029
“Jiangshi.”
Day drew to a close─and that night.
Having ascended the mountain path we had traversed more times than I could count in the past few days, we found ourselves within the precincts of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine. We raised one another’s vampiric levels almost to the max and also produced four duplicates of the enchanted sword Kokorowatari so that we were armed to the teeth, carrying two blades apiece.
Shinobu hadn’t changed her body into a battle-ready form, choosing instead to remain a little girl. She stood at the ready, those massive enchanted swords, so incongruous with her physique, resting across her shoulders.
The zombie hordes didn’t come for us, probably because our vampiric level was elevated nearly as far as it would go─meaning our humanity was lowered nearly as far as it would go.
If we’d been in town they might have sensed us, but because we were at that unpopular shrine─and likely also because of the efficacy of that talisman affixed to the main hall, the grounds were peaceful.
Most effective of all, however, may have been the rice (brought up the mountain from the market in town) sprinkled all around us just in case.
Of course.
For extra insurance we could also bite the bullet and return Shinobu to full vampire status, if absolutely necessary─in which case Shinobu would regain her full power─or rather, in which case Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade would be restored in place of Shinobu Oshino.
If we did that, we might be able to look forward to a fair fight─or maybe more than fair, given the additional presence of her true thrall, i.e. me. But though I suspect that plan occurred to her just as it did to me, neither of us spoke it aloud.
It wasn’t a matter of trust.
It wasn’t out of Shinobu’s anxiety that she might turn on me if she regained her power─that anxiety was long gone.
Having read Oshino’s letter.
We’d gotten past that.
For that very reason, however─we didn’t want to alter our relationship as it stood now.
Our strange relationship where each of us was the other’s master and slave.
In a certain sense, I prized that bond above life itself.
That was why.
Maybe it was a ridiculous thing to be hung up on, but it was ridiculously important to us.
We had no intention of putting it before the fate of the entire world, of course─in that case we’d just have to save the world.
“Aye, ’tis─a continental aberration. They differ from vampires and the like, who have been deprived of death from the start. They would best be termed ‘living corpses.’”
“Jiangshi, yeah. I think they were pretty popular back in the day.” That was my parents’ generation, though, so I don’t know much about it. “Ononoki and I were talking about all that. Anyway, if they’re weak against rice, then that’s probably what they are.”
“They would never be able to attend a wedding.”
“Since you mention it, vampires can’t handle crosses, either… I think I also remember hearing something about the girls being cute.”
“’Tis only Tenten, is it not?”
“Why do you even know about Tenten?”
But the strongest impression I have of them is not as “the resurrected dead,” but as the slaves of magical practitioners─seeing how they’d been restrained by the talisman made me think that maybe they were sort of like Ononoki, like a shikigami. And I had the impression that Tenten herself was a yugen doshi, who controlled such jiangshi.
Shinobu spoke as if they were distinct from zombies, and I pictured jiangshi as stiff, not limp like zombies.
“Aye, as though rigor mortis hath set in. Anyway, in most cases─the resurrection of the dead carries a price.”
“A price, huh?”
Having for the moment laid aside my dual enchanted swords, I was performing some careful stretches. This may have been unnecessary for a vampire body, which is to say, it was definitely unnecessary, but it was more about mood.
“Not that I was bringing back the dead, but if the price for saving Hachikuji was the ruination of the entire world, well, that sounds about right.”
“’Tis not a fair trade, though, in the end.”
“Yeah. I refuse to accept the idea that the world ended just because Hachikuji is alive. Even if fate decreed it.”
That made it seem…
Like she’s dispensable, like the world doesn’t need her─bullshit.
Whether dead or alive.
Child or adult.
“The world isn’t the same without her.”
Aye, Shinobu agreed. Finishing up her dual-wield practice swings, she said, “I am ready. The time is ripe, now is the moment. Shall we call forth our accursed foe?”
“You do the honors.”
Without any particular cue.
Abandoning any thought of turning back, abandoning all else─Shinobu drew a great breath and cried to the heavens like a bullhorn.
“W !”
The volume was deafening, but I didn’t block my ears─because the moment that cry was loosed, the battle had already begun.
It was a sort of signal like the fireworks in the park, or rather a sign saying: Here We Are.
Like bats using ultrasonic waves to determine one another’s location─it was a message demarcating the boundaries of a vampire’s turf.
If, as Oshino said, the other Shinobu was still alive in this world─there was no way she could ignore a signal pattern identical to her own. She would come.
It might also draw out the zombie hordes─but they were slow, so she, a genuine vampire, would arrive first.
“…Now we can neither run nor hide,” Shinobu announced once the signal cry had ended. Seeming a little bit out of breath, she returned to my side.
“I have no intention of running or hiding.”
