A Person of the Same Nature (2)
"Might I borrow a weapon?"
When the woman who had burst in without warning came out with those words, not a single person present simply nodded along as if to say, yes, of course. No—long before acceptance could even enter into it, none of them could follow what was happening at all.
They had come running on a sudden report of vampires, only to find one of their own already missing a leg. A holy knight sent as backup had charged in, and his waist was severed almost at once. Faced with a comrade's entrails spilling out in wet, slapping gouts, and with the dreadful enemies who had wrought that carnage so easily, there was no way a mind could keep working.
"No, it's dangerous…! Those things are the real thing. They're not the sort of opponent one extra person is going to—"
That anyone had managed to get a word out at all was, if anything, astonishing. Half of it was a professional's reflex, still reading the situation in the middle of a crisis; the other half was the duty that said even one meaningless death ought to be kept from the tally. Hold the line while I run for backup—he never finished the thought. A sharp rush of cut air tore past his ear.
He turned his head, stiff. A vampire stood there with a knife planted in its forehead.
"……Huh?"
"I'll be borrowing this."
By that point it was already a sentence handed down. No—not even that. It was a report filed after the fact. The woman who had closed in on them had already snatched a holy knight's longsword.
She seemed to settle her stance for a breath… and then she vanished from sight again. It was movement no eye could hope to follow. Only by the wind that arrived a beat late could they barely catch the place where she had already finished.
The sword, swung with ferocious force, crashed into the vampire—the one that did not have a knife sprouting from its brow. As if in mourning for the holy knight already dead, the blade drove into that very same stretch of waist. Her strength seemed a little short of cleaving the spine clean through… so she simply hurled the longsword still buried in the creature and slammed it into the wall across the way.
By then the other vampire had belatedly begun to move. She had planted a consecrated dagger in its head, but against an anomaly built for regeneration the wound only made it falter for a moment. Ordinarily the blow would have bitten deeper. That it had not was largely because this was no ordinary vampire. Ever since the Christmas Massacre, reports had surfaced now and again of vampires with a measure of resistance to the sacred.
"Which is why I contacted the Catholic Church in Japan and told them to issue the holy knights armaments prepared for precisely this… It seems they did not listen to me."
Bang—!
Even so, that was not to say there was no way through. The woman, who had already drawn a pistol from inside her coat, shot the charging vampire through the jaw. This, too, was no substantial blow… but it was enough. She did not miss the instant it hesitated, and drove a kick into its abdomen.
The moment that body sprawled on the ground, she lunged in before it could rise and stomped down hard on the handle of the knife still lodged in its forehead. After the sickening give of flesh and skull at once, there came a crunch of something scraping asphalt. Using the knife that had punched clean through the head as a stake, she pinned the vampire to the earth. A body of that caliber might still haul itself upright by brute force, so she kept her foot planted on the handle and held it fast. Then she leveled the pistol again, aimed for the chest, and fired.
Suppressed reports rang out. Again and again.
The opponent was an irregular, but the conclusion was simple. One had only to think of it not as slaying an unholy anomaly, but as killing a human who had obtained powerful regeneration by some means or other.
"…Hah."
Only after emptying the magazine completely did she let out that breath. She took her foot off the vampire's head and slipped the gun back into her coat.
…Or so it seemed, until she picked up the holy knight's pistol lying on the ground and mercilessly emptied a second magazine as well.
"It can't be… Bartholomew……."
"Yes. That is correct."
One of the holy knights still living seemed only then to realize who she was, murmuring the apostolic name. The woman—Han Seoyeon Margarita—agreed in a deadpan voice and tossed the second pistol back onto the ground.
It was hard to tell, but perhaps her face held a trace of surprise. At least, by her own reckoning, she was privately quite startled. She was not even wearing the habit, and they had recognized her anyway.
This spared her a measure of explaining, which was all to the good. Quite apart from any certainty that she truly deserved an Apostolic Seat, Han Seoyeon knew very well how easily the name of Apostle drew cooperation out of others. Considering that a second time they were unlikely to stand there dazed and let her take their weapons, it was genuinely fortunate.
"A weapon."
"…Yes?"
"I will be borrowing this as well."
Even so, there was no growing used to the sight of her coming over with a hand held out, calm as if she meant only to collect something she had left in their keeping.
At any rate, swept along by the force of the moment, Han Seoyeon took a three-section staff from one of the holy knights and gripped it at both ends. She turned her head toward the wall where she had flung the remaining vampire. The thing staggering upright with a sword half-buried in its abdomen was horror itself.
Han Seoyeon set the three-section staff across her shoulder and walked toward it, step by heavy step.
The vampire flinched back for an instant, then, as if to hide the fact, shrieked all the louder. It twisted the longsword free of its own belly. The blood did not fall under gravity. It writhed, coiling about the blade.
The two figures, weapons in hand, regarded one another.
And the instant the vampire raised the sword and took a step, Han Seoyeon closed to right in front of it and swung the three-section staff.
A swift blow aimed at the head. The vampire startled and blocked with the sword… but a three-section staff, stopped only at its middle, wraps around and comes over the guard. One has to focus harder and strike the outermost rod aside, as if intercepting it. Of course, that was never going to be possible for an opponent who had already slipped the leash of reason and fallen into panic besides.
The metal club smashed the skull of a vampire who, in all its life, had almost certainly never once met a three-section staff.
But it was still not enough. Han Seoyeon swung again and struck the waist, the wound not yet closed. With the jangle of chain, something burst from the point of impact in a wet splat.
