t use Shinobu as backup, she’d be in the background─the mere fact that we were one and our fates were linked would give me strength in a pinch.

It was at the end of the previous month that I reconciled with Shinobu─but come to think of it, she’d joined with me in body and spirit, joined in my fate, from the moment we first met. I’d failed to notice such a huge thing until just recently─had never thought to notice.

“’Tis hot… I must avouch that I hate the sun. Perhaps I should have hidden in thy shadow as ye urged. My body is turning to ash. This cap is worthless. Yet would I melt were I not a vampire.”

“Ha, I bet. Even the asphalt melts in this sort of heat.”

“Is this the global warming they speak of? Hmph─the Earth has been warming and cooling erst long ago.”

“Right?”

“Why the clamor over a change of a mere hundred or two hundred degrees?”

“If it went up and down by two hundred degrees, we’d be past clamoring.”

Okay… I should probably head straight for the ruins after I got home.

It wasn’t just a matter of wanting to handle this as quickly as possible. As a basic negotiation tactic, I wanted to take the initiative.

Lately, in shogi, the consensus seemed to be that the player who makes the first move is actually at a disadvantage, but it wasn’t like I was going there to confront them. This wasn’t a match.

We were going to talk.

Even if the two-man cell of Kagenui and Ononoki hadn’t come to our town for Shinobu and me, they were experts, so I highly doubted they were just here on vacation.

It probably had to do with aberrations.

In which case, I ought to clue them in on the town’s peculiar circumstances even if that made me a busybody─or else, this might come to affect Kanbaru or Hanekawa.

As it occurred to me earlier, the aberrations that resided in those two weren’t particularly immortal, but there was no guarantee they might not get tangled up in some mess and collaterally slayed.

It almost sounded laughable when I put it into words, but it would be just like those two. Suruga Kanbaru had the worst luck, and Tsubasa Hanekawa easily got mixed up in things.

I wouldn’t be doing any studying today.

I’d rest my liver for a day, so to speak.

It was fine─I was prepared for this.

Over spring break, when I decided to spend the rest of my days with an ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire, and to live until we died─to die until we lived, I knew I’d be dealing with this sort of stuff. It was my natural duty, even a right.

This barely qualified as trouble. I wasn’t even on the front line, and this was no match. To me─to us, it wasn’t even a minor event.

There was no flag to trigger and no choice to make. Imagine what Oshino would say if I panicked over this much.

“Well, if that’s the deal, I could even drop by the ruins on my way home…”

Glancing at Shinobu, who was beginning to nod off in the basket─it was the middle of the day, so I guess she was sleepy after all─I considered going to the abandoned building right away.

But before we left Mister Donut, I’d spent one of the two thousand-yen bills that Kaiki had mercifully spared on a box of donuts to bring home as a present to my little sisters (Shinobu kept nagging from the side, “What about me? Where is my present?!” like that was going to happen), so instead I decided to drop it off first.

I could also give it to Kagenui and Ononoki, but I had to admit that it seemed a little insincere to repurpose something as a peace offering. Moreover, Ononoki might not love Mister Donut as much as Shinobu did just because they were both aberrations. Despite her calm expression, maybe Ononoki preferred super-spicy food.

It would be a shame if it backfired. I also didn’t want to seem too obsequious.

I just wanted to make the first move.

As I pondered how best to proceed, I was under the impression that I was approaching the issue with a fair sense of urgency─but I was in fact operating as slow as molasses, at a turtle’s pace, and soon I was in for a rude awakening.

Really soon.

Pedaling my bike and arriving home, I spotted, believe it or not, the very two people in question─Kagenui and Ononoki─at our front gate, ringing our doorbell.

Kagenui noticed me and said, “You again.” Ononoki also turned in my direction, as if in imitation, her face expressionless.

Incidentally, as the one being stared at, what with a blond Lolita crammed into the front basket of my bicycle like a sack of groceries, I made for a pretty indecorous sight.

Downright indecorous.

