It happened during spring break.
I was attacked by a vampire.
In this day and age of real, working maglev trains, where overseas school trips are nothing unusual, it’s embarrassing enough to make me want to go into hiding, but regardless, I was attacked by a vampire.
She was blood-chillingly gorgeous.
A beautiful demon.
She was─such a beautiful demon.
Though they’re concealed behind the collar of my uniform’s jacket, the traces of her deep bite still remain on my neck. I’m hoping that my hair will grow out before it gets hot out, but putting that aside─usually, when regular people get attacked by a vampire, the story goes that they’re saved by an expert vampire hunter, by Christianity’s special forces, or perhaps even by a vampire-slaying vampire who hunts its own kind, but in my case, I was saved by a shabby old dude who happened to be passing by.
Thanks to him, I was somehow able to turn back into a human─fine again with sunlight, crosses, garlic, and such, but the effect, or rather, the aftereffect the experience had on me was a remarkable improvement in my physical abilities. Not my athletic abilities, mind you, but like my metabolism, in the way of recuperating. While I don’t know how I would’ve ended up if the box cutter had ripped my cheek apart, it takes less than thirty seconds to heal something like a simple staple stabbed through my flesh. At any rate, to begin with, wounds in the oral cavity tend to heal quickly for any organism.
“Oshino─a Mister Oshino?”
“Right. Mèmè Oshino.”
“Mèmè Oshino, huh─quite an adorable-sounding name, I have to say.”
“You shouldn’t get your hopes up on that count. He’s a weathered, middle-aged, thirty-something.”
“I see. But as a kid, he must have been quite a moé character.”
“Don’t look at flesh-and-blood people like that. And wait, do you even know what that word means?”
“It’s a part of common learning these days,” Senjogahara said blithely. “And you call characters like me tsundere, right? Cold and mean at first, but loving once you get to know me?”
“………”
With how cold she was, “tundra” suited her better.
But I digress.
About twenty minutes by bicycle from Naoetsu Private High School, which Hanekawa, Senjogahara, and I attended, stands a cram school slightly separated from any homes.
Stood.
Apparently, a few years ago, it took the full brunt of a big cram school chain setting up shop in front of the station, ran into financial troubles, and went out of business. By the time I learned of the four-story building’s existence, though, it was an abandoned ruin through and through, so all this is second-hand info.
Danger.
Private Property.
No Trespassing.
Despite a plethora of such signs and the Safety First fence surrounding it, access is as good as unrestricted thanks to all the gaps.
In these ruins─lives Oshino.
He’s taken up residence, without permission.
For an entire month now, starting during spring break.
“God, my bottom hurts. It’s numb. And my skirt got wrinkled,” Senjogahara said.
“Not my fault.”
“Stop trying to talk your way out of this, or I’ll lop it off.”
“Which body part?!”
“This is my first time riding on a bicycle with someone else. Can’t you be a little more generous?”
Wasn’t generosity hostile behavior for her?
Everything this girl said and did was beyond the pale.
“So, how exactly might I have tried?” I asked.
“Well, as a small suggestion, couldn’t you have given me your bag to use as a cushion?”
“Do you not give a crap about anyone other than yourself?”
“Please, don’t use such rude language with me. I said it was only a small suggestion.”
How did repeating that make it any better?
It was most questionable.
“You know, I bet even Marie Antoinette was a little more modest and humble than you,” I said.
“She’s something like my disciple,” Senjogahara replied.
“In what timeline?!”
“I wish you’d stop casually riffing off of everything I say. You’re acting like we’re buddies or something. Listening to you, a stranger might even think that we’re classmates.”
“We are classmates!”
How much was she going to disavow me?
That was just too cold.
“Jeez…” I lamented. “I guess dealing with you requires an unbelievable amount of patience.”
“Araragi. The way you put that, it almost sounds like I’m the one who’s hard to get along with, not you.”
That’s exactly what I wanted to say.
“Actually, where’s your own bag?” I asked her. “You’re empty-handed. Do you not carry one?” In fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing Senjogahara carrying anything with her.
“I have all my textbooks stored inside my head. So I just leave them in my school locker. If I hide all my stationery around my body, there’s no need for a bag. And in my case, gym clothes are out.”
“Ah, I see.”
“If both of my hands aren’t free, it’s harder to fight when the time comes.”
“……”
Her entire body was a weapon.
She was a human weapon.
“The only issue I have is with hygiene products because it bothers me to keep them at school. With no friends, I can’t borrow them from anyone, either.”
“…You’re being awfully open about this, you know.”
“Why not? Menses is Latin for month. It’s a natural phenomenon, nothing to be embarrassed of. I’d say it’s more indecent to be furtive about it.”
I wasn’t so sure about not being at least a little furtive.
No, it was a matter of personal choice.
Not my place to say.
