Old Testament: Margarita, Age 15 (4)
Pitch-black ash scattered in every direction. Acrid, cloying air packed itself into her lungs; she gave a small cough, spat onto the ground, and what came out was mottled dark.
The color of the spit she had just expelled was, of course, none of Seoyeon's concern. It had vanished from her sight in a single instant anyway.
She was only passing along the city's outskirts, and still the quiet was uncanny. The only sounds were a motorcycle engine flogged to its limit, and the prayer Han Seoyeon kept reciting.
How many hours had it been since she had started cutting back and forth through the streets? By feel, it had been a long time. A stretch of straight road happened to open ahead, so Seoyeon took her hands off the handlebars, pulled out the map she had been sitting on, and spread it open.
"......"
She sighed at once. She had ridden all this time, and this was as far as she had come? She had combed every corner rather than anything like the shortest route, but seeing it with her own eyes still unsettled her. A moment later she shook her head and cast the thought aside. If she had time to despair, she was better off using it to save even one more person. Human decency aside, her teachers were spending everything they had to hold a god down. She had to drag that god back to earth.
"?!"
Right after that, Han Seoyeon jerked her head up, shock written across her face. At the edge of her vision lay a black sky choked with smoke, but what she was looking at was something farther beyond it.
A sound reached her from a distance still great enough that noticing it at all was difficult. It was so faint that even Han Seoyeon could not be sure of it—and yet the brass serpent lashed to the motorcycle had drawn its body rigidly straight, warning her that something was wrong. Not that it would have mattered if she had missed it in that instant. The sound was coming this way, growing louder, and sooner or later she would have had no choice but to recognize it.
...An aircraft!
A roar swelled in a heartbeat and swallowed everything around her. The moment she understood what it was, Han Seoyeon bit down on the map and yanked the handlebars. The motorcycle slewed nearly sideways, the rear wheel lifting clear of the ground, but she brought every bit of her skill to bear and set it down again. Then she shot toward the nearest building in sight, turning only her head toward the noise.
The source of the sound was still nowhere to be seen. Which meant, conversely, that the other side would have a very hard time finding her as well... but Seoyeon did not relax. She slipped into a narrow gap between the buildings and hid.
Anything flying this fast and this loud inside China right now was very unlikely to be friendly. The first stage of the Jiangxi human sacrifice had been a communications blackout, so it was difficult to write this off as an ordinary military flight with nothing to do with the incident. If Han Seoyeon herself had been the architect of the plan, and the President of China, she would never have let an ignorant aircraft wander anywhere near here.
Then a sound like the air being torn—something falling—came again and again, growing louder, while the noise of the aircraft that had passed overhead steadily faded. Han Seoyeon was not so green that she could hear that and fail to understand. The aircraft had dropped several somethings and begun to withdraw. And from experience, she knew very well that those somethings were, in most cases, bombs.
Why.
That was the first thought that came to her.
The bombing itself was not strange. This human sacrifice had combined several methods to make the slaughter certain, and bombardment from the air had been among them. The enemy had already committed bombers to set the incident in motion; another strike, on the pretext of confirming the results, would not have been odd.
The timing, though, was wrong. The people of Jiangxi had been massacred by every means available hours ago. The sacrificial rite itself ought already to have ended. Han Seoyeon and the Church's other collaborators had known as much, which was why they had been sent in believing a minimum of safety was assured. Their observations had come from outside, so certainty was somewhat lacking, but survivor responses had dropped into the triple digits, and they had moved only after confirming that the rite was finished. With no one left to kill, and no reason left to kill them, it had been only natural to judge that entry was now safe.
Then are we the target?
The answer came quickly. President Yu Yan had seen through the Church's scheme and meant to kill Han Seoyeon and the medical personnel. Seoyeon's face tightened.
Perhaps she ought to have expected this as well. However he had learned of it, this was an opponent who had realized the Church had uncovered the sacrificial plan and meant to stop it, and who had begun moving in haste. The further assumption—that he also knew Han Seoyeon was in China now, and that she was regarded as the joker who could overturn the board—was not much of a stretch.
The bang of something detonating came just after Han Seoyeon, still astride the motorcycle, hurried into the building. It could not be called completely safe, but it beat remaining out in the open.
...Isn't that still a little high?
The question followed at once. From her training, Han Seoyeon knew that in a bombing it was more effective to detonate at some distance above the ground than right on the surface. Even accounting for that, the blasts sounded far too high. It was not a single munition bursting early by chance; the sounds came one after another. Unless the person in charge was the most incompetent officer in history, the timing had been deliberate.
The answer announced itself a moment later, as a brilliant yellow snowfall began to fill the sky. Watching it through the window, Seoyeon's eyes went wide.
A chemical round. That had to be it. They had burst it at altitude so the contents would scatter wide.
Even after she understood that much, the questions remained. The people sent in were, at base, professional medics, or anomalies specialized in healing and purification. A CBRN attack was hardly an effective answer to opponents like these. A simple misjudgment? A specialized anomalous weapon that would work even against them? Or nothing more than a bluff, meant to make her think so?
Until she could be certain, stepping carelessly outside would be a fool's move. The joker called mass resurrection was a card that existed in Han Seoyeon's hands alone. If she was taken out of play, everything was over. If she moved, it would have to be after the yellow powder had been identified, or after all of it had settled.
...That was plainly the rational judgment. Han Seoyeon let out a heavy sigh all the same. Rational did not mean she felt no frustration. She got off the motorcycle and began to pace the inside of the building. Time was desperately short, and still she was trapped here; if she were told, on top of that, to stand frozen like a stone, she did not think she could bear it.
