Only, the One Who Flees (4)
"I've been waiting for you."
Far off, a vermilion torii came into view, the mark of the boundary between god and human. They never reached it. Before they could, the master of the mountain came to them herself.
"...Lady Inari?"
Inari no Kami—an agricultural deity, held to descend from the immigrant faiths that crossed over from the Korean peninsula, who takes as her messengers sacred foxes no ordinary eye can see.
Speak of an Inari shrine, and most mean the famous Fushimi Inari Taisha, with its tunnel of torii. But she is a god so widely known that her divided spirits can be found in every corner of Japan, and the Onitake Inari Shrine of Mount Oe was only one among those shrines, great and small.
Its mistress had come all the way out to the torii to receive them in person. It would be no exaggeration to call it the highest courtesy a host could offer.
Meeting that welcome, Seoyeon let her expression harden a little, and a strange bewilderment showed in her eyes. Part of it was simple guilt—there was no need to go this far—but that was not the whole of it.
"You... your appearance has changed a great deal...?"
A beauty with white hair and crimson eyes, fox ears pricked at the crown of her head. Red pigment traced patterns over her, and yet her looks were such that the ornament never seemed too much. The trouble was that as recently as a year ago she had been nothing but an oversized fox. She had been literally at the edge of starvation then, skin drawn tight over bone, so Seoyeon had supposed that flesh returning to her might change her somewhat. But to have changed this much? To have predicted it would have been the unreasonable thing.
"I hear a look like this goes over well these days. Have I got that wrong?"
"No, it—it ought to go over well. Yes."
"Then that's fine, isn't it."
If the goddess said so herself, Seoyeon had no answer to give. All she could do was cheer her on.
"And the rest of you are quite sturdy, I see. You've climbed all this way, and not one of you is the worse for it."
Inari looked over her companions as she spoke. Not a soul among them had gone short of breath on the mountain path. Where the body was concerned, every one of them was the genuine article.
"That child especially. The last time she came, she was half dead, wasn't she? She must have trained hard."
"Ah, ahaha..."
Hitomi managed a wry laugh. A year ago she really had arrived little better than a corpse. This time she had come up easily not because she had thrown herself into training in the meantime, but simply because her species had changed, and so the smile could not help coming out awkward.
"You remembered me, too."
"You came with this young lady on the day my life was saved. As if I could forget."
Seoyeon had put down the oni that a dying Inari had been barely holding back, and given her room to breathe. There was no chance she would fail to remember Hitomi, who had come along with her.
"Anyway, come in. I don't know what brings you, but."
"Then... excuse the intrusion..."
Hitomi said it carefully, and the party followed the fox as she turned and stepped into the shrine grounds.
"Um... shouldn't we pay our respects first?"
Partway in, Sakuragi Honoka's eyes went round. Even if one meant to do something at a shrine, washing one's hands and offering worship ought to come before anything else—or so it seemed to her.
"We were just speaking with the goddess herself a moment ago."
"Ah, so that person just now really was...?"
She had not been long in the hidden world. Divine spirit or not, it was too much to ask that she take one look and feel the woman before her was anything but ordinary.
"I wonder if I used to be like that."
"Well. More or less."
Watching her, Hitomi whispered it quietly to Seoyeon. Until now she herself had done nothing but spin in circles, trying to adapt to the common sense—no, the utter want of sense—of the hidden world, and the sight of someone newly stepped into it felt strangely fresh.
Oka, the elder sister, was another matter. Far from struggling to adapt, she was an irregular who had seized a place among the Freemasons in a blink, and so she could be set aside as the exception.
At any rate, the look became that of someone watching a strangely adorable newbie. For a person with a niche field of study and a taste for niche games, it might have been an instinct there was no helping.
"Ah, though if I absolutely had to name a difference..."
"A difference?"
Then, as if it had only just occurred to her, Seoyeon brought her lips to Hitomi's ear and murmured.
"You were cuter."
"......"
No answer came back from Hitomi. She only drove a fingertip hard into Seoyeon's side. There was a little give to it, but the firm muscle of that abdomen stopped her almost at once.
The reaction drew a quiet, satisfied laugh from Seoyeon.
Then an odd scratching sound reached her, and she glanced back. There stood Kiira, notebook in hand, a pen moving across the page.
"Ah, you needn't mind it. I am merely recording the frequency and duration of acts of affection."
"I beg your pardon?!"
Hitomi's voice came out utterly lost. A why on earth rose all the way to her throat.
"The lesbian tax must be paid."
"There's such a thing...?!"
What followed left her even more aghast. This was, it seemed, no moment to be cooing over how cute the newbie was. Dig as one might, the hidden world was nothing but horror stories, and Hitomi went cold to the bone.
"No. A joke. Seeing the two of you being affectionate simply called it to mind."
"...What?"
"...When a tax collector says a thing like that, one takes her to mean it, does one not."
Someone as innocent as Hitomi would believe it outright. She just had. And it need not even have been Hitomi. Let the public face of a body mad for taxation—a person, moreover, in whom no change of expression was to be found—say such a thing, and eight out of ten would think, surely not...?
Han Seoyeon, having seen that face from time to time, knew her to be more given to mischief than she appeared. Others did not.
"Hm? A tax collector, you say?"
Unexpectedly, it was Inari who reacted. Her fox ears flicked back for an instant, and she turned her head to look their way.
