The Eve of the Bizarre One (7)
A blade some eighty centimeters long. She took it in her right hand and lightly braced it with her left, the way one handles a two-handed sword.
The wielder being who she was, the foundation of the movement was the Church's longsword art—though, examined closely, subtle alterations showed through here and there.
"……."
Of course, that was a truth Akaba Akane, watching, had no way of perceiving. Honestly, merely following the path of those movements with her eyes was ordeal enough.
"Are you hurt anywhere?"
She had already drawn the last vampire's neck halfway through on a level cut, then driven the blade in again with a wet thunk to make certain of the kill. Only once she confirmed the dead would not rise did Han Seoyeon make her way back to where Akane was.
"I'm fine. That one isn't."
Akane, whose legs had given out beneath her, looked up at Seoyeon and pointed off to the side. A girl sat there who had been wailing until she simply ran out of breath, and now could manage nothing but choked little hiccups.
"……Hm."
At the sight, Han Seoyeon put on a faintly troubled look.
"What?"
"Well... I'm afraid I don't have the sort of face that wins children over. Would you calm her down in my place?"
"...And you think kids would like me?"
"……."
The fierce-looking shrine maiden and the holy knight with a face closer to a corpse's regarded each other, and fell into a peculiar sympathy.
In the end, all Han Seoyeon had managed was to reconfirm that words would not soothe the child. She abandoned the attempt at once and treated her instead. The girl must have been thoroughly spent; the moment the pain vanished and the tension left her, she was asleep. Only the soft sound of her breathing lingered, low and even.
Han Seoyeon hoisted the child onto her back as if it were the most natural thing in the world, then held a hand out to Akane where she sat.
"Thanks. I really almost died."
Akane took the hand and got to her feet, then tried to take the child back—and was stopped at once.
"You're exhausted, aren't you? How far do you expect to get carrying a child on top of that? I'll bear her as far as somewhere safe. Consider it an escort as well."
"Can't argue with that. But aren't you busy?"
Akane had already judged for herself that evacuating while worn out, and burdened with a child besides, would be too much. An offer to see them somewhere safe was more than welcome. Even so, detaining someone who was an Apostle... Seoyeon had no shortage of work waiting. The worry sat with her.
Hearing it, Han Seoyeon smiled faintly.
"Calming this down does keep me busy with one thing and another, yes. Not so busy that I'd leave a woman and a child in danger standing right in front of me."
"...Ah. Is that so."
Sayings to the effect of women and children first had been around since forever, but it had been a very long time since Akane herself had fallen into the category of someone to be protected. Even setting that aside, she was Akane of the fierce looks, once written off as a delinquent student. More often she was the one doing the protecting—or, failing that, the one people were trying to protect someone else from.
"And yet, contrary to how you look, you're rather fragile, aren't you?"
"...By your standards, that'd be most people."
"No. You're worn out, and it doesn't look as if you brought a stack of talismans with you, either..."
Which was why treatment like this felt considerably new. The feeling was strange enough that Akane turned the subject.
"Anyway. What's that on your head?"
What she pointed at was the ring of light seated above Seoyeon's head.
"Ah, this? It's one of the masterpieces Mister F made, but..."
"I'd appreciate it if you picked up the courtesy of explaining before you drop a proper noun."
"Oh. You don't know him? He's fairly famous."
"Until recently I wasn't all that interested in anyone from the hidden world besides me and Tenka..."
At that, Han Seoyeon nodded.
"Well. Just think of it as someone inventing a gadget with the power of an anomaly. ...Ah. Let's talk while we walk."
"Got it."
Was that an acknowledgment of the explanation, or agreement with the proposal? Han Seoyeon puzzled over it for a moment, then decided not to care.
"It serves two purposes, broadly. The first is to imitate the appearance of beings called angels—things the surface world finds utterly nonsensical—and thereby undermine the credibility of eyewitness accounts."
Certainly, a woman with a ring of light mowed the zombies down was a story no one would believe.
"And the other... it provides a considerable degree of perception distortion. That one's for personal protection. Unless someone both knows my face and knows that I'm a holy knight, they'll have a hard time making it out. Photograph me, and you'd likely get a spirit photo."
At Han Seoyeon's words, Akane nodded quietly. It wasn't as if there was anything in it she could reasonably refuse to accept. She dragged her tired body along and followed at Seoyeon's back for some while.
A man was walking down a corridor.
Even at a glance, his clothing was that of a Church cleric. His skin was black, and the hems of his robes were red.
At the far end of the corridor he was making for stood a single elevator, and armed soldiers flanked it to left and right.
"It's me."
"...Cardinal Adam Greenie."
