Only, the One Who Flees (5)
Having all but brought her account to a close, Seoyeon took a sip of tea and wet her lips. For a while, silence drifted through the room.
"Um, Shion."
Hitomi was the one to break it, careful as she chose the words.
"That story... isn't it really about how you somehow managed to stitch shut a problem that nearly blew up into something terrible?"
Hadn't Seoyeon meant to explain just how dangerous a person the Necromancer was? It was hardly strange that Hitomi should find the telling odd. The malice soaked through that being, and the catastrophe it had meant to unleash, had come across clearly enough—but if the ending was simply that they had managed to stop it, that sat a little at odds with what Seoyeon had intended to say.
"...Because I never properly finished it."
At that, Seoyeon glanced up at the ceiling, and a bitter smile touched her mouth as she murmured.
"In the second battle, after Evaristo became a vampire, I did not intervene."
"You didn't have to worry about the enemy's miracle anymore, so there was no need to keep shooting... no, wait. Now that I think about it, you still could have given supporting fire, right?"
Because of Evaristo's miracle, in the stretch of the fight where allies had to be killed ahead of time, the priority had been sniping her own side. Even after that ceased to be necessary, though, it should still have been possible to aid Evaristo with fire from a distance. By that point she could even have brought down the chimera monster-bird. The miracle had vanished from the hide of flesh that sheathed the creature as well. She had, in short, been in a position to harass the enemy at will from long range, with nothing left to stand in her way.
And yet Seoyeon said she had done no such thing.
"I chose to strike first, so the Necromancer could not escape."
The root of the evil had to be torn out. That was the thought Han Seoyeon held then. She would not leave a villain of that sort free to run rampant any longer. And so she moved.
"The monster-bird appeared all at once, at less than a kilometer. Even so, if it had been one of the Church's surveillance assets, they would have detected it and reported it from much farther out."
What that meant was simple.
"It means the thing first took to the air somewhere nearby."
There was a strong chance, in other words, that the Necromancer's stronghold lay somewhere around the place of that first sighting. And for Seoyeon, that was enough. She had grappled with the monster-bird at close range and committed its scent thoroughly to memory. A few hundred meters was nothing for her to track.
"I thought that with this, I could catch her off guard. A Necromancer packed solid with malice, who cared for no one but herself, would never be able to accept an action founded on trust—one that, at a glance, did not look rational."
Those teachers of hers would seize an honest victory and come back even without her help. Because she held that faith, Seoyeon could hunt the Necromancer instead of fighting at their side. And in the end, the Seoyeon of that day succeeded. She scoured the stronghold she had found from end to end, and she killed the Necromancer.
"It was an arrogant thought. I didn't even realize that this, too, was part of the plan she had laid."
Evaristo had been a joker, a card obtained by pouring in nearly every resource the Necromancer possessed. Against the day that card was lost, she had prepared an exit. The sort of exit through which eternal life is granted only by dying.
Because Han Seoyeon killed her so completely, the Necromancer was officially regarded as subdued. Thanks to that, the lunatic was able, for years, to slip free of any suspicion that she was the hidden hand behind the incidents of the world.
In the end, on that day as well, Han Seoyeon had lost to the Necromancer.
"That is what that necromancer is. Against most people, she will not even permit a battle of wits. Fall into a trap and take the damage, and she will still wring out exactly what she wanted, and leave. That is the sort of being she is."
It was not for nothing that she had been counted the most dangerous of the lunatics, even while her capacity for slaughter fell short of Anna Anderson's, or the Professor's.
"One slip—no. Even if you have made no particular mistake, she is an opponent who can bring down an Apostle. What I mean is that you, Mr. Sanjo, a civilian, have no need to blame yourself for failing to stop her."
With that, Seoyeon closed her mouth. Then she looked at the man before her.
He—Sanjo Yusuke—had been staring blankly at the tabletop. His gaze shifted to Seoyeon, and the creases of his brow twitched, just slightly.
Follow it all the way to the root, and his daughter's death was the butterfly effect of Han Seoyeon having let the Necromancer slip away that day. It would not have been strange if he had thrown words of resentment at her. Seoyeon was not ignorant of that fact. She had told him the truth regardless, judging even that better than watching him blame himself until he rotted from the inside.
"Thank you. It is a comfort. A little."
But Sanjo Yusuke turned no resentment toward her at all.
In truth, he had not failed to understand what Seoyeon intended, and so he could hardly have resented her. He was not so far gone in character as to shove the blame back onto someone who had shown him consideration out of nothing but goodwill.
"From what I can see, I need not worry about the keeping of the shrine."
