Monogatari Series - Volume 7 - Chapter 1.02

002

The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.

The next day, I was roused from bed as usual by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi. Whether it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, they’re like machines designed to wake me up early each morning, which is why it made no difference that it was the first day of Golden Week, April twenty-ninth. While I almost wanted to praise their diligence─rising and shining when they always goofed off and stayed up late couldn’t be easy─they probably weren’t interrupting my sleep out of concerned consideration for their brother’s daily rhythm but rather as a way of displaying power. It was a demonstration, a shot in a domestic territorial dispute.

Speaking of which, I haven’t spent much time yet describing what exactly my sisters do when they wake me up, but, well, it’s mostly because it isn’t anything worth describing.

In the anime version, my sisters will go on to approach me with a plethora of rousing methods─shoving me down the stairs, putting me in the camel clutch, hitting me with a muscle buster, and more─but those are, you could say, played up for the small screen. I’m sorry for shattering any perceptions, but sadly, no little sisters in the real world are so cute.

Well, anyway, I don’t know about other households, but at least in my family, Karen and Tsukihi just gently say, How long are you gonna sleep for? C’mon, wake up, and then─

“You fell back asleep? You’re dead.”

A crowbar came swinging down beside my pillow.

“Whooooah!”

I nearly leapt as I dodged it.

Actually, I didn’t dodge it all the way. It took a tuft of my hair with it.

The tip of the crowbar then pierced my pillow, hair and all.

A poof of feathers scattered into the air.

The sight would make you wonder if angels had descended from heaven, which is why I thought I may have died, but the 32nd notes I could feel my heart trilling from inside my chest hinted that I was still among the living.

I looked around.

There with the furious expression of a demon-god, clad in a yukata, was Tsukihi Araragi, my little sister in her second year of middle school, as she struggled to remove the crowbar that had penetrated not only my pillow but the bed underneath it.

The crowbar-like object.

No, just a plain old crowbar.

The most crowbar-like crowbar in the world.

“Tsu-Tsukihi?! What are you doing? Are you trying to kill me or something?!”

“You went back to sleep, why would I want you alive? Why would you sleep after Karen and I went to the trouble of waking you up? It doesn’t make sense. You can die you can die you can die.”

“You realize we’re only at the opening scene and you’re already acting like a completely different character?!”

Think about consistency with the previous installment!

“I just wasn’t standing out compared to all the other characters, so I thought I’d try and act like a stalker,” she explained.

“You’re acting like a psycho, not a stalker!”

“But if you were able to dodge that, I guess that means you were only pretending to be sleeping.”

“No, I was sound asleep…”

It seems people are surprisingly capable of responding to danger even when they’re asleep.

They might say humans have reached an evolutionary dead-end, but no, there’s still a lot further we can go.

“You were worried about not standing out as a character? God, you sound like a middle schooler,” I scolded.

“That’s because I am a middle schooler.”

“Right.”

It’s not like my time in middle school qualifies me to make fun of anyone else’s, of course. Well, maybe my experience means I have a duty to warn others.

“Anyway, don’t overdo it,” I told her. “You’re the little sister who comes to wake me up in the morning. That’s enough.”

“That’s like, the definition of a background character.”

No thanks, she said.

Fair. No one would want to be a character defined by her older brother.

“I want to be a flashy character like Karen. Look at her, she’s the final evolution of a little sister.”

“I wouldn’t call her a final evolution. She’s more of the kind of character where your life is over if you end up like her. Listen, there’s still hope for you. You need to work hard to become a proper, respectable character.”

“A proper little-sister character.”

“Yup.”

No one present realized that striving to become a “little-sister character” was hardly proper.

“Specifically,” I said, “you should try to become like Marilla from Anne of Green Gables.”

“Marilla?!”

“Well now, that’s right,” I replied in my best Matthew impression.

I’d just woken up, okay?

“Man, Marilla really is the ideal little sister,” I opined. “I wish I could’ve had one like her ’cause she’s a tsundere among tsunderes. ‘I wanted a boy! A girl is of no use to us!’ and then fawning over Anne by the end.”

“Oh, so she’s a tsundere in the classic sense.”

“She’s one by current definitions, too. Her snippy comments to Anne after she’s done fawning are super-adorable, too.”

“Is that how my big brother reads Anne of Green Gables?”

“Yep. As I read it, my mental voice actress for Marilla from start to finish is Rie Kugimiya.”

“No actual names.”

And how old is Marilla anyway, Tsukihi asked.

What an idiot. She didn’t understand anything.

The real fun with little sisters starts after they turn fifty.

“When you think about it, Matthew got such a good deal,” I said. “Living all that time together with his little sister, plus he gets to raise a little non-blood-related girl with braids. He’s who every gloomy shut-in boy wishes he could be, even more so than Shinji.”

“Please don’t call Matthew from Anne of Green Gables a gloomy shut-in…”

“The scene where he goes to buy a Christmas present for Anne is such a tearjerker. It really strikes a chord. Yes…you end up buying inessential stuff,” I keenly recalled that masterpiece. “And that’s how you need to be, Tsukihi. Because then, one day, you and I can live together in our old age at Green Gables.”

“You know you’re almost proposing to me.”

“Hah, it’s no mere proposal. It’s a polonaise.”

“A courtship dance?!”

How am I supposed to read Anne of Green Gables now? groaned Tsukihi, clutching her head.

What am I ever going to do with you, I muttered, shrugging and getting off of my bed to begin taking off my clothes.

This of course isn’t to suggest that I was about to commit any sort of indecent act against my little sister, only that I was changing from my pajamas into my house clothes.

“Umm, so what’s up with Karen?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

By the time I’d spoken, Tsukihi, her mission to keep me from going back to sleep apparently accomplished to her satisfaction, was already splayed out and lazing around on my bed.

She wasn’t just a far cry from Marilla, she had even given up on getting her crowbar out of my bed.

What was I supposed to do that night?

Maybe leaving my room and coming back would fix it, like a video game?

Either way, Tsukihi looked like a caterpillar the way she rolled back and forth without any concern for her yukata opening up.

That’s what I’d call her. Sisterpillar.

“You shouldn’t give your little sister kinky nicknames, Koyomi.”

“Stop reading the narration. And anyway, answer my question. I asked what happened to that flashy, tracksuit-wearing, taller-than-me female whose hip you always seem to be joined to. You’re not with that ponytail on legs?”

“Karen’s jogging right now.”

“Jogging? Jogging as in running but not quite? That’s rare, she doesn’t normally do that.”

“Today’s special. She said it’s her way of celebrating the beginning of Golden Week.”

“How is that a celebration?”

“She must be thinking of Olympic torch runners.”

“Oh. So she’s as stupid today as any other day.”

“I think she’s gotten Golden Week and the Olympics mixed up.”

“Oh. Because of the gold medals they give out during the Olympics? She’s as impressively stupid as ever.”

How heartwarming.

So that’s why Tsukihi had come alone the second time she came to wake me up.

They’d come together early in the morning (well, an hour ago) to rouse me from my idle slumber, but after realizing that I’d attempted to fake them out and go back to sleep, Tsukihi had come marching back in on her own for my reawakening (whatever that means).

Hence the crowbar.

You really couldn’t let her act on her own.

Between Karen and Tsukihi, the former, with her life’s calling to martial arts, is the more brutal of the two, but the latter seems to be the more dangerous. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word “restraint.”

“Ugh,” I grunted. “And I guess Golden Week starts today? Nothing but bad news.”

“I see you’re being pessimistic from the very start, Koyomi.”

April twenty-ninth, a Saturday.

Greenery Day.

“It hasn’t even been nine hours since Golden Week started, you know,” reminded Tsukihi.

“Nine hours is enough to figure most of the details out once you get to be a master like me.”

“Yeah, you do hate holidays, special events, Sundays, and all that. You’re a weekday lover, a weekday person.”

“A weekday person?”

What a sorry-sounding person.

Completely charmless.

Then again, I am a sorry person.

“It’s not like I hate them,” I countered. “I just dislike dealing with them.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Is it?”

Hate and dislike feel like two separate things to me.

But if you want to argue that they’re the same, well, they are.

It almost felt like I’d said, I’m remorseful, but I don’t regret it, only to be told that remorse and regret are synonyms, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to go about rebutting her.

“It’s not like there’s anything particularly better about it being Golden Week, though,” I said. “Morning is still going to come, my little sisters are still going to wake me up, my nails are still going to get longer, and my height is still going to stay the exact same.”

“Yeah, I guess so. We don’t have school is all.”

“Man will never stop warring with man, betrayal and lies will continue on without end.”

“What? Why are you suddenly talking about things on such a grand scale?”

“There’s still no question that someone in this world is going to die today. How do you disregard that and call today a day to be celebrated? We ought to be mourning!”

“Koyomi, why are you angry, and who are you angry at?”

My little sister seemed genuinely creeped out that her older brother, not knowing how to deal with all the time he had on days off (having nothing to do), was pissed off about it.

I could understand how she felt.

But I was getting fired up, so I continued. I’m not the kind of brother who gives any sort of consideration to his little sister’s feelings.

“I’m in mourning every hour of every day. I’ve never once sent holiday cards to anyone.”

“Isn’t that because you don’t have any friends to send them to?”

“Don’t act like you know everything about me! You don’t know a thing!”

“I at least know how many holiday cards you get.”

“You’re right.”

“More precisely, I know how many holiday cards you don’t get.”

“You’re right.”

My holiday card count finally dwindled down to zero after I started high school. I didn’t even get cards from kids who sent one to every classmate. In other words, I didn’t feel like I was in mourning year-round, I was just plain mournful.

“I see, I don’t like holidays because I don’t have any friends to play with,” I admitted. “What a fresh, new discovery.”

“Sounds like you learned something you were better off not knowing.”

Tsukihi looked at me, her honest-to-goodness brother, with a deep sense of pity in her sad eyes. As a side note, she (and Karen) have a network of friends so large it requires them to send holiday cards in the hundreds, putting pressure on both the Araragi family budget and the Araragi family mailbox.

We were extreme siblings, if nothing else.

I could only imagine how hard it’d be to find the average between the three of us.

“But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s nothing different or better about holidays,” I argued. “Dream all you want, it’s not going to change reality. You could put aside my personal circumstances, and there’d still be nothing better about them. Golden Week? Give me a break, they’re just days like any other. What’s so golden about them? Are they gonna catch me in the rye? Er─I guess that’d be Holden Week. Morning is still going to come, my little sisters are still going to wake me up, my nails are still going to get longer, my height is still going to stay the exact same, man will never stop warring with man, betrayal and lies will continue on without end, and your panties are still going to be white.”

“Don’t bring up my panties.”

Taken at face value, Tsukihi’s reply sounded like the bashful plea of a fair, young lady, but I want you to know that she was a second-year middle schooler smack dab in the middle of adolescence who couldn’t care less that the hem of her yukata was exposing everything for the world to see.

It wasn’t just a peek under the kimono, it was practically the full monty.

My sisters, Karen too, really did everything they could to grind down any illusions I had about women.

“I bet Gregor Samsa had a great time. I mean, he woke up and he was a bug! Now that’s what I call a metamorphosis. I couldn’t be any more jealous as a fellow little sister-haver. Don’t you agree, Sisterpillar?”

“Don’t be trying to make that kinky nickname stick to your little sister.”

“Hmm.”

Well.

Having said that, maybe envy for Mr. Samsa was misplaced given my own metamorphosis into a vampire, let alone a bug.

Yup.

A month had already passed since spring break.

A lot of things sure did happen in that time─would be the kind of thing I’d say if this was a series finale, but it really did feel surprising in a way when I took a glance back.

My experience over spring break had made an indelible impression on me. It was so incredibly intense, in other words, that it left me feeling like those two weeks were the climax of my life.

If you believe that every life has its peak, that spring break was mine.

And that’s why it was surprising.

Life still went on even after spring break.

On and on, eternally.

One thing after another, it continued.

People say that life isn’t a game, and I guess they say that because it doesn’t have a reset button. The way I see it, though, isn’t the real reason that it doesn’t have an ending?

I suppose games that don’t have endings do exist these days, whether they’re online games or StreetPass or whatever, but it’s almost like that’s a case of games coming to resemble life, not the other way around.

Whatever the case, human life doesn’t end so long as you don’t die─life goes on.

There’s no ending theme or closing credits.

You can become a high schooler.

You can wash out.

You can have no friends.

You can become a vampire.

You can turn back into a human.

Life goes on.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Or, slow and steady is life’s pace.

“They say Golden Week this, Golden Week that, but you know what I really think?” I asked my sister. “Shouldn’t you be embarrassed for falling hook, line, and sinker for a movie industry sales tactic? That’s my appeal to you.”

“An appeal, you say.”

“A repeal!”

“You want to cancel a string of holidays?”

“It needs to come to a stop. There isn’t a single good thing about it. And speaking of things coming to a stop, it makes printers and distributors grind to a halt, too, so it pushes everyone’s schedule up!”

“Why are you talking like you’re in the publishing industry?”

“A book that should’ve come out in April ends up coming out in July thanks to Golden Week!”

“What a specific example.”

