Did You Think Before Digging the Trap?
Shhk.
Shhhk.
Lupin's sword danced toward the corpses lined up against the wall. It was no different from planting straw dummies and drilling forms. A horizontal cut, a vertical cut, a diagonal cut. This was the very foundation of the sword her master had taught her.
Lupin screamed, voice raw with rage, and hacked the bodies to pieces.
Anyone who had taught her would have been clutching their forehead. Lupin, however, was blameless. They were the ones who had swung those vile things first — though whether the things had been all that vile was debatable — and they were the ones who had launched a coordinated assault on both her mind and her eyes. Pure self-defense. A textbook first response. And when it came to sex crimes, man or woman, nothing worked better than no, don't, and die.
Her upper body dyed a furious crimson, Lupin stowed the Lightning Sword without so much as shaking it clean. Blood forced its way through the seams and ran down the scabbard. That she hadn't flicked it off the way she usually did said everything about the state she was in, which was also why the venting refused to stop. Scraps of flesh that had been rolling across the floor caught the toe of her shoe and went sailing. The blood they had been holding sprayed wide, and even the lower half of her that had stayed relatively clean turned just as red.
Only after she had scattered the bandit chief's corpse in every direction did Lupin come back to herself and mutter.
"How is it I run into this three times a year, without fail?"
Just when she thought she had forgotten, the same plot got her again. That made sixteen of these bastards already. It had only stayed that low because she had been walking roads humans didn't travel. Now that the Secret Chests were keeping her among people, the frequency was only going to climb.
So Lupin was going to have to catch on sooner or later. A captivating body did draw perverts in, true — but that pull was amplified all the further by her usual vacant face and thoughtless behavior. If she meant to cut nuisances like that down before they could get close, she was going to need a particular kind of power.
Even so, Lupin was the type who trusted people easily and, by the same token, wasn't especially shocked when they betrayed her, so incidents like this repeating didn't leave her with any internal damage. Get betrayed, and you simply paid it back in kind. What was the point of chewing on the pain alone? And just now, the damage hadn't come from a knife in the back at all. It had come from unpleasant audiovisual material.
"But what happens if I open a treasure chest here?"
Above all else, where a magical girl had a vial for injecting the power of happiness, Lupin had a chest for recharging dopamine. Freaks like that, you cut them and you were done. Stress, you opened a treasure chest and it came undone.
"O Treasure Chest, O Treasure Chest. Please grant me happy energy today, too."
Muttering nonsense under her breath, Lupin went down two floors and stepped into a space thick with a suspicious stench. From somewhere, she could have sworn she heard a guttural growl — a monster's.
And there it was. A very large, and very beautiful, treasure chest.
Lupin scampered over and let out a cry in front of the rectangular box that rose to about her waist.
"Mamma mia!"
It was easily big enough for three people to climb inside. Ominous symbols were studded all over it, the sort that looked one bad decision away from a corruption arc, and the fact that they made her want to laugh was purely a bonus. A pentagram with a skull set at every point, and two concentric circles ringing the outside. Truly, was this not the dark of all darkness? Lupin was struck by a perfectly unnecessary urge to wrap a black flame dragon around her right arm.
"Hiyah! Open wide!"
Fully prepared to massacre the bandit band if anything strange came leaping out, she flung the lid open without hesitation.
What even was all this.
The whole chest was packed with objects she couldn't identify. Most of them were sturdy glass bottles filled with purple liquid, and in the spaces without bottles, several things like black wing membranes lay tumbled together. The moment she took one in hand, a status window appeared.
The veils of the cult's shrine maidens are crafted from the wing membrane of a special magical beast.
(The next clue can be obtained from Shrine Maiden Parmenia.)
Drawing one step closer to the wing garment put Lupin in an unreasonably good mood.
"Looks kind of like a bat's wing."
It was simply astonishing that a shrine maiden's veil, translucent as it had been, was made from a black membrane like this. Lupin took one and threaded it through a ring on her harness, meaning to ask someone nearby what the thing was — or else bring it to a collector. Having forgotten the disaster of a few minutes ago so completely it might as well have been pitch-black, she shut the enormous lid with a satisfied look.
At the same time, her stomach growled. The most accurate belly-clock in the world.
"Hah. Already?"
Ten minutes to the meeting. She didn't know the roads, but there was no time to hesitate. A promise had to be kept. Get unlucky, and being five minutes late was enough to get someone killed.
The two of them stepped into the station three minutes ahead of the appointed time. The inspection ended the moment they lowered their hoods. Whether or not the posted guards were hunting Parmenia alone, the wanted notices were nothing but her face, every last one of them.
Watching the clock tower, Yegor spoke. The hands were creeping steadily toward the promised hour.
"Looks like she's going to be late."
Vatslava shook her head.
