Through the Door (1)
"Damn it. This one's a bust."
Alejandra muttered it with her face screwed up tight.
"I'm cutting the connection and pulling out right now. They've already seized the permissions. Keep going like this and all we'll do is hand them the Hypnosis App."
Displeasure saturated her voice. She clearly hadn't expected to take a hit quite like this. That irritation, though, was also there to cover the unease creeping up on her before she could stop it.
"…This was just about our only shot."
Even that wasn't enough to hide what she felt, and the words slipped out. The air around her went solemn all at once.
And rightly so. The operation had only been possible by turning the Doctor's link to Abraham back against him, and by drawing on Rachel Evans's blood, planted in advance. It was not something they could attempt twice. Even if they could, this was not an opponent the same method would work on a second time. People like them would already have a countermeasure ready for every approach that had been tried.
"So we… failed?"
Rachel Evans, seated in her wheelchair, asked it in a trembling voice. Her face was drenched in cold sweat. Her body was nowhere near recovered, and still she had pulled off the feat of manipulating her own blood across an immense distance.
The one who answered was Hyakurenno Aito, gripping Evans's bloodless hand tight in his own.
"Not completely."
With the hand that wasn't holding hers, he fidgeted with his phone—the same phone that had taken a report from the company only moments ago.
The plan had rested on two pillars: isolate Battleship Leviathan and purify the world with Hyakurenno's help, and have Abraham personally purify the interior of the ship. The second had plainly failed. They had been forced to abort at once and flee, lest the worst come to pass and the Hypnosis App be taken. The first, though, had succeeded so cleanly it could almost be called perfect, which made it a little difficult to say the plan had failed outright.
"…It's not as if we came away with nothing."
Even Alejandra, who looked thoroughly unhappy with the result, did not deny that much.
For the moment, everyone outside Battleship Leviathan had been purified. Every fragment of the Necromancer with feet on this earth was gone. The trouble was that the moment it returned, it could spread again like a plague… but even that had been held off for now. Flung into distant space with its systems wrecked, recovering them and making it back would take a considerable amount of time.
At the very least, they had bought a great deal of time. Whether they could devise a countermeasure before that time ran out was another matter.
"I'll go explain the situation to Seoyeon."
Han Seoyeon had gone back up to the shop and was standing watch at the elevator, just in case. There was a chance the Necromancer's fragments, having grasped the situation quickly, might throw themselves at this place in one last desperate lunge. They had kept the speakerphone on through the whole operation and passed word along, but things had moved so fast in the latter half that she had likely lost the thread.
"Before that… what happened to Abraham?"
As Alejandra turned toward the elevator, Colonel Evans asked, carefully.
From the moment they had hurriedly severed the link to Battleship Leviathan, Abraham had vanished without another word. The last thing he had witnessed had been shocking enough that feeling uneasy was only natural.
"…He cut every connection himself. Ours included."
Alejandra let out a small sigh. Colonel Evans had no reply to give.
Even after Alejandra left the underground garage, she only kept her silence.
Withdrawing after a shock that great was entirely understandable. Even so, Evans turned a worried look on Aito.
"…Do you really think he can recover?"
His very existence, and his free will, had been denied outright. Could he truly get back on his feet even from this? Evans was desperately afraid he could not. She thought of herself. If I were in a position like that—if I learned I was a brain in a vat—could I keep my sanity?
"Who can say. That will be up to him."
Even Aito had nothing he could offer. He did not know Abraham's character with any precision, and he certainly did not know whether Abraham was the sort of being who could overcome a blow like this. He was not someone Aito could claim to understand even as empty courtesy, so he could not bring himself to say the tired line that of course that man would pull through. All he said was that it depended on Abraham himself.
…It was about a week later that the apostolic name of James the Greater passed to someone else.
"It is only a temporary post. I am merely acting in the role."
Cardinal Adam Greenie said so, and the Church's official announcement said the same. Most Paranormal Citizens did not believe a word of it.
Almost nothing was known about the former Apostle James the Greater. That he used the codename Abraham, and that he was a holy knight attached to the special mission unit of Vatican Intelligence—that was the whole of it. If a man like that was suddenly stripped of his post with no reason given, even a fool could tell he had died, or been left unable to carry out his duties. And if that moment came immediately after the Church had, out of nowhere, joined hands with Hyakurenno and blasted a hypnosis beam across the entire world, the suspicion only deepened.
Died in the field while carrying out the mission to put down the Necromancer. That was what most people concluded. The details stayed sealed, they assumed, because the dead man had been an operative whose identity was classified.
A very few, however, knew that death, at least, was not the case. The VTuber Sarah Groothuizen was still broadcasting, and her schedule had even grown longer than usual.
