Dramaturgy.
A massive man over seven feet tall.
A dual wielder of wavy greatswords, apparently known as flamberges.
A mountain of a man─a ball of pure muscle.
The hairband he wore to hold back his hair stood out, too.
And─he was a vampire hunter who had taken Kissshot's right leg from
her.
After this and that─though to be honest, only Oshino knew what this
and that were, and I had no idea why things turned out as they did─I was
facing him first.
"Phew..." I sighed, slumping my shoulders, a little hunched over as I
walked around the town at night once again.
The date was March 31st. The last day of the month.
If I took too long, midnight would come and it would be April Fool's
Day... I needed to be careful. Don't get me wrong, I was already about to be
in my last year of high school, so it's not as if I had any particular feelings
about April Fool's Day. It was simply a matter of my mood.
While I have no feelings about April Fool's Day in particular, I don't
like days that are like special events.
"Dramaturgy is a vampire."
I'd just been told that.
Moments before I was going to leave, in that second-floor classroom,
Kissshot gave me another lecture about Dramaturgy.
This bit was new to me, though.
"V-Vampire?"
So naturally, I was surprised.
"He's─a vampire?"
"...Could ye not tell by the sight of him? Or are there humans who boast
his frame? I've never heard tell of any in my five hundred years."
"..."
Well, she was right. He was more than just tall or muscled, he was on a
different level. Still, did she have to look at me like I was an idiot?
"But why would a vampire be a vampire hunter? That doesn't make
sense."
"Vampires who slay their own kind are not particularly uncommon. An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a vampire for a vampire, eh?"
"Wouldn't that make him a traitor, though?"
"We've no such concept," Kissshot said.
Even though Dramaturgy had, in fact, stolen her right leg from her, I
didn't catch any traces of resentment in her voice.
"Or do ye mean to say that humans do not kill one another?"
"..."
"Listen, as far as I know, no species of animal exists that does not kill its
own kind. No, even among plants, trees rob one another of nutrients."
Though strictly speaking, she added, vampires are not living beings.
What a fine detail to point out.
"Even among plants, huh? Anyway, I get it...but you do need to tell me
those kinds of things."
"Hmm. I suppose so. In my weakened state and in this form, both my
thought and memory must be slightly impaired."
"So, what should I do?"
"Oh, nothing special. Merely have a firm grasp of the characteristics of a
vampire. And I've already taught thee, have I not?"
Advice.
Though her offhand remark hardly merited that name.
"I doubt Dramaturgy would use the tactic, given his position, but do be
careful not to let him suck thy blood. Vampires who have their blood sucked
by another vampire will see their very existence wrung dry."
That was all she said.
...For some reason, Kissshot's attitude ever since I woke up made it
almost seem like she thought highly of me.
Like I would win anyway.
Like I just needed to hurry off and fetch her limbs.
Like I ought to, ye imbecile, get off my butt already.
Maybe it was this high estimation of me that kept her from scolding me
to any great degree even when I failed. But while I was glad of her high
estimation, I couldn't help but feel that she was overestimating me.
Well, the fact was that she saw me as her thrall and servant. She sang
her own praises as a legend and the strongest, so she must have conferred that
valuation on me as well.
Still, you know?
"..."
I walked forward slowly, stopping and starting intermittently, reading a
book.
Its title: Aikido from Step One!
It was a martial arts training manual.
"Hmm..."
The first place I'd headed after leaving the abandoned cram school was
the one major bookstore in town. The very same bookstore I went to before
meeting Kissshot below that street lamp. I was on my second attempt, and
possibly what you could call my first serious one, so I'd been expecting more
constructive advice from Kissshot. Since I didn't have that to rely on, I
needed to see to the matter myself.
And that is why I had the book.
By the way, buying a martial arts training manual on its own was
embarrassing, so along with it I purchased a guide on how to play baseball
and a book of lists of suggested classical music.
Though...
