The One Who Dodges the Blade
Morning came early to the Hyakurenno house.
Not because wealth and power enough to pierce the sky saddled them with just as many duties. It wasn't that.
"──Please get up, Chisa. Morning has broken."
"Hey, young miss. Four in the morning isn't morniiing... And the days are still short... haaahn, forget bright, it's pitch daaark..."
"Please get up."
"Uuugh. If you weren't a Hyakurenno, you'd have been hauled in for labor-law violations ages ago..."
It was only that a freak who began annihilating her cardio at four-thirty in the morning happened to live in this mansion.
That freak's maid and bodyguard, Momomomo Chisa, hauled herself upright with a face worn thin by exhaustion, then, eyes still shut, put the pillow and the bedding in order. The freak herself, Hyakurenno Yuri, watched in silence. It was a strange arrangement, the master rising first to wake the one she employed, but no one was going to lecture her over it. Everyone in the family, Yuri included, knew perfectly well which of them was not normal: the woman who, without even holding a job that used her body, got up at an hour when the sun had no thought of rising and went straight into a half marathon.
Bedding squared away, Chisa rustled up out of bed and, yawning, undid the buttons of her nightclothes. Half-lidded as her eyes were, she folded each piece straight and even, set them on the bed, and took up the clothes waiting on the nearby shelf. Those, too, had been folded with the corners matched. In a flash she changed into them and tidied her appearance.
As for washing her face — well, picking the sleep from her eyes would do. She would only have to wash again after the run, and even then it would still be early morning. There was time to spare.
And so the two of them, Yuri and Chisa, slipped quietly out of the mansion and limbered up. The Hyakurenno estate was so vast that people joked online you needed a car just to get around the house, and Yuri crossed that courtyard on nothing but her own two feet. She walked a short while at first, then steadily built her speed, and by the time they had left the grounds entirely and come out onto the street, she was moving at something like a double-time jog.
Chisa, following behind at an easy pace, asked out of nowhere.
"Young missh. Something I've been noticing lately — that outfit's still cold, isn't iiit?"
A tight short-sleeved shirt and leggings. Respectable enough, as jogging wear went. The trouble was that they had only just entered March, and this was a sunless dawn besides. The wind, when it blew, still cut to the bone.
"But isn't that actually better?"
Yuri answered without so much as a glance back. They had not been going long, and yet her breathing was steady enough to impress. Whether that better meant the cold was good for conditioning the body, or whether it was another flicker of the masochistic appetite she let show now and then, Chisa decided not to think too hard.
"If anyone's dressed unsuitably, it's you, Chisa."
"I'm fiiine, though? One sip of vooodka and I warm right up!"
"That isn't what I meant. No — what you just said is also full of things I'd like to take issue with. In any case. I was talking about the maid uniform. The skirt."
"I set this one aside as workout clothes, so it's fiiine──. This one's allowed to get sweaty... hic."
Chisa answered only after clamping the mouth of the bottle in her hand between her teeth and gulping. Yes. At this very moment Momomomo Chisa was running through the streets in a maid uniform, and not even the sort of miniskirt that might turn up in an anime, but a long skirt that fell well past the knee. It was clothing that would have been a misery just to walk twenty kilometers in, and she was matching Yuri's pace in it besides. Considering that the woman setting that pace, if one timed her, would land somewhere in the upper ranks of amateurs, even following along in comfortable clothes would have been a physical feat worth admiring. Well, thought about properly, one probably needed at least that much laid down as a foundation to go about escorting the young lady of a great house all on one's own.
"That aside."
At this level, she must have been one of the people they called the Three Great Evil Oni or some such, back in her days as a working onmyoji. Yuri shifted her interest at once.
"How did that matter turn out?"
"That matter?"
"The thing Shion-san asked of us the other day."
"Ah! That?"
Only then, as if it had just come back to her, did Chisa break into a sputter of laughter. There was nothing the least bit funny in it, or so one would have thought — but this was a drunk, and common-sense objections of that sort did not land. Laughing oneself sick at a leaf tumbling past was, in the end, a line about drunkards, not about schoolgirls.
