Anyway, Blame the Cult
"You want to be my slave that badly? Should I stretch it from a day to a whole month? Or shall we make it for life?"
Ekaterina nodded—and color rose in her cheeks before she could stop it. A chill prickled straight down Lupin's spine.
"What is wrong with this crazy bitch…."
Some people were a problem merely by being dealt with, and Ekaterina was precisely that sort. Without quite meaning to, Lupin understood how Klein felt, worn raw from managing the most dangerous madwoman alive, and she made up her mind. Whatever it took, she was going to void this duel. She was going to avoid getting entangled with this woman at all.
Somewhere in the Rostov Republic.
"Captain. You ought to come take a look."
A sentry who had been standing watch as usual came to fetch the guard captain. He had told them not to call unless it was serious, which meant the odds were high they had either found a major wanted criminal or something had gone wrong at the outpost. The captain ran for the post in a rush, took one look at the woman they had in custody, and startled.
"…Parmenia?"
She was the cult's Shrine Maiden who, not long ago in Viskogorsk, had kidnapped a guard captain, fled, murdered him with vicious cruelty, and vanished. But when they lifted the hood she had drawn low, her condition was so wretched it hardly bore comparison to before. Her cheeks were hollow, her bones stood out, and her eyes were sunken and unfocused.
"She's much thinner than she used to be, but I believe it's Parmenia. Her bag is full of medicine bottles of every kind. We asked, and she confirmed it herself."
"She admitted it? Well. I'll take her to the detention center for now."
"Yes, sir! I'll return to my post, then."
If a Shrine Maiden had resolved to turn herself in, there was no reason to refuse her. One of the policies handed down across the Imperial Alliance was precisely this: do not block the defection of cult members, Shrine Maidens above all. The more executive-level personnel—Shrine Maidens and the Black Dragon Corps alike—abandoned life in the cult and came over, the more they would work on the cult like a lethal poison. Of course, some of them infiltrated on purpose and caused incidents, so they were never brought to a base or to headquarters. The practice was to hold them a short while in detention until the Rounds or the Sub-Rounds arrived to take them away.
The captain's decision was perfectly sensible. It was also the start of the disaster. The Republic's Rounds were blinded by a private objective and in the middle of a duel.
"…Kh—?!"
A burning sensation bloomed at the nape of his neck as he dozed, having locked Parmenia behind iron bars. Something burrowed into the skin and tore the muscle apart. Blood ran from the wound, then was sucked out as if a hose hooked to a pump had been driven into him.
"Ghk. Haaah—"
Strangely, the pain didn't feel like much. It was like the instant a mosquito bites—you can't quite register the fact of it while it's happening. In less than a few minutes the captain folded, a drained white corpse.
All the while Parmenia was fondling her chest and hips, which had recovered a little of their fullness.
"I need more blood……."
Desperate to grow stronger, she had mixed drug after drug and poured them into herself without restraint—and without knowing it, she had evolved into a new form of life. Neither human nor demonkin. A new demi-human race had been born: the vampire.
Word that a human-shaped monster draining people's blood had struck a remote city in the north raced by telegraph straight to the Adventurers' Association, where the duel trial was underway. An aide hurried up and whispered to Dmitri, seated in the judge's chair at the highest point along the rim of the arena, which had been thrown together from stacked stage platforms.
"…What? The real Parmenia has appeared?"
"Yes. She's sucked the blood out of everyone she's touched and left them as white corpses."
"Good God! They haven't misidentified her, have they!"
"No, sir. There are already more than a hundred witnesses."
In other words, Lupin had been swept up in an absurd misunderstanding. Had the resemblance truly been nothing but a resemblance? Then why had she been carrying Parmenia's signature lethal poisons? Unable to swallow the question, Dmitri blew a long, sharp blast on the whistle he carried. He was declaring the trial temporarily suspended.
Ekaterina, sensing something ominous, jerked with nerves.
"What. What is it?!"
Dmitri strode forward until he stood close to the two of them and asked Lupin in a voice the crowd would not catch.
"Lupin. How did those lethal poisons come into your possession?"
"Oh, those. Visko-visko, or whatever that place is called—I caught Parmenia there and took them as loot."
"Parmenia?"
"Yeah. I caught her and handed her over to the guard. Did something happen?"
The guard, unwilling to be caught having branded an innocent adventurer a criminal, had boldly left that part out, and so until now Dmitri had known only that Parmenia had been arrested in Viskogorsk and then escaped. She was hardly someone the guard could have taken alive with ease, and he had wondered how she had been caught at all. The picture assembled itself: Lupin had captured her, and the guard had let her slip in the most pathetic fashion imaginable. At the thought that they had wronged a hero of the Republic for nothing, Dmitri groaned.
"Why in the world didn't you say so sooner…."
When a situation turned awkward, Lupin was accustomed to simply leaving. Even when Ekaterina had sent the lethal poisons rolling across the floor, her first instinct had been to grab Klein and run. She just hadn't wanted to dump trouble on her master, on Yegor, and on Vatslava for no reason, and while she hesitated she had been drawn into the duel trial almost of her own momentum. In a sense, the Holy Ark—and the recent plenty of treasure chests from raiding the mafia's stronghold—had made her a little more of a decent person.
"Well, the situation was suspicious enough. I figured the duel trial would be fine so long as I won."
From where Dmitri stood, she was kind. Excessively kind. Who in the world could stay that calm and unruffled while a false charge was fastened around their neck? He stroked his beard, sheepish, and bowed his head as if to apologize.