And it’s not just the publishing industry. There are some people in jobs out there that don’t let them take a single day of Golden Week off, which is apparently why a certain Japanese public broadcaster doesn’t use the triumphant and dazzling “Golden Week,” opting instead for the simpler “long holiday.”

Then again.

That doesn’t change the fact those people still have to work.

“And speaking of sales tactics, it’s the same with Christmas and Valentine’s Day,” I went on. “And then you have White Day, which doesn’t even make any sense! Does it have its own Jesus Christ or Saint Valentine-esque origin?”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

“So then it’s not White Day, it’s a white lie!”

Tsukihi tilted her head in confusion. “Huh?”

I thought I’d be able to pull that one off through sheer momentum, but it didn’t seem to work. “Either way─and I know I’m repeating myself─it’s such an overstatement to use the word ‘golden.’ A golden string of holidays? Its length changes depending on the timing of the weekends around it, so why compare it to one of the most stable materials in the world?”

“Hmm. I don’t know about getting so specific with your criticism, but I guess calling it ‘golden’ might be overdoing it.”

“I wonder what’s on your mind right now…”

“Why are you suddenly talking like the King of Distortion from Boogiepop?”

Don’t say something just because you think it might sound cool, my sister chided.

I was deeply remorseful.

“Golden?” I reprised. “Is a bunch of holidays in a row really that great? Sure, three-day weekends used to be rare in the past, but now we’ve started observing holidays on Mondays.” Incidentally, people in the publishing industry also view them as anything but holy. It’s a business that even wishes Saturdays and Sundays would disappear. “Even if you ignore my dislike of holidays, it still doesn’t feel like it lives up to its name.”

“Hmm. I don’t know if it’s about living up to the name as much as a branding strategy. Like something they use to make it feel more fun. They talk about a labeling effect, and people do seek out nice names. Did you know why Greenland is called Greenland? It’s an Arctic tundra, but they wanted to make it sound like it’s green all over so that lots of people would go there.”

“Who do you think your brother is? Of course I know that. And that’s not all, its capital was named Godthåb, God’s hope.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s called Nuuk now.”

Brother and sister smiled as this tense trivia showdown disguised as friendly banter played out. But then the battle came to a close with a single line from Tsukihi.

“By the way, Greenland is a Danish territory.”

That left me in the dust.

Really?

Danish territory?

I had to admit, at the end of the day, she was a smart girl.

Trivia was one thing, but there was no way I could ever match regular knowledge for knowledge with her.

“Hmm, and it looks like we’ve ended up talking about Greenland on Greenery Day,” I tried to conclude.

“Koyomi. I don’t know where you got that idea, but today’s April twenty-ninth, Showa Day. Greenery Day is May fourth.”

“Huh? The fourth isn’t a generic holiday?”

“Nope.”

“The times sure are changing. I don’t have the slightest idea anymore what year it is on the Gregorian calendar. Are they still doing analog TV broadcasts these days? But you might be right. Golden Week doesn’t fail to live up to its name, it succeeds because of it. It’s like Japan as far as country names go. We call ourselves ‘the land of the rising sun’ when we’re nothing more than an island nation to the far east. Who isn’t busy building their brand? But regardless of whether Golden Week’s name makes it a success or a failure, we’re still putting lipstick on a pig. I think we should be like that nameless public broadcaster and just call it a long holiday. Of course, I’d change my tune if you decided to wear dazzlingly gold panties for these nine days.”

“I’d never wear panties that tasteless.”

“White?”

“White,” Tsukihi declared, spreading the hem of her yukata wide to make what was already showing even more brazenly visible.

It was the act of a deviant.

Of course, while I was the intended audience, seeing it didn’t do a thing for me. Not when she already walked around the house in her underwear after getting out of the bath.

It was no different to me than if I was flipping through a book of color samples.

But it felt wrong to be so disinterested as an older brother in this day and age, so I decided to clap my hands as loud as I could before praising her to high heaven.

“Woo-hoo! Nothing better than little sister panties!!”

“Aww, thank you!”

She played along, too.

What kind of siblings were we?

Doubt had started to weigh down on me quite heavily at this point, but Tsukihi stormed ahead.

“White panties really are the only way to go. In fact, I’d even say that if they aren’t white, they aren’t panties at all.”

“Oh man, I can hear the excitement in your voice. All right, here we go! I can feel a full two-page spread of you talking about panties coming on.”

“That’s right. If you don’t like reading about that kind of thing, you should skip ahead,” Tsukihi footnoted, though it felt awfully late to be saying that given how meritless our conversation had been to this point. “And it’s not just panties, Koyomi. I think that all underwear, from bras to whatever else, generally ought to be white.”

“Wow. So you’re really going for two pages?”

I’d just have to play along.

I was ready for her to do her worst.

We were so busy talking that I wasn’t focused on changing my clothes. I was half-dressed now but my torso was still bare, and yet I clasped my hands and began to stretch, moving my arms up and down and swinging my shoulders from side to side. Then I plopped down cross-legged.

Okay. It was time to get real with her.

“You know though, Tsukihi. I’m sorry to criticize you right as you’re getting all riled up, but I just can’t agree with you there.”

“Hrm? Oh, so are we on opposite sides here?”

“If you want to put it that way, then yes. The opposite sides of a shiny coin!”

Since I was talking to my little sister, I didn’t have any reservations about using lines that weren’t particularly cool or funny at all. I hope that you take the fact that I’d just been woken up into consideration and overlook this last exchange.

“Are you just going to be two-faced?” my sister probed.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that I’m against white panties. In fact, I accept them with wide-open arms. No one is as tolerant as Koyomi Araragi when it comes to panties. But don’t you think that where there’s color, there ought to be variation? Why have colors if you aren’t going to be colorful with them? White or not, how Spartan would our world be if everyone in the world wore the same color of underwear?”

“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to reply to that one.”

“Colors may be what saves this world, who knows─well, I know!”

“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to reply to that one, either.”

It’s not like I’m trying to reject all other colors, Tsukihi said.

It seemed like she had a well-considered position. Then again, it made sense for her to be picky about her underwear. Her tastes may be skewed toward Japanese clothing, but she was in general a well-dressed girl, a fashion leader among her middle-school classmates.

“I just think that among the myriad of colors, white stands at the very top,” she began. “If you said there’s a color hierarchy, white would totally rule over all the rest. It’s to the point that I feel like replacing the very word ‘ranking’ with ‘whitening.’ Can’t you imagine it already? ‘This week’s top-ten whitening!’”

“Hmm… Well, yes, only black is as full and complete, but I see how you might not want to prioritize a color that also equals a darkness that obliterates all others.”

I could imagine someone thinking that we were two art school students engaged in a serious discussion, but we were talking about underwear.

Got that? Panties.

“At any rate, Tsukihi. It’s about time people came clean on how they really feel about a common view that’s out there.”

“What might that be?”

“There’s nothing particularly sexy about black underwear.”

“You said it!”

High five.

My little sister and I came to an understanding through our taste in underwear.

“Yeah!”

“Whooo!”

This was a culturally refined conversation we were engaged in.

I could see someone registering it as part of our cultural heritage.

“We were talking about whether or not things live up to their name, and in that sense,” I commented, “there’s a whole spectrum of feelings people have about different colors.”

“Spectrum. Colors. I get it.”

“Yikes, that wasn’t intentional.” I realized that Tsukihi had said “a myriad of colors” earlier to tiptoe around that trap. What a sneaky little girl. “I mean like cold colors and warm colors. Or how painting dumbbells white makes them look lighter.”

“No, you’ve got it all wrong. White looks serious, pure, and chaste,” Tsukihi put our conversation right back on track. It was pretty sharp of her, but at the same time I also felt that perhaps our original topic wasn’t worth returning to. “Just look, Koyomi,” she said, undoing her sash and taking off her yukata, exposing not just her pants but even her brassiere. She folded her yukata by her side and turned my way, showing me that not only her panties and brassiere but also her high socks were white. Was it what you’d call a fully coordinated outfit?

Tsukihi Araragi then began kneeling and posing.

“So? It looks serious, pure, and chaste, doesn’t it?”

“No, I’d say ridiculous, soiled, and slutty…”

If she wasn’t careful about assuming such poses, she might end up as a figurine looking just like that.

They might make a Petite Nendo out of the moment.

The pillow behind her with a crowbar sticking out of it was a nice addition, making the scene look like a racy centerfold.

“Koyomi, isn’t that just due to your preconceptions and prejudices about me? Hey, how about if I hid my face with my hand and became anonymous!”

Tsukihi held the fingers on her right hand together to hide the top half of her face.

Now there was a censor bar over her eyes.

She continued to pose that way.

“……”

I told her it only upped the raciness.

Maybe she was stupid after all.

How odd, when she supposedly had excellent grades, close to straight A’s.

Maybe they were right, and how well you did in class was only one aspect of intelligence. But if this idiot really aced it, I bet that sapped her classmates’ will to bother studying…

“Well, what about those striped trunks you’re wearing, Koyomi? The way you’re showing them off to me, those horizontal stripes make me think you need to be behind bars instead.”

“For what?”

Then I realized, for all my worrying about my little sister’s mental condition, that I was also in nothing but my underwear.

I know I said I was half-dressed, but I didn’t say I had put on pants!

And there you have it, a perfect example of a narration trick.

A living specimen of the mystery genre: Koyomi Araragi.

“Koyomi, people are going to get the wrong idea if you’re also going to show them your underwear and it isn’t white.”

“They’re getting the wrong idea from the moment I’m showing them my underwear, white, striped, or anything else.”

A sad misunderstanding, or maybe a correct understanding.

“How often do I get to show my underwear, anyway?” I asked.

“Huh? You’re wrong. I actually have lots of opportunities to see boys’ underwear.”

“What?!”

My heart instantly filled with murder.

If my little sister, a second-year middle schooler, had that many opportunities, her high school senior brother had no choice but to act.

“No, no, I don’t mean it in any obscene way. What are you even imagining?” whispered Tsukihi, stroking my face like a jockey soothing her horse. “I guess it’s not the same as low-rise pants, but you know how boys like to wear them saggy? When they crouch and stuff, their shirts get pulled up and their underwear shows.”

“Ohh.”

“Or during P.E. class when their underwear hangs out from their gym shorts.”

“So that’s all you meant,” I said, relieved.

Thank goodness, I wasn’t going to have to kill anyone.

I was nearly about to slaughter all of Tsukihi’s male friends.

She remarked, “Lots of people have always complained about how girls’ skirts are too short, but as a girl, I wish people would pay more attention to how loose the rules are for proper attire for boys. I mean, I think boys’ gym shorts are way sexier than girls’ volleyball shorts. All of that leg hair, out in the open? I can’t even look straight at it.”

“There the problem seems to be whatever’s going through the head of whoever’s doing the seeing.”

Then again, boys and girls get both embarrassed and aroused over different body parts.

In that sense, and there aren’t that many places where you can have a serious conversation about this, boys might have more openings in their defenses than girls. If you were to ask me whether or not I could do a lap around the town wearing nothing but my striped trunks, I wouldn’t be able to give you a straightforward no.

“And if we’re going to be serious about this,” I continued, “no matter how aroused a girl gets, it’s hard for me to imagine them forcing a boy to do this or that with them. Maybe girls get shy as a kind of necessary survival instinct, to protect themselves.”

“We don’t need to be serious about this. Let’s keep talking about underwear.”

“……”

I got a vague feeling that I’d come to know someone like Tsukihi in the near future. A boys’ love-obsessed basketball player. It felt like a dry run─was it just my imagination?

I hoped it was just my imagination.

“Survival instinct, huh? In that respect, girls like Karen who’re way stronger than the average boy do seem to let their guard down about this stuff.”

“Ah, true.”

“She’ll even change into her gym clothes in front of boys.”

“Tell me what class she’s in, right now. I’m going over and massacring all of the boys in it.”

“Come on, it’s fine. When she starts changing, it’s the boys who turn away and run off,” Tsukihi soothed me once again.

Stroke. Stroke.

Was that cold sweat I saw on her?

“Really? So I don’t have to massacre them?”

“You’d only cause more trouble if you did… I know this isn’t something I should be saying about my own sister, but Karen isn’t very feminine.”

“I guess you’re right about that.”

She was a martial artist, after all.

Even taking away the fact that she was my little sister, she didn’t feel very feminine to me, and for her part, she hardly seemed bound by traditional notions of ladylike behavior. In fact, from what I’d seen of her exploits as one of the Fire Sisters, I was worried she was trying to become a man among men.

“In that sense, I guess it’s inevitable that she can just relax,” I noted. “That tracksuited girl who’s trying to become a man’s man ever wearing a short skirt or low-rise pants is just unimaginable.”

“Oh, but Karen does have a cute side. She says she’s embarrassed about her underwear being visible under her tracksuit when she meets her boyfriend, which is why she goes commando instead.”

“What is she, a nympho?!”

Every girl in my family was a pervert!

What a mad nympho tangle.

“No matter how much I like kimonos, even I wouldn’t go without underwear on a daily basis. All I can do is take my hat off to her.”

