A New Teaching with Authority (4)
A habit of purest black, and a fascia just as black wound about the waist. Twin swords hung loose at her left hip, and the cappello romano, banded in cyan, stirred in the night wind.
Saint Bartholomew, armed. The very same attire as when she had come to Takaku Shrine to find her. Watching Han Seoyeon, preparations for departure complete, Akaba Akane thought as much.
"If everyone is ready, let us go."
"Akane-chan."
At Seoyeon's words, Tenka turned golden eyes their way. Wolf ears had already risen atop her head.
"Get on."
"…Is this seriously the only way?"
"What else are we supposed to do?"
The party bound for Ouou Shrine numbered four, and of them the only one close to an ordinary human was Akane—more precisely, the only one who could not manage the minimum speed Han Seoyeon demanded. Akane sounded thoroughly unwilling, but Tenka was right that there was no other way, and in the end she entrusted herself to her childhood friend's back.
"…I'm in your hands—"
All the while the woman in the maid uniform, Chisa, stayed crouched with a liquor bottle clutched in her grip. Then a single drop fell from it. A tree trunk surged up on the spot, and a leopard crawled out from within. Chisa stroked the beast once and draped her whole body over it like a piece of laundry left out to dry.
Seoyeon confirmed that the rest of the party had boarded their mounts(?), dropped into a low stance, and kicked off the ground, breaking into a run.
Tara-chō, Fujitsu District, Saga Prefecture. Ouou Shrine—the Great Fish Shrine. A shrine famous for the torii standing in the sea.
"…So this is the place."
"Careful, Akane-chan."
Meeting the cool, salt-smelling wind off the water, Tsunashi Tenka walked a step ahead of her childhood friend. They had not brought Akaba Akane expecting much in the way of combat. She was here as an expert in Shinto, and little more.
"Heheh. Pretty moon, though."
"…That is not the moon. You heard as much at the hot spring, but tonight is the new moon."
At the very front went the woman in black, twin swords hung at her hip. At the rear, a drunk in a maid's dress staggered along with a bottle in hand. Han Seoyeon lifted her gaze to a night sky bare of even starlight, then flicked the brim of her hat with one finger. Quite by coincidence, the wind died at that very moment.
"Be careful. From here, we are inside a god's maw… no. If this is an intrusion, you are more accustomed to it than I am."
"Eheheh. Crushing the wind flat like that—fat god, huh."
Seoyeon did not turn her head. She only nodded, conceding the point.
They pressed on, and would have walked farther still had someone not come shuffling out from behind the shrine's main hall.
"Visitors in the dead of night. How unusual."
He looked to be in his fifties or sixties, a flashlight in one hand. Dressed in hakama and haori, he was surely a man who served at this shrine.
"The age, the air about him… the kannushi?"
So Akane guessed. Exceptions like herself existed, but a kannushi was, as a rule, a shrine's most senior elder.
"No."
The guess was denied at once by Tenka, standing right beside her. Her voice had gone rigid with tension.
"Fur. The smell of a beast……."
What Ouou Shrine enshrined was Namiou—a fish god, with nothing whatsoever to do with fur. The tradition told of a corrupt official exiled to an uninhabited island who prayed to the heavens; a giant fish appeared and saved him, and the reformed official founded Ouou Shrine in the wake of it. There was no reason for that kannushi to smell of a wild animal.
"Well, now…"
It had not been a loud voice, but it seemed to have reached the man's ears. He let out a thin laugh and covered his face.
"I was hoping to bluff my way through."
Crack. His body collapsed. It scattered like mist, and assembled itself again.
"What a nuisance you are."
What stood there differed in sex, in age—even in species. Three lush fox tails tore free of the hakama. Tawny hair, and triangular ears pricked high.
"Ooh. A fox."
The liquor-slack voice broke the mood. Akane's expression twisted at once.
"What did you do with the kannushi?"
"He's right here, isn't he? I'm the master of the fish now."
The fox gestured with an easy air, and a fierce wind howled through the precincts—proof that she held this place, and its master, in her grip.
"Cocky little bastard."
"Akane-chan… this is what I'm thinking it is, right?"
"Yeah. She stole the god off the priest."
"No idea how a stray spirit managed it, mind you." Akane muttered the words as she drew a talisman from her pocket.
"A stray spirit, is it."
So she had heard that too. Not that Akane had meant to hide it.
"Well, you might not be wrong. Thing is, I've made myself a rather good friend."
Snap. She flicked her fingers, and something pitch-black squirmed up out of the shadow. In a moment it coalesced into a monstrous figure with a goat's head.
"…A demon?"
"Now that is a design just begging you to notice it's a demooon."
Bat-like wings of stretched membrane jutted from its back. The maid, watching, set the bottle to her lips for a few more swallows before she spoke.
"But a traditional yokai borrowing power off Western kids is cheeeating!"
"What, are you frightened?"
Fair enough, really. The fox chuckled. A divine spirit under her dominion, and a contract with a demon besides—she was, in a word, a calamity wielding three kinds of power at will. Shoulders rose of their own accord. That held until the demon at her side came out with something strange.
