Old Testament: The Book of Evaristo (6)
Kill yourself before the enemy can, or let an ally do it, and you rise again a little later. The fight simply goes on.
When the battle turns hopeless, you cut your own life short. If you lack even that much time, a friend at your side—or a disciple waiting in the rear—severs the thread for you.
Put that way, it hardly sounds difficult at all, save for the matter of finding the courage to accept death. Is it not, in practice, the same as playing a game with infinite lives?
Regrettably, the battle Giacomo was fighting now did not lend itself to comparison with any video game. Death halted every thought at once, and only resurrection set consciousness running again; unless one was concentrating fiercely, it was difficult even to realize at once that one had died and come back. Worse, everything changed according to how long the gap had lasted—at the mildest, one's own position and posture; at the worst, the very ground.
And the body was, without question, still carrying wounds grievous enough to have killed it once already. Fail to assess those injuries at once and treat them, and breath would stop again not long after rising. Under those conditions, a fight with one's life on the line had to be carried on without pause.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that Giacomo Marchisio and Han Jihan had been reduced to movements given over entirely to defense.
The longsword skimmed the glittering glacier with its tip and surged up from below. Giacomo barely caught it on the blade in his right hand, but Evaristo let go of the sword at once, drove in close, and thrust out that skeletal hand. Giacomo hastily sheared the wrist away with the sword in his left and brought his right back up, aiming for the neck—only for his opponent to arch sharply backward and slip the blow.
Bang! The gunshot snapped Evaristo's head hard to the side. Han Jihan, closing from the flank, had blasted him at point-blank range with a shotgun's silver shot: a four-gauge load of quadruple-ought buck, forged of consecrated silver. Struck from that close, even an Evaristo clad in an undying body and risen from the dead ought to have felt it.
"Zeal for the house of the Lord hath—"
He had been a breath from crying triumph when Giacomo realized he was staring at the ground. No—he had not merely dropped his head. His whole body was pitched toward the floor. He planted a hand and shoved himself upright, hauling every scrap of concentration toward the wound: a holy round buried in his left temple, and one bullet each in his back and the back of his skull. He had been shot from behind.
He whipped his gaze around to the source. A severed hand had a finger curled on the trigger, the muzzle trained on him.
…Come to think of it, he was not fighting the Evaristo of life, but a corpse raised from the dead. To assume a severed hand could no longer move had been a careless judgment.
He dug a finger in, pried the lodged bullet free, and roughly sealed the wound with a miracle of healing. Then he filled his vessels with fresh blood and sprinted for Evaristo's severed wrist. The hand of nothing but bone pulled the trigger again and sprayed rounds, but Giacomo, having already read the motion, had leapt wide to the side.
A lone hand twitching where it lay could only do so much—still less while gripping a gun far heavier than itself. Giacomo closed the distance in a flash and stamped the muzzle down hard beneath his foot. Then he turned his head toward his old friend and shouted.
"Jihan!"
He had confirmed that Han Jihan was not, at this moment, dead. That was enough. Between men who had crossed the brink of death together more times than either could count, no further words were required. Without a heartbeat of hesitation Giacomo lifted the leg that was not pinning the muzzle and kicked the skeletal hand clutching the gun with everything he had—or rather, the instant he committed to the kick and moved, the process itself was already gone and the kick had landed. He had died and come back once more in between. Half his skull was blown away, so the cause hardly needed naming: Han Jihan's shotgun. Giacomo packed fresh flesh into the wound and fixed his eyes on the hand spinning off into the distance.
Detached or not, that was still part of Evaristo's body. Touch it, and one met a death from which no resurrection could be hoped for. That was why Jihan had killed him in the instant his foot was about to connect—breath leaving the body did not make the kinetic energy already loaded into the leg evaporate. Giacomo swiftly emptied the magazine of the gun taken from the hand and hurled the weapon itself into the sky, then drew a blade and split it into three. Ranged attacks, at least, were sealed.
He turned his gaze again. In the time he had spent destroying the gun, Evaristo had driven a longsword into Han Jihan's throat. Covering Giacomo had left him no choice but to neglect the Evaristo who had been right beside him. The wrist already grown back, Evaristo hauled on the sword and swung Jihan's body—skewered on it like meat on a spit—in a great arc.
A round that keened with an uncanny sound tore into the place where Jihan had been standing: a holy bullet, fired to kill him the moment someone saw—or predicted, or foresaw—that he was in danger again. The trouble was that the enemy was hardly fool enough to simply take it. Having grasped their tactic, Evaristo drove in the sword rather than laying a bare hand on him to invoke the authority of instant death. A blade had far greater reach than a hand, and the strike landed faster; thanks to that, he had moved a beat ahead of the timing Seoyeon had anticipated when she fired.
And Evaristo's hand reaching out a second time was faster than the next bullet's arrival. Stay still, and death could not be avoided. Jihan answered by thrashing his half-dangling head, run through on the longsword, hard enough to saw through his own neck.
Of course, a being who had taken an anomaly into his flesh—the one called the Vampire Slayer—would not die outright from so little. As a means of warding off instant death, it did not hold. Even so, Evaristo drew back the hand that had been reaching for him, recovered his blade, and charged at Giacomo.
