Commandments, Statutes, and Ordinances
Seated in the chair, she looked up at the old ceiling and saw the mold blooming across it.
Ought she to wipe that away? Thinking as much, Akaba Akane waved a hand vaguely through the empty air. The spot was too high to reach without a ladder, so she meant to call over some stray spirit drifting nearby and put it to work.
What blocked her vision an instant later, though, was a yellowish ball of fur. The thing had sprung from the window and settled squarely on her face.
"…No. Not you."
She grabbed the furball—a fox kit small enough to sit in her palm—and lifted it, and the little beast let out a short yip. For a body that size, it was surprisingly heavy. Neither a spirit nor anything of the sort, just an ordinary animal, so the weight was only natural.
"I don't need you, so go back to your uncle, or… forget it. Just go. I'll call you later."
"Kyeng?"
Of course it wasn't going to understand a word of that. Akane simply took the baby furball, which only cocked its head, and flung it out the window. It might have looked delicate, but it was a beast that lived romping across a sacred mountain, and it had the nerve to stroll into the very dwelling of a shrine maiden who served a tiger god. This much wouldn't leave so much as a scratch.
So instead of worrying over it, Akane turned her attention to the stream.
"Well, you see. A truly great many of my servants were kind enough to enter the contest."
Mary Tepes's avatar, all smiles, was chattering away brightly from the corner of the screen. Behind her lay a painting of an old-fashioned shrine, and just at her back a red torii had been drawn in. A large ema, one of those wooden votive plaques, occupied the center of the frame—space, no doubt, for putting up the contest entries.
"The norito we select this time is actually scheduled to be used in a rite at my shrine. Now then, before we take a look… at the candidates who entered—"
It was a rather unusual premise for a broadcast. After all, where else would you find a VTuber who personally owned a shrine—
…Right here.
Akane glanced at the shrine-maiden robes hanging on the rack and pressed a hand to her brow. Come to think of it, she was still the one managing a shrine. Even so, she could never pull off a broadcast like this. Declare to the internet, that endless well of bizarre ideas, that she would take their norito and use them in actual worship, and she would be greeted at once by Lord Sanmeedora's furious paw-kneading. The stream was possible not simply because Mary was the shrine's legal owner, but because she was a god in truth.
"Before that, I've invited the guests who will be judging with me today. First… Rokumondera-senpai!"
"Iramkarapte! A fine evening to you all, my utari. Anathema first generation—Aki, of Rokumondera Shrine!"
"And next, Rin-senpai."
"Hebinichiwa. Tachibana Rin, also Anathema first generation. Treat me well."
"And last of all… Tama-senpai!"
One after another, the three first-generation avatars appeared on screen. In order: a shrine maiden by lore, an itako; a god by lore; and a shrine maiden currently holding the office.
"Nya-hello. Yugure Tama here, the baka-neko who debuted alongside those two, nya."
Akane switched her mic on and greeted the viewers. A way of speaking nothing like her usual one—so-called nya-speak, which she would never use in ordinary life. Three seconds was enough to shift into Yugure Tama, the broadcast persona. Early on the awkwardness had been overwhelming, but three years was plenty of time for it to settle on the tongue.
"Not just me. These three senpai will be serving as judges. Senpai, I'm counting on you today, all right?"
Mary smiled once more as she said it.
"…The panel's a little too stacked, isn't it, nya?"
Two of them had studied, each in her own way, for the sake of a character. Mary was a specialist in the field, and as for Tama, she was a working professional. Of course, a VTuber with a role to play couldn't simply drag real life onto the stream, so officially she was not a shrine maiden at all but a cat yokai freeloading at a tiger shrine. Well. The people who knew already knew the whole story. In any case, if people like this started measuring entries against their own knowledge, it was only natural to feel it was a bit much. Akane, however, was not stupid enough to say so outright and kill the mood.
After a suitable bit of back-and-forth, the contest judging finally began.
