EP.18 Vorpal Rabbit -2
EP.18 Vorpal Rabbit -2
When it came to rabbit Divine Beasts, only one candidate came to mind.
The rabbit that lived on the moon. Commonly called the Jade Rabbit, but it was purely a creature of legend, its existence never confirmed.
After all, no human had ever laid eyes on a Jade Rabbit.
So was the rabbit before me the legendary Jade Rabbit, or was she a new Divine Beast still unknown to the world?
I had no idea. All I had learned was the single fact that she was a rabbit Divine Beast. I didn't even know what her true form looked like.
And why was a Divine Beast deliberately taking human shape and staying in a place like this?
Everything about her raised one question after another.
"You saw."
"Huh?"
"You saw me. My appearance."
"Uhh... yeah."
At this point, pretending I hadn't seen anything would've been outright nonsense, so I answered honestly.
I didn't know if it was the right choice, but telling the truth was better than telling an obvious lie.
"I see..."
The rabbit pressed her hood down firmly and hung her head.
It must have been a secret she truly hadn't wanted exposed, because her small frame was trembling.
Then, in an instant, the rabbit glared up at me, her eyes as sharp as her own dagger.
"If you've seen my secret, then you have to die."
"Calm down for a second! I'll never tell anyone your secret, I swear. Couldn't you let it slide just this once?"
"A lie. I can't trust you."
Still unwilling to hear me out in the slightest, the rabbit hurled her knife at me without a flicker of hesitation.
A seasoned stance, superb throwing skill, and on top of it all, an ability that defied prediction. The rabbit's knife was already aimed at the spot between my brows before I even had a chance to register it.
Fortunately, Tia had already stirred up a gust across the whole space beforehand, and the knife was flung aside before it could reach me.
'What the hell kind of ability is that?!'
The knife throw had failed to touch my body, but it succeeded completely in making my blood run cold.
The astonishing part was that even though I had raised a wind right in front of the rabbit to interfere with the throw, the knife reached right before my eyes without any issue.
I couldn't even see its trajectory. It was as if the dagger had simply teleported.
During the close-quarters exchange with the rabbit earlier, her body had also given me the sensation of abruptly vanishing and reappearing, and this dagger was exactly the same.
I guessed it might be a spatial ability, but if so, what explained the attacks that ignored my evasion and defense?
The future version of myself had clearly blocked her strike. Yet when I looked at myself one second later, I was blocking nothing and pouring blood.
The rabbit's ability casually ignored future sight.
All the Divine Beasts I had fought until now were the type who used their own powerful bodies as weapons. The rabbit was the polar opposite.
An ability-specialist. A Divine Beast who fought by utilizing her unique power to its absolute maximum.
Toss in her freewheeling mastery of human weapons, and the rabbit was a total mystery wrapped in an enigma.
"Let me ask one thing. Are you really a Divine Beast?"
"..."
"At least answer that much! Asking one question before you die, that's fair, right?"
"Yuu...! Y-you're dying?!"
"Ah, no! It's just a figure of speech, you know..."
Tia grabbed onto my sleeve, on the verge of tears.
I hadn't meant it literally, but Tia's pure heart took it at face value, which made things awkward.
A mistake born from a brief lapse in thought. As I was patting Tia to make up for it, the rabbit tossed a quiet word my way.
"I am a Divine Beast."
"Ah...!"
I had wondered if maybe she was a human who had made a provisional contract with a Divine Beast, like Jack or me.
After all, she was so adapted to human society that she casually handled not just weapons but machines like cell phones too.
The rabbit ears... well, if I imagined them as a price paid for a contract, that was a plausible enough story.
But with that one word from the rabbit, my entire hypothesis was proven wrong, and the rabbit ears hidden beneath her hood were confirmed to have been with her since birth.
"Happy? Then die now."
"S-sorry, but I really do have just one more thing I want to ask...!"
"I'm not listening to any more."
I was overwhelmed by the ferocious momentum of the rabbit charging at me. My body wouldn't move freely.
Even if I could move, I would only end up falling victim to her ability anyway.
At the moment of crisis, however—as they say there's a sliver of hope even in despair—I saw the one and only future in which I could survive.
So please, let this one future not be thwarted by the rabbit's ability...!
"U-uh, Assassin's Creed!!"
The rabbit's body—mid-charge—flinched and faltered.
One phrase, utterly irrelevant to the current situation, and it had an effect.
If so, this could only mean one thing: this rabbit was a game junkie.
"Your outfit, your weapons, even your whole mentality of 'assassination only when there are no witnesses'—you lifted all of it from that game, didn't you?"
"N-no, I didn't."
"Don't try to deny it. You coming to a dead halt at just the name of a game is ironclad proof."
"Urk...!"
"Got anything else to say?"
"...Do you know about that game?"
"Of course I do. It's a famous game regular people know about. How could I not?"
"Then... do you like games?"
Finally, she took the bait...!
The rabbit's voice was still flat, but I could spot her eyes gleaming under the hood.
To be honest, when I first saw her, I was dumbfounded.
The assassin who had put me so on edge was actually a small woman in what looked like cosplay. How could I not be bewildered?
But now I could completely understand why she was dressed like this.
There was no grand cause behind it. This rabbit was simply a game-junkie lifer down to the marrow of her bones, and until now she had simply never had a friend to talk about games with.
I still had no idea how a Divine Beast had turned into a game-junkie lifer, but anyway, being able to dispel her hostility, even temporarily, with game talk was a stroke of genius.
"I like them."
"Th-then how much of the AC series have you played?"
"Huh...?"
"You'd have played 1, and of course you'd have played 2 since that's a masterpiece! Did you know 3 got a remaster recently?"
"U-uh? Mm..."