Bartholomew Evaristo was a holy knight who had been active around the Second Vatican Council—the 1960s. Of Han Jihan, who had only truly made his name in the twenty-first century, he knew little. That peculiar sense of his seemed to have grasped Jihan's fighting style, but there was no way to know, short of seeing it, that the man had contracted with a demon and taken a vampire's vitality for his own. There was the opening. Jihan's headless body hurriedly fed fresh shells into the shotgun it still held.
Whether he caught that faint sound or that faint presence, Evaristo spun in a rush to answer—but it was already too late to dodge.
Boom! A sound closer to an explosion than a gunshot rolled across the ice, and the split, fissured glaciers shuddered under the echoing shock. A consecrated four-gauge silver slug, hurled on by a special powder charge, utterly pulverized the skeleton's spine, tore the old Gravekeeper's vestments to shreds, burrowed in, and crushed the bone.
Giacomo was not about to stand idle. He hurled the sword in his right hand and buried it in the skeleton's brow, then closed in and drove his remaining blade through Evaristo from ribcage to throat.
The swords driven into him seemed to turn a sickly yellow—and then, before long, began to seethe and swell into a bizarre shape. The mass expanded in an instant, crushing Evaristo's joints from within and shattering him to splinters. Even then he reached an arm toward Giacomo, trying to answer—but in that moment something streaked past his side. Han Jihan's severed head. In the split second the skull, kicked by its own body, came flying and passed beside him, a brilliant flash bloomed from the eyes hidden behind the goggles. Accelerated kinetic energy at the microscopic scale burned away the skeletal hand that had been reaching for Giacomo. In the end Evaristo, never managing a proper counter, collapsed from within and crumbled onto the ground.
"…Finally."
Giacomo murmured it like a sigh, glancing from the strewn wreckage of Evaristo to Jihan, who was picking up his own head and setting it back upon his neck. But that did not mean the fight was over. Had this been an opponent a mere two could put down so lightly—three, counting Seoyeon in the rear—the Church would never have raised such a clamor.
At some point the scattered fragments of bone began to rattle and draw back toward the center. In an instant they took a skeleton's shape again. This was the first time his entire body had been reduced so, though they had watched pieces of him regenerate again and again; what differed now was that it did not stop there. Muscle, vessels, even flesh began to grow back.
Seeing it, Giacomo pulled off the goggles he had worn to keep the sight censored and looked at him. Even staring Evaristo full in the face, his heartbeat did not so much as change. With these numbers alone, they could not bring down the return of Bartholomew Evaristo wielding miracles. The condition of their victory, then, was time—more precisely, the time it would take for word of the present situation to reach the countless beings of the hidden world.
The chaos the Necromancer had set off on every front in order to seize Evaristo's corpse had left the Church short of people it could field, but that shortage applied only to Apostle-class talents capable of meeting him head-on. Simply spreading a rumor was something anyone who belonged to the Church could do, and when it came to a network of that kind, no body in the world excelled the Roman Catholic Church. The rumor the Church had set out to spread rested on two points: that the holy knight Evaristo had risen again, and that the Vampire Slayer had gone forth to put him down. What belief did the pairing of those two facts produce?
"────!!!"
New flesh grew upon the body of the risen one, and he recovered the appearance he had borne in life—Bartholomew Evaristo, exactly as Giacomo had once seen him in a photograph. Immediately afterward a scream tore from his throat as if something were ripping. Vocal cords, absent when he was bone, had formed again, and so it was possible. Flame began to blaze across his whole body, and from his gaping mouth a dark violet mist seeped out.
In this very moment, nearly every human and anomaly who knew of the hidden world shared a single recognition: that Bartholomew Evaristo had come back as a vampire. Where a belief is held in common, and held with power, it becomes an anomaly. That is one of the few axioms that hold in the hidden world, where every law has been smashed into a tangled mess. And so Evaristo was now reborn a vampire.
The sun seated in the leaden sky gave off no warmth at all, yet its light fell clear and certain, and the glaciers scattered that light in every direction. A vampire was greeting his weakness, the sun, from above and from below alike. Nor was that the only condition set against him. The divinity harbored by Evaristo, greatest of holy knights, was in itself a vicious poison to a vampire—as if he carried an entire crucifix inside his body. Become an unholy thing, he had not only lost the miracles the Lord had granted him; he was being roasted within and without, a vampire's weaknesses laid bare.
Even this, of course, was not a complete end. Screaming, Evaristo—the vampire wearing Evaristo's shell—gathered the flames consuming him even as he burned, and forged them into a gigantic sword. Then, with a monstrous cry, he hurled himself at Giacomo and Han Jihan.
"We've won."
"Don't let your guard down yet."
"Well. I had no intention of doing so, obviously."
And yet neither anxiety nor tension could be found on their faces anymore. If anything, there was only the faint glimpse of a thrill, as though they were at some amusing game. It was only natural. There was no world in which the Vampire Slayer lost a head-on fight against a vampire.
…Judging by the state of their bodies alone, it was plain they would be indebted to a hospital for quite some time once this was over, but they studiously looked away from that all-too-obvious future.
On that day, the Gravekeeper who had been the greatest of them—and who, through the malice of another, had forsaken his duty—returned to his coffin with a stake driven through his chest.