The Eve of the Uncanny (5)
"Friends that brutishly tough really are a poor matchup for you, aren't they, Seoyeon?"
Saint Thomas. Boanerges. The Crusher. Holy Communion—Giacomo Marchisio Bonaventura. Once Han Seoyeon's swordmaster, he said it with an easy smile.
"Had they given me time to prepare, I would have brought consecrated grenades and given them something to chew on. There was no leisure for that. Am I wrong, Seoyeon?"
"No… it's as you say."
Han Seoyeon answered with a bitter smile.
If she had a specialty, it was fighting only after every preparation was in place. She belonged to the school of thought that firepower could always be supplemented—with modern firearms, or with holy weapons made in earnest.
"So I'll take these big fellows. You go and clear out somewhere else."
Vampires had erupted in several places at once. Han Seoyeon had swept this vicinity clean, but even now, elsewhere, more of them would be multiplying. In the districts beyond this one, of course, Tokyo's police and the Holy Knights would already be throwing everything they had into the fight… Even so, if she could lend a hand in another quarter, there was no reason not to. Han Seoyeon nodded.
"And this, as well. All I brought with me was a pair of short swords and a handful of holy relics, so this is the only thing I can spare you… though it's better than nothing."
With that, Giacomo unhooked one of the twin swords at his waist and held it out. She accepted it, then asked, carefully,
"Will you be all right? It's your sword, Master."
Her master's foremost specialty was the Benedictine Twin Swords, and what Han Seoyeon had learned from him most thoroughly was that very art. A technique built from the start on the premise of two blades working as one—losing a sword from it was not a matter of combat power simply being cut in half by arithmetic.
But Giacomo was still smiling.
"With only the one sword, do you imagine I'll have any trouble making those friends behave?"
"……No. I suppose not."
Han Seoyeon tried to picture her master unfolding an incomplete sword art with nothing but a single one-handed blade. …Hm. Even then, she couldn't quite see him losing.
"You understand, then? —Go on. Quickly."
Once that judgment was settled, what followed was swift. Before Giacomo had even finished speaking, Han Seoyeon planted a foot on the shoulder of a hulking vampire who looked to stand three meters tall, kicked off with all her strength to topple him, and shot like a bullet through the pack and out behind his back.
Even in that instant, one sharp-eyed specimen seemed to have noticed. A spear of scarlet blood bent in a zigzag and came rushing at Han Seoyeon's back. The one that had manipulated blood to bind her feet a short while ago was surely this same creature. Set against its kin, most of whom had lost the better part of their intelligence, its wits were considerable.
"That won't do. I tell you to leave them to me and go, and then I can't even stop one of them from tying your feet? I'd have no face left to show my student."
But before those blood-red shafts could so much as reach Seoyeon, they seemed to shift in color, ever so slightly—and then splashed across the ground in a wet scatter.
From the dampened asphalt rose the smell of alcohol, wrapped in something sweet and tart.
"…It isn't a verse of Scripture, I'll grant you. But it is a line I'm truly fond of."
Giacomo Marchisio regarded his opponent with eyes that held no smile at all, set in contrast against the corner of his mouth, and lifted the pitch-black point of his blade.
The city grew clamorous in an instant. Phones, and a number of other devices with them, had gone dead, and the citizens were all the more unsettled for it.
"Damn it. What the hell is that?! A zombie?!"
"Help me…!"
"What are those people doing? A riot…?"
"That guy's eyes have rolled back……."
"Aaaagh……!"
That it had not yet sunk into a pandemonium beyond all control was thanks to forces that had appeared just as abruptly as the monsters, to meet them. Police intent on protecting the citizens, and not hesitating to use their guns whether the rounds were rubber or live—Ninomae was certain that hidden among them were officers of the concealed world quietly firing live ammunition. Up to this point, it was still, barely, the realm of common sense.
But figures dressed in pure white, rings of light hovering over their heads as they fought the monstrous ones—that was a sight that belonged plainly to the unreal.
Church people, perhaps? Ninomae thought.
In the midst of it, one Holy Knight—this one, too, clad in white—swung a great two-handed sword and cut a vampire down. A blade whose crossguard was long to an uncanny degree: a longsword for exorcism, taking the shape of a cross in itself. Watching that, Ninomae found herself sinking into thought, because the fashion looked like nothing so much as an angel's.
Given how desperate things were, she could understand the Holy Knights stepping into the open without weighing too carefully the problems bound up with the Secrecy Protocol. But did they truly have to go so far—dressing in outfits so "religious and grotesque"—just to advertise that they came from the unreal world behind the veil?
