028
“I was entrusted with handing over that letter to a boy by the name of Koyomi Araragi, provided he had a little blond girl with him─by that Oshino guy. I told him I didn’t believe that our local urban legend was actually true…but surprise, surprise, here you both are.”
I was expecting you to be wearing a school uniform and a dress, though, Miss Hachikuji said.
I guess our talk of a dress code and wearing yukata just barely did the trick─she didn’t seem to realize for the moment that Shinobu and I were the same urban legends who shoved her out of that crosswalk whom she had encountered as a young lady.
That was eleven years ago, after all, and her memory was probably hazy.
And nothing was leading her to suspect that the high school student of eleven years ago might still be a high school student today.
Who gets held back that many times?
“I first met Mister Oshino before the apocalypse, when he used to roam around town─that urban legend got him all fired up, which I thought was kind of weird, but now it makes sense. I guess it reminded him of someone.”
“…Seems that way,” I agreed noncommittally.
I did everything I could to meet her in the middle but couldn’t meet her eyes─I see.
Oshino.
Here, too─Oshino.
Was that sort of guy─that kind of guy.
The kind who sees through everything, no matter what route he’s in─whose insights extend even to other routes.
Dude’s still got it.
“Thank you very much, you’ve been a great help.”
“What did the letter say?”
“You know… Rendezvous point, his last will and testament, that sort of thing.”
“Huh…”
Somehow it seemed like Miss Hachikuji didn’t quite buy it, but I guess she didn’t think it proper to speculate about the contents of a private message, and she left it at that.
“Listen, Araragi. If you’ve got nowhere to go, why not come with me? I think I have it in me to look after two minors. I’m living in a nearby house at the moment─it’s where my mother used to live, actually, back in the day. I don’t have enough supplies to divvy up, but I could teach you the survival skills that Mister Oshino shared with me.”
“…”
“And look─the fact is, I’m lonely all by myself.”
“…I imagine.”
She really has turned out great, I thought.
It was strange, thinking about her like that, when this Mayoi Hachikuji was older than me─but well, for her to end up like this.
It wasn’t my world─but if this kind of world was possible?
It made me glad.
Even Oshino said it was me who’d done the saving─but in the end.
It felt like I was the one who’d been saved.
“You’re very kind─Miss Hachikuji.”
“No, not really. It’s just, when I was a kid, a stranger was kind to me. So I try to be as kind as possible to strangers too, that’s all.”
“Oh─I see.”
“So, what do you think? I can scrounge up some tea for you, at the very least.”
“No─thank you anyway, it’s a nice offer, but we have somewhere to be.”
“You do?”
“Yes. And I’m sorry to say, we have to hurry. We didn’t set off those fireworks as a means of communication, we were just having fun.”
“That’s… You’re awfully weird, you know that?”
“Yes. I’m a weirdo.”
It’ll be okay. Soon you won’t be lonely anymore, I promised, taking Shinobu by the hand.
Shinobu seemed like she was about to say something, but looking back and forth between Miss Hachikuji and me, for once the little motormouth of a girl─kept mum.
Maybe she read the mood.
Or maybe she read ahead a bit.
“Sorry it was a wasted trip,” I apologized.
“Not at all, I’m glad I could deliver the letter I’d been entrusted with, but─hey.” Miss Hachikuji stopped us as we were about to race out of the park. “Hey, Araragi-kun. Have we…met somewhere before?”
“Hmm. Well, maybe we passed each other on the street sometime or something? They’ve got streets all throughout this great nation, after all.”
“No, it isn’t that…”
“We’ve never met. I’m just passing through,” I said. Probably smiling. “But thank you so much, for being alive.”
And just like that─without so much as a backward glance, I put the park in the rearview mirror.
Just like always, my mind was full of frivolous questions like─Now that she’s grown up, has she learned how to read the name of that park?
“Did that truly sate thee, my lord?” Shinobu finally opened her mouth after we’d been walking for a while already. Like it was hard on her, she seemed about to trip on the cracked pavement at any moment. “Was there not more thou wouldst have liked to discuss with her?”
“Nope. Because in this world, she doesn’t know me. It was only thanks to Oshino’s good offices that we ran into each other─” I don’t know what the exact odds had been, but I had a feeling it hadn’t actually been much of a gamble on Oshino’s part. For Hachikuji to meet the me from another route must have been a necessity. “I mean, this route’s me and this route’s Hachikuji never even met.”
“Route, eh? I see, ’twas that sort of logic. So that’s how we bested the difficulty of time travel into the past─put down in writing, ’tis easier to understand. ’Twould be even easier were it put into the form of a diagram.”
“When it’s turned into an analogy about intersections, you can’t but get it. Well, it’s on Oshino for not having helped you understand something so important.”
We’d ended up taking one hell of a detour thanks to him.
Or rather it had been futile from the start.
Returning to the past to do my summer homework wouldn’t have done any good.
I’d have pointlessly finished the summer homework of a me from another route.
“Shinobu, have you read Dragonball?”
“Aye.”
“In the manga, Trunks comes from the future, right? To defeat the androids that are causing chaos in his world. But that’s a parallel world, so no matter how successful he is at defeating the androids in the past, the future won’t change. And Trunks says something like, ‘I do it because I want there to be a world where the androids have been defeated’─which never really made sense to me when I was a kid,” I said. Full of emotion. “But now I get it. How Trunks felt.”
