Old Testament: The Book of Evaristo (3)
A transport of the Chinese Federation military was dragging its ponderous weight across the sky. It was a thing Seoyeon had requisitioned by very nearly taking the officer in charge by the collar.
For a military to have strategic materiel requisitioned out of it by a civilian—and a foreigner, at that—was a peculiar state of affairs, and yet not one person found the fact itself strange. How could they, when the party in question was that Han Seoyeon Margarita? The Guillotine. The Nun of the Silver Hammer. The Shameless Margarita.
Had any ordinary Apostle come to the government saying that such-and-such had occurred and that such-and-such supplies were required, the stores would have been handed over in the end regardless. But when the Queen of Requisition herself stormed the military command in person, there was simply no way to hold her back.
By ideology she was as extreme a dove as a person could be, and yet the moment it came time to fight, her eyes went wild. Was she not precisely the sort who, to kill a single bedbug, shows up already hauling the firewood to burn the whole thatched house down?
Whether she had learned something strange from her adoptive father or not, she had taken to worshipping heavy firepower right alongside him, and for any operation in which she herself was deployed she made a habit of mobilizing every weapon imaginable. By now it was fair to say she had the whole art memorized—whom to squeeze, where, and how, in order to produce materiel at a moment's notice. Set the station of an Apostle atop that know-how, and the birth of a monster capable of gnawing a military down to the marrow was only to be expected.
To the Chinese Federation, the woman called Han Seoyeon was even, if one insisted on putting it so, a mother of the nation—quite apart from the question of whether such a phrase suited a girl barely out of her teens. Plenty of people, even within the hidden world, did not know the finer circumstances of the Chinese civil war; those inside the military, however, were in no position to remain ignorant of at least its outline.
At any rate, that was why a strategic transport out of China was flying over the border between India and Pakistan.
"Lady Margarita."
The one who addressed Seoyeon—perched atop a tank as though she meant to ride it straight into the assault, running a final check of her gear—was a Holy Knight of the Chinese Church. He would be no help in a fight, of course, but three people could hardly manage the whole of the supply transport by themselves, and so he had been brought along. Ironically, for all that his office was that of Holy Knight, his actual role was closer to a squire's.
"Here. This is what His Holiness the Pope instructed me to deliver."
"Ah. Thank you."
So saying, the Holy Knight brought over a piece of cargo that called a safe to mind and set it down before the tank. Seoyeon finished the work she'd been at, hopped lightly down, and looked the thing over.
"Two hundred kilometers to the planned landing point. Delivery of the scheduled cargo from Luo Chang Procopio to Han Seoyeon Margarita is complete."
"Han Seoyeon Margarita, confirming receipt. What's the password?"
"Six-eight-seven-three-two-two-zero-zero."
For the sake of secrecy, it seemed, the arrangement had been that the password would be passed along only once they came within a few kilometers. Thinking to herself that such things were usually disclosed by the clock rather than by distance, Seoyeon nonetheless entered it as given and opened the safe. What emerged was a set of goggles reminiscent of a VR rig. They weren't truly the size of a headset, but they were unmistakably thicker than any ordinary pair.
First she picked up the paper envelope lying inside. It was sealed in red sealing wax, the sort of thing one never saw in ordinary life—a design of flowers and creeping vines wrought lavishly around a skull at its center. Anyone who had reached the rank of Gravekeeper could not fail to know it. It was the Fisherman's Seal.
What the envelope held was, unexpectedly, not paper at all, but a thin memory card.
The triangular mark engraved on its face was a motif Abraham-Delta often used, and so its intent was easy to read. She drew out a Church terminal, slid the card in, and the screen flickered before displaying that very same mark.
"I don't believe all that much time has passed."
They had seen each other in Korea just the other day, hadn't they? So Seoyeon added. They would have worked side by side on Operation Saint Barbara, carried out on the peninsula not long ago, and the phrase it's been a while sat a little strangely on that account. Of course, if it was nothing more than a formal greeting, it wasn't exactly unreasonable...
"...Abraham?"