"All right, here it is at last, the first norito! 'I want to lick the armpit of Mary-chan, who dwells in Takamagahara'— h-hey?!"
And it ran aground immediately. Netizens, after all, are not the sort to obediently do as they're told.
"Mary-chan. Not reading the rest?"
"Wha—?! There's no way I'd read something like this!"
"That so. Agreed. Even if it means trampling the feelings of a viewer who tried, in their own way, to write a norito for Mary-chan. Still. Accepted."
"N-no, you don't have to put it like that…… uuu."
Mary Tepes was weak to being pushed. As if determined to prove that assessment all over again, she was swept along by the mood and ended up reciting the hymn to Mary—or rather, a naked assemblage of desire set in type—all the way through to the end. Only then did Rin, as if satisfied, lift the corner of her mouth by a truly minute degree.
"What are you making a kid read, nya? One oni bastard is plenty of harassment-fiend for Gen 1, nya."
Akane sighed and steered the topic elsewhere, more or less.
"So, what's the score, nya?"
"Getting to see Mary-chan embarrassed was satisfying. …But the judging stays serious. Four points."
"If it were just Mary-chan, maybe, but this is far too shameful to make an elderly kannushi read aloud… I suppose I'm a four as well?"
Rin and Aki were both comparatively harsh. There were prizes on the line, so a fair evaluation was only proper.
"Don't like the content, nya… but for something like this, you can tell they actually studied, nya. It's a parody of the Dragon God's norito, nya? Still, they copied too much, so factoring that in, about a six, nya."
"Five, for the same reason. And this sentence is a little awkward in how it reads. You referenced the modern-language translation that comes up right at the top of a search, didn't you? But the interpretation generally accepted as standard is…"
"Um, Mary-chan? Isn't the feedback a little too detailed, starting with the very first entry? The viewers who meant to enter are going to get scared and run away."
"It's fine, Rokumondera-senpai. Applications are already closed, so they can't run anymore!"
"Is that actually okay…?"
In the end, setting aside the moments when Mary could no longer endure her discomfort as a specialist and started picking the entries apart, the stream flowed well enough.
"Really, though… don't you think our kamuy is superior to some imprisoned reptile god?"
"Finally lost it? A shrine maiden with nothing she won't say in front of a god."
Of course, in a collab, "well enough" meant "fairly noisy, on account of the banter actually landing." Akane personally didn't much care for a racket, but she was a broadcaster too, and she couldn't help reacting the moment the sound started to thin out.
At any rate, just as the broadcast seemed to be continuing without incident—
"……Mind if I step away for a moment, nya?"
"Tama-senpai? Yes, that's fine, but did something happen all of a sudden?"
"Someone showed up at the house out of nowhere. Gonna go check, nya. Sorry, nya."
Ting. Ting. Without warning, a clear bell-tone reached Akaba Akane's ear. No—it was closer to a sound ringing inside her head. A veil of spellcraft, meant to isolate the main sanctuary where the god actually dwelled from the surface world. The signal that someone had crossed that boundary.
In itself, it was no great problem. Worshippers were rare at this hour of the evening, true, but a barrier meant for the surface was, put another way, easily breached by residents of the hidden world who could recognize an anomaly. A barrier that kept out even hidden-world people would disqualify a shrine that had to receive worshippers, so the arrangement was only natural.
But if the air of the pair approaching the shrine—or, to use the more fitting word, their spiritual power—was anything but ordinary, that was another matter. As if daring this side to come out and receive them, they were scattering power in every direction with no thought of concealment. She could feel the mountain's beasts and souls fleeing, crushed beneath that presence. Akaba let out a sigh, threw a denim jacket over her camisole, and stepped outside.
On a nameless unease, she left the residence with a bundle of talismans and a sheaf of neatly folded paper dolls.
The dolls that fell to the ground twisted strangely and became two wolves, falling in at her side. A crude grade of shikigami, but enough to buy time if things went as badly as they could.
