The One Hanged Upon the Tree (2)
She was gazing up at a sky choked with storm clouds when a single drop tapped the bridge of her nose. Seoyeon drew a folding umbrella from her bag and opened it, and before long the rain was drumming a steady patter across the canopy.
"Oh, Natacchi~"
How long had she been walking? A familiar voice called her name. She turned, and there—crouched before the awning of a shop with its shutter down—was a girl sheltering from the rain.
No. Calling her nothing but a girl didn't quite hold. There was something seductive about her, helped along by skin gone glossy in the wet and by clothes soaked enough that what lay beneath showed through in faint suggestion. Even drenched, that artificially golden hair held on to a beauty that was hard to dismiss.
"What brings you here, Eru?"
"What does it look like? I'm just dodging the rain~"
"I trust you know that isn't what I was asking."
Mika Eru Michael. Set Han Seoyeon aside, and it would be no exaggeration to call her the strongest holy knight in Japan. She was, at the same time, a student still in high school, and on an ordinary weekday she had no business being this far from campus.
"I left early this morning~. Had something to take care of around here. ...Oh, mind if I share the umbrella?"
"If you'll tell me about that something in detail."
"Uh-huh, uh-huh, all you want! I'm sooo glad Natacchi happened to walk by!"
Seoyeon nodded. Eru broke into a radiant smile and scurried in under the umbrella.
"And where does this errand require us to go?"
"Ah, that part's already done. I only wanted to check how the investigation was going, so now I just have to catch a train back home."
"Then I'll see you to the station."
The two of them walked a long while through the rain-swept streets of Tokyo. A brief silence followed, and then Mika Eru spoke again.
"...Sakisaki's still slipping off every which way, from the sound of it."
She was grinning as brightly as ever, and yet a bitterness seemed to seep through her gaze.
Han Seoyeon turned the name Sakisaki over for a moment, then remembered that Eru had once called Sasaki Kisaki exactly that.
Sasaki Kisaki—one of the masterminds behind Hermes Trismegistus, which was to say behind Vampire Syndrome, and at present its sole survivor. In truth she was a vampire who had lied about her age to live out a schoolgirl's life among high school students, and by the circumstances she was estimated at a hundred and fifty years old at the least. Her motive for cooperating with Vampire Syndrome was still unknown, and even now she went on fleeing the Church.
"If I'd known it would turn out like this, I never should've covered for her."
Eru murmured it with her chin tipped slightly up. The umbrella cut off whatever she was looking at, but the regret itself came through to the bone, and a sigh leaked out between teeth clenched hard enough to grind.
Eru had already known that Sasaki Kisaki was a vampire. She herself was a monster who had risen as far as Apostle Candidate; there was no way she would fail to tell a vampire standing right in front of her, least of all after being trained under the Vampire Slayer himself. Even so, she had let the fact pass, so that Sasaki might get through her school days in peace.
Sasaki had gone so far as to confess a desire some would have called vile—that she wanted to satisfy her urges among the students—and that very honesty had made Eru believe her. She had admitted to a crime that would have gotten her arrested the moment it was reported. It had never even crossed Eru's mind that something else might still be hidden.
Mika Eru was a person who affirmed human desire, sexual desire most of all, and the rare fact of a fellow lesbian seemed to have given the two of them a rapport of their own. That was surely why she could not accept things as they stood. Victims had suffered because of her own misjudgment, and the one who had committed the crimes was a friend she had trusted. Coming all the way up to Tokyo to clean the mess up—she meant to take responsibility for something that had come of her...
"The second I catch her, I'm fucking her till she cries and begs. No. Even if she begs, I won't stop..."
"Th-that still counts as a sense of responsibility, yes?"
No. Looking at her now, she seemed to be running on something closer to one hundred percent pure rage...? Han Seoyeon regarded her with a distinctly uneasy eye.
Seoyeon had heard that Mika Eru had somehow gotten through to Sasaki Kisaki and delivered a final demand for surrender—including the part where she had heard, from Eru's own mouth, a remark to the effect of "Any day now that adult ID comes through, and then you're a hen in a coop." Ever since, Eru had been showing a remarkable appetite for the hunt. She had even called the Vampire Slayer himself in on a family favor, which rather said it all.
From the scraps that reached her, though, the situation did not sound good even so.
"How do things stand at present?"
"Weeell~ it's the worst."
Eru let out another sigh and dropped her head.
"I brought Papa in, and she's still covering her tracks and running~. Plus, last time Natacchi joined the search too, right?"
"I did."
They had Han Jihan, peerless when it came to hunting vampires, and alongside him Han Seoyeon, whose nose was so keen that a beast would have seemed dull by comparison. Abraham-Delta, too, had set aside a fair share of their processing power, even if not their full strength. And still the quarry was at large. That was plainly unnatural.
"If she had concealment of this caliber, she would never have been caught in the first place."
Which left one of two possibilities.
"Either there is a spy in the upper ranks, or else a prophet of at least Abraham's level is cooperating with her."
"Which way does Natacchi figure it~?"
"...The trouble is that both are exceedingly unlikely."
Take first a spy embedded at a considerably high station. The chance that Hermes Trismegistus had been tied to such a person from the start was very small; had that been so, none of this would have happened at all. Kan'in Tomoe, who had served as both prophet and informant, had known nothing of it either. So if a spy existed, they could have been turned no earlier than around the time the operation to capture Kan'in Tomoe was set in motion.