"In 4, the protagonist is...!"
Was this really the same tight-lipped rabbit from before? The moment a conversation on the topic of games got going, words started pouring out of her like rapid fire.
As if she couldn't contain her excitement, the rabbit bounced up and down while laying out her personal takes and then immediately asking for my thoughts.
I found it unexpectedly hard to keep up with the conversation. It just meant the rabbit's love of games burned even stronger than mine.
Then again, if she came to carry out an assassination while cosplaying a game character, that says it all.
"Do you have any other games you're playing?"
"Uh, that's..."
"Ee-suh!! Divine Beast Forest!!"
"Divine Beast Forest...!! That one's a pretty fun masterpiece, too."
Before long, Tia had joined the game chat, and our little corner turned boisterous.
Enough to make you wonder if this was really the right mood for a scene where everyone besides us had been wiped out.
"If there's a Divine Beast in the village you don't like, you just take their whole bed and... Ah...!"
"Hm? What's wrong all of a sudden?"
"Sorry, let's go somewhere else for the rest of this."
Before the question was even out of my mouth, I heard a commotion coming from the club stage area.
I'd been so caught up spending time with the rabbit that I'd completely forgotten we were in the middle of making our escape.
"Here! The bastards are still here!!"
"Kill every last one of them! Make them pay dearly for crossing us!"
"Hey! Leave one alive! We need someone to cough up information, don't we?"
These didn't seem like ordinary customers. They were probably members of the terrorist organization that ran this club.
My plan had been to take out only the owner and slip out quietly, but things had gotten bothersome.
"There's an emergency exit inside the staff room. How about we leave through there and keep talking?"
"Okay. I'll go on ahead."
The moment the agreement was made, the rabbit dashed forward at high speed.
Reaching the first terrorist to spot us in the blink of an eye, she drew her dagger across the man's throat.
Next, the rabbit reached out toward the man right behind him, pierced straight through his chest, then ripped his heart right out and crushed it.
After that, the rabbit relentlessly and precisely dispatched every terrorist in sight, swift and clean.
'She's absolutely sick...'
When I thought of herbivores, the rabbit was the first animal that came to mind.
A primary target of carnivores, an animal that sat near the bottom of the food chain.
But her killing intent was so brutal, so razor-sharp, that you could never call it the killing intent of a rabbit.
It was enough to make me proud of myself for having lasted this long against that max-level rabbit.
"Tia, let's go too."
"Okay!"
Enough sightseeing. We decided to head out the emergency exit before more people swarmed in.
But anyway...
'When she's on your side, she's reassuring as hell.'
A simple escape game where all I had to do was step over the bodies the rabbit left behind.
Once again, I offered my profound respect to the rabbit's ability.
***
After fending off the terrorists' persistent pursuit, we reached a desolate back alley and sat in a row behind cover, hiding ourselves.
The terrorists weren't a problem, really. If we felt like it, Tia and I could sweep them all away, just the two of us.
But the game-nerd rabbit was giving off clear signals that she wanted to continue our conversation as quickly as possible.
So I had reluctantly agreed to hide in the alleyway with her until things quieted down.
"Then let's get back to what we were..."
"Ah, wait just a moment!"
"Hm?"
"Talking about games is great, but before that—could you tell me about yourself?"
"...What's the point of that topic?"
"Well, I figured if I knew what got you into games, we could have an even more fun conversation..."
"Mm, then it can't be helped."
Readily convinced by the word "games," the rabbit began detailing things about herself one by one.
If it was game-related, she seemed willing to divulge any secret she had.
Anyway, the story the rabbit told went like this.
The rabbit was originally a Divine Beast living in the snowfield region of the northern Great Wilds, and she said her days had been nothing but tedium.
Day after day, wild animals mistook her for prey, and she'd reverse the situation and devour them instead.
This routine was unbearably dull for the rabbit, so she wandered here and there, until twenty years ago she happened to encounter our country.
Naturally there was a border in place, but a small gap existed just large enough for small animals to pass through, and the rabbit said she had entered the country through that gap.
At first she'd planned to look around a little and return, but she experienced culture shock from the cuisine humans had created and decided then and there to settle.
And so the rabbit transformed into human shape, hid her ears, and made bloody efforts to adapt to human society, she said.
"I was living only for human cooking, and then I learned of the existence of games—five years ago."
"You found out pretty late, considering."
"Yeah. I lost out on half my rabbit-life."
While out on the streets as usual in search of delicious food, the rabbit had happened to spot a mysterious shop.
The shop was a game store, and there the rabbit got her first taste of the charms of gaming through a demo kiosk they had set up for people to try.
After that, the rabbit became a regular at the game store, conquering game after game, and thus she was splendidly initiated onto the path of the game junkie.
That was the rabbit Divine Beast's story.
"That's amazing."
Honestly, the rabbit Divine Beast was so peculiar that I'd never imagined I'd live to see a case like this.
A Divine Beast who entered human society of her own volition—not through a Companion Contract—and became a gaming geek, captivated by human culture...
It was so absurd I was at a loss for words.
"So is that why you bought those clothes and weapons too?"
"The weapons are custom-ordered. The clothes are handmade. I made them myself."
"Th-that's some serious fandom..."
"Yeah. I always wear them when I go on assassination jobs."
"So, how did you end up doing contract killing?"
"To earn money."
"Thought so..."
"There's no choice. Buying new games takes money."
"No, wait! So your whole motivation for going around killing people is just to buy games?!"
"Yeah. Because games are a god. If it's to welcome a new god, I can kill anyone."
"Ha! Haha...! You crazy...!!"
Divine Beasts, every last one of them, were out of their minds. Grandpa Qilin racked up another effortless win today.
Just how long would his winning streak continue? I found myself genuinely curious.