A New Teaching with Authority (6)
"You worried?"
Mika Eru had been looking up at the sky, letting the night wind wash over her, when she turned her head to ask.
Cold as the air was, Ninomae Hitomi had come outside and would not stop pacing the same stretch of ground. Clutched tight in her hand was the necklace Han Seoyeon had left behind—a silver cross set with rubies. A sacred relic easily centuries old, and to Ninomae, just then, that fact did not matter in the slightest. It was only the one thing that could still tie her, if only in her heart, to Han Seoyeon, who had gone out armed.
She pressed her palms together around the cross, as if in prayer. No—she was praying. She had no faith of her own. But if you wanted someone precious to come home safe, what was there to stop you from clinging even to a god you didn't believe in?
"…Yes. Quite a lot."
Ninomae nodded, making no effort to hide it. Of course she was worried. She knew from what she'd been told that Seoyeon did this sort of thing often enough. But no matter how professional you were, accidents arrived when you least expected them. Having been bewitched by an anomaly herself only a short while ago, Ninomae remembered that terror with perfect clarity; how dangerous a hostile anomaly could be had been carved into her body and her mind alike. And Han Seoyeon had gone out to face a thing like that. Telling her not to worry would have been absurd.
"It's fine. Natacchi's strong."
"Natacchi… so that nickname was one you gave her, Mika."
"Yep. The name she got as an Apostle is Bartholomew, so Nathaniel. That's why it's Natacchi."
Natacchi—the handle Han Seoyeon used on Etube. Hitomi had been wondering about the etymology for a while, and she certainly hadn't expected to learn it like this.
"Anyway, Natacchi's stupid strong, for real~."
Mika added it with a giggle.
"Really good holy knights get granted the name of Gravekeeper, and a title comes with it."
Han Seoyeon Margarita
"Doesn't the name alone sound ridiculously hardcore?"
"U-um… still, you never really know, do you?"
"I told you, there's nothing to worry about. The others went with her, didn't they?"
"That's its own problem. The others might get hurt too……."
Mika was all smiles—and then her phone rang.
"See? Told you she was fiiine~?"
The screen she thrust at Ninomae showed the name Natacchi. If she was placing a call, then at the very least she was in any state to do so.
"Pick up."
"M-me?"
"Who else is here? If you were that worried, you ought to be the first one to hear how it went."
Ninomae took the phone carefully and pressed the answer button.
"Situation resolved. Suppression complete."
"A-are you hurt anywhere? What about the others?"
"Miss Ninomae?"
Seoyeon's voice came through from the other end of the line. At how utterly calm it sounded, Ninomae felt the tightness in her chest finally loosen.
"No one was seriously hurt. At most, Miss Tsunashi Tenka has a few scratches here and there."
"Oh, thank goodness……."
"If… if you don't mind, I'd appreciate it if you put Eru back on. There's a situation I need to report at once."
At what followed, though, her shoulders gave a small flinch.
The tone made it sound like nothing much. Even so, Ninomae caught a nuance in the words—as if there were something Seoyeon wanted to gloss over. Something she did not want Ninomae to know.
"……."
"……."
Ninomae held her silence. So did Han Seoyeon, the moment she realized she had slipped.
There hadn't truly been anything wrong with what she'd said. But if the person on the other end was Ninomae, she ought to have been more careful.
"You're sure no one was hurt? Really?"
"Yes. No one among us was hurt."
What flashed through her mind was the worst possibility. Han Seoyeon, however, had spoken with the flat certainty of a first report that did not lie.
"…'Among us,' you mean."
Ninomae did not miss the slight shift in the phrasing. For some reason, whenever Han Seoyeon was the one across from her, she grew strangely sharp.
"What about the people who were kidnapped?"
An implication that everyone outside their group had not come through unharmed. Even so, Seoyeon would have had no reason to hesitate over telling Ninomae that an enemy had been hurt. Which left only one conclusion.
"Their lives aren't in danger. We'll finish a brief round of questioning, see to it that they stay quiet about the anomaly, and send them home."
No danger to their lives. Reading the possibility of injury folded inside those words, Ninomae fell silent again.
If Han Seoyeon was going to insist that far, she had no intention of pressing any further. Ninomae herself had nearly been kidnapped. Put another way, what those people had suffered was what might have happened to her. If it was something dreadful, then hiding it was the right choice—for the sake of Ninomae's peace of mind, if nothing else.
"I'll put Mika on."
Having talked herself into accepting that, Ninomae handed the phone back to its owner.
Mika Eru took it with a wide grin and put some distance between them, so the call couldn't be overheard.
"──So. For real, how's it actually? The truth you can't tell that girl?"
"…All dead. And there are more of them than was reported."
"You mean even counting the shrine people they killed so they could devour the shrine… it's still a lot, riiight? And the condition of the bodies."
"The corpses are badly emaciated. The fox must have drained not only their stamina, but their very life force. The times of death are all roughly the same."
Eru was quiet for a moment, thinking, and then she spoke.
"Because of us?"
"Most likely."
If they had died from having their life force sucked out by the fox, there were really only two possibilities worth considering. Either they had been drained little by little until they wasted away, or they had been sucked dry all at once the moment they were captured.
"If it was the first, the ones taken more recently should still have been breathing. If it was the second, the bodies would've been in different shape from each other, riiight?"
Different enough, at least, that an expert like Han Seoyeon could have told the estimated times of death apart.
For the scene to look like this, the fox would have had to be feeding slowly all along—and then, at some trigger, that draining would have had to turn suddenly violent.