What did it mean that I was able to buy dirty magazines on their own
while I couldn't overcome my shyness about buying such a manual on its
own?
Thinking about that, I read as I walked─and soon, I had scanned through
all of its pages.
Hmph.
At nighttime, it was convenient having eyes that could see in the dark...
but what I was doing seemed far too much like a stopgap solution.
It wasn't clicking at all.
But then, I was reminded that the older of my two little sisters practiced
a martial art.
Was it karate?
Right, while I may have had zero experience in real fights, if I counted
scuffles with my sister, then I was quite seasoned... She didn't really know
how to hold back.
But then, I realized what I was thinking and chuckled bitterly. I was
about to fight a vampire, of all things. And not only that, it was a duel with a
vampire-slaying vampire, and I was trying to learn from some last-minute
cramming and fights with my little sister. I was being absolutely ridiculous.
Sheesh.
I really couldn't act serious, could I?
I was just a devil-may-care kind of guy when it came down to it. When
exactly had I given up on living an honest life? And just then─
"Is that you, Araragi?"
I heard a voice from behind me. I turned around─and saw Tsubasa
Hanekawa there.
She was wearing her school uniform, even though it was spring break.
She looked the exact same as she did when school was in session, down to
her glasses and braided hair.
"Oh─Ha-Hanekawa."
Wh-Why was she here?
There wasn't anything special about the location. It was just a point
along the shortest route between the bookstore and the "duel site" Oshino had
decided on.
A regular residential area, like the crossroads where I'd been attacked by
the three.
Huhhh? Did Hanekawa live around here?
Don't tell me she picked up on the trigger word "honest" running
through my head and was here to follow up? Was she that aggressive? Well,
that couldn't be it, could it.
Naturally─I had begun staring at Hanekawa.
"Hmm?" She tilted her head, then suddenly held down the front of her
skirt with both hands. "Oh, no. I'm not giving you a look today."
"..."
This woman...
She delivers a line like that with a straight face?
So adorable, dammit!
"Wh-Wh-Wh-What do you m-m-mean m-mean m-mean mean b-b-b-by
th-th-that?"
I tried to play it off coolly, but instead I sounded like I was trying to rap.
My voice was cracking. The reaction of someone who knew damn well.
"Hmm? So you forgot what happened?" Hanekawa said in wonderment,
pouting her lips.
Forgot? Me, forget?
If anything, I'd expected Hanekawa to forget about our encounter that
day soon afterwards.
"Even after you saw my panties."
"..."
"After staring right at them."
She remembered. Remembered it devastatingly well.
"Panties? Oh, you mean those items of clothing used in this country for
protection against the cold, worn below the torso?"
"Don't act like you're from a different culture."
"...N-No! This is a misunderstanding, it's all a misunderstanding! I only
saw the lining of your skirt! That was the only thing I was paying attention
to, the lining of your skirt!"
"That's pretty perverted in its own way," she laughed at me.
She laughed at me...
No, that wasn't the issue here.
"What are you doing here, Hanekawa?"
"Hmm? Going for a walk? I guess?"
"What, at this hour?"
The time was nine at night. Right on the borderline of when it was and
wasn't normal for─putting aside people like me─a serious student like
Hanekawa to be out. No?
"I should ask you the same thing, Araragi. Why are you out here at this
hour alone trekking like the Magnificent Seven?"
"How do I even trek like the Magnificent Seven all alone?"
"Hmm? What're you reading, Araragi? Is that a book about baseball?"
"Um."
I started by putting my manual away.
I doubted she'd be able to figure out that I'd become a vampire just from
my behavior─but since vampires don't show in mirrors (so they say), I
honestly couldn't tell how I was coming across at that moment.
Still, I had to hide what needed to be hidden.
First, my canines. I would be fine as long as I didn't open my mouth too
wide as I spoke...I bet?
Apart from that─the wound on my neck?
The wound from when Kissshot bit me─but even if Hanekawa spotted
it, I would be able to explain it away.
