Lamplight, Violet, and Brimstone (2)
Kokura Racecourse, Kokuraminami Ward, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan.
Turf, 1,615 meters. Right-handed. A course of that description lay wrapped in the clamor of the crowd.
And somewhere in the stands—
"…Is it really all right for a cleric to be in a place like this?"
"Even among the clergy, a Holy Knight is an impious office to which not even Canon 1024 applies."
The woman who answered let her eerie sanpaku eyes slide across the track. Judging by the shape of the remark, she had meant it as a joke, but her voice carried so little rise and fall that the humor was difficult to catch.
"And, being an Apostle, I have not bought a ticket. For what that is worth."
She had not put down any money. The woman, Han Seoyeon, added it as if offering an excuse.
As a rule, once one reached the standing of an Apostle, wagers of the sort that turned on a win or a loss—horse racing, sports pools, and the like—were forbidden. It was not a written regulation, and so it would not have been unlawful, but it came close to a breach of manners. Those of such rank were held to be capable of bending reality in a meaningful way by the force of a strong wish alone.
"You came strictly to look at the horses, after all."
"To look at the horses?"
"There is a rite that requires a horse, and I thought I might borrow one for a little while. I came today to negotiate that."
When Han Seoyeon said so, the other woman seemed to think for a moment, then opened her mouth again.
"It isn't a sacrifice, is it? I've gotten attached to the racehorses because of a mobile game I've been enjoying lately, so that isn't a story I want to hear."
"If it were that, it would hardly be borrowing, would it? Riding is merely included in the course of the rite, so you may set your mind at ease."
"Oh, that's a relief."
"…Setting that aside, you were playing that game?"
"Want to play too, Sir Bartholomew? There's a newbie-friendly event on right now…."
"I will decline, for the time being."
"That so? Anyway, pull the gacha for me, would you? There's a character I absolutely have to get, and she's on rate-up."
She held her phone out with precisely that degree of shamelessness, and Han Seoyeon regarded her with a wry smile.
"Yes!"
"…Mm."
Well, she had pressed the button all the same. A favor of that size was hardly beyond her. It felt a little strange, though, coming as it did immediately after she had said that, as an Apostle, she was taking care not to interfere in the outcome of any contest.
"That aside, I find it far more surprising that you are here."
Han Seoyeon said it with a sidelong glance at the other woman, who was busily taking screenshots.
Dirty blonde. Gold, in the most literal sense, of a muddied tone, worn a little past the shoulders. Set white skin and clear blue eyes atop that, and she was the very stereotype of the foreigner a Japanese person might picture. She would have stood out at a racetrack on that alone, but what drew the eye above everything else was—
"—Colonel Evans."
The fact that she was in uniform. Anyone with a working knowledge of the military could have looked at that dress and known she belonged to the U.S. forces stationed in Japan. Several ribbon bars were pinned at her breast.
The colonel's insignia caught the eye as well. A rank that sat poorly with that face. The first thought to surface was that she was either remarkably young-looking, or the beneficiary of no small amount of preferential treatment.
"Were you not busy of late with the development of some new technology? The name was…."
"Bremen. The Bremen Project."
"Yes. That."
"To put it bluntly, the ones who are busy are the subordinates under me, not me. A superior is most useful in peacetime when they stay planted where they are and don't meddle."
Rachel shrugged as she said it.
Colonel Rachel Evans. Second Anomaly Response Special Unit Leviathan, of the U.S. Navy in Japan. Supreme commander of the unit that had taken the half-exaggerated boast of the Marines who catch ghosts and made it, in all seriousness, no joke at all. That was the woman called Rachel.
She was a thoroughly awkward person to have turn up at a racetrack. Even so, Han Seoyeon was not especially flustered, because she had known from the start that Rachel, contrary to a perfectly ordinary appearance… well, possessed a somewhat peculiar personality.
"So then, Miss Evans. For what reason are you here?"
"An ordinary vacation. Horse racing itself has been a hobby since I was back in the States."
Their meeting now, then, was pure coincidence. Han Seoyeon nodded at the words.
"Honestly, when you grabbed me from behind out of nowhere, Sir Bartholomew, I was so startled I nearly stopped breathing."
"About that… I apologize. But you do not breathe in the first place, do you?"
"Yeaaah. Vampire joke."
Rachel Evans laughed, sketching a V with one hand. Han Seoyeon, watching, offered nothing but a wry smile, though there were surely people who would have felt a peculiar fear in that smile of hers.