Han Seoyeon's request. No — strictly speaking, it had been closer to a demand for cooperation. She had asked it not as the private person Han Seoyeon, who happened to be on friendly terms with Hyakurenno Yuri, but as an agent of the Church. As Saint Bartholomew.
"You mean that talk about some villain or other hiding among the high-ups? Still no resuuults!"
"...Then I suppose I'll have to meet them in person and sound them out after all. When was the next gathering?"
"Le's see... hmm... Oh, the Saturday after next!"
Chisa took another long pull straight from the bottle, then answered with a grin.
The Kikuei Friendship Society. A social circle of sorts, formed by the former imperial family — the old miyake.
Taken at face value, a former member of the imperial family was anyone in history who had once been royalty and then ceased to be. In practice, however, the name usually meant the miyake houses that laid down their imperial rank in 1947.
Fushimi-no-miya. Kan'in-no-miya. Yamashina-no-miya. Kitashirakawa-no-miya. Nashimoto-no-miya. Kuni-no-miya. Hyakuren-no-miya. Kaya-no-miya. Higashifushimi-no-miya. Asaka-no-miya. Higashikuni-no-miya. Takeda-no-miya.
When the World War ended and the postwar settlement was carried out, twelve collateral houses were struck from the imperial register — removed from the imperial family — and reduced to ordinary citizens. In truth, the Allies had meant to strip imperial status only from the houses implicated in war crimes. What sprang out of that process without warning were two anomalies.
The eccentric Higashikuni-no-miya, and the hellion Hyakuren-no-miya. They had regarded imperial rank as nothing but a shackle, and they were quick to declare their own removal from the register. The mood that created swept the remaining miyake along with them, and those houses, too, set down their imperial seats. Even so, the connections of that era had been handed down to the present day under the name of the Kikuei Friendship Society.
And Han Seoyeon's guess was that the culprit of Vampire Syndrome — the whole Hermes-what's-his-name affair — was among them.
Crossing into the modern age, the miraculous power granted by imperial blood had grown very faint, but a mutation was bound to surface now and then. Yuri's own great-grandfather had been precisely such a case, so it was, of course, a fact she knew well.
"The trouble, if one can call it trouble, is that nothing guarantees this 'prophet' will even appear at the gathering."
Hyakurenno Yuri let the words out on a sigh. It might only have been her breathing, roughened by the run. And if Han Seoyeon's guess was right, they were dealing with someone highly likely to be a prophet. The other side might sense this approach in advance and simply flee.
"If the other side's got an information advantage like thaaat, it is tough, yeeah. Which is why the ones who see too far ahead are easy to deal with, thooough."
"Don't you have any advice born of experience, Chisa?"
"Honeshtly, my job was to charge in and smash everything once the other kids brought me the intel... hic. So I'm hopeless at the spy stuff, sorryyy, young missss!"
She hiccuped without pause and staggered as she went, and yet somehow matched her stride and kept on Yuri's heels.
"Buuut, heheh. There is something I heard from the intelligence kids! Two ways to catch bastards like this by the tail!"
"Two of them? If you have something like that, please tell me at once, Chisa."
"Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm sayin'... First one is, 'set a good trap'!"
Yuri said nothing. The moment she heard it, her expression darkened.
"Ehh? Why's your face like thaaat? You told me to say it, so I said it!"
"No, it's only that it feels as though I asked how to pass an exam and got back the answer, 'Study hard.'"
"Heh. Well, yeah. A trap so fine they don't notice it exists until after they've already gone into the fish weir — that kind of meticulous snare is hard to dig, isn't it? We don't even know how far their ability goes."
In short: even if they saw the future, leave them with no countermeasure they could actually take. Foresight of a plane crash would do you no good if you had already taken off and were crossing the open sea. So the point was to get them onto the plane before they could foresee a thing. Of course, that was easier said than done. Not knowing the reach of the opponent's power, pulling it off would be exceedingly difficult.
