Old Testament: The Beelzebute Grimoire (3)
A sudden dizziness swept through her. Han Seoyeon braced a hand to the wall and pulled herself upright.
"…Again, Seoyeon?"
"No… I'm all right, Master."
The aging man watched her with open worry, and Giacomo Marchisio smiled, gentle as ever.
"There's no need to come visiting every day when you're in no condition yourself."
He said it from a hospital bed. The place where the two of them were speaking was a Church-run hospital, one that specialized in patients of the hidden world.
Several years ago, a great upheaval had broken out across the Chinese mainland. To clean up after it, Han Seoyeon had been the one to propose that they eliminate not Chinese people, but the people of "China" — and the butterfly effect of that idea was only now coming home.
She had cut north and south across the Korean peninsula, running two operations back to back. At the very moment it seemed they might finally be done, the Necromancer, one of the Mad Ones, had burst in dragging the corpse of the Bartholomew from two generations prior, and she had been thrown into the subjugation with no chance to rest. Seoyeon had come out of it carrying severe internal injuries. They were bad enough that even the Church's miracles had their limits, and even now a dizziness like the one just now still took her from time to time.
Then again — for having gone up against that Evaristo and still put the Necromancer down cleanly, she had gotten off remarkably cheap.
Even setting that aside, three scenario resolutions in a row across a handful of days meant that simply having all four limbs still working counted as having looked after her body rather well. Giacomo, right there in front of her, had died and been raised again somewhere in the triple digits along the way, and was paying for it in a hospital bed.
"And you'll have to be sent out on yet another scenario resolution, won't you? On account of those Beelzebute things, or whatever they are."
"…Yes. It seems my head is what they're after."
"Then you ought to rest even a little more."
It was only too obvious. She needed every hour of rest she could get — all the more so when her master wasn't even gravely ill, merely slow to convalesce.
"Or is there some other reason you come to check on me every day?"
"……."
Han Seoyeon gave a small, quiet nod.
"If they are targeting me, there is a risk they will harm the people around me."
In ordinary times, he was not a man Seoyeon had any cause to worry over. He was stronger than she was, and far more experienced. But weakened as he was now, who could say. If they were to ambush him while he lay here…
"Seoyeon."
"…Yes."
"Please don't think so little of your master. I am not the sort of man who loses to mere demons over a thing of this degree."
He grinned at her as he said it. It might have been genuine faith in his own skill, and it might have been nothing but bluster, meant to set her at ease.
"For now, focus on resting properly. It's only going to get harder, for a while yet."
"……Understood."
Han Seoyeon nodded. Even if it was nothing but bluster, she had no wish to pick it apart and call it out — not a master's bravado, offered in front of his own disciple.
"By the way, my other master—"
She brought it up as if it had only just occurred to her.
"He kicked his way out of the room a little while ago. Said he was going to hunt a vampire."
"…He wasn't in any condition to move, was he?"
"No. So he sold his flesh to a demon for a short while. He'll likely be wandering around as a zombie for a few days."
"……That does sound like him."
"It does sound like that friend of mine."
What kind of obsession even was that, she couldn't help but wonder — but these two, at least, were long since used to it, and could only manage a bitter smile.
"Then I'll be going. …Please take care of yourself, Master."
"And you take care of yourself as well, Seoyeon."
She dipped her head once and left the room, though in the instant before the door shut she hesitated and looked back.
A wet, slapping sound reached her, and she looked down. A dark, blood-red, sticky fluid lay in a shallow sheet across the whole of the corridor floor. Further along, corpses of uncanny shape were strewn in every direction. There had been no smell at all while she was in the room, and there was none now, which suggested these were no ordinary living things.
Seoyeon's face tightened at the sight, and a voice gone thoroughly hoarse addressed her.
"You do worry yourself sick over that monstrous old man, Bartholomew Margarita."
A man stood with a spear lifted in each hand, in the middle of kicking aside a wolf-headed corpse. His back was bent into a severe hunch, and his lip was cleft and twisted.
"…Philip."
Apostle Philip, Cesare Bianchi. The master of the twin spears stood guard before the hospital room with a look of pure boredom.
Seoyeon had known he was escorting her master. She had brushed past him on the way in. But there had been no corpses like these when she entered, which meant the attack had come while she was briefly speaking with Giacomo inside.
