Old Testament: The Lament of Ninomae (4)
The beam of her phone's flashlight raked the leaf-strewn dirt path. Her eyes widened at the trace of something—though it did not take long to see that they were only the prints of a deer that had passed.
Han Seoyeon was combing every corner of Mount Oe for the evil spirit behind the falls.
I must have been thinking about this all wrong.
An oni's dwelling, she had vaguely assumed, would sit somewhere near the summit. But the accidents, when she thought back, had befallen the shrine's worshippers more than anyone. Which was to say she ought to have put the ground below the shrine at the head of her suspects.
It would have been so much better to realize that before she reached the top. Han Seoyeon let out a long sigh, and in the end she went trudging back down. She could not have said how far she walked before she found herself near the Inari Shrine again.
"......"
Then, all at once, the reek of beast pricked her nose, and with it the raw tang of blood.
Han Seoyeon frowned.
It might well be nothing. Mountain beasts quarreled among themselves often enough, or one of them might simply be wounded and wandering alone. Even so, she turned her steps toward the source of the smell. Her only grounds were a feeling—an Apostle's intuition. She knew from experience that little good ever came of ignoring a feeling like this.
A moment later a beast came into Seoyeon's view: a bear, badly wounded and maddened, eyes rolled white, foam clotting its jaws.
No. The order of it was probably the reverse. The thought arrived on its own. It had not been wounded and then grown frantic; it had raged, and the wounds had come of the raging.
Then what had driven it to rage?
The answer was plain. Along the back hunched like a hunchback's, a tumor swelled as if fit to seethe, and that only confirmed it. The beast had fallen under an evil spirit's unclean power. It had lost its reason—or rather, what it had lost was closer to the instinct for survival. People often went docile at the sight of an Apostle's title, but beasts usually bolted the instant their eyes met hers, long before they could have known her station.
The bear over there did not even do that. It glared this way, and from its whole body poured a miasma so vile it turned the stomach. If it would not run, then that, in its way, saved her the trouble. Watching the beast sidle closer at a prowl, Han Seoyeon slipped a hand into her bag.
Her fingertips met the heavy haft of a hammer. The Hammer of Saint Margaret.
—Rustle.
"...?!"
But she never drew it. The instant her hand closed on the haft, she heard leaves crumbling underfoot—the tread of something on two legs, not a sound she could take for another resident of Mount Oe the way she might this bear sunk in unclean power.
"Huh?"
The owner of those footsteps showed herself only a moment later. Ninomae Hitomi. Han Seoyeon's expression tightened.
This is a problem.
Why Ninomae was here did not matter. A night stroll, or some other purpose—Seoyeon could not know, and did not need to. What posed the problem, right now, was the woman's existence itself. Ninomae was a human of the surface world, and to someone like her a woman who beat a bear to death with a single small hammer was a thing that defied all common sense.
"Ah—ahhh?! A b-bear...?! Shion-san?!"
She had even let herself hope the other might be too sleep-addled to grasp the situation. The way those eyes flew wide in shock put an end to that. Of course it did. Meet a bear on a mountain, and whatever sleep you had left would flee with the rest of you.
Han Seoyeon sighed inwardly and drew her hand back out of the bag. Glaring at the bear, she eased one careful step away.
First, get clear of this place.
Out of Ninomae's sight, bear and all. That was the heart of it.
Ideal, if I take the hit and tumble down the slope.
Should the bear charge, she would seize it as if they had merely gotten tangled and throw herself down the mountainside—the soundest way out, and the most natural. The cleanup would be simple enough. She could call it a miraculous survival and spend a while laid up in a hospital bed.
That it might leave Ninomae with a trauma of her own... honestly, she had not thought that far. The situation was too urgent to spare it. The beast was still coming on at a walk, but there was no telling when it might kick off the ground and come hard.
Han Seoyeon let her breath out slowly and set her teeth, lightly. A Holy Knight grew used to pain, but that did not mean she felt nothing at all. Colliding with a bulk like that would mean bracing for a considerable impact.
The bear took one step closer. Seoyeon gave back exactly that much ground.
Then she met the beast's eyes. They were utterly vacant, the soul gone out of them, but the set of those firmly planted hind legs let her read the intent.
It's coming.
Any moment now, the beast would—
—Thwack!
"...What?"
The dull sound rang out in that very instant.
Its source came shining out of the dark, spun glittering through the empty air, and dropped with a soft thud onto the carpet of leaves. Ninomae's phone, the flashlight still burning.
A creak. Struck square in the head out of nowhere, the bear turned its head with terrible slowness. Sharp teeth showed between its gaping jaws, and wet spit strung down in long threads.
"Ah... uaah......"
Ninomae faced the beast. Han Seoyeon stared at her, blank.
So many feelings crowded Ninomae's face that the old phrase seemed made for it—a countenance where every emotion crossed at once. Terror, with an enraged animal before her eyes. Regret, as if she wanted to demand of herself why on earth she had done such a thing. And, faint beneath the rest, relief.
"Hhk... ah, kkh......"
The beast turned its whole body at a crawl. It looked as though it had shifted its target entirely onto Ninomae. Her legs shook without cease, and as she stumbled backward they finally gave out beneath her. She sat down hard. Tears welled.
Death lies in wait wherever there is life, and yet to a modern sensibility it has a way of feeling distant, far off. Ninomae was staring that unfamiliar death in the face. Her throat closed of its own accord. So this was what people meant, the thing you only ever heard tell of—a fear so great it would not even let you scream.
And then her eyes met Han Seoyeon's. Ninomae looked toward her with a face soaked through with tears, and somehow, to Seoyeon, it seemed only as if she were forcing herself to smile.
