“You’re actually me.”
You’re me.
Ogi Oshino─is Koyomi Araragi.
The moment I said it, rebuking her, it appeared.
I’d seen it before─but really, that’s not the right word. Nothing more than a shade, a hole that sucked everything into itself, a lone, pitch black, darkness─nothing but darkness.
The Darkness.
Nothing was there.
A nihility, an absence.
So black, though, I couldn’t call it emptiness.
Overwriting, blotting out the world’s typos─a black, black blackness.
Black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black.
Black─engulfing black.
“Well, that was fast. The main attraction, already on stage? Were the lies that serious, the crimes so grave?”
In contrast to my stunned state as I flashed back to my previous dramatic escape from it, Ogi was coolness itself─even smirking.
I knew this’d happen, of course. I’d been told.
If I exposed Ogi Oshino’s true identity─which is to say, my own deceit, the Darkness would appear and swallow her up, according to Miss Gaen’s plan.
I thought I was emotionally prepared, but the Darkness that I was facing once again had appeared with such astonishing abruptness.
“To think that I tried to play the part of this─I wasn’t in my right mind, if I do say so myself. I imagined I was hewing to stricter standards than the real thing, but…not even close. It wasn’t even a decent impression. I suppose being more unyielding than the world’s rules, and dubbing myself the cosmic law, was unreasonable to begin with? I did hope to be dark matter.”
I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off the Darkness, which had entered the classroom with an impact that threw perspective out of the window, but Ogi had no problem looking away and faced me as she spoke.
Her composure seemed to imply─a critique of my own weakness, even now.
“Don’t worry, I won’t run or hide. I do love mystery novels, after all. Nothing more shameless than a culprit who doesn’t know the score─in fact, I’m one of those old-fashioned readers who want it to end with the criminal’s suicide.”
“…”
“Oh, but cool and collected doesn’t cut it either. It’s a buzzkill in its own way, it just pisses me off, when they’re calm even as they’re confronted with the truth. Given that I’m about to disappear, I’m trembling on the inside. Annihilation, matter and anti-matter colliding. I’m trying to put up a bold front because you’re watching, but I have to wonder, what’s that like? Does it at least beat getting sent to hell?”
Ha haa, she laughed.
I was halfway out of my chair, but she showed no sign of standing up from hers.
“Suicide…” I began, my voice actually trembling. “But you knew this’d happen, didn’t you? If you’re me─that I’d be waiting here, having realized your true identity. So then why did you come? You could’ve dropped your criticism of Tsukihi’s case and run away.”
“Run away, like where? I just do what I need to do, even if it’s pointless─remember? I’d leave some unfinished business behind, but no regrets. In that sense, it really is suicide,” Ogi said with a beaming smile. “Sometimes you have to fight even if it’s a losing battle. While we may never agree on anything, if you’ll allow me something like my final words, I think I straightened your life out, in my own way. In a good way─though life might be going too far when I only spent a brief six months correcting a brief six months’ worth of deeds. How about youth? Even if I didn’t make yours any better, didn’t I make it more just?”
“If this is what you call just, then I don’t need my life to be just. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused?”
I’d resolved not to blame her─she’d done it all because of me─but the words slipped out of my mouth. I was being critical toward my self-criticism.
With the all-engulfing Darkness next to us, with nonexistence existing right there. With less than a minute left to exchange words with her.
“For Senjogahara, for Kanbaru, for Sengoku, for Hanekawa, for Shinobu, for Oshino, for Miss Kagenui, for Ononoki…for Kaiki─do you know how much trouble you’ve caused them? Do you have any idea just how much harm you’ve spread?”
“If they did suffer harm, it was nothing more than comeuppance,” answered Ogi. “I didn’t do anything─don’t you know that yourself? Trouble, harm, misfortune, they aren’t something you can come to terms with so easily. Even less so difficultly.”
“But you can, if it’s justice? You can neatly pack up what’s right and wrong?”
“Impossible─which is exactly why I worked with you, as a team. Even if you can’t determine what’s right, can’t you still decide which side is right?”
“…”
“Regarding Sodachi Oikura’s case, I was wrong. Regarding Nadeko Sengoku’s, I was right. Tadatsuru Teori’s was maybe a dissatisfying draw─I knew he and Izuko Gaen were connected, believed a one-on-one match was winnable. Nor did the kind of rift I wanted between you and Yotsugi Ononoki ever materialize.”