Hitomi was one of those who knew. Even so, hearing Han Seoyeon's account, she did not think Abraham was all right. Isn't he only clinging to the one thing he has left—his streams? That was all it felt like to her. Han Seoyeon had added that he would be fine, that he would surely overcome it, but to Hitomi the mere fact of Sarah's lengthened hours made it seem unlikely things would turn out so well.
Set that aside, though, and the life around them had gone back to what it was.
Battleship Leviathan, which had been raising hell on a worldwide scale, had been driven off to some far reach of space, and they had taken the crisis as a chance to root out factions that might turn against the Church. Someone could fairly say they had only pushed the danger back. Still, within what had been possible, hadn't they handled it about as well as they could? Thinking so, Hitomi looked at what was in front of her.
A café table with a coffee cup set upon it. Across from her sat the young lady of the Hyakurenno house—the one people in Japan would call you a spy for failing to recognize.
"Are you all right, Yuri? You look terribly tired."
"Ah, well… I suppose I have been a little short on sleep."
Yuri, who had been staring blankly off at nothing, wore a strangely worn look, and when Hitomi asked she nodded with a bitter smile.
She had unquestionably been extremely busy of late. Only a few days ago the Hyakurenno Group had abruptly brought the whole of its strength to bear and broadcast the Hypnosis App across the world. This time there had been a justification, since it was part of the operation against the Necromancer—but what guarantee was there they would not abuse the same method the next time?
Had they slipped even a single suggestion into the data they sent out—attack the person beside you—the whole world would have come within a breath of going up in flames. The chance of that was low, of course, but more than a few people would be thinking, even so, what if?
That people had begun avoiding Hyakurenno products was hardly strange. In a flash the group's goods had become something to shun, and there was no way the stock would come through that unscathed. In the worst case, the opening bell might have shown a plunge so violent that even cratering would fall short of it—a drop steep enough to be mistaken for a rigged issue.
And what the Hyakurenno Group chose, astonishingly, was to meet it head-on.
The one charged with delivering the official statement to the hidden world's people was Hyakurenno Aito. His condition, though, was visibly unlike his usual self. He appeared before the reporters of the hidden world with his hair in disarray and his face contorted, and he began to speak while glaring around him, eyes bloodshot, as if he meant to chew up and swallow whatever stood in front of him on the spot.
It was a figure with one foot plainly set in madness. All the more so because the man wearing it was the Second Prince, ordinarily so flawless that people found him unpleasant for it. Of everyone gathered in the hall, not one failed to see that the Second Prince had blown his lid to a degree without precedent.
That produced a rather unexpected result. People came to regard the incident as an aberration born of his having lost his reason entirely. So that was why he had done it—he had gone that far off the rails. At the same time, they understood that the Second Prince would never grow this angry unless someone laid a hand on his family, or his lover.
It worked because, even if a measure of performance had been mixed in, the fact of Aito's rage was genuine: rage enough to stomach a catastrophic crash. He had only expressed it in a form easier to read, and more extreme. To add to that, the fact that he was somewhat out of his mind was also, to a certain degree, the truth.
He was the man who, while carrying out the raid on Battleship Leviathan and then trading on Rachel Evans's name to clean up after it, had been forced into an untimely battle he was obligated to defend. No—strictly speaking they were no longer married, so it had not even been an obligation. It had been an ambush.
Rachel Evans's condition had not been normal either, or so it was said… but she was still the monster in command of a special forces unit. And so Aito, repaid at last for Pearl Harbor by an American-made vampire after several decades, had walked into the press conference in a state where collapsing on the spot would not have been strange.
Hearing the story from Yuri, Ninomae Hitomi felt an odd sense of kinship and could only offer her sympathy.
In any case, they had succeeded in leaving the impression that he would do nothing reckless unless he were truly driven all the way to the brink… which did not mean the crash could be avoided entirely. All they had managed was to soften a drop that would kill you into a drop that would drive you mad. Cleaning that up, naturally, required the whole group to throw itself into the work. They had gone so far as to mobilize even Yuri, who stood effectively outside the core.
It was easy to imagine she had been so busy with one thing and another that sleep itself had run short. Her meeting with Hitomi now was not a private one, either. It was VTuber business.
"No matter how much I work, new work keeps coming in… It's the best……."
"…You do realize that sometimes you seem like the strangest person at Anapro?"
Not that Hitomi could quite bring herself to pity her. Yuri was, in her own way, living a life she found perfectly satisfying.
Hitomi let out a small sigh and changed the subject.
"So what, exactly, did you call me here for today?"
"Ah. That."
If she had asked to meet in person, it was unlikely to be a simple offer of a collab stream. On an ordinary day, maybe. Given the volume of work on her now, she would not have called over something slight.
Yuri wet her throat with the coffee, looked at Hitomi, and spoke again.
"Ninomae—have you given any thought to taking your VTuber avatar onto television, or onto a concert stage?"