By the time Akane had come as far as the front of the worship hall, she could make out a man and a woman just passing through the torii. A huge man with his head cropped short, like a soldier or a monk. And beside him a woman who only looked small because of the company she kept; look closely and she had to be a good five foot seven or more, her hair cut to about her shoulders. They wore neat black clerical vestments, clerical collars fastened at their throats as if that were the most natural thing in the world.
"…Holy Knights?"
Akane recognized them at once. Thoroughly trained muscle. A scar on the man's cheek, and the woman's left eye a prosthetic outright, so both of them had clearly lived by the blade. A woman in a priest's vestments, short of cosplay, could only be an armed exorcist—in other words, a Holy Knight. There were plenty of other grounds besides, but above all else, they were armed. A long cruciform sword with an extended crossguard slung across the woman's back, and a man in studded gloves with his sleeves rolled up. They had plainly come prepared to fight if it came to that.
Akane watched them with a face gone stiff.
"You two. What did you come here for?"
People trampling a god's dwelling with weapons in hand and dirt on their feet. There was no need to offer them courtesy.
"We came to investigate the tiger that's said to live here."
"Investigate? …Ah."
It was the woman carrying the sword who answered. Hearing it, Akane recalled something, and murmured.
"The thing Shion mentioned."
The flood of ghosts, back when Mary absorbed the divinity of Tatari no Moyoko-sama. The cause had been that all manner of evil spirits were hiding inside that divinity—born from the terror of a serial killer—gnawing at it from within. By all rights it should have ended with an apology to Lady Moyoko, who had overnight been turned into a popular restaurant. And yet.
"…Something's wrong."
Kure Rikka, daughter of the shrine, had said as much before they parted that day. Before she was of a priestly bloodline, she was an anomaly specialist attached to the Onmyoryo.
"There are ones who died charging in without even being able to gauge an Apostle's power. Amateurs by the common sense of the hidden world, and raw amateurs in their own senses and skill."
They hadn't even known an Apostle's reputation, and even if ignorance excused that, they had seen the opponent with their own eyes and still failed to grasp the gap. Behavior, in other words, close to that of a newborn anomaly, barely hatched.
"I don't think creatures of that level could pull a cunning trick like this. One or two might have stumbled onto the idea by chance, but what we just saw was easily ten of them."
"…So it wasn't them. Someone else intervened?"
"Maybe."
There was a chance a mastermind existed apart from them. That fact had been reported, through Kure Rikka and Han Seoyeon, to the Onmyoryo and the Church respectively, and an investigation of various gods and buddhas had followed. And when a not-insignificant number of divinities were in fact discovered with their godhood being eaten away, the guess was revealed as truth. Han Seoyeon had passed that information along only a few days ago. Even now, a great many onmyoji and Holy Knights were probably scouring every corner of Japan, working to settle the matter.
"If that's what this is, Shi— Apostle Bartholomew already inspected the place and left, a long time ago. You can just go back. If you want, should I fetch the certificate?"
A certificate Han Seoyeon had left under her own name, telling them to show it to anyone who wouldn't believe them.
"And how are we supposed to trust that? There's no guarantee it isn't forged."
"……What?"
Akane couldn't help but scowl at the answer. What on earth was this woman saying? No idiot impersonates an Apostle. The only result is the punishment of the Apostle who comes looking in person. And anyone with the power to withstand that would have no need to borrow an Apostle's authority in the first place. Yet here this woman was, saying something that stood in complete opposition to that common sense of the hidden world. Akane could only be dumbfounded.
"Impersonate an Apostle just to get through this moment? Do I look like I want to die? Or is it that you can't see straight, with only one eye?"
Akane shoved a hand into her jacket pocket and glared. The other woman looked back with the single eye she had.
"…No. That wasn't it."
A moment later, watching the woman unfasten the chain at her waist—from a distance Akane had taken it for a belt, and it wasn't—she understood.