"As I thought. Worrying too much is your problem."
"I'll take the advice, gratefully."
Cesare had meant it as a jab, but she let it pass without weight. Rather than press the point, he brought the spear in his right hand down against the floor with a thud, and demon ichor spattered up in a wet slap.
"What was that for?"
"Look at this."
"Yes, I'm looking. The Spear of Longinus, if I'm not mistaken."
Apostle Philip was, as a rule, chosen from among those Holy Knights deemed to have no peer in the spear of their age, for the simple reason that the holy relic inherited with the seat was itself a spear. Other relics bound up with the spear were, quite naturally, often issued to Apostle Philip. Cesare Bianchi, Philip of this generation, was no exception: a specialist in the paired spears, he had been granted the Spear of Longinus as one armament more.
"This isn't the one I usually carry. It's a replica. The higher-ups cleared its release for this affair."
"……."
At what followed, Seoyeon's eyes went wide. There are times when a replica far outstrips the genuine article, and the Spear of Longinus — the Lance of Longinus — was precisely such a case.
"Unless you're a fool, you understand what that means."
"…The Church is taking this crisis very seriously."
In other words, the upper ranks were in earnest — earnest enough to bring out even an object like that.
"You are an Apostle, selected and proclaimed in the Church's name. Leave the ones trying to stick a knife in you before the investiture's even been held, and the dignity of the Holy See hits the floor."
The demons who had risen after Han Seoyeon's selection, declaring they would not stand to see such a thing — that, in its way, was a challenge laid against the Church's own authority.
"His Holiness the Pope was considerably displeased."
His goddaughter, and the adopted daughter of a close friend. Given that bond with Seoyeon, of course he would be furious — but the point was that even set apart from all of that, this was a matter on which the head of the Church had cause to register his displeasure.
To Han Seoyeon, who had kept her mouth obediently shut, Cesare Bianchi muttered it low, in that thoroughly rasped voice.
"This is a crusade. You understand?"
"…Yes. Perfectly."
"Then go and get ready. You'll be spearheading the detached force."
Han Seoyeon left him a slight bow and started off again. A sticky sensation kept climbing up through the soles of her shoes.
"Other way. The stairs over there are choked with corpses."
"Ah. Were they. Thank you for the advice."
So Han Seoyeon changed direction and went, and the hunchbacked man set his back to the wall and let out a sigh.
A short while later, the blood blanketing the corridor floor began to seethe and boil. What rose out of it was maggots beyond counting — monsters, every one of them, about the size of a three-year-old child. They tore at one another and packed themselves together, taking on shape after shape, lumps of meat forming themselves like dolls of clay.
"Damn persistent vermin."
Crossing his spears and spitting on the floor, the hunchbacked man muttered it with his face twisted shut.
"So it will be all-out war after all, won't it?"
A clack. Something was set down on the table — a meat dish that looked terribly good, the plating perfection past perfection, enough to make one swallow, undignified and unthinking.
A human head, a frog's head, and a cat's head regarded the dish. Slowly, they turned their gaze and fixed it on the woman who had set it down.
"Is there any need to bother saying something so obvious, Nisroc?"
The three heads spoke as if in chorus, and a thread of anger ran through the sound.
"We foresaw that much. We foresaw it, and the arithmetic still came out, which is why we declared war."
Go head to head with the Church at full strength? They would, of course, be smashed to paste. United as one, Beelzebute might be called the greatest of demons — and yet if the Church truly brought its full power to bear, the odds of victory converged on zero. Not Beelzebute alone. Gather every one of those "greatest demons" and fight them all together, and the chances would still be poor. That was the sort of thing the Church was. In terms of raw power, it was no exaggeration to call it first in the world.
"But the Church cannot bring its full power to bear. It never could."
They were strong — strong enough to administer the whole of the world. But what they had to do was far too much. Their charge was not a single demon horde going by the name of Beelzebute. For the sake of the days ahead, the Church had to fight while keeping its losses in check, and in that necessity there were gaps to slip through, and in those gaps a chance of victory. The Church of the present day had grown too vast. It had reached a bulk at which it could no longer live by a purely religious view of things, at which it could not ignore the logic of politics. And so, the moment it weighed gain against loss and found the latter grown too great, it would try to negotiate.