“She’s already taken her underwear off, there’s no need for any more clothing to be removed here. But putting aside the fact that her go-to panties for dates are literally lacking, she’s normally pretty colorful with her choices. A real colorful girl, right? So do you two clash when it comes to that?”

“We do clash. In fact, Karen almost hates white. But the underlying thinking is the same. She says she doesn’t like white because it’s too serious.”

“Ahh.”

So she didn’t like being serious.

Well, she was at the age when you feel like rebelling.

She might pretend to be some defender of justice but was acting like a normal middle schooler.

Even so.

“Sheesh, you two really are still kids. Look at how you’re letting yourselves be bound by trite values. What an impoverished way to see the world. It wouldn’t be an overstatement for me to say here that ‘white equals serious’ is just as prejudiced and narrow-minded as ‘black equals sexy.’”

“Excuse me? Are you trying to say that white doesn’t equal serious? I’ll kill you.”

“Why are you being so short-tempered with your big brother? No, what I’m trying to say is that whether or not it’s serious has less to do with the color of the underwear than your person─”

I stopped before I could finish my thought.

An idea came to me.

No─maybe I should say a realization.

About a question that had perplexed me incessantly for the last month─something I’d agonized over but made zero progress on.

We were on such a closely related topic that it seemed like it would be a waste not to ask Tsukihi─that’s what I realized.

“Um, what were you going to say? Your person…?”

“Oh, just that whether your underwear looks serious or not is a manifestation of your personality. In other words, if you’re serious, pure, and chaste, it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing black or white, your underwear is going to look serious, pure, and chaste.”

“Hm. Like me right now!”

“Nope.”

I was pretty sure I had in fact asserted the opposite.

Off by 180─my little sister was a wonderful person who didn’t bother listening to a word I had to say.

But that was precisely why she was the perfect person to ask for advice─no matter what we discussed, she’d probably forget it by the next day.

“Okay, Tsukihi. That’s enough talk about panties.”

“What? We’re already done?”

“We’re long past that two-page spread.”

If anything, we’d spent too much time on the topic. I’m sure more than a few people out there skipped ahead trusting Tsukihi’s footnote only to be dumbfounded that we were still talking about panties.

But what’s the big deal, right?

Everyone likes talking about panties.

“Anyway,” I said, “a young woman shouldn’t be repeating the word ‘panties’ like you have.”

“Huh? Are you really trying to act like we haven’t been in this together?”

Tsukihi frowned as if she’d been betrayed.

Then again, it was a momentous betrayal─a textbook example of pulling the rug out from under someone’s feet. My treachery was nothing more than a segue, though, and I hoped she’d overlook it.

“Instead of talking about panties,” I declared, “let’s talk about love.”

“Love?” Tsukihi scowled. She clearly didn’t want to. “Nooo! I wanna keep talking about panties.”

She fell backwards on my bed and flailed her limbs so furiously I couldn’t tell if she was throwing a tantrum or trying to swim. She needed to take her practice routine to some gym floor instead.

…I’d feel bad if people misunderstood my maidenly sister, so allow me to add a footnote of my own: Tsukihi saw all of this talk about panties as a discussion on underwear as fashion, nothing more. I just thought I should stress that here in closing.

“Shut up. We’re going to talk about love, okay? Now stop acting up and put on some clothes.”

“Same to you, Koyomi.”

“You’re right.”

It went without saying.

While everything was in full accordance with our house rules, this tableau of a half-naked brother together in a cramped room with his underwear-flaunting sister was not one that would be looked upon kindly by society.

The curtains were wide open, too.

Tsukihi and I both stood to attend to our attire─she put her yukata back on, while I resumed changing into my house clothes. Though we would no longer be able to speak naked truths to each other, this is where I really had to spill my guts.

It was time for verbal seppuku.

I sat back down in the same position.

Tsukihi got off my bed and sat across from me cross-legged, possibly noticing the change in mood.

…This is a complete digression, but it feels to me like there aren’t many girls who sit with their legs fully crossed. Maybe it has to do with their skeletal structure?

Tsukihi was doing a great job in that regard, but it could have been because she was flexible. Never working out the way Karen does, she looks so squishy that you might wonder if half her flesh was melting.

“You’re as soft as a macaroon, you know that?”

“Did you mean to say marshmallow?”

How do you manage to bring up the less known of the two and get it wrong, Tsukihi asked.

A flawless retort.

Of course, it’s not as if having a squishy body necessarily means you’ll be flexible.

The real difference between men and women in this instance was probably one of manners.

“So, what about love, Koyomi?”

“Well, it’s not exactly about love. It’s more something that might be love.”

“Hmm? Something that might be love? What is my big brother even talking about? I wish he’d drop dead.”

“Stop wishing for me to die every chance you get. You’re the only person I can ask. You’re in middle school but already have a boyfriend, which means you must constantly be fielding questions from your friends about romance. You’re a veteran.”

“You can’t ask Karen? She’s in middle school but already has a boyfriend, and she’s constantly fielding questions from her friends about romance. She’s a veteran.”

“I would never ask that idiot for advice on any topic,” I stated. A decisive tone by my standards. “That tracksuited woman is a veteran of war, not love. Even if I did ask her for help, she’d just offload my question onto you, right?”

“No, I don’t think so. If you see her as some sort of combatant who spends all her time running from one brawl to the next, you’re very mistaken. She’ll help if someone comes to her looking for romantic advice. She just fails every time, that’s all.”

“That’s the worst of both worlds.”

If you can’t do something, you should tell people you can’t do it.

The fact that she won’t is why she’s still a kid.

“Then what about you?” I asked. “What’s your success rate when it comes to romantic advice?”

“A hundred percent, of course.”

This seemed to be a point of pride for her, given the boastful way she puffed out her chest. While I was pretty annoyed at the sight of my little sister bragging to me, I couldn’t deny that it was a boastworthy résumé.

A hundred percent?

She had to be exaggerating, though.

“No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s an honest number. It doesn’t matter who it is─if someone comes to me for advice, I’m going to make their romantic dreams come true.”

“……”

That was scary to hear.

Those results were actually menacing to the point that they made me hesitate about asking her─well, it felt like I was already making a big mistake asking my little sister for advice in the first place.

And not just any advice─romantic advice.

Then again.

I still didn’t know if this was love in the first place─I could be casual, like I was dripping solution onto litmus paper.

“There’s actually this girl in my class I have an interest in.”

“What percent?”

“Not an ownership interest!”

Our exchange operated on a high level, and yet was as stupid as could be, in a way that was only possible between siblings. But Tsukihi wasn’t really trying to make a joke and seemed to be half-serious. She was visibly confused.

“What? What? I don’t understand.”

Smirking with a faint sense of superiority over having bewildered my little sister, I explained in more direct terms, “In other words, I might be feeling affection for a girl who’s in my class starting this year.”

It was an odd thing to be saying with a smirk.

“My goodness!” exclaimed Tsukihi.

If her popularity was the result of this kind of overacting, it felt like it might be worth taking notes, but I had other concerns at the moment.

And wait, why would she be shocked?

“Why wouldn’t I be shocked? I’m not just shocked, I’m fried to a crisp! My own big brother, who used to make cringey declarations like ‘making friends would lower my intensity as a human,’ finding someone he likes?”

Shaking all over, Tsukihi covered her mouth.

I’d scared my sister for real.

“It’s almost as shocking as a dog starting to talk to me,” she said.

“……”

You know, maybe a dog standing on its hind legs, but talking was in the realm of biological impossibility. How much of a loner did she take her own brother to be?

Not that she was particularly wrong, of course.

And by the way, it did kind of sting that she offhandedly called that declaration of mine “cringey.”

“Wow, wow, we need to break out the champagne,” she fretted. “How does it go again? Do I face it toward you?”

“What are they teaching you in home ec these days?”

It would make for a lively scene, though.

“And don’t jump to any conclusions. I just have an interest in her, and I specifically said ‘might’ and ‘something that might be.’ Nothing’s definite yet.”

“Hrmmm?”

“Which is why I’m asking for your advice, as much as I don’t want to. How do I determine if I like someone of the opposite sex?”

“…Um. Sorry, Koyomi.” Tsukihi’s body abruptly stopped shaking as she apologized to me. I didn’t know what the apology was about, but it did feel nice to have my little sister telling me she was sorry. “What was that? Could you repeat it?”

“Oh, you didn’t catch what I said? C’mon, aren’t you supposed to be the brains of the Fire Sisters? What a blunder. Give me a break. Okay, are you ready? You’d better be listening this time. How do I determine if I like someone of the opposite sex? In other words, at what point do the feelings I have for the person in question go from normal to affection?”

Tsukihi crossed her arms in silence.

What was the matter? I couldn’t chew it down any more than that─did I have to go get some liquid baby food?

“Sorry, Koyomi,” she apologized again.

The reason didn’t matter, the number of times didn’t matter. It felt nice to have my little sister tell me she was sorry. It was so refreshing that the breakdown in communication we were having barely bothered me─but that didn’t seem to be the case for Tsukihi, the apologizer (well, if either of my sisters started saying, ‘It feels nice to tell my big brother that I’m sorry,’ I’d take them straight to the hospital), who disclosed the reason for her apology.

“A near-infinite number of people have come to me for romantic advice, but I’m sad to say that I’ve never been asked a question on that sort of level.”

Huh?

Really?

So it did hurt to ask.

I was going to need to file for damages.

“So after all your bragging, Tsukihi, that’s all you’ve got to show for it?” I stood up so I could look down on her, body language and all (imagine an American soap opera). Looking down on my little sister felt nearly as good as having her tell me she was sorry.

It made me feel like I could forgive her for betraying my expectations.

“I guess it’s fine,” I said. “I suppose I might be the one to blame here, asking a middle schooler a fairly difficult, high-level question.”

“No, I mean I’ve never been asked such a simple, low-level question before.”

Tsukihi Araragi gazed at me with the eyes of a dead fish─no, gazed at me with eyes like I was a dead fish. It was a look that made the living want to die, more a death ray than a look.

“Yeah. Koyomi, I know you’re normally the one who handles the retorts, but allow me to take on that role this one time. ‘Ooh, I don’t know what this feeling is. Could it be love?’” She stood up as if to give chase and, backfisting my chest like an old-school slapstick comedian, hollered, “What kind of fair little maiden are you?!”

Getting insulted by my little sister, being called names by my little sister, and taking a backfist from my little sister all felt pretty decent too, but I’m getting this odd sense that my proclivities are turning overly and excessively perverted, so going forward, let me leave out descriptions of the heart-throbbing excitement that was mine.

I gotta be careful, Koyomi Araragi is supposed to be a character who’s just playing the role of a pervert in order to entertain all of you.

“A maiden? Who’s the maiden here, middle-school girl?”

“There are no maidens among middle-school girls!”

She’d spoken with such conviction. Perhaps that was what she truly believed as someone who’d clambered over a corpse mound of queries about love, and I felt like a retort could dig too deep and result in me never trusting women again. I decided to let it pass.

“Sit! On your knees!” my sister yelled.

At me.

It made me want to defy her and ask what right she had to act so high and mighty, but the intensity behind the words forced my body to obey. How slavishly submissive was I?

But what was with her?

What was she so mad about?

What had enraged the woman? What had infuriated her?

I was kneeling before her, but Tsukihi made no move to sit. Her arms crossed and her chin high, she glared down at me.

“Koyomi. I need to ask this first. Are you being serious?”

“As serious as can be. I’ve never not been serious in my life.”

“Watch your mouth,” she ordered me.

My little sister.

“You need to address me as ma’am. And don’t act stupid.”

“Y-Yes, ma’am.”

I obeyed.

My little sister had forced me to sit on my knees before her, was glaring down at me, ordering me around, and making me call her ma’am. This made me feel a certain way, et cetera.

Leave it out, Koyomi. Leave it out.

“Explain yourself from the very beginning. And you call yourself my big brother?”

Why yes, I did.

And I’d never been happier to call myself that.

This was getting so good I was starting to wish they’d make her the thirteenth little sister in Sister Princess.

“Um, well, I can’t really be too specific about it, but…”

Going into details would have been a violation of (my) privacy, after all. I didn’t want my personal info falling into my little sister’s hands.

“…But a bunch of stuff happened. Let’s just call her Miss H.”

“Miss H.”

How particular of you, Tsukihi said.

It was just an initial, though.

Particular, yes, but reasonable.

“Ever since we were put in the same class at the beginning of the month, it seems like she’s been all I can think about. And it’s not just mental. Sometimes in class, I look away from the blackboard and find myself looking at her seat. And it’s not just during school. On my way there and coming back, I just so happen to search her out. Even when I go shopping at a bookstore or something, I start thinking about how it’d be neat if we ran into each other, this being a small town and all. And when I’m reading a book that I bought at the store, I think, ‘Oh, I bet Miss H. would like this sentence.’ If I try to buy something dirty, a thought goes through my head like, ‘Ah, I bet Miss H. would hate me if I did,’ and I put it back on the shelf.”

“Could you please not be so open? I don’t want your personal info falling into my hands.”

I don’t want to hear about my big brother agonizing over buying dirty magazines, Tsukihi muttered.