“Hello…” I bobbed my head.

Seeing them side by side like this, they really did come across as a two-man cell─if I were to say every cracked pot has its broken lid, it might not sound very generous, but Kagenui and Ononoki seemed to fit together perfectly like two pieces of a puzzle.

Human and aberration. Onmyoji and shikigami.

“First your sister and now this waif, eh, fiendish young man. Quite the basket of eggs you’ve got there. Or should I say an orgy of them? Ha, I wouldn’t mind luck like yours.”

Like before, Kagenui’s feet weren’t touching the ground as she spoke.

This time she was squatting agilely atop our gate─like a thief about to jump over it to sneak into our house.

I take that back, she didn’t look like anything. She in fact was a suspicious person.

“Sister, that is not a waif, but a vampire. If you must, she is closer to a hag─he said with a dashing look.”

Her face actually blank, this was Ononoki, her finger still on the doorbell.

Shinobu twitched at the word “hag” and woke up moodily.

Maybe she felt more offended than moody.

Hmm, I knew that Shinobu was dissatisfied with her current Lolita appearance (More than once, in the middle of the night, I’d witnessed her patting at her own flat chest and heaving a poignant sigh. It was sad), but she didn’t seem to appreciate being called a hag, either.

For someone who’d been alive for five centuries, she could be surprisingly touchy.

“Hmph. How the little rookie ba─”

Barks, kakak. I think Shinobu wanted to say so with aplomb and elegantly leap to the ground, but alas, the basket wasn’t designed to be exited with any ease by a person crammed in there (to be ridden in, actually), and her struggles began. She should have accepted my help, but stubbornly refusing it, she finally freed herself from her reverse ET by twisting and tipping the bike over sideways.

She didn’t have a shred of dignity left. It was decidedly unimpressive.

“Ah. Literally from the cradle to the grave, eh, fiendish young man,” teased Kagenui. “I reckon you’d even fancy a zombie caller from the dirt. They say necrophilia is an aristocratic predilection. Kakak, a fair playboy.”

“……”

The Araragi residence’s gate, nowhere as grand as the one for Kanbaru’s mansion, was just a narrow steel fence─but Kagenui’s balance did not so much as falter as she perched atop it on the tips of her toes.

Agile didn’t begin to describe it.

I’ve never seen a circus, but from what I’ve heard and imagine─in balance tricks like the tightrope, performers maintain equilibrium by actively swaying their bodies. That might seem risky at first glance, but apparently it’s more dangerous to stop and hold still─I guess it’s like how bamboos are less likely to snap than cedars in a typhoon?

Kagenui, however, directly contradicted that theory. It was like time had frozen in a bubble around her or as if some invisible pane of glass spread underneath her feet─she didn’t even budge. The spot was high, and her footing wasn’t exactly stable, but as far as I could tell, she wasn’t even trying to balance herself.

She was beyond advanced. With equipoise like hers, she could probably do a handstand on a balance ball and make it look like child’s play. In fact─she almost looked like she could walk on water.

Karen might have sensed more, but an amateur like me wasn’t able to comprehend even the basic wonders of Yozuru Kagenui.

I just found it mysterious.

Mysterious─and inexplicable.

“Man, I don’t know,” I blurted out without meaning to.

If it was as Shinobu said (her testimony was much more reliable than Kaiki’s), Ononoki was the nonhuman and, whatever her true nature, an aberration─but she seemed the more normal of the two.

Maybe that was part of the onmyoji-shikigami deal: a proper, hierarchical master-servant relationship with a clear and precise chain of command, unlike the strange and complicated bond between Shinobu and me.

Ononoki did just refer to Kagenui as “sister”─but that didn’t necessarily mean they were sisters, did it? Wasn’t it only a mode of address like “big brother”?