Maybe what I ought to be making a note of instead was her even more open admission─that she didn’t have any friends.
“Oh, that’s right,” I said, turning to face her after reaching an “entrance.”
Though it was all the same to me, I’d searched for a particularly large one because, to judge from her earlier comment about her skirt, Senjogahara, being a girl after all, might not want her uniform to fray.
“Let me hold on to your stationery or whatever.”
“Huh?”
“Take it out. I’ll hold on to it.”
“Huh? Huh?”
From her expression, you might think that I’d made an outrageous demand. It seemed to ask if something was wrong with my head.
“Oshino is, well, he’s a weird dude, but he did technically save my life─”
Not only that.
He’d saved Hanekawa’s, too.
“─and I can’t have the man who did face a dangerous person. So I’ll hold on to your stationery.”
“You only tell me after we’ve come this far?” Senjogahara glared at me. “It seems I’ve stepped into a trap.”
“……”
Nah, that was way overboard.
But Senjogahara struggled silently with the matter for a while. She scowled at me now and then or stared at a point by her feet.
I wondered if she was going to turn around and leave, but at last, like someone prepared for the worst, she said, “Understood. Take them.”
Then, taking out a myriad of stationery from across her body like it was some magic show, she began handing them to me. What I’d seen earlier on the landing was only the tip of her badness and madness. You could’ve told me her pockets stretched into the fourth dimension; it could’ve been twenty-second-century science. I’d told her I’d hold on to it, but she was producing so much materiel I was starting to doubt if my bag was up to it.
…Someone like her strolling around in public unrestricted surely amounted to negligence on the part of the authorities…
“Don’t get me wrong,” Senjogahara warned after she’d finished giving everything to me. “It’s not like I’m letting my guard down around you.”
“You might as well…”
“If you’re trying to get back at me for stabbing you with a staple by tricking me into entering these desolate ruins, you’ll be making the wrong party pay.”
“…”
No, as far as which party, I would be right on.
“Understand?” she said. “I have five thousand of my rowdiest pals ready to attack your family if they don’t hear from me at least once every minute.”
“It’s fine… Stop worrying.”
“You mean you won’t even need a whole minute?!”
“I am not that boxer.”
And hold on. She didn’t think twice about targeting my family.
I couldn’t believe her.
On top of that, five thousand pals? What a lie.
A bold lie for someone who had no friends.
“Say, I hear your two little sisters are still in middle school.”
“………”
She knew my family’s makeup.
She might’ve lied, but she wasn’t joking.
In any case, displaying a modicum of my “immortality” hadn’t made her trust me one bit. Oshino always said that relationships of trust were important in these things, and my current situation wasn’t a good one from that perspective.
But what can you do.
From here, the problem was Senjogahara’s alone.
I was merely a guide.
We passed through a tear in the chain-link fence onto the grounds, and into the building. It was still evening, but it was fairly dark inside. There was a lot of clutter on the floor after days and months of neglect, and you could trip on something if you weren’t careful.
That’s when I realized.
An empty can lying around was nothing more than an empty can to me, but it had ten times the mass for Senjogahara.
Relatively speaking, that was the case.
It wasn’t like in old comics where you spoke of “ten times the gravity” or “a tenth of the gravity” and left it there. The simple take that “lighter equals more athletic” didn’t work. Worse, it was this dark, in a place she didn’t know. Maybe Senjogahara couldn’t be blamed for parading a wild animal’s level of caution.
Even if she were ten times faster.
She’d only be a tenth as strong.
Her reluctance to surrender her stationery also began to make sense in that regard.
And─why she didn’t carry a bag.
Why she couldn’t carry one, either.
“…This way.”
Clasping Senjogahara’s wrist, I led her forward from the entrance where she’d been standing uncertainly. She was taken aback because I was a bit sudden, but while she gave me a “What?” she followed without resisting.
“Don’t expect any thanks,” she said.
“I know.”
“In fact, you should be thanking me.”
“I don’t understand?!”
“I put that stapler around your mouth so that it’d hit the inside of your cheek, not the outside. I didn’t want to leave a visible wound.”
“……”
I couldn’t hear that as anything other than an abuser’s “It’ll show on the face, so punch in the belly” thinking.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if it had penetrated,” I pointed out.
“I judged that you’d quite likely be fine, going by how thick-skinned your face looks.”
“If you’re trying to comfort me, it’s not working. And ‘quite likely’?”
“My intuition is right about a tenth of the time.”
“That’s all?!”
“Well─” Senjogahara paused before continuing, “it was all wasted consideration in the end.”
“…Seems that way.”
“If I said that immortality seems convenient, would you feel hurt?” she followed up with a question.
I answered, “Not so much, now.”
Not so much─now.
But during spring break?
If someone had said that to me then─the words may have killed me. May have dealt a fatal wound.