Damn, saying “Miss H.” had led me astray. The initial also stands for “hentai” after all.

“Actually, Koyomi?”

“What.”

“That’s love.”

She’d made her assertion. Her affirmation.

That she did so with an appalled look and not a serious one only made her more convincing, but such a clear-cut opinion made me want to challenge her.

I’m a bit of a devil’s advocate at heart.

“You don’t know that for sure. It’s possible to feel that way about someone you hate. And considering how vague these feelings are, I might just get used to them if I wait long enough.”

“Hmm. Yes, but no… How do I put this?” Her arms still folded, Tsukihi tilted her head in contemplation. “There are a lot of things I want to say, but I don’t know how I should say them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is this kind of thing so obvious to you that you don’t even need to think about it?”

So she was like a centipede that had been asked how to walk? There’s a story about the creature being asked the sequence in which it moves its namesake, its hundred legs, and not being able to answer. Worse, while it was able to walk normally before, it can’t figure out how it managed to the moment it’s asked that question, leaving it immobile.

This was getting risky. Thanks to my careless question, Tsukihi might have to pass up on romances for the rest of her life. She could end up sharing the same problem I’d come to her with.

……

But that didn’t seem like such a bad outcome.

“No, Koyomi, like I told you, it’s not some kind of high-level question. It’s a low-level one, okay? Also, centipedes don’t have a hundred legs.”

“Wh-What?! Centipedes…don’t have a hundred legs?!”

I tried overreacting to a clearly ridiculous degree to this dime-a-dozen piece of trivia that I already knew, but Tsukihi fixed her blizzard-cold stare at me, and I sat back on my knees, dejected.

She was some kind of Frieza.

“By the way,” I said, “if Goku and Frieza fused, would they have turned into the ultimate warrior known as Geezer?”

“Goku and Frieza wouldn’t be able to fuse, they have completely different body types.” I’d charged straight at her with another question, undeterred, but not only was Tsukihi’s reaction calmer than expected, she was even closely familiar with Dragon Ball. “Forget that centipede stuff. It’s simpler, like I’m trying to teach a kindergartener the concept of multiplication.”

“Multiplication? Don’t be ridiculous. Are you saying this is that simple?”

“Yes. What you should be thinking when you look at me now is that this is how puzzled a little sister would be faced with a brother who can’t do multiplication.”

“……”

What a picture.

You couldn’t put a little sister in any worse of a situation.

Poor thing.

“Oh, but I could understand that happening,” I said. “You know, like, uh… Who was that guy who invented the light bulb and stuff again? Thomas the Tank Engine?”

“Thomas Edison.”

“Yeah, him.”

“How does the name ‘Thomas’ come to you before ‘Edison’?”

“Sorry. We’re pretty good friends so I end up calling him by his first name without thinking.”

“Yet you mistook him for a tank engine.”

“So, about Thomas,” I pushed forward. I’m stubborn when it comes to jokes. “They say that when he was in elementary school, he constantly asked his teachers basic questions like ‘Why does one plus one make two?’ Not even multiplication, this is addition. He wasn’t able to understand things in the way they were taught to him, so he kept asking questions until he was satisfied.”

“Stop, you’re almost making it sound like you and Edison have something in common. You don’t.” Tsukihi shook her head. Vigorously. “There must be lots of precocious kids all around the world throughout history who’ve asked smartass questions like ‘Why does one plus one make two?’ But there’s only one Thomas Edison, king of inventors.”

“Whaa?”

What an unsentimental and pessimistic thing to say.

What a buzzkill.

Don’t be discouraging all those smartass kids out there who might one day become Thomas Edison.

I objected, “But even Edison must have played around as a kid and told people, ‘I’m going to become the king of inventors!’”

“If he was saying that back in his day, that means he must have invented the time machine, too.” I guess it’s true that the simpler the idea, the harder it is to explain, Tsukihi put us back on track. “You must be serious about this in your own way, though. I shouldn’t insult you or poke fun at you too much, but if you want my personal opinion, I think that if you’re wondering whether or not you like someone, you basically like them already.”

“Really?”

“Would you spend all this time in deep thought about it if you didn’t?”

“I don’t think I’d call it deep thought, to be honest.”

It was more of a nagging feeling.

More of a gnawing feeling.

Like mist or fog, something that just won’t clear up─that’s all it was.

Like a fluffy cloud.

As someone who’d never bothered confronting his own emotions, it was all but impossible for me to understand how I felt.

But.

I was wrong to have been that way─I realized that now.

I could realize that now.

Which is why now─I wanted to confront them properly.

I wanted to confront my feelings, my emotions, all of that, properly.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve never found myself liking another person before to begin with.”

“You haven’t?”

“Yep, you could say never.” Though I was still sitting on my knees, I puffed my chest out with pride the way Tsukihi had earlier. “I’ve never loved anyone before.”

……

……

That’s odd, I thought.

I’d started to feel empty as soon as I spoke the words.

Like someone had popped a big hole in my puffed-up chest. No, maybe that was a hole leading straight to hell that had always been there.

Hmm?

Was I always this kind of character?

This wasn’t good, was it?

My bragging posture began to droop until I was hunched over. Of course, you’re not really supposed to bend your back in either direction when you’re sitting formally.

“You know, on a school trip,” I said, “when you’re done with the pillow fights and it’s past lights out and everyone is whispering about their romantic secrets─if you could imagine someone piping up and saying, ‘Actually, I don’t have anyone I like right now,’ then that person would be me.”

“I have a feeling that has something to do with why you don’t have any friends.”

No one asked you.

This wasn’t a conversation about friendship, it was about romantic feelings.

Not being able to make friends because you’re not able to love? What kind of new generation were we?

“I do have an excuse, though─”

“I don’t want to listen to any excuses.”

“Listen!”

“No!”

“This is an order from your brother!”

“Gah… I guess I don’t have a choice, then,” my sister relented.

It seemed like she was going to listen to my excuse.

“That overnight trip scenario is a good example of what I’m trying to say. Don’t you think there’s an odd sort of pressure at school to have someone you like?”

“Guh,” Tsukihi reacted ever-so-slightly. It seemed she hadn’t expected my point to be so sensible.

“I call it romantic coercion. What I never liked is the feeling of─how would you put it─of being forced to have a best buddy, and maybe the girls who come to you for romantic advice as friends feel the same way. It’s a form of violence, and I never liked it.”

“I do feel like you’re overdoing it with the devil’s advocate stuff, but you might be right to say that a kind of romantic supremacy rules over us at school. I think it’s the natural result of cramming a bunch of men and women together in the same spot. But,” Tsukihi said, initially agreeing with me, or rather, acting like she agreed with me. “Even if that’s the reason why everyone is so interested in romance at school, it’s not a valid reason why you, personally, can’t love others. It might have been suffocating for you, but it’s not why you can’t love others, is it?”

“It isn’t.”

“It’s an excuse, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Apologize.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized.

She had demanded an apology.

From me! Someone who’d never once apologized to anyone since the day he was born!

“Don’t lie,” she said.

“Ah, okay. I’m sorry. I apologize for always causing you so much trouble, Miss Tsukihi.”

“I’m putting us back on track.”

“Please, go ahead.”

We got back on track.

Around the point in the conversation where we discussed how Koyomi Araragi had never liked another.

I have to say, though. It seemed like I had to be put back on track a lot when I talked to Tsukihi.

“And now that I think about it, Koyomi, you’ve never brought a girl to the house before, have you? Then again, you’ve never brought a boy here either, but still.”

“I guess. But that’s what I’m trying to say─I don’t understand what it means to come to like someone. It’s like a language from a different planet.”

“Okay, but don’t you get somewhat of an idea of it when you read manga or watch anime and dramas?”

“Of course I get an idea, but that’s all fantasy. It’s like you’re telling me to believe that dragons exist. When you watch some stylish love story played out by celebrities, do you think, ‘Oh, that looks pretty good. I’ll do that’?”

“Hmm. True.”

But hearing it from someone who sees himself as another Edison… I don’t know, grumbled Tsukihi. My dragon example seemed to lack persuasiveness on its own, so I decided to bombard her with more.

“When you read Harry Potter, do you come away from it expecting to be able to cast Firaga?”

“All that line does is tell me you haven’t read Harry Potter.”

My bombardment had failed.

Sadly, fire magic didn’t seem to work on a Fire Sister.

Hey, it’s just hard to start on a series if you’re not there from the beginning.

“Or maybe it could be the other way around,” I said.

“Hrmm?”

“In other words, we get inundated with these super-stylish, or at least super-dramatic romances in manga, anime, and dramas. So maybe it’s made me think that something isn’t romance unless it’s at that kind of level. Maybe I want things to be so big and ostentatious that I’ve been overlooking the more subtle kinds of love hidden in my own life. In other words, I’m a victim of our information-overloaded age.”

“I understand what you’re saying and what you’re trying to say, but the way you’re saying it is still annoying because it feels like you’re trying to shift the blame.”

What victim? You hypocrite.

Saying so, Tsukihi lifted one leg and placed it on my shoulder where I sat. She’d probably wanted to step on my head but couldn’t raise her leg that high.

She started grinding her foot into my shoulder.

I normally would have smacked her for this, but I was going to be magnanimous and ignore it, given the situation.

I won’t deny that perhaps I was being magnanimous at all the wrong moments.

“You can’t turn around and blame others, Koyomi. We’re all overloaded with information but still manage to have normal relationships.”

“Hmph. So that’s what you’re using now? Facts and logic?”

“Could we sum this discussion up by saying that you’re a loveless person?”

“Nope, nope, that’s not true. I’m full of love. In fact, you could call me a missionary for love. You know they call me Kanetsugu Naoe, right?”

“Who ever called you that?”

No one, that was who.

Not once.

“But,” Tsukihi said.

Her foot was still on my shoulder, if you were wondering. The fact that her sock was directly next to my face was, well, a complicated situation. It made me want to rub my cheek against it.

“My devotionless brother, it isn’t like─”

“That’s right! Nothing’s holy to me.”

“My devotionless brother, it isn’t like…” she repeated searchingly, tossing out my joke without a word.

We’d been living under the same roof for more than a dozen years, but I still couldn’t fathom her standards when it came to responding to my jokes.

“You’re not a misogynist or anything, are you?”

“Huh? What do you mean by that?”

“I’m asking to make sure you’re not trying to act like you hate girls.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. I’ve donned the hat of a world-weary misanthrope plenty of times in my life, but even then I would make special exceptions for women.”

“So you were making a special exception for more than half the population.”

“Oh, right.”

Just to be clear, this part was me trying to be funny. I never made such an exception, nor ever donned the hat of a world-weary misanthrope to begin with. I just couldn’t bring myself to be earnest and honest when I was talking to my little sisters. It wasn’t possible for me to have an entirely serious conversation with them.

But, well.

It wasn’t like I’d ever acted like some rough-and-tumble guy with no time or interest in women, either.

I wasn’t a misogynist, and I didn’t think I had a problem dealing with women─at least, that’s what I thought (not confident enough to say for sure).

“Yup. I guess not,” Tsukihi agreed. “I mean, you might not have ever brought anyone to our house, but you used to always play with the friends Karen and I brought over.”

“Did I?”

“M-hm. My friend and you were like love-doves.”

“What, me? Love? Dove?”

I’d practically been a shampoo commercial. That was like striking gold.

“That must have been the first and last time in your life that you naturally attracted girls.”

“So I’d gone through such a period. A moteki… Oh, whatever.”

Now that she mentioned it, I did have some memories somewhere in my brain of playing Life and other games with a royal procession of her friends who used to stream into our home.

If there was an odd number of them, counting Tsukihi, I’d get dragged in to make it even.

But that was in the past.

I didn’t even feel nostalgic about those days.

“Either way, I don’t hate women. My policy in life has been to avoid any semblance of choosiness.”

That was me.

Cool and dry, someone with a personality you could compare to the Tottori Sand Dunes. For me to feel shaken the way I did now was a huge deal when you thought about it, a regular paradigm shift.

“And so you’ve come to me for romantic advice.”

“Yeah. That’s right. And also, I know I’ve gone on for a while, but it’s not like I’m hoping for a comprehensive answer. I just wanted to ask if you’d heard about any similar cases, for my own reference. How about your boyfriend─um, Rosokuzawa, was it?”

“Yup. You remember. I’m impressed.”

“Just his name.”

It’s not like I’ve met him.

It wasn’t that I remembered his name, more that I only knew his name.

“At what point did you judge that you liked him? That’s what I really want to hear from you.”

“Well, I guess─”

Tsukihi hesitated, pouted, and went quiet.

She seemed less stumped than embarrassed.

Cute little bugger.

Maybe I’d give her a smooch.

“─It just kinda happened,” she said.

“It just kind of happened.”

“Yeah. It was vague. Random.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“I’m okay with that. That’s how it is.”

Her comments sounded outright offhanded by the end. It must have been her trying to hide her embarrassment in part, but it also seemed like she’d scrapped her attempt at an explanation.

So she’d given up?

Given up on her brother?

What a sad state of affairs this was.

