Destroy This Temple (1)
"Good day, Miss Akaba."
Akaba Akane had been sweeping the shrine grounds, putting them in order, when a voice came out of nowhere and she turned her head.
"Han Seoyeon?"
The moment she saw who was standing there, her eyes widened a fraction.
She was startled that it was someone she hadn't expected. What unsettled her more was that a guest had come this far without her noticing at all.
Takaku Shrine was Sanmeedora-sama's domain. If an outsider set foot here, there was no conceivable way the spirit would have failed to notice.
"Sanmeedora-sama?"
She worried something might have happened to the spirit she served — and yet, if something had, it was strange that she, a shrine maiden, had failed to sense it.
"She said it had been a while and suggested a match, so she's collapsed down below."
"Ah..."
True to form for a deity who crossed over from Goguryeo — that temper. Akane let out a heavy sigh.
Most of the time she was perfectly pleasant company. The problem was the fighting instinct that burst out of her now and then, whether it came from the nature of the god or from what she was as a tiger spirit. Not only Han Seoyeon, but even the werewolf childhood friend who dropped by "occasionally" — which was to say, quite often — always ended up on the receiving end of those duels. The opponent was a spirit you couldn't even see, so no matter how much it was Tenka, the matches usually ended in Sanmeedora's victory.
"Sorry. For the trouble, every time."
"Not at all. It wasn't particularly difficult, so I'm fine."
"...Why are you fine with it?"
"Uh... who knows?"
What she could not understand was how this woman beat that thing and came back as if it were nothing. Even Tsunashi Tenka's victories amounted to no more than this: duel after duel, until she had learned the opponent's habits and patterns and finally slipped a blade into some narrow gap. And yet here was someone who had barely fought her a handful of times — someone who, in raw physical ability alone, ought to fall well short of a werewolf — walking back from a win as though it were only natural. It was absurd. She didn't even look armed this time.
A paper bag hung from one hand. This being Han Seoyeon, it would have been no surprise if she carried a pistol, a knife, or a silver hammer as a matter of course... but no gunshot had sounded, so she probably hadn't used a firearm.
Just what sort of being was an Apostle, anyway? She knew they were extraordinary. She had heard, over and over, that they were extraordinary. What she did not have was any real sense of where the limit lay.
Not that she particularly wanted one. Get tangled up in something that would make her feel it, and she would almost certainly find herself grateful simply to still be alive.
"So. What are you doing here."
"First, if you would accept a souvenir."
"Ah... right. You said you'd been on a trip."
Now that she thought of it, Seoyeon had said she was going to Princess Hyakurenno's private beach. One night and two days, if Akane remembered — she must have gotten back yesterday. Akane took the paper bag and looked inside.
"Wasabi-zuke? So the place you went was Shizuoka."
"Yes. She said the nearest one she owns is in Shizuoka."
"...I'm not going to ask, at this point, whether Her Highness Hyakurenno even has something like that. But there was a selection?"
"She said it was multiple choice. Four options."
What was this, a college entrance exam? Akane muttered it, at a complete loss.
And yet the name Hyakurenno had a way of making even nonsense like this feel as though it might actually be true.
"I did buy a wasabi root as well, but... Sanmeedora-sama has gotten harder than I remembered from last time, so it broke."
"...Right. That so."
Sanmeedora-sama... got beaten with a raw wasabi root. Akane pictured the scene and covered her face with her palm.
She would choose to call it a mercy. At least for a while, sunk in gloom, the spirit wouldn't go picking fights for no reason. If she didn't tell herself that, this was going to be very hard to accept.
"But you didn't come just to hand that over."
"That's right."
Of course, it wouldn't have been strange if she had only stopped by with a souvenir on her way back from the trip. But if she went out of her way to say accept the souvenir first, that meant there was other business. At Akane's words, Seoyeon nodded.
"Would you come with me, perhaps, the next time I go to see Miss Natsugahara Hina?"
"Me?"
Akane's eyes widened slightly once more. The request had struck her as a little odd.
