“Please don’t speak to me,” she said with a visible frown. “I’m a god now.”
It went to her head! And she was back where she started!
“If you have to speak to me, bow twice, clap twice, bow one more time, then present me with an offering like you’re supposed to for a god.”
To begin with, Hachikuji didn’t look any different even if she was a god─she wasn’t wearing the garb of a shrine maiden or any traditional attire.
Maybe in the future, but I guess aberrations, like humans, don’t change overnight. Only gradually.
“So why’s a god wandering around town? Don’t tell me you’re lost.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m on the side of saving the lost now, unironically at that.”
“Who’s being ridiculous? I gotta admit though, it’s quite a promotion…”
“I’m taken aback that you’d call this wandering around. Observing the lowly creatures of the world below is one of the more trivial duties of a god.”
“This god stuff has really gotten to your head. Don’t change so much overnight. Gradual change, I was saying.”
“Is your commencement ceremony being held today, Mister Araragi? I’d like to congratulate you on all your hard work,” Hachikuji lauded me at last and bowed her head. “I’d love to attend and help you celebrate, but my divine presence could disturb the unwashed masses, so I abstain out of consideration.”
“You know, no one’s coming to worship at your shrine. This town is going to end up godless again.”
“Ha ha ha. Don’t say that. Come by whenever you’d like. All are free to worship at Kita-Shirahebi, do come over to play anytime.”
“Sure. I’ll come over─to play at your house.”
“Yes, to my house,” Hachikuji said and walked off in the direction I came from─she wasn’t kidding as far as the bit about observing our town.
“…”
I saw her off.
Well, she wasn’t the type to sit quietly at home. Interacting with her took me back but also seemed normal.
It was a normal that had required no small effort.
In any case, Miss Gaen’s terribly reckless plan to deify Mayoi Hachikuji seemed to have worked out in the end─honestly, I’d had my doubts about such a forced solution, but you might say that’s what the big boss of the experts was capable of.
“Capable? You mean you, Koyomin, because I sure didn’t expect it to end this way. Please, I’m begging you, don’t go around spreading stupid rumors that I was envisioning an ending this slapdash from the start,” she’d told me the previous night.
Did she have to go that far?
“Seriously, I haven’t been this shocked since I mentioned Nostradamus’ prophecy just to pander to a kid and was told, ‘I wasn’t born yet in 1999’─guess I’m getting up there.”
“I’m not seeing your point.”
“There’s no particular point. Just that we’re living in a future that didn’t end then.”
“Okay…but Miss Gaen. A lot of the credit for getting to our slapdash ending should go to Hanekawa.” I mean, if not for her, wouldn’t Ogi and I have died in a double suicide? Nothing interesting about that end.
“Right, she does deserve my thanks for finding that amateurish junior of mine─I can only raise a white flag to her. What’s really amazing isn’t that she found him, but that she found him and brought him back.”
“…Because she broke through the barrier? But it wouldn’t affect Hanekawa, who’s a resident of this town─the Lost Cow can’t make you lose your way if you want to go home.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Miss Gaen brushed my lay opinion aside with a shake of her head. “She managed to make him feel like it.”
“…”
“As far as I know, Mèmè Oshino isn’t the type to make a ‘Special Cameo Appearance’─and when I say as far as I know, it’s a fact… By the way, are you sure about this, Miss Shinobu?” she asked the golden-haired, golden-eyed babe (and not little girl) standing next to me. “If I’m being honest with you, your decision pleases me, as an expert, but your desire to be sealed in Koyomin’s shadow again is one I have trouble understanding. If you have some kind of aim here, I’d like you to make it clear.”
“I harbor none─is tiring of battle and wishing to be regarded once more as harmless so mystifying to an expert? I think not. Kakak!”
From little girl to bewitching woman. She now wanted to go back to being a little girl. Our link hadn’t been restored yet, but as she answered with her gruesome smile, I could tell she wasn’t lying.
“If my master, who fast removed all traces of vampirism from his form, doth protest against becoming a mockery of a human and of a vampire, I defer to his wishes of course─having healed his arm, I shall retreat to a mountain mayhap to live as a recluse.”
“Like I’d ever let you,” I spoke up before Miss Gaen could. “You know there aren’t any Mister Donut branches in the mountains.”
“True.”
After this exchange─and naturally, after I vowed not to err and become a vampire again by offering excessive blood libations, or rather donations, my link to Shinobu was fixed for a third time. Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, who hadn’t enjoyed her full form since spring break, was sealed off in my shadow once more as Shinobu Oshino, a harmless eight-year-old kid.
During spring break, there was no choice─but this time was different.
Of her own will.
She sealed away her existence─and wasn’t lying or faking it. She, who’d rejected godhood four hundred years ago, chose to be a little girl, four hundred years later.
Well, maybe there was no choice. At least, I didn’t have any future that involved not living alongside Shinobu.
Not that we’d forgiven each other, needless to say─a time to forgive, and to forget, might come after four hundred years; for now, that’s where our relationship stood, whether you call it collusion or caprice, custom or compromise.
“If you want to die tomorrow, I’m ready for my life to end tomorrow─if you care to live for today, then so will I.”
“If ye were to die the day after tomorrow, I shall live until the day after that─to speak of thee to another. I shall speak, and they shall listen to the tale of my master.”