Not knowing when to quit, I protested, “Fine, then putting aside for now the question of when, could we start with you telling me why? What made you like Rosokuzawa?”

“That just kinda happened, too.”

There was no hesitation this time, but it was another offhanded reply, in an irritated tone.

Maybe she didn’t want to talk about herself too much─which was fair enough, yet it seemed selfish after the deep (?) conversation we’d been in.

“Well, it really did just kind of happen. It sorta kinda just happened, sorta,” Tsukihi explained sulkily.

It sorta kinda just happened, sorta.

“I thought that I might like him, and then I felt that I liked him, and then I knew I liked him. That’s how it went.”

“There’s such a thing as being too subtle,” I complained.

What parody of a grammar lesson was that?

How was I supposed to see how it’d gone?

“If you really want a reason,” added Tsukihi, “there are plenty of things I could say to make you happy. Like that he’s cool, or that he’s kind, or that he’s tall, or that he’s rich. I could give you all kinds of reasons.”

“……”

The fact that being rich was on her list seemed to say a lot about her as a person.

That wasn’t the point here, though.

If anything, it was what she said next.

“But all of that is a lie, just a self-serving attempt to understand my feelings rationally. They wouldn’t be reasons but rationalizations. It’d be like starting from the conclusion that I like him and building myself a ladder to get there.”

“A ladder.”

“Maybe a rocket, not a ladder. Yeah, like I’m building myself a rocket.” Tsukihi struck her palm with her fist─apparently happy with her analogy. The fair thing to do would have been to consult me first, but she wasn’t that kind of person. “If you think you want to be with someone forever, you’re probably in love. Koyomi, have you heard this saying before?”

“What saying?”

“He who loves a toad will look at a toad and see the moon.”

“…Nope, never.”

But I didn’t have to think hard to understand what she meant.

There was no simpler proverb about love.

If you fall in love with someone, the reasons don’t matter─that’s what Tsukihi was telling me, and it made sense in that light.

She’d made a rocket to fly herself to the moon.

True, questions like “Why do you like him” and “What do you like about him” might have been off the mark. And she’d feel there was something similarly wrong about the “when” question.

It wasn’t anything that precise.

It was fuzzy.

“…Well, I get it, it’s because I’m always theorizing about it that I’ve never been able to like anyone.”

“Calling you devotionless is going too far, but loving people and loving a person are opposites in some ways.”

“They are?”

“Yeah. Loving humanity ends up meaning the same thing as not falling in love with anyone. Love might be fair and just, but that’s not romance. You could even say that choosing an irreplaceable someone amounts to discrimination. Humanitarianism and discrimination don’t go together, do they?”

Maybe you’re a humanitarian, Tsukihi said.

Guh.

For some reason─that didn’t feel like praise.

She might have been saying something nice, but I don’t know─it somehow reminded me of spring break.

Specifically─

What my humanitarianism over spring break resulted in.

I couldn’t keep the memories from pestering me.

“Loving all of humanity would make you a saint─but could you imagine a saint getting worked up over romance?”

“No, I can’t.”

I couldn’t see a saint being so worldly.

Hmph.

Calling it discrimination was taking it too far, but romance was a worldly thing, and it had to be.

It wasn’t love for all mankind.

Not at all.

“If there was someone who could fall in love with every human being on the planet,” Tsukihi mused, “I guess that would be unbeatable.”

“Someone who pined for humans as a whole? Yeah, that’d be difficult. Actually, not difficult, but absurd.”

“In fact, on face value he just sounds like a very fickle adulterer.”

“Hmph.”

Well, extreme examples wouldn’t get us anywhere.

I needed to put concepts and definitions aside for now.

If we let this discussion get too broad, we’d never be able to wrap it up.

We were talking about my classmate Miss H.

“Anyway, you may be right that I’m a sad man who’s never fallen in love with anyone from the day he was born, but now I, Koyomi Araragi, at the age of eighteen, at long last, may have done just that.”

“No! Don’t say ‘may have,’ say it as a fact!” Tsukihi bent over and slammed both of her palms into my shoulders as if to encourage me. Then with an energized smile she declared, “You did have done just that!”

“I…did have?”

“My brother has fallen in love! It’s settled!”

“It is?!”

“That’s right! Your mindset is now set!” Tsukihi swooped in toward my face and smacked her forehead against mine. We were so uncomfortably close that I could feel her breath. “You’re in love with Miss H., I’ve decided for you!”

“If you’ve decided it, there’s nothing I can do!”

The pressure was too much for me. I had no choice but to nod along.

No, I wouldn’t say I had no choice.

“……”

Yeah, I guess so.

Tsukihi was right.

Well, I still had no idea if she was─but I’d go ahead and listen to her.

What was wrong with saying that maybe liking actually meant liking?

I thought that I might like her.

I felt that I liked her.

So I knew I liked her.

I wanted to be with her forever.

That was probably what this feeling was.

“Okay, Tsukihi, I’ve made a breakthrough thanks to you. And that’s something, considering what a broken kid I am. Looks like I’d underestimated you.”

“No, no, no, no. You paint me badly in a good light!”

Looking embarrassed, Tsukihi smiled and waved her hand back and forth in front of her face.

It was human nature to want to embarrass her even more after seeing such an adorable reaction.

Or maybe not human nature, but an older brother’s nature.

Blushing little sisters are cute!

So moé!

“You’re the best sister ever, Tsukihi!”

“Oh you! I’m not!”

“I always knew that you’d do something great one day. To think that day was today! You’re on Marilla’s level already, and you’re not even fifty! I can’t believe how fast you’ve managed to evolve. You’ve got such a huge presence about you now that I don’t know if I’ll even be able to remember who that Karen girl is!”

“Ahahaha!”

“You aren’t my sister for nothing.”

“Huh? Did you just switch over into praising yourself?” asked Tsukihi, snapping back to her senses.

So she’d caught me out. What a sharp girl.

My plan had been to keep going until I’d trained her to be a little sister who was delighted whenever her older brother got praised, but it looked like my plans had been dashed.

She also hadn’t flinched one bit at being elevated at Karen’s expense. Perhaps it was something to note down as an issue.

But jokes aside.

“Allow me to say thank you, Tsukihi.”

“Oh, it was something.”

After all, it was the first time I’d ever been asked such an elementary question, Tsukihi said, sounding relieved. “And I know I just said a lot, but really, coming to like someone is about as natural as a dog barking. There’s no need to worry yourself sick over it.”

“Oh? So it’s natural.”

“Yeah. It’s normal.”

“So it’s normal for there to be a girl in my class I’m interested in?”

“It’s normal!”

“And it’s normal for me to spend more time in class looking at her than at the blackboard?”

“It’s normal!”

“And for me to look for her on the way to school, and for me to wonder if I’ll be able to run into her, and for me to imagine all sorts of things when I buy books?!”

“It’s normal!”

“And for me to want to fondle her breasts?!”

“No.”

The conversation came to a halt.

“Hm?”

“Hm?”

We traded looks, each trying to figure out what the other might be thinking.

Neither of us could figure out why the conversation had come to a halt.

“Huh? Wait, what? What are you saying, Tsukihi?”

“Huunh?! I-I’m the one with the problem here?”

“Maybe you should be down here with me on your knees.”

“Oh, all right then.”

Still confused, Tsukihi sat on her knees.

Now brother and sister were both on their knees as they faced one another.

What was this, a tea ceremony?

People often forget this character detail, but Tsukihi was in the tea club.

“Well, so what I’m saying is that Miss H. has a very attractive chest, and I end up thinking about how much I want to touch and grope it. That’s what I’m trying to discuss.”

“Hm? Maybe I’m stupid or something. For whatever reason, I understand the words you’re speaking but can’t make out what they mean. The only two answers to what you said that come to mind are ‘Come again?’ and ‘Go away.’”

“What? God, you’re hopeless. You know it’s not easy on me having such a failure as a sister.”

My assessment of her had done another 180. My flip-flopping was so blunt it was amazing, if I do say so myself.

“This is a little-known fact in my class, or actually I think I’m the only one to know,” I elaborated, “but she’s actually got huge breasts. How could you not fondle those?!”

“I’m sorry, Koyomi, but could you please stop using crude words like ‘grope’ and ‘fondle’?”

“Huh? Oh.”

I, in my magnanimity, decided to honor her request.

“Okay, then. How could you not grab those?!”

“You’ve gone from crude to rude now.”

I don’t know, Tsukihi surrendered herself to dejection.

I was starting to get the impression that the way she looked at me was not the way she’d look at her brother but rather at a pervert.

Was I mistaken?

Yes, it had to be an illusion.

Trick art was all the rage these days, wasn’t it?

“So in other words,” I said, “I’m obsessed with the idea of touching Miss H.’s chest. That’s love, right?”

“No.”

Tsukihi stood firm and shot me down.

She sounded so steadfast that it nearly made me want to give up advocating my position.

Guh.

She was so damn stubborn.

Yet I clenched my fists and boldly challenged her. “You wouldn’t think about wanting to touch a chest belonging to someone you don’t like, would you? That’s why I think this has to be love.”

“If that’s what you honestly think, I’m going to have to start feeling responsible for making you believe that…”

I loved the expression that she wore. She looked like an archaeologist who had awakened an evil god of destruction sealed away by an ancient tribe.

Just as long as this responsibility she was feeling didn’t drive her to end things by her own hands.

“Even that Rosokuzawa kid you like so much is thinking all the time about how much he wants to touch your chest.”

“I’m sure he does, but in set theory terms, that’s what you’d call a proper class. Rosokuzawa wants to touch every girl’s boobs in the world, including mine!”

“……”

That was one guy I didn’t care to meet.

Actually, I didn’t know about Tsukihi, either. How was she able to yell something like that at the top of her lungs?

“So, Koyomi. It’s a natural feeling for boys to want to touch girls’ boobs, and you don’t have to worry about it.”

“……”

It felt like she was giving me advice on an entirely different topic now.

We’d gone from romantic advice to sex ed.

“I did say no, but it’s normal in another sense,” my sister assured me.

“Is it, now.”

“Yes. It’s obvious.”

“Obvious.”

“It’s not love, it’s sexual desire.”

“Desire!”

Desire, huh…

That sounded wanting.

“Or rather, it’s precisely wanting.”

“Don’t talk like a classic raconteur delivering one of those punning punch lines.”

“Oh, I thought it was just right, good enough to end the chapter on, in fact. Are we really going to continue?”

“Yeah. We can’t end on that. There are some things here that are over, though. Like you.”

“What do you mean? My life is just getting started.”

“I meant your humanity. Ugh, and while I did do this half as a joke, the other half of me was really trying to give you serious advice. I never imagined I’d have to answer questions from my own big brother about his brimming libido.”

“Excuse me, my libido? Are you saying that about the honest questions I was asking you?”

And she was doing it half as a joke?

This was no laughing matter.

“But isn’t that what it is? There’s a girl in your class and you’re interested in her boobs, and you spend more time in class looking at her boobs than you do the blackboard, and you look for her boobs on the way back from school, and you always imagine her boobs when you go to the bookstore. If that’s not lust, then what is it?”

“Hold on, you swapped out a bunch of my words there.”

A huge find-and-replace had just been committed on me.

Or maybe a search-and-destroy.

“When you put it like that, then it’s lust, not love, and the guy is a pervert, not your brother, but Tsukihi, you need to keep in mind how mistaken your assumptions can get. I’m almost certain that you’ve misunderstood.”

“Have I?”

“Yes. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll concede a whole mile to you and say that my clean and pure emotion of wanting to touch Miss H.’s chest is lust. A pure kind of lust. After hearing all of that from you, I won’t hesitate to admit that this lust has at least something to do with the issue that I’m facing. I will defer to you, my little sister. But what do you think about this, Tsukihi?”

I paused for a moment. Then, in a firm voice, I spoke my prepared line.

“Isn’t it impossible for love to exist without lust?”

“Shut up. Oh, sorry. It seems that I somehow picked the wrong comeback there. Die.”

That is the most ridiculous thing in the world and how dare you act like it’s some wise saying, spat Tsukihi, clicking her tongue.

How uncouth.

Whatever happened to that bit about her being in the tea club?

“I’m not going to die. Sorry, but your big brother is immortal.”

“You’re immortal? Well, I’m immortal too.”

Seriously… she sighed.

Are you seriously serious? she sighed.

Still sitting, Tsukihi skillfully shuffled her knees back and forth and drew closer to me.

Closed the distance, you might say.

“What do you want?”

“I thought I’d try something.”

“Really, now? You want to try your big brother?”

“Yes, now that I know what kind of big brother he is.”

Stopping just before our kneecaps collided, Tsukihi thrust her chest out toward me.

“Come on. Touch them.”

I touched them.

Without a sound from my mouth. Without an expression on my face.

With immediate resolve and immediate execution, I touched them immediately.

“AAAGH!”

Maybe it was my speed, surely on par with the speed of light, that surprised Tsukihi. She screamed and nearly fell backwards, but if she’d continued on her trajectory, she would have hit her head on the corner of the bed behind her, and so I clenched my hands to somehow keep her upright.

Well, yes.

That is to say, I’d clamped down into Tsukihi’s chest so hard that my fingers were digging into it.