After all, securing a post like that at her age would have been impossible for a human. It was for the same reason that Han Seoyeon, having come to the racetrack, caught the scent of an anomaly and went straight for Rachel. The incidents of late had left her hypersensitive to the smell of vampires. Had it been someone she saw often, perhaps not—but they had only ever met a handful of times, and only in passing, for work.
"While we're on it, how's the Vampire Syndrome coming? From your reaction, Sir Bartholomew, I probably shouldn't get my hopes up."
"As you anticipated, it has gone to hell."
At the question, Han Seoyeon let out a long sigh.
"We secured a sample of the Vampire Syndrome. One that had been on the verge of use in a terrorist attack—and that had been carefully preserved in a petri dish, at that."
And yet the only thing they had managed to grasp about the enemy was that name.
"A fact we learned only barely, through the name submitted on a tax filing. Even this, however, seems to have fallen within the other side's expectations. They sent the emblem of their own organization up in plain sight, as if to say they would have been found out regardless."
Considering their intent to harvest faith under the name Hermes Trismegistus, the furthest one could reasonably infer was that they were a group assembled as a trio to match that structure. That was the edge of what could be reasoned.
"They let a clue that vital slip, and still we never stepped on their tail. The recent incidents were put down early every time, and yet even in the midst of that, the concealment of the mastermind was nearly perfect."
The Vampire Syndrome was by now closer to something that could be sufficiently controlled than to a spiritual, occult calamity. Set beside an infectious disease, it was a pathogen already at the stage where a vaccine had entered use—one on the very brink of eradication.
But that was not the true dread of the Vampire Syndrome. It was a secrecy so complete that not a single inhabitant of the hidden world had been able to confirm the mastermind existed, until the affair gave rise to the conspiracy theory that this was no man-made calamity at all, but an epidemic with nothing artificial about it. The mastermind's gift for concealment—the very thing that had led the public to take this for a vampire syndrome—that was what was truly terrifying.
"Cunning they certainly are, but cunning alone would not be enough to evade the Church's eyes to this degree. There is no doubt that some anomaly specialized for the work exists."
"A Japanese tsuchinoko?"
"How do you even know of such a thing… no. You belong to an anomaly response unit, so it is not strange…."
A tsuchinoko was hardly obscure even among the Japanese of the surface world to begin with…. Han Seoyeon accepted it well enough and let it pass.
"It does seem a little different from that, however. Less an anomaly that is itself adept at hiding, and more a form that acquires information… the sense that they are using that, somehow, to stay out of our sight."
"ESP, then. …And your basis for thinking so?"
Psychometry, for one. Clairvoyance, for another. Precognition, for a third. Whichever the name, it was the sort that made one want no part of the thing.
When Rachel asked for the grounds, Han Seoyeon thought a moment, then said,
"For the present, intuition alone."
"That's plenty. An Apostle's instinct, and the matter's closed."
"On that premise, I intend for the time being to leave the analysis with the higher-ups…."
But the sentence never reached its end, for at that unlucky moment her phone began to ring.
"Excuse me. A brief call…."
"Yeah. By all means."
Han Seoyeon, having stepped away, returned only after a fair stretch of time. A faint bewilderment lingered on her face when she did.
"Mind if I ask what that was?"
"Only a message from an acquaintance. The contents, however, were a little…."
"A little?"
"No. Rather thoroughly puzzling, I should say. I cannot fathom the intent at all."
Han Seoyeon muttered it with a crease between her brows. Her face was severe to begin with, and the spectators around them, cowed, had been quietly edging back to a distance; Rachel had simply decided not to remark on that.
"What on earth did you hear, to look like that?"
She asked, instead, the thing she wanted to know right then. From Han Seoyeon's reaction, she did not seem to be trying to hide it.
"Well. I was asked what my sexual orientation is."
"…Out of nowhere?"
"Out of nowhere."
"That's… yeah. Certainly a little awkward."
Contacting someone out of the blue for the sake of asking this. It was, at least, a thing Rachel had never once experienced.
"Maybe they bet on whether Sir Bartholomew is heterosexual or homosexual."
"I wonder. It would make an ambiguous category for a wager, would it not? Calling someone at random and betting on the answer might be possible in itself…. But this is not a person who would toss out a question like this, carelessly, as a joke."
"When you say they aren't that sort of person."
"That is… hmm. I suppose it is all right to say. The two of you do not know one another, and it does not seem you will have occasion to meet…."
