Destroy This Temple (7)
"……."
Han Seoyeon sank into thought.
They had come on so hard — all that talk of how it had been necessary — and now, without warning, they were this low to the ground. She could hardly help finding it strange. If they were going to cause what they themselves insisted on calling "collateral damage," they ought to have simply pushed through. Then she, at least, could have told herself there must have been some reason worth the trouble, and made her peace with it in her head if nowhere else.
If they were willing to bend this easily, shouldn't they simply have refrained from doing anything strange in the first place? It would have been stranger not to wonder.
"First — would you explain the circumstances? What led up to this, and what followed."
She glanced at Hitomi beside her, then at the tablet resting on the table.
Up on the screen was a character model: Nokbal. Sarah Groothuizen. Archbishop Ibuki had come with her as well, but they sent him off the moment the apology was finished. His face had been hidden under a hat and a mask.
Seoyeon had been a Holy Knight for years. She could read a room. She understood at once that, officially, he was not yet in any position to apologize. She still didn't know the precise circumstances, but the mere fact of an archbishop visiting their home was clearly something that had to stay secret. That much she judged in a moment, and, setting feeling aside, she sent him back on nothing but reason.
What had changed, to bring about a shift in attitude like this? That, she could hear from Abraham, who was right here. The archbishop must have smuggled in Abraham's terminal for exactly that purpose — he had to leave at once, so he had brought a proxy to pass the story along in secret.
"First, the apology…"
"You just gave it. Let's get to the point."
"…Understood."
Understanding that a thing had been necessary, and forgiving it — letting the heart unclench — were entirely separate matters. Seoyeon's eyes said as much. She had accepted the apology, but her temper was still foul. Sarah hurried to change the subject.
"Then, to begin… there is a Korean saying. If you must take a beating, better to take it first. I will start with the part that earns me one."
"You're telling me there's more here that deserves a beating? …No. Speak."
"The Church intended to throw Ninomae Hitomi into the middle of a Scenario. In a moment when she was apart from you, Seoyeon."
"Shion. Shion!"
"…Ah. I'm sorry."
Hitomi pulled Seoyeon into her arms and called her name again and again, and Seoyeon drew a long breath and forced her heart back down.
In a single instant, the thread of her reason had nearly snapped. No — it had already snapped once, and Hitomi, reacting in that same instant, had all but forced the ends back together.
It was an entirely natural reaction. The standard by which a thing was classed a Scenario-grade crisis was Scenario Z: mutual assured destruction by nuclear war. What Abraham had just said was no different from announcing that a nuclear missile would be sent at the place where her wife was. Abraham herself would not be the one to launch it, nor the Church — but to know beforehand and still take not a single preventive measure was to be an accomplice all the same.
Had Hitomi not held her back, talk would have been the last thing on the table. She would have smashed that terminal first.
"I expect this will only provoke me further… but I'll ask all the same. What is the Scenario code?"
"Scenario S. Samson."
"Have you lost your minds? Or is Japan Sinks making the rounds in Intelligence these days?"
What Scenario S meant was the danger of large-scale, indiscriminate destruction, born of a being above a certain threshold losing all self-control. A monster on the order of an Apostle — fallen, or controlled — with a high chance of slaughtering every living thing in sight. Among Scenarios, it was one with a particularly high likelihood of civilian dead.
And on top of that, they meant to throw an Apostle's wife into it. Was that even something a person could say? At that level, if she died in the midst of it, that would be bad enough — but even if she lived, the mere fact of having cast her into such a situation could have been enough to turn Seoyeon against the Church. In short, it was the sort of plan that stops one Scenario only to open another. What meaning was there in offering up a sacrificial lamb to put down one mad Apostle, only for a second mad Apostle to rise in their place? There was nothing remotely strange about Seoyeon speaking as harshly as she had.
Ironically, the reason her reaction had stopped at harsh words was that sheer disbelief outweighed even her fury at the thought of putting Hitomi in danger.
"At the end of this year, the Necromancer will resurrect the previous Bartholomew and drop them on Japan."
"……."
Well. That did change the shape of things. Seoyeon's expression shifted, subtly, at last. That she and Hitomi were still the ones who would be hurt remained unpleasant — but it was no longer a judgment she couldn't follow.
If the price of making the previous Bartholomew easier to subdue was having to make an enemy of the current one, a fair number of people would weigh it in earnest. An elephant and a lion were both foes no unarmed human could stand against. Even so — if one of them simply had to be set charging, wouldn't you rather it were the tiger?
"So you mean to weaken the predecessor through Hitomi. A human sacrifice? Or bait?"
"Ah — Miss Ninomae isn't meant to play any role at all. She would truly be nothing but a victim. Simply thrown into that place, and nothing more."