"No. She'll be here right on time. She always is."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because she's someone who always keeps her promises..."
Vatslava rubbed at her forehead as the business at the safe house came back to her whether she wanted it or not. How she had survived being hit with an ashtray that day was still a mystery. Lupin might have thrown it meaning not to kill, or Vatslava's skull might simply have been harder than it looked.
Tick.
The minute hand of the clock tower advanced another notch, and something went thump, stepping across the station roof. The guards' eyes followed the sound, then drifted back toward the city. It had been a light noise. A cat, most likely.
Vatslava, though, tracked it all the way, and when she saw the state of the person who landed on the platform she couldn't help but be aghast.
"Uh. Ah. Uh..."
"What's the matter?"
"Th-th-there."
Lupin, dyed a furious red, was coming toward them with blood dripping as she walked. She was even busy grinning like a fool, apparently with no idea what she looked like. Thank god the platform and the concourse were empty. If anyone had seen her, it would have been a chorus of screams on the spot.
Vatslava rushed over, tore off her own robe, and held it out.
"L-Lupin! Quick, this—!"
Whether she registered the feeling behind it or not, Lupin ignored her, walked straight past, and asked Yegor.
"What's with the fuss? Hey. Did you get a room?"
Yegor, robbed of words, pressed a hand to his forehead. The red-haired shrine maiden on the bounty posters plastered around the station and the condition of their returned companion were not so very different. No — if one were splitting hairs, Lupin was considerably worse. She looked like she had gone out, committed a massacre, and come back.
"...Put the robe on. Now."
"Why. Answer the question. Did you get a room or not."
Yegor, on the verge of barking at her to pull herself together, caught the presence of the guard captain turning their way.
Whump.
Caught completely off guard, Lupin took Yegor's foot and went tumbling backward. As she rolled, the blood stamped the floor in interesting shapes. Shoved a good distance off, she got up yelling.
"Hey! What's with all the kicking?!"
"From now on, you're Parmenia."
Lupin cocked her head. The guards had been acting strange earlier, too. Had the whole lot of them eaten something off today? But she had no time to object before Yegor raised his voice.
"You vile shrine maiden! How dare you impersonate my companion! And looking like that!!"
"Looking like what? What's wrong with how I— oh."
"Guards! This one is an impostor! It's Parmenia, no mistake!"
And so began Yegor's cover-your-ass performance, staged to keep Lupin from being hunted down over a needless misunderstanding. The hardest part had been whether she would understand the ad-lib. Fortunately, she seemed to catch on to something, and before the guards could come running she sprang up onto the clock tower. Yegor allowed himself a measure of relief, if only because she hadn't chosen to meet them head-on.
The guard captain, sprinting up with a full squad, demanded an answer.
"What's this commotion?"
Yegor pointed at the clock tower. There stood Lupin — no, Parmenia — dripping blood.
"That one tried to deceive us by impersonating my companion. It's Parmenia. No question."
"Wh-what?! Is your companion all right?! She hasn't been killed, has she...?!"
"Can't say. We'll go look for our companion, so I ask that you pursue that one!"
"Understood!"
Tweet. Tweet-tweet. Tweet!
The guard captain blew his whistle in the prescribed signal. The front rank of the squad, formed in two lines, dropped to a knee, and the entire squad leveled their rifles at Lupin.
"Parmenia! Thought you'd slip out of town disguised as someone else, did you? Not a chance! Get down from there this instant!"
Lupin was not ignorant of how suspicious it was to wander around lacquered in blood. She had even been mistaken for Parmenia a little while ago. So when Yegor's kick swept her legs out from under her, a curse had been rising to her lips — and the moment she grasped the truth, it turned into awe.
Holy shit. Are you a genius?
Just then, a train approached the station from far off. The last train of the day to stop at Viskogorsk.
Hearing its whistle, the guard captain grew anxious. If he failed to seize Parmenia quickly, she might take the passengers hostage. A standoff wouldn't produce many casualties, but kill even those few and a pay cut and a disciplinary suspension would come crashing down after them.
"Parmenia! I'll count to ten! Refuse the order, and we open fire!"
Lupin leapt from the clock tower and pattered across the platform roof, provoking the guards with a hand gesture understood in every nation on earth.
"We will shortly be arriving at this train's final stop — Viskogorsk. Viskokorsk!"
Aboard the sparsely filled train drawing into the station rode one passenger who could not have imagined any of this, not in her dreams. She had been nodding off; now she blearily opened her eyes and neatened the pink bangs that had slipped down over her face.
"So sleepy..."
A long ponytail, tied carelessly and left to hang. A white shirt. A pleated skirt. A woman who resembled Lupin, and yet felt just a little different. A shrine maiden of the cult, disguised as a doctor out on a house call — Parmenia.
