Naturally, it didn’t regenerate.
I was nothing but human now.
The degree of pain probably wasn’t too different from back when I was slightly vampiric, and I should’ve been used to it, in terms of tolerance─but the sense of loss was something else.
“Trying to save people when you aren’t even immortal…” Ogi’s indignation continued unabated. Still on the floor, she glared at me with her black eyes. “I-Is that who you are in the end? You throw your life away for others on a whim? You’d even save someone who only ever criticized you, who only ever attacked you? Why die here, what good will it do? Why save me here─you’re wrong, after all. There’s something wrong with you as a person. You’re scum─”
“I wasn’t trying to…” Despite everything growing hazy due to the blood loss, her rough dressing-down helped me hold on, and I replied haltingly, “…save people. I saved myself just now.”
Miss Gaen had misjudged this one. The lady who knew everything was, how else to put it─wrong.
Hard on myself and hard on others? That wasn’t me.
Self-sacrificing, self-critical, self-flagellating.
I, who couldn’t stop throwing my life away for other people─self-centered for once.
Egotistically.
Saved myself.
Not caring what people wanted or how I looked, selfishly true to desire, to instinct─I saved myself.
Showing my true colors.
Self-staged, was what this was. Nothing more…
I’m hardly praiseworthy or great, and since I was such a weakling, if I didn’t save myself─
I was going to die, wasn’t I?
“Hitagi…” I said deliriously. “Hanekawa…Shinobu…Ononoki…saved me… They all saved me, so how can I not? How’s that okay…”
“…”
Silently.
The ever-talkative girl silently and gently touched my wound─and the bleeding stopped. Using some aberration’s power that she’d inherited, whether from Seishiro Shishirui or Toé Gaen I don’t know, but anyway she stopped my bleeding.
Maybe this was pointless.
As pointless as shielding Ogi’s body─we’d survived the initial strike, but now that I couldn’t move, the Darkness might just swallow me up as well.
None of my muscles was responding to my will. Even if I reconsidered and chose to be strong and unforgiving, it’d be too late to abandon Ogi and run away─and I liked that it was too late. Getting swallowed up along with someone who’d worked so diligently on my behalf seemed like the least I could do.
“My goodness, Araragi-senpai. I was planning on offing myself, and now it’s a double suicide. You do realize that I’m not a little girl?”
“Fine by me… You’re still like a six-month-old…baby…aren’t you.”
According to Miss Gaen, defeating Ogi was easier than taking candy from a baby.
But you don’t take candy from babies, you’re supposed to protect them, like I was doing.
“If everything I’ve done so far wasn’t some mistake, then I bet this isn’t a mistake, either,” I said. “I’m not doing things wrong.”
Yes. Just as you’re not.
Maybe it was because the bleeding had stopped─my words were miraculously clear. When Ogi heard them, that smile returned to her face.
No. This was another first.
It was a smile she’d never shown until now. A bit bashful, and somehow embarrassed, smile.
“You really are─such a fool.”
“Not really.”
Then.
I heard an unbelievable voice. Not mine or Ogi’s, but a third party’s─when I looked in its direction, which is to say at the door Ogi had opened to enter the classroom, I again couldn’t believe who was standing there.
I thought Tsukihi had returned at first, but it was no one like my little sister, a middle-school girl who was adorable at least in appearance─a Hawaiian shirt.
A middle-aged dude in a Hawaiian shirt.
“It’s nothing to sneeze at. You finally fought for yourself─I respect you, Araragi.”
Easily, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
Mèmè Oshino─uttered those words.
“…!”
I thought I was hallucinating, that on the verge of death, I was seeing the phantom of a man who couldn’t be present. Yet under me, Ogi was looking in the same direction with a shocked expression, so it couldn’t be a convenient delusion.
Well.
If Ogi and I were the same person, then surely, pushed to the limit, we could hallucinate the same thing─and witness a convenient mirage, like a party of travelers seeking out a desert oasis.
From behind the middle-aged delinquent, however, wobbled another figure, like a newborn fawn─or rather a dying fawn, with trembling legs. Spotting this second individual, I realized it was no convenient delusion or mirage but simply the result of honest effort.
Effort.
On the part of a girl with mottled hair who looked ready to fall flat on her pale face at any moment, bags carved so deep under her eyes that I could see them at my distance, her layers of clothes in utter disarray, just drained and depleted and dead on her feet in general─Tsubasa Hanekawa’s outlandish effort.
