Sweetness from the Strong (1)
In its place, I humbly offer you watashi's Mary cosplay.
Oh, hell. Han Seoyeon stabbed the back button and shoved the phone into her pocket. She had only meant to skim the broadcast's reactions for a moment, and in that brief window she had been ambushed. She crossed herself against the image seared into her mind, then started up the stone steps once more.
A torii showed above her. An ancient wooden gate, so old that only traces of its red paint remained.
A bleak wind blew, and the current of air stroked Seoyeon's black habit. At her left hip, two scabbards of the same black were bound in place.
"—How unusual. A person of the Church, coming all the way here to pay respects."
The moment she took the last step and passed beneath the torii, the wind stopped dead. In its place, a woman's voice barred the way.
Red and white. The shrine maiden's robes she had seen earlier that day. But the dignity in them belonged to an entirely different order from cosplay, and a hush of mystery hung about the figure who wore them.
"The Hifumi norito. Not a bad choice, if one means to shield the body from the divine. It's a widely known incantation, so there's little fear of the source being traced, either."
Han Seoyeon delivered it calmly to the miko, whose sharp eyes lent her a fierce look. Well—Seoyeon herself was told often enough that her own face was frightening. She was hardly in a position to lose her nerve and retreat.
"But setting the incantation aside, the talisman carried far too much information. There are almost no shrines in this area tied to Goguryeo. Narrow it to a tiger spirit, and there are fewer still. Two candidates, so I did hesitate a little."
She had looked at a talisman and deduced that it was made here, and she was saying something that outrageous as if it were nothing at all. What set the miko—Akaba Akane—on edge, though, was not the deduction. It was something more fundamental: the simple fact that Han Seoyeon, the holy knight called Sister, knew the talisman existed. A charm written to protect the body having been used meant Tsunashi Tenka had fought her.
Tenka was streaming just fine. I thought nothing had happened.
So there had already been a fight. From where she stood at the worship hall, Akaba stole a glance at the woman before her.
The pitch-black habit was a strange thing. It felt holy and blasphemous at once, and merely looking at it stirred a faint dizziness. The black twin swords, both worn gathered at one hip, were of course a holy knight's armament.
"Ah. I'm late to introduce myself. That was rude of me."
She had not smuggled the weapons in. She was fully armed. She had come here prepared, if it came to that, to fight Akaba Akane.
Not her given name—the name of an apostle, bestowed by the Church. That, too, was her way of making plain that she had presented herself as the Church's holy knight.
"And you would be Miss Yugure Tama, yes?"
"…Yeah. Akaba Akane. I'm the one who plays Yugure Tama."
One possibility flickered past. There had been a fight, and yet Tsunashi Tenka—Charlotte—had gone right on streaming, which meant the odds were high that Sister's side had been the one driven off. For that same woman to then come looking for Akaba, of all people……
"A hostage? You servant-of-God bastards really do get up to some funny shit."
"I can more or less guess the misunderstanding you're under… but I don't imagine you'd believe me if I corrected it."
Tell her the truth and she still wouldn't listen. So saying, Han Seoyeon drew both swords at once with a single hand. She split them between her two hands, let the tips fall at an angle toward the ground, and crossed them in an X before her face.
The wind still did not blow.
"Kids—bite!"
In the very next instant, two wolves burst from the brush. Seoyeon snuffed them with a single stroke, the blades falling in a cross from left and right. No blood sprayed, and no flesh; they reverted into straw dolls plastered with talismans.
Akaba had never imagined, not from the start, that something like this could suppress Han Seoyeon, an ace even among holy knights. The aim was only to buy time, and to split her attention.
The real one was already at the holy knight's back.
A two-headed tiger god waited there with its great jaws open. Sanmeedora no Kami. Unseen by any other eye, giving off not the slightest presence, the spirit held its ground in that spot—so that, should the moment come, it could bite the enemy of the miko who served it.
"Hm."
However she had noticed a monster no one could see, Han Seoyeon lifted her head with a faint smile.
"An invisible spirit. Certainly threatening."
As if she were meeting the eyes of the great tiger standing there.
"I would advise you to be careful about managing your gaze, though. Watch the pupils move, and one starts to think there must be something around here. As for the size… let's see. Somewhere around eight meters, would you say?"
"……."
A monster. She had known beforehand that her opponent was strong, and the shock still hit her all over again.
"…Please withdraw."
The words left Akaba Akane on a sigh, and it was plain they were not meant for Han Seoyeon.
Seoyeon felt the spirit retreat from her and let out a long breath.
"Thank you. Even so, killing a spirit that still had its miko attached would have left me feeling a little unpleasant."
A remark that took for granted she would win if they fought. Akane had no wish to deny it. She had called the god off precisely because she could not even picture landing a single blow, hoping to keep the clash from turning ugly.
"Well then. This time, let's actually talk. You finally seem willing to listen."
Willing was a generous word for it. It felt less like a change of heart and more like being seized by the collar and planted in a chair at the table.
"Forget that—is talking actually what you're here for?"
"If I had come to kill you, I could cut Miss Akaba down within three seconds, even now."
"……Damn it. Yeah. That much is true."
Han Seoyeon looked at the subdued Akaba and nodded, satisfied. This sort of thing came up often enough when she went about her holy knight duties in Japan. She herself was a moderate, whose creed held that there was no need to go out of one's way to harm an anomaly that had settled properly into society. Whether the other party was willing to believe that was, as ever, a separate matter. Anomalies badly burned by the holy knights of the Japanese diocese could rarely take Han Seoyeon's kind words at face value. They dropped straight into erotic-doujin mode—Sure, that's what you say, but you're planning to do something awful to me anyway!—and Han Seoyeon was convinced, by long experience, that the surest way to calm opponents like that was overwhelming violence.
"I could have beaten you to death, and I didn't, did I?"
"Aha! So you had some purpose other than beating me to death!"
…Yes. Handling it that way really is the fastest.
She smiled faintly at the thought, and Akaba—who had no way of knowing what was running through her head—put on a needlessly tense expression.
"D-do you want to come in, then? I can at least offer you tea."
Perhaps she had decided she wasn't about to be harmed right this moment; the reaction was considerably gentler than at the start. …Or perhaps she simply felt guilty for swinging first on a baseless assumption.
A nonlethal application of the Hello-and-Homicide Method practically counts as good manners on my side. …Well. I'm not about to refuse.
Han Seoyeon nodded, perfectly willing. Thanks to that Superchat stream, she had just been thinking she wouldn't mind a little tea and something sweet.