At the strange shade of what followed, Seoyeon drew her brows together. Wasn't that the tone of some third party, looking on from the outside?
"Do you not have the memory?"
It didn't particularly feel like a lie—though what tell of a lie one could possibly find in a synthesized voice was another matter. The Abraham present here truly had no memory of Operation Barbara. Nor should there have been any need to erase that memory on purpose. It was a military operation, yes, and so a great deal of it was deeply classified, but nothing had occurred that even an Apostle would have been forbidden to know. It had been nothing more than a perfectly routine(?) northward reunification.
"So you aren't the original. You're a copy. You, the Abraham here."
Then only one possibility remained. Prepare a machine capable of running the program called Abraham, and the data could be copied without end. What sat here was data that had been duplicated in advance—at the latest, before Operation Saint Barbara was ever set in motion—and then severed from the original. A backup, in other words.
It wasn't as though the Doctor had minted him an NFT token, Abraham added, as if it were a joke.
"And the reason one such as you came out in their place is that the odds of dying are high. Isn't it?"
At the emoticon floating on the screen, Seoyeon frowned faintly once more, then fixed the display with a look that demanded an explanation.
"Is something like that possible?"
"...You're looking through the camera yourself."
Even Abraham did not seem likely to come through it intact. Had he been immune to Evaristo's miracle, command in the field would have passed to him.
"...Are you truly all right with this?"
Seoyeon was silent for a moment. It had struck her, all at once, that even a word of comfort might be an insult to him.
"Understood. ...You came to brief us on the operation plan, didn't you?"
It was not a matter on which Seoyeon had any standing to speak.
"Then I'll bring my teachers."
And so she did nothing more than marvel, inwardly, at the fortitude of the sibling called Abraham-Delta, and carry out the one thing she could do in that moment.
"For a so-called hero, he certainly knows how to be a nuisance......"
A woman dressed with crisp precision in a suit muttered it, dragging a hand through her already shaggy hair. At the end of her gaze sat a single monitor, and on its screen a skeleton clad in the vestments of a Gravekeeper of old.
At a glance there was nothing unusual about it—setting aside the small matter of a skeleton walking about on its own two feet—but look closely and the garments revealed themselves as a relic once worn by Bartholomew Evaristo. The woman watching that figure from so near, then, could be none other than the nameless Necromancer.
She sighed again. She had meant to seize that magnificent body and make it her own; and now look what a state of things this was. She had never imagined a counterattack could be wrung out of that moment.
"What even is that woman... She isn't a gorilla. She's a damn Godzilla......"
It had been a span closer to an instant, and yet she couldn't begin to count how many times she'd been hit. The trouble was that Evaristo had been blasted far off and slipped out of her control for that single moment.
And that brief instant had been fatal. There had not, of course, been time enough for Evaristo to do anything to the Necromancer, nor to turn back to the Church's side. Evaristo understood that just as well, and so, rather than attempt some futile resistance, he simply chose to destroy his own brain completely.
Because of it, injecting the Necromancer's data had become impossible. She was forced to handle him like any ordinary undead—and the problem was that even with his brain pulped, this one, a corpse that had once been granted the title of the greatest Holy Knight for whatever that was worth, still put up a resistance of its own. Control was impossible unless she stayed at quite close range. She was hardly going to be caught in the attacks of a corpse she herself commanded, but should things go awry, there was a risk her real body would be tracked.
Under ordinary circumstances it was a distance one could reasonably call safe. Against that hunting hound Margarita, however, the matter was entirely different. At this range, she was well inside the danger zone. So she could not afford to lose this time. Lose, and she would have to set the immortality plan—the one that ran on the Silver Key—into motion even sooner than she had anticipated.
"......They're here."
At last the radar's alarm sounded. When she checked, an aircraft was closing on her position at speed.
The Necromancer confirmed it, clapped her hands once with a sharp smack, and every screen went dark—so that she would not lay eyes on Bartholomew Evaristo. Then she leaned her mouth to a microphone close at hand and murmured, her voice gone cold.