Old Testament: Margarita, Age Fifteen (3)
There was, admittedly, the matter of her being underage. Even so, Han Seoyeon was, in every formal sense, an ordained Holy Knight of the Congregation for Divine Worship's Special Solemn Exorcism Knight Order—the body sometimes called the Direct Command.
Real combat she had seen time and again. Having taken the Vampire Slayer himself for a master, she had been thrown onto dangerous ground more often than not, and corpses were no novelty of one or two sightings. She had gone so far as to stain her own hands with blood. Hers, then, was a body that might be called somewhat accustomed to death.
"……."
And yet, before this carnage, her face crumpled before she could stop it.
The smell of searing meat came off the air on every side—blood flung without care, flesh crushed to pulp, the foul reek of excrement—and all of it braided together into the stench of the dead. Not even Han Seoyeon had ever looked so directly upon death in such volume. It was broad daylight, and still a corpse entered her eyes no matter where she turned. Shut them tight, and the terrible smell of meat stabbed at her nose all the same. For the first time since she was born, she found herself resenting the keenness of her senses.
"…Son of man, prophesy unto the breath."
Even in the midst of this, Seoyeon's mouth did not rest. She knew she was in no position to indulge a child's weakness. Nor was she unaware that even this horrific scene was what remained after it had already been gone over once; a considerable force had been recovering the bodies for some time already. The corpses Han Seoyeon was looking at now were like the grains of sand that slip through the fingers of one who tries to scoop them up—a fraction of a fraction, nothing more.
If I lose my grip now, it's over.
Han Seoyeon clenched the motorcycle's handlebars until they creaked. Yes. She could not afford to act like a child. If she did not move now, these terrible corpses would remain corpses for good, and so she laid the whip across her own will, that she might raise as many as she could before it was too late.
"Arise."
Confirming that human shapes flickered far off, Han Seoyeon brought the prayer to a brief close. The motorcycle's headlight began to blink of its own accord, shining with a sacred light. At the rear of the bike a pole had been raised high as a lightning rod, and around its upper length a serpent of bronze was coiled.
"O Almighty Lord."
"On earth as it is in heaven. As You covenanted with Israel before the prophet Ezekiel, so make Your covenant here in the Central Plains as well."
Metal though it was, the serpent turned its head this way and that from time to time. Now it hissed like a living snake; now it cried out as if in answer to Han Seoyeon's words.
Before long, the distant silhouettes stirred. That was the ground where a medical team—physicians of the hidden world, clergy, and volunteers, all mixed together—had gathered the corpses so the resurrection rite might proceed more easily. But several of those standing watch beside the laid-out dead started in alarm and rushed to the bodies. They felt for a pulse at the throat, and brought a hand before the nose to test for breath.
What each of them did was different. What came at the end was not. Right where they stood, without so much as shifting their posture, they turned their eyes on Han Seoyeon.
"This… is this even possible?"
"Th-they're really breathing."
There is a cursed phrase that binds no small number of those who work in medicine. It is not some sorcery laid on them by a grudge, but a lament of regret one pours out upon oneself.
Whether they had volunteered or been drafted by the Church, a fair number of those sent into a scene like this, on a task like this, would have had experience of surgery. Surely more than a few had known the horror of a patient growing cold in their hands. Had there been times when the mind, when instinct, had already judged it too late—and still they denied it and treated on, until the sand in the hourglass ran out ahead of them?
If so, this mission, to treat and suture corpses already long past the hour, may have been too cruel for them. No one had meant it to be so, and yet it must have felt like being mocked for those desperate failures of the past.
And those same people had just watched the hourglass turn over in truth. Treatment so empty of hope that it felt like mockery had, at the last, taken on meaning and become a miracle.
The gazes that came to Seoyeon were, as a matter of course, nine parts awe. Among them were some so overcome that they folded their hands and began to pray.
But Han Seoyeon had no room in which to be proud of it. Duty pressed hard against her chest. Without trading a single word with them, she held the motorcycle's speed and swept past as if only brushing by.
Jiangxi Province was vast, and the victims she still had to return to life lay heaped like a mountain.
"Right. So it's flying straight this way, with nothing at all to hinder it?"
The speaker was a middle-aged East Asian man whose hair had begun to thread with gray. His frame was a little ample, and perhaps for that reason he gave no impression of frailty whatever his years.
Yu Yan, President of the People's Republic of China, regarded the figure before him through narrowed eyes.
"…I have no excuse."
"No—what would you have to be ashamed of? Do you think I fail to see that the opponent is nothing but a monster?"
