Cast Them Before Pharaoh (1)
Ninomae Hitomi slowed mid-step and picked up yesterday's thread. "Well, it seems the recruiting kept going even after the stream ended, so all nine of them have settled into their places."
Han Seoyeon listened, taking in both what had happened on air and what had followed once the broadcast was over.
"And how did the sides divide?"
"Four went with Rin-senpai. Sae, Serena, and Tsubasa."
Which meant the remaining five—Rokumondera Aki, Mary Tepes, Charlotte Lupus, Yugure Tama, and Kitayama Maya—made up the other group.
Seoyeon considered that for a moment, then spoke.
"Tachibana Rin. She isn't bullying them, is she? Every member of the first generation ended up on the other side."
"I don't... think so. When they stream together, they seem close enough."
Seoyeon had delivered, in that same deadpan register, the sort of accusation that might have gone up online under a headline like The Darkness of Gen One. Hitomi denied it with the particular fervor of someone who very much wanted it not to be true.
"Even so, I hope nothing like that is happening." She murmured it as she set a mesh bag of onions into the basket. "...More importantly, Shion, what are you doing?"
"Ah."
Their eyes met at precisely the moment Seoyeon was trying to slip a carrot out of the basket unnoticed.
"You don't like carrots?"
"It isn't that I dislike them. Just... not in curry." Carrots gone soft and mushy simply were not to her taste. She looked away as she made the excuse.
The two of them had come to the supermarket to shop for dinner. Make a generous batch, and the leftovers would see them through tomorrow morning as well.
"A pity. Had I been wearing the shroud, you truly wouldn't have caught me."
"Does that thing conceal your presence too?"
"Strictly speaking, it isolates a portion of space so as to suppress sound and presence... no. It's close enough. Let us simply treat it as such and move on."
Trying to parse the domain of the anomalous by logic was irrational from the start. One could construct a theory, certainly—but a truly rigorous theory of this world inevitably collapsed into something no one else could understand, a language from another planet. Professor Senjoji did not enjoy his extraordinary standing as an expert for nothing.
None of that, of course, mattered just now.
Hitomi sighed and plucked the four-pack of carrots from Seoyeon's hand. For the briefest instant, something in Seoyeon's eyes dimmed.
"If there's something you don't want to eat, just say so. I'm not going to force it on you."
Only when Hitomi set the carrots back on the shelf did relief settle over Seoyeon's face. If she disliked them that much, she could have said so all the more.
"I thought... I would be scolded."
Hitomi looked gentle, but she had a quietly decisive streak, and the first thought to surface was whether she would really let picky eating pass.
"Picky eating is a problem, yes... but honestly, Shion, you don't need to worry about nutrients, do you?"
By what principle, Hitomi had no idea, but Han Seoyeon could remain perfectly healthy on holy power alone. Perhaps her body synthesized nutrients on its own. Once, Hitomi had simply assumed she ate well enough and hadn't thought deeply about it. Living together and actually seeing her habits had sent Hitomi's common sense straight out the door. She had heard that Seoyeon, out of laziness, made do with bread for breakfast—but she had never imagined a diet skewed to this degree.
Seoyeon's present caution was the fruit of several days, at the start of their cohabitation, during which Hitomi had grilled her without mercy.
"These days you do eat three meals without fail, and where you're concerned, Shion, taste comes first."
"It may be a little late to say so, but I truly am in your debt..."
Unable to endure it any longer, Hitomi had taken to cooking proper meals herself, changing the menu across all three. Several days of that, and food that could actually be filed under the category of a meal had become Seoyeon's ordinary life.
"At first I was fairly seriously wondering whether you might be capable of photosynthesis, you know."
Considering that a body sustained on the binary choice between eating nothing and eating things bad for it had reached such an artistic pinnacle of condition, holy power was, as expected, a cheat. And compared to those days, Seoyeon had come a remarkable distance. Letting her skip a single vegetable she didn't want was hardly worth the fuss.
"I'm overlooking it because I trust you'll at least take proper care of your body. You understand?"
"Of course. In my line of work, the body is, quite literally, the tool of the trade."
Whatever the process, Hitomi trusted the result: a healthy body would be maintained. Had she not, even this degree of pickiness would have met with no mercy at all.
"If I didn't, I really would have force-fed you."
"And if I were the sort to cling to picky eating even as my body fell apart, I wouldn't have ignored a warning like that, would I?"
"With you, Shion, it would have ended the moment I said it in the Mary voice. Don't resist. Eat quietly."
"That... is difficult to deny."
Seoyeon set a hand to her chin and nodded with perfect seriousness. If Shutang told her to eat it, she would purify even something rotten and eat it anyway.
"No—that's the part where you're supposed to deny it."
The answer was so unshakably certain that Hitomi, a little deflated, felt obliged to object.
Idle talk carrying them along, the two of them loaded the basket with ingredients for curry. They had just reached the meat counter, and Hitomi was about to ask whether beef or pork better suited her taste, when Seoyeon's voice got there first.
"Ninomae."
She cut in ahead of the question, pointed toward a display far across the aisle, and dropped her voice to a whisper.
"Would you look over there?"
"Over there?"
Where her fingertip led, two men stood. Foreigners, both of them, with unmistakably Western faces—conspicuous enough on that alone. One wore a silk hat so tall it bordered on the ridiculous. The other had a mane of black hair, lush enough to reach his waist and sticking out in every direction.
