An Abomination Among You (5)
"All cleaned up over here~"
Humming a little song that refused to find a pitch, the girl called out. Her face was still young, but the yellow dye in her hair gave the impression that streets at this hour of night were nothing she wasn't used to.
"Aaaaaagh…!"
"…Tsk. So noisy."
Of course, giving off the air of a kid out playing didn't mean she belonged in a place like this.
She—Mika Eru—shot a sharp glare at the man lying face-down on the ground, and a pale hand thrust up from the floor to clamp over his mouth. He thrashed in terror, of course, but it hardly counted as resistance. Beyond the hand that had just sealed his mouth, countless arms were already pinning him flat, and he was not the only one crushed in that grip. Enough people to nearly fill the room lay sprawled across the floor in the same state.
"Yeesh. I seriously don't get what kind of nerve it takes to pick a fight with the Church~"
Eru burst out laughing. It wasn't that any of it was truly funny. It was the dry little laugh pulled out of her by an irony she simply could not understand.
"Trying to scrap with us at this level? There's naive, and then there's you."
"I would ask you not to put it quite so harshly."
The one who appeared beyond the half-open door was a woman in a black habit. Eyes whose whites had spilled past sanpaku into full yonpaku swept the room, and she let out a small sigh.
"Huuuh? Natacchi, you're not actually sticking up for trash like this, are you?"
"Of course not. But the point is to root out garbage of this sort and smash them before they can grow any stronger. It only stands to reason that they're weak. …In any case, their identities have come in."
With that, Han Seoyeon tossed over the sheaf of papers in her hand. Not a single clip held them, and the sheets scattered wildly through the air. For Mika Eru, that was no trouble at all. A light flick of her fingers, and a dozen-odd hands caught each page and spread it open before her face.
"Wow, this is organized crazy neat? Wait, more than that—did you dig through every CCTV feed?"
"Abraham analyzed them. We have him to thank for that."
Abraham-Delta was, at present, in an extremely fragile position where security was concerned. His developer, the Doctor, had turned against the Church, and the moment anything important reached Abraham's ears it would be passed straight along to her. That did not mean Abraham could do nothing. Information that didn't matter—information it was acceptable for the Doctor to have—he could handle without worry. Set aside the self-aware artificial intelligence, set aside the Church's Apostle who worked the miracle of prophecy: his processing power alone was an enormous help.
What they had asked of him this time was to identify the members of a criminal organization. Everyone in sight had already been subdued, but someone among them might have been forced to cooperate against their will, or might simply have happened to be here today by chance.
"Mmm~ guilty, all of them?"
This time, no such case turned up. Mika Eru matched the photographs attached to the files against the faces pressed to the floor, one after another, and a bright smile curved her lips. An instant later a string of wet cracks rang out, and every neck bent at a grotesque angle. Not even five seconds passed before all of them, save two Holy Knights, had stopped breathing.
"The cleanup…"
"I've already sent for people. They'll be here shortly."
"Gotcha~. But I just got curious out of nowhere—was it actually okay to hand this job to Ab-chan?"
Eru tipped her head as she asked.
"Information of this degree is fine."
"No, I don't mean fine like that. Ab-chan had his own work he was supposed to be doing, didn't he?"
"Well… that is true."
Seoyeon conceded the point. Eru was one of the very few who knew the plan that would use even this Herem Protocol itself as a smokescreen.
"But that is precisely why. Everyone else is busy under the Herem Protocol. Leave Abraham idle by himself, and that might look suspicious instead."
Under any ordinary circumstances there would have been no need to worry so far. But were their opponents ordinary people? From the moment two maniacs joined hands, however much preparation they made, it was not too much.
"So we assign him duties that look plausible. Until the 'operation' begins, Abraham has almost no role to play in the first place."
So saying, Han Seoyeon rested a light hand on the scabbard at her waist.
"This building has been dealt with as well, so I'll be on my way."
"Get back safe, Natacchi~"
With nothing more than that light send-off behind her, she turned her back. It was about time to move in earnest—to take the head of a wraith that had missed its hour to die and still circled the world of the living.
