The One Who Receives Grace (2)
Ninomae Hitomi stared at the woman fussing her posture back into order.
She had only just managed to talk her down from suddenly standing on her hands, and even now the woman stayed on her knees in a formal seiza. Water-pale hair, and wings unfurling from her back—not the membranous wings one pictured on a demon, but wings clothed in feathers as white as any bird's. A ring of light drifted above her head besides. She looked, in every respect, like an angel itself.
"Shirase Hikari-san."
"Yes."
And yet, for all of that, Shirase Hikari was one of the demons brokered to them through Philotanuss.
Her air was closer to an angel's than a demon's, and Hitomi had once found it strange enough to ask Seoyeon outright.
"Is she really a demon?"
"Well, if you insist on splitting hairs, Christian demons are all fallen angels to begin with. It isn't unreasonable. ...That said, she probably isn't the sort of demon you're picturing, Ninomae-san. Japanese name, after all."
Needless to say, no Christian angel had ever borne a Japanese name. Not unless the conspiracy about the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel crossing to Japan and settling there happened to be true—or unless the Harmony of the Six Races, the Fugu Plan, had borne some absurdly successful fruit.
And so they had settled on the conclusion that a popular character from some Japanese work had gathered enough fame, and a sufficient medium, to be born into this world. Belial's faction, once driven to the very brink of vanishing, had taken in beings of that kind by the score and clawed its influence back. If that was the case, the question of why an angel would have a Japanese name answered itself easily enough. School stories in which some supernatural anomaly disguises what it is and enrolls are a dime a dozen on the subculture side of things.
"Nothing comes up no matter how I search. Can faith really gather to that extent?"
"Then she'll probably show up in the future and become popular."
"Huh? That's possible?"
"Christ was nailed to the cross and forgave all our sins—past, present, and future alike. It isn't common, but there are anomalies that reach across time to exert their influence."
Psychometry, prophecy, and the like were the famous examples. She remembered nodding along to the explanation.
At any rate, an angel—no, a demon?—of that presumed sort now sat before their eyes.
"So the motive was pure self-interest. That's what you're saying."
"Yes. That's correct."
While pretending to be the near-egoless familiar Hitomi had summoned, she had clung, played coy, and indulged her own desires. Shirase Hikari confessed almost at once. How fast was that confession? She drove her forehead to the floor in a grand bow before Hitomi had even grasped the situation, let alone begun to press her. With an Apostle right beside them it was the correct response, but the speed of the judgment was impressive all the same.
In the end Shirase only came down from the handstand—passing at once into a kneeling seiza, admittedly—after Han Seoyeon declared she would leave the matter entirely to Hitomi, and Hitomi promised not to take her life.
"I figured that was probably it, but even when I changed the familiar's form to match mine and did the clone play..."
"Yes. That was me......"
"...I knew it."
No wonder she had seemed so excessively frightened, trembling from head to toe. Even by her own reckoning she had plenty to feel guilty about. Barging uninvited into a couple's bed would do that.
Strictly speaking, Hitomi had been the one occupying that body at the time, so one could make a case that she was innocent......
"If taking control of you made your consciousness disappear, you wouldn't have been summoned in that shape in place of a familiar to begin with, would you?"
"......"
Under Hitomi's steady, questioning gaze, Shirase looked away. Silence held for a moment—and then she planted her forehead on the floor and went straight into a dogeza.
"I couldn't move my body, but my mind and my senses were there...!"
At yet another confession offered without a moment's hesitation, Hitomi only let out a small sigh.
"If Shion wasn't uncomfortable, then I'm fine."
"If Hitomi is fine, then I don't particularly mind either."
Hitomi murmured, and Seoyeon's words followed at once. Still face-down, Shirase lifted only her head and stole a glance at the two of them.
"You two are... awfully open-minded? This is basically the same as a third person getting mixed in against your wishes, you know?"
She had been the one bowing and scraping for forgiveness, and yet being let off this easily left her the flustered one.
"The moment you were dealing with Hitomi and Shutang at the same time, it was already no different from the three of us doing it together...... That's how it strikes me, at least."
"Huh?"
"Shion is the type who draws a very sharp line between the VTuber character and the person inside."
"Huh...?"
"Well, that was half a joke... I truly don't mind all that much. It's Hitomi I'm worried about."
Half a joke meant the other half was sincere, didn't it? While Shirase's eyes rolled in frantic little circles, Hitomi was the one to speak this time.
"If we're being precise, the one who can actually claim to have been wronged is Shion, isn't it? Strictly speaking, you didn't directly toy with me or anything, Shirase-san."