As far as changes outside of my body, being a vampire I didn't have a
shadow─but as long as I didn't walk too close to a street lamp, she probably
wouldn't notice.
What concerned me more than anything was how my clothes smelled.
Being a vampire, I didn't worry about my body odor in the least, but nor did I
have a change of clothes or access to a bath in that abandoned cram school.
I really needed to just go and buy a change of clothes...
I wanted to take a bath, too, just because.
But I basically wanted to allot whatever precious money I had in my
wallet to the war effort... The phone charger cost more than I expected, and
after buying the books, I was essentially out of spending money. Maybe I
really needed to go by home at some point?
"What, is that book something you don't want me seeing? Hey, could it
be something dirty?"
"Don't be stupid. I've never even touched printed matter as crass as that.
I wouldn't want to sully my soul."
It was a blatant lie, but Hanekawa let me off the hook at that─cool
person that she was.
"Well, yep, that's about it."
I didn't know myself what I was yepping or what was about it, but I was
focused on cutting the conversation short and splitting─partly because I had
to hurry ahead after taking longer than I'd hoped to read my book.
But there was also a more concrete fear I had.
Wasn't there a chance that I'd get her caught up in this?
I was a vampire, after all.
And so was the man I was about to meet.
There was no room for a regular person─Hanekawa─in that.
No matter how much of a model student or a class president, Hanekawa
was a regular person.
"Hmm? Hold on. You're such a fast walker, Araragi. It's not every day
we run into each other, we should take the chance to talk some more."
While I thought I had managed to briskly turn my back to her and walk
off, Hanekawa caught up to me.
Just like she'd done that day.
"Talk...about what?"
"Hmm? Right─okay, here goes. Araragi, what did you study today?"
"..."
What kinda small talk was that?
I hadn't studied anything, duh.
Hadn't I told her? I wasn't the kind to study on my own during spring
break.
Besides, since becoming a vampire my days and nights had completely
reversed themselves, and in my mind "today" had just started.
"I focused mostly on math," she said.
"M-Math, huh..."
Ever since I started high school and stopped caring, I'd failed a test in
nearly every subject at least once.
But math was an exception.
It was thanks to my ability to score well on math tests that I was able to
cling on to my life as a student at a selective private school. Even in the
teachers' lounge, you could find people who, fortunately, equated being good
at math with being smart.
That said, did I have the confidence to take Hanekawa on about math
right then? The answer was an emphatic no.
I wouldn't stand a chance.
After all, if the rumors were true, Hanekawa knew her times tables up to
five hundred.
Five. Hundred.
In other words, even a dizzying product like 456 times 321 was
something she could supply without thinking.
Well, people who use abacuses can apparently do even more impressive
things─but ultimately, no matter how difficult, math came down to
multiplication and division. If you bypassed the hassle of multiplying and
dividing, you spent significantly less time per question.
I was good at math precisely because it wasn't a subject that benefited
from a lot of memorization, but even math fell under that category for
Hanekawa.
Maybe she was far more of a monster than any vampire.
"U-Unfortunately, all I studied today was Spanish."
"Spanish? ...Hunh," Hanekawa said with a surprised expression.
Did that mean she believed me? I hadn't actually expected her to.
"Too bad, I don't know much Spanish."
"Th-That really is too bad."
"Yeah. Just enough for basic conversations."
"..."
So she could handle basic conversations...
"Spasibo!" I yelled involuntarily.
"...'Spasibo' is Russian," Hanekawa shot back. "Also, it doesn't have
any connotation of 'wonderful' if you wanna know."
"..."
I wasn't expecting to be hit with that kind of a correction.
Or rather─way to go, Hanekawa, you even guessed I'd used the Russian
word thinking it meant "wonderful"...
"You need to remember what words mean, Araragi."
"Y-Yeah... You really do know everything, don't you?"
"Not everything. I just know what I know."
"Ah."
Letting slip words pregnant with meaning as if it were the most natural
thing, eh?