“Dost thou fancy thyself to be like Trunks? Thy self-opinion is wildly over-inflated.” Shinobu looked disgusted. As ever, we just couldn’t get on the same page─it seemed dicey to call me the Koyomi Araragi who successfully forged a positive relationship with Shinobu Oshino. “So, what wilt thou do?” she proceeded to ask.
“What will I do?”
“Though the Aloha brat’s letter hast changed thy perspective somewhat, nothing else has. The energy at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine is exhausted, so ’tis true as ever that we cannot return to the past, nor to Route A. We have no choice but to live on in this timeline─in this world. That being the case, would it not have been better to obediently learn the means of survival from the lass instead of performing a cool exit?”
“…”
“We might also have been able to garner information regarding other survivors. She may even know aught of Miss Tsundere or the former class president, or of thy sisters, and the rest.”
Hmm.
That hadn’t occurred to me, but there was a good possibility.
Wouldn’t that be great.
“But it’s no good, Shinobu.”
“No good…wherefore?”
“We have somewhere we have to be, remember? Miss Hachikuji said, ‘If you’ve got nowhere to go’─so it’s no good.”
“Somewhere to be, eh?” Shinobu shrugged her shoulders resignedly. “Thou meanest to go forth to save the world?”
“No. To save the girl.”
That was always the plan.
So we had to.
That’s what I always did.
This time too─that was all there was to it.
Nothing special about it at all.
“I never thought I’d have to fight you again.”
“Hnh─nor that I would have survived. So a suicidal vampire changes classes into a failed-suicide vampire, eh? We shall simply have to finish the job for her.”
“The you from another route… Neither Type A nor Type B, but Route X. Think we’ll get along?”
“I disavow any me who could destroy the world in full knowledge of the flavor of Mister Donut.”
“Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t have any during Golden Week.”
“Mayhap.”
“If we can defeat the you in Route X, Oshino says everyone who’s been turned into a zombie will come back to life.”
“A convenient setup, indeed. Her suicide a failure, to say nothing of her failure in creating thralls… I can but hope to avert my eyes from the ineptitude of this route’s Kissshot.”
“But it’s thanks to that we’ve got any. Hope, I mean.”
“Mayhap.”
“And hasn’t the you in my shadow been failing all along, too? Come to think of it, when you made me into a vampire, you were really worried about me going into a frenzy.”
“I have never once failed.”
“This again… Incredible.”
“Precisely, I am incredible…though, aye, if all the zombies become human once more, thou canst do it, canst live on in place of the already-deceased Koyomi Araragi of this route. Thou canst even become close with the Miss Tsundere of this route, or the former class president of this route, and thy sisters of this route─”
“I can’t do that. I may look the same, but my personality is different, and the relationships with them were constructed by the Araragi of this route. I can’t just cut in and hijack them.”
“…”
“Hey, after we save the world, let’s you and me wander off somewhere, just the two of us.”
“Haha, an interesting proposition.”
“Will you help me?”
“I suppose ’tis unavoidable.”
Shinobu laughed─laughed gruesomely.
No. She laughed cheerfully, lightheartedly.
“I said we would die together, did I not?”
“…So you think we’ll die?”
“We have no hope of victory. I, an incomplete vampire, and thee, an incomplete human, such a two-man cell against a vampire at the height of her powers? Even if my vampiric level were raised to the limit, ’twould be vain. ’Tis as though we are challenging her with our legs tied together for a three-legged race.”
“I guess.”
Oshino’s letter said much the same thing.
So it was probably true.
It had to be true.
“But our battles have always been like that,” I reminded Shinobu. “You going to lose your nerve in the face of certain defeat?”
“…Hmm.”
“I’m not saying we should do it because Oshino asked us to. How can we let a route where it’s possible for Hachikuji to be alive be a route in which the world lies in ruins? Don’t you want the route where she’s alive to be a good one?”
“Aye, well, destroying the world simply by being alive… Who is she, Helen of Troy?”
“A full-tilt Helen of Troy.”
“’Tis most difficult for a single human to try and change the world, but perhaps ’tis not impossible to tilt it a bit.”
“I don’t know about playing tilt-a-world, but just about anybody can tilt a narrative.”
“A dandy tale, eh?”
“We’re the dandies here.”
“’Tis a bit affected.”
“I don’t deny it.”
“Kakak. Well, my lord, if thou must affect something, what wilt thou affect?”
“Good question. For the moment, I think I’ll try and tilt the world, after all, out of affection for the girl standing before me.”
“Ah, that weigh the life of a girl against the entire world and choose the girl thing, eh? How current.”
“Nah, it’s already played out.”
“Heheh.”
“We’re going to save the world, and we’re going to save the girl. Heroes these days are all about being that greedy.”
“Indeed.”
Now you’re talking, Shinobu approved, taking my hand in hers.
Our fingers entwined.
As though we were setting forth into a new world.
“If we are to die together─so much more whilst we live.”
“I like that.”
Now it was my turn to laugh lightheartedly.
Now I saw.
We really had forged a positive relationship─so far so good, and, I was pretty sure, it’d be good from here on out too.
All right then.
Time to fashion the here-on-out.
Time to fashion the future.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login