It was Han Seoyeon's side that had been touched by the body under Hitomi's control. From Hitomi's point of view, it wasn't strange to think that if anyone ought to be laying blame here, it was Seoyeon.
"So I was the one who got it... there is that way of looking at it, yes."
Hearing this, Han Seoyeon brushed a hand along her chin and nodded.
"No, that's how people normally think, isn't it? Seeing it from some other angle is the weirder thing, don't you think?"
"Even if you tell me the one gasping like she was about to pass out was the perpetrator, it doesn't exactly feel real..."
"Nnh—! Be quiet...!"
Seoyeon drove the fact straight through her without so much as a change of expression, and Hitomi flushed scarlet and raised her voice.
Counted one by one, the number of times was considerable for a couple still only engaged—more than one might expect. Unfortunately, among all of them, Hitomi had never once beaten Seoyeon in bed. Come to think of it, summoning a clone—what she had believed was only a clone, Shirase Hikari—had been one of the schemes she had devised in the hope of winning somehow. In the end it had been the sort of clone that, in manga terms, didn't gain total stats the more you split it, but actually lost them, so she had given up and relegated the whole thing to one special night of play.
...Wait. If I think of it as basically the three of us, doesn't that mean I went at her two-on-one and still lost?
The thought flickered through her mind, but for the sake of what remained of her pride, Hitomi firmly decided to ignore it. ...Setting aside the question of whether any pride remained at this point.
"More to the point, she's an angel character. Is it all right for her to be this thirsty for women?"
Perhaps out of respect for Hitomi's resolve, Han Seoyeon turned the subject at a suitable moment. If, as she suspected, the woman had been born out of some work, then Shirase Hikari's personality would rest on the character constructed within it.
"These days, if you look at manga, the angels are even worse."
"...That is true."
She nodded, convinced at once. Consider the nun characters of recent subculture alone: those who failed to keep their monastic vows—chastity above all—outnumbered the faithful several times over. The Church itself regarded the trend as a considerable headache. Born of a culture like that, a slide into promiscuity was easy enough to accept. Thinking so, Han Seoyeon unconsciously picked up the phone she had set nearby.
And she was a little startled at herself. Reaching for one's phone out of habit was nothing unusual for a modern person, but Han Seoyeon was someone who, even by her own reckoning, had passed an uncommon childhood. She had adapted to ordinary life far enough to grow a habit like this. Realizing it, Seoyeon felt an odd, quiet pride.
She had been dispatched to Japan on an Apostle's business, but the cover had never strictly needed to be that of a university student. It would have been enough to affix some suitable title and enter her name with the Onmyoryo, or with a company run by the Church. Even so, she had chosen to enroll, running errands for Professor Senjoji all the while, because certain people had insisted on it hard. Chiefly her master, Apostle Thomas, and her godfather, Pope Dionysius II. She needed to learn what ordinary was, they had said, and they had pushed the point with considerable force.
At the time she had wondered, briefly, whether she ought to be doing something so inefficient. Only briefly. She had never had the slightest intention of disobeying an order.
...Looking back now, I think they would have liked it better if I'd told them it was inefficient and I didn't want to do it.
Wouldn't they have been moved, seeing the first sprout of a self of her own finally beginning to bud in Han Seoyeon? The thought came to her unbidden. Whatever the case, it was thanks to that choice that she had been able to meet Hitomi like this.
She had been sinking into sentiment in a thoroughly unexpected place when she noticed an unread message. It was the group chat tied to Anathema Production's third-generation work. Seoyeon's present standing inside the company was a peculiar one, and "assistant manager to the third generation" was one of the odd titles attached to that peculiar position. ...For some reason she had been invited not only to the room that included staff, but to the one that held only the third-generation members as well.
In any case, messages arriving in this room were a familiar thing for Han Seoyeon, and she unlocked the phone and opened the messenger without much thought.
"...Huh?"
She simply stared at the screen. Slowly, her head turned toward the back of the sofa. Her eyes met Shirase Hikari's—the other woman, deciding the worst had probably passed, had finished her dogeza and was squirming her way upright.
"Uh, um, should I maybe stay down a little longer?"
"No. It's fine."
"...? All right. I'll get up."
She soothed the woman, who had flinched under her gaze, and returned her eyes to the screen—quite certain, all the while, that her own pupils were trembling just a little.
"...Anathema Production's name is going to turn up in a Church report again."
At least it seemed clear now just whose personality that thirst for women had come from.