"Hey. What the hell did you bring?!"
"What? Don't tell me you're scared. With power like this?"
A contract still had to earn its keep. The fox snorted, but the demon's view of things was plainly different.
"Yes. A contract must be kept. But these are formidable opponents, are they not."
"You flinched because one's a miko who serves a god? The eyes are a little nasty, sure, but she's chaff. Left her spirit back at her own shrine and came empty."
"Not that one."
The werewolf, then? True enough—she had never fought a werewolf either.
"Yeah. Damn it. Even among werewolves, that one is considerably strong."
"Still just the one, isn't it? And the last one's a drunk."
"You stupid beast! Of the three, that lush is the most dangerous!"
"She doesn't look it at all……."
The fox narrowed her eyes at the drunk bringing up the rear.
"Ugh, I already drank the whooole thing."
"…Seriously? Her?"
That human, the strongest one here? Her head tilted of its own accord.
"Huh?"
The sound that escaped her was pure bewilderment.
"What is it? Don't tell me you doubt my word, you animal."
"No, that's not—what did you just say?"
"So you are doubting me!"
"I said I'm not!"
The fox shrieked it, then turned the demon's words over again. The drunk back there was the strongest.
—Of the three.
"The presences that entered the shrine were four, I'm sure of—"
The sentence never finished. The fox hurled herself forward on pure reflex. It could only be called a beast's instinct.
"Ghk—?!"
An instant later, two swords cut the necks of both monsters from behind at once. The blade sheared halfway through the fox's nape. She was the fortunate one. The result of failing to react at all was rolling at her feet.
Her eyes met the severed goat head. Those rectangular pupils, peculiar to goats, were speaking to her.
"What the hell did you actually bring, you crazy bitch."
Behind the place where they had stood, a holy knight with a face to chill the blood was already there, pitch-black twin swords leveled in both hands.
"Quicker on your feet than I expected. I had intended to take both necks in a single stroke."
"Y-you damned—!"
The fox clutched her blood-soaked nape and ground her teeth. The wound was already beginning to knit, but the fury that had climbed to the crown of her head would not. She had not even sensed the approach. She had nearly been killed without understanding why, and as if to bury that fear, rage boiled higher still in the dark of her mind.
"Calm down! Four against two is a gap we absolutely cannot overcome!"
"I know, I know…!"
The fox stamped her bare foot. Ghostly blue-green flame roared up and slashed a great line across the shrine grounds, and a wall of fire cut the rest of the party off, leaving only the fox and Han Seoyeon.
"Kh— Tenka!"
"Stay back, Akane-chan!"
The split. Precisely the outcome one hopes to avoid while holding the advantage in numbers. Akane cried out, and Tenka swung her arm—her foreleg. The blast of wind from a single motion snuffed the flames at once.
"…Tch. So they aren't fools either."
But where the wall of fire had vanished, a wall of earth and rock now stood. She had clearly assumed the fire would be put out. Buying the time to raise this second wall had been the entire point.
"Can you break it?"
"It'll take time, but somehow…"
It looked terribly solid, though not beyond breaking. Tenka judged as much and clenched her fist once more. The instant she set her stance, someone yanked her collar from behind.
"Look at the sky. Full moon."
"Miss Maid. This really isn't the time for—"
Tenka turned her head with an uneasy look, and froze.
"You can all see it now, caaan't you?"
A moon hung there. Radiant.
"……Hell."
Only then did Akane register the wrongness in the sky, and her face twisted.
"See? Told youuu."
"That's not the moon. …It's a lantern."
A lantern: the lure of a deep-sea anglerfish, drawing prey in along its line. The fish god Namiou was gazing down upon them. The body was simply so vast that it reached the sky itself. But something was plainly wrong with the spirit. A writhing blackness clung to the fish, twisting it into a grotesque shape.
"Ahahaha! Magikarp went and turned into Gyaradooos!"
Closer to an insect larva than to a dragon, but the comparison was near enough.
"Damn it. What do we do with this?"
"Get behind me for now, Akane-chan."
Fortunately, at least, the god did nothing. It merely occupied that place. And yet the presences of wicked things drawn by the lantern pressed in from every side—like being surrounded by a pack in the woods. The sense of danger plucked at every hair on her body.
"What's there to do about it."
But the converging stray spirits were not the only thing wrapped in that eerie air.
"We kill them, obviously."
"…Miss Maid?"
"Mind you, taking the spirit's head with this lineup is pushing it. So how about we peel that black thing off instead?"
Soft eyes. A mouth gone slack, as always. The pupils, though, were terribly empty.
"You have a way?"
"Heheheh. You wanna soothe a god, a miko's gotta praaaay!"
"In the middle of those stray spirits?"
"Then someone's gotta keep her safe. You can manage that, can't you, wolf girlieee?"
"Huh? Yeah. I'll protect Akane-chan."
Momomomo Chisa grinned and started to lift the bottle to her lips again, then caught herself—oops—and lowered it. There was no liquor left to drink.
"Then let's just see it through somehowww. It'll work out. Somehow."