"I truly am sorry. The real Parmenia's appearance has cleared my doubts about you, and as things stand there is no reason to continue the duel trial—"
Shing.
A clone appeared from nowhere and set the point of a blade against Dmitri's face.
"…Ekaterina. You understand this will only hasten the stripping of your qualification as one of the Rounds?"
"I know, I know. But absolutely not…! This trial cannot be allowed to end in a void…!"
Watching Ekaterina, worked up enough to drool, Lupin sighed with a face that had gone entirely past disgust.
"Your Grace. What do we have to do to void the trial? I'll help."
"First it has to be declared void. I convened the trial, so I must speak from the judge's seat myself."
He meant the chair he had been sitting in until a moment ago. Lupin promptly knocked aside the clone threatening him. However fast a clone might be, it was slower than Lupin, and Dmitri was a former Aura User besides. A thrust coming from somewhere he could see, he could—just barely, with her help—avoid. A moment later she had him braced and hooked over her shoulder.
She looked around. The judge's seat, which had been sitting there perfectly intact a moment ago, was gone. While she had been securing Dmitri, one of Ekaterina's clones had made off with it.
"Not a chance. The trial has to go on!"
"Oh, for—this crazy bitch."
Clang!
At once Lupin, wrapped in her wing-cloak, caught a clone's strike from behind on her sword and shot into the sky. A blind dodge might get Dmitri hurt, so she switched into full defense.
Kang. Clang!
The clones were bursting out distinctly faster than before, and they were aiming at nothing but her back, which made them awkward even for Lupin to notice and evade. If it had only been her back, that would have been one thing. They kept appearing in a chain at the worst moments, once she had left the ground and dodging was hardest, and she had to wrench her whole body around. Alone, it might have been easy. She had someone to protect. Even Lupin had not expected the madwoman's assault—bent on dragging the duel trial into a fight that actually drew blood—to be this dangerous.
Nine clones. One of them was fleeing with the chair, which brought it down to eight, and even so she was every bit worthy of being called the strongest in single combat.
"If she had skill like this, what was she doing not tearing the cult apart?"
His body was being flung every which way, the inertia scrambling his head, and still Dmitri answered.
"That is precisely my point. We don't withhold our trust from Ekaterina for no reason."
"For real, though. How does a woman like this even exist?"
Clang! Clang! Ching!
Lupin kept turning aside the clones' continuing attacks. If the exchange went on, Ekaterina would be the one to burn through her aura first—but Lupin did not much care for this kind of stifling fight. She had a pride of her own: the only person allowed to overwhelm her, speed and all, with raw offense was her master. So what else was there? Nothing but to call out the strategic weapon she had kept hidden.
Snap!
Space split. Doves poured out.
Every spectator who saw it cried out in shock. Dmitri, watching from the closest place of all, had even less room not to be stunned.
"Th-this is—?!"
He had heard tell of the dove magic from Kakavita. But she had rambled so incoherently that he had assumed she had seen a phantom and thought nothing of it. Lupin was the Sword Emperor Tasili's disciple, after all, and until now she had shown nothing but the Shadowless Sword Style.
"Don't tell me the doves were yours…?"
By then the doves that had spilled out were circling on their own, throwing their bodies in the way of the clones' attacks or rushing the main body, assembling an offensive all by themselves. At the sudden assault of doves, Ekaterina screamed.
"Kyaa! What is this? Ack. Aaack!"
With a little room to breathe, Lupin set Dmitri down in the middle of the dove storm, dropped low toward the clone that had been running off with the judge's seat all this time, and spoke.
Dmitri let out a long, stunned breath. Hadn't every one of them been laboring under a preposterous misunderstanding?
The Ryavolsk affair had only been dressed up with the words serial mass murder because the city police needed a result to show. Had it simply been called an adventurer hunting bounties, there would have been nothing much wrong with it. Every last one of them had been a violent criminal with a price on their head; taking their lives was hardly grounds to punish Lupin. The same was true of the whirl of doves that had appeared when the Holy Ark was damaged. The citizens, recalling Ryavolsk, seemed to be mistaking the doves for Klein's—but if one said Lupin's flock had fought Klein's menacing hidden blades, that accounted for it just as well.
If Lupin had gone around smelling of suspicion from the start, perhaps. But hadn't she always been plain and transparent? She had even volunteered, readily, to take on Klein herself, when the absence of the Rounds had nearly left the girl unattended. Ordinary citizens might easily misunderstand. A statesman could not—not Dmitri, and not the prime minister.
While the prime minister was still turning it over, Lupin flashed in like lightning and sheared clean through the leg of the clone clutching the chair. Even Ekaterina could not answer Swift Advance streaking at a clone while she was also holding off the flock. The leg broke like a glass statue, shards scattering. The clone lost its center and went tumbling, and the judge's seat rose into the air. Lupin snatched it up and shot back to Dmitri.
"Your Grace! Declare it void, now!"
"Understood!"
Thud. He climbed onto the chair set upon the floor, about to put the matter to rest—and that was the moment.
"Everyone, your attention—"
The stands grew noisy, and voices rose one after another.
"I'm telling you, those doves are Klein's doing!!"
"You damned Shrine Maiden! You still haven't come to your senses?!"
The audience rose first and closed in around Klein. For Dmitri, who had been keeping critical information in check so that citizens and nobles might be held together, it was a sickening lapse. In the gap where the government had offered no firm word, rumor among the citizens had already seated the doves firmly in place as some new weapon of the cult, like an experimental specimen.
Startled, Klein hunched in on herself and stole glances at the people around her.
"W-what? What did Klein do?"
