Spare Not the Shaman (8)
For someone, that day was nothing more than an ordinary one.
The weather was brilliantly clear — or rather, the season had reached the point where early summer could stand to lose the early, and a fierce sun was beating down. On a day like that, plenty of people would be craving a cold drink, and there was nothing the least bit strange about the woman now making her way toward the café.
If anything was strange, it wasn't her. It was the one watching her: an old man on a bench, phone to his ear, tracking the woman's back from the corner of his eye.
"That so. So Tatsuo's finally come to it, has he……. Yeah. He'd been living off a hospital bed for years now."
The target passed Checkpoint Delta-3.
What he fed down the line was a cipher agreed upon in advance. That was the role he had been given — confirm the woman's movements, and report them up the chain. Beyond a description of her person, of course, he knew nothing of who she was. Not that her true name was Kan'in Tomoe. Not that she performed as a singer under the stage name Tomoe. Not even that she was one of the masterminds behind Vampire Syndrome.
All he could guess was that she was some criminal who had run wild enough, in the world behind the world, that the Church itself had been forced to move. And that was enough.
A life as a Holy Knight, already decades long. No talent anyone would remark on — but the career he had stacked up, what one might vulgarly call time in the trenches, that he had. When the higher-ups declined to brief the people on the ground, there was always a reason. He knew this world held anomalies for which merely coming to know them could prove fatal. The man thought of the mad monk of Russia; of Leviathan and Baalzebul; of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
But he shook the stray thoughts off at once. He rose, performed the loneliness of a man who had just sent an old friend on ahead of him, and left that place. Not because he knew the spot would become a sea of fire if the job went sideways. Only because the report of a moment ago had ended his mission. Besides — if things truly went wrong, there would be nowhere safe left anywhere in Japan.
The café was packed. They were not, however, ordinary people who had come to purchase a few hours of air-conditioning for a few hundred yen. Every last one of them was operative and actor both, occupying seats so no civilian could wander in. NPCs, if one wanted a word for it.
She knew that, of course. And yet no matter how she looked, they seemed like nothing but ordinary café patrons, and the effect was genuinely uncanny. Were they all masters of the craft, or was her own eye simply not up to it? The woman in the apron turned the question over as she studied them — then glanced at the monitor beside her, and her brow creased.
An Etube channel that played jazz around the clock. Another track had just been added to the Up Next queue, which already held five. This, of course, was no ordinary channel either. The song's title meant target has passed Checkpoint Alpha-4: the subject had come within ten meters, as the crow flies.
The operation was truly about to begin. She cleared her throat — the signal — and for one brief instant a tension rippled through the café before it sank away again.
Ting. The little bell on the door let out a dainty chime. The woman coming in was a regular of the place. Right now, she was the target to be taken.
"Welcome!"
"…Oh? Are you new here, by any chance?"
"Ah, yes. I started a few days ago. The owner asked me to swap shifts, just for today."
Kan'in Tomoe had noticed a face she had never seen here and asked. Anticipating exactly that suspicion, the server really had begun the part-time job several days prior. Fortunately, Tomoe's interest seemed to end there; she finished ordering at once. Just as their intelligence had described, she lingered in front of the counter, took the same coffee as always, and headed for a seat.
Watching her go, the server picked up the object she had kept beneath the counter and strode straight over. The timing caught Tomoe halfway — tray just set down, chair half drawn out, her body caught awkwardly between standing and sitting.
"Excuse me, miss."
"Yes?"
The air of someone with something important to say. As Tomoe looked up, the server thrust the object at her. It was a book — an odd thing for a café server to produce out of nowhere — and Tomoe looked at it.
"—Don't fight it. Sit your ass down, you damned bitch."
And that was the end of the polite server's act. A sneering smile had settled over Tomoe's face the moment she confirmed the book; seeing it, the woman wiped the kindness from her own expression as well. She had no desire to keep up the sickly-sweet little-girl routine once the other side had dropped the performance.
Chk. In the same instant the server fixed the prophet with a glare, a medley of sounds broke out from every side. The young woman at the next table drew the hand she had kept in one pocket — and with it a grenade, the pin already pulled. The middle-aged man who had been leisurely drinking his coffee leveled a rifle taken from a violin case at Tomoe. The man in the suit stopped hammering at his laptop and slid a knife from his sleeve, and the schoolgirl in uniform produced a hatchet from her bag. Everyone else likewise brought out whatever weapon they had hidden, bracing for whatever came next.
"Good heavens. To think you'd prepare a gift like this for m—"
"I'd drop the clever ideas, if I were you. Kan'in Tomoe-chan."
And the man with a pistol pressed to the back of her head. One hand on the trigger, he pulled his hood back and showed his face. She was in no position to see it, not even from the corner of her eye… but the voice rang a bell.
"Assistant Inspector Koube?"
"You know me? Hell. I'm goddamn honored."
"…I may not look the part, but I am a terrorist. How could I fail to know Section Three's ace? Margarita's own right hand, no less."
With that, Tomoe raised both hands in surrender. Once she had sat, the server growled down at her.
"Not sure I even need to spell it out for someone who walked in on her own two feet already knowing the lot… but since you're a damned prophet bitch, call this a briefing for the you of a minute ago."
Thump. The book was set on the table.
"We stuck the author in a cell on Azau Island, Hong Kong, and made him write it."
"Ah. The Church truly is a petty lot, isn't it? You even have the power to make real what every reader only dreams of."
"Shut your mouth, prophet bitch. I wasn't finished."
A hand reached for the book as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The server slammed her palm down on it and stopped her cold.
"Every step of it was done cut off from the outside, with the remains of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints present the whole time. The writing was done on a PC connected to no other line, and of course the data was destroyed the moment it printed. The printer sat in a total blackout room, and the binding was done right there, by the hands of the blind."