“Ah, right, right, I ought to thank you first. What a great help you were. I found Eikow Cram School just where you said it would be. It’s so difficult getting there, I reckon I might not ever have without your instructions─and you actually helped Yotsugi, too.” Kagenui said all this in such a laidback, easygoing manner. There was no hint of hostility or menace. “Maybe you’ve heard this before, but they say that folk what are easy to ask directions from have a mentor’s soul. Their aura beckons people. Not that I put much stock in jaw like ‘auras.’”

Her face broke into a smile.

It was a pleasant smile. A very─pleasant smile.

If I hadn’t heard that she was an expert on immortal aberrations, I would’ve seen her as an ordinary, friendly lady. The source of that info happened to be the world’s most unreliable and ominous man, so it was all the harder for me to settle on a stance.

“I don’t know if a body has asked me for directions once in my life─do you reckon that means I don’t have an aura?”

“That is why you walk no road, sister… None stretches before your feet, and none behind─he said with a dashing look.”

I couldn’t even tell if Ononoki’s words were meant as consolation.

Maybe it was sibling-speak? An inside joke?

I didn’t know how to react─and had never met anyone so hard to converse with as these two. It wasn’t like they put up barriers, they were frank─but Kagenui and Ononoki seemed to have their own little world. They didn’t seem to need anyone else.

Honestly, it was as awkward as being invited to another family’s family gathering─and we were standing in front of my house.

I couldn’t just stay silent, though. If I let them lead, this negotiation would never get off the ground.

“Actually…there’s something I wanted to get straight.”

Negotiate─I had to negotiate with them.

My inept strategy was already derailed, unfortunately, and they had made the first move─but if I didn’t get overwhelmed any further, I had a chance to turn things around.

The consensus─was that going second gave you an edge.

Waiting for Shinobu to struggle free at last from under the overturned bicycle, I screwed up my courage and said, “You two came to this town because you’re hunting us─an unholy immortal and its thrall.” As for who was whose thrall, I skipped all that because it was too convoluted. “You came here to kill us, didn’t you? It wasn’t just coincidence that you both asked me for directions─you were scouting us out.”

“……”

“……”

I cut straight to the chase, with no plan, letting the chips fall where they may. We weren’t going to get anywhere unless we spoke the same language, so I decided to just go for it and see how things turned out. You could say I was swinging blindly.

In response, however, Kagenui and Ononoki─cocked their heads at me simultaneously, in apparent puzzlement.

As for Kagenui, she even wore a wry smile. “Oi, I don’t know what you’re on about, fiendish young man, but I reckon you’ve got the wrong idea,” she said.

The wrong idea?

Huh? Had Kaiki duped me, in fact? Had I let him shake me down for some pocket money?

Possible!

If so, then I probably looked like a total head-case to them─accusing someone of wanting to kill you just for asking directions? Talk about having illusions of grandeur.

Yikes. Now I was in a whole different kind of hot water. How was I going to worm my way out of this? At this rate, I was going to be negotiating with a psychiatrist.

Just as I was starting to panic: “W-Well, it’s not like you’re coming out of left field─but you’ve sure got some britches on you,” said Kagenui, seeming honestly put out. “The matter regarding the ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire, the king and slayer of aberrations, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, is considered resolved. As an aberration, she has already been thoroughly slain─as an aberration, her thrall is only present as an absence. You’re each other’s alibi and proof of nonexistence, and regardless of the type of specialist, you’re untouchable now. Besides, in our business we’ve got better things to do than squander resources on an ordinary human experiencing a few aftereffects.”

“……nkk.”

Just as I was starting to relax, I felt myself tense up again. Kagenui knew Shinobu’s former name─only Hanekawa and I were supposed to at this point, and no one still called her that.

An expert.

A ghostbuster─a professional.

The immortal slayer and aberration roller─

“I suppose Oshino’s meddling is to thank for it. Sticking that beak where it doesn’t belong is his specialty,” Kagenui muttered almost as if she was talking to herself─wait.

Just now─did she mention Oshino?

Judging from the context, she couldn’t have meant Shinobu─so who was she talking about?

It wasn’t very hard to figure out.