That was the part that refused to sit right—not because she blindly trusted that no one on their side would ever turn, but because the story failed on purely rational grounds. Vampire Syndrome, at this stage, was an organization in collapse. It was hard to imagine a group like that possessing the means to recruit someone of high standing so quickly. To begin with, vanishingly few people will willingly board a sinking ship.
Assume a prophet, then, and the difficulty was the same as with the spy. Had they commanded a prophet of that order, they could have acted far more capably, and since they had not, the natural conclusion was that no such prophet had existed to begin with. The awkwardness matched the first hypothesis exactly. Prophets are not stones one kicks in the road, and hauling an excellent one in on short notice, inside so brief a span, was no easy thing.
And so she would have had to swallow it as a coincidence on the order of hitting a dozen lottery tickets in a row. There had been no other way to think of it—not until evidence surfaced that Sanjou Miyuki might have been a disciple of that Necromancer.
The King of the Dead, one corner of the Seven Sisters, the seven great madmen. That freak, after changing bodies a handful of times, had at last met eternal death at Han Seoyeon's hands. Seoyeon looked back on those days: the Heaven-Defying Operation, Operation Bolt, Operation Saint Barbara, the subjugation of Bartholomew Evaristo, and the Sheol Civil War. For the person known as Han Seoyeon Margarita, it had been the most densely packed season of her life.
The thing had been less a human being than malice itself walking about in human clothes. No grand ambition—only a wish to see someone suffer. A lunatic for whom more demon than a demon was the fitting phrase. And the most dreadful fact of all was that the lunatic had been an exceptional one. They were not called one of the seven great madmen for nothing.
Materials touching on that loathsome Necromancer's core technique, she was told, had been discovered in the home of Sanjou Miyuki, who had taken her own life.
"I never imagined the Silver Key would turn up there."
"Right? It really almost turned into a disaster, I'm telling you."
The Silver Key. Even within the Church, not many people so much as knew the term. Fewer still knew that it named a specialized necromancy wielded by the Necromancer, and those who understood the particulars of a technique built for burying evidence would not number twenty if one searched the entire world.
Han Seoyeon, having faced the Necromancer herself, knew it well enough, of course. She would hesitate to say she had grasped it perfectly, but she could at least look at the related materials and judge the real thing from a counterfeit. And unless her mind had simply broken, this was real. They were, in fact, the very data used for the Silver Key.
At first, in sheer shock, she had wondered whether the Necromancer had changed bodies yet again—but no one knew better than Han Seoyeon that this was impossible. She was the one who had annihilated the Necromancer's soul. Sanjou Miyuki, then, was a case of knowledge handed over and nothing more: a disciple, of a sort. If she had known even the Silver Key, she had learned nearly everything that damned necromancer had to teach.
The Church, naturally, was turned on its head. Sanjou Miyuki had killed herself just before the raid on her house—burning even her own soul, perhaps to avoid being raised and interrogated—but the problem was not Sanjou Miyuki herself. It was the bare fact that a disciple existed. The possibility had never been entertained, a judgment drawn from the Necromancer's temperament, and then a disciple had appeared whom no one could deny. If she had already shattered the Church's expectations by making one, nothing guaranteed that there had been only the one.
Bracing for the worst, the Church had mobilized nearly every intelligence service within reach to learn whether another disciple existed. The want of further support for the pursuit of Sasaki Kisaki, even while that pursuit lagged, came of personnel being drawn off in this direction. Then again, if one insisted on counting, two Apostles, one Apostle Candidate, and the Vampire Slayer already amounted to a generous investment of people.
"...And of all things, I never thought the timing would fall out like this."
"Hey, a wedding isn't a crime, is it~?"
On top of all the rest, the wedding of Han Seoyeon and Ninomae Hitomi was itself due to eat into the Church's administrative strength. A sacrament of marriage packed with monsters—the groom and the bride, or rather the bride and the bride, and the guests along with them. By the Church's forecast, a great mass of miracles would manifest across Japan that day. It was not an institution inclined to leave a foreseeable problem sitting, and preparations for controlling the press were already underway. Piling still more work on them in the middle of such a crush, Seoyeon could not help a faint pang of guilt.
"Natacchi already helps out with a ridiculous amount of Church work on an ordinary day—. Add the pluses and the minuses, and I still think you come out ahead~."
A day that comes only once, in other words, was entitled to this much consideration. Mika Eru said it as if to comfort her.
"I'm grateful you'd put it that way."
"And it's not like the wedding is only a burden, y'know~. Right in the middle of the busy stretch, this pretext let us call the Peace of God, too."
The Peace of God: a declaration that anyone who stirred trouble in this window would be killed by a Church that had made up its mind to do it. It was invoked whenever important figures within the Church, the Apostolic Council among them, had to leave their posts. Press control of this pitch at all times, and hostile powers would come throwing themselves in ready to die; declared briefly, for one fixed span, the other side settled into keeping its head down just for now. The Peace of God was what had been drawn out of that tacit understanding.
It had been declared during the last Apostolic Council, of course, and it was to be declared again around Seoyeon's wedding, now truly close at hand. For the Church, the interval naturally became a chance to breathe. Even granting the extra hands that had to go into controlling the press, in a season as frantic as this one it felt like rain breaking a long drought.
"So Natacchi can enjoy that day with a clear heart. You've more than earned it."
Eru grinned, gave her a solid pat on the back, and skipped several steps ahead. It was still overcast, but somewhere along the way the rain had stopped.
"Got it?"
"...Yes. Of course."
Han Seoyeon offered her a faint smile in return.
It was a day with less than a week left until her wedding.