"……So the film that moved you wasn't Japan Sinks. It was Deep Impact."
She had thought they meant to make an enemy of the less dangerous Apostle in order to stop the more dangerous one. This was simply a rampaging-Apostle, buy-one-get-one event. Had the other party been anyone but the Catholic Church, she would have concluded that the entire organization had taken drugs together and collectively lost its mind.
"What are you thinking?"
"A Scenario breaking out while you and Miss Ninomae are apart from each other, and her being caught up in it — that is what happens if you hear this prophecy of mine and do nothing in response."
That much went without saying. If Seoyeon heard a prophecy that a Scenario would erupt while she was away from Hitomi, she would be at Hitomi's side in that moment, no matter what it cost.
"…It's the bombing of Coventry."
Unlike Seoyeon, Hitomi seemed to have caught onto something, and murmured it.
"Coventry? Where St. Michael's Cathedral stands."
"Yes. That's right. It's a story from when that cathedral was destroyed, a long time ago. A conspiracy theory — that Britain had broken Germany's Enigma code and learned about the plan to bomb Coventry, but did nothing and left the city to it, so no one would find out they'd broken the cipher."
Evacuate the citizens beforehand, and if the codebreaking came to light, Germany would simply change the cipher they had only just managed to crack.
"You said Sarah — Abraham, I mean — was supposed to have broken down after the last incident and quit every bit of Church work, right? So she could stay out from under the Doctor's surveillance."
Stay connected to Abraham, and a hack might come riding in along that line. Cut the connection and turn her loose, and she would go right on handing the Church prophecies and tripping them at every step. To resolve the dilemma, the Doctor had chosen to neutralize Abraham with a mental attack. Set against someone who, even turned loose, would only be streaming as a VTuber, cutting the surveillance line would pose no problem at all. Abraham, and a portion of the Church's people, had turned that against them — and manufactured a situation in which she could prophesy freely.
"If the Necromancer tried something, and we answered in a way that was only possible because of Abraham's prophecy, the other side would try to connect again……."
"You mean the card of striking the Necromancer's main body is one we have to keep in reserve."
Han Seoyeon murmured it, her voice low and sunk.
"Correct. But if I told you, you wouldn't cooperate, would you? Right up until the day it happens, you'd stay glued to Miss Ninomae's side."
"…That's true."
Even if it was the right judgment from the Church's seat, Han Seoyeon the person could never accept it. Cooperate with an operation that threw away the one person who mattered most? How could that be a thing to say?
"So we hid it. …Though if that had truly been all we did, then once everything was over, Scenario I would have been confirmed."
Which was why, on the day the disaster fell, the Church had to pull Seoyeon away from Hitomi and still keep Hitomi safely protected. Put another way, they needed to buy a little time — only until Han Seoyeon could hurry back to her side.
"The attack the other day was for that. Since that day, whenever you're away from your post, you've been asking the Holy Knights of a nearby church to stand guard, haven't you?"
"Yes. After I learned the Church was behind the attack, I did start to wonder whether I ought to change the guard……."
Of course she had. Right after Hitomi was hit while she was alone, there was no world in which Seoyeon would leave her unattended. Whenever Seoyeon was away from the house, she kept people waiting in the area around it, and even when Hitomi had to go out by herself, someone followed at a distance.
"…So you staged the attack to create a pretext for assigning a guard, without ever telling me the future."
"Yes. Put in order, that is what it comes to."
Seoyeon pressed a hand to her brow.
"If that was all it was, you could have given me word beforehand and staged the attack with me."
"Because you aren't stupid, Seoyeon. The moment you start to feel that something is off about why a guard has to be assigned, it's over."
Sarah Groothuizen answered, perfectly calm.
"You would know the day the disaster falls. Are you confident you could go far off, Seoyeon, telling yourself the other Holy Knights will buy the time, so it will be fine?"
"……No."
Of course she would try to raise the odds of coming through it, even by a little. And of course the way to do that would be to protect Hitomi not only in person, but by mobilizing every connection she had.
"But then, why tell me now? Because it got out that the Church was behind it?"
"No. Because a card came into our hands — a way to read the future by some method other than prophecy."
"Reading the future without a prophecy? I don't imagine you're about to tell me a story of gathering evidence and reasoning it out……."
"No. It isn't that."
Sarah's avatar smiled, just slightly.
"In accordance with the Quantum Virginity Theory, we will observe an element that has been resting in probabilistic superposition, and thereby fix a future possibility in place."
"……There really isn't some strange drug going around Intelligence. Is there."
What was that even supposed to mean.
Seoyeon gave serious thought to whether she ought to turn the artificial intelligence in front of her off and on again.