Rugged Rocks on This Side, Rugged Rocks on That Side (3)
“It's been quite a while since I've seen that hat.”
The man who addressed her had hauled the corners of his mouth so high that one had to wonder whether something had gone wrong with the muscles of his face.
“Well, I suppose it would be. You are an ordinary person, after all, President.”
Judging by his looks, by the employees he kept under him, and by the web of connections he maintained, it was a difficult fact to credit — and yet the man called Nakabashi Gyokichi was plainly an ordinary person. He merely knew that the hidden world existed. He himself was no anomaly, and he wielded none of an anomaly's power; considering his childhood friend's constitution, the odds were good he had lived a life kept rather far from such things.
And because he was ordinary, his experience of meeting a holy knight of the Church in any official capacity would be scant indeed. Narrow the field to Gravekeepers, and it grew scanter still. At present the only Gravekeeper of Japanese nationality was Mika Eru, and even counting foreign residents one merely added Han Seoyeon. Across the whole history of both Korea and Japan, the Gravekeepers came to five in all. Their rarity hardly needed stating.
What was more, the hat Seoyeon wore now — the one that marked a Gravekeeper — was, as a rule, worn only in the course of duty. The hat itself, the Cappello Romano, could of course be worn with ordinary clothes... but a Gravekeeper was not a post that officially existed in the surface world, and the standing principle was not to wear it unless one had cause to reveal oneself.
“Even so, I do wear it now and then in daily life... though, now that I think of it, I don't believe I've worn it much when coming in to the company.”
A principle was all it amounted to, in truth; nothing required that it be observed with any great strictness. The Gravekeeper's very existence was a secret, so the people of the surface world, even looking straight at the dress that symbolized one, had no idea what they were seeing. When Seoyeon felt like wearing a hat and happened to have no other to hand, she wore this one often enough — Hitomi owned a matching couple's hat of a similar design, besides. She had no desire, however, to parade a couple's hat up and down the neighborhood until the day she left the company, and so it was a look she had scarcely shown here.
Put another way, her presence in this seat was a plain declaration. She had come with official intent, as a representative of the Church and as a Gravekeeper in her own right.
“Please, make yourself comfortable. What would you like to drink?”
“Coffee, if you would.”
That the president received her himself and went so far as to prepare the drinks had nothing to do with his guest being a Gravekeeper; this place had never stood much on ceremony to begin with. Even so, a company of this size whose head personally brewed the coffee, however occasional the occasion, was a rare thing.
“I understand you've already been told how the situation stands, President.”
“Yes. The broad strokes.”
Seoyeon had come, of course, on account of yesterday's assault on Ryuumai Fuu. As representative of the company to which Ryuumai belonged, Gyokichi had a right to hear how matters were turning.
“If I begin with the conclusion we reached through the interrogation that followed: this incident arose from a political dispute inside Russia. ...Though, frankly, it's almost embarrassing to call it a dispute. They're a minor faction at best.”
The ones who had carried it out were a Russian PMC with one foot in the hidden world, and the party that employed them belonged to an anti-emperor faction of that same world. A grab-bag conspiracy, gathering everyone from those merely offended that a demon ruled Russia, to the republican camp, to leftover Reds of the genuine article — that had been the hand behind the incident.
“She's effectively no different from what Japanese Shinto calls a bunrei, a spirit divided off from the whole — no, the connection runs deeper than even that, doesn't it? Which is why she was targeted.”
“That's right. As things stand, one may as well regard Miss Ryuumai as a divided body of Lord Behemoth.”
His childhood friend was an authority in this field, and he himself had handled all manner of material on the verification of anomalies; perhaps for that reason, something very near the correct answer slipped from Gyokichi's mouth almost at once. Han Seoyeon nodded her agreement.
“Put simply, they were aiming at a result akin to the ushi no toki mairi — the hour-of-the-ox pilgrimage, much the same as a curse doll. I doubt they ever meant to use anything so crude, so some more elaborate rite was surely performed... but in its essentials, one may take it as not greatly different.”
Through Ryuumai Fuu, they had attempted to reach the imperial princess of Russia. Their plan could be summed up in that.
“Won't this grow into an international problem?”
“They cut the tail off rather cleanly, so I don't expect it will. The members are all of Russian extraction, and their origins lie on that side as well, but at present every one of them has renounced Russian nationality. Aside from the few required for the bare minimum of administrative work, most were stateless outright.”
“Officially, then, an organization with no connection whatsoever to Russia.”
“Yes. That's correct.”
In short, it could be called an outfit built from the start to specialize in dirty work. The conviction that the faction over there had deliberately manufactured this pawn was as good as certain; regrettably, there was no material proof. Even without evidence in hand, of course, the Church was an organization that could join forces with the state in question and simply roll over an ordinary anti-government faction by sheer weight... Still, set beside the times one held a justification no one could wriggle free of, it would mean having to force things a little.
“That said, I don't believe this particular point calls for much concern.”
This case, however, was a different story.
“Quite apart from their knack for this sort of scheming, it's certain our opponents are fools.”