"Whether it's true or not doesn't matter. Does it?"
They were Holy Knights, plainly declaring their will to fight. Somehow, Akane forced down the wolves, which had begun to growl at that killing intent.
"Right. You lot were always bastards like that. Goddamn Church brats."
What came to mind was her first meeting with Han Seoyeon. Why had both she and Tsunashi Tenka thought of subduing her before they ever tried to talk? Simple. Japan's Holy Knights were, as a rule, a breed you could not reason with.
Root and branch. Remove the anomaly before an incident involving one can break out. That, more than anything, was the ordinary code of conduct of the Japanese Catholic Church.
"You planning to put down an anomaly your own boss guaranteed?"
"An Apostle is not a superior."
"Oh, for fuck's sake. We really got the ones you can't talk to."
Even so, the reason people tied up with anomalies—Akane among them—could go on living ordinary lives was that a comparatively moderate faction still existed inside the Church. It mattered a great deal, in particular, that the two currently rated the strongest in Japan—Han Seoyeon, an Apostle, and Mika Eru, who had been an Apostle Candidate—were out and active, throwing their weight around in the manner of these people are under my guarantee, so don't touch them. To ignore that guarantee was the same as announcing they meant to pick a fight with an Apostle.
"Even if this goes well and you somehow manage something against Lord Sanmeedora, you'll die to an Apostle. You know that?"
"If I throw this one body away and perish together with an anomaly that might be dangerous, that ought to be enough."
"…Crazy bastard."
There was no further point in talking. Even if she tried, they no longer seemed inclined to listen. Akane sighed over what a wretched lot hers was, and then drew her hand from her pocket and snapped her fingers.
At once the two wolves split left and right and lunged at the two Holy Knights. Of course she knew this much would never work on professionals. So the real attack was elsewhere.
Sanmeedora no Kami, the formless tiger spirit, charged the Holy Knights from behind in the same instant the wolves moved. A complete ambush. It should have been.
"If it can't be seen, it can't be fought. That's what you thought, I take it."
"……."
The pincer that had failed the last time she tried it on Han Seoyeon. Taking to heart the advice that Seoyeon had pinned their position by line of sight, this time she didn't so much as glance toward the tiger. Even so, the woman met Sanmeedora's eyes dead-on. The pupil that was not the prosthetic was glowing, faintly.
Akane didn't know exactly what it was, but she was sure there was something in that eye. By the time she realized it, it was already too late. A chain wound around the tiger's neck, cinched hard, and slammed that huge body into the ground. Pinning the beast's neck underfoot, the woman reached for her back. She had meant to draw the sword and cut its breath short.
"Even so, it seems a god isn't perfectly visible."
"…Tch!"
There was only one reason the execution was not carried out on the spot. Sanmeedora had two heads. The tiger bit through the chain with the maw that wasn't bound, twisted its body, and slipped free. An instant later it opened the distance in a flash and returned to Akane's side.
The Holy Knight clicked her tongue and flung the severed chain to the ground. Then, with a clean motion, she leveled the cruciform sword their way.
…Damn it.
She had dodged the immediate crisis, somehow. But no matter how she turned it over, she couldn't see an answer. Just now she had only stabbed at an opening. That the other side was clearly a tier above was certain. Worse still, the other one hadn't moved at all. Against someone a tier above her, she was losing on numbers too.
"I am seriously going to lose it."
Even so, not fighting was not among the options. That last move alone made it plain. Those bastards had come all the way to this shrine to kill a god. Akane's expression twisted again, and she spat on the ground, irritated.
"Damn it. It'll work out somehow. I've fought an Apostle before. Why wouldn't I manage against a couple of grunts?"
To say it again, there wasn't really a choice. Akane hurled every talisman she had brought up into the sky and scattered them. Through the shrine grounds, awash in the colors of evening, black smoke began to spread.