Our savior─the slacker in the Hawaiian shirt.

This woman, Yozuru Kagenui─knew Mèmè Oshino?

“My lord,” Shinobu interrupted us─while she had extricated herself from beneath the bicycle, she was still sitting with her butt planted on the ground. I don’t think she was somehow trying to vie with Kagenui that way, but she spoke without getting up. “This is no time to be losing thy wits─do not let idle matters distract thee. Is there not something else that thou should be thinking about?”

“Huh?” My physical and emotional sensations transmitted directly to Shinobu─so when I was upset, she could tell in a tactile and not just intuitive manner.

True, I was upset. But I didn’t see why she should be admonishing me─except…

No. Think, Koyomi─just think.

About the non-idle matter.

Kagenui may not have been a con artist, or even really an onmyoji, but that didn’t mean I should let her string me along and swallow everything she said hook, line, and sinker.

Even if everything Kaiki said had been lies, and even discounting the stuff that Shinobu had told me─originally, it had been my own hunch, hadn’t it, that there was something suspicious about these two.

Suspicious.

Right off the bat─I’d thought they were different.

I still hadn’t heard anything, from anyone or from anywhere, to contradict that feeling.

I knew damn well that evading questions and spinning half-truths were these experts’ stock in trade.

Of course.

Of course!

If they weren’t targeting Koyomi Araragi and Shinobu Oshino─then why were they here?

Why were they at the Araragi residence?

Why was Kagenui squatting on our gate?

Why was Ononoki pressing our doorbell?

Just as I put up my guard again and was about to take an obvious defensive stance─

“Argh, shut up! Shut up shut up shut up! How long are you going to keep ringing that bell?! Can’t you see I’m pretending no one’s home?!”

Our front door burst open─to the sound of shrill, hysterical screaming from the other side.

I didn’t even need to turn my head. Didn’t need to look.

Naturally, it was my sister, Tsukihi Araragi, the strategist of Tsuganoki Second Middle School’s Fire Sisters, who came bolting through the door─still half-naked in her yukata, the idiot hadn’t even bothered to put on sandals before rushing outside.

I guess you had to give her some credit, though.

She must have at least had the common sense to think, I probably shouldn’t step outside in my nightwear. And: I shouldn’t carelessly answer the door when the rest of my family isn’t here. That was why she’d been ignoring Ononoki’s ringing for so long.

She was pretending no one was home.

But Ononoki wasn’t just ringing the doorbell. She was hammering it fast. Tsukihi was hysterical and all, but even I would have come running out in a rage. That was more heinous than a ding-dong-ditch.

For someone with such a calm face, Ononoki was a bad girl and a prankster.

Of course, even assuming I did come running out, only Tsukihi would bother to do so with an awl gripped in her good hand.

She was ruining the reputation of awls.

An awl was actually a useful tool. What a shame.

“Committing a terrorist act against the Fire Sisters’ home, this little house on the prairie where justice dwells─you’ve got some guts. Hmm?”

Tsukihi was just starting to get worked up, spewing nonsense as her claws came out─when just as suddenly her rage deflated, the claws retracting immediately. The sight that greeted her eyes must have been too much to process.

There was her brother, Koyomi Araragi. That part was fine. Nothing unusual there.

But what about the blond Lolita sitting on the ground beside him? The strange woman squatting with perfect balance atop the thin railing of our front gate? The bizarre girl hammering the doorbell with her finger even now?

It made no sense─no sense whatsoever for any of the three to be there. Indeed, the fact that there was one person, namely myself, whom she could expect to find there mixed in with the other three bizarre figures probably made it even harder for Tsukihi to make sense of the picture.

She possessed the unusual skill, Regulate Emotion, flying into hysterics at the drop of a dime and putting that hysteria back on the shelf at a moment’s notice. First things first, she took a step back to get a better view.

“Um,” she said, as if thinking out loud, “I’m pretty sure that blond girl there is the one I saw in the bathtub with my brother before…”

Why was she bringing that up?