This was no longer a touch, it was a catch.

“That hurts!!”

What an ingrate.

I’d narrowly saved her from smashing the back of her head on my bed. You could say I’d saved her life; yet her body rose up toward me like a pendulum at an incredible velocity, and she head-butted me.

Forehead struck forehead.

Fireworks exploded in my visual field.

But I still didn’t let go of Tsukihi’s chest.

Her chest was the lifeline keeping me from flying backwards.

“I said that hurts! Let go! Leggoleggoleggo!!”

“Le goal? Oh, are you practicing to be a soccer announcer? But why in French?”

“If you have the time to be thinking up stupid jokes, why haven’t you let go?!”

“Let go? As in, let go of common sense?”

“You’ve clearly done that already! I mean it in the more common way, you moron!”

There was no need for her to call me a moron. As soon as I was able to raise my fallen body, I released the protrusions into which I’d hooked my fingers.

“What is your problem, what is your problem, what is your problem?! Putt is your wroblem?! Agh, and now my words are getting jumbled together.”

Her rage was acute, and cute.

“There wasn’t a moment of hesitation just now, was there? You came to grab them the moment I said it. The way you reacted, it was like the words bypassed your brain and went straight to your spine.”

“How rude. No brother would ever fondle his little sister’s chest.”

“You just did! With everything you have!!”

“Nope, nope. It’s the opposite, in fact. Think outside the box. It was your chest that groped my palms.”

“How are you able to come up with such a disgusting sentence?!”

“What a perverted sister you are, coming and fondling your biological brother’s hands with your chest.”

“Inside or outside the box, who thinks such a thing…”

Fondling someone’s palms with your chest? she asked.

Tsukihi had her hands against her temples.

I noticed that neither of us was sitting on our knees, probably as the result of our little slapstick dispute.

The balance had collapsed at last.

“I can’t believe you, Koyomi! You shouldn’t touch your little sister’s boobs so much!”

“What? Why are you getting mad at me? You’re the one who told me to touch them. I could even say that you seduced me.”

“Seduced.”

“By the way, have you ever read the word ‘seduced’ in a font that made it look like ‘secluded’?”

“That’s a keen-eyed observation, but you’re not getting me sidetracked! If you think I’m just going to sit here and take this, you’re dead wrong. I’m going to Karen and telling her about every little thing that happened here!”

“Don’t. There won’t be anything left of my original form.”

I would be pummeled.

Karen got mad whenever someone bullied Tsukihi.

I demanded, “Would you be able to live with yourself if the base of Karen’s fingers got scratched up in the process?!”

“How can you say something that lame in such a proud voice?” Tsukihi glared at me, and hers were the eyes of a killer. “Maybe there shouldn’t be anything left of your original form. I’ll come back tomorrow to wake you up with a crowbar again.”

“It’s pointless. Unfortunately for you, weapons don’t work on me.” I laughed through my nose at Tsukihi’s threat. “I’m a nonexistent youth. I’m protected by certain ordinances.”

“How…cool?!”

Well.

I hadn’t done a thing to be ashamed of, but I was afraid that there could be a misunderstanding.

Or not a misunderstanding, exactly. It was Karen I was afraid of.

“Fine, then,” I said. “No getting sidetracked. I’m going to rehash and revisit the topic, okay? You were the one who seduced me, saying, ‘Come on. Touch them.’”

“What pisses me off more than anything is your awful impression! It didn’t sound like me at all!”

Tsukihi Araragi was in hysteria mode.

What a hystery novel this was turning out to be.

……

No, that wasn’t good enough of a punch line, either.

As much as I wanted to move on to the next segment, a chapter couldn’t end on that.

“My voice sounds more like Yuka Iguchi!”

“Don’t use a real person’s name,” I scolded.

“And I never seduced you or anything!”

“Yes you did. You stuck your chest out all like, ‘Why don’t you reach out…and touch somebody?’”

“Don’t turn me into some lame, airheaded character! No one ever requested that! Stop it, don’t you know some people are starting the series with this installment?!”

“Uh-oh. If they really are, I ought to be worried about my favorability rating.”

I’d thought I was in safe territory with all of this joking around because we were working off of six previous volumes. I was going on this rampage on the presumption that everyone already knew all the great things about me.

“Be careful about the way you act, Koyomi. We even have readers in Nebula M78 by now.”

“You’re right…”

This could turn into a cosmic issue.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Earth’s fate now rested on my shoulders.

“So, what, Koyomi, would you touch just anyone’s chest if they asked you to?”

“Hold on, do you see me as that immodest of a person? I can’t believe you,” I said in my best exasperated tone. “You can provoke me all you want with lines like that, but the only chests I’m going to touch are Miss H.’s and yours.”

“I’m in a special category together with Miss H.?!”

“Wait, no. Karen too.”

“You even want to put your filthy hands on her? Really? Hold on, is it okay for us to be thinking of you as family?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. It’s because we’re family that I feel this way,” I explained in the simplest terms possible for my comprehension-challenged sister. “Putting aside Miss H., the only reason I’d say that to you two is because I’m your brother.”

“Wh-What is that supposed to mean?”

“To a boy, his little sister’s chest doesn’t count as a chest. Which is to say that a boy can touch his little sister’s chest all he wants and it still won’t count as having touched a chest. So I can touch your chest all I want.”

“Forget whether or not I should think of you as family, that syllogism is so ridiculous, I don’t know whether I should call you human.”

You’ve leapt right out of the box, Tsukihi groaned.

It seemed that I hadn’t been able to make her understand.

How sad.

Perhaps humans are doomed never to understand one another.

Despite all the advances in communications technology, we still can’t share our thoughts and trust in each other?

But Tsukihi refused to be discouraged by the social satire in my narration, and her drooping head popped up, testifying to her stout heart and bold spirit. Life remained in her eyes. It seemed she wanted to continue protesting.

Talk about obstinate.

Why wouldn’t she die already?

I decided to strike first before Tsukihi could say something obnoxious.

“For argument’s sake, let’s say your chest is an inviolable object. But you, its owner, gave me permission to touch it. So how can you blame me?”

When it came down to it, the earlier slapstick bit started because she’d suggested it.

That was its genesis, after all.

“No!”

But Tsukihi was persistent.

“No! No! That was me being tsundere!”

“Excuse me?”

Sorry, how?

I’m fairly well-versed in the subject, even without bringing up Marilla, but I didn’t see a shred of such an inclination in what Tsukihi had said earlier.

“See, now I’m the one thinking outside the box!” my sister exclaimed. “I’m not a slave to any of your adult rules and regulations!”

“Well, you need to be.”

Especially the adult ones.

She was on thin ice there.

They’ve been cracking down a lot, lately. If we’re going to be titillating, we need to play by the rules.

“In other words, I’m a reverse tsundere!”

“And what exactly is that?”

“In other words, I’m normally all lovey-dovey and act like we’re really close, and I’m fine with physical contact like putting my hand on your shoulders or putting my face close to yours, but when you see that and wonder if I like you and confess your feelings to me, I suddenly transform into a cold, mean girl and snub you with a ‘Oh, no, it’s not like that. Please stop, really. What have you misunderstood here? Don’t get carried away.’”

“……”

No, that wasn’t tsundere or reverse tsundere.

Wasn’t that called being a pretty common kind of regular girl?

“As a reverse tsundere, I’ll joke around and say, ‘Come on, touch them,’ but if you really do touch them, that means I’ll get snap on you, like ‘Oh my god, what are you doing?! What are you, stupid?!’”

“That’s horrifying.”

These reverse tsunderes were scary.

How was I supposed to approach them?

“Actually, what were you even trying to do there?” I asked. “Where did you think the conversation would go when you thrust your chest out in front of me?”

“Well, that was me playing around, or maybe trying something out. I told you I was trying something, remember? As the brains of the Fire Sisters, my plan was to thrust my chest at you so you’d say, ‘No, I’m not interested in your chest’ in order to justify your theory, but I’d shoot back with ‘That’s because it’s your little sister’s chest, right?’ It was supposed to be a beautiful little rally between us.”

“Oh. That was how it was supposed to go?”

“Why did you have to hit a beautiful little return ace?”

I can’t believe you, Tsukihi said, puffing her cheeks.

It seemed like we had slightly different ideas about our intimacy as siblings.

“But touching your chest there would make for a funnier scene than that kind of dime-a-dozen exchange.”

“Hmm. I guess you’re right. Okay, I forgive you.”

She forgave me.

This must have been why she was able to draw so many people to her and why she was such a leader, but at the same time I was worried that she might be a little too charitable.

“So, how was it?” asked Tsukihi.

“Hm?”

“I’m asking you how it was.”

“Oh. I see, you want to know how I felt touching my little sister’s boobs.”

It was something you’d want to know.

It’s natural to mind what others think about something you’ve spent many months nurturing.

This was no time for me to pay her any kind of easy lip service. I thought for a bit before giving her my honest opinion.

“Seventy-six points. Room for improvement!”

“Subtle!”

We needed to give it time.

Then again, the scorer had only ever touched his little sister’s chest and no one else’s. His grading standards lacked credibility.

“So what’s going to happen now?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you told me, ‘Touch them ’ere,’ and I touched them.”

“Cut it out with your grating impressions!”

“This something-or-other you were trying─what kind of conclusion were you led to?”

“Um…”

Tsukihi considered my question. It was a strange reaction, as if she’d been completely unprepared until the moment I asked it.

Maybe she just wanted me to grope her boobs?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I actually groped them.

In fact, it was my palms that had been groped by her chest.

The world’s most shocking massage.

“Koyomi, I think you might be feeling sexually frustrated.”

“What?!” She’d been led to the worst possible conclusion.

“Now that I think about it, you were lamenting, ‘I can’t buy dirty magazines, I can’t buy dirty magazines, I can’t buy dirty magazines!’”

“I didn’t say it three times.”

Why would I chant that?

I’d simply misspoken.

Simply blurted out how I really felt.

“But that’s what’s backfiring,” Tsukihi said. “It’s doing the complete opposite of what you want. You’ve confused sexual desire for romance, and you’re creating an inflationary spiral of frustration.”

“An inflationary spiral?”

What was that? Though I’d heard of deflationary spirals before.

“Geez, an inflationary spiral… You’re telling me some 007-ish phenomenon is taking place inside my head?”

“M-hm. And that’s why you went ahead and touched your little sister’s chest.”

“So that’s why I touched that touch panel of a chest…”

“Those are flat!”

She struck me.

I would have gone flying into the wall had I been dealing with Karen, but this was an attack coming from Tsukihi’s slender arm. A mosquito bite would have hurt more.

So I decided to keep going.

“Hah. It’s a touch panel used to enter the secret code of romance.”

“That’s not even clever!”

“Then I withdraw all your savings.”

“Nice one!”

As furious as Tsukihi was, when it came to judging jokes she was fair, being my little sister.

“This is a problem,” she noted. “It’s okay because it was just my chest, but if you get any more frustrated, you might put your hands on the chest of your true love, Miss H.”

“Hmm, you think I might literally put my hands on her… And wait, did you just say that your chest was okay?”

“It was better than okay, wouldn’t you say?”

“It wasn’t bad.”

What kind of conversation was this?

“But,” I said, “if that’s the argument you’re going to make, then Miss H. would be thrusting her chest out in front of me and inviting, ‘Come on. Touch them’…”

She would never.

I couldn’t even imagine it.

“No, no, Koyomi, you’re the kind of person who’d strike off on his own and touch them even without her invitation. You’d devise some kind of plan. ‘Let’s play tag! You’re it if you get touched anywhere on your body!’ or something.”

“What a transparent plan…”

“Or maybe it’d be a game of tag, only instead of a light pole being the safe zone, it’d be Miss H.’s brassiere.”

“Forget transparent. You know, if anything here is flat, it’s the way these so-called plans are falling.”

Well.

The more I thought about it, the more they did seem like the kinds of plans I’d devise.

I nodded slowly as if I were digesting her words.

Oh. So I was frustrated.

It was a mean thing to say, and it did wound me (;_;), but yes, now that she’d brought it up, I sort of agreed with her.

Actually, I simply agreed with her.

I might even say that she hit it right on the mark.

Did a culprit exposed by a famed detective feel the same way? No wonder they were always so sportsmanlike about it.

Boy, I was almost feeling refreshed.

So that’s what it was. Sexual frustration.

“Ah, of course. That’s what this is.”

“M-hm. That was a real close one. You nearly mistook being attracted to the chest of a classmate whom you don’t particularly fancy for love.”

“Gotcha, gotcha. Now that would’ve been one big wrong idea to get.”

“I’m sure Miss H. absolutely wouldn’t want you getting it.”

“Guh.”

True.

Not only would I have mistaken lust for love, I’d have gone on to tell her about the way I thought I felt. What would we have done about that?

It would have been a disaster.

Even so.

Even so, considering Miss H.’s personality─she might have put up with such a disaster.

And that was why.

Why I needed to control myself.

Why I had to.

“Right. Tsukihi, you saved me from a close one there. I almost let my actions lead me down the path of evil.”

