Uninvited Guests 3
Golden auroras rippled across the dark blue sky.
One by one, those who had been staring blankly up at the majestic sight returned to reality, and the backyard of the rest stop was once again packed with the lively heat of a party, as if nothing had ever happened.
"Yuahaha! Cheers!"
Santa bellowed, raising his glass high.
It was already his tenth toast or so. The people who had answered his first few calls were now quietly slipping away from their seats.
All except one.
Except Ifrit.
"Cheers!"
The two clinked their glasses hard enough to ring out, downed their drinks without so much as a race to see who'd finish first, then flashed each other a grin.
They'd clearly only just met, and yet somehow their energies matched perfectly.
Off to the side, where the two were pouring yet another round, Siren seemed to exist in a world entirely her own. The food Ash had served her earlier still sat nearly untouched before her, and she was savoring it with almost religious reverence, taking the tiniest bites imaginable as though it were some sacred relic.
She'd been like that ever since she learned that Ash had cooked it himself.
The strange aura she gave off made it awkward to approach her, and besides, she looked utterly blissful — so no one disturbed her solemn meal. Every now and then, Akina, sitting beside her, would toss out a casual question.
"Is it good?"
Each time, Siren would beam a radiant smile and nod her head vigorously. Akina would watch her with a soft, warm smile — though why she did so, when the food wasn't even hers, no one could say.
Meanwhile, Ash was having a conversation with Jack O'Lantern.
Inside the armored transport, the Revenant.
Wrapped in thick plating, the interior was relatively quiet. Ash liked that quietness. The sheer depth of the armor, capable of muffling even sound, felt like a guarantee of safety.
As Ash sat in the driver's seat scanning the forest of gauges and monitors, Jack O'Lantern carried on with his explanation.
"Basically, for an emergency transport vehicle, speed is everything, right? So what's this baby's heart, you ask! The Apex V12 twin-turbo engine! Whew, this thing's the real deal. Honestly, unless it's something special, no vehicle out there can keep up with her."
He rapped his knuckles against the vehicle's wall.
"We took a bit of a hit on the outer armor for the sake of speed, but that doesn't mean it's cheap stuff. Triple-compressed steel plate — small arms barely leave a scratch. Oh! The suspension's custom. It originally came with electromagnetic fluid dampers, but maintenance on those was a bit of a pain, so..."
In truth, Ash hadn't understood even half of what Jack was saying. But the man was talking with such infectious enthusiasm that interrupting him felt like a crime.
"Is that so."
And so Ash nodded along with suitably vague responses, examining the Revenant's interior with the slightly awed eyes of a 'novice.'
Compared to Jack's new armored car he'd ridden before, it was cramped — but since the permanent crew amounted to just himself and Akina, it hardly mattered. If anything, having everything within arm's reach gave him an odd sense of security, even if he had no idea what functions all those things at his fingertips actually housed.
While he was lost in thought for a moment, someone pounded on the Revenant's rear hatch. It was Dullahan. He tossed the beer can he was holding to Jack O'Lantern and flashed a message across his visor.
"Aw, and it was just getting good."
Grumbling about it, Jack nonetheless cracked open the beer Dullahan had tossed him and stepped out of the armored car. In the meantime, a new message lit up Dullahan's visor.
He jerked his chin toward the hatch.
Ash glanced toward Ifrit, who was even now mid-toast with Santa, and nodded.
"The schedule. You mean the matter of the 'deal'?"
Dullahan, perched in the back seat, produced a small data chip from within his chassis.
Ash nodded at once.
"A good idea."
"I'll pass the word along to Asoja as well."
Their conversation wound up quickly — but Dullahan didn't leave.
"...Was there something else you wished to say?"
At Ash's question, Dullahan nodded. He hesitated for a moment, then printed a somewhat longer sentence across his visor.
Dullahan looked a bit sheepish, scratching at his helmet a couple of times before pointing at a single button beside the driver's seat.
The button's design didn't match anything around it. It had almost certainly been newly installed when the Revenant was handed over.
Ash stared for a moment at the red button jutting out from the center of the dashboard, then turned his head toward Dullahan.
"Thank you."
Having said his piece, Dullahan turned without a second's hesitation and stepped out of the armored car. Left alone, Ash looked over the driver's seat for a little while, then soon left the vehicle and headed for the backyard where everyone had gathered.
The backyard was raucous with shouts and music. And so, the first night of the rest period faded peacefully away, steeped in satisfying fullness and pleasant tipsiness.
First Team Elementary Girls, and now Siren. None of them were exactly invited guests — but Ash figured that, too, had its own charm.
It was around then that the rest stop received its first true uninvited guests.
There are moments when even blaring music falls silent.
