An Abomination Among You (4)
"You... fuck..."
His hand shook as he hauled on the trigger. The instant his fist clamped down hard enough to crush the grip, the muzzle spat fire in a stuttering roar. The belt of ammunition running from the box slung across his back like a pack was sucked into the gun and driven straight back out the barrel, riding a choking reek of powder.
Unless the body could carry it—and even if the physical stats checked out, not without real training behind them—the recoil was simply more than flesh could endure. Only natural. The thing had never been built for a human being to hold and fire in the first place.
But the man with the bizarre, bat-like head, Yetrem Matveyev, weathered it as if it were nothing at all. Those grotesquely swollen forearms, each nearly the size of an ordinary man's skull, were surely to thank.
With that enormous frame he mastered the recoil completely, and the marksmanship he showed was superb—tracking the target's every movement and laying the sights dead between the eyes without the slightest waver. Had this been an online game rather than the real world, crowds would have risen as one to shower him with the highest praise a player can offer, screaming that he had to be hacking. It was shooting that bordered on art.
Of course, this was not an FPS.
And if anyone here was using a hack, it was the other side.
Mid-flight, the bullets stopped dead in the empty air. A moment later gravity took them, and they dropped. The man they had been meant for paid them no mind at all. He came on toward Matveyev at a heavy, unhurried walk, and the rounds rolling underfoot crumbled like crackers beneath his dress shoes.
The old man in his drab, somber clothes did not so much as blink at the muzzle flash flaring directly in front of him. Hands clasped behind his back, he simply plodded forward, offering no reaction whatsoever.
Behind him lay countless corpses, blood and gobbets of flesh strewn wide, a limb flung loose here and there from the body it belonged to.
Apostle Thomas. Cardinal Giacomo Marchisio Bonaventura, called Holy Communion.
"Matveyev. Ah—Yetrem Mikhailovich Matveyev."
He turned a gaze gone cold upon Matveyev and came on at his leisure, the same man who stood as the foremost authority on the Benedictine Twin Swords. For all that renown, he was not holding a single blade. He was on his way back from having already driven them into someone among the corpses behind him.
"Why were you ever permitted to stand in this place. Did you truly not know?"
Among the Apostles he was a moderate so thorough that one might well set ultra in front of the word, and even within the quartet that had once turned the world upside down, he was reckoned the most sensible man of them—gentle of face. But if that had truly been the whole of his nature, the name the Crusher would never have stuck. Among his old comrades he had been the only pacifist, and at the same time the one who bore the greatest share of their violence.
"Did you truly believe you climbed that high because you were something remarkable? That you had set your organization upon a rock even Her Highness the Princess herself could not move?"
Giacomo Marchisio, now close enough that they were all but nose to nose, laid a hand on Matveyev's shoulder. The fingers were not especially thick, and yet they closed on that shoulder with a hardness that called steel to mind. Blue eyes regarded Matveyev coldly. The gun he had been holding had long since gone to dry bread and crumbled apart.
"Tear you down, and given time some other breed would only take your place. Smash you completely, and a swarm of petty little organizations would flood in, each more troublesome to manage than the last. And so we handed the seat of a client king to whoever seemed the most docile and the most inclined to obey, and left you alone so long as you did not cross the line."
Had he failed to understand that all this time? Or had he known, and gambled anyway, believing this the moment to overturn the board?
"And now you've crossed it?"
In all honesty, Giacomo did not care about that in the slightest. What mattered was only whether the thing before his eyes was something he was permitted to smash.
"Taking orphans on as your lowest rank and file. Think of it as an orphanage of a rather extreme and illegal sort, and it isn't impossible to look the other way. Judging by how long it was allowed to pass, that seems to have been Her Highness's assessment, at least."
"But," Giacomo added.
"Raiding an orphanage that belongs to the Church and kidnapping the children—that, I'm afraid, can only be called crossing the line."
A raid that killed two birds with one stone: replenishing their numbers, and declaring war on the Church. There had also been a plan, this time, to hand a portion of them over as "merchandise." Until now they had kept their heads down and left that territory untouched. This was a frontier they had meant to open.
"Kh—?! Ghhhhk—?!"
"Even so. You really ought not to have gone into trade with five-year-olds."