“The path of evil…”

“Kaahahaha! Indeed, how I’ve erred─I, Koyomi Araragi, the Sixth Demon King, must never consort with a simple lass!”

“You sound like some sorcerer who’s already been led down the path of evil…”

And what’s with that laugh? muttered Tsukihi.

“Asuraman,” I replied. “So, now that we’ve arrived at a conclusion, it’s time to come up with a plan to address this. It’s going to be bad if I left this frustration to fester. I have to protect Miss H. from my wicked talons.”

“True.”

“It’s a godsend that I saw the truth of the matter─if a touch late.”

“True.”

I’d uttered the first words that had come to mind, but she took a pass on it.

There were apparently some things that I shouldn’t say even to my little sister.

“Koyomi, let’s avoid a punch line where you put your wicked talons on Miss H. and get arrested and groan, ‘Aw shucks! This is the last time I bother with boooobs!’”

“I don’t think the scene would end in such a jocular mood if I got apprehended by the police…”

“And I don’t want there to be a criminal in my family, either. It’d be a blot on the name of the Fire Sisters. All of the trust we’ve spent our time building up will vanish into thin air.”

“Hmm. Yes, you do hear people say that it’s not capable enemies you should be scared of, but incompetent allies.”

“I think I’d say catastrophic allies in this case, not incompetent.”

“You might.”

Hold on, I wasn’t the Fire Sisters’ ally in the first place.

Some people did seem to put me in a Sixth Ranger kind of position (They apparently call me the Fire Brother. Talk about lame!), but I didn’t have any recollection of ever donning a silver suit and doing battle, even metaphorically.

“Oh well, I guess I’ll have to fondle your boobs or Karen’s when I feel like it as a palliative treatment to tide me over.”

“That treatment can never happen!”

“Why not? Don’t you two Fire Sisters fight for justice? You ought to be jumping at the chance to sacrifice yourselves for me.”

“Maybe the just thing to do here would actually be to sacrifice you.”

No way you’re fondling my boobs just to kill time, muttered Tsukihi.

“Then what are you going to do?” I demanded. “Either Miss H., an innocent civilian, is getting touched, or you sisters are. It’s one or the other.”

“If those are the only choices, then… Gaahh! Fine, you can touch us!”

The Sisters were so full of the spirit of self-sacrifice.

The creeps.

“Do as you please with our chests, but promise you won’t lay a finger on Miss H.!”

“Okay, I promise. Not just Miss H., in fact. So long as you two sacrifice yourselves for me, I don’t care if I run into an irresistibly cute, pigtailed, lost elementary schooler with a backpack on in the future─I swear I’ll never hug her from behind or anything!”

“Why such a specific example?”

“I’m not sure.”

How strange.

I could only tilt my head in wonderment.

A cosmic will was making itself known.

“Then again,” I said, “I think promises ought to be as specific as possible. They’ll be easier to keep.”

“I see. So you’ll never break that promise, no matter what.”

“Sure.”

Why?

The future wasn’t set in stone, so why did it already feel like I was telling a lie?

“And anyway, those wouldn’t be the only choices.”

“Yeah.”

Of course not.

Touching your sister’s chest wasn’t anyone’s idea of a funny punishment.

“There are a lot of ways to deal with sexual frustration without setting your eyes on your little sister’s chest,” stated Tsukihi. “That’s like a method of last resort.”

“Last or not, better not resort to it at all.” In which case─we needed to think about the best way out of all the other methods to relieve my frustration.

“I think the usual thing to do is to get really involved in a sport, or maybe to find some indoor hobby that’ll be your passion.”

“Sports, huh. I should’ve gone jogging with Karen or something.”

“Three-legged, too.”

“Yeah, like in a three-legged─wait, why?!” I’d probably end up getting dragged along and looking like a bride’s veil at a wedding ceremony.

“Nope, this is Karen we’re talking about. She’d run fast enough for you not to be dragged.”

“So fast I’d float behind her?!”

Sounded like ninja training.

Truth be told, that was a more likely path for Karen than becoming a bride.

Ugh, she’d made me reply like a real straight man for the first time in a while.

“No sports,” I ruled out. “I feel inferior enough to Karen.”

“What a small person…” a scornful comment escaped Tsukihi’s lips. I didn’t know if she meant that with regards to my mind or my body.

Probably both. “So an indoor hobby.”

“Yeah. You don’t seem to be playing video games lately.”

“Ah, recent games. Or maybe not recent, but new games? They all have so many connected features and online battles that even if you play alone, you can’t figure out half of the fun the creators were trying to put into it.”

“Oh. Like StreetPass?”

“That’s part of it.”

Not that you’d pass anyone on the street out where we lived in the middle of nowhere.

You congregated by the arcade machines at the department store.

What a lame attraction.

“Knowing the fun’s going to be limited makes it hard for me to get excited.”

“You know we do have an internet connection in this house. Why not play downstairs?”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m someone who wants to play games alone to begin with.”

I hate versus cabinets, I intoned. I didn’t want any challengers storming into my heart.

“I doubt anyone who can only play games by themselves would ever find love,” Tsukihi alluded to our past topic with feeling. “Fine then,” she said. “Grope your little sister’s boobs.”

“We’re already down to the last resort?!”

“Oops. My mistake.”

“I have a feeling that everything we’ve done here has been a mistake.”

“Fine then,” Tsukihi repeated. “Just go buy some dirty magazines.”

“……”

So that was her conclusion?

“You’ve been hesitant to buy them for a month now because your misunderstanding made you conscious of how it’d look to Miss H., right? Knowing you, I can even imagine you bundling up all the treasures you’ve kept hidden away and tossing them out to ‘reset your mind and body.’”

“H-How did you guess?”

I seemed to have a very perceptive little sister.

Or my actions were just that predictable?

“That’s what made your frustration grow, which is why you should buy some new dirty magazines to solve the problem.”

“Hmm.”

I’d been offended at first, but now it was starting to sound like a good idea. Perhaps it went past a palliative treatment into removing the root cause.

It promised to be a radical cure.

Right.

Who needs love so long as you have dirty magazines?

This settled everything.

In fact, hadn’t Tsukihi and I just solved the world itself?

That said, being a solution to the world, our philosophy also threatened to lead humanity to extinction.

“I see… So you’re recommending reading as a form of companionship.”

“Yeah, read with your whole heart. Read until you leave the pages creased and marked.”

“Wow, make that two things you’ve made me realize today. No wonder you have a perfect record when it comes to solving people’s romantic troubles. I thought we were never going to get to the punch line, but now the end of this chapter is finally in sight.”

“That’s right. We’ve gone on for so long that this would probably take three episodes of anime to cover, but it’s finally time to move on to the next chapter. So if you’ve made up your mind, strike while the iron is hot. Why don’t you go right now? The bookstore is just about to open. I’ll even go with you.”

“No, I could never ask that much of you. You’ve already done more than enough for me. I’d feel guilty if I bothered you any more than I have.”

The rest of this battle is mine to face alone, I said in an attempt to sound cool, but then the truth struck me.

“Oh, crap. Maybe I can’t.”

“Huh? Why not? Was there something wrong with my nice idea?”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with your idea, it’s just that I’m missing something indispensable to it.”

“What? Like a soda stuck in a vending machine?”

“Indispensable, not undispensable.”

Hmm. Our system of having to say something stupid before moving on in a conversation took so much effort.

“Money,” I told her.

“Money?”

“I’m short on funds.”

You could call me a bearish trader.

Only three hundred and seventy-seven yen sat in my wallet─they say people who know exactly how much they have in their wallet have what it takes to be rich someday, but in this case I had so little that it was harder not to know.

“What did you waste it on? Didn’t Grandpa give you money as a birthday present the other day?”

“I spent it all on a game.”

“So you are buying games.”

She was right. Then again, complaining about things but doing them anyway was the way I lived.

“What game did you buy?”

“I pretended to buy Idolm@ster but really bought Ice Climber.”

“Why would you need to pretend… Oh, you’re such a handful. You know it’s not easy for a girl to have such a failure as an older brother,” Tsukihi said, getting me back for earlier.

She looked very satisfied with herself.

Yet I was the one who’d managed to buy a game with only three hundred and seventy-seven yen in my wallet left to spare. Tsukihi should have been thanking me for allowing her to look so smug.

“Fine. I’ll give you one of the books from my stash, or maybe Karen’s.”

“……”

I didn’t want to get a dirty magazine from my little sister. I didn’t know if that counted as a hand-me-down or a hand-me-up, but either way.

It would be pointless if our tastes didn’t match, and I couldn’t imagine anything worse than if our tastes did.

“…But I guess I might as well ask. What kind of books?”

“I feel like they’re quite varied, but generally speaking, cute boys with cute boys.”

“Great, I’ve heard enough.”

I cut it short.

I cut our rotten conversation short.

“Don’t you want to hear me out to the end?”

“I didn’t even want to hear the beginning.”

“Koyomi, it’s not cool to go around turning up your nose at people’s tastes without so much as hearing them out.”

“It’s okay to go around turning up your nose at people’s bad taste.”

“You haven’t even read them!” Tsukihi started to grumble and boo, pouting. She apparently wasn’t satisfied with my thinking. “I, for my part, would never be so prejudiced. I thoroughly check out your tastes before feeling grossed out by them.”

“Don’t check them out! And don’t feel grossed out, either!”

And here I’d thought she was just perceptive!

She’d been sweeping the whole house!

“To be honest, Koyomi, your tastes worry me.”

“Shut up!”

I didn’t want to hear that from her!

And this goes without saying, but my tastes and interests are as normal as can be!

Damn, I’d have to find a new hiding place…

I said, “You’re complaining I’ve never even read your kinds of books, but what if I had? As my sister, would you be okay with it?”

Tsukihi thrust her finger toward me. “A BL-fan big brother? Who wouldn’t go crazy for that?!”

No good.

It’s rotten. It was too late.

“I just don’t know what to do,” she had the nerve to add. “I may be a Fire Sister, but I’m going to get burned.”

Standing up, she strode out of my room without saying another word. Given how silent her exit was, she probably meant to be back soon.

She couldn’t have gotten mad all of a sudden, right? Because your clothes piss me off! or whatever?

That’d be pretty chilly between siblings, but fortunately it wasn’t the case, and she returned right away. When I took a closer look, I noticed three neatly folded thousand-yen bills in her hand.

Then Tsukihi offered them to me.

“Here. You can borrow this.”

“Wh-What?! Are you really bestowing this charity upon a wretch like me?!”

I began to abase myself in the blink of an eye.

It was shameless even by my standards.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Wait, no, I’m just letting you borrow this, okay? You haven’t used my touch panel to access my savings! You need to pay me back.”

“O-Of course! With plenty of interest on top! Within legal rate limits!”

“Very by the book, I see…”

“I’m a man who always repays his debts.”

“You know that line doesn’t sound so impressive when it’s a cash debt…”

When I thought about the picture we were painting, a boy sitting on his knees in front of his little sister to borrow money from her, it was the most pitiful tableau ever.

Perhaps the pity got to Tsukihi, too.

“And I don’t need interest,” she waived.

She really did.

“But I want to see you show your gratitude instead.”

“My gratitude?”

“I want you to bare your heart and feelings. ‘Thank you, I love you, Tsukihi!’”

With those words, she proceeded to take off her socks.

The way she took them off was far more erotic than it needed to be.

Then, standing on one leg like a character in a kung-fu movie, she raised and shoved the other in front of my nose. In her most intimidating voice, she said:

“Lick it.”

I licked it.

“Do you ever hesitate?!”

From there, she kicked my nose, again like we were in a kung-fu movie.

This actually hurt. The level of her attack went beyond trying to give me a nosebleed and could have broken my nose.

“What have you done?!”

“Hey, that’s my line!”

“No, it’s my line! And you’re never getting this one!”

“Gimme!!”

Gross, gross, gross, muttered Tsukihi, wiping down the foot she’d given me to lick, scrubbing as though to cleanse herself of a disgusting memory.

“Hey, don’t treat my tongue like it’s something dirty, that hurts my feelings. I only grudgingly licked it because you begged, ‘C’mon… Lick it.’”

“The only grudge here is the one I’m going to have over how enthusiastic you were! And that’s not even an impression of me anymore! Claiming that I ever said that is baseless slander!”

“If you don’t want your feet getting licked again, hand over that cash.”

“Now you’re threatening me!”

Tsukihi tossed the three thousand-yen bills into the air.

I ran over like a child flocking to candy and snatched them before they fell to the floor.

Flip, flip, flip.

I checked over the bills like a bank teller.

“Okay, then. That’s three thousand yen, paid in full.”

“Why are you treating me like I’m repaying a debt when I dipped into my paltry allowance to lend you money?”

“I’m sure you don’t trust me, so I’ll tell Mom and Dad to automatically deduct three thousand yen from my allowance this month and give it to you.”

“That’s very considerate of you, but if that’s how you see things, I wish you’d try harder to get your little sister to trust you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind going backwards,” I said, then checked my clock.

It was before ten.

Yes, a perfect time for some cycling.

I opened my dresser and started changing clothes yet again─now to go out. This morning had been like a fashion show.

“Hey, Koyomi.”

