The Old Testament: Margarita, Age Fifteen (5)
There is a simple reason Scenario B is treated as a threat out of all proportion, and why so many holy knights would rather not go near it.
The anomalies in question deny the Christian faith by the mere fact of existing, and they have a habit of sealing away holy power—the very strength of the holy knights, who are the Church's main force. On top of that, creatures of this kind tend to be considerably powerful to begin with, which makes them miserable to face. Most of the roster has no choice but to be ruled out of the engagement, and yet putting the thing down demands serious combat strength. An irony, if ever there was one.
Still. There are always exceptions. There always have been.
The place had been Qinzheng Hall in Zhongnanhai, Xicheng District, Beijing—residence of the sitting Chairman. Inside a space blown out to infinity by a divine power that overrode reason, a violent exchange was underway.
Chairman Yu Yan raised an arm and jabbed a finger at some point in the air. That was all. An exceedingly light little motion. The man behind it was middle-aged, with nothing you could call a superb physique and the beginnings of a belly besides; had he thrown a punch with everything he had, it would have been a sorry spectacle either way. The result of that trivial gesture, however, was anything but trivial. A pitch-black hole opened where the finger pointed, and an eyeball the size of a house came squirming out of it.
It was a sight so vile that an ordinary person would lock up from head to toe just from looking. Factor in the killing intent coiled around that shape, and even a reasonably capable holy knight would have felt his courage fail.
"Jesus spoke, saying—"
Giacomo Marchisio swung his sword without a flicker of hesitation. A cut so clean that even a complete outsider to the blade would have caught his breath—yet he did not carry only one sword, and the attack was not finished. A second stroke, drawn at a perfect right angle to the path of the first, quartered the monstrous eye. Set holy power aside entirely, and this man was still reckoned the authority on the Benedictine Twin Swords. Put a pair of blades in his hands, and Cardinal Bonaventura was a monster who could butcher a dragon resurrected into the modern age.
Split apart, the eyeball still swelled, as if boiling over—and then, before long, it simply stopped moving in that state.
At some point the remains had taken on a yellowish cast. Now they baked to a golden brown and gave off the savory smell of fresh bread.
He turned his head, fixed Chairman Yu Yan with a razor gaze, and settled into his stance once more. St. Peter's Stance—two jet-black swords crossed on the vertical into an inverted cross, and leveled at the Chairman. Yu Yan aimed a finger at him again, but the hole that opened was wiped away by nothing more than a flick of Giacomo's sword-point.
The negation of anomalies, grounded in atheism. It was precisely that quality which let Chairman Yu Yan, who had seized a god's power through human sacrifice, hold a measure of the advantage in any collision with the Church. For Giacomo Marchisio, the advantage did not apply. Heir to Thomas the Doubter, he possessed, on this particular axis, an identical power. No—weigh the Church's reach and its history, and his side stood far higher in class. Had that divinity not drawn its nourishment from a population of 1.3 billion, a fledgling living god of this petty sort might have been extinguished inside of a minute.
Yu Yan felt the truth of it in his bones. The old arrogance, drunk on divine power freshly won and certain that even an Apostle would be light work, had evaporated from his mind long ago. The one who had to wring a plan out of nothing was him. So he aimed his fingertip not at Giacomo himself, but at a different point entirely.
The power Yu Yan had obtained was still confined, for the present, to a portion of Zhongnanhai. Within that boundary, though, it was an authority of terrible strength. Lay the exaggeration on only a little, and it would be fair to call it the manipulation of reality. That power twisted the space again and called forth a monster with its maw gaping wide. Since Giacomo could negate anomalies, the tactic was to summon the creature somewhere else first and then attack in the physical—the eyeball from moments before had followed the same logic. But to say it was the same as before was also to say that the result would be the same. The monster, now wearing a physical body, was butchered once more and turned into bread.
"......!"
What followed was a little different. The dismembered creature, even after it had become bread, kept moving, and lunged for Giacomo. Yu Yan caught the faint bewilderment coloring the man's face and drew the corner of his mouth up. An ability that turned objects into bread? Then the answer was obvious: make a monster that was bread from the very start. His new power made it possible. The thing wasn't alive. It had never moved by muscle in the first place, so there was nothing to stop it from moving while already in pieces.
Even startled, Giacomo reflexively cut the things apart again and again, and the skill in it was extraordinary. This was no longer a problem that cutting could solve. Hack them smaller, and they only became a greater number of finer attacks. Realizing it a moment too late, his expression went hard.
Chairman Yu Yan's misfortune was this: the opponent before him was not Apostle Thomas alone.
KRAANG! With a sound like an explosion, fragments of the monster blasted through the air. A wave of finely milled flour tore open to the left and right and cleared a path, and at the end of that path stood a woman with her muscles swollen to their limit. Apostle Bartholomew.
In the brief quiet that followed, only Yoo Hye-rin grinned, teeth bared. A beat later, Giacomo answered with a bitter smile—a laugh at himself, who had very nearly eaten the blow, and an awkward smile of thanks for being pulled clear of it. Perhaps it was the shape of the moment, but a joke she used to tell came back to him.
"The gift the Lord has bestowed upon me is a miracle of the same kind as Moses's."
And so it truly was. Set someone like her in front of you, and what meaning was there in a hundred petty spirits, or a thousand? From where Yu Yan stood, forced to take her as an enemy, it was enough to make a man want to die.
The most frightening part was that the power called the negation of anomalies belonged to a holy relic vested in Apostle Thomas. Apostle Bartholomew, in other words, was not using the slightest measure of what was ordinarily classed as holy power. Put another way, that was pure physical strength, owing nothing to any anomaly. She could swing that fist exactly as it was in the surface world, and it would not so much as brush the Secrecy Protocol.