"Have you come about taxes?"
"Not all of us. Only this one."
Seoyeon said it with a light glance aside, and Kiira traced a smooth sign of the cross before bending deep at the waist.
"Kiira Korhonen Barbara, of Matthew and Zacchaeus, comes before the sacred fox of the fields. The tax rate applied to the revenue of the game you created has changed, and I have come to give notice of it."
"Ah, that matter. From the look of you, you've come from across the sea..."
"Considering the sum and the faith involved, I judged it necessary to match the dignity of the occasion. I would be grateful if you would take it as the greatest respect a tax collector can offer."
"Ooh~? A game? I came because of that too~"
Oka's eyes went round. They did not. Still nearly shut, she pointed at herself with a finger.
"I'm Sakuragi Oka, here for the Freemasons~"
"So the young lady is from that side? Well, I suppose you had reason enough to come, but..."
Murmuring it, Inari shot Seoyeon a glance.
"Would it be all right if we stepped aside for a little while? I came out meaning to guide you, and now it will look as though I'm slipping off, but..."
"That's fine. I remember how the place is laid out, from last time."
"Good. Thank you."
Inari moved off with Kiira and Oka. Honoka kept turning her head this way and that, as if unsure which side she ought to attach herself to, and in the end followed her sister.
Left the two of them, Hitomi and Seoyeon went deeper into the grounds—past the hall of worship, to the main sanctuary, and on into the living quarters behind it. Word of their arrival had surely already been passed along. Otherwise Inari would have seen the guiding through to the end.
A light knock at the door, and before long a middle-aged man appeared from within. Wrinkles webbed his face, but the way they bent suggested a man who had worn a smile often.
"...It's been a long time, Mr. Sanjo Yusuke."
"It has. That is to say..."
"Han Seoyeon. And this is Ninomae Hitomi."
"I'm sorry. My memory has gone terribly foggy."
"Not at all. It's quite all right."
Seoyeon answered with the faint trace of a smile. They had met only once, a year ago. A face, perhaps, but a name was another matter, and only natural that he should have lost it. A foreigner's name, at that.
"And Lady Inari?"
"She's speaking with the others. They came on different business."
"Ah, I see. Come in, then."
Sanjo Yusuke nodded and showed them into the house.
"Excuse us."
Hitomi followed Seoyeon inside. They slipped off their shoes, set them neatly together, and sat with care on the cushions before the low table, as they had been shown. Yusuke had tea and sweets out almost at once. Far too short a time in which to have boiled water. Inari must have told him of the visitors when she went out to meet them, and he had prepared the welcome ahead.
"So, what brings you all here?"
"I'm assisting a junior who's interested in folklore, on a site visit. In my own case, I came along to inspect the place as well."
"An inspection."
"It's been about a year since what happened then."
At that, Yusuke smiled—a smile with a little regret in it, more than joy.
"If it truly hadn't been for Lady Inari, it would have been a disaster. I can see why you would come to look in on us often."
Because he himself had not believed that Inari no Kami existed, she had nearly died, and the evil spirits she had kept sealed had nearly been loosed upon the world. Remembering it, perhaps, his face was not wholly bright.
"The inspection isn't... only for that. I'm sorry to have to say it, but..."
"...Because of my daughter. Because I've been so unsettled that the shrine may not be properly kept."
"...Yes. That's right."
Seoyeon nodded quietly. It was a sorry thing to say, and it was the plain truth.
The Sanjo Yusuke before them was the father of Sanjou Miyuki—the mind behind Vampire Syndrome, and the Necromancer's most recent vessel. Word that Sanjou Miyuki had hanged herself would of course have reached him, and so far as Seoyeon knew, the truth beyond even that had been delivered to him afterward: that Miyuki's self had been annihilated long before, and that she had become another Necromancer.
By the time Seoyeon visited a year ago, it was already too late. Exactly when the turning point had come, only Miyuki herself would have known.
"You needn't worry over the keeping of the shrine. If anything, I think there are ways this has made me more devoted."
"When you say that..."
"I have that regret, from time to time. If I had believed from the start that the gods and the buddhas were real. If Lady Inari had been at her full strength because of it, might she not have been able to protect my daughter... And even if not that—if I, her father, had noticed the change not long after her body was taken..."
"Perhaps that is why I give myself so wholly to Lady Inari."
He smiled as if it were a joke. Seoyeon could not smile with him.
"...Even if it had been so, there would have been no avoiding it."
She said it with care.
"A Necromancer is a living... no. A dead calamity. Anything of merely that order would never have been enough."
A cruel truth, if cruel was the word for it—and still she said it, because she did not want him regretting a useless if only. Thought of this way, at least the fault would no longer be his own.
"...Is that so."
Even so, he did not look particularly convinced. There are not many who can simply accept being told that nothing they might have done would have mattered. All the more when the matter is the death of one's child.
"Sometimes there exist madmen whom a faltering heart cannot even bring itself to defy."
Gravekeepers exist so that such beings may be put back in the earth, by whatever means it takes. Seoyeon drew a small breath, and went on.
"...About the wicked one who harmed your daughter. I would like to tell you, for a little while, what sort of being that was. You have the time, I trust?"
"Of course."
"Yes. Then—Mr. Sanjo, have you ever heard of the greatest Holy Knight of the modern age, and of the strongest Holy Knight?"