Righteousness, Truth, and Holiness (1)
The organism known as a holy knight is, as a baseline, possessed of formidable power. Reach the station of Apostle, and one is treated, in practice, as a strategic weapon.
This is no figure of speech. It is strategy in the strict military sense — the tier above tactics and operations. In other words, they are monsters who, should they ever truly cut loose, can overturn an entire theater of war.
The movements of such an Apostle are therefore handled as a matter of genuine weight. If one so much as crosses a national border, that scarcely needs saying.
Whenever word went out that an Apostle was being dispatched to a given country, the press of the hidden world would, without fail, be howling about it from a full month in advance.
And yet Han Seoyeon learned of Alejandra's arrival only after the woman had already passed the gates at Narita Airport. That meant either she had been handed a confidential mission that had to be carried out in the utmost secrecy...
"Say, Seoyeon. Any chance I could pull a friend's privilege and pick up the merch early?"
"I fail to see how that would be possible."
...or that the reason was something wholly personal, and impulsive.
Han Seoyeon regarded the person before her. The brown of that skin was no tan; she had been born to it. The stranger out of South America faced her in an outfit so perfectly that of a tourist it was almost insulting — straw hat, sunglasses, and all.
"Tch... so it really can't be done."
"That 'really' suggests you already knew it couldn't. Why, then, did you ask in the first place."
"Well, you never know, do you?"
The woman — Alejandra Monica Lopez Sanchez, Apostle Matthias — slumped back in her chair and let out a stifled laugh.
"If it can't be done, then it can't, and that's fine by me. Getting them early would've been the dream, but I wasn't planning to leave the country before then anyway."
"...You are quite a severe case."
Han Seoyeon said it with a wry smile. Anyone who could hear that an Apostle had come to Japan in pursuit of VTuber merch and fail to react this way was no inhabitant of the hidden world.
The image of Alejandra in a Rokumondera merch T-shirt still sat vivid in her memory, but strictly speaking, her oshi lay with Komori Sae — Mary's peer from the same generation. More precisely, one ought to call her a fan of the woman inside that avatar, Bansei Marin. She belonged, however, to the faction cheering on Marin's reincarnation as a VTuber, so the distinction hardly mattered.
And before long the second generation would mark the first anniversary of their debut. Special broadcasts and commemorative merchandise had been announced for the occasion, and it was these that Alejandra had entered Japan to chase.
"No — that isn't really the conversation I wanted to have with you, Seoyeon. I mean that."
At Seoyeon's remark, though, Alejandra's face soured. Only a little, but the irritation was genuine.
Alejandra would admit, even to herself, that she had a streak of the hardcore fan. Even so, how could she ever compare with Han Seoyeon? However fierce the devotion, it had never climbed into the realm of faith.
"I, for my part, never went so far as to scheme my way into merchandise before the release window."
"No, that's... a slightly different matter, I'd say. And besides — that restraint of yours isn't healthy fandom at all, is it? It comes from holding yourself back so you don't break a religious taboo."
The two fell silent, and each quietly sipped the drink set before her.
"Nice café. The Church runs this place, doesn't it?"
"Yes. When we arranged to meet today, you hinted that you wanted somewhere discreet."
And then, with no one needing to suggest it, they changed the subject. Both of them knew perfectly well that pressing the previous thread any further would only mean jabbing at one another's sore spots.
Alejandra's gaze traveled over the room. The café was full of people, but she spared not a moment's worry on the matter of secrecy. Everyone here was, in any case, someone the Church had planted.
If two Apostles gathered in a place locked away in total secrecy, that alone would set a rumor moving that something was afoot. For that reason the Church kept, as a rule, a handful of venues open to the outside world and yet controllable at a moment's notice. This café was one such example.
Of course, even a space like this would betray the original premise if one simply rented it out for the day and talked between the two of them alone. The wall of people existed precisely to prevent that. Two figures alone in a spacious café would look suspicious; a shop packed to the walls, by contrast, would never strike anyone as the site of a secret conversation — and with no seats remaining, the crowd itself kept further customers from coming in.
"So. What is this actually about? I trust that two Apostles did not arrange to meet alone merely so that you might commission me for merchandise."
Han Seoyeon asked it while looking Alejandra in the eye.
Coming all the way to Japan for a favorite VTuber. Alejandra's fandom ran deep enough that this, in itself, was nothing strange. Seoyeon was herself a woman of whom one could fairly say that a solid three-tenths of her life was the VTuber life.
But if Alejandra had gone so far as to hint that she wanted a discreet space, it could not be only that. True, asking someone to quietly divert a little merch was not the sort of request one made in public. Even so, it was hardly a matter that required borrowing the power of the Church, and Seoyeon could not help concluding that there must be a second piece of business.
"Mmm. Of course there is. But first, let me correct one thing."
Alejandra grinned and laid a hand on the trunk bag set beside her chair.
At that, Seoyeon's eyes narrowed. So it had not been a bag she had simply brought along while changing lodgings?
Even as she wondered, Alejandra's hands opened the trunk. From inside came a silver briefcase of aluminum alloy. She set it on the table, clicked through a combination, and from within emerged yet another box of metal.
Only after Alejandra drew one key from her trouser pocket and another from the pocket at her breast, and undid the locks, could Seoyeon at last confirm the contents. It was a laptop. Not especially broad, and yet quietly thick — somehow it gave off the air of something old-fashioned.
Seoyeon knew, of course, that it was no mere outdated machine, heavy and nothing more. It was not the first time she had seen the thing, and given how secretively it had been kept, it would have been strange not to understand that much.