I started with my jeans, and as I got them on, Tsukihi stopped fiddling around on my desk to speak to me.

What could it be?

She’d given me her money. Why wouldn’t she hurry up and leave?

Not just my room, but the planet, while she was at it.

“When’d you start working out?”

“Huh?”

“Ottermode.” Tsukihi pointed at my stomach. “I guess I haven’t seen you naked in a while, but you didn’t always have abs like that.”

“Oh.”

I now had a six-pack. And I guess it was the first time I’d taken off my shirt in front of my sister in my current state.

I’d become this way during spring break, so─wow, I hadn’t taken my clothes off in front of Karen or Tsukihi for the past month.

How stupid of me!

I was so ashamed that I hadn’t shown my body to my sisters!

…Hold on, no.

What kind of a pervert was I?

And also, I was quipping at myself an awful lot this morning with lines like What kind of a pervert am I? Maybe that was the surest sign you were a pervert.

“I’ve actually been into abs lately.”

“I see. Into abs.”

“That’s right. I’m doing Billy’s Bootcamp, but just the ab workouts.”

“Why such an unbalanced plan…”

I of course couldn’t tell her the truth, so I gave her the first excuse I could think of to brush off her question. “I came up with a real gut-ripper of a joke and ended up like this while I was getting ready to unveil it to you two.”

“I see, it’s so funny you made yourself laugh…”

“Yep. You’d better start training your abs if you don’t want it to kill you.”

“With Billy’s Bootcamp or Core Rhythms?”

“No, my suggestion would be the Electric Slide.”

“The Electric Slide?!”

I gave her another excuse, about how it was a better fit for a girl as fashionable as her, and it seemed to work.

“Hmm, okay,” she nodded.

While Tsukihi was smart (though I’m not sure you still buy that characterization), she wasn’t the type to pry into every aspect of her brother’s affairs.

I asked her for help this time, and she answered. That was all.

“Okay, thanks for today,” I finally expressed my gratitude in a normal way once I’d put on a long-sleeved shirt. You could say I should have spoken those words sooner.

“Not at all, you’re welcome.”

“I’m heading out.”

“Be safe.”

When I looked at Tsukihi, she was lying on my bed again. It seemed like she meant to doze off. Coming from a person who’d interrupted someone else’s attempt to go back to sleep, it was terribly selfish, but since she’d helped me, I could at least provide her with a place to nap. She just needed to get rid of that crowbar.

Before I left, I asked Tsukihi one more thing.

“Tsukihi?”

“What.”

“I know that we came to the conclusion that it was all a misunderstanding, but do you think that even someone like me might fall in love some day?”

“I assume you would, if you’re human?”

“Okay.”

Hearing her reply, I closed the door to my room with a good night.

And then I smiled.

A faint smile.

Human, huh?

Boy, ever since spring break─I’d developed a reaction to any mention of a category that shouldn’t have meant anything.

Like abs.

It really was sidesplitting, in its own way.

“My intensity as a human? What an embarrassing joke, when I look back on it.”

To be strong.

Strength.

Spring break smashed such concepts, too─thanks to none other than Miss H.

Miss H. Miss H. Miss H.

“Kah─”

Just then, as my sneer was on the verge of turning into an Asuraman-esque burst of laughter.

“I’m back!”

I heard a voice.

It seemed that Karen had come back from her jog─faster than I expected. As you might guess from our family’s nickname for her, “The Bullet,” she tends to stay out for a long time once she leaves the house.

Her record to date was from sixth grade, when she announced that she was going to take a walk around the neighborhood and didn’t come home for three days─she was found in Okinawa that time.

Who takes a walk across the ocean?

The police had to get involved, for Pete’s sake.

“Welcome home!”

Though nothing but a nuisance when she was at home, I felt that maybe I should welcome her early return given what a hassle that incident had been.

Fine, I’d go over and say hi.

You might wonder who the hell I thought I was, but with that exclamation, I briskly descended the stairs and headed for our front door. There I found Karen Araragi, the tracksuited woman, sopping wet and taking off her shoes.

…?

Sopping wet?

“Hm? Is it, uh, raining outside or something? I was about to go out.”

It wasn’t like I’d looked out the window to check the weather, but I hadn’t heard any rain, and to begin with, sunlight was coming into the house.

A sunshower?

“Oh, Koyomi. So you woke back up?”

Karen finished taking off her shoes, straightened them, and stepped onto the welcome mat. Or rather, she drenched the welcome mat.

“They say that only Estark can rival you when it comes to sleeping, so waking you up is a real ordeal. I was concerned about leaving it all up to Tsukihi, but hey, looks like she did a great job.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a great job…”

It felt like Tsukihi had paid a pretty big price even if she’d met her goal. Not only did she have to pose in her underwear, grope someone’s hands with her chest, and get someone to lick her feet, she even got ripped off for three thousand yen.

Somebody had put my dear little sister through such an ordeal.

Unforgivable.

“Yup, yup,” Karen said, “looks like the time when Tsukihi goes off and stands on her own has arrived. I feel lonely just thinking about it. Still, I gotta tell her she did good.”

“You should leave her alone. She’s in my room sleeping, having accomplished her mission. You can praise her after she wakes up. Anyway, Karen, did you not have an umbrella?”

“Hrnn?!” Karen’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What’s the matter? You almost never call us by our names. You said it’s too embarrassing, which is why it’s always ‘big little sister’ or ‘little little sister.’”

“Oh, that trait got annoying so I decided to get rid of it starting with this round.”

It’s not like anyone else liked me doing it in the first place.

I just had to grin and bear it.

“Huh, it feels like the timeline here is getting all topsy and turvy and higgledy and piggledy, but whatever.” Karen’s brain had the unfortunate characteristic of being unable to dwell on anything too complicated, which meant most of her thoughts concluded with a whatever. Instead of pursuing the issue of how I addressed her, she said, “Nah, it’s not raining. Clear blue skies, just like the first day of Golden Week oughta be.”

“What? Then why are you so drenched? Did you fall into a swamp or something?”

“I may climb at times, but I never fall,” Karen said with a dashing look.

My little sister was more annoying than any tic.

“I may not fall, but all jokes fall flat around me,” she boasted.

“What a nightmarish character…”

“It’s like the term ‘social climber’ was made for me!”

“……”

Was she okay with that being the phrase made for her? I didn’t know what to say. She was too much of a masochist, both physically and mentally.

“I don’t care if you’re climbing or falling, just tell me why you’re drenched,” I backtracked. “Did Sailor Mars or someone chastise you in the name of her planet?”

“Don’t be stupid. She’s my buddy.”

“The only one being stupid here is you.”

“Well, this is sweat.”

See? she said, hugging me. It felt like my entire body had been wrapped in a fully soaked sponge.

In other words.

“Gross! My discomfort index is off the charts! For reals?! Ugh, you reek of sweat!”

S-Sweat?!

All of it?!

“Hey, hey, Koyomi. I can’t believe you’d tell a girl of a tender age that she reeks.”

“Let go-o-o-o! Aaaaagh! This goes beyond discomfort, it’s downright unpleasant!!”

I thrashed around with all my strength, but to no avail.

Unlike Tsukihi, I was dealing with Karen, my jockish, power-based little sister. I lacked the strength to shove her away.

“C’mere!”

Karen started rubbing her cheeks against mine. While her perspiration acted as a lubricant, making it an unusually smooth cheek rub, it still felt more like she was trying to grind the salt in her sweat into my face.

It was like the world’s worst facial scrub.

“S-Stop it, Karen! Think about the difference in height here! My face is getting stuck between your boobs right now!”

“What? Really? Oh gosh, I’m so-o-o embarrassed!!”

The moment I pointed this out, she got away from me with a bashful expression.

While my life had been spared, I was confounded by what did and didn’t embarrass her. How did you blush after giving that intense of a hug?

“That’s all sweat? Seriously? Well, yeah, I guess this really is sweat…”

I won’t say I was drenched, but I was awfully damp as a result of Karen’s hug. When I ladled off some of the moisture and inspected it with my tongue, I could tell it was nothing but authentic sweat.

“Don’t be licking your little sister’s sweat. You’re such a creep of a brother.”

“Not nearly as creepy as a little sister who comes back home looking like a monster you’d see by the riverbed.”

What was that yokai called again?

The Wet Woman?

That would be an amazingly straightforward name, though.

“Who gets that sweaty after going for a jog? Are you sure you weren’t fighting Godzilla or something while you were at it?”

“No, it’s because I don’t go jogging very often. I don’t know how hard I should run, and it seems like I was pacing myself wrong.”

“Huh.”

So she went jogging but ran at full speed?

Okay.

Still, it felt like the amount of water enveloping her body weighed more than her…

“That was a longer jog than I expected,” she said. “42.195 kilometers.”

“You ran a full marathon?!”

“Well, I went jogging like an Olympic torch runner to celebrate the start of Golden Week.”

“Torch runners don’t run 42.195 kilometers!”

She’d confused the torch relay for the actual Olympic marathon!

“Whaa? But they go from one country to another. Don’t they run at least that far?”

“They divide it into sections and get different people to run them, and anyway, if that were the case, 42.195 kilometers would be way too short!”

She had such a narrow view of the world.

This was the Olympics, not a neighborhood athletic meet.

“No, Koyomi, 42.195 kilometers was long.”

“Of course it is. Long enough to cause you to get soaked in sweat, at least.”

“Yep, I’m feeling it. More than I’ve ever felt anything. I know they say 42.195 kilometers, but I thought it’d only be like running ten hundred-meter dashes in a row.”

“……!”

Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god!

Oh god was my sister stupid!

I was going to start shaking in fear!

“I see, I see, no wonder I’m tired. Now I understand why I’m so exhausted.”

An idiot who never got a thing was going on about how she understood.

I was so worried for her.

“So, Koyomi, where’s the finish line tape? You do have some ready for me, right?”

“Why the hell would I? What kind of guy expects his sister to go out and casually run a full marathon while he’s gone back to sleep?”

“Hm? That’s weird. I asked Tsukihi.”

“I doubt she took you seriously…”

That, or Tsukihi just ignored the request. She could be cold, even though the two of them got along. You could say she wasn’t so obliging.

“Oh, fine,” Karen said, “she doesn’t always know how to close the deal. I guess she still needs me.”

“I bet Tsukihi would hate to hear that from someone with an empty head full of nothing.”

“But if there’s no finish line, that means my run isn’t over.”

Oh, fine, Karen repeated before facing me.

“Could you make a ring around your head?” she requested.

“A halo? Like an angel?”

“No, no. Just a ring with your arms, like this.”

“Ah.”

I did as Karen demonstrated and held my arms and shoulders in the shape of a zero, though I didn’t know why she wanted me to─

“Hup!”

She leapt off the floor.

Then, as if she were a high jumper performing a straddle, she passed through the loop I’d made.

She was like a dolphin.

Or maybe a lion bounding through a flaming hoop.

She brushed against the top of my head.

As if she were threading a needle─with the mobility of a hornet, she slipped through my arms.

“There!” she declared, pulling off a perfect landing, “I’ve passed through my brother! I can say I’ve reached my goal!”

“Don’t scare me like that!” I yelled at her, pretending that I wasn’t really scared, but my voice was trembling. In my mind’s eye, my entire body was covered in goosebumps.

“Ah, I’m beat. Actually, I’m thirsty. Time for water!”

“Wait! I’m not done talking to you!”

Also, don’t walk around the halls when you’re dripping wet, I said, chasing after Karen as she headed to the living room, presumably to rehydrate.

Following her into the kitchen, I found her sticking her ponytailed head into the sink and gulping down water straight from the faucet.

How manly… Was she already a man among men?

Despite being my little sister.

“Glurp, glurp, glurp, glurp, phew!”

Having swallowed what looked to me like a gallon of water, Karen finally took her mouth off of the faucet.

“All right, Koyomi. My maidenly feelings are in tatters because you said I reek of sweat, so I guess I’m taking a shower.”

With that, she started to take off her tracksuit.

On the spot.

In other words, right in front of me.

Nothing about her behavior hinted at a maidenly anything that could be put in tatters… Maybe she wasn’t concerned because we were siblings, but normally, a kitchen wasn’t a place where you disrobed.

“……”

Still, you know what?

Like Tsukihi, she had a boyfriend.

Mizudori, I think his name was?

Not that I cared.

So whether or not she had any maidenly feelings, she was familiar with romantic ones, at least.

“Hey, Karen.”

I spoke up figuring I had nothing to lose. Maybe I’d get really lucky and be treated to a decent reply.

“What is it, Koyomi?”

“I want you to help me with something.”

“Oh. You’re finally interested in starting down the path toward karate mastery?”

“No, I didn’t mean any sort of secret technique.” Trying to sound serious, I put my question to her: “How do you decide whether you’re in love, whether you like someone?”

“Hunh? What, romantic advice?”

Now nude from the waist up, Karen draped her track jacket, shirt, and sports bra over her shoulder like a towel.

She replied, “If you see someone and think, I wanna have this guy’s kids, I guess you’re in love with him?”

…It was a very manly answer, but unfortunately, I doubted it would be of any assistance to me.