She wasn't a class president among class presidents for nothing.
...When I stopped to think about it, we were neither second years nor
third years during spring break, so Hanekawa wasn't really a "class
president"...but why split hairs.
She felt like a class president.
"Anyway, who cares what I studied," I said. "Every day is a new lesson
for all of us."
"Hm? That's a pretty good one."
"So let's think about something more constructive. Like how to make
society a better place."
"You're right," Hanekawa said, taking my makeshift excuse seriously.
"Okay, what might we do to get rid of bullying?"
"..."
Like I'd know!
This was supposed to be small talk─spare me the heavy stuff!
She'd toss that at me without any sort of advance prep?!
"I know it's heavy, heavy stuff, but Araragi, we've got to start
somewhere. Like they say, Lourdes wasn't built in a day."
"You mean Rome wasn't─"
Wait...didn't "lourdes" also mean "heavy" in French?
A clever one, wasn't she? She ad-libbed that?
"...Um, for starters, placing security cameras throughout a school
should get rid of outright bullying at least?"
It wouldn't address the cause, but it'd surely wipe out the effect.
"Hmm. It's not bad as an idea, but there's still the issue of privacy. What
about the locker rooms?"
"Guh."
She'd pointed out a major flaw in my plan.
People do get bullied in locker rooms. In fact, private spaces pose the
highest risk.
"...Okay, I got it. As the person who came up with the idea, I'll take
responsibility for checking the videos of the girls' locker room."
"What's 'okay' about that?"
Miss Hanekawa shook her head in earnest with a teacherly expression.
I'd misspoken big time.
"And anyway, I wasn't really talking about the girls' locker room, was
I?"
"Yikes!"
I panicked. Hanekawa continued to look at me, decidedly unimpressed.
"You'd peep, Araragi?"
"No, wait, I got it! I'll let you check the videos of the boys' lock-er
room, so just pretend that I never said that!"
"No, thank you!"
...Wait.
That wasn't what was important here. I had to hurry up and get away
from Hanekawa─I couldn't stand Dramaturgy up. And I couldn't get her
involved.
"Hey, Hanekawa... Why don't you head home already? I was about to
do the same, anyway."
"Hmm? Well, you don't have to tell me. That was my plan to begin
with."
"Do you live around here?"
"Nope. I was on a walk and ended up here."
"...You shouldn't wander around at night," I said. "You might run into a
vampire, you know?"
It was meant as a self-deprecating, ironic remark, but it wounded me far
more than I was ready for. I didn't expect my own words to be so cutting, but
on top of that─
"Actually, I was kind of hoping I would," Hanekawa said, almost
playfully, as I thought that. "I guess it's only a rumor─but I was thinking I
just might get to meet a vampire."
"Why?" I couldn't help but ask. "Why would you want to meet a damn
vampire?"
"Oh, I don't have anything particular in mind. I'm at that age where you
hanker after something out of the ordinary, that's all. I thought I'd meet a
vampire, then have a little chat─"
"Bullshit!"
And like that, without even meaning to─I yelled at her.
Oops, I thought. I messed up.
"Huh... Hmm?" With a confused, vague smile on her face, Hanekawa
hurried to say, "S-Sorry. I-It seems like I touched a nerve there."
"..."
It would have been easy to say, Not at all.
It probably would have been easy. But─I didn't.
Honestly, I was surprised; it wasn't Hanekawa who was confused, but
me.
I'd thought I'd come to accept my situation and was keeping my cool as
I dealt with it.
"It" being the fact that I'd become a vampire.
The fact that I was out to collect Kissshot's limbs.
I could become human again if I did that.
It was simple to understand, and simple to accept. Or so I'd thought.
No part of me regretted saving Kissshot from the verge of death─even in
spite of my predicament, I could confidently say so.
Yet─a few little words from Hanekawa had rattled me.
When was the last time I'd yelled at someone outside of my family?
Oh, boy...