"Hm?"
Wandering through the interior, Han Seoyeon felt a sudden wrongness in one of the rooms. It was sealed tight, without a single window, and yet the air moved strangely. For an enclosed space, the concentration of the smell shifted far too sharply at one particular point. She sniffed several times, then bit down on three of her fingers, hard enough that blood welled and ran. Droplets pattered onto the floor. Seoyeon fouled the room here and there with her own blood, soaking the air in the smell of it... and tracked the current with the tip of her nose.
Her steps stopped at a display cabinet that occupied one wall. Beyond the seam where two cabinets stood flush against each other, the space opened into somewhere much wider. Han Seoyeon frowned for a moment, then drew one of the twin swords at her waist. A single hard swing split the cabinet cleanly along a diagonal. There was surely a proper way to open the thing, but a strong body meant the head did not have to work so hard.
"......"
Behind the sundered cabinet was a passage leading down. Han Seoyeon stared at it, blank.
Is this... really a coincidence...?
A secret passage, in a building she had ducked into by chance to take cover? Faint as it was, she could almost feel the guidance of God in it. Han Seoyeon drew something from her pocket: a small box that called a cigarette case to mind, packed with tightly rolled papers. She pulled one out, set it between her lips like a cigarette, and lit it with a lighter. Then she took out another, unfolded it, and stuck it to her neck like a pain-relief patch. They were talismans, marked with strange patterns.
A coincidence of this degree was as good as fate, and of course she meant to go down. That was no reason to dive in unprepared and defenseless. Whatever the structure below might be, if toxic gas spread through a narrow space, it would be over before she could do a thing. There was no harm in being careful. And if there happened to be dangerous flammables down there... well, Saint Barbara would watch over her then. Thinking as much, Han Seoyeon stepped forward.
She had gone some way down when her face creased again. The talisman between her lips had gone out with a soft puff. She tried to relight it, but the lighter itself would not catch.
No oxygen?
The instant she realized it, Han Seoyeon backpedaled several meters up the stairs. Toxic gas she could purify by any number of means, but a heavy gas that had claimed the space and shoved all the oxygen out was another matter. Not even a gas mask could answer that. So she withdrew to where it was safe... drew a deep breath, and plunged back down. Unlike her cautious movements a moment before, this was a very quick sprint. If she meant to finish looking while she held her breath, she would need at least this much speed. Counting the return to the safe zone, it was a round trip, which would cut her effective range in half.
...If her teacher Giacomo had heard of it, he would not have bothered calling it madness. He would have been aghast and told her not to go in at all. Seoyeon did not care in the slightest.
A short while later, with the stairs fully behind her, a wide space opened before her eyes. More stairways were visible; this was not the only entrance. The gas must have poured in through one of them—as part of the slaughter for the human sacrifice, no doubt.
The space was round, built to encircle a stage at the center. It called a colosseum to mind, though the circular stage itself was quite narrow, poorly suited to any real duel. Or perhaps the collapsed ceiling had come down entirely over the stage, and that was why it felt smaller than it was.
The bodies sprawled across the seats each held a placard marked with a number. It did not take Han Seoyeon long to arrive at the word auction.
An underground auction hall you can only enter through a hidden door.
The place reeked of something illicit. No matter how she looked at it, this was not a venue for lawful trade. Thinking as much, Seoyeon meant to cross the central stage and head for the stairs on the other side. The distance to that entrance ought to be about the same as the one she had just come down. It might even connect to somewhere the yellow powder had not reached, so there was no harm in checking.
"......?"
But Han Seoyeon stopped again. She had been about to pass the wreckage heaped beside the stage.
—It was, so to speak, the smell of life.
The smell of this world, born of breath and sweat: a smell no corpse gives off. It caught hold of Han Seoyeon's awareness. In this underground space, where even ordinary breathing was impossible, and from beneath that heavy wreckage no less, the trace of a living person was leaking out.
Han Seoyeon swung her sword in a rush and smashed the debris apart. If there was even the slightest chance a survivor lay underneath, she could not spare a moment. What emerged was iron bars, bent and collapsed this way and that. No—perhaps they ought to be called a cage.
Inside that cage, half-ruined where the wreckage had crushed down on it, a girl sat in formal kneeling posture. A child of ten, dressed in a pale blue kimono. And yet the air about her was truly strange. Setting aside the fact that she was sitting in the middle of a disaster, she held a perfect formal posture without the slightest sign of tension or fear. No emotion could be found in her expression, and the eyes gazing somewhere far away were terribly clouded. Perhaps because she was so thin, the kimono—crossed left over right—hung quite loose on her.
But the strangest thing of all was this: arms that had risen from the ground were holding the cage up, keeping the wreckage from crushing it flat.
She turned her head slowly, looked at Han Seoyeon, and smiled, very faintly. It was the first change in the girl's expression, and far too pitiful a look for a child of that age.
A sorrowful tone, as if she were sighing. The manner of speaking itself was flat, and yet a faint rapture lay beneath it, enough to suggest how twisted she was. A life already broken, or a life that had never once been normal. The girl's reaction belonged to someone like that, and so it felt pitiful even as something in it turned cold.
"Uh......"
Han Seoyeon was at a loss for words. She could not have been anything else. Wearing a look of considerable panic, quite unlike her usual self, she rolled her eyes this way and that.
What do I do. I don't know a single word of Japanese.
This was, without question, a serious problem.