"We kill Han Seoyeon Margarita. That is the standard."
The demons would already have achieved their aim, and that would be the end of it; and once that came to pass, further fighting would be nothing, from the Church's side, but the venting of spleen. The Church, being in the end a political power, could not simply go on with a meaningless war. So Bael explained, taking up a fork and a knife.
A slick cut — he sliced the meat. A clink — the knife, driven clean through, tapped the plate. He portioned what lay there into dozens of pieces, speared one with the fork, and lifted it.
"Pretty sure Japan said something like that, right before they went and poked Pearl Harbor…"
"What did you just say?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all. So — how does it taste?"
"…You really are something. To cook a subordinate you killed right in front of me, serve it up like this, and still stand there so utterly unashamed."
"It hardly compares to Lord Bael, who sets about eating it without so much as a blink."
"Impudent."
Bael spat it from the cat's head, while the frog's head swallowed a piece of flesh that, until an hour ago, had been his subordinate.
"I merely judged that you would be far more useful than that Gremory you killed. By presence alone, you were running first even among my own."
Nisroc of Gluttony, one of the three brat demons. Bael privately rated her as living up to a name that well known.
"If you'll join us for no more than the cost of my chewing on a corpse that's already dead, I'll eat as many bowls as it takes."
"My. Praise like that, and I hardly know what to do with myself."
"So what, in the end, did you come here for? A grudge against Margarita, I assume?"
At length Bael asked it, as if puzzled. Nisroc, called a brat demon, had been stirring up one incident after another, and yet the Church had never moved in earnest to put her down — because, for whatever reason, she had not laid a hand on a human life in several decades. It seemed unlikely, then, that she harbored any great grudge against Margarita, who went about resurrecting people without discrimination. Not, at the least, a grudge deep enough to make an enemy of the Church.
"A simple reason. I only grew curious what an Apostle's meat might taste like."
"…You've lost your mind."
For no more reason than that? Bael stared at her, dumbfounded, but Nisroc only smiled lightly and shrugged. She was the one who, on some whim, had given up human flesh entirely decades ago — but putting back to one's mouth, on a whim, the meat one had quit on a whim was hardly impossible. Bael decided to let it pass without pressing further. It was better not to get too entangled with a lunatic.
Had Belial been in the room, they would no doubt have pointed it out — the Church you picked a fight with is the greatest lunatic in the world, and that doesn't scare you? — but they were not, at least, here. No. They wouldn't show their face on the board at all, not for the whole of this war.
That Belial is laid up recuperating because they got beaten to a pulp? If you're going to make an excuse, at least make it sound plausible.
They would side with the Church, surely enough, but they had no wish for the sparks to land on their own faction. They were all but announcing as much outright.
"Lord Bael…!"
"Have some manners. Knock before you enter, Ronove."
"Forgive me. But the news is rather urgent…"
"Yes. They've spotted an army, I take it?"
"Ah, y-yes. That's right. In Turkey, a host of considerable size…"
"So the Church has moved. Faster than I thought."
"No, that's not it… it's Belial's army! All eighty demon legions under Belial…!"
"……What? W-wait. Why would Belial…?"
An advance? That much, they could manage. But for one who had so insisted on playing the bystander to come charging in at the head of their entire force — that was strange, however one looked at it.
"Don't tell me it was a deception! Full of the intent to join from the very start, and all of it just to trick us! Hmph — as if I'd let things go your way…!"
"Um, Lord Bael? There is also the possibility that Belial really was badly hurt without our knowing, and never actually meant any deception at all……."
"Nisroc, do you think that holds together? Between 'Lucifer, imprisoned in St. Peter's Basilica, secretly slipped out and attacked Belial' and 'a nuclear bomb quietly exploded' — which piece of nonsense are you believing?"
"U-um."
"If a surprise like this was the aim from the beginning, then Belial themself might appear from anywhere. Order every front not to let its guard down, so we can answer whenever it comes!"
…Demon of wisdom and insight though he was, one who saw through all things, it seemed even he could not pierce through to the truth — that this entire situation was nothing more than a subordinate committing fragging, out of rage at a man intruding on yuri.