The Food Chain
Whenever the people of the branch office got together, a certain story made the rounds now and then. Lupin might be handy at cracking skulls, but she was, surprisingly enough, a docile and good-natured young lady.
Had Vatslava heard it—she who had been chasing after Lupin for a month—a snort would have escaped her on its own.
Docile?
That face existed only in front of Tasili. How fussy Lupin was, how thoroughly she did as she pleased, was something only a person who had lived through it could know. A stray cat that could never be tamed, if one had to put a name to it.
The certificate of commendation in Vatslava's arms was never going to find its owner. Lupin looked as though she had lost every last scrap of interest in the case, so Vatslava found the thing a new one: Administrator Tasili.
"Ah. For the Administrator. Understood. I'll hold on to it."
She only hoped he would be satisfied with his disciple's accomplishment. Once the handoff to the receptionist was done, Vatslava glanced around.
The stray-cat substitution method remained undefeated. In the space of those few hours, Lupin had vanished from the branch office.
She went out even in that state?
A new entry went into Vatslava's notebook.
"Lupin's gone again already."
"She'll be on the hill behind the Association. Let's go together."
Ordinary people settled somewhere, whatever the somewhere was. Adventurers at the Association branch, office workers at their workplaces, knights with the knight order.... Lupin, though, was an adventurer in name only, closer to a drifter or a vagabond, and she could not sit still at the Association for anything.
Why in the world did she sleep outside? Did she enjoy the rain and the wind? Perhaps she really was a stray cat who had lucked into becoming a person.
And that was not the end of it. There was another piece of evidence shoring up the Lupin-is-a-stray-cat theory—a preference wired straight into an extreme survival instinct. Once, Vatslava had served her a pale olive cocktail, and Lupin had declared that it tasted something like a mimic's gastric fluid. Whether a mimic had burned her before or not, she never touched a similar drink again afterward. Try to clear up the misunderstanding and she grew wary the moment you drew near, then fled. Lure her with a cocktail and she drank the cocktail and nothing else, and vanished. For a while Vatslava's heart had dropped clean out of her, terrified she was about to be abandoned.
"It's done."
Cocktail sloshing in one hand, Vatslava climbed the hill with great care. Lupin must have spread some unseen domain or other, because the instant she caught the smell of liquor she popped out of a tree like a ghost. She scurried over, and then she only stared, wordless. The look said it plainly enough: you brought that cocktail to give it to me, didn't you?
If this was not a stray cat, then what was it? Vatslava swallowed a laugh.
"What are you doing? You brought it to give to me, didn't you?"
Lupin was not without her reasons for rushing her. Grab a pigeon, let it go. Burn through all her life force calling pigeons, collapse alongside the Jade of Spontaneous Life, and sleep like the dead. Open her eyes and call the pigeons again. Catch one. Hurl it.... She had been repeating a round of please-hold-me therapy until her mind was half gone, so how could a drink not have been calling her? She had been about ready to sprint down to the Association for a bottle of hard liquor when Vatslava arrived to offer up a cocktail, and she had come to receive it with gratitude.
"That's right. This is the last cocktail I can learn here."
"Ah. Already the last one?"
"I had a feeling you might up and leave again any moment. I studied as hard as I could. Only, this cocktail is so finicky to make that it took a little longer."
Ryabolsk Sunrise. Modeled on the morning sun caught in a five-hundred-year-old great tree east of the city, the drink was famous for a first taste that burned like fire, and then for four different sweetnesses wrapping the mouth one after another.
Lupin poked out only the tip of her tongue and tasted the top.
"No way. This is straight-up spicy rice-cake sauce. Did somebody invent MSG while I wasn't looking...?"
A moment later she dumped the remaining layers into her mouth without ceremony.
"And the bottom's a juice pop."
How was something like this allowed to exist as a cocktail? She muttered and chattered to herself for a good long while, then shot a thumb into the air. It tasted like gelatinous spicy rice cakes packed for astronauts—not a flavor she would want often. Even so, she was thoroughly satisfied.
The mood had gone soft. Lupin was in a fine humor, and Vatslava, starved for attention, was happy too.
"D-did I... was I helpful?"
"Yeah. Whoa. My head just snapped wide awake, just like that."
Wide awake, was she? Then she had better finish what she had been doing. Lupin passed Vatslava the empty glass and promptly planted herself on the ground.
"Hoo.... Time to finish the adaptation training."
Tack!
With a crisp sound, space split open before Lupin's hand. The rippling cross-section wore a higher-dimensional, tangled shape that human eyes could not properly take in, and pigeons poured out of it. They took to the air and seemed about to scatter in every direction, then whirled and came down one after another. Cooing, rolling, setting their feathers to rights—there looked to be a hundred of them, at a rough count.
"Hup. Hup! Huaap! Hup!"
Seated in the middle of them, Lupin caught pigeon after pigeon and flung them back into the sky. Watching it, déjà vu of the trafficking ring's safe house crept through Vatslava's mind. Yegor, face gone stiff with shock, could not hold himself back and asked first.
"...Lupin. Have you ever attacked people with these pigeons?"
The case was closed, and the pigeons had been revealed as something the Shrine Maiden had summoned. Even so, one question had never been put to rest. Why had the feathers seen when the trafficking ring was slaughtered been the same kind as the feathers of the pigeons Shrine Maiden Klein called forth? Why had pigeons taken flight from the place they had told Lupin about? Lupin's answer cleared it in a single stroke.
