Old Testament: The Lamentations of Ninomae (5)
A bleak wind drifted through the narrow cave. Something like a lizard was scrabbling upward with a dry, ticking rustle when a gleam of silver punched clean through it and left it a pulp.
It was a consecrated silver bullet—though not fired the way a bullet is meant to be fired. She had flicked the whole cartridge, casing and all, off her fingers and struck true. Noise was a concern, and she had not brought many rounds to begin with; wasting them on petty spirits of this caliber would have been a shame. With that thought, Han Seoyeon stooped and picked the bullet back up.
Then she turned her steps deeper into the cave. A stench sharp enough to sting the nose came flooding out, close to the smell of rotting meat and yet not quite the same. Only the entrance was narrow. Step inside, and the space opened wide, and there Han Seoyeon saw an enormous fox.
It did not look well at all. The bright yellow fur was stiff and caked with mud, and the legs were gaunt enough to notice at a glance. In that state it had sunk nearly flat against the ground, panting in harsh, ragged breaths.
The being standing before it, by contrast, was imposing in the extreme. Tiger-striped cloth wrapped the great brute's body, and a horn jutted from her brow. Her skin was a dull, unhealthy red; set aside the matter of her sex, and she was an oni lifted straight out of a fairy tale.
From her shadow the same lizards Seoyeon had just seen came crawling up in a slow swarm. The fox dragged its exhausted body forward to claw the petty spirits and crush them, but the movements were weary and sluggish even at a glance, and it could not put them all down. One or two slipped away to the side.
With a wet splat, Han Seoyeon hurled silver bullets into the stragglers.
"And who are you supposed to be?"
The oni had been cackling as she watched the lizards the fox had missed. At the sight of them bursting apart her brow furrowed, and only then did she turn her eyes on Han Seoyeon.
"Just a Holy Knight passing through."
"A Holy Knight? ...Aha. One of those Jesus-mongering curs, are you?"
Han Seoyeon offered neither denial nor agreement. She simply drew a weapon from her handbag. At first it was difficult to tell what the thing was, but when she gave her wrist a light flick, the folded sections sprang open and showed their true shape.
A folding single-edged sword.
"Oho. Amusing equipment. Brought over from the West, was it?"
"I don't believe I have any reason to tell you."
"Cheeky. Well then—do you mean to fight me? In this fox's place?"
"Of course."
At Han Seoyeon's answer, the oni grinned and kicked the fox spirit flying. Seoyeon had already suspected as much, but the oni did indeed have the strength to smash straight through the Inari god's defenses. That she had not was entirely a matter of her own will—whether to mock a god whose power had failed, or to wait until the god starved outright and then absorb it, Seoyeon could not say.
Han Seoyeon leveled the point of the blade at the oni. The oni smirked, then took up the iron club she had leaned against the cave wall.
"Khahaha! Fine! Come at me if you—glurk!"
—And in the next instant, a fierce jet of water lanced from the tip of the blade and slammed into the oni's face.
The account given a moment ago, then, requires a slight correction. It was a folding water gun designed in the shape of a sword—a custom piece, of course, built for an ambush exactly like this.
"GYAAAAAAH?!"
The water inside was, naturally, no ordinary water. It was fresh and holy, consecrated a week prior by the Archbishop of the Osaka Archdiocese himself. Where it struck, the oni's face began to melt away with a hissing sizzle.
"You—you bastard, what happened to all that talk of jus—ghhk!"
"Rewarding good and punishing evil is justice too, is it not?"
Crack! Han Seoyeon closed the distance and drove a hammer into the oni's jaw. A holy ripple spread, quiet and even, through the cave.
Once it had come to that, what followed was obvious. Han Seoyeon beat the oni for a good long while, the way one thrashes a dog on the hottest day of summer.
"You cowardly little—ghk?!"
"Do be quiet."
It did not take long before Seoyeon had silenced the monster completely. The means by which she was quieted went by the name of cessation of vital activity. Only after the oni had breathed her last and scattered into ash did Seoyeon wipe her brow with her sleeve.
"Hm."
Well. A very small part of it had also been letting off steam. Han Seoyeon glanced at the Inari fox, still wheezing in thin, ragged breaths. For an instant—no more than an instant—she saw Ninomae Hitomi laid over that fox.
No. Of course Inari was not Ninomae. This spirit had originally possessed tremendous power, and had merely been faithful to the duty that power entailed.
"You've endured a great deal."
Even so, that was no reason to belittle the effort and devotion of the Inari god. Han Seoyeon bowed her head to the fox—partly a comfort for what it had suffered, and partly thanks for having kept watch over this mountain all the while.
The world ought not to be a place where the good are mocked and go unrewarded. Looking back, that was why Han Seoyeon had resolved to serve the Lord and become a Holy Knight in the first place. She had not defined it for herself in words this clear at the time, but the feeling had certainly been that. She was a servant of Christ because He was the Good Shepherd.
"This should hold for a while. The matter of the shrine priest will be settled promptly as well..."
In any case, the present business was finished. Han Seoyeon wiped the hammer lightly on her clothes and returned it to the bag.
