Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh (4)
"…This is bad."
The old man's gaze traveled over the wrecked interior of the facility. Bullet scars pocked the walls and the floor, and scraps of flesh and blood had been flung in every direction.
He crossed himself from long habit and slowly turned his head. His eyes met those of the woman who had followed him in.
"What do you make of it, Seoyeon?"
"An internal conflict looks all but certain. How does it seem to you, Master?"
"I am of the same mind."
The woman—Han Seoyeon Margarita—drew a fingertip lightly across a bullet scar and sniffed at it.
A powder blend whose scent she knew well: the propellant loaded into the special rounds used by the U.S. military's anomalous-response units. Set beside everything else, it seemed plain that the troopers of Leviathan had opened fire on one another.
Giacomo Marchisio, walking a little ahead, nodded as though he had reached the same conclusion.
Once the wedding of Han Seoyeon and Ninomae Hitomi was done, and the reception after it, the two of them had hurried here, to the ground where the Leviathan unit had been stationed. The Doctor's defection had been reported, and they had come to see to the aftermath.
Of course, however fast they came, they could never have stopped Dr. Groothuizen. They had come only to put the place in order.
"Three bodies. Have these transferred as well."
"Yes, ma'am."
Seoyeon gave the order to the personnel who had come with them—Holy Knights in protective suits and gas masks, prepared for whatever might be waiting.
The Holy Knights began loading the corpses she had indicated onto stretchers. The damage to the bodies would be restored in the rear, and afterward Seoyeon meant to resurrect them all at once.
She spared them a brief glance as they headed back toward the exit, then turned around again.
"Let us go on, Master."
"Yes. Let us."
And the two of them walked on.
Communications inside the research facility were still cut, so the Church did not yet know exactly how things had unfolded… but the farther they went, the more traces turned up to suggest that the operation had failed.
They had already guessed as much, in a general way. Had the doctor been taken intact, a report of success would have arrived long since. That there had not been so much as a report of failure… amounted to the same thing as every Leviathan operative sent inside being dead, or having defected.
And above all, word had come in only a little while ago that the American mainland itself had been attacked. To deny reality under circumstances like these was already the province of mental illness. Han Seoyeon sighed inwardly and spoke with her usual calm.
"Why do you believe there was an internal split, Master?"
Giacomo considered a moment before he answered.
"Well. I find it difficult to see this as purely of their own will."
"These are not people who would turn their backs on their homeland, even if they were one day to stand against the Church. One or two, perhaps—but for so many to betray us all at once sits wrong."
Putting a patch on a soldier of exceptional skill does not make a special operator. That is all the more true of a case as particular as an anomalous-response unit, special even among special forces. Fellowship among comrades, and devotion to one's country—only with all of that in place can a person become one of Leviathan.
"But on the other hand, isn't it also hard to believe that a group with a vampire at its head was being controlled by someone?"
"That is true as well."
Their minds would hardly have been tampered with, either. Countermeasures of that order would have been in place.
"What of possession?"
Giacomo murmured it, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
"If their bodies were seized outright, I mean."
"Would that not come to the same thing? They would have prepared for so much."
"Have you forgotten? Our opponent is a dangerous element in possession of the Necromancer's arts."
At the very least, it was certain that Sanjou Miyuki had held that technique. Whether she had passed even a portion of it on to Sasaki Kisaki and the rest of her company remained unknown… but if she had, then even Leviathan might have been given a chance.
"I still think that, too, would be difficult."
Han Seoyeon thought for a moment, then shook her head.
It lay within the reach of theory, but the problems were many. If one could set the souls one wanted into this many people all at once, the world would already have fallen under the Necromancer. The more bodies involved, the longer the work takes—and if, in all that time, not a single comrade noticed a possession, they would have to hand the name of special forces back.
Even supposing the souls had been put into them, nothing guaranteed they would move under a unified command. Nor was it a matter of copying one and the same soul and pouring it into every body.
In the end, no answer emerged as to the method. The result was already laid out before their eyes, and they were only accepting it because there was nothing else to be done.
They let the talk trail off there, more or less, and rounded a corner—and another victim came into view.
A woman lay face-down, her blood sprayed in every direction, her head cut away. The severed head had rolled across the floor with its eyes shut. Blonde hair, matted with blood into a ruin. And yet the face was unmistakably the one in her memory.
"…Colonel Evans."
The flesh, gone cold, lay without so much as a twitch.
Seoyeon looked at it in silence for a while. Then she carefully parted her lips and murmured.
"Kindly stop the games and get up."
"It's not a game. It's a vampire-joke, Lord Bartholomew."
And the head grinned wide and snapped its eyes open. Watching, Han Seoyeon sighed once more.
It was only to be expected. As if that Rachel Evans would die of a mere beheading. A monster who, in the Sheol Civil War, had survived being crushed at point-blank range beneath a mass-weapon called Behemoth. Among the vampiric kind, the captain of Leviathan yielded to no one where durability was concerned.
Presently the torso dragged itself along the floor, caught up the head, and set it back upon the neck with a soft thump.
"I know you are not one to do this without a reason… What happened?"
"Sasaki Kisaki got me. There was nothing I could do in this state, and since she didn't know I was a vampire, I just lay there and played dead."
She had lived because they had not delivered a finishing blow. Of course, if one asked why they had failed to confirm the kill on a woman whose head had been cut off, Sasaki would have every right to feel aggrieved.