A clear voice, murmuring the words with perfect calm. It never properly reached his ears. All at once his sight flooded black, and a searing pain crashed down over him. Matveyev clutched at his own face without thinking. From his nose and from his mouth, both of them joined to the eyes, there rose a sour tang shot through with the smell of alcohol.
"You, at least, I will not kill here, Yetrem Mikhailovich Matveyev. We will go to the Church together."
"Death is too comfortable an ending to bestow upon you. I happen to be a little angry." The cardinal murmured it in a voice gone cold.
It was the day a bratva that had made the southwestern district of Moscow its base, and held nearly a third of Russia in its grip, was erased from the face of the earth.
The room was full of wailing.
It had to be called wailing, and not a scream, because the sound did not end in a single cry. Everyone there had become of one heart, and they were all howling together at the top of their lungs.
"I can't—I can't see..."
"Aagh?! Who is that?! Who stepped on me?!"
"Is anyone...! Is anyone there?! Agh?!"
"Aaaaaaagh!"
Some had collapsed to the floor and were scrabbling wildly at it with their palms. Some staggered on with both arms thrust out before them, like zombies in a film, and some, having stepped on a body and gone down, were rolling across the ground. Others blinked over and over, or rubbed frantically at their own eyes in terror.
Only one person walked through the midst of that chaos with a settled heart: a man in a monk's habit, a double-edged saw in one hand. He paused a moment before a woman crawling along the floor, and brought the blade down across her neck.
A saw is not, by nature, a thing for cutting or for cleaving. It is a thing for slicing. And yet the beheading was immaculately clean.
The man—Apostle Simon—harvested the lives one by one, his expression never changing, perfectly calm. Against human beings who had merely lost the light from their eyes and were groping at whatever lay around them, the work was far too simple. It did not take long before the only life left in the room was his own.
When it was finished, the Apostle wiped the blood and flesh from the saw roughly against the waist of his trousers and looked at the door before him. It was a metal door that looked solid even at a glance. Once it had been a security measure, meant to keep this bunker safe. Now it served only to help seal the occupants in, so they could not flee outside.
Presently Simon—Andile Tekie—drew a phone from his pocket and contacted Matia at once.
"Yes. It's finished. You may open it now."
"Oh, already? That finished even faster than I expected."
A woman's voice came through from the other end of the line, and not the slightest seriousness could be felt in it. To her, something like this likely did not even qualify as work. And yet it must have been a bunker they had built with real intent...
A moment later the massive door played a bright little melody and slid open with a smooth, easy hush. Andile Tekie glanced back at the countless heads rolling across the floor, traced the sign of the cross over that assemblage of meat, and stepped out through the door.
The sound of it closing followed him. Something must have caught; it creaked a little more than it had on the way open.
"You attempted tax evasion, I see."
"Ah, no, that's—that's, you see—"
"Tax evasion. You attempted it?"
"...If I pay my taxes in good faith starting now, will you let me live?"
The person known as Han Seoyeon Margarita could hardly be called sociable, and yet her connections within Japan ran remarkably wide. To a great many of Japan's youkai, she was a benefactor.
Perhaps because the Church there had once been savagely persecuted by means of youkai, Japanese Catholicism had more than its share of holy knights bent on extreme measures. They would not lay a hand on a youkai once it had been judged innocent—but a judgment of that kind rarely came easily, since so many of them began from a presumption of guilt. And so the youkai of Japan, unless they had solid backing, tended to live with their true natures hidden. The moment they were found out, they might well be killed.
Into that state of affairs stepped Han Seoyeon, who used her standing as an Apostle to protect them. She took on even the petty errands an Apostle need not have touched, and gave as many youkai as she could a guarantee that they were safe. Some among the hardline holy knights turned resentful eyes on her for it. To certain youkai, by contrast, she was received as nothing short of a savior.
There were more than a few who would offer up their very lives if Seoyeon wished it, on the grounds that those lives were ones she had saved to begin with. Even short of that, youkai who would come running at a word from her lay thick across every reach of Japan.
And why, precisely, is any of this being told—
—is that this, exactly, was why an untimely Night Parade of a Hundred Demons broke out in the Japan of the twenty-first century.