No… is that exactly why?
A certain thought slipped through her then. The dead electronics were surely a measure taken for the Secrecy Protocol, so that no photographs or footage would remain, and so that nothing like a live report could go up on the internet. Once the situation ended, the only means by which outsiders could come into contact with the incident would be the testimony of those who had been there. And if that testimony was the sort of thing that called religious visions to mind no matter who heard it? Talk of hallucinations born from mental shock, of mass hysteria, would be inevitable. If a story is too absurd, people will not believe it even when it is the truth—a very simple psychological trick. Rant about such a thing online, and one would count oneself lucky to draw so much as a comment asking for an anime with a plot like that.
"Ghk—?!"
A voice of pain burst out, and Ninomae was yanked from her thoughts.
One of the Holy Knights fighting at close range was having the nape of his neck torn open by a vampire. His body convulsed in agony, and then he bent himself into a bizarre shape and lunged at another Holy Knight nearby. An axe the thickness of a forearm sank into the turncoat's face.
They were answering the anomalies, after a fashion… but it was not going easily. The creatures already surpassed any ordinary person's body, and however many you killed, the moment a single citizen was taken in the interval, you were back at the start. They had to fight while keeping people alive, and yet they were in the same bind—bitten, and they were finished—so putting their own bodies in the way was all but sealed off. That left attacking the vampires bound for the citizens and cutting them off, but the crowd was scattering in every direction as it fled, and even that was no simple thing.
Is there… nothing I can do…?
Watching that chaotic brawl, Ninomae found herself thinking it. This was power she had won at long last. If she could not spend it helping others in a place like this, then what meaning did it have at all? Perhaps because of the necklace, the vampires seemed unwilling to approach her, but she was not a person who could tell herself that her own safety was good enough and leave it at that. She did not need to distinguish herself on the front line and sweep the anomalies away. If she could only calm people, gather them, and see them evacuated… But would people swallowed by fear and anxiety even listen to a girl they had never seen before?
If only there were some good way…
"……."
In that instant, an idea flashed through Ninomae's mind. At the end of her gaze were the white-robed Holy Knights, fighting as they shed halos of light. She could borrow the power of religion, too.
"Hexagram Li, of fire. Shirase Hikari."
A grimoire was in her hand before she knew it. There was no time, so she discarded the clutter of incantations entire. The name she called belonged to the master of a spell she often used when she wished to purify something clean—the name of a demon she had guessed took its origin from an angel character in some work she didn't know. What her true origin might be was no concern of Ninomae's. All she needed was the outward appearance.
"—Come here."
And against the snowing sky, the shadow of a person appeared. A halo shedding light as if it burned. Two great pairs of wings unfurling from the back. Hair the color of clear water spilled beautifully down, and the garments were an archaic costume of the sort one would have to visit a museum to see.
To contract with a demon and wield its power—the most fundamental thing in such demonology is the summoning. Ninomae herself was bound, through Philotanuss, into a contract whose modernization was long since complete, and so in ordinary times she could omit every petty procedure. But a demonic contract, by its nature, begins with the calling of the demon. If she only chose to, there was no reason at all that Ninomae could not call her forth.
An angel, appeared all at once in the sky above. Countless people stared blankly up at that sacred sight. The angel glanced about… and smiled, small and bright. At a glance it was a smile of perfect compassion, but Ninomae thought she glimpsed in it some sly intent she could not name.
A moment later, a soft voice resounded inside her head.
I don't care if you burn through every last bit of faith I've built up. Please—help those people.
The angel—Shirase Hikari—smiled once more, and slowly raised her left hand.
In the next instant, the world was swallowed whole in blue flame. Snow that had piled in the streets melted in a single breath, and a rampart of blue fire surged high and wrapped the surroundings.
The demon's magic did not end there.
As a crackling bonfire spits embers in every direction, torn scraps of flame peeled from that wall and went wheeling all about. They grazed perilously before people's eyes, brushed even against skin, and yet conveyed nothing but a warmth pleasant to feel. The instant that same flame touched a vampire, however, they folded to the ground one after another, without a single outward wound.
"My God……."
Watching the scene, Ninomae murmured the words blankly. Even she, who had given the order to handle it somehow, felt this way—so what of utter strangers who knew nothing of the circumstances? She looked around and saw that a few people, few though they were, had gone so far as to kneel in the street and begin to pray.
Sh-she's incredible, Miss Shirase…!
……What?
Hm. She didn't understand.
Ninomae simply decided to clutch the cross necklace in both hands and pray that Han Seoyeon would come through safe.