Destroy This Temple (5)
Professor Senjoji Chihaya's laboratory lay inside one of the university buildings. Books and papers rose in such disordered heaps that the place felt less like a room anyone lived in than a warehouse.
"Contractor."
"Eek?!"
An angel with hair the color of clear water had sprung out from between those countless pillars of books, and Hitomi, badly startled, let out a thin scream.
"There's no need to be quite that surprised... Is it still yesterday?"
"Mm... Yes. Probably."
The reaction had been far louder than expected, and even Hikari looked a little taken aback. For a moment it seemed absurd that anyone could jump like that over so little—but yesterday, properly considered, made it not so strange after all.
Once Hitomi accepted Hikari's proposal, Seoyeon had agreed to take the attacker's part in their intruder play... and what she produced was a threat so adorable that one had to wonder whether even a child would have been frightened. Her base specs(?) being what they were, children might still have been scared by that much alone; even granting as much, it was crude enough to work on no one but actual little kids. Hitomi, at the very least, had felt neither fear nor even tension.
It wasn't as if Seoyeon didn't know how to frighten people. Asked why she had gone about it that way, she answered that she had been afraid of scaring her too badly, and Hitomi could only let out a small laugh. Even so, she couldn't help thinking she was being taken for something of a fool—and she was confident, besides, that she of all people would never feel fear toward Han Seoyeon.
This was no surprise sprung on her without warning. The one coming to attack her was someone she truly loved, and the whole point of the attack was to catch her and do that sort of thing. There was no way it could be scary. Still, the pursuer ought to have come on at least a little threatening, if there was to be any tension at all. Fear of an assailant was too much to ask, but the taut thrill of a game of tag should have been within reach.
So she had told her not to worry about her, and to come with everything she had. Even in earnest, Seoyeon would never do her harm.
...Looking back on it now, Ninomae Hitomi thought it had been a remarkably complacent judgment.
When fog began to fill the house, she had only thought, She's really committing to the atmosphere. Deciding she ought to meet that seriousness partway, she scattered her familiars to search, and confirmed Seoyeon walking slowly in from the entrance. Hiding would be the worst plan imaginable—scent would give her away—so if Seoyeon was coming from over there in this direction, which way should she run? She was in the middle of that very thought.
Han Seoyeon dropped from the ceiling and struck.
She had been certain the woman was still far off, and for one true instant she thought her heart had fallen clean out of her. From that moment until Hitomi's eyes were covered and her limbs bound, not even two seconds passed. Nor did it end there. Seoyeon carried out an attacker's proper duty—which is to say, she set about taking Hitomi with all her strength.
Tying me up and then going to fetch the toys is cheating, isn't it...?!
Even now the complaint rose of its own accord... but anyway. Not even a full day had passed since all of that, so of course she was going to jump whenever something suddenly popped out.
"Did I keep you waiting? My apologies."
"Ah, no. It's fine. I was reading."
The one who presently came around a pillar of books was the mistress of the laboratory herself, Professor Senjoji.
"As you know, there are limits to the information I can take in. It took a little while."
She shrugged, then hopped lightly up to sit on one of the lower stacks.
Senjoji Chihaya cannot perceive anomalies. To investigate them, she had to make use of any number of detours. In concrete terms, the Hikari present here had to be framed as a cosplaying psychiatric patient who believed herself an angel, merely explaining the setting of her own delusion. Even that introduction did not make the detour perfect—partway through, Hikari would go mute, and the passing of information would snag—but the account seemed, somehow, to have reached its end.
"How is she?"
"Normal, to my eye."
"What?"
Hitomi's eyes went perfectly round.
"But Shirase's memory was definitely strange."
That was precisely why she had come.
Driven to the very brink of vanishing, Hikari had gone to the house of her main body, Anri, so she might take in faith and recover quickly. On her return she had started grumbling at Hitomi about this and that. The rambling was considerable, but the point, once sorted out, was that she disliked how a fake—Hikari's own word—had piled up sexual experience ahead of her. To Hitomi it looked about half displeasure and half envy.
Hitomi could only be bewildered. Setting aside, for the moment, that she had learned without meaning to that those two had crossed the line...
"She was definitely wedged in between us, and she—um—did it."
Most of it, of course, had been nothing more than help from the side. Holding her legs so she couldn't close them. Fetching the tools in her place. But why had they used her as an assistant and nothing more? Because experience had taught them that summoning a double still drained Hitomi's stamina in the end, which defeated the entire purpose. And that experience had happened no fewer than twice.
"Did you not say, Ninomae, that you can transform a familiar and use it as a double? Shirase here disguised herself as one and slipped in on the quiet."
"Yes. That's right."
"Then, on precisely those two occasions, was it not in fact the familiar, rather than Shirase in disguise?"
"That can't be."
The first time they caught on that Shirase had disguised herself as a double, she had immediately dropped into a dogeza—no, a grand grovel that put even a dogeza to shame—and apologized.
"And while she was at it, she clearly admitted she'd 'done it,' didn't she?"
