Sent into the Midst of the Heart (1)
A road that did not bother to distinguish street from sidewalk.
Ninomae Hitomi hummed under her breath as she went along at an unhurried plod, a tote bag hanging from one hand. She was on her way home from the supermarket, the shopping done.
Now that she had contracted her familiars in person and their intelligence had risen to match, an errand of this scale could easily have been left to them. Even so, for a thoroughly private reason — because the two of them were the ones who would be eating it, after all — Hitomi still insisted on seeing to such things herself.
...And partway through choosing the vegetables, she had even stopped to marvel, all alone: Hold on. Don't I look incredibly wifely right now?!
"Huh?"
In any case, it happened while Hitomi, the day's shopping finished as usual, was heading home.
There was a narrow alley she favored as a shortcut, and she was passing through it when she caught sight of someone. Where the lane opened onto the main road, a man sat in half-lotus, planted there as if to bar the way. That alone would have been suspicious enough, and his clothes only deepened the wrongness of the picture: an impeccable, expensive suit, set in perfect contrast to the fact that he had set his backside down on the bare ground. Over his face, a dark mask that called pockmarks to mind.
A suspicious character — or rather, the very specimen of a pervert. Hitomi swallowed, hard.
At once she turned to go back the way she had come. Needless danger was better avoided.
"Ninomae Hitomi."
"...Yes?"
But the moment her own name was spoken, she couldn't. Without thinking, Hitomi turned her head back toward the man.
Slowly, he was rising from where he had sat.
"Ninomae Hitomi. Is that correct?"
Rough Japanese. The pronunciation, at least, left her certain he was no local.
"...Ugh?!"
Their eyes met. The instant she looked straight into that mask — crude, somehow, in all its lumps and ridges — goosebumps rose over her entire body.
It was a sensation much like the first time she had faced Han Seoyeon. From deep in her soul, revulsion toward the man before her came boiling up. And yet it was subtly different from Seoyeon. If Seoyeon's eeriness had struck at the human part of Hitomi, this was the reverse.
Which meant the cause, too, would be the reverse of Han Seoyeon.
If Apostle Bartholomew Margarita was a butcher of humankind, then the man in front of her could only be called a butcher of vampires. The conviction settled into her by instinct alone.
A vampire hunter — and a professional worn smooth by long years of the work. That someone like him had come looking for her, knowing exactly who she was, sent a chill straight through Hitomi. Her guard sharpened of its own accord. Behind her back, in secret, she called up a familiar in the shape of a bat, wary that if she were seen reaching for her phone to contact someone, she might provoke him.
Seoyeon went to the church. She said she still had things to finish before she left the country. Send the familiar that way, and it'll be fine—
Flash!
"...Eh?"
But in the very next instant something flared bright across her vision, and the link to the familiar snapped at once. She looked that way without thinking, and there it was: the familiar itself, giving off an acrid reek of char as it scattered into ash.
Hitomi's head turned, stiff, back to the man.
"Ninomae Hitomi."
He was staring straight at her, not changed in the slightest from a moment before.
"—Correct?"
Her fingertips began to tremble. Part of it was the feeling of having been informed, flatly, that a cheap trick of this caliber would not work. More than that, though, she was certain that if the thing from a moment ago were turned on her, she would not come away intact.
What on earth was that? Magic? Or some weapon from the hidden world that I don't even know about?
What frightened her more was that she had not even been able to tell what the attack was. The greatest fear, after all, is the fear that comes of the unknown.
Perhaps she had to assume the worst. Still watching him, Hitomi reached a hand behind her, and a pitch-black hand stretched out of her shadow to press something into her palm. She drew it around in front of her.
A katana, still in its scabbard — one of the things Han Seoyeon had given her for self-defense.
"Wh-what is it you want?"
She had no confidence, even in herself, as to how much good it would do. But it was a comfort, however small, and so she put the question to him even as she stammered. There was always the chance he had not come for her out of hostility.
He doesn't look armed. A pistol or a knife hidden in his clothes, like Shion, at most... But the problem is that attack just now.
Even while she tried for conversation, her mind worked without pause, scraping for whatever information it could get.
What was that red light? There was heat in it, too, something hot... A railgun? A laser weapon? No — never mind whether a thing like that can even be made small. He never drew anything in the first place.