Seoyeon said it with a faint smile, drawn out by the way he had answered.
He was a man of firmer spine than she had thought. At the least, she would not have to fear the seal coming to harm because its keeper had grown negligent.
"That said, I did hear some talk of a game..."
The matter came back to her all at once, and she turned the conversation toward it.
Making a promotional game was not, in itself, anything remarkable. Government offices did it. Religions did it all the time. Step into the hidden world, and she knew of more than a few cases where such things were used quite deliberately as a means of gathering faith. The Freemasons of the present day had gone so far as to make a specialty of it.
And yet, think as she might, the work underway at this shrine did not seem ordinary in its scale. When M&Z's field captain and the Freemasons both reached for it at once, that alone said everything.
"Ah. You mean that."
Hearing her, Yusuke gave the wry smile she had more or less expected.
"I haven't involved myself in the details, so I don't know them exactly, but... as for how this came about—"
"Miss Korhonen, you really are from overseas, aren't you? And yet your Japanese is incredibly good."
"If one is to work in Japan, it is necessary."
"Which country are you from?"
"Finland."
They were walking a mountainside where no path had been cut, and Sakuragi Honoka chattered the whole way at the red-haired woman from abroad. The gift for getting along with people was formidable—precisely, one might have said, what was required of anyone who meant to be president of a club in which Apostle Candidates, collaborators of the Necromancer, and the like all sat mingled together.
"You're an Apostle too, aren't you? The same as Miss Shion."
"Correct."
"Can clergy hold a second post?"
"A Holy Knight can."
A Holy Knight was, if anything, encouraged to hold another office. They needed a profession fit to show the surface world. In practice, even someone laboring under the Church to preserve the order of the world could, if they were ordinary clergy, simply say they were engaged in pastoral work at the church. The occupation of clergy existed on the surface. A Holy Knight did not, and must not. A separate profession was therefore recommended, if only for the sake of building a cover identity.
"For Margarita—Miss Han Seoyeon—her age is such that keeping a university enrollment is sufficient. In my case, my years being what they are, it is more natural to say that I am employed at a suitable foreign firm."
"Huh? Aren't you in your early twenties? I was sure you were..."
Westerners, it was said, tended to look older than their years beside East Asians. Even so, the circumstances hardly suggested a minor, and Honoka had been thinking that in Kirra Korhonen's case the face and the true age were more or less of a piece. Her eyes went round.
"Thirty-seven."
"...What? You're joking."
The words that followed left her no choice but to be still more appalled. Older than she looked, Honoka could have accepted—the late twenties, perhaps an early thirties that wore its years lightly. She had never once imagined someone with forty coming into view.
"Buuut her body age is in the twenties, riiight~?"
The voice that slid in, lazy and drawn out, belonged to Honoka's older sister, Sakuragi Oka.
"Huh? Body age? Sis, what's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, thaaat~ I heard the Apostle Matthew of this generation sold a piece of her life to a devil, y'knooow?"
Ten years, was it, or twelve? Oka tipped her head one way, then the other.
"If I were to, like, compare it, mmm, yeah~ She was a frozen human for more than ten years, so looking like she's in her twenties is actually the obvious part~"
"Uh... is that true?"
"Yes. That is correct. From the age of six until eighteen, and for seven months beginning in April of the year I turned twenty-eight, the time of my body was stopped."
Why in the world had it come to that? Honoka fully meant to ask—but the fox god guiding them spoke first.
"—Here we are."
Beyond the brush they pushed through lay an open clearing. In one corner sat a generator, paper talismans plastered thick across it, turning over with a low hum. Bundles of cable ran from the machine into a cave in the slope.
"Why? Why? Why is the bug gone? It was there a minute ago!"
"Uh, hold on. You want me to draw what? A space battleship?"
"Heehee, drawing, s'fun..."
"Who the hell wrote this code, you sons of bitches?!"
What met them, once they had set careful feet inside, was a row of some ten desktop computers—and, before those screens, yokai in the act of dying.
"Ah, you've come? What we've laid out is worse than modest. There is truly nothing at all. Come in, all the same."
"...Every time I visit, the same thought occurs to me. You haven't switched over to milking faith out of pain and despair, have you?"
"Joke though it may be, that is a wounding thing to say. Do a thing like that in Japan as it stands, and they drop a strategic Apostle on you and take your head on the spot."
"An—an oni...?!"
"Thaaat reaction—Honoka really does have an eye~ Blue-skinned monster girls get you going after all, huh~"
"Wh—what kind of nonsense is this sister of mine spouting?!"