If something still snagged at her, though...
"...Hmm."
Han Seoyeon looked again at the place where the oni had fallen. A sticky residue of vengeful grudge still filled the cave. Perhaps something else had played a part in the oni's growth. Judging by the state of that resentment, she wondered whether a murder—or something on that order—had taken place nearby.
Once she descended the mountain, she would need to look into it. Han Seoyeon let out a sigh.
"HYAAAAAH?!"
Ninomae shot upright with a scream.
"...Eh?"
She looked around at her surroundings, and the sound came out dazed.
Her last memory was of waking in the night, stepping outside, and being set upon by a bear. The scene before her eyes, however, was the room she had seen before falling asleep the day before.
"Did you have a nightmare?"
"A d-dream...?"
A moment later, that was the conclusion Ninomae reached. She had little choice. Set against the commotion still preserved in her memory, nothing here was dirty, and nothing was hurt.
In truth Han Seoyeon had secretly purified and treated her with holy power, but Ninomae had been unconscious at the time and had no way of knowing. On top of that, even Han Seoyeon—the very person she had met on the mountain—was feigning complete ignorance, so it could only settle in her mind as an unbearably vivid dream. And even supposing it had been real, that posed a problem of its own. How in the world had she survived, and made it back here?
"That aside... Miss Ninomae."
"Yes?"
"I—no. Please, take this."
Right around the time Ninomae was settling on that conclusion, Han Seoyeon carefully laid her own coat over her.
"AAAAH?!"
Only then did Ninomae grasp her own state. She was naked. She had stripped her clothes off to let them dry and slept that way, so of course she was. The blanket had covered her until a moment ago, but even that had slid away when she bolted upright. Flushing scarlet, Ninomae hurriedly clutched the coat over her chest.
A silence hung there.
Han Seoyeon, for her part, awkwardly looked away.
On an ordinary day this was not the sort of thing she would have minded. This time she could not help being conscious of it. She herself was the one who had undressed Ninomae. If Ninomae was to believe that all of it had been a dream, every condition had to remain identical to the moment just before she fell asleep, and the clothes she had put on to step outside were, of course, included in that.
A subtle current passed between the two of them.
"Th-then... shall we get ready to head back?"
"...Yes. Let's."
After a moment Han Seoyeon stole a glance at Ninomae's face. Still flushed—and yet she was making herself smile.
For the first time in a long while, it seemed there was something she wanted to do from here on.
I want to protect her.
That shy, innocent smile. That boundlessly kind heart.
Aware of the feeling, Han Seoyeon turned her eyes, for no particular reason, out the window and far away.
"Nothing much. I simply drew the shrine priest into the other side."
Leaning back into the cushion of a private booth at an internet café, Han Seoyeon answered calmly.
"Frankly, the problem was that no one knew things had come to this. Once you grasp it, it's the sort of thing you can settle quickly enough, isn't it?"
If one meant to ignore the Secrecy Protocol and make someone a resident of the other side, showing them a handful of supernatural phenomena was enough. Sanjo Yusuke at last began to carry out his role as the one truly responsible for the seal. Leaving him as he was had never been an option. Han Seoyeon had put the oni down, but if that alone had been the end of it, there would have been no need for a sealing in the first place.
A tradition spread too widely becomes, in itself, a cause of anomalous birth. Among Holy Knights, the phenomenon is called a scar left behind. The oni of Mount Oe was precisely such a case, and so he remained, in effect, immortal until the moment the legend of Shuten-doji was erased from the memory of most of the Japanese people. He would rise again someday. There was nothing for it but to repair the sealing system itself.
"At any rate, because of what happened then, regulations came into being—keeping at least two people responsible for a seal, and so on. Prior instruction on this side of things grew more systematic as well."
And so the affair of that time came to an end. Or it ought to have.
"Ah... yes. That. In the end, it was closed as cause unknown."
The more she investigated, the more certain it became that someone had died an unjust death in the area—and yet no physical evidence surfaced at all. Even after she borrowed Inari's power and all but tore the mountain up by the roots, she could not find so much as a splinter of human bone. The riddle remained unsolved, even at this very moment.
Abraham-Delta soon turned the conversation. No—as they themselves put it, this was the true main point, and so it would be fairer to say that only now, in the dead of night, had things come back around to where they belonged.
The AI's analysis had named Kan'in Tomoe as the Prophet.
"And the higher-ups..."
"I see." Han Seoyeon nodded.
"In that case, will you be heading back now, Abraham?"
If the enemy began to wonder why they had come to Japan, matters would grow considerably complicated. Han Seoyeon understood that perfectly well, and nodded.
"Is that an analysis?"
So saying, Abraham brought a smiling emoticon up on the monitor.
"...That is certainly not bad news."
Not on the level of an Apostle, granted, but a name of considerable fame had come up—and one in whom even Han Seoyeon could take an interest.
"I'll look forward to it. And... until next time, Abraham."
The Council of Apostles was not far off. To Abraham, who had reminded her of that, Seoyeon offered her farewell once more. They exchanged a few words beyond it, and then she stepped out of the internet café.