A moment later her mouth worked, gaping without a sound. Her lips trembled so badly it was closer to a spasm; there was no reading the words at all. The intent came through regardless. Seoyeon understood, at last, why the woman had been holding even a faint relief in a moment like this. Ninomae was telling her to run. Now. This very instant.
...Thud.
And in the end, the moment the beast threw back its head and roared, Ninomae could not overcome the terror. She fainted.
It hardly needed saying that the bear—which had already marked her as prey from the instant she went down—came bounding in with delight. Of course, the beast never got what it wanted. Han Seoyeon, who no longer had any need to consider the Secrecy Protocol, was a step ahead of it.
She ripped the hammer from the bag in a flash and brought it down at an angle across the unguarded back of the skull. That was the end of it.
The bear pitched forward and hit with a boom that advertised the whole of its massive weight. The wound-riddled body lay prone, twitching.
"......"
Han Seoyeon held her silence. She lifted her gaze from the beast to the woman who had fallen, clothes soiled with dirt and crumbled leaves, looked down at her a moment, and then carefully gathered that body into her arms.
"......"
Han Seoyeon Margarita looked at the woman laid upon the bedding.
She had made the clothes clean by sacred power, and, just in case, breathed into her a healing so abundant it overflowed. That ought to have finished the aftermath where Ninomae was concerned. Even so, she could not take her eyes off her.
It was only natural. Seoyeon owed her a life.
Not that Han Seoyeon had truly stood at the edge of death. She had power enough to laugh a thing like this aside. From where Ninomae stood, though, that had not been true at all. She would have thought Seoyeon might die, and afterward believed that death was coming for herself—and still she had chosen to drag the beast's eyes onto her own.
She had no great strength. She was a dweller of the surface, and not even a gifted one among those: an ordinary woman short on exercise, the sort who panted her way up a mountain path. From the start, Seoyeon had thought her timid and frail, the sort of person who stirred, oddly, the urge to protect. That was the whole of the impression.
And that weak woman had picked a fight with a beast, to save Han Seoyeon.
To wear eyes like that, in a moment like that.
Even to the instant she sensed death coming and the thread of her mind slipped loose inside the terror, the relief never left her gaze. From the moment the bear turned its attention off Han Seoyeon, Ninomae had been smiling—glad, truly glad. The fear must have been the greater thing, for it had not quite managed to show on her face.
Han Seoyeon found it hard to accept. Her head understood. She could not reach empathy.
To throw one's body away to save another, weak though one was—that was never a decision easily made. Everyone's own life is precious. Even when the other person is family, people know how hard it is, which is why, now and then, they hear some anecdote from the scene of an accident and praise a parent's love.
But Han Seoyeon was not even that. Not blood kin, of course, and not so much as a close friend. They had grown a little fond of each other, talking through a school assignment, yet theirs was a relationship that would part and be forgotten once the work was done. Strangers, for all practical purposes.
And still Ninomae had staked her life for her. No—given how little stood between them, it would have been no different had some third person been standing there in her place.
A damnably good person.
Someone who could cast their life away for the single purpose of saving a person, whoever that person might be. Not even the noblesse oblige of the strong—self-sacrifice carried out by someone genuinely frail.
So people like this really did exist. Han Seoyeon let out a small sigh.
At any rate, it was time to move again. The moment had come to finish the work she had set aside, having put bringing the woman back first.
Only after turning, again and again, to make sure of Ninomae did Han Seoyeon finally step back out of the shrine.
She trudged along the mountain path sunk in darkness. She had walked it once already, and her feet moved without hesitation. When at last she stopped, a great bear lay sprawled on its back before her—not of its own will, it seemed, for it kept thrashing, trying to rise.
What held the attempt down was a single silver-plated claw hammer resting on its chest. That alone, and still the bear could only pant, unable to get up.
"There is no point in struggling. This is the Hammer of Saint Margaret. ...Not that I expect you to understand."
A sacred armament that had beaten down Satan in the form of a dragon. Against a beast possessed by an evil spirit, there was no better specific.
Sure enough, the bear gave no sign of understanding her, and twisted its body hard. Each time, the hammer stirred by the slightest fraction—so the resistance was not wholly meaningless.
Whether the evil spirit's power ran that deep, or the beast itself had simply been born with a powerful frame—
"Kokkuri-san—"
Either way, Han Seoyeon had no reason to leave it be.
She formed a hand seal twice in swift succession, and at the last shaped a fox with one hand and leveled it at the beast. It was not a technique she often used in a real fight—given a free hand, Seoyeon would rather spend the opening on one more bullet—but in a situation with no combat to it, she had nothing to hesitate over.
"Kokkuri-san, please come here."
She snapped her wrist downward, and the bear was crushed flat against the ground by something unseen. Only after even its shivering spasms had ceased did Han Seoyeon approach.
What she drew from the handbag a moment later was a pistol. The shrine was close, though, and she had no intention of firing. Instead she took a silver bullet from the cylinder, crouched, and set it against the bear's brow.
Then she curled her middle finger as if pressing it beneath her thumb and—thwack—flicked the back of the round. The beast twisted at the pain.
People of old believed a piece parted from the body could still act upon the whole. That was why they made a doll with someone's hair and drove nails into it, meaning to lay a curse. This was not so different an act. She had merely used the remnant of an evil spirit in place of hair, and a doll of hide and flesh in place of straw.
Of course, a metaphor thrown together in such haste could hardly land a meaningful blow......
It was enough, though, to make the thing flinch.
For a while Han Seoyeon gazed toward somewhere far off, her focus slightly unfixed, and then she smiled, faintly.
"Found it."
Laden to the brim with a profane stench, the wind flowed past.