To the soldier Rachel Evans, the woman Senjoji Chiyo occupied nothing more than the position of Apostle Bartholomew's Acquaintance B. Given her place in an anomaly response unit, she might have read a paper or two by the elder sister, Senjoji Chihaya, but that would be the whole of it.
"She is a lesbian. She is fond of self-deprecating jokes, yes, but she is also a person who understands how sensitive a subject like this is."
Not someone who would spend it as a mere joke. That was Han Seoyeon's assessment of Chiyo.
"Hmm. I see. …No, wait. She? A lesbian?"
"Why so suddenly? Have you realized something?"
Rachel had been about to nod along and let it go, but in that instant something flashed through her mind, and her mouth closed again.
"Uh… you really don't get it?"
"If I understood, I would not be this confused…."
"It's that, isn't it?! Nee, Takeshi-kun—what's your type of girl? That exact situation!"
"A more fluent pronunciation than I expected…. And who, precisely, is Takeshi-kun."
Han Seoyeon cut in, but Rachel paid her no mind. She looked thoroughly delighted—specifically, much as she had during the proxy gacha a moment ago.
"No matter how I turn it over, there's no rational reason to suddenly ask a thing like this in a situation like this. Put the other way, the reason is supremely irrational. It's love. It's love! Love!"
"No. I do not believe that is the case…."
"Think it over carefully, one more time!"
"You have no intention of listening to me."
Is a human who floors the accelerator and runs wild in a straight line like this really fit to command Leviathan? Han Seoyeon sighed around the thought.
"She is someone who has been confessing to me in jest all along. For it to be genuine now, of all times…."
"But a relationship that started as a joke turning serious somewhere along the way is a cliché too, isn't it? Maybe she was only pretending it was a joke from the very start…? They say nine-tenths of April Fools' confessions are the real thing."
Rachel was by now outright grinning as she looked at Han Seoyeon.
"Has there been any event lately that might have changed her heart?"
"There could not possibly have been."
"A lucky pervert moment…!"
"That is even less likely…."
Han Seoyeon sent her eyes rolling in a slow circuit from left to right.
"……There was a time I held her down in the passenger seat and tried to kiss her."
"What. That story. In detail."
A head of steam that called Philotanuss to mind, she thought, and only inwardly.
"I mean, come on. If something of that degree happened, a person might fall for someone all over again. That's how it goes, isn't it?"
"Er… mm."
But if she went on hearing talk of that sort, it was not as though she were entirely unpersuaded, and Han Seoyeon swallowed the short sound in her throat.
It did not take long at all for even so… to turn into wait, could it be…?
"So what are you going to do?"
"No. I have not even been confessed to. There is hardly a question of what I will or will not do."
"Assuming you had been."
"…I could not say. I have never harbored feelings of that kind toward anyone at all."
Seoyeon was accustomed neither to holding romantic feelings nor to receiving them from another. Told, at this late hour, that there might be such a possibility, she could hardly have answered with any certainty.
"A knight who hasn't even realized what love is yet… you've got a long road ahead, but this is a delicious cliché in its own right, so…."
"Answer me honestly. You attended Winter Comiket this year as well, did you not?"
Her circuitry ran entirely on that of an otaku. Or rather, she was closer to a fujoshi whose only alteration was the gender of the thing she obsessed over.
Whether she knew the verdict Han Seoyeon was rendering inwardly or not, Rachel's eyes went on sparkling.
"But I've said this much, so it's started to nag at you, hasn't it?"
"……."
If one asked whether it nagged at her… denial was, in the end, difficult. Hear a speech like that and think nothing whatsoever, and that would have been strange in its own right.
Reading the reaction, Rachel drew a sheaf of paper slips from her pocket.
"Let me give you a little push. If you make money on these tickets, Sir Bartholomew asks that acquaintance of yours on a date. It'll be a chance to quietly sound out what she actually feels."
"Were I to ask why I ought to… you would only argue again, I expect."
"You know me well. And we've barely met."
"…You are remarkably unabashed. Remarkably enough that it is almost novel you would bother routing it through a wager, rather than simply forcing things through to suit yourself."
"Haha… fair. But in truth, those two aren't so different."
Rachel smiled and shoved the tickets back into her pocket.
"My luck is good when it comes to the races, you see. I don't have it in me to lose."
"No—looking at them now, you bet on every single horse, did you not…?!"
"But I won, didn't I? The total's a minus, sure, but anyway—ah, a ticket hit, right?"