“Then what dost thou intend to do?”
“A little something I like to call, ‘not having a plan.’”
“Keheh.”
’Tis just like thee, Shinobu said.
Well, she was probably right.
But it wasn’t death before dishonor or anything; I wasn’t set on throwing my life away in a suicide attack.
I intended to win.
“Even at the height of your powers these enchanted swords will deal you damage, right?”
“So I trust. Yet at the height of my powers, I am given to ignore all common sense. The unforeseen possibilities are legion.” Shinobu looked over my two katanas, comparing them to her own─since they were replicas that she herself had produced, I doubted even she could tell them apart. “In the face of the Kokorowatari I wield at the height of my powers, even this series of enchanted swords amounts to naught but toys.”
“In that case, we’ve got no choice but to find the chink in her armor.”
The strong are also careless, I proffered a strategy that wasn’t much of a strategy at all.
“If her armor has such a chink,” Shinobu warned. “Even I would be on my strictest guard after hearing a boundary marker identical to mine own.”
“Hmm. A you who isn’t careless is going to be unstoppable… In which case, what do we do? We’re invulnerable like her, and yet…” It was also true that “invulnerable” meant something quite different for us and for a fully powered Shinobu.
“If we have any chance of victory, it lies in the fact that the me of this world seems to have crossed the line into madness.”
“That’s actually helpful?”
“Aye. Though, of course, it may also be our downfall─but an insane me will likely be plumbing the depths of despair. Her failed suicide attempt doth not change the fact that even now she remains a potential suicide.”
Hmm.
A potential suicide plumbing the pits of pathos and paranoia?
Somehow that sounded even more frightening.
“At any rate, I wonder what happened to Oshino after he formed a scrum with Kagenui or Kaiki for their final suicide attack? After he entrusted that letter to Miss Hachikuji. What if he was victorious in his final battle? We’d look like total idiots.”
“With those zombies still about, ’tis unlikely he was victorious outright.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Methinks a little rice shower will not serve against 6.5 billion zombies. As his letter said, a final suicide attack would likely fail─we can but pray that he hath not yet found the me of this world.”
“And if he has, then he’s become a zombie?”
“There is also the possibility that he has simply been slain.”
“I can’t stand that possibility. Even Kaiki’s death would weigh heavy on my conscience.”
Though even death probably couldn’t make an honest man out of that swindler.
While it may seem like we were strategizing right up to the end, what we were engaging in, right up to the end, was in fact small talk.
That, too, was─just like me.
Like us.
“Keheh.”
“Hahaha.”
“Heheh.”
“Heehee.”
At last we were just laughing, about nothing in particular.
And then─the moment arrived.
She arrived.
Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade arrived on the battlefield.
“…Urk!”
Her very being lay beyond the ken of humans.
I had no clue what kind of entrance she would make─and figured that dropping from the sky with the speed of a meteorite was probably more or less her standard practice.
Or maybe she’d float down on the wings sprouting from her back, silhouetted against the moon. Or, using her vampiric ability to transform her body into mist, she might appear before our eyes even more casually and suddenly than the zombies had. I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if she burst forth from the earth.
I could even conceive of some unexpected, grotesque entrance where she devoured her way out of our innards.
Well, however she did it, the one thing I couldn’t imagine, given my understanding of her character, was a surprise attack that might in any way be perceived as cowardly, so in that sense, at least, we could maybe relax a little.
Thus, while we were on our guard, we were also looking forward to a show, immodestly enough.
Wondering just what kind of colorful entrance Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade might make in the full glory of her power.
However─her entrance.
Utterly betrayed every one of our predictions and expectations.
Betrayed in a bad sense.
She─the aberration slayer, the legendary vampire who had brought the entire world to ruin─came on stage in the most literally pedestrian manner possible, climbing the steps of the mountain path just as we had done.
The zombies certainly had the edge on her in terms of the element of surprise.
She walked under the torii─and onto the shrine grounds.
Her appearance, though, sufficed to leave us speechless.
“Urk…”
“Hmph.”
While I could do nothing but groan, Shinobu nodded with understanding even as she covered her mouth in horror.
Nodded─at the miserable sight of herself as she was in this route.
Her entire body horribly burned.
Giving off the stench of corruption and dragging one leg behind her.
More zombie-like than the zombies.
More corpse-like than the corpses.
Seeing herself in that state, Shinobu nodded.
“So ’twas─self-immolation I chose, after all.”
The same as him.
The same, Shinobu repeated.
“Him”─her aforementioned first thrall?
The thrall who, despairing of himself after only a few years as a vampire, chose suicide?
Had to be.
I’m fairly certain he─abandoned his body to the sunlight, committing suicide by self-immolation.
His suicide, however, had been successful.