"Glaive."
She did not stop there. Han Seoyeon reached a hand behind her.
"Yes? That's…"
"The naginata! Throw it!"
The holy knight who had been staring blankly at the fight was not catching her meaning, so she had whipped her head around, fixed him with a glare, and shouted. Only then did he throw her the weapon in his hands.
He hardly registered that a vampire's attack had already split the thing in half. Or rather, Han Seoyeon's momentum left no room to think of it; his body simply moved.
She glanced at what he had thrown and, as if trading it for the three-section staff, drove it straight into the enemy's chest. The moment she judged the depth a little wanting, she drew a silver hammer from her coat and struck the butt of the half-severed naginata, sinking it deeper still.
Stake and hammer: an allegory. One of the oldest ways of putting a vampire down.
Only after she had confirmed that the monster had gone still did Han Seoyeon turn to the other holy knights. The stares coming her way, awe stirred in among them, she ignored as she always did.
"Are you all right? Ah—I put this to good use."
She picked up the three-section staff, returned it to its owner, and inclined her head. The naginata was still run through the vampire… but it was already broken, so it would have to be discarded anyway.
"Miyuki, don't move. You've lost a lot of blood, so we have to put you back together quickly…"
"Y-yeah… thank you……."
The man who owned the naginata was in the middle of trying to reattach his comrade's severed leg, and she had no wish to call him off for his weapon and break his concentration.
"And that one over there… reconnecting the body ought to come first. Evacuate them at once, and once the treatment is finished, it should be enough to call me back."
Not that the remaining knight was holding himself together particularly well. Still drawn tight in the immediate wake of the fight, he heard her and gaped, more dumbstruck than before. What she was saying lay entirely off the ordinary course of things.
The Arbiter. The anomaly that locked even death inside a coffin. The woman before them was precisely that.
"Setting that aside, the fight just now—what in the world was…"
"As you saw, a simple application of the holy knights' Fourfold Gospels. This sorely lacking body of mine has only stitched miscellaneous tricks together into a poor imitation, but……."
Even so, you could more or less see it, couldn't you? Han Seoyeon said it as if it were only natural, without a flicker of doubt. The sentence rose at the end, and yet it did not, in any functional sense, amount to a question.
No human being could pursue perfection in every field, and so a manner of fighting was bound to specialize in one direction or another. A proper holy knight, however, generally had at least the forms of the Fourfold Gospels learned. Her listener would surely be no exception.
"The Fourfold Gospels, you say…?"
"……? Yes. That is correct. A transition from the Augustinian sword art into the Jerome Unarmed Martial Arts. Spraying them with a pistol was hardly what one would call a martial art—mere indiscriminate fire—and after that, an application of the Ambrosian combat arts and the Benedictine Twin Swords. I had not expected them to come at me with a sword, and so the three-section staff regrettably lapsed into the handling of a whip-staff, but."
"……."
The holy knight shut his mouth.
That… was the Fourfold Gospels? There wasn't a shred of the original form left. In truth, it was less that he closed his mouth than that it was closed for him. Struck utterly senseless, he had simply lost the power of speech.
Yet even had he recovered his wits, the conversation would still have been cut short.
"……."
"What…?!"
For in that instant, the vampire impaled on the naginata had begun to twist.
It should have been impossible. She had confirmed, beyond question, that its activity had ceased. And yet in the world of anomalies, there was likely nothing one could declare impossible with complete certainty. Wondering whether it meant to rise yet again, Han Seoyeon hardened her expression and seized the hammer once more.
The result showed itself before long. Something tore out of the writhing vampire's abdomen and shot high into the sky. Then it burst, dyeing a portion of the night. A viridian sigil embroidered itself across that black canvas.
If one had to compare it to anything, the sight called fireworks to mind.
But Han Seoyeon could not simply stand there and marvel. For one thing, it had burst from a vampire's flesh. For another… the pattern it drew was unmistakably occult.
The caduceus, or the kerykeion. Two serpents wound about a single staff. And three celestial bodies, shining as they revolved around it.
"That is…?"
"Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes, thrice great."
Gazing upon the sight, Han Seoyeon let out a long, heavy sigh.
A quiet café a little removed from the heart of the city. There, a girl was sipping coffee at her leisure.
"Hii~!"
A hand came down on her shoulder. A ring on the ring finger made the newcomer look, at a glance, like a married woman. The girl knew that was not, in fact, the case.
"Ah, Miss Mii. It's been a while."
"Mm-hm, it has—."
The girl turned a bright smile on the woman who had appeared behind her.
"Would you like some coffee? I was about to order another cup myself…"
"Mmm. Forget that. Let's just go to a hotel, yeah?"
"Don't say that so loudly. The looks we're getting are sharp… Well, I don't mind, so long as you're paying."
"So that's a yes?"
The woman called "Miss Mii" happily pulled the girl's arm into an embrace. The girl was in a school uniform, which only made the stares from the other patrons stranger still.
Miss Mii, of course, paid them no mind at all. She simply leaned in and said something. The voice was too small for anyone else to catch, and most of them assumed it was some cheap whisper of love, looked displeased, and tuned it out.
"—As planned, the 'mark' went up."
"And what are you announcing so proudly? The plan to raise a commotion failed miserably, and still you speak."
"Tch. Sharp ears, and not another thing worth having."
"First, let us change seats. There are many eyes upon us."
"Come on, let's hurry to the hotel! I saved up plenty of money for today—"
"There's no need to rush, Miss Mii. We have plenty of time."