"If these guys see a bad person, they attack first even without an order. Why?"
Yegor, who had been rubbing the bridge of his nose, unfolded a map and tapped in red the places where the forty murdered felons had been found. A dozen or so of them were places Lupin knew as well.
"Did you ever send pigeons to these spots?"
"I didn't pick them and send them.... The kids went on their own, didn't they?"
"Every pigeon that flew to these places killed a felon."
"Huh?"
What was that supposed to mean? Lupin knit her brow, plainly not following, and Yegor glanced around before stuffing the open map back into his bag.
"Klein said she was the one who did it, so everyone got neatly taken in. Vatslava's deduction was the accurate one, then."
"It's just... the same feathers we found with the trafficking ring kept turning up at the other sites, too...."
"So the great detective was a phantom that could never have existed."
"That's how it turned out."
"We're burying the case like this."
As if they had planned it, Yegor and Vatslava tore the great-detective badges from their chests and hurled them toward the woods. Yegor looked at Lupin, who was still utterly lost, and raised a thumb.
"Well done."
"No. You need to actually explain what happened...."
"You righteously took care of the mafia and the felons. Well done."
And with that, the two of them went down the hill. Left alone, Lupin stared at the white pigeon in her grip and muttered.
"....So there never were any cult pigeons? Did you guys really do it?"
No answer came back. All that had been added was one more reason to rank up Bird Affinity.
Lupin sent the pigeon resting on her neatly gathered palms flying high into the sky. With a furious flutter it climbed, circled overhead, and then melted cleanly into the blue and was gone.
Three days to settle the pigeon trauma. Bird Affinity had hit Grade X along the way. Until now she had not been able to speak with the pigeons she summoned, which made the results of today's experiment—the first since reaching Grade X—matter a great deal.
"All right. Let's try it."
Lupin crushed the nuts she had brought, ground them fine, and scattered them over the ground. The birds wheeling nearby hesitated, then came in to peck and cheep at the pieces. The variety was something else: little ones like sparrows, big ones like crows, and even raptors, drawn by the flock itself.
"You there! And just whose 'safe' is this supposed to be!"
Lupin seized the raptor perched on her shoulder and met its eyes. Yellow eyes bright, the bird asked its question.
"Why, though~?"
She could hear the birds.
"No slaughter today. Eat your nuts and behave."
The raptor blinked. "I can only eat meat, though~."
Then save the slaughter for later.
The raptor dipped its head. "Okaaay."
Released skyward, it flapped off and settled in a high tree, plainly waiting on a chance. An artificial peace, established entirely by Lupin.
"Now if only our ugly little pigeon brat would talk, we'd be set."
Please, please don't let it be a two-step translation of the spirit tongue. Foreign languages had been misery enough back when she was job-hunting. Lupin prayed, and reached out.
Pigeon Magic changed the number of pigeons it summoned, or the time they lasted, according to the life force spent. She had left it alone until now out of sheer laziness, but today was for experiments: the duration of a hundred birds, loaded into one.
Tack.
A single pigeon popped out of a small, card-shaped cross-section. It circled once, then landed on the arm Lupin had lifted like a perch. A pigeon no different from any other.
"Hello? What's your name? By any chance, did you all kill criminals I never even told you to?"
Lupin asked politely, and the pigeon answered. The voice was so elegant, so exalted, that it called to mind none other than a queen.
"A rude and mannerless wretch, through and through. You bear a star upon your back, and that nose of yours sits so high it means to pierce the clouds and keep on rising."
Nothing about the way it spoke suggested it meant to hold a conversation. A world apart from the raptor, which had reacted adorably even after being grabbed without ceremony. So her Spirit Affinity really had been too low. But Lupin had never met any spirit but pigeons, and ranking the thing up on the spot was pie in the sky.
And the more she thought about it, the angrier she got. A little. Maybe. A summon talking back—to Lupin, once a modern gamer, that was utterly unacceptable. Gratitude toward a precious spirit for deigning to answer a summons was the basic rule of this world. Lupin, who had skipped the whole complicated process thanks to Big Sis Star, was thinking the exact opposite. As it happened, her grudge against pigeons had piled up dozens of times higher than anyone else's.
The quick hand she had drilled for three full days seized the lofty Pigeon Queen by the leg and slammed her into the dirt.
"Aaagh, you wretch! What is the meaning of this!"
"What's your name? Take two."
"Do you mean to make sport of me?!"
Like dredging a chicken in flour before the fry, Lupin rubbed head, back, and wings evenly across the ground. No dirt or soot stuck, but the white feathers fluffed into complete ruin. Ten polite questions changed nothing, and Lupin herself began, slowly, to warp.
"Your name is—"
"If you would ask another's name, first speak your own."
"In your next life, please be born a human and not a pigeon!!"
"You wretch! I shall curse you for all eternity!"
"This one's a rice ball too. That one's a rice ball too."
"You indulge in meaningless acts! When the time of the contract is spent, I return to the spirit realm regardless. Unless your life is infinite, you cannot subdue me by such means!"
Wow. Really.
Lupin fiddled with the Jade of Spontaneous Life hung at her waist.
"I can do this all day."