That alone, though, could not be why Seoyeon had singled them out. She was neither a child who leapt in shock at the mere sight of a foreigner, nor a racist. Their looks would have drawn the eye even setting nationality aside, but she was not the sort to make a joke of that either. If it was Shion, there had to be another reason. Hitomi studied their attire more carefully, and soon she had the answer.
"Ah..."
"Could it be that Anathema is expanding onto the world stage?"
It was December, and yet each of them wore only a thin coat, buttons undone, the fronts hanging open. And the T-shirts visible beneath were merchandise of their first-generation seniors. Yugure Tama and Tachibana Rin. A pair of Western men, handsome enough in the face, each wearing across his chest a shirt printed with an animal-girl—one a cat, one a snake. The sight was, how to put it, profoundly surreal.
"Foreign VTuber fans."
Seeing one in person was a second for Hitomi, after Han Seoyeon. Blond hair and blue eyes—the European stereotype—that was entirely new.
"Hmm..."
Setting that aside, though, the blond one—the one in the hat—looked somehow terribly familiar. Hitomi sank into a brief puzzle.
"—Ah. Philotanuss?"
The conclusion did not take long. How many people in Japan—no, how many demons—wore a hat that bizarre? Surely not two.
"That is the Philotanuss?"
"Yes. The demon who came by before and made the contract."
Philotanuss. Vassal, companion, and steward to King Belial. The river that flows from below to above. The sinner who does not walk according to the natural order. The explorer who unearths the gold of gematria. The stonemason who hewed the bedrock upholding Sodom and Gomorrah.
"This is my first time seeing him in person."
While Seoyeon lingered in that sentiment, the pair across the aisle seemed to notice them as well. A delighted smile, and a hand raised in greeting.
"Lady Ninomae Hitomi! And beside you... that would be Lord Bartholomew, I daresay."
That he knew Han Seoyeon was no surprise in itself. The whole affair had begun, after all, because he had offered Hitomi a favorable contract for fear of incurring Seoyeon's displeasure.
"M-M-Margaritaaa?!"
The surprise was not Philotanuss, but the other one's reaction. The moment his eyes met Seoyeon's, he all but jumped out of his skin and hid behind Philotanuss. The black-haired man was a towering wall of muscle, while Philotanuss was on the slender side, and the resulting composition was considerably absurd. At first glance the hair had suggested a lion's mane. Like this, he looked less a lion than a thoroughly spooked cat.
"You—you wench! What are you doing here!"
The thick finger jabbed in accusation was not a pleasant sight. Then again, Seoyeon had been the one to point first, so she decided to let it pass in silence.
"Do you know him?"
"No... not that I recall."
Even so, given the circumstances, that one was surely a demon as well. Seoyeon was well aware she had done plenty to earn the resentment of demons. Better not to pick a fight on this point either, she decided.
"Pardon me, but your name?"
"Marbas. Fifth of the Lemegeton—Marbas!"
"...Ah."
Hearing that proclamation delivered in Japanese far more fluent than his appearance suggested, Seoyeon understood. Marbas. The lion-headed demon. Among his principal authorities was dominion over disease: a god of pestilence who could inflict any illness, and cure it just as well. Which meant he was, fundamentally, a poor match for a healer—and worse still against a robber who repossessed even souls already dead and scattered. Her mere existence, in short, was a natural enemy to him, a threat by presence alone.
"Compose yourself, my friend. If you go on shouting like that, will you not draw every eye in the place?"
"Is that what matters right now?! The soul-thief is standing right in front of—"
"Should she be judged a breaker of the Secrecy Protocol, that woman will carve you to pieces on the spot, you know?"
"That is, in fact, important."
Marbas fell silent in an instant. The reversal was startling enough that anyone watching would have been amazed.
"In any case, I expect this friend of mine will now adopt a more cooperative attitude... Shall we remove ourselves for the time being? We do seem to have drawn rather too much attention."
"Let us. I am relieved the demon contracted to Ninomae appears to possess some wisdom."
Philotanuss and Han Seoyeon reached an accord at once. Step away from here; neither party had any particular business with the other, so they could part immediately. That was the extent of the plan.
"—Something seemed noisy, so I came over."
Yes. There had been no business. As of five seconds ago, that is.
"What are you doing here? Ma-kun."
The voice of a third party—or, counting everyone already present, perhaps a fifth—cut abruptly into the conversation and seized the attention of all.
"...Eh. Rin-senpai, by any chance?"
Ninomae Hitomi, dazed, put a name to that presence. Tachibana Rin of Anathema's first generation was walking toward them, her face a perfect blank.
"You know me?"
"I'm Mary. Mary Tepes."
"Oh. Mary-chan?"
At that answer, Rin's eyes widened the very slightest bit, her expression otherwise unchanged. Surprise was only natural. In real life, this was their first meeting. Under ordinary circumstances Hitomi would not have recognized her either—but if the person inside was a retired famous actress, that changed things. It was why Hitomi knew her face despite never having met her in person.
The two of them marveled at the chance encounter and began, in their own way, to warm the air between them.
"Watch yourself, contractor! The one behind her is Church!"
"...Church?"
"......Contractor, you said?"
That is how it would have gone, had a certain black lion not hurled a bombshell without so much as signaling. The looks they turned on one another flooded, all at once, with confusion.
"Lord Bartholomew does not seem particularly surprised."
"Well, once upon a time I would have been flustered. Another anomaly—is Anathema some den of anomalies... that sort of thing."
"Then why not now?"
"Once it was confirmed that it is, in fact, a den of anomalies, I felt remarkably at ease. Whoever I meet is going to be an anomaly anyway."
"You have become a sage entire!"