"In any case, this is fortunate. Now we can hear what happened."
"Ah, but you'd better set the explanation aside for now and get to the hangar."
"The Church has already confirmed that what was under development was stolen. Johnson County has already been attacked. In Wyoming."
At Colonel Evans's words, Han Seoyeon let out a short sigh and answered. When the report had first come in—people claiming, out of nowhere, to have witnessed a spaceship invasion—she had doubted her own ears.
It was a sparsely populated place, and they had succeeded, just barely, in cutting off outside communications…….
They had avoided the worst of it, the incident spreading across the internet. The trouble was that more than one or two survivors had watched the enormous craft pour down its bombardment and vanish.
If things went badly, it could swell into a situation where every last one of them would have to be wiped out to keep the Secrecy Protocol. No—under ordinary circumstances, that was exactly how they would have answered.
"…It was a miracle that the project Mr. F was running finished just in time."
Frederica Friedrich. The woman people called Mr. F, possessed of a suspicious amount of money. The art she held as her greatest specialty was the sponsoring of creators, so as to steer the cultural works of the world in a chosen direction; through it, she had been bringing into being a great many anomalies of use to the Church in the keeping of world order.
For these last few decades in particular, the matter she had taken up was subculture—and the erotic end of it. By her own account, it was "the genre likeliest to be of help once made real, because so many convenient elements appear in it." And the prototype she had completed this time was the Hypnosis App.
Strictly speaking, it was a separate thing, fashioned by taking that cliché of erotic manga as an object of faith… but those involved simply called it the Hypnosis App. It had been the same at the last council of the Apostles. The effect was nothing extraordinary, yet it was enough, at least, to erase the memories of surface-world people who had no answer to any of this.
The foundations of the Secrecy Protocol had come within a breath of shaking, and so it was a mercy beyond reckoning. Even granting that they settled this incident by removing every witness, the terrorists had taken the weapon, and the chance that the attacks would end with this one was low. Nothing guaranteed that, the next time, they could shut out every witness before the Secrecy Protocol came apart.
The essence of the Secrecy Protocol was to make the belief that no such thing exists the mainstream thought of this world, and by that belief hold down the power of anomalies. Should it ever be dismantled, a hell upon the earth was not difficult to imagine.
"No. That isn't what I meant. The Vampire Slayer is over by the hangar, so I meant you should go and see, my lord."
"…Master is here?"
"Yes. So I heard. I don't know what on earth he did, but he actually managed to run Sasaki Kisaki down…"
Evans added, however, that he had taken a direct hit from the ship's main gun, and that his condition was likely grave.
"Understood. We will look there first. …Can you walk on your own?"
"I've been rolling around, so I've got most of my strength back. I can manage alone, so go on without worrying."
"Then… excuse us. Master, let us go."
"This is it. This right here."
A blonde woman stared at the screen and grinned, well satisfied.
And into the empty air, where no one was listening, the Doctor cried out—that this magnificent ship sailing the sky was her own work.
"Ah! I am seeing my child move, with my own eyes!"
"…Enough of that. Have you no clothes to change into? I should like to wash."
Watching that rejoicing back, Sasaki Kisaki muttered sullenly. At least she felt she understood, quite clearly, why the Doctor had joined her in stabbing America in the back.
America's F-22 stealth fighter is often called, half in jest and half in earnest, a weapon with no occasion for use unless an alien invasion should happen to break out. Considering the gap between it and the armies of other nations, even a somewhat lesser weapon would be more than enough to answer them—praise so extreme it borders on saying the thing is not even cost-effective.
If a piece of surface-world hardware received that sort of treatment, how could this battleship be any different, built by throwing every anomalous technology they had at it? Given that it could not even be brought out lightly onto the surface, it was doubtful whether Dr. Groothuizen would ever have seen it sent into real combat before she died.
And so she had simply resolved to drive the thing into America, quite certain it would make a fine match.
Crazy woman… a truly crazy woman…….
It was not a notion anyone in their right mind would have.
"But the way I see it, your goals are the more outlandish of the two."
She had been regarding the Doctor with a somewhat sour eye when the woman suddenly whipped her head around and looked at Sasaki. Feeling, all at once, as if her thoughts had been read, she flinched before she could help it.
"Tearing down the Secrecy Protocol, of all things."
But the Doctor paid it no mind whatever, and only went on snickering.
"And you mean to pull off a feat like that—for what? One of you just wants to watch other people suffer. The other wants to found a little kingdom of her own and live in splendor with women hanging off her arm?"
"Out of your mind, the both of you."
So the Doctor muttered, tapping her own temple with a forefinger.
"Come. Time we were moving again. Haha—where shall we warp to this time?"
"I asked whether you had clothes to change into. The stench is so foul I can scarcely endure it."
"It's someone else's blood anyway, isn't it? I should think a vampire would find it a pleasant smell."
"You must be the sort who picks meat up off the floor and eats it."
"Hah. Particular, aren't you."
"Well, very well. The mood is on me, so I myself shall personally guide you through every last corner of my darling child."
"…And yet, to speak of exploring a young child in every nook and cranny—is that turn of phrase not rather obscene?"
"Wow. You really are a crazy little sh—ahem. In you go. I believe I said that I would be the one giving that child the tour? And what of it? From time to time even I am stirred to carnal lust for my children. Surely that falls within the bounds of normal?"