That red was the mark of the third-highest dignity in the Church. The men with the guns were themselves in the Church's employ, and so they lowered their muzzles at once before that authority.
"I've come to see the Preacher. I was under the impression arrangements had already been made."
"Ah. Yes, we received those orders. You may go straight down."
Adam Greenie stepped into the elevator. The doors closed, and though he pressed no button, it began to move.
He glanced up. A surveillance camera in the corner. Whoever was watching him from the other side would be the one operating it.
Then he drew a sheet of paper from his pocket—the English version of testimony Alejandra had received from some ghost. He had brought the original as well, but Greenie could not read it.
The contents themselves were thin. A teacher's sacrifice, giving their body to protect a student, was moving... and that was all. Only natural, if one thought about it. There had been no contact with the mastermind in person. All that had happened was an attack by someone the mastermind had turned into a vampire. At the most generous reading, a secondary victim. There was a considerable chance it did not even amount to that. It would have been strange for anything essential to be in here.
Which was precisely why he had come to see her.
The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a dimly lit corridor appeared. At its end, a woman was restrained. Her limbs were bound in a straitjacket, and she was fixed besides to a steel chair with belts. A blindfold, a gag, and earmuffs in the shape of a headset had even been applied, cutting off all five senses.
"I have business with her. Would you release her?"
Those standing guard to either side moved, at his instruction, to undo the woman's restraints.
"Been a while, Mr. Adam."
"Spare me the tedious talk. Let's get to the point."
"How cold."
The gag came off first, and the moment that chattering voice spilled out, Greenie answered with his brow drawn tight. That she still had neither blindfold nor earmuffs removed, and so could not perceive him at all—he no longer even felt like pointing it out. Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck.
Apostle John. The Preacher. Matchbox, Elif Yazıcı Nino. An Apostle chosen from among those called monsters even among monsters. And in Greenie's judgment, the one among them closest to a monster was here, now.
Then the blindfold came away, and emerald eyes flashed.
"So, Arbiter... our darling Margarita's getting along all right, I take it? You brought a lead on the Vampire Syndrome, didn't you."
Some time had passed since the incident began.
People had gathered around the sacred pillar of fire for safety, and the holy knights had deployed their numbers with this place at the center, to protect them. Only a little while ago, two people had passed through the wall of flame and come inside. Not a scorch on either of them, and no sign of pain. Once there was a sure foothold—a safe rampart—the situation slid into stability in an instant.
Set aside the occasional person ready to bolt back out after companions they'd lost, and the scene was remarkably peaceful. The holy knights and the police, having judged the interior safe, were posted outside the pillar of fire, leaving only the minimum needed to keep order.
Still—would Han Seoyeon be all right? Ninomae worried over her, and closed a hand around the cross at her neck. Of course, she wasn't the sort of person who went somewhere and came back having lost...
...Though an awful lot of people look unwell.
A cough from over that way lifted her gaze. She supposed it was only that the cold had a great many people coughing. The interior was quite warm, thanks to the sacred flame, so it would be colds caught earlier—it was winter, after all. Ninomae did not concern herself with it overmuch.
"Aaagh—!"
What seized her attention instead was a middle-aged man's voice. She whipped her head around, and a bleeding vampire was lunging at him. At the sight of a vampire bursting out where everyone had thought the inside completely safe, screams erupted from every direction.
A lucky specimen that had hidden somewhere and slipped the baptism of flame? Even as she guessed, the angel's response was swift. Blue flame came dancing down out of the sky and shot toward the vampire.
A spear of flame pierced "its" chest.
And "it," having taken no damage whatsoever, kept going forward and tore into the man's throat.
Something had gone badly wrong. Whether from the shock that the angel's power—which she had thought all but invincible—had failed to take, Ninomae looked around with startled eyes. And she understood. The screams rising on every side were not merely because a single vampire had broken in. Blood-soaked grotesques, appeared from nowhere, were striding about all over the place.
Where in the world did this many vampires come from...?!
The answer to that horrified question came at once. Ninomae saw it happen: a woman who had been coughing in a string suddenly poured out a great quantity of blood, then staggered and lunged at a nearby child.
Vampires were being born. Not from any particular source—close to at random, here and there. No one had bitten them. They were, quite literally, occurring.
Sacred flame wove through the sudden intruders in every direction. The movements were terribly quick, and fierce—and yet she could not shake the impression that they looked rushed. As if it were only to be expected, the flame achieved nothing at all. By now it was nothing more, and nothing less, than warm lighting.
Ninomae's heart hammered. Within the ring of fire tossing and blazing, another pandemonium was about to begin.
This was truly dangerous.
