Old Testament: The Beelzebute Grimoire (6)
"Seoyeon."
"Yes, Your Holiness."
What Han Seoyeon Margarita had been ordered to do was wait at the command post with no end in sight. Faithful to that instruction, she had been sitting in perfect posture when Dionysius's words made her snap her head around.
"It would be better if you moved now."
"Understood."
An immediate answer, and she was on her feet. The motion was slight, and yet it carried a hint of impatience.
Part of it was training. She had been drilled until swift, lucid response—or, to put it a little irreverently, the knack of moving with snap—lived in her body. But it was also simply that, on a purely emotional level, the order was profoundly welcome.
Strip it down to the root, and this was a war that had broken out because of Han Seoyeon. Because of it, other people had gone to the line with their lives in their hands. No—there were surely already those who had lost them. And in a situation like that, being the one who had to sit still was hardly something she could be glad of.
Seoyeon rose at once and stepped out of the command post, and heavy footsteps followed in her wake. A glance back showed a massive man coming after her, a rough-looking fellow with a thick, unkempt beard.
"Quick on your feet, Miss Margarita. You look like you can't stand another second without throwing yourself onto the field."
"Yes. That is correct. Is there a problem?"
"Not at all. Same here."
He said it with a wide grin. Her reply might have sounded, at a glance, like a curt challenge, but he understood that she had only wanted to confirm whether there truly was a problem.
"Just thinking I get to cut loose to my heart's content for the first time in ages has me itching all over. If it weren't for His Holiness's orders, I'd have bolted out there before I knew what I was doing."
"...Please take care not to leave the operational zone."
Han Seoyeon let out a small sigh. The man went on needling her even as his body began, little by little, to swell.
He had already been a giant of six foot three, and now he swelled larger still, his clothes drawing drum-tight as if they might split. Gray-brown fur sprouted thick across every stretch of exposed skin until it covered him from head to toe.
"Well then. Shall we go see what we can do?"
He growled it through a protruding muzzle, a sound like leaking wind hissing between the densely packed fangs.
Apostle Jude Thaddaeus—the Pioneer. Horseshoe, Moritz Hoffmann Christophoro. At present, he was the Church's only lycanthrope Gravekeeper.
"That's the one, isn't it."
"Yeah."
"What the hell kind of notional enemy are those Yank bastards even planning for, building junk like that? An anti-alien superweapon, right? That's what the mil-nerds used to say."
"Yeah."
"And here we are, seeing the whole show in Hell."
"Yeah. In a broad sense, you can count Hell as an outer world too, so..."
"You wretches over there. If you're going to run a comedy routine, take it outside!"
Bael turned his frog's eyes on the demons seated in the corner and grumbled. His head was cluttered enough already; he had no patience to spare for a provincial variety hour like that.
What the screen showed was a column of countless tanks and armored vehicles, and far off, a formation of fighter jets. From the standpoint of war, it might have been a fairly ordinary sight. If one ignored the fact that this was Hell.
A moment later a boom rolled out, and a great explosion flared across the screen. Flame and flash kept coming, and the instant they recognized it as artillery fire support, the picture drowned in black.
"A familiar's been hit. Nisroc, switch to another feed... Get up, Belphegor."
"...Why?"
"What do you mean, why. Get up and lend a hand stopping that damned advance."
Bael's gaze had landed on the woman sprawled in a nearby seat. Outfitted with a sleep mask and a blanket besides, she yawned long and slow and heaved herself up with a sluggish wriggle.
"Those ones would handle someone on my level anyway..."
Belphegor grumbled, lifting the mask just enough to glance at the screen.
"Making them respond is the entire point, so spare me the complaints and do it."
"Haaahm..."
Bael gave the order while glaring at the woman, who, thoroughly unimpressed, was fiddling with her own horns.
And in the next instant, shadow fell across the battlefield. Black butterflies large enough to span several meters beat their wings and stitched the sky. Before long, the soldiers who had been using the vehicles for cover and pouring out gunfire began to drop where they stood, one after another.
Of course it was that Belphegor. Sloth among the Seven Demon Kings, and the Craving for Sleep among the Three Brat Demons. Set aside the Beelzebute quartet, and she and Nisroc were the strongest cards they could play as single beings.
But the sorcery of that deep sleep lasted only a moment. Before much time had passed, the screen showed them donning protective gear—gas masks and the like. Some began reciting prayers from the rear; others hauled a sack out of a vehicle and scattered the powder inside it over their comrades.
The difference between an ordinary Holy Knight and a Paladin lay in the equipment they used, of course, but the essential difference came from organic coordination. Unlike those who, in most cases, were committed as a small elite and forced to become all-rounders, Paladins could divide their labor and specialize. Indeed, they were encouraged to. There was no need even to confirm that they had been drilled to the bone in organized procedure for a contingency of this kind, and Belphegor's lukewarm reaction had sprung from that same knowledge.
Even knowing it, Bael ordered her to attack them. However successfully they responded, as they were doing now, the process could not help but consume men and materiel. And above all else—
The human eye, the frog's eye, and the cat's eye all stared, unblinking, at a single point on the screen.
On the surface, Paladin doctrine was nearly identical no matter which nation's unit they belonged to. Scattered across many countries, they were just as often massed and thrown in together, so if their methods diverged, problems followed. Put the other way around, though, it meant that even a Paladin whose name sat on a U.S. military roster did not share doctrine with the actual United States military. An emergency-response manual for an anomalous CBRN situation like the one unfolding now, for instance.