Just process that as a hallucination.

In any case─this was looking pretty bad. I had managed to keep all this occult and aberration business totally secret from both Karen and Tsukihi. Even after Karen got stung by the bee, I’d concealed that aspect of the incident from them.

I probably needed to tell them about my condition and about Shinobu, the aberration that lived in my shadow, at some point─but I didn’t think it was the right time for that yet. I didn’t have my own thoughts in order enough to talk about it─but more than anything, Karen and Tsukihi were still too young, in my opinion.

Which is why, at the very least, I wanted to avoid dumping that stuff on them in the form of a traffic accident of a run-in. Especially if it meant starting with Tsukihi rather than Karen…

Tsukihi’s appearance threw me back into a panic after all the trouble Shinobu had gone through to get my head back in the game. The caution and composure I’d regained was in tatters.

Yotsugi Ononoki, one half of the two-man cell─seized the opportunity.

“Unlimited Rulebook, rules consisting mostly of exceptions─he said with a dashing look.”

Did I really say that compared to Kagenui, Ononoki seemed like the normal one? Because I must have had no idea what I was talking about if I did. Talk about underestimating a person.

Her index finger, which was pressing the doorbell even after Tsukihi had come rushing out, exploded.

No, not exploded.

Rather─it expanded in volume, in explosive fashion.

I was already familiar with Dramaturgy─an expert vampire hunter that I had encountered over spring break, he hunted vampires despite being a vampire himself. A kinslayer aberration.

Dramaturgy stretched the limits of his unique vampiric transformation abilities to hideously contort and disfigure his arms, wielding them as exquisite twin flamberges─I can still recall, with perfect clarity, the pain those blades inscribed into my flesh.

And as much as I disliked it, I was flashing back on that memory.

But whereas Dramaturgy transformed his arms into blades, Ononoki transformed her finger into a blunt instrument.

The first thing I thought of─was a humongous hammer.

A giant hammer─like the thunderbolt of the gods.

Ononoki’s enlarged, swollen, ginormous index finger completely obliterated the columns on our front gate as if they were no more than Styrofoam.

I hadn’t just been upset. I’d also been careless.

It was the middle of the day, the sun still high in the sky─I can’t deny having assumed that there was no way a battle could unfold in a residential neighborhood.

But I was wrong.

My assumption could not have been more misguided.

Although night was the time for aberrations, even when the sun was up, even in the middle of the day, whenever, wherever, they were always near.

There, and also not there.

Oshino had drilled that into my head!

“Nrk…”

My most flagrant assumption, however, was yet to be exposed─not just my physical, but also my mental stance had been all wrong.

I was sure that Ononoki’s sudden hammer strike must be aimed at me, or if not me, then Shinobu─but I was wrong.

Very, very wrong.

Her hammer, Unlimited Rulebook, obliterated the columns of our front gate like Styrofoam…and then kept going.

And going.

And going.

Until it obliterated Tsukihi Araragi’s top half.

“………nkk?!”

Enlarged, swollen, and ginormous─it devastated her from the waist up, along with the door behind her─like mere Styrofoam.

“Tsu-Tsukihi-chaaaan!”

I couldn’t even grasp what had happened, what I was seeing.

But I didn’t need to understand─my body began moving on instinct.

Sending me flying toward Ononoki, who wasn’t paying any attention to me. Shinobu, attached to my shadow, dragged along by the momentum, helplessly tumbled across the asphalt.

But I was incapable of worrying about even Shinobu, now.

All I could see was red. The whole world was red.

Searing, crimson rage.

What had she done?

To Tsukihi Araragi. To Tsukihi-chan.

To my little sister who was more precious than anything else in the world!

“Cool your head, fiendish young man. Don’t get so hotheaded. Don’t young people these days know? Anger is a hellfire that burns the wielder─it’s fire, pure fire.”

I remember up until the point I was about to grab Ononoki by the neck─but after that, my memory cut off like a sandstorm. The next thing I knew, I was lying folded up on the ground.