The Church kept a surprising number of sites set aside for secret meetings. This time, none of them could be used. With the worst case in mind, it was correct to assume that everything Abraham-Delta held was already known to the enemy, and headquarters judged that intelligence on the secret facilities had very nearly been stripped as well. So the venue had been sponsored by someone else.
"…Even so, I never expected a space like this under a car dealership."
Han Seoyeon murmured it without quite meaning to. A large elevator had been installed to carry vehicles up to the second and third floors of the showroom; throw the switch hidden in one corner, and it descended to the underground garage of the Tokyo flagship store. The moment she stepped off, a row of brightly colored cars came into view. She didn't know much about cars, but even at a glance every last design looked ruinously expensive.
"This is the private garage my uncle uses."
At the voice beside her, Han Seoyeon turned her head.
A solidly built man with his hair slicked straight back stood there, sharp eyes regarding her from behind his glasses. A man Han Seoyeon knew—they had even spoken, if not at any great length. Then again, living in Japan and claiming not to know him would have been absurd on its face.
"Ah. Mr. Hyakurenno Aito."
Because this man was the direct blood of the Hyakurenno Group.
Hyakurenno Aito. The Hyakurenno Group was spoken of, half in jest and half in earnest, as a house nobler than royalty, and so the chairman's second son carried the nickname of the Second Prince. That alone would have put him beyond the reach of most people, but more terrifying than the blood was the ability. Until the divorce became a public uproar, he was a man so flawless that people went so far as to say he was difficult to like—a monster judged the closest thing alive to the Hyakurennomiya of the years when the house struck itself from the imperial register. That was the man called Hyakurenno Aito.
"You mean him?"
"He insisted a secret garage hidden under a shop open to the public was romance, and he would not be moved."
"If it's romance, then it can't be helped."
Uncle, then, would mean the current chairman's older brother, and he was a celebrity of a sort in his own right: born into wealth, wringing every last drop of pleasure from a life of consequence-free indulgence, the very peak of that "rich and unemployed" existence every working adult has dreamed of at least once. The image of such a man building a secret base and calling it romance rose so easily that Han Seoyeon let a faint smile slip. Split hairs, and it was closer to a dry laugh.
Still, she decided a good thing was a good thing. They now had the use of a secret place that not even the Church's own people knew.
"Thank you, truly, for resolving to cooperate this time, despite the considerable risk."
"Not at all. If I can be of help to the Church, I am only glad."
Hyakurenno Aito pushed his glasses up and indicated the folding chairs set along one side of the garage. A folding steel table stood there as well, laid out ahead of time for this meeting, no doubt. Taking one of the chairs, Aito went on.
"Am I simply to carry out, exactly as given, what you told me last time?"
It was easy to understand that he meant the plan to broadcast the Hypnosis App across the entire world.
"No. We will be running one more operation alongside it. The Necromancer's most dangerous fragment is somewhere out in space."
As she said it, Han Seoyeon pointed at the ceiling—not at the showroom overhead, but at somewhere far higher than that. The Necromancer that had descended into the Doctor's body was currently on the run aboard the Battleship Leviathan. However far the Hyakurenno hand reached into every corner of the world, that part was something the Hyakurenno Group could not resolve.
"So the Church will take them. …But will it be possible?"
Aito's eyes narrowed, as if the thought worried him. The doubt was plain enough: could a Church that kept being dragged about by a pair of maniacs actually do anything about the Battleship Leviathan?
"Yes. As you fear, storming them physically and thrusting the Hypnosis App at them would be difficult. I have no choice but to grant that."
But would they simply give up because one means had been closed? People differed in their values, so she could not say one side was unconditionally right… but that, at least, was not the Church's way.
"Which is to say—electronic warfare."
And right on cue came the sound of the elevator starting up. Hardly what one would call well-bred timing. Han Seoyeon smiled faintly.
"It's been forever since the wedding~"
"Your timing is excellent, Miss Alejandra."
The woman who stepped off the elevator saw Han Seoyeon, smiled brightly, and waved. The hem of her green poncho swayed with the motion.