The man who had reported the situation bowed at the waist and apologized. Within the military it would have been faster to count his rank from the top, but even so, the man he faced was the Supreme Dignity of China. However low he stooped, it was not servility so much as a sound strategy for survival. At least, that was what he told himself.
Yu Yan, however, waved a hand as if none of it were necessary. Or perhaps it was simply indifference—the look of a man who had never expected otherwise. Well. He had just been told that a civilian helicopter was casually ignoring his nation's air-defense network and flying toward the presidential residence. It would have been reasonable to be so disappointed that he simply set the whole matter down. And the ones putting on this disgraceful show were not even the police, but the Chinese People's Liberation Army—a regular military in every formal sense.
An aircraft of unknown affiliation, flying into the capital region. The moment it occurred, it was a problem large enough for jurisdiction to pass from the police to the army. Naturally, it was the military responding now. And yet here they were, in this state.
The man who had come forward as the military's representative—he knew himself that he was closer to cannon fodder—had no hope of lifting his head.
"…Hah. Enough. You may go."
President Yu Yan knew just as well that the man was nothing more than a shield for bullets. Realizing that berating him here would accomplish nothing beyond venting his own feelings, he wasted no time in showing him the door.
"……I'm going to lose my mind."
Alone in the room, he muttered it blankly. His eyes were fixed on the footage of the scene he had just been briefed on—a video that drew nothing from him but an empty laugh, no matter how many times he replayed it.
A helicopter cruised leisurely through the sky. An ordinary civilian rotorcraft, with hardly any armament mounted at all. Had Yu Yan not already possessed prior knowledge of the being riding in it, he might well have dismissed the matter entirely. Put another way, that helicopter carried a cargo even the President of China could not afford to ignore.
In the footage, something came flying in at tremendous speed. Even slowed drastically, the object was fast enough that one could still feel its velocity. It was an air-to-air missile, fired from a fighter marked with the Five-Star Red Flag—far too costly a thing for shooting down a single helicopter that was not even military. Not so much a cleaver for an ox as a blade meant for slaying a dragon.
And yet the thing streaking toward the helicopter stopped dead in midair. Inertia carried it a little farther, but the missile, having swiftly lost its speed, drifted gently down toward the ground.
A chilling voice reached the ears of Yu Yan, who had been staring blankly at the footage. He turned toward the voice that had come with a clacking sound, and saw a skull that had climbed onto his desk. The third drawer stood open, having come undone at some point. It seemed the skeleton had only just popped out.
"The missile that fell—"
Was that something to call fortunate? Yu Yan considered it a moment, then shook his head. He was a man who had already offered up an entire province in human sacrifice. It was far too late to be weighing whether one death more, or two, ought to be called a mercy.
All the while, the footage ran on. Something pitch-black, kin to a dragon not yet risen, shot in from off-screen at terrible speed and wrenched its jaws wide. It had the momentum to swallow the helicopter whole at any moment—and in the very next frame, the thing had evaporated without leaving a trace.
"……."
Ordinary weapons did not work. Anomalous weapons did not work. That was this generation's Apostle Thomas—Giacomo Marchisio Bonaventura.
"……."
At the skull's counsel, Yu Yan answered this time without a word, by skipping the footage ahead several minutes. Onto the screen rose soldiers strapped into jetpacks that looked as if they belonged in a game, charging the helicopter.
"The problem, of course, is that there isn't only one of them."
And in the next instant, lead tore through their heads. Past the helicopter's half-open door, a pitch-black muzzle flashed. The footage had even caught a hulking mass of muscle leaping from the door, planting a foot on a soldier to spring again, and returning to the helicopter.
"……What in the world is an Apostle?"
He really was going to lose his mind. The mutter had escaped him on its own.
Yu Yan dug his fingertips into his throbbing brow, again and again. But regret was nowhere in his eyes. If anything, what could be felt there was the pride of a man certain he had been right.
"Wiping Jiangxi off the map really was the correct answer. For the power to stand against things like that, a price like that is as good as free."
"…Hmph. All you provided was the idea, anyway."
Watching this chaos from up close was satisfaction enough. The skull hopped atop the desk, rattling as it went.
"That tongue of yours certainly runs well, Necromancer."
"Be quiet, madman."
With those words, President Yu Yan rose smoothly from his seat. He had done nothing more than draw a light breath, and yet he could feel vitality stirring through his body. The corner of his mouth lifted of its own accord. To touch divinity while still wearing a human body was a sensation of pure refreshment.
Even in the immediate wake of footage like that, it did not occur to him that he might lose.
"Come, then. Let them try."
So saying, the middle-aged man began to walk—slowly, toward somewhere only he had in mind.