Battling on the precipice of death against Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.
Being saved by Mèmè Oshino.
Facing Tsubasa Hanekawa─Black Hanekawa.
Catching Hitagi Senjogahara at the bottom of the stairs.
Walking Mayoi Hachikuji home.
Competing for a girl’s heart with Suruga Kanbaru.
Freeing Nadeko Sengoku from a charm.
Facing Black Hanekawa again.
Reconciling with Shinobu Oshino.
Banishing Deishu Kaiki.
Fighting Yotsugi Ononoki.
Getting spared by Yozuru Kagenui.
Having Tsubasa Hanekawa confess to me.
Failing to save Mayoi Hachikuji and parting ways.
Confronting Seishiro Shishirui.
Getting reintroduced to Sodachi Oikura.
Failing to save Nadeko Sengoku after all.
Sitting in Tadatsuru Teori’s sights.
And settling it all with Ogi Oshino.
An entire year─our year-long tale, all just a dream? I hadn’t wandered into another world─but only woken up?
Just as many people do every morning.
I simply woke up? All that sorrow, joy, loneliness, frustration, pain, and fun, all the smiles, tears, words, and strength, all the life and death─was all just something I dreamed? This inconsistent, contradictory world was in fact real, was the original world that I always existed in?
Both sides see the other as the counterfeit─Shinobu had told me, but only my world was the counterfeit?
Only I was the counterfeit. The world had always been universal.
Next morning─I’d wake up as always.
“If you’re saying all of it is a dream…” I─Koyomi Araragi, answered. “I’d say I had a wonderful dream, stretch my arms─and know with a smile on my face that an incredible day awaits me.”
“An answer you could only dream of.”
In that case, let me retract my hypothesis, Ogi said with a shrug─excuse me, what?
“I said I take back my hypothetical. It can’t be true. So, why don’t we cut out the small talk and get to the topic at hand?”
“Small talk?!”
Hold on, hold on, hold on! It all seemed pretty serious to me!
We neatly summed up all the previous installments and drummed up a crisis that threatened to turn everything on its head, ruining it all!
“Ha haa. Even I don’t have the courage.”
“I’d say faking me out with something that malicious is pretty brave… Wait, so it’s not true? The entire series of tales so far wasn’t just a dream?”
“I guarantee it. I mean, just how long would you have to be dreaming for that to be true? Speaking of which, did we discuss it the other day─the butterfly dream? Where you can’t tell if you’re a human being dreaming of having become a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of having become a human being─which would be just a dream when you wake up?”
“Oh…if you put it that way, I guess the idea of experiences all being a dream is thought-provoking.”
“But, Araragi-senpai. However thought-provoking, don’t you think there’s an innegligible hole in it?”
“A hole?” Was she claiming to have found one in a famous anecdote that people have been telling for thousands of years? Now, this was big.
“Challenging historical fact is a part of period mysteries. Just because something is written down in an ancient text doesn’t make it indisputable─for example, did the Honnoji Incident really happen?”
“You’re saying the butterfly dream isn’t real? Is that it?”
“My conclusion is that it never happened─it was just a type of thought experiment by an ancient philosopher. That it, if anything, is a hypothesis. A metaphor. In other words, it’s saying, ‘I was dreaming. In my dream, I was a butterfly, floating from flower to flower─and then I woke up. I was a human. But then the thought struck me, could I simply be a butterfly dreaming that I’d become human…’”
“I don’t see that as contradictory. At least, you can’t disprove it in theory.”
“But for an entirely emotional argument against it, I’d say, Who the hell dreams of becoming a butterfly?!”
There’s my double for you. She delivered the quip exactly as I would, in an identical tone─then, a beat later…
“No matter how fantastical a dream, you’re never going to not be you. Or─has that ever happened to you? Have you ever dreamed of being a butterfly? It doesn’t have to be a butterfly. A dream where you’re a dog, say, or a bird.”
No, I couldn’t say I had.