The instant one song ends and the next begins — that was precisely such a moment. The pounding beat cuts out, and even the melody goes quiet, if only for the space of a breath.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The sound of someone hammering violently on the iron door rang out.
Most of the drunks either failed to notice it or dismissed it as just another noise of the city and let it wash over them.
But not Ash.
His audio input device caught two things: that the sound was very close, and that even though new music had already started, the pounding hadn't stopped.
And so Ash reached his conclusion. Someone was knocking at the door of Santa's Rest Stop.
"Old Master Santa."
"Huuaah?"
Santa looked up at Ash through half-lidded eyes.
"It seems we have a visitor."
"A visitor? What kind of visitor?"
"Someone is pounding on the rest stop's door."
"Let 'em knock. We're closed for the night, I tell y—"
CRASH!
Before Santa could even finish, a dull impact and the sound of something shattering exploded through the air. From the evidence, it was unmistakable — the 'visitor' Ash had spoken of had smashed through the rest stop's front door.
"What kind of lunatic—!"
Santa shot to his feet in a fury, a mixture of rage at the destruction of his establishment and irritation at the party being so rudely broken up mid-flight.
Everyone else changed just as quickly. After all, every soul gathered here was a Pathfinder.
Every pair of eyes sharpened. Hands drifted reflexively to the weapons at their hips, and heads turned toward the source of the noise.
Between a haze of drifting dust and shattered iron fragments, a lone figure appeared through the back door that led to the yard.
And then, before everyone's eyes, he collapsed.
The man — a middle-aged figure dressed in a stylish longcoat — forced out his words between ragged, rasping breaths.
"S... Santa, boss..."
At the sound of that voice, Santa lowered his sunglasses and studied the intruder. Within moments, the old man's face had gone deathly pale.
He pushed through the crowd as if sprinting and shouted at the blood-soaked man.
"Rudolph!"
Santa rushed over and caught the man's body in his arms. Rudolph, leaning against Santa's chest, coughed up a handful of blood.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, boss... this was the only place I could think of..."
As Santa started to say something at the sight of the man's rags-for-clothes appearance, Rudolph vomited blood once more.
In that very instant — the moment every gaze in the yard was fixed on the sudden arrival —
KAANG!
A sharp metallic shriek tore through the stillness.
Before anyone had even registered what was happening, Ash followed the sound with his eyes — and there he was, standing between Rudolph and Santa, blocking their path, a steel blade in his hand. The blade still trembled faintly, as if it had just struck something away.
Embedded in the ground at Ash's feet was a single black shuriken of strange, alien design. Had he failed to deflect it, that blade would have pierced Rudolph squarely through the heart.
But — a shuriken?
The first to react was Ifrit. She drew her sidearm, racked the slide, and muttered under her breath.
"The hell? Who even uses those things anymore..."
In an age when smart guns bent the trajectory of bullets and micro-drones chased their targets down to bore through their skulls, a lump of metal that was merely hard and merely sharp. It looked less like a weapon and more like a primitive artifact — the kind of thing that belonged behind glass in a museum.
But Ash thought differently.
He looked down at his faintly trembling blade. Power enough to make the blade shiver still. It carried force comparable to the sniper rifle he had faced on the last expedition.
And such a projectile had come flying without a sound. So silent and swift that even Ash would have struggled to react in time had it not been for his electromagnetic sense.
The simplicity of a weapon means nothing. What matters is who wields it.
Was Ash's own weapon anything more, taken on its own, than a blade of exceptional quality?
Someone who scattered silent projectiles with the destructive force of rifle rounds. A single calling rose instantly to Ash's mind.
'...An assassin.'
His judgment was correct.
Ash's teal optical sensors blazed fiercely, sweeping toward the rest stop's rooftop — the direction from which the shuriken had flown.
"Show yourself."
There was no one there.
But that lasted only a moment. Against the backdrop of the golden Veil filling the sky, the empty air seemed to ripple faintly — and from within that distortion, a group of figures materialized.
They emerged so seamlessly, it was as though they had been standing there all along.
There were three of them, all dressed alike. Techwear, as it was called — garments built around function and practicality above all else. Each had his face hidden beneath a deeply drawn hood and an animal-shaped mask.
But that was merely clothing. It was not what seized Ash's gaze.
LED lines were embedded densely along the surface of their clothing like veins, and even now they pulsed with a faint glow, blurring the outlines of their bodies. That, without a doubt, was the core of the optical camouflage technology that had made human beings appear out of thin air.
—...
They said nothing.
They simply gazed down in silence at those below them, like predators surveying their prey.
An unnervingly indistinct presence — and all the more chilling for it.
Seeing them, Rudolph's face drained white, and he whispered in a voice barely more than a crawl.
"The ninjas... they're already here...!"
Ninjas.
The final uninvited guests to arrive at Santa's Rest Stop this night were none other than they.