"I believe that once we stopped the kidnapping, it grew wary of the attack that would follow and tried to gather as much power as it could."
"Sooo that's why you hid it from Nino-chan?"
It was only a what-if. But if Ninomae hadn't been helped in time and the fox had taken her—if it had never realized a holy knight was nearby—then those people might not have died.
She didn't want Ninomae feeling guilty over a thing like that. Not even on the slimmest chance. Reading that in Han Seoyeon, Mika burst out laughing.
"This is actually dangerous, you know? Who would've thought that block of wood Natacchi would end up with someone she frets over like this. Is the world ending tomorrow?"
"…I'll head back once the cleanup is finished."
"Okaaay~. Just tidy it up roughly. I'll contact the Church."
"…Haah. Damn it. Are we too late?"
Akane muttered it as she arrived with Tsunashi Tenka, the two of them having smashed through the earthen wall that had been blocking the path to the shrine's main hall.
She was not, of course, lamenting that she'd come too late to help because the fight was already over.
"We really… are too late."
Tenka said it as well, her face gone stiff.
The basement of the main hall lay open where the ground had split. Seventeen emaciated corpses were strewn across it. One more besides: the yokai fox, its body beaten to ruin.
The only thing still standing and drawing breath was a single figure. A holy knight in black, wrapped in an air more dreadful than the corpses sprawled around her.
Eyes sunk deep beneath dark circles turned slowly toward the two of them. Then she let out a long breath and slid her twin swords back into their sheaths.
"You've come. I'm glad neither of you was hurt."
"And you…? No. Nothing to worry about, I guess."
She'd meant to ask out of courtesy, but there wasn't a scratch on her. Not so much as a speck of dirt.
"Huh? Wait, more than that—how did you know we weren't hurt?"
Tenka asked it then, as if the question had only just occurred to her.
"Before I annihilated the demon, I received a report on your condition."
"Ah……."
Well, the one who had hit them would know exactly how hurt they were. Tenka nodded, satisfied.
"I've already contacted the inn. And I've asked the Church to handle the aftermath."
"The aftermath… yeah, that's gonna be a pain."
Akane clicked her tongue.
"Seventeen dead to an anomaly? How are we even supposed to announce that to the surface world?"
A serial killing? Terrorism? Seventeen corpses were not an easy thing to hide.
"No."
But Han Seoyeon shook her head and walked over to them.
"There's no need to disguise this as a mass death."
"What?"
"And we aren't late, either."
She drew the two swords at her hip again with her left hand alone and drove them hard into the ground. Two pitch-black straight blades stood side by side.
"Jesus said, Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of the dead, said to him, Lord, he has been dead four days; by now there will be a stench."
"What are you doing?"
"Please stand back."
"Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
Han Seoyeon knelt before the two black pillars and pressed her hands together. A faint light began to spill from her whole body, lighting the night.
"…And what are you doing?"
"Looking at that kinda stings."
"Tsk. Idiot."
A werewolf, a creature of the dark—perhaps facing that divinity was enough to hurt on its own, because she slipped behind Akane's back and hid.
"Eep."
Smack. Clicking her tongue, Akane turned and slapped a talisman onto Tenka's forehead as if striking her. At the sudden blow Tenka hunched in on herself, clutching her brow.
"You're an anomaly. A hit like that shouldn't even hurt, so quit being a baby. …Can you stand it like this?"
Akane drew that curled-up body gently into her arms and shielded her from the light. A talisman, and a meat shield on top of it—she ought to be fine now, she thought.
Tenka gave no answer. She only pulled Akane close in return and nestled her face softly against her. Some wolf. This is a dog. Akane swallowed the words.
Instead she only flicked her gaze sideways toward Han Seoyeon, as if wondering what on earth the woman meant to do.
"So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me."
No—on instinct, she understood. The exchange she'd just had with Han Seoyeon, and the scripture spilling from that mouth, let her guess what was about to happen.
"I knew that you always hear me. But I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, that they may believe you sent me—the words of Jesus of Nazareth."
But common sense and experience barred the way to that imagining.
This was the hidden world, where every kind of common sense had already collapsed—and even here, you ended up thinking some things simply could not be. At least, not a single person deliberately bringing that to pass…
And yet.
The thing that could not happen, happened. The people who should never have risen, rose.
"…Seriously, how did Ninomae end up friends with something like that?"
Seventeen corpses became seventeen people. As if possessed, they staggered and got to their feet. Then they came walking slowly past the broken iron bars—bars Han Seoyeon had no doubt cut in advance.
Most of them were wasted to the bone, and their procession carried a deeply uncanny air.
"Please head back first. I'll hand these people over to the Church, and then I'll go."
Han Seoyeon recovered her swords, sheathed them, and said it with perfect calm.
An attitude of utter familiarity. This was not the reaction of someone who had done it once or twice.
So this was an Arbiter. Akaba Akane recalled what she had read about her online before, and let out a sigh. Less a lament than a breath spent trying, somehow, to hide her shock.
Surely that was the origin of the epithet, strange as it was.
"Don't work too hard. Cleaning up something like this has to be a nightmare."
And with that, Akane simply gave up on thinking about it too deeply. Arguing over something that had already overturned common sense would only give her a headache. What became of the dozen or so people who had been kidnapped by an anomaly, killed, and brought back to life was none of her concern. She only wanted to get back and rest as soon as she possibly could.
"…More importantly, how long are you gonna stay glued to me, you leech."
"Eep."
First things first: peel off the leech who was still stuck to her.
Akane smacked Tenka's forehead again.