Old Testament: Margarita, Age Fifteen (7)
"My, you're really putting it away~"
The clink of a spoon against a plate rang on and on. From a certain angle it might have looked like poor manners, but the woman watching wore an expression of thorough satisfaction.
If the one making all that noise was an adorable child, eyes gone perfectly round over a delicious dessert and shoveling it in for all she was worth—and if that child was an unfortunate girl who had never tasted such a thing in her entire life—then the reaction was only natural.
"Want me to order you some more?"
"Mmph?"
"That's right, that's right. Over here, an order!"
"...Isn't it unwise for her to suddenly eat so much of something she's never had?"
"This much is fine. Even if it goes wrong, you might as well eat your fill and then die, no?"
"You're not supposed to die."
Han Seoyeon let out a sigh and looked at the woman who had raised a hand for the server—Wei Chen. She was youthful enough that she looked no older than her thirties. Given the scale of her fortune, she was surely kept under considerable care, so that was only to be expected.
"Ah. Of course, this child has to be out of the country before that."
"...Ms. Wei."
"I keep telling you, don't address me so stiffly."
But a moment later Wei came out with those abrupt words, and a beat after that Seoyeon understood. They were an answer to what she herself had just said—that one was not supposed to die.
"How much time is left?"
"Probably... about three hours."
"Then we'd better start getting ready to send her."
"Just let her finish this, and that's it."
Wei shrugged as she added it.
When she said the girl, Setsuku, had to be sent out of the country, it was for no reason other than what was about to unfold upon this land.
The moment she confirmed that someone's intervention had turned the corpses of Jiangxi Province into undead, Han Seoyeon left Jiangxi behind. Nullifying the human sacrifice through resurrection had become impossible, and the report had to be made. She had gone to the trouble of spending so long on the move only because the Chinese government, bent on concealing the incident for even a little longer, had cut communications across the province. Reaching neighboring Zhejiang at last, she submitted her report to the upper ranks of the Church, and an answer came back before long.
It did not stray from her expectations by so much as a hair. Plan C—the resurrection operation—could no longer be pursued. They were to proceed with what had been prepared in advance: Plan D.
In other words, Damnatio ad Bestias. The Exclusion of Faith, directed at Chairman Yu Yan of the People's Republic of China.
The Exclusion of Faith. Chairman Yu Yan had ascended by abusing the very concept of the nation, and once that was taken into account, the meaning was singular. They meant to erase most of the Chinese people from this land.
"Strictly speaking, it isn't murder, is it?"
It was Wei who answered her so.
As she said, the operation was not simply to set a genocide loose at random across the Chinese mainland. It would be enough if most of those who constituted the faith lost consciousness all at once. In all likelihood it would be done by dispersing a drug in concert with the relevant sorcery.
"But a great many will die. The weaker they are, the more of them."
That was the problem.
If a drug were spread to render most of the population unconscious, the dose would of course be calculated against an adult. Consider what happens when a child is given an anesthetic in a quantity meant for a grown man, and it was obvious what would soon take place upon this land. Children, the elderly, the sick, the destitute—the young, the frail, the wasted. From among such people, the dead would come at a grievously high rate.
"Is this... truly the right thing to do...?"
It was no wonder Han Seoyeon hesitated.
"For all we know, if China's chairman wields the power of a god for the rest of his life, the victims might be fewer than the people this operation will kill."
Was it acceptable to do a thing like this merely to keep the Church's hegemony intact? She could foresee deaths enough that even a thought like that rose in her.
"That's only if you look at it optimistically, you know."
"But is it right to kill this many people by weighing what-ifs?"
"It's the business of a nation, so the what-ifs are exactly what you weigh. This is too enormous. Once it actually blows up, you're too late."
"You pull it out by the roots while it's still only a possibility. This is that kind of matter."
Wei added it with a light laugh.
"To begin with, he's a dictator who massacres his own citizens to seize power for himself. The odds of anything good coming out of him are pretty high, wouldn't you say?"
"That... is true, but."
"And besides, Seoyeon, you filed that report because you decided this was the lesser evil in the end. Didn't you?"
The option of not reporting the situation at all had existed, at least. If she had truly wanted to stop this no matter what, Han Seoyeon would have taken it. That she had not...
"...is because my teachers have already entered the chairman's residence."
That was the problem. They were already committed. If Plan D were not set in motion, they would be killed in the end, once the ammunition ran out or the stamina did. Han Seoyeon had no choice.
"...No. I suppose I arranged it so I wouldn't."
She murmured it in a voice that had gone a little slack.
Turning corpses into undead in order to suppress Han Seoyeon's miracle—that operation had, without question, been effective. Undead into which every resource had been poured for endurance alone. Killing them took a staggering amount of work, and once it was done there was the danger they would be damaged past even what her power could restore. It had seen clean through her weakness. So cleanly, in fact, that it made no sense unless the enemy had caught the Church's strategy at a very early stage and prepared for it.
But think of it that way, and the thing grew strange. If they meant to use a method like this, would sooner not have been better? Before Han Seoyeon could intervene at all—turning the citizens into zombies the instant they were slaughtered—would have been far more effective, and far more efficient besides.
There was only one reason she could imagine for why they had not. This was a hostage play. They had waited until the assassination team, her teachers at its head, was committed, and then taken the choices out of her hands. Perhaps the girl called Han Seoyeon was exceedingly tender-hearted. Tender enough that she might set the lives of little children above the order the Church maintained. And so, to remove that variable, they had taken her teachers' lives as hostages.