I was pretty sure, too… I’d had a lot of dreams in my life, but they were always from my own point of view─I’d never been anyone other than myself. Even if I budged and pretended that I’d dreamed of being a butterfly, that’d still be a dream about nothing more than me as a butterfly. Plus, I didn’t imagine a butterfly had the mental capacity in the first place to dream of becoming human.
“Indeed. Dreams are always had from the dreamer’s perspective. Butterflies must not be able to recognize themselves in mirrors─but anyway, that’s why it’s a kind of metaphor. He used the example of a butterfly for ease of understanding. In other words, nothing but-a-flight of fancy,” Ogi punned. “It was all just a dream endings are considered off-limits not because they’re cowardly and unfair, but because they aren’t realistic. They aren’t convincing─you couldn’t possibly accept everything so far being a dream, could you?”
“True, but…”
As her senior, and as her partner, I wanted to respond to her big lie, which had felt a little too true-to-life─but I wasn’t going to let Ogi’s mean tricks get to me at this point. Sheesh, what was it that this girl wanted to do? Don’t confuse me as a prank.
“In that case, what is happening to me? You’re saying that this isn’t a dream either, right? This world, that world. Inside a mirror, the land of mirrors─left and right being flipped around, everything being inside out, it’s all so incoherent that my brain can barely handle it. If there’s something you know, tell me, I’d really appreciate it. Ogi, what exactly do you know?”
“I don’t know anything─you’re the one who knows. And the work of understanding falls on you too,” she said. “It’s because you’re so slow to understand that you end up having to cosplay me in an unsightly display.”
“Oh…right.” Calling me unsightly was going too far, but having nothing to say in return, I asked a question to shift the topic, to hide my embarrassment so to speak. “Whatever this world is, if you exist in it, I don’t see any reason for the school uniform in my closet to change into a girl’s uniform─could you start by explaining that?”
“I don’t think that’s where I should begin…and didn’t I explain that already?”
“What? No, I don’t remember ever getting an explanation?”
“I told you that was just a joke too, right at the outset.”
“…”
Had she? Ah, yes, but I hadn’t taken her meaning. Though I certainly remembered thinking that me cosplaying her as she cosplayed me was some sort of sick joke…
“It should go without saying,” averred Ogi, “but let me play the boor and give you the details. You were taking too long sitting back and enjoying your time here flirting with Miss Oikura, so I got annoyed and thought to tease you by swapping my uniform with yours.”
“How does that go without saying?!”
Like I’d ever figure out from a single line that she’d been so proactive!
What was the point of this costume change, then?!
“Please don’t get so upset. Listen, I wasn’t expecting this either. I thought maybe you’d get a little flustered if you saw that your uniform had changed. But you went so far past flustered that you even put on a pair of stockings… I don’t think that’s normal.”
In fact, I ended up being the flustered one, Ogi noted. I panicked and put a barrier around the whole school.
So not encountering anyone or being spotted on campus wasn’t just dumb luck…
In the end, the change in my school uniform─the idea of changes coming from the opposite vector─was only a prank on Ogi’s part.
“Also, while I’m confessing here,” she said, “the smirking face you saw in the bathroom mirror when Tsukihi washed your face was also me.”
“Not the kind of thing you just tack on to a confession…Seriously? You can do that?”
“Yes. It’s hardly impressive, you and I are the same person. Or rather, that was about all I could do, trapped here in this classroom. To fan your sense of crisis, of course.”
“…”
Oh. While I was furious, this gave me some respite. For the time being, the idea of me no longer being me, the loss of Koyomi Araragi, was ruled out. But it only meant that the world exerted no pressure on me, and didn’t do away with the pressure I put on the world.
Ogi trying to make me fret implied that I needed to hurry up and go home. It was a sort of request on her part, in which case I shouldn’t be mad at her─nor would I be awarded any injury time at the end here.
“But even if you’re telling me to go home, I don’t know how,” I grumbled. “Unless you’re able to create a gate to the other world like Shinobu? Actually, which are you anyway? The Ogi who’s my double, or Ogi, this world’s Koyomi Araragi? You could even be both…”
“I’m your double,” she answered with unexpected candor─Ogi never answered a simple question with a simple answer, so I was a bit stunned.