"Ghk—?!"
His shock lasted the span of a blink. Yu Yan whipped his arm around and threw up dozens of walls in front of himself, and an instant later a great explosion bloomed and swallowed the structures whole. The shock was enough to send even Yu Yan, tucked behind them, sailing a long way through the air. Past the walls, blown to powder in a single breath, a gun muzzle came into view, held by a man whose hair had been whipped into a wild tangle.
Han Jihan. Not an Apostle. Not even a Gravekeeper. A man filed, simply, as an ordinary holy knight. He was, without question, the weakest of the three. In a straight fight with Yu Yan, one on one, he looked like a man who would be slaughtered before he finished drawing breath. And yet, as if determined to prove that the name Vampire Slayer had not been won on a lucky bet, he was exceptionally good at one particular art: making someone stronger than himself suffer for it.
He shifted his ground, struck from beyond the reach of conscious attention, and put rounds down at the exact moment a man was likeliest to let his guard slip. Ordinary bullets would have left a divine body entirely unmarked. Whatever these rounds were, though, they raised mushroom clouds—small ones, but mushroom clouds all the same—and not even Yu Yan could dismiss them.
Granted, a monstrous weapon of that grade would be limited in its number of shots. His opponent could hardly have failed to notice the flaw. Most of what Jihan sent downrange was ordinary rifle ammunition, or at best the sort of thing that passed for a standard rifle grenade, with those monster rounds salted in among the rest. Unless a man could be certain that this shot was a feint, he had to treat every one of them as real and answer it. Attacks of that kind came whining in from every side like mosquitoes, and there was no getting through it without the nerves fraying.
"This isn't the time to be looking over there!"
"?!"
The instant his attention was dragged that way, the huge mass of muscle came down on him again.
"......!"
Her fist closed the distance in a flash and buried itself in Yu Yan's gut. The noise was closer to a detonation than to a punch, and it stuffed his ears shut; he couldn't even hear his own voice, soaked through with pain. He had wrapped himself in a barrier of divine power, of a sort, and still the acid climbed his throat.
A red haze lifted off Chairman Yu Yan's body. Once flesh met flesh, that alone was enough to drive divine power into her. He had eaten the blow, yes—but this was a body that had risen to godhood and become, for every practical purpose, undying. If anything, he had just been handed his chance to strike back. That was what he was thinki—
Boom!
"......?"
Yoo Hye-rin Agnes's second strike was faster still.
What Chairman Yu Yan felt was not rage, and not humiliation. It wasn't even astonishment. It was simple puzzlement. He was certain he had set the counter to trigger the moment they touched, and Bartholomew had undone the phenomenon by landing a chain of blows far faster than it could manifest. For one short instant, understanding refused to catch up.
No. In theory, he understood. Pull the fist back and drive it in again faster than physical law could act, and it was possible. Understanding and acceptance, though, were different things. It was kin to being told that you could walk on water, provided you took the next step before you sank.
By the time Yu Yan clawed his wits back together and barely managed to open the distance, seven blows in succession had already been driven through his whole body. His head swam. Had he not become a living god, his limbs would have been in pieces already, and then some.
A plain disadvantage. The only reason this fight, already several hours old, had not yet ended was that the Chairman had become, in effect, immortal. The battle would not last forever, of course. Let this go on for days, and Han Jihan's ammunition would run out in the end. Give it longer still, and Yoo Hye-rin's stamina would be next, and last of all even Giacomo—the one man among them who could wield holy power—would feel his concentration slip.
Knowing that, Yu Yan grinned, cornered though he was.
"...Something's off."
Jihan watched the grin with eyes gone cold, and muttered it. It was true enough that their assault couldn't go on without end. But the same held for Yu Yan. He had a finite resource of his own: the citizens of Jiangxi Province, offered up as his sacrifice. And by the arithmetic, the ammunition that would give out first was Chairman Yu Yan's. Three days at the outside, and Han Seoyeon would have raised enough of the dead to revoke his ascension.
So why the face? The fact of it sat wrong with Jihan. If the man simply didn't know Han Seoyeon existed, the look would make sense. But both of her companions were standing right here. For him to remain ignorant of her even so was a little too unnatural.
Sunk in that suspicion, Jihan swept his eyes over the surroundings, and only then did he find the skull rolling across the floor. He hadn't seen it because they had gone straight into the fight the moment they breached, and divine authority had expanded the space, which made it harder still to pick out. Looking at it now, some anomaly bound up with concealment seemed to be tangled in the thing as well.
Was it coincidence that it happened to be here, of all places? Surely not. Yu Yan had a collaborator. Reaching that conclusion didn't take long. It accounted for the skull, and it accounted for the Chairman's ease. To Jihan, though, it felt far too strange.
The operational plan had been drawn up with every available means, the Church's intelligence arm included. A collaborator who hadn't left a single trace, even in that analysis? Set the rest aside—John and Matthias were one flank of the madmen called the Seven Sisters. Even so, to slip past a madman's eye...
"...The Necromancer?"
The word that flicked across his mind, Han Jihan murmured without meaning to. If a thing like this were possible, it could only be a madman of the same rank. Anna Anderson was already dead. Professor Senjoji had no such ability, and the "Doctor" was the last man alive who would hide his own name once an incident broke. Mister F, given his temperament, would never lend himself to Scenario B. And if the being was tied to a skull besides—
The Nameless Necromancer. No one else. Him, or her.
Nothing good has ever come of that monster getting involved.
Jihan's face set with a sense of ill omen, and still he took up the flashbang lashed to his belt. A new conclusion changed nothing. All he could do was give everything he had to this very instant. Metal scraped, and the safety pin and the lever went tumbling across the floor of the Chairman's residence.