To all appearances he was empty-handed. Which meant the attack just now might be something he could use with no tool at all — a laser fired from the body itself, like some sleight of magic...
"...Ha?"
And in the instant that followed, Hitomi's thoughts stopped dead.
It was not that her focus had come apart under too many guesses flashing through her head. The opposite, if anything: a conclusion had arrived, and there was nothing left to consider. The trouble was only that the conclusion lay so far outside anything she had expected that she could hardly bring herself to accept it.
With trembling eyes, she looked at the masked man. Middle-aged. A foreigner, by his accent — and among foreigners, very likely from East Asia, to judge by the color of the hand he made no effort to hide. And that mask. It had the feel of something she had seen once before, while digging through old records.
Unless a person were an inheritor of one of Korea's intangible cultural properties, the number of people who would go about wearing a mask like that was vanishingly small.
And on top of all the rest—
Beams from the eyes.
Take that into account as well, and so far as Hitomi knew, exactly one person fit. He was also someone she had never once imagined meeting in a manner like this, and so owning up to it took her far too long.
"...Father?"
"...I have never had a daughter like you."
A father-in-law and a daughter-in-law, met in a shape that not even a dream would have predicted.
Han Jihan. His baptismal name was James.
A former soldier, born in the Republic of Korea — a man who, for the present, made his living as a Holy Knight.
As was usual for a Holy Knight of real excellence, a great many names had attached themselves to him. Poison Frog. The Red Knight. Vampire Slayer. Van Helsing. Malttugi. The Greatest Vampire Hunter. Tolmai — Talmai.
But the most famous of them, and the one used most often even if only as a joke, stood apart from the rest: the one among Bartholomew Margarita's teachers who shoots beams from his eyes.
A playful name, granted. And yet at the same time an exquisitely efficient title, one that accounted both for the peculiar standing of an Apostle's adoptive father and for that peculiar method of attack — beams, from the eyes.
"Um, that is... er... do you happen to drink coffee...?"
And it was this man whom Ninomae Hitomi now faced.
Han Seoyeon and Ninomae Hitomi's newlywed (?) home. On the living-room sofa, a man in a pitch-black Malttugi mask regarded her in silence.
"Thank you."
Hitomi carefully offered him the coffee she had just brewed, and the man — Han Jihan — answered with a small dip of his head.
Haah, of all the times for Shion not to be here... uuugh.
Her stomach felt sour, and no wonder. Han Seoyeon's father was, put another way, nothing other than Hitomi's own father-in-law. She had heard, besides, that he had disciplined Seoyeon with great severity from the time she was small. Granted, considering Han Seoyeon's abilities, there had been reason enough to train even a child without mercy. Even accounting for that, though, the first meeting a moment ago had been more than sufficient to tell her that this was not, by any stretch, a warm-hearted man.
Han Jihan removed the mask at an unhurried pace and took a sip of the coffee. A face nearly half mottled with burn scars came into view.
"With Seoyeon."
His gaze turned to Hitomi.
"What is your relationship?"
"...We're lovers."
There was a little hesitation in the answer, but it was not a lack of certainty. She had only felt a brief flush of embarrassment, unused as she still was to introducing herself to another person as someone's lover.
"Lovers."
Hearing her, Han Jihan murmured the word quietly. It did not seem that he had failed to understand the Japanese. He was only turning over what he had heard.
"Look after her."
"......Yes?"
And at the words that followed, barely a moment later, Hitomi's eyes darted, lost.
"Er — I don't think this is something I ought to be saying, but is it really all right to put it that way already? You might want to learn a little more about me first..."
"What meaning would there be in that?"
"No...? I mean, there would be some meaning, surely...?"
"Even if it came to light, out of nowhere, that you were an international terrorist."
A soft clink. He set the coffee cup down.
"You think that child would leave you?"
"That... I don't think so, no."
"Then what kind of person you are has no meaning in the present situation. Whomever Seoyeon is with is not a matter for me to involve myself in. And even if I did meddle, they hardly seem likely to break it off."
"Ehh..."
Having said precisely what he had come to say and nothing more, the man returned his attention to the coffee.
No — if you think about it in purely objective terms, he isn't wrong. But even so, to be this decisive...?
Ninomae Hitomi was certain of it.
This man, no matter how she turned it over, was an eccentric on a level beyond even Han Seoyeon.