The Two Olive Trees and the Two Lampstands (1)
With her university classes done for the day, Ninomae went looking for a café a little farther from campus.
November was hurrying toward its end. Stepping out of autumn's last stretch of weather, she let the warmth of the café's heater soak into her—and ordered, all the same, an iced café latte. The season had already passed mere coolness and tipped into real cold, and still she poured a chilled drink down her throat in the middle of that gentle heat. It was a small, sinful pleasure, not unlike blasting the air conditioner in the height of summer and burrowing deep beneath the covers.
She had not, however, come all this way for the sake of that pleasure. Had that been the point, any café near the university would have done. She was here because she had a particular piece of business. Ninomae Hitomi had come today to meet someone.
The appointed hour, though, was not yet. Her motto was "better to arrive early and wait than to be late because something unexpected came up," and today, having left herself a generous margin, she had ended up a full forty minutes early.
Once she had cleared the daily quests in the mobile game she was playing, she drew a notebook from her bag. To say that winter was coming was, put another way, to say the semester was drawing to a close—which meant finals were right around the corner. For a university student it was hardly unusual, of course, to start cramming in a panic only at the last moment. But Ninomae's real work lay elsewhere, and spending exam week with her eyes on nothing but books all day was not especially practical. If she had less time for studying than other people, she had no choice but to get a head start. All the more so if she meant to keep the scholarship she was living on.
"Hm?"
All at once she looked toward the café entrance. Something about it had struck her as strange—and she was not the only one. The other patrons turned their eyes that way as well, and from the moment they looked, they could not easily look away.
The clothes were the sort a church priest might wear. A cassock, if she had the formal name right. In any case, a pair dressed in them, black brimmed hats on their heads, was coming into the shop.
One was a middle-aged man who looked to be about fifty. White had begun to streak in patches through his black hair, and yet he looked remarkably hale. He was tall to begin with, and broad shoulders and a ramrod posture made him seem larger still.
The other was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late twenties. Her hair, a brown shot through with red, was braided and hung to her waist; considering how a braid shortens the length, it was very long hair indeed. Her skin was a little dark, and though she was a woman she wore the same cassock and carried a handbag.
Had they stepped in for a moment while shooting a film nearby? That was probably what the people watching them thought. Both were foreigners, and both good-looking enough that the theory they were actors gained still more weight.
But the instant Ninomae saw the pair, she was certain. More precisely, she was certain the moment she saw their hats.
Hats called the cappello romano. In themselves they were the dress of Christian clergy, and there was nothing strange about them—save that they were not a woman's garment. If a cyan band circled the hat, however, the story changed. The color of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. The mark of a Gravekeeper, elite even among holy knights.
They were, without any room left for excuse, residents of the hidden world.
That alone was enough to set a strange tension coiling in her, but what followed was more shocking still. The pair glanced about, and before long their eyes met hers. They exchanged a few words in some foreign tongue, then began to stride this way. Ninomae watched them with her body gone stiff. It was not even ten meters. Of course it did not take them long to reach the table—and yet in that short span every thought she possessed crashed through her head.
"Ninomae Hitomi. Am I right?"
"Y-yes!"
It was the woman of the two holy knights who had spoken. A foreigner, so the pronunciation sat a little awkwardly, but the Japanese was surprisingly fluent. Ninomae had meant to feign as much calm as she could manage. It was not easy.
"You don't have to be so nervous. We only stopped by for a moment. It's a simple matter."
As if that would ease anything. Whatever their business was, the circumstances made it plain they had come looking for Ninomae on purpose.
Why did they come for me? Why? Don't tell me it's the demon contract. Shion said it was fine—was it actually not?
She swallowed.
"Th-the matter you mentioned...?"
"No! It's really nothing. A coworker got herself a roommate, so we came by out of curiosity. That's all."
The woman said it, and smiled.
"Alejandra Sanchez. Baptismal name, Muerte. Sorry—the introduction's a little late, isn't it?"