She had been outplayed completely. Han Seoyeon clenched her fist tight.
"Not the sort of thing Chairman Yu Yan would do."
"...No."
Wei had offered the remark, and Han Seoyeon nodded her agreement.
Set aside whether scheming of this sort was in his nature. The situation itself diverged sharply from the chairman's intent. What was ideal for him was to succeed in becoming a god, and for the Church not to pick any particular fight over it—not this, with the Church charging in hell-bent, massacre of civilians and all. Which meant the intent belonged to someone else at Chairman Yu Yan's side. In all probability, the human who had told him of human sacrifice and urged him on.
When Han Seoyeon conveyed to the Church what was unfolding in China, the analysis that came down from the upper ranks—issued together with Bowl-grade measures—had included conjecture about that mastermind as well.
"The Necromancer, they said."
Han Seoyeon sighed and let the name fall. Strictly speaking it was not a name at all, but this was a person for whom anything resembling personal information simply did not exist, so there was nothing else to call them.
One known by nothing but the Necromancer, without so much as a name. Those who work with the dead are legion, east and west, ancient and modern, and yet say only "the Necromancer," bare of any epithet, and everyone knows who is meant.
The Seven Sisters, regarded as the finest minds of the present generation. The nameless Necromancer was one of their number. Set beside the other madmen, he—or she—was said to fall a move or two behind in sheer intellect. What they possessed instead was a malice that outstripped anyone's. Always hidden in the back, arranging the board. Always stirring incidents in which countless people were swept up and made to suffer. Succeed at stopping them or fail, and they almost always left a bitter taste behind. A damned human being.
The second most threatening of the madmen in the hidden world. Trash that would have been put down ahead of Anna Anderson, if only an identity had been known. That was the Necromancer.
And those claws were tormenting Han Seoyeon even at this very moment.
Seoyeon had heard that the Necromancer had lately been collecting children's corpses in great number, and the revulsion sat all the heavier for it. However she turned it over, she seemed to be moving exactly as that freak desired.
"Sometimes there are things you just can't help, you know?"
"...Even so."
Wei said it as if to comfort her, but Han Seoyeon's mood did not lift.
"Ms. Wei. Are you all right?"
"What's there not to be all right about? Other people aside, as far as I'm personally concerned, I sleep for a few days, wake up, and that's the end of it."
"No, but your own people are going to be slaughtered......"
"In the end it's somebody else's problem, isn't it? Do you have any idea how many people are in this country? Honestly, once there are this many, they barely even feel like countrymen. We share a nationality and nothing else. There's no sense of kinship, I'm telling you."
It was probably a lie, meant to set Han Seoyeon's mind even a little at ease. Of that, Seoyeon was certain. Even if Wei truly carried a loathing of her own country in her chest, Han Seoyeon knew her character. Whatever nation's name might be written in the nationality line of a child's passport, she was not a woman who would take the deaths of little children gladly.
"......A passport?"
And in that instant something struck Han Seoyeon's mind. An idea so sudden she felt it prickle, electric, through her.
"A passport."
Slowly, her eyes widened.
"A passport? Why? Ah—because of that child? It's fine. I'll arrange it so she can leave the country even without one."
Whatever she had made of the muttering, Wei said it with a smile, thinking Seoyeon must be worrying over how to send Shishigai Setsuku—who had surely not entered through any proper channel—back to Japan. Hadn't Han Seoyeon called her out in the first place to settle exactly that sort of procedural trouble?
But despite those words, Han Seoyeon shook her head.
"No. Your passport, Ms. Wei."
"Hm? Right. I have it here, for now..."
Wei rummaged through her handbag and drew out her passport. Han Seoyeon looked at the letters written there and nodded.
This is it.
"Ah, is it a mainland passport you need?"
"No. There was just something I wanted to confirm, for a moment."
So saying, Han Seoyeon met Wei Chen's eyes with a grave look.
"Ms. Wei. Would it be all right if I borrowed your connections? A few of them... no. A great many."
"My connections? Well, if you're the one asking, I don't particularly mind. What for?"
Han Seoyeon explained the thought that had just come to her. Wei's expression changed sharply.
"That's..."
"This path might spill even more blood."
The odds of that were by no means low. She had no grounds for it, but that was the feeling she had. Han Seoyeon would be party to deaths in the hundreds of millions. Her hands would be wet with blood past the point of soaking; her very soul would be fouled beyond any hope of cleansing, and she would surely earn the resentment of countless people. She might even have to bear hundreds of curses. Thousands.
But she looked at Setsuku beside her, still smacking her way through the dessert. At a girl who was still a child.
"Even so, the children, at least, will probably die in fewer numbers than they would under Damnatio ad Bestias."
Seoyeon said it with a steady gaze, and for a moment Wei only looked at her.
Then she lifted the corners of her mouth in a gentle smile.
"You've become an adult."
"...I still have a few years left before I'm of age."
"If you've decided a child must be protected, and moved to do it, then you're already an adult."
"All right. I'll help you as much as you need."
With that, Wei took out her phone.
"You should ask the Church to cooperate as well. The more cards your idea has to play, the better."
"Yes. I'll contact them right away."
Han Seoyeon picked up her own phone. What she entered at once was an international number, and her godfather's.
To erase "the Chinese," there was no need to erase the people themselves.