“Ten all-nighters in a row was pushing it…”
She nevertheless wrung out her last bit of energy to force a victorious smile and point a provocative finger at Ogi, who lay under me.
“I win.”
With that, Hanekawa collapsed.
So dramatically I thought she might’ve died─but she’d only fallen asleep.
“I don’t believe it. Miss Hanekawa really brought him…from Antarctica. How did she even get there and back?” Ogi muttered in a feeble whisper I could barely make out─hm? Antarctica?
Antarctica, a frozen land that even an exceptional aberration at her full strength, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, could not tolerate and evacuated─a place absolutely devoid of aberrations.
In other words, a place absolutely no expert would visit.
Is that what she meant by…a reverse approach? We’d only searched places where Oshino might go, but should have tried places where he wouldn’t, instead? Hiding a tree not in a forest but on the ocean floor─was legitimate. Yes, but it was human psychology to look for it in a forest. Who’d go dredge the ocean, other than Hanekawa…
I was speechless─she hadn’t said a paid man, Hitagi.
Depaysement.
So Hanekawa’s two possible locations had been Antarctica and its opposite, the North Pole… Beautifully winning that coin toss, she had tracked down Mèmè Oshino and, moreover, made it back to Japan with a day to spare.
“Her head’s messed up.”
This probably wasn’t referring to the jumbled speckles of white and black─but Ogi Oshino admitting defeat to Tsubasa Hanekawa.
Come to think of it, Ogi had been wary of her from the start, which made total sense, since I knew better than anyone how incredible Hanekawa is. If Dark Koyomin was an answer to Black Hanekawa, no wonder they didn’t get along.
Miss Gaen and Hachikuji’s read on the name Ogi was that it played on fan─it seemed forced, and I realized belatedly that it wasn’t just forced but tacked-on, a bit of misdirection to put it in mystery novel terms. Wasn’t the point that you obtained Ogi by adding the character for portal on top of the feather in Hanekawa’s name?
All that wariness, all the countermeasures did have an effect but could only buy time and got breached, futile in the final analysis─Tsubasa Hanekawa.
Just how Tsubasa Hanekawa was she?
“Araragi,” Mèmè Oshino said with a grin, not so much as glancing at Hanekawa, who’d collapsed right next to him. “In an abandoned place like this… What’s the idea, shoving my cute li’l niece down to the floor─so spirited, Araragi. Something good happen to you? You’re acting awfully suspicious with a junior when you have a girlfriend.”
What a ridiculous thing to say, look at the situation we’re in, I nearly shot back as I always used to in this classroom, but before I could─it was gone.
Not Ogi’s form. The Darkness.
The law of nature that seemed ready to engulf us at any moment vanished entirely─the existence, or nonexistence, we could neither see nor feel in the first place.
The Nothingness was no more.
“Ah…”
Niece? He just said that. About Ogi.
Mèmè Oshino said that.
In other words, he recognized her as a relative─meaning her actual existence.
Her presence was no longer a lie or fake.
Hence─the Darkness disappeared.
“…”
Ogi could say nothing, dumbstruck.
Even Ogi Oshino, who acted like she saw through everything, must not have imagined being saved like this, not by someone whose return she thought she’d resisted by putting up a barrier, to keep her true identity under wraps.
But that’s the kind of guy Mèmè Oshino is.
The original and progenitor─when it comes to acting like he sees through everything.
“You saved us there…Oshino,” I thanked on behalf of the speechless Ogi─though speaking for her simply meant saying what I felt.
“It’s not like I saved you. You just went and got saved on your own.”
Well done.
When I heard those words.
I reached my breaking point and crumpled, no longer able to support my own weight─and Ogi, who had to bear all of it, groaned. Geh─the moan sounded real, with nothing cute about it, and perhaps proved her existence. She had substance.
Became real the moment her true identity was exposed.
Ogi Oshino became Ogi Oshino.
So ended my, Koyomi Araragi’s, youth─a period when not caring for myself meant loving others, and even sacrificing myself to save someone made sense─that weak thin inebriation, that sweet deception came to an end.
But it was only the beginning of my bitter, gruesome, and evenly pitched battle against Ogi.
Neither brightly affirming myself, nor blindly negating myself.
I’d not stop thinking, and not be afraid to act; I’d not hesitate to try again, no matter how frustrating, scrutinizing my constant trials and errors, experiencing remorse and regret as if to split every hair, but taking on yet greater challenges and gambles; recouping every loss with three times the gains─an endless battle in pursuit of happiness, hereby begun in earnest.