So my intensity as a human was still at an all-time low.
Well─I wasn't even human anymore.
And yet. Or rather, that was why.
Precisely why.
"...No," I shook my head.
Instead of apologizing back to her, I swallowed my words.
"You're the one who gets on my nerve," I continued instead.
"What?"
"You piss me off. I'm sick and tired of you."
As Hanekawa stood there, still with her vague smile as if she hadn't
taken my meaning, I started hurling at her the most lacerating words I could
think of.
It felt like abusing a kitten. In other words, it couldn't have felt worse.
But I had to say them.
"I'm alone because I want to be alone. Stop following me."
"Wait, A-Araragi? Why are you saying these things all of a sudden?
Weren't we having fun talking until just a second ago?"
"It wasn't fun for me at all," I said, doing my best to strangle my
emotions. "I was pretending."
"That's─"
"I was only after your fortune."
"M-My family isn't that rich, you know?!"
Ack. I hadn't meant to crack a joke.
I regrouped.
"...I don't know if this is some way for you to get good letters of
recommendation, but what's a model student like you doing talking to a
washout like me? You might enjoy whatever feelings of superiority you get
from this, but I can't bear you standing there and feeling sorry for me."
"..."
Hanekawa's face went blank. But I couldn't falter. I had to keep going.
I took my phone out of my pocket and pointed it at Hanekawa. "And
don't mess with people's phones without their permission."
I made sure she could see my phone as I deleted Tsubasa Hanekawa's
name, number, and email address.
"...So get out of my face."
Sst.
Hanekawa closed her eyes after I said that to her.
I wondered if she was going to cry. I hadn't made a girl cry since
elementary school.
That's what I thought.
But rather than cry, she opened her eyes and smiled─though it was a
weak smile.
Even at this stage?
"All right," she said. "Sorry you had to say all of that to make me go
away."
Then, Hanekawa turned her back to me and ran off, leaving me behind.
Sorry?
Did she just apologize there at the end? After everything I'd said to her?
Honestly, I had managed to blacken my own mood saying all those
things─how was she able to smile at me like that?
...It was obvious why.
She wasn't like me. She was a really cool person.
I had to quickly part ways with Hanekawa before going to the agreed-
upon location─I couldn't allow a regular person like her to get involved.
That, of course, had been going through my head.
But far more than that, it seemed like I had vented my anger on her.
Armed with a host of justifications, I'd taken things out on her.
She wanted to meet a vampire.
I had vented my anger on her for innocently saying so, when it was clear
she didn't mean ill.
Maybe I was actually regretting it? Helping Kissshot?
Maybe I actually hated it? Having to get back Kissshot's limbs? Having
to endanger my own person to do it?
And there was one more thing─which truly scared me.
Did I...
Did I really want to return to being human?
I found myself in a living hell if I went out in the sun.
There were lots of other restrictions, too.
But─was I sure that I didn't long to be a vampire, an existence greater
than any human, closing my eyes to those details?
In the end.
I had to be feeling nervous.
In that case, it was good that I hadn't simply parted ways with
Hanekawa─it was good that I'd cut ties with her.
No, the two of us had probably yet to meet─
We simply happened to pass by, this time too.
And that's why.
That's why it was probably fortunate that we'd parted ways before any
ties could form between us.
Was I lucky or what?
"Fine," I muttered. I took my phone, still in my hand, and put it back in
my pocket. "That must have done something─to up my intensity as a
human."
I was stronger─which meant that my battle with Dramaturgy, my
mission to return Kissshot's right leg to her─would surely go off without a
hitch.
Right now, that was what I needed to do most.
My heart aching was not a problem.
My heart aching was not the issue.
I stepped forward.
It'd taken me more time than I'd expected, but there still seemed to be
no risk of being late─to begin with, my destination wasn't far from the
bookstore.
The location of my battle with Dramaturgy, as specified by Oshino, was
a spot I knew well.
The athletic field of Naoetsu Private High School.