Shion's coworker. Han Seoyeon's. Dressed as holy knights, that would follow. But nothing guaranteed they weren't impostors. Could she really trust these people? At least the Secrecy Protocol ought to keep them from making a scene in a café. An execution order would come down the moment they did... No. If they were impersonating holy knights, wouldn't that alone already be grounds for one?
"This is Giacomo Marchisio Bonaventura. I think you've already figured it out, but he's a colleague."
"I... see?"
"Hehe..."
With that, Alejandra looked her lightly up and down.
"I was wondering what kind of woman could have bewitched our little sister, who hasn't a scrap of charm in her... hmm."
Bewitched? At a word she had not expected, Ninomae's face went blank for an instant. A relationship close enough to warrant an expression like that, in the first place—
She got that far, and the color drained from her face. If they had misread what lay between her and Han Seoyeon, the worst possibility would lock into place.
"I-I'm not in that kind of relationship with Shion!"
She cried it out, badly flustered.
Catholicism, at its foundation, looks on homosexuality with disapproval. No—not mere disapproval. Hostility. A great and grievous sin. If the holy knights in front of her had mistaken her and Han Seoyeon for lovers, how would Ninomae appear in their eyes?
A wicked woman who had led an elite holy knight into corruption. An Eve, pressing the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil into Adam's hand. The rest wrote itself.
"Who knows. No one ever really knows the truth, do they?"
"I'm telling you, it's really not like that!"
"Hmm... I couldn't say. There is one thing I'm sure of, though."
Alejandra smiled a meaningful smile and leaned in over the table.
"At the very least, having a grimoire ready under the table beforehand is not a good strategy."
"......!"
Ninomae's body jerked. In the hand she had quietly lowered beneath the table, she was holding a black-covered book. She had summoned it so she could answer, if it came to that. Even that had been seen through, and a terror seized her so complete she felt her breath might stop then and there. Sweat dampened her palms. Her legs trembled on their own.
"Sorry. The introduction wasn't quite finished, actually. —Saint Matthias. Unworthy as I am, this body inherited an Apostle's name."
Apostle-class. Which was to say, Han Seoyeon's equal. No—Seoyeon always insisted she was on the weaker side among the Apostles, and if one took that into account, then beyond even her...
Simply turning the fact over was enough to convince Ninomae she could not win. An existence that could strip away one's will to fight with a self-introduction alone. Absurd, in the truest sense.
—Smack!
"Ghk—?!"
"...Eh?"
But the tension ended in a truly ridiculous fashion. Giacomo, the middle-aged man who had been sitting quietly beside them all this while, brought his palm down hard across the back of Alejandra's head. At that utterly abrupt friendly fire(?), Ninomae's eyes went round. Alejandra's hat fell, and she folded face-first onto the table.
"×××××. ××! ××××××."
"×××! ×××… ××, ××××."
The two of them launched at once into some foreign language... and before long they bowed their heads to Ninomae.
"××... I'm sorry."
"Ah—n-no. It's all right."
The first of it was a foreign tongue she could not parse. The last of it was English. Ninomae could manage English to some extent, and flustered though she was, she returned the bow.
"You speak English?"
"Only a little, really. If you speak slowly, I can manage somehow..."
"That is a relief, at least."
He said it with a bitter smile.
"Allow me to apologize once more, Miss Ninomae. As you have just seen, she is not a person of good character. She simply takes her jokes too far. Going about frightening people for no good reason is a hobby of hers. You need not trouble yourself over it."
"Ah... is that so...?"
"Nor need you worry over the matter that worries you. Whether you are homosexual, or a magician contracted with a demon, we have no intention of condemning you for it."
Ninomae's shoulders flinched again. He had told her it was all right, but the way he spoke made it sound as though he had come already knowing she was under contract with a demon.
"Then why, exactly, did you come to see me?"
"It is just as was said before. Because you have formed a rather close relationship with Seoyeon—Saint Bartholomew. Not, as Alejandra claimed, out of pure curiosity."
Hearing that, Ninomae found herself thinking, for no reason she could name, of the Korean morning dramas certain broadcasters imported. The sort of scene in which someone declares, You dare say you'll marry our son? Don't be absurd. Take this, and get lost.