The moment her eyes met those of a vampire that had lifted its head toward her, she turned and ran.
"You should have come an hour earlier."
Time having passed, and freed now from every restraint, the woman—Elif Yazıcı—looked at the paper in her hand and spoke. Not the translation. The original: a Japanese record annotated in Mexican Spanish.
"What is that supposed to mean, all of a sudden?"
"It means the mastermind went and moved first."
"Looks like the other side caught on that we've got a thread." Having rolled the long sleeves of the straitjacket up as far as they would go, baring her forearms, she fluttered the paper.
"Need it explained? There's a long version and a short one. Which do you want?"
"Just the point, if you would."
"Mm. Figured. Lucky, though. Explaining how the three masterminds relate to each other would've taken forever, and that would've been a problem."
"...No. Wait. What?"
Something he had not expected at all followed, and Greenie's eyes went round.
"Oh? That's the part you're curious about? Shall we go with the long version, then?"
"...I'd like that portion later, as a formal report."
A rather concerning remark had slipped out, but he held himself in and pressed for what came next.
"This time, our mastermind friend has a fairly simple logical structure, too. 'Oh. Looks like the plan's been found out and they're going to stop it. Better set it off before that!' ...Pretty simple, right?"
"Kindly elaborate on that 'set it off.'"
"It's probably already happened, so you could contact the outside and get a report... hmm, never mind. We're short on time, so I'll just tell you. They simply let vampires loose all over the city."
A kind of anomalous act of terror, in other words. But hearing it, Greenie frowned.
"Is that truly all? In that case it would be far too..."
"Too easily put down, right? There are three Apostles in Japan right now, and that's only the Apostles. There's even someone who made it as far as candidacy. An idiot could tell."
As the last thrashing of a mastermind who had worked from the shadows all this time, it felt entirely too thin. But Yazıcı soon grinned, and her eyes glinted, a little baleful.
"But was the culprit an idiot? Really?"
"The other two... one is almost certainly the master, the Shatterer, and the rest... could be the Strategist, or the Critical Patient, but the likeliest is still the Visitor, Alejandra. Anyway, the two who only just arrived in Japan, perhaps not—but that the Arbiter was residing in Japan, the mastermind would of course have known."
"No. Even if there hadn't been an Apostle, Japan's own people would have been enough. The damage gets larger and the cleanup becomes a nuisance, that's all."
So Yazıcı muttered, tacking it on. And yet they had caused the incident anyway? Two possibilities. A hopeless fool... or someone with a thought.
"So what was the intent? No. Ask it that way and even stupid Greenie's brain couldn't answer, so let me ask differently. The surface-world residents caught up in this—what are they going to think it is?"
"A large-scale riot...? Or mass hysteria?"
"Bzzzt. Wrong."
No—wasn't that about as far as it went? The surface world didn't believe in vampires, so...
"There's a better image than that, you know. —A zombie outbreak."
Bodily enhancement, and a violence turned on human beings. And specimens that multiplied by biting. Granting that it might indeed be so, Greenie nodded.
"Then the principle behind a zombie?"
"Hm? That would be Haitian voodoo..."
"Not that. Something more superficial. More in the way of mass media."
After a moment's thought, the answer came.
"...A virus?"
"That's the one."
He had hit on the right answer, and he did not like it in the slightest. Greenie pressed a hand to his brow.
"A virus..."
"Anomalies are such cheap things, aren't they. If everyone believes it, it really becomes so."
That was the law of the hidden world. The reason everyone labored to maintain the Secrecy Protocol.
"In that respect, the Church took a hit as well. Nothing funny about it."
So Yazıcı added—while she herself chuckled quietly all the same.
"The very phrase 'Vampire Syndrome' ended up helping the other side without anyone meaning to. Or were we led into thinking of it that way?"
"The plan was to create a real Vampire Syndrome through the collective unconscious?"
"Probably."
Greenie's expression crumpled further.
"Surely, if this virus were to mutate..."
"There's a bigger problem than that. If the disease called Vampire Syndrome has truly been born."
An instant later, the paper in Yazıcı's hand caught fire.
"The vampires born of it are no longer an unclean race apart. Merely humans who caught an illness."
Put otherwise, they would no longer be subject to purgation or exorcism. What meaning was there in shaking spirit-warding bells before a patient with a cold? And if weapons that had worked perfectly well until now suddenly ceased to work? Considerable chaos would follow until someone could grasp the situation as it stood. The incident would swell in an instant.
"If settling this takes too long, then just as you said, some horrific mutation might occur, and it could pass the point of no return. How about you get a message through to Japan and share this precious information?"
The Preacher was still laughing, needling him.