A match. That’s how Ogi described it.
Okay… Then our face-off had begun as soon as we’d met─was every one of our conversations, and not just the three rounds she mentioned, a kind of duel?
A duel to test─not what’s right, but which side is right.
That’s what rightness meant to her…and maybe it was closer to justice than righting wrongs─however.
“What was the record in the end, then? Which of us ended up being right?”
“Since I’m about to be annihilated like this, I’d say you. Congratulations.” With this, Ogi finally stood up from her chair. “What you’ve been doing wasn’t wrong.”
It was right.
Her saying so hardly made me feel any better. It was more like a fistful of salt in my wounds.
It was Ononoki who’d hit me where it hurt with her remark that I was seeking forgiveness by forgoing happiness. Since I was so pitiful, I ought to be beyond reproach─if that stance gave rise to Ogi, who’d unleashed so much fury, it put me deep in the wrong.
But maybe fury isn’t correct─or right, when she’d been trying to pacify our town.
Just like Miss Gaen, in that they both sought to install a god at Kita-Shirahebi. Ogi’s point of view was expansive, as if in reprimand of my inability to see past the end of my nose.
If she’d been righting my wrongs all this time, I needed to be thanking her─but I couldn’t.
Even if this was goodbye, an eternal parting.
I couldn’t allow myself to thank her─Koyomi Araragi and Ogi Oshino could only exist in opposition, critical of each other. We could only affirm our own existence by denying the other’s.
And that existence would soon vanish. Go away─in atonement.
The imitation Darkness swallowed up by the Darkness.
“The end of youth, we might say. Or maybe of a tale. Well, nothing serious. It’s not your life ending here, and nowhere near the end of the world. One of your many stories concludes, and it’s not even the finale. I’m glad I could disappear before you graduated, great work,” Ogi snuck in a mystifying bit─and dipped her head down in a bow. “Bye, Araragi-senpai.”
“Bye, Ogi.”
And now.
Ogi Oshino, who came on as Suruga Kanbaru’s junior, threw my life into as much chaos as possible since second term, pulled strings behind the curtains all throughout town, crawled between the lines to dig up everything foreshadowed there, rehashed what had come to an end, demanded self-understanding and atonement, self-flagellation and silence, feared no opposition, flinched at no hostility, allowed nothing to slide with her sneering, unforgiving attitude, and forgave nobody.
Ogi Oshino, who appeared wherever I went, like my shadow─everywhere.
Her crime of self-falsification tried, her true identity exposed, like the many deceptions she herself had punished, Ogi Oshino, whom I could see anytime, would be swallowed up by the true Darkness, which virtually didn’t exist, as though she never existed─leaving behind neither shape nor shadow, she’d vanish.
Her rightness and my wrongness.
My wrongness and her rightness─annihilating each other.
Done and gone, ceasing to exist.
All that she’d been up to was about to end.
So I’d say it again─I’d never allow words of gratitude to come out of my mouth, but I could at least see myself off with a recitation of my farewell.
Bye, Ogi.
Goodbye, my youth…
“Nope, no can do!”
I leapt.
Forcing my human body that dared not budge, using the strength in my human legs to stand from my chair, I put my mass to work like a human and ran like a human─in other words, as a plain human.
I leapt at Ogi and shoved her to the floor.
As if to dodge the Darkness, which was only inches away, I shoved a high school girl down on the cracked floor of an abandoned building. I wasn’t even sure if the Darkness had been moving, but it did pass over my head.
I─saved Ogi Oshino.
“A-Araragi-senpai?! Wh-What…”
For the first time.
For the first time now─Ogi let out what sounded like a panicked voice. No, thinking back, maybe this was the first time ever that I’d seen her truly shaken.
“What are you thinking?!”
Okay, maybe she was just angry.
But I couldn’t respond to her anger─to her criticism. Not because I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words.
I couldn’t speak because I was in pain.
“…gh.”
As if to dodge the Darkness, I’d said, but I hadn’t actually─it had grazed my right arm.
A graze was all it needed to take the whole thing: my upper arm down was gone like it had never existed.
The bleeding wouldn’t stop.