"Please. Take it."
What they held out, however, was not an envelope of money.
"This is...?"
A few sheets of A4, stacked together. And written across the top of the uppermost page—
"Answer the questionnaire honestly, if you would. It only checks whether there is any truly severe defect of character."
"Why are you doing this at all...?"
"Now and then there's some damned wretch who becomes precious to a power like an Apostle, and then tries to use that power."
Alejandra answered the question in his stead.
"Even if you never meant anything of the sort, you could still be taken hostage. So how much strength you have to protect your own body is something we check as well... In that sense, being a demon contractor is actually a plus!"
Alejandra grinned, and added, "If it's Belial, we can trust that much, at least."
"Oh, and one more thing besides the questionnaire."
"Wh-what is it?"
"You came to meet Bansei, didn't you?"
Bansei Marin. By another name, Komori Sae of Anathema's second generation—and also the name of the person Ninomae had come here to meet. How they knew was no longer surprising. They would have found out somehow.
To Ninomae, arrived now at something closer to resignation than understanding, Alejandra slid across a sheet of paper. Thick for paper, and stiff: colored stock of the sort people get signed.
"Could you get me an autograph? I'll come collect it before I leave the country."
"...What?"
"Ah, is there something you'd like in return? Money? A holy relic? The weight of an Apostle-class holy knight's name?"
"Whaaat...?"
"Ehehehe......"
"Frankly, this puts me in a thoroughly unpleasant mood."
Italian, ringing through the streets of a Japanese city. Two people of different sex and different age, identical only in their strange dress, were walking along. It was a pairing that drew the eye, but anyone who knew them well would likely have done everything in their power not to look.
Apostles. Ten in number, the pinnacle of the single-soldier strength possessed by the Roman Catholic Church. A full fifth of that power was strolling the avenue in broad daylight.
Alejandra Monica Lopez Sanchez Muerte
Giacomo Marchisio Bonaventura
"Ninomae-chan was a good kid~ Pass stamp, wham, wham!"
"And what are we to do if the examiner is bought off?"
Alejandra was in excellent spirits. She had secured a promise of an autograph from someone she had followed as a fan since she was small. Bansei Marin, the woman inside Anathema's demon VTuber Komori Sae, was a former idol. It was a story from well over a decade ago, but there were people who kept their devotion even for memories that old. It was also why Alejandra could speak Japanese as fluently as she did.
"So you were thinking of failing her, Giacomo?"
"...She passes."
Character, a passing mark. Combat ability, a passing mark of sorts. She could look after her own hide, and she was not someone who would use Saint Bartholomew—Han Seoyeon—or exert a bad influence upon her. Then she could hardly do anything but pass.
Yes. The two of them had come all the way to this far country for one reason only: to evaluate the human being named Ninomae Hitomi.
Once a person stood where Han Seoyeon stood, even so ordinary and trivial a thing as gaining someone precious drew the attention of the Holy See. More precisely, the attention one pays a bomb's detonator. Consider how she would act if someone harmed Ninomae, and it was only natural. They had come under orders, in the worst case, to "eliminate" not only Ninomae but Han Seoyeon with her. That was why two figures of Apostle class had gone out of their way to come.
"Only the worst case, of course. An extreme possibility—less than one in eight million, wasn't it?"
In all likelihood it would be fine. They must have boarded the plane thinking so.
"Even so. As the chance of a country or two being destroyed, one in eight million is far too high."
Set against the scenario-scale disaster that worst possibility would unleash, it was a probability that could not be dismissed.
"You're glad you don't have to fight your disciple, aren't you? The master who doesn't shoot beams out of his eyes."
"Even you call me that?"
Alejandra giggled, and Giacomo, bitter as it was, broke into a laugh as well.
"I don't want to fight Han either. She's weaker than I am, sure, but I still wouldn't bet on beating her. Giacomo, how do you even raise a kid so she turns out like that?"
"Well. Because she is that child."
Not that he had ever particularly raised her. She had simply grown up that way, as she pleased. Giacomo's voice was flat, and somewhere in it difficult to read.