The instant it was finished, it went into a perfectly sealed case and was brought to Japan. That case had been opened for the first time some five minutes ago, and not once since had the book been turned even as far as its flyleaf.
"Meaning — peer into whatever moment you like. Unless you turn the pages yourself, you can't confirm what's in it. The book gets handed over when we judge your restraint is complete."
"Is that so."
"Refuse the restraints and we burn it on the spot. That should go without saying. No other copies exist, and the author we're holding gets shot as well, so the thing becomes a work that is never published. Forever."
"Oh dear."
"And don't even think about grabbing it and running. As you can see, this one's built as an upper and a lower volume. If you want to watch a tragic work whose second half never comes out, I won't stop you."
Having said her piece, the server shot Koube a look — her part was done. Still aiming at the back of Tomoe's head, Koube opened his mouth.
"Kozaki. Restrain her. And do not let your guard down. Not for a second."
If she really was a genuine prophet, it would be no surprise for her to slip every attack in the room and stroll right out. They would simply blow the whole café if it came to that, so it wasn't a great problem… but even from the standpoint of keeping costs down, there was no harm in being careful. Following his advice, the woman who had been sitting at his table approached Tomoe with a tense face, moving carefully. She drew Tomoe's arms behind her and cuffed them, then lashed her up to the forearms with a vivid red rope wound with several talismans. The same rope linked her legs, so that she could manage only a short, shuffling step.
"A blindfold as well? I won't be able to read the book like this."
"'Restraint complete' means the moment you're locked in a facility for certain."
"To think I was trusted so little. Truly regrettable."
They had accounted even for the chance of a rescue by her associates along the way. Tomoe gave a disappointed little shrug, but offered no real resistance, and quietly let the officers lead her on.
"Ah, that's right. May I ask just one thing?"
"What."
At the entrance, as if it had only just occurred to her, she turned her head.
"Assistant Inspector Koube himself is on this operation, and yet you were the one trusted to carry the most important thing — the book. Who in the world are you?"
Who could she be, to be trusted that far? At the question, the server answered with a growl.
"Marbas. President of the Hell Council."
"Good heavens. I had no idea you were so devoted to an infiltration that you'd go so far as to change your sex."
"I'm irritated enough as it is. Shut up."
"Oh my. Was that a reverse scale just now? Then I really must apologize."
She was needling her on purpose. No question about it. Marbas ground her teeth at the grinning prophet — but the curses never reached Tomoe. Assistant Inspector Koube had already fitted her with earplugs.
"…I can't believe it wrapped up this easily, senpai."
So it was that, as they moved the prophet, the policewoman who had been called Kozaki spoke up to Koube. Security had been piled on to an absurd degree, and only people they could truly trust had been put in. She had been told it was a mission where the slightest slip could kill dozens — hundreds. That it had ended in something close to anticlimax did not feel real.
"What the hell are you even saying? We prepared all of this so the ending would be exactly this empty. Emptier, if we could get it."
"Right. I do think that's a relief, but… did she really let herself be taken, just for this one book?"
From here on, no one could promise Kan'in Tomoe a future. The odds were high she would be sentenced to death, or to a punishment that would make her wish for it — and even life imprisonment would come only if she offered up every scrap of information she had.
"No matter how much she loves a series, is a new volume really something you sell your entire life to get?"
That was what she could not understand. The assistant inspector thought for a moment, then parted his lips.
"'Prophets fall into three kinds.'"
"Pardon?"
"Apostle Simon Lucia. Words left by a holy knight who, sometime around the medieval age, was captain of Cassandra."
Foremost authority on the hunting of prophets, and a prophet herself, she had judged them so.
Put another way: anyone who was not incompetent — any prophet above a certain level — was either extremely rational or extremely mad. The Church had staked the operation on that.
"At some point, she definitely foresaw her own ruin. The kind that can never be avoided. She was the sort who could read at least that much of the future. And if the ending was already fixed, she picked the branch where she could still get something out of it."
If I'm going to die anyway, I'll die dragging as many others down with me as I can. Cases of that sort are not especially common among prophets. The more capable the prophet, the more they tend to resign themselves to reality.
"And even if she isn't the rational kind — even if she's the kind who's fallen into madness — this plan still has a chance of working."
"…You mean she'd truly give her own life, just to see the next volume?"
"Think that's absurd? Yeah. I get it, completely. But listen — don't you dare try to measure a madwoman by what you think makes sense."
All the more when that madwoman was an aberration existing outside the timeline of reality. One calls them mad in the first place because they cannot be understood, doesn't one? Koube thought it as he shoved Kan'in Tomoe into the vehicle. Ordinary people like him only had to do as they were told. Dealing with those crazy bastards was work for allies who were crazier still.
For a moment, the image rose in him of Bartholomew, dressed in a black shroud. A world of lunatics, far too distant from Koube.
"Huh? What's this all of a sudden? Author Enoch is off cheating on us with some other work right now."
"…No, I'm just checking. Just checking. 'Serena-chan's falling for it again, lol' — excuse me, I wasn't fooled in the first place?"
"……Huh?"
"Kyahoooooo! That's it for today's gaming stream! From here on out it's a drinking stream, so minors, get out! Adult viewers, I'm not letting you sleep tonight, so brace yourselves!"
"Pull out whatever booze you've got, right now! If you don't have any, I'll wait a little, so get to a convenience store and buy some this instant!"
For someone, that day would have been utterly ordinary. For someone else, it became the sort of anniversary that guarantees hell the next morning, in the form of a hangover.
…That day, a fifty-minute compilation of aegyo from Serena Razania of the second generation recorded the highest view count of any fan video of hers that year.