The Shinobu─no, the Kissshot─who stood before me now must have tried the same thing.
To follow him into oblivion, after assuring herself that the destruction of the human race was complete─as he had, so too did she surrender herself to the sun.
Then failed.
Her entire body was horribly burned, leaving her barely a shadow of her former self.
She failed to die.
And.
“…What a wretched creature,” Shinobu spoke beside me. In a poignant voice. “To go so far and yet not perish, such a foolish variety of immortality do we enjoy─and yet ’tis precisely what she deserves. To be reduced to this despite knowing thee─despite having encountered thee…”
’Tis naught but failure, she condemned.
I wondered if she was speaking to me, but as far as I could tell from her expression, she seemed to be speaking to herself.
It was too sad a soliloquy.
Too painful.
To share with me.
“Wherefore think to die─this me?”
“Ha.”
Kissshot finally emitted a sound.
At first I didn’t know what it was.
Maybe she couldn’t vocalize properly because her throat was half burned? I thought that was it, but then the guttural rumblings continued─and I remembered.
I remembered that it was her laughter.
Kissshot’s.
Guffaw.
“Ha”Ha”Ha”
“…”
“Ha!”Haha!”Hahaha!”Hahahaha!”Hahahahaha!”Hahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahahaha!”
Even with half her body burned away─even having failed to die.
Even as a potential suicide, even as a failed suicide.
Even after everything that had gone wrong.
Even then she laughed heartily.
And gruesomely.
The iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire─Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.
In her helpless immortality.
Made every inch a monster─her final, ultimate beauty.
Neither I, nor even Shinobu, could get a word in edgewise in the face of that guffaw─we couldn’t even move a muscle.
Right.
Even in that state─a failed suicide, her lover’s pact unfulfilled, half her body paralyzed, even then Kissshot was the mightiest presence in the world.
Even in that state─she was not the slightest bit enfeebled.
Even on the brink of death, her entire body horribly burned, neither I nor Shinobu, nor Oshino or Kagenui─no mere “human” could stand up to this aberration.
This monstrosity.
The aberration slayer and king of the night, the bane of all and sundry.
In part we were overwhelmed by that resonant laughter─but in any case, we wouldn’t have been able to move a muscle.
Doing it through sheer willpower.
Making up for it with your fighting spirit.
I could feel in my bones that such boys’ manga thinking would get us nowhere. Such was the disparity between us─and suddenly my hands, each holding a Kokorowatari, felt useless.
To the point that if I didn’t grip the hilts so tightly that my hands bled─I might lose those trump cards then and there.
It took me back, to the beginning.
And then I realized.
I finally understood.
Just how much consideration she’d shown me when, that time over spring break, we fought to the death─
“Ha!”Haha!”Hahaha!”Hahahaha!”Hahahahaha!”Hahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahaha!”Hahahahahahahahahaha─then,” she said.
Finally uttering something resembling a word.
“Then…’twas possible. Such a future. Such a world. Such a route─’twas really possible, that I and thou would lean on one another.”
Laughing as she said this─she wept.
Like that time over spring break.
Shedding bitter, red tears─she wept.
“Keheh─what a comedy of errors. ’Twas possible, and yet─I spoiled everything, with my worthless jealousies. Thou wert lost to me when I absconded from the cram school, and I felt like a bird with but one wing, half my body plucked away. But…’twas never so poignant as this. As being confronted with the possibility.”
“…”
“Then─that disagreeable Aloha brat was right all along. As though he can see through everything─how ludicrous. Were it not so?”
The two of thee?
Turning upon us a gaze flooded with red tears, her eyeballs melting into cloudy murk, she addressed us directly for the first time.
She, who could kill us without so much as lifting a pinky─instead of killing us, with her face still drawn into a rictus, asked us that question.
“’Twere.”
It was Shinobu who answered.
She’d asked the question, and it was she who answered.
“Thou art quite the clown. A most amusing tale, indeed. Look at thyself─unable to die, even now. Even immortality hath its limits─this is what they mean by not knowing when to give up the ghost. This failed death. I say unto thee, the difference between us is not so great as ye might think. ’Tis a matter of only the slightest difference in the relationships we weave with those around us─”
Hachikuji being alive.
Hachikuji being gone.
“─And the conditions were not so different. For myself, the difference was not insurmountable. With just a touch of compromise on our part. If thou hadst opened thy heart just a little more to this man─trusted him, put thyself in his hands, ye might have been the same as I. History would have corrected for it. To put it plainly, I cannot for the life of me understand why thou didst fail.”
“…Haha. Tickles me to hear. For I cannot for the life of me understand thy success.”
I want the strategy guide.
So saying, Kissshot sat down on the spot─or rather than sit down, she more or less collapsed there on the grounds of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine.