While everyone else answered in lockstep, by the book, one group stood out as glaringly out of place: a body of soldiers that barely amounted to a company, if it amounted to one at all.
It was as the prophecy had said, and as expected. Tucking a wholly unexpected dagger inside a noisy, orthodox offensive was precisely the Pope's specialty. Had they simply been so short of bodies that they had taken on attachments and built a composite unit, that would be one thing. But to hire in, from outside, an awkward handful as mercenaries... it was plain as day they meant to use them for some operation.
"As expected."
And then that unit pushed its speed to the limit and bulged out of the formation. No—it went further than that, breaking away entirely and beginning a head-on charge. Bael drew up the corner of his mouth and grinned.
"Lord Bael! Word that Halphas has made contact with Margarita...!"
"Be quiet. From here on is the critical moment."
"Ah, yessir. Understood."
At that exact timing one of the subordinates handling communications shot to his feet and shouted, but Bael silenced him with a single glare. Hearing any more of the report would only have wasted time. Instead of answering it, Bael picked up the piece sitting on the table.
A white chess piece: the queen. He moved it up near the fortress under Halphas's charge, then took a pen left close by and marked an X over the fortress. It would not have fallen yet, of course, but everyone present knew it was only a matter of time. The path that white queen had traveled so far was strewn with red X marks, like footprints.
No one sitting down to chess argues that the pawn or the rook originally standing on a square might, after a valiant struggle, repulse the enemy's attack. In reality such a thing can happen, but in the game, the rules are simply the rules. This was no different. The enemy was merely something close to a system of that kind. There was no way to meet her from the front. All they could do was labor to draw her into a situation where their side could attack.
"The distance is closing. Have Baalzebul ready for deployment. ...Right now, though, this is the time to discuss what to do about that salient."
And so Bael's attention was fixed not on Margarita, but on the company closing in at high speed.
"So the hammer was hiding inside the anvil."
Were they planning to swing around fast and strike his own forces from the rear? That was the notion likeliest to come to mind first.
...Or.
"This ought to be an interesting situation. Summon every prophecy specialist. From here on, it is entirely a contest of wits between commanders."
"Floor it! More! More! Moooore!"
"We're already at top speed, Colonel!"
"Then at least take the shortest route! We go in a straight line! Anything in the way, smash it—I don't care! Gun down every last one of them!"
At the sight of Colonel Rachel Evans grinning wide enough to bare her fangs, her subordinates looked bewildered. Ordinarily she was an unassuming superior with a sense of decorum, a thoroughly decent officer... but true to a horse-racing maniac, the moment a situation like this arrived, she went completely off the rails. They had surely nailed her into the Navy for exactly this disposition. Put her in the Army and it would not have been strange for her to climb onto a tank and attempt a lance charge, so they had quarantined her at sea.
"Yes, we're going! All we have to do is go, right?!"
"Good! Let's do this! Maintain stealth? Conceal our intent? Tell that shit to get fucked!"
But that was precisely everyday life for the 2nd Anomaly Response Special Task Force, Leviathan. The troops grumbled in their various ways and carried out her orders all the same. Madwoman though she was, she was a madwoman who, at her age, had won the Navy Cross and lived to wear it.
Amphibious armored vehicles, considerably modified by the standards of what the military ordinarily fielded, tore across the broken ground of Hell. Torn out of the column and bellowing with engine-thunder, the unit was altogether too conspicuous.
...It seemed more than a little difficult to believe this was a decapitation operation—that is, the unit charged with striking the enemy command. Say decapitation strike, and what comes to mind is something in the vein of a covert assassin. Set beside that, this felt closer to an extremist of a certain religion, suicide vest on, howling Allahu Akbar. And in practice, what they were doing was not so very different.
Common sense would call it insanity... but the supreme commander of this war, at least, appeared to think otherwise.
"Try to hide halfway and the prophecy catches you anyway! If there's a moron here who takes the First of the Lemegeton for a fucking idiot, I'll put a draft hole through his skull right now! You hear me?! A monster that fought through cutthroat competition and took first place!"
"Uh, Colonel? That 'first' doesn't mean a ranking, it—"
"Quiet! Anyone who doesn't know how hard it is to finish first has no right to speak. Anyway, it's a charge. Charge! If getting spotted is already certain, then forget concealment and ram them at top speed, shortest distance!"
Rachel Evans was shouting, at the top of her voice, the operation she had received from the supreme commander. The Pope would never have put it in words like these, of course; her own arrangement had gone into it.
Whether that operation was actually sound... not even the troops carrying it out could be certain. A perfect operation could exist only in theory to begin with, and even if such a thing did exist, they lacked the eye to judge it. Had they possessed insight of that order, they would have been sitting in a staff section somewhere, not out on a front like this.
"All right, so that's Bael's castle...! Now, gentlemen! Hold your speed. From here we ram the enemy command as we are! Bust that cute little lady open and make her bawl!"
Leviathan's subordinates, however, were certain of one thing at least.
...Setting aside whether the operation was right or wrong, this was, at minimum, clearly the best way to spend this lunatic colonel.
"Yeeeeeehaw!"
With a shattering crash, armored vehicles by the handful launched off a slope turned ramp and slammed, one after another, into the wall of the stately old castle.