“Did they leave traces somewhere else?”
“No. It's simply that no evidence is required to smash them. Not once they've laid a hand on Triage.”
Gyokichi nodded, as if to grant that this was fair enough.
Beings set down somewhere between saint and madman. On the battlefield they were called the angels of the black armband: the Triage Team. Among those who worked the field, it was said there were those who half-deified them and offered up something like worship. Retired or not, let word get out that someone who had risen as far as unit commander had been attacked, and how many would see red and come charging? Hardly just one or two.
“Above all, the current captain of Triage is someone who treasures the team dearly... That person will move as well, so within the month, I expect, the anti-government forces inside Russia will be pulled up by the root.”
“I've heard that Triage is formidable... but isn't that on account of their obsession and their will? I was under the impression their specialty lay in defense, in holding a position, and in fighting withdrawals.”
“That's true. Triage's own armed strength isn't all that extraordinary.”
The figure they cut on a battlefield owed largely to a mad obsession that would see an objective accomplished even if they had to crawl to it on severed limbs. It was not that they possessed such tremendous force they could smash through whatever blocked them and press on, nor some absurd tactical insight with which to overcome an extreme gap in strength.
“The thing is, their captain has a friend for whom both of those are possible.”
“A friend? Triage's captain is surely... ah. I see.”
Only then did Gyokichi nod, as though it had clicked. That what flashed through his mind in that instant should have been, of all phrases, the Tatar Yoke was most likely no mere coincidence.
“So I don't think you need to worry greatly over this side of the matter. As I see it, even the Church will probably have no need to intervene.”
And so, still speaking, Seoyeon lifted the hat from her head and set it gently upon the desk.
Parting the Gravekeeper's emblem from her person was not, of course, a courtesy of removing one's hat indoors. Had that been the point, she would have done so from the start.
“I'd like to hear about our measures on the other front.”
What the gesture declared was that from here on she would speak not as Gravekeeper Margarita, but as Han Seoyeon, an employee of Anathema Production on paper.
“The gunfight and the break-in at the house were broadcast just as they happened. It was a VTuber stream, so at least no picture went out... but I've confirmed that the gunshots, and the voices in conversation, went out quite clearly.”
That the conversation had been in Russian rather than Japanese was very little comfort.
Ryuumai Fuu — Iwabami Kyouka, in her life as a VTuber — had a fair number of Russian viewers on her stream. With the supreme sovereign of the Russian Empire standing behind the broadcast as its patron, Russian viewers from the hidden world had multiplied, and clips subtitled in Russian, the so-called kirinuki, had been cut in droves, drawing speakers of Russian in from the surface world along with them.
Even setting that aside, Anathema Production teemed with polyglots, and its share of foreign viewers ran high even measured against a modern world drawn tight together. Among them, naturally, people who could manage a fair amount of Russian were everywhere. Let someone merely curious what on earth had happened upload a clip to the internet, and a specialist happening past at the right moment would leave a comment interpreting it. Fairer, then, to judge that it made no great difference from the whole exchange having been spoken in Japanese to begin with.
“Miss Ryuumai did post a tweet saying it was nothing serious, but no matter how I turn it over, this doesn't seem like something that stops at a mere flame war...”
You tune in to a VTuber channel, gunshots crack out one after another, Russian men in heavy voices come storming in, and the broadcast cuts off. Think it over however you like — no one would file that under a flame war, or an accident. They would take it for the genuine article.
It was only a mercy that Ryuumai had posted she was alive not long after the stream ended; from where the viewers sat, they must have been sick with wondering what in the world had happened. Even at this very moment there were surely some whose worry had climbed nearly to terror. A broadcast was set for this evening, and yet Seoyeon couldn't shake the sense that they ought to throw on an emergency stream this instant, confirm she was safe, and offer some kind of account. Ryuumai was the victim, so “account” was an odd word for it — but neither could they come straight out and say that foreign terrorists residing in the country illegally had attacked her.
Hearing this, Gyokichi nodded once more, and then he spoke.
“Ah... do we need to explain?”
“...I'm sorry. I must have misheard.”
And at once Seoyeon was struck dumb. The thought, one imagines, ran something like what on earth is this fish-man saying?
“Don't tell me this is another talk about going viral. Even so, surely the broadcast going up in flames outweighs whatever we'd gain from the virality.”
“No. Is this a problem? Truly?”
If this wasn't a problem, then what under heaven was? Seoyeon looked at Gyokichi as though she couldn't understand him, and he looked back at her in exactly the same register.
“Our company already has a practicing shrine maiden working as a VTuber, and Lady Hyakurenno is a VTuber as well. I don't see any reason an Eastern European mercenary who's earned enough grudges to be attacked in the course of ordinary life shouldn't be one too.”
“Er...”
Han Seoyeon was lost. She couldn't tell whether Gyokichi was talking madness, or whether the VTuber industry had gone mad around her.
“In Miss Shion's homeland, I hear they have a phrase — the high school girl who's finished her military service. At about this level, wouldn't that sell as a character trait?”
“Er...”
And she reached a conclusion. It was probably both.