Alejandra opened the laptop and turned it so the screen faced Seoyeon. The display was pitch black. And then, upon it, a string of pure white characters appeared.
That the sentence had come out in Korean — had that been a courtesy, for Seoyeon's sake?
"Japanese is fine. Miss Alejandra is not exactly fluent in Korean."
"In any case, it has been a long time. And welcome to Japan — Abraham."
What Alejandra had meant to correct, it seemed, was the premise that there were only two Apostles present. Seoyeon wore a wry smile, and yet she welcomed him with a measure of genuine feeling.
Abraham Delta Schors. By another name, Apostle James the Greater. He was an artificial intelligence wrought by human hands.
In every age, now and then, a genius appears who single-handedly shifts the paradigm of a field, or shakes the world itself.
Such people are, by nature, the sort of whom one or two might emerge in a century, if that. In this respect the early twenty-first century had been considerably exceptional. Perhaps it owed something to the string of incidents crowding the turn of the century. Beings beyond every standard of measure had existed seven at once, within a single generation.
They were called — because they were existences that simply could not be cut to the measure of common sense — the Seven Great Madmen of the World, or the Seven Sisters.
Anna Anderson, of vampiric stock, the very architect of the strategy for stabilizing the world through the Secrecy Protocol. Elif Yazıcı, who saw through the state of the world with perfect clarity even while locked in a solitary cell. Mister F, suspiciously awash in money. The nameless Necromancer, who caused one major incident after another and whose identity went undiscovered even at the hour of death. Professor Senjoji, the authority on the theory of anomalies. Black Rabbit, the hacker of the age, who treated every security system as a personal playground.
At present more than half had vanished or died, and most of the rest lived quietly, cooperative with the social order, so their fame had faded somewhat beside the old days. Even so, they were not figures one could simply dismiss.
"Doctor" Laura Groothuizen was a woman counted among those seven.
Set beside the other six, she came closest to the ordinary image of a genius ahead of her time — a being who was, quite literally, the stereotype of the mad scientist. In the sense of personality, and in the sense of talent alike.
Among the inventions that mad scientist had produced was the strong artificial intelligence called Abraham. Because the version in which it was at last completed was the third, its formal designation became Abraham-Delta.
He was, at the same time, the first artificial intelligence ever to receive baptism, and in the end the first case in the history of the Church in which a non-living being ascended to an Apostolic Seat.
A creation of human hands that turned its back on its own creator and came to serve God — an exceptional case, referred to half in jest on the internet as proof of Roman Catholicism's triumph in the contest of faiths. That was Abraham Delta, who bore the baptismal name of Schors. And one of the terminals carrying his data sat, at this very moment, before Han Seoyeon.
"...The Church has drawn its blade in earnest."
So she murmured, almost at once. Even granting that God's Peace had been invoked ahead of an Apostolic council, dispatching two Apostles at a single stroke was by no means an ordinary matter. By Japan's reckoning, the sending of Apostle Matthias and Apostle Thomas to track the Vampire Syndrome had been only about half a year prior, so it was not exactly the first such thing in an age. Even so.
"With this particular combination, the purpose is an investigation after all."
"Ding-ding-ding! Seoyeon really is quick on the uptake about things like this. So hopeless when it comes to people's hearts, though. ...Well, that's old news too, I suppose."
Over the past few years, since she had begun living steeped in VTubers, Han Seoyeon had grown a little less like a robot. Idols really do make a person grow — so Alejandra decided, entirely on her own, and nodded in satisfaction.
"Now that God's Peace has been declared, the administrative paralysis over Japan's hidden world has eased a little, hasn't it? We're gathering that manpower, and this time we mean to catch the Vampire Syndrome by the tail. We'll be opening an investigation of our own, but if you turn over whatever you've dug up on your own, Seoyeon, we'll analyze it down to the bone."
Seoyeon accepted that. Alejandra was someone of enough standing to be dispatched a second time on the Vampire Syndrome investigation. Her insight and her gift for analysis must be acknowledged even in the upper ranks of the Church. As for Abraham, who was data itself, that went without saying.
The epithet Apostle James — Abraham — had received in his capacity as a Gravekeeper was the Prophet. It came, of course, from his miracle of foretelling what lay ahead.
They had sent this particular pairing. Seoyeon could not help but be convinced that the Church had truly resolved, this time, to lay hands on Hermes Trismegistus.
...Well. That Alejandra, of all the Apostles, had been the one selected probably owed a great deal to her own vehement insistence, on grounds of the VTuber life.
Even so, Abraham at least would have been dispatched on the judgment of the Holy See alone, with no personal will mixed in.
"...This really was a dispatch by the Holy See's judgment, wasn't it?"
Grown vaguely uneasy, Seoyeon asked again. The thought had occurred to her from watching the people around her — Apostles living the VTuber life, demons living the VTuber life.
"Nothing. Mere idle talk, really. I only wondered whether, like Miss Alejandra, you had entered Japan for the sake of Anathema Production merchandise."
"Of course not. It would be difficult enough for there to be more than one case like Miss Alejandra's."
Only after hearing that answer did Seoyeon let out a sigh of relief. It was not, strictly speaking, anything to be anxious about. Somehow, though, it had felt like the thing to do.
...What?
For an instant, Seoyeon doubted her own eyes. An Apostle's keen vision swept the same sentence three times in rapid succession. Then she opened her mouth again.
"Pardon?"
"Pardon? Pardon?"
"Ah. Seoyeon's broken. Well, she has been in service a long time."
"Par... don?"
The world swam before Seoyeon's eyes. After she clicked the channel link Abraham had sent her, it swam harder still.
The fellow Apostle she had not seen in so long had, in the virtual world, already become female.