True enough, even Natsugahara Hina, shut in by a severe fear of people, had opened her heart a fair amount to her fellow first-generation talents — enough to overcome that fastidiousness and allow physical contact, or even take her mask off when they were near. For anything ordinary, though, going along with Hitomi ought to have been plenty. Hina had clearly opened up to her as well, in her own way. At the very least, she had cared enough to overcome her terror of a hall full of guests and attend the wedding.
Was it the assistant manager title? On paper, Akane and Seoyeon each carried one — assistant manager to the second generation and the third, respectively.
"No, hang on. That hat..."
But Akane soon caught on.
Han Seoyeon was wearing a black wide-brimmed hat. A cappello romano.
The band around it looked, at a glance, like an archbishop's green, but in truth a faint bluish cast ran through it. It was the hat that marked a cemetery keeper of the Western Church — known, in short, as a Gravekeeper.
Which meant she had not come here as Han Seoyeon, wife of Ninomae Hitomi. Nor as Hinata Shion, an employee of Anathema Production. She had come as Han Seoyeon Margarita of the Special Solemn Exorcism Knight Order under the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship — as Apostle Bartholomew.
A Holy Knight under that title, seeking out Natsugahara after Vampire Syndrome had already, for all practical purposes, come to an end, and the girl had once been pushed out of anyone's attention. Akane was certain this was nothing ordinary.
"Exactly which one is this about? Natsugahara Hina? Or Rokumondera Aki, the VTuber?"
"There's something I need to confirm with ReM of Placeholder."
"The fuck? ...Ah, sorry. That slipped out."
"No. I understand."
At Akane's reaction, Han Seoyeon gave a bitter smile, as if to say she understood perfectly.
"...I intend to ask about a colleague who passed away."
And the reason she had come all the way to Akane became clear at once. This was not merely stirring Hina's trauma. It was gouging the wound open.
Colleagues who had been laughing and talking together only moments before had suddenly turned and begun to slaughter one another. To the surface world, it had been released as a story of accumulated friction and stress exploding all at once into a fight, which then ended when someone was stabbed by accident.
But Seoyeon had seen the bodies.
Think about it. Girls whose vitality had been amplified by becoming vampires would never have died from being hacked apart with a knife and nothing more. They would have cut, been sliced open, smashed, bitten into one another, and chewed flesh between those jaws before they finally stopped moving. Only Hina, the sole survivor on the scene, knew exactly how it had unfolded, but the bodies alone were enough to guess how horrific the process must have been.
They were going to the person who had lived through that, to rake through those painful memories. Hearing it, Akane let out a long breath.
"You're not the sort who doesn't care how other people feel."
From what she had heard before, Seoyeon was the type to throw herself into work she didn't even have to do, if it meant protecting innocent anomalies from the hardliners of the Japanese Church. Contrary to that frightening exterior — though Akane had to wonder whether she herself had any right to say so — she carried a rather gentle heart. She would not wound someone this way without a reason that actually mattered.
And even if Akane had simply misread her, and she was not gentle at all... so long as the person in question was someone Hitomi knew, she would not do anything strange. If only so she would not disappoint her.
"It's either something directly tied to Ninomae's safety, or something that could turn into a major disaster if it goes wrong. One of the two."
"The former."
"Now that I think of it, you said a stalker came all the way to the house last time. An anomaly from the hidden side, I take it."
Seoyeon nodded.
"The number the culprit used to make the threat is one that is no longer in service."
"No longer? Then before..."
"It appears to be a number a member of Placeholder used, until they passed away."
In other words, a phone call from a ghost — the kind that turns up in ghost stories. If that was the case, then retracing what the deceased had done in life was a sound enough way to follow the trail.
"Got it. All right. Shall we go."
"Uh... right now? It might be better to at least contact her first..."
"Tell her the situation ahead of time and give her room, and she won't steel herself. She'll run. If we've already decided to hear it from her, it's better to ambush her like this."
"...Understood. For now."
Han Seoyeon let out a small sigh and nodded. Someone who had known her far longer than Seoyeon had would know better, after all.
"Then let's go."
"Yeah."
And that was how a duo of fierce-looking hunters came to ambush one innocent, frail little outcast — simply because that was the way the matter had turned.