Exhibiting no inkling of weakness.
But her crimson tears─had ceased.
“Myself from another world. And─my servant from another world.” With her eyes riveted on us, she said, “I shall return ye curs to thine own world.”
“…Huh?”
For a moment I couldn’t comprehend what she’d said.
Neither of us could.
And wait, how did Kissshot know right off the bat that we were travelers from another route─Shinobu and I were obviously familiar figures to her, but there was no way she could have perceived the truth in the blink of an eye.
I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t think she was endowed with such powers of deduction.
So how─in the same instant my question began to form, I guessed the answer.
It was Oshino.
Mèmè Oshino.
Eleven years ago, in the course of collecting tales of aberrations, Oshino had happened upon the urban legend about me and Shinobu─in other words, sometime around April or May, he’d become aware of the possibility that we were from another route.
And if he made some inferences from that.
And hinted at them─to her, while they were cohabitating in the ruins of the abandoned cram school─
About the whole route concept.
If at that point he’d told her about the existence of parallel worlds.
Though of course, even if he did, it probably went in one ear and out the other─because if she’d been attentive, the world wouldn’t have fallen into this state.
But actually seeing us.
Together like this.
When she, when Kissshot, saw Shinobu Oshino and Koyomi Araragi working together─it must have dawned on her.
And.
In a flash she must have put it all together.
Because this sight, of herself in someone else’s company, was what she’d sought for centuries─
“Return us to our own world… What dost thou mean?”
With no attempt to hide her suspicion, Shinobu glared back at herself.
In a sense, it was an appallingly tone-deaf response.
She wasn’t even trying to understand what was in the other party’s heart─though her interlocutor was herself, in this other world she was someone else, a stranger.
You’re not supposed to meet yourself, either in the world of the past or the world of the future─which is why I’d been careful not to meet myself eleven years ago─but now.
What did they see? What were they thinking?
How incompatible─are two different selves?
“What, dost thou mean to stay in this ruined─in this world that I have ruined? If ’tis possible, dost thou not wish to return, to thine own world?” demanded Kissshot─as though she were sounding us out.
“Aye─yet there is not sufficient energy for such.”
“If there were, wouldst thou wish to go?” the legendary vampire threw back in response. “If I consume, for instance, all my would-be thralls, my misbegotten thralls who now run rampant in this town, the resultant energy may be sufficient.”
“Thou speakest nonsense. ’Tis exactly why thou didst fail. Those zombies were once the residents of this town. Humans. Convert them not into energy.”
“Convert not humans into energy.”
“Never.”
“’Tis─most unlike me.”
“’Tis most like this me.”
“Then convert me,” Kissshot shot back, placing the palm of her hand on her own chest. “The spiritual energy thou couldst derive from Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade herself in her full glory, even though I be on the brink of death, should suffice for a journey to another route.”
Not just suffice─if we spent that much energy, we’d have change coming to us.
This time, I really did─let the two enchanted blades fall from my hands.
Of course.
In his letter, Oshino did make the over-the-top request that I save the world─but not once did he, in a single line or word, ask me to defeat Kissshot.
He wasn’t counting on me to accomplish anything so ambitious.
Facing her like this.
Showing ourselves to her, was enough.
That was all it took─to save her.
To save the world.
The girl standing there in front of me─had also meant the six hundred-year-old Kissshot.
If Oshino could see us, me and Shinobu wielding four deadly, enchanted great katana, could see us prepared for a violent end, no doubt he’d say:
You’re awfully spirited today. Something good happen to you?─and at least.
Something good did happen to her.
And so.
And so also to us.
“Convert thee into spiritual energy─by which thou meanest, drink thy blood.”
“Aye, needless to say, ’tis precisely my meaning.”
“And needless to say, thou wilt die.”
“Needless to say, I might as well be dead.”
“I see.”
That was all.
That was the extent of the conversation between Shinobu Oshino and Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade─they probably didn’t really understand one another.
In the end they were selves from different worlds, different people, strangers.
No way they’d understand or get through to one another.
And yet. And so.
They had no use for needless chatter.
I accompanied Shinobu as she approached Kissshot─and as we got close.
“Hearken to me, o my servant from another route…”
Kissshot spoke to me.
“This is no contract I propose, nor is it a bargaining chip, but merely a request─might ye not stroke my head?”
“Gladly,” I answered immediately and placed my hand on her head.
Tousling her hair.
Though her entire body was melting like mud, her golden hair was still soft and pleasant to the touch─and as I mussed it around, her expression, which had been unremittingly grim, at last softened into one of joy.
Even when Shinobu sank her teeth into her neck, that expression didn’t change.
And so ended that summer’s adventure.
I think it taught me a hell of a lot more than any summer homework.
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