"So the method I recommend for you, young miss, is the second one!"
"And that would be?"
"'Don't get found out from the start.'"
Chisa answered with a wide grin. Cold and drink had flushed her cheeks red.
"To put it more specifically, the plan is, 'let them predict the result, but never learn the cause'──."
"...That sounds even harder than what you just said."
"Nah. It's not that haaard. The scene where you hand the information you've found over to the Church. Just keep that from showing up in the foresight, and you're good."
This, too, was simple only in the saying. Yuri drew her brows together and flicked a glance at her maid.
"Are you joking?"
"No? Not at all."
Chisa giggled again. But set against the face heated by drink, her eyes were considerably serious — clear enough that one might doubt she was drunk at all. A difficult person to read, as ever. Even employing her as a bodyguard and keeping her always close, that remained Yuri's assessment of Momomomo Chisa.
"Their power is incredibly strong. But it's narrow."
"And the basis for that?"
"Think about it. However much of a prophet they are... wouldn't our side have people like that too? In that terrifying Vatican? Even in Japan, this out-of-the-way island country, there are people whose whole job is answering problems of this kind."
"Considering how far modern transportation has come, I don't think 'out-of-the-way island country' is a particularly meaningful condition. But I take your point."
A power, in other words, great enough to slip even the net of organizations devoted to answering the anomalous.
"Then what did you mean by narrow?"
"They've got power like that, and their plots have still been stopped again and again. So even if it is foresight, it's limited to what's around them. About that much, I'd say."
Mere reasoning, or else an intuition risen out of experience? While Yuri turned it over, Chisa threw back another gulp of vodka and let out a satisfied, "Khh."
"Anyway, that's the gist! Like I said, it's not as hard as you'd think, riiight?"
"Yes. For the moment, at least."
Yuri answered, then faced forward again, putting her attention, first of all, on the running.
"...Ah, but. One more thing."
As if something else had begun to nag at her, she turned her head and met Chisa's eyes.
"If they can only foresee what's around themselves, couldn't they simply step in, in person?"
"The other side is trying reeeally, reeeally hard to stay hidden, you knooow? Foresight or not, the moment they get caught once by that Arbiter's nose, unless they flee the country it's completely over! So they'll try their hardest not to show up at the scene, riiight?"
With that, Chisa breathed out a sigh thick with the smell of alcohol.
"Of course, if we keep blocking their plots... eventually they'll have no choice but to come out themselves to get what they want. And once that happens, it's just over! Happy ending."
But, she added, grinning.
"No telling how much damage'll hit civilians before then, thooough. That's why they left it to you, young miss."
For a moment Yuri said nothing. At length she looked up into the sky, which was still dark. Thought of that way, she could not claim she felt no weight at all. What pressed on her even more than the weight, though, was duty: the ethic drilled into her until her ears grew calluses, a daughter of a noble house raised from the first to be a young lady.
"Shion-san must do her work as a Holy Knight while thinking of things like that. Every time."
"Probably not just her. Most of the other Holy Knights, too. Weeell, it's a job you stake your life on."
"Were you the same, Chisa? When you worked as an onmyoji."
"...Who knows? Hehe, not too sure. Don't remember it well!"
She gave no proper answer, and set the mouth of the bottle to her lips again. She must already have finished it. All that came out were a few drops, rolling free.
"In any case, I'll have to work hard. They must have entrusted this to me for that reason, and Shion-san is surely in agony as well, doing her very best. So please give this one your best too, Chisa?"
"Heheh... If the young miss is gonna put it like that, I guess I've got no choice!"
Picturing the sublime figure of a Holy Knight, Hyakurenno Yuri ran on with her attendant through the streets of dawn.
──And at that very hour, the pious cleric the two of them had been discussing.
"Th-that a coincidence like this should exist..."
"It's only a brief check, after all. Yes. This much is surely fine..."
...had discovered the Sisumea erotic manga stored on Ninomae's PC, and was sunk in worldly torment.