"I heard no such account in the interview just now."
"No—wait a moment, Contractor. I don't remember saying anything like that...?"
Under Professor Senjoji's gaze, Hikari shook her head. It did not look like the reaction of someone lying. So this was why Hitomi had said there was something wrong with the memory. Senjoji nodded, satisfied.
"Even so, my view that she is normal remains unchanged."
"What? Her memory was erased. How can that be...?"
"And is an erased memory a problem?"
"...Uh. What?"
The professor's meaning was not easy to follow. Wasn't it called amnesia for a reason—a condition, a kind of illness? If this wasn't an abnormality, then what was?
"Then every human being now upon the Earth is abnormal?"
"Uh, what do you—...ah!"
"Yes. It seems you have caught on as well, Ninomae."
With that, Hitomi understood what she had been driving at.
"The Hypnosis App...!"
A worldwide erasure of memory, meant to incinerate the Necromancer's seed where it existed in the form of data. Yes. That was what had happened.
"Then a seed of the Necromancer had been planted in Shirase here...?"
"Would that not be strange? Why should only that day's memory vanish so neatly? From the encroachment onward, until the day the Hypnosis App took effect, the disturbances of memory ought to have arisen evenly throughout."
So saying, Professor Senjoji lifted the book she had been sitting on.
"A demon is spiritual, more than it is material. An entity formed and sustained by faith—and so the phrase information life-form may suit it better."
She smiled, just slightly, and went on.
"For a demon, therefore, the alteration of memory is a thing that shakes identity itself to some degree. The damaged places are restored on the basis of the information already held."
"You mean...?"
"I mean that Shirase here is a virgin, by her setting. That setting would have been the standard of the restoration."
"Um... if this were a game, would it be like respawning and just losing the status ailment that was already on you...?"
"An amusing analogy. Yes—just so. When one revives in a game, do health and status ailments not return to the initial state they were set to?"
For a demon, however, a change in the body cannot help but affect the self. In short, a portion of memory had been rebuilt to match the body.
Hearing the explanation, Hitomi looked unconvinced. It more or less held together, and yet the question remained of why only that day's memory had flown away. If the erasure of memory struck demons as hard as Senjoji claimed, then shouldn't confusion have broken out among demons on a large scale?
"She knows a great deal, and so a great deal of memory was erased; the blow she took was far heavier than the others'. The rest of the demons would not have been affected to this extent."
"Um... then that still means Shirase was carrying the Necromancer's data, doesn't it...?"
"Which is why I have never once said that the cause was the Necromancer."
"What?"
Hitomi's head tipped to one side.
"But the only memory wiped from people all over the world back then was the data the Necromancer needed in order to possess them..."
"Can you be certain of that, Ninomae?"
Senjoji grinned and looked into Hitomi's eyes.
"Truly. Can you swear that the memory erased then was that, and nothing else?"
"That's... uh, that's..."
Hitomi's eyes were shaking. It was not that she had failed to understand what was being said. She reacted this way because she understood perfectly well.
If some particular memory had been erased from every person in the world, was there any way to know what that erased memory had been? And could she guarantee that the Church, while it was about the business of erasing the Necromancer, had not harbored some intention of its own and rewritten the world however it pleased?
"Two things."
"Two?"
"One, once you set aside what concerns the Necromancer."
The professor said it with two fingers raised. Hitomi stared at them blankly for a moment, and then her eyes flew wide.
"Ah...! You know, Professor, because an anomaly's power can't erase your memory?!"
She did know. If anyone here could tell what information the Church had manipulated, it was this woman. Senjoji Chihaya alone would have come through perfectly intact even after seeing or hearing, with her own eyes and ears, the suggestion that Hyakurenno Electronics—its power mustered to the full—had spread to every person alive.
Then this much, at least, was certain. The Church had not meant to cause some great calamity. Had they tried to work the world to their own liking, the professor would have exposed them on the spot. And from the simple fact that they had not killed Professor Senjoji beforehand to shut her mouth, the worst possibility—the corruption of the Church—could be ruled out.
"So what was it, exactly...?"
"Information concerning a prophecy. And, by the circumstances, very likely information obtained on the day of that 'act' erased from memory... Hmm. Wait a moment, if you would."
Professor Senjoji broke off mid-sentence and sank suddenly into deep thought, as if something had occurred to her.
"Aha."
A minute or so passed, and the professor smiled to herself, satisfied.
"I am sorry, Ninomae. This is information that might turn dangerous from the mere act of conveying it, so I cannot tell you at present."
"I-is that so...?"
"In exchange, I believe I can solve one problem. Wait a little. There is someone I must contact."
"......?"
Ninomae Hitomi could not begin to understand what on earth she meant to say. She let it pass with nothing more than this: the professor had always been an eccentric, and she had simply struck upon yet another idea, as ingenious as it was strange.
"What."
The next day, the Archbishop of Tokyo, come to call at their home, and Sarah Groothuizen—accompanying him through a tablet—flung their whole bodies into a dogeza.