Folded up.

That may sound vague, but it was the most accurate expression for my predicament.

My legs, my knees, my waist, my arms, my elbows, my shoulders, my neck, were all folded over and under, in and out, like the gussets of a bellow─neatly, like in some celebrity homemaker’s storage tips.

And the very person who had reduced me to this state, Yozuru Kagenui─was balanced atop my folded-up back, in a squatting position exactly like before.

Smiling. In an amused─even a good-natured way.

“You reckon what Oshino would say at a time like this? You’re so spirited, did something good happen to you?”

“Ngh…”

Why─just why?

Why did she know so much about Oshino? Why was she able to quote him? And at a time like this!

“Damn you! You…you pieces of shit! My sister! You killed my sister…Tsukihi! You won’t get away with this!”

“Huh? No kidding─that child is your sister?” asked Kagenui, surprised. She nodded, as if something suddenly made sense. “Of course. I just reckoned you happened to have the same surname.”

What?

The two of them…didn’t even know that this was my house?

Then what in hell were they doing here?

“I see. There was some noise in my information. This must have been a very shocking sight for you, then. So sorry about that,” Kagenui apologized offhandedly like she’d spilled some water on the table.

An apology.

An apology?

“Ngh… You think an apology is going to cut it?!”

“Watch for yourself.”

I couldn’t turn my neck. It was pressed against the ground as stiff as if it had been set in plaster. But Kagenui jerked my neck forcefully in the direction of our front door─as easily as you might twist a baby’s arm.

Forcing my eyes to behold the scene once more.

The destroyed pillars, the demolished gate.

No trace of the front door remained, and just inside that opening, gruesomely annihilated, lay Tsukihi Araragi’s lower half─

“Wha…”

When I saw what Kagenui meant─I could barely believe my own eyes.

“H-Huh?” I sputtered.

Tsukihi─didn’t have a scratch on her. As if in inverse proportion to the demolition around her, her upper half, which ought to have been blown clean from her body, was attached firmly to her lower half, right where you would expect to find it.

She was propped unconscious against the wall in the hallway─but was perfectly alive.

Completely fine, as if the dramatic scene I had just witnessed had all been an optical illusion.

She was healthy and whole.

But considering how all of the non-corporeal parts of her upper body─her scanty yukata, the accessories in her hair, and so forth─had, indeed, been obliterated, blown to kingdom come just as had been seared into my memory… Considering that the only thing that remained whole was Tsukihi’s now exposed, naked upper body…

Perhaps the real optical illusion was what I was seeing now.

“Nope,” I muttered without thinking.

Nope.

I knew this─knew it like the twists and turns of hell. I had seen it, had been shown it, time and time again.

I recognized this hellish truth. It wasn’t an optical illusion─but regeneration.

Healing, recovery─and immortality.

To be injured and injured and not to die, to be obliterated and obliterated and not to die, to be killed and killed and not to die, to die and die and not to die─this was immortality, perennial and everlasting.

Shinobu Oshino had been living and dying for five hundred years like this─I, too, had lived and died this way, if only for two weeks.

I had died again and again.

Which is why─I was accustomed to this sight, the upper body blown wretchedly from the rest regenerating exuberantly in the span of a few blinks.

A sight I was accustomed to and tired of. A death I was accustomed to and tired of.

Immortality. This was immortality─but.

Why did my little sister, of all people, possess the skill of an aberration?!

“Mister Koyomi Araragi─kind monster sir. It seems your fate is closely entwined with such immortal aberrations. You’re a daredevil who’d leap over hell. I’m the one who’s surprised here.”

Her index finger having returned to normal size at some point, Ononoki stated the facts with a blank expression.

“Your sister is afflicted with an immortal bird of omen. From the outset she was your sister but not your sister, Tsukihi Araragi but not Tsukihi Araragi, human but not human. What you see there is a rare bird of fire, the evil phoenix─he said with a dashing look.”