Weeping Flesh. The Visitor, Alejandra Monica Lopez Sanchez Muerte—the Apostle who had inherited the name of Saint Matthias. And she was also the true face of Black Rabbit, a hacker now said to have ceased activity, one corner of the Seven Sisters.
"She is a hacker of excellent skill in her own right, but what is truly frightening about Miss Alejandra lies elsewhere. …A miracle runs alongside her hacking."
That was why not a scrap of Black Rabbit's personal information had ever leaked into the world, and why, when she had actually attacked the Church, she had been unable to hold her ground before simply vanishing. Security dismantled by miracle. Beyond logic and system, she simply forced open whatever was locked. That was the miracle that had made her an Apostle.
"We will seize the Battleship Leviathan's systems as they stand and force the Hypnosis App to run."
"Is that possible?"
"Well, not just like that, of course."
At Aito's question, Alejandra cut in with a shrug.
"From everything we've confirmed so far, the Battleship Leviathan's systems are isolated on an internal network. Even I have no way through that."
She could throw open any locked door, but this was a slightly different story—no different from a door hung halfway up a cliff. Whether it was locked or not was a question that had not even arrived yet.
"Solving this takes two conditions. A proper explanation gets very complicated, so think of it this way… first we pry that gap in the door a little wider, and we also have to open a path that actually reaches it."
Alejandra explained while sketching something in the empty air with her finger. Whatever she was drawing, though, was impossible to make out, so it wasn't much help.
"Of the two, making the path is Abraham's role. If the enemy is continuously stealing information through Abraham, that means a route itself definitely exists."
And so long as that route stayed connected, it was no obstacle at all to Black Rabbit. The plan, of course, was still being kept secret from Abraham. If the information crossed to the enemy and they prepared countermeasures, that would be trouble. Abraham was an artificial intelligence made of data regardless; they only had to organize the operation cleanly and inject the data immediately before it was carried out.
"The problem is connecting that linked route into the system's internal network… and that requires a physical intervention."
That part could fairly be called the greatest difficulty. Alejandra, though, turned her eyes to Seoyeon with an expression that showed little concern.
"Seoyeon, you did say you'd handle this part somehow."
"Yes. There is someone who can intervene inside the Battleship Leviathan. Their condition is far more serious than it appears, so it is a method we have been unable to use until now……."
It really was something bordering on coincidence. On their own account, they had probably done nothing more than blindly pile up every card experience would let them play… and yet, arriving at this moment, it was nothing short of miraculous help. The instant she had said as much, the elevator began to move again.
"It seems they are here."
At her words the other two turned toward the elevator as well. A moment later the doors slid open, and someone came out: a woman seated in a wheelchair, a beauty with blond hair and blue eyes, the very stereotype of a Westerner as an East Asian might picture one. Those sharp fangs, however, made it unmistakable that she was not human. She rolled the wheels with a creak and a creak, spotted Han Seoyeon, and grinned as she tossed off a slightly careless salute.
"It's been a while, Sir Bartholomew. Meeting Sir Matthias in person is a first. And…"
It was Colonel Evans. After Han Seoyeon she looked toward Alejandra, and last of all her gaze moved to Hyakurenno Aito.
"……Huh?"
Her eyes flew wide, and she froze in that exact posture. She was not holding the salute because no one had returned it. She had simply locked up, and that much was obvious.
She was not the only one caught off guard. Aito's expression barely changed, and yet he was plainly startled—the look of people who had met someone they never expected, somewhere they never expected to, and found it a thorough piece of bad luck.
A moment later Rachel Evans jabbed a finger at him in open shock. Far too rude a gesture to aim at a prince of the Hyakurenno… but in her case, it was no problem at all.
"What is this? Why on earth is darling here?!"
The shout echoed through the underground garage. For a moment, silence followed.
"…Darling? Huh?"
Alejandra was the only one who looked baffled by the word.
"W-wait. Seoyeon, this isn't what I think it—"
"Yes. I imagine that thought is the right one."
Han Seoyeon nodded at Alejandra's quavering voice, then opened a palm toward the wheelchair.
"This is Colonel Rachel Evans of the Leviathan Unit. She will be cooperating with us on this operation… and she is also Mr. Hyakurenno Aito's former wife."