A House of Prayer, or a Den of Thieves (5)
A secret signal between two people depended, inevitably, on what the other party could do. Someone able to memorize thousands of words without effort could just as easily commit a cipher for each of them to memory, and if one's counterpart had perfect pitch, a code built on the rise and fall of tones would be perfectly feasible. Seen in that light, passing a signal to Han Seoyeon by means of a particular scent was not strange in the least.
She drew a small scrap of paper from her pocket, brought it to her nose, and sniffed it twice.
Bergamot. The same fragrance had clung to Alejandra, who had slipped her the note in secret. It was too strong to have merely soaked in from something carried on her person; the paper was faintly damp, which meant she had most likely sprayed the perfume onto it herself. It was a signal the two of them had used before, back when they were assigned to the same mission. I have something I need to tell you.
Judging by the feel of it, the matter probably wasn't urgent. Alejandra hadn't come looking for her on purpose, and in all likelihood she had never meant to pass anything along at this particular moment. If she had, there would have been no need for so cumbersome a method; a note with the business already written out would have done perfectly well. Going to these lengths suggested something closer to it isn't especially urgent, but since we've run into each other, I'll tell you now. Having settled on that, Han Seoyeon stepped away from the booth for a little while.
She followed the scent. She followed the trail Alejandra had left behind her, and the trace led to a doujin circle's booth sitting in an awkward spot on the floor, where the smell hung thick. Drawing near, she turned a look of just the right weight on the young man selling doujinshi there, and he—wearing a somehow uneasy expression, a paranormal citizen, most likely, who knew exactly who Han Seoyeon was—handed something over. A mobile phone and a zipper bag, he added, things he was holding for a foreign Holy Knight.
The perfume she could grant. But why walk around with a zipper bag? Turning the question over, she looked inside, and a petri dish caught her eye. Within the dish, something dark crimson was writhing.
Whatever it was, the shape of it was not pleasant. At a glance it felt bound up with anomalies, and with the ominous, unclean kind of them at that.
...Vampire Syndrome?
She learned what it truly was only after she had finished the memo stored on the phone. What Alejandra had written there summarized the whole course of finding the thing and analyzing it.
"Hmm..."
The sound escaped Seoyeon before she could stop it. She had armed herself just in case, yes, but she had never actually expected another bout of bioterror to come this close to breaking out.
A dish in which the pathogen of Vampire Syndrome had been cultured, with magical measures already laid so that it would destroy itself after a fixed span of time. Had it gone undiscovered, it might well have become a serious disaster. The condition might have entered the realm of the treatable by now, but that hardly meant the uproar in between would tidy itself neatly away. Well—the countermeasures were already in place, which was surely why Alejandra had judged it not urgent either.
The reason she had gone out of her way to put it in Han Seoyeon's hands was the tracking of the culprit. The operative who had planted it might still be somewhere inside the hall.
In a low voice Seoyeon recited a prayer, purified the thing, and only then lifted the petri dish out of the zipper bag. She had no intention of opening the lid. Alejandra would have seen to it properly, of course, but there was no harm in caution all the same.
Then she sniffed, carefully, at the scent left on the outside of the dish. Hmm. With this much, tracking ought to be possible one way or another—and as it happened, she could already sense a trace nearby.
By way of thanks she bought one copy each of the two doujinshi on the table, at which point the face of the young man minding that quiet booth brightened enormously, and she set off after what remained of the smell.
But even then, Han Seoyeon did not know.
She did not know that this would reduce her to so wretched a spectacle—
...What in the world. How did it come to this?
It was flustering, and bewildering, and very much both at once.
"Could you look this way, please?"
"Yes? Ah—yes. Will this do...?"
—for the Apostle Han Seoyeon Margarita, whom demonkind called by the name of Abhorrence, was holding a photo session in a broad plaza, ringed round by cameras.
Why...?
Han Seoyeon's footsteps, as she pursued the one who had carried out the attack, were not particularly hurried. Not long after the chase began, she realized her quarry wasn't moving with any real urgency either.
She had expected as much. This was the mastermind of the Syndrome, someone who had kept their identity hidden even from Han Seoyeon's nose all this time; it seemed unlikely they would have their tail stepped on now over so simple a mistake. The operative probably knew neither how dangerous the thing they had planted was, nor who was directing the situation. The mastermind would have passed the orders down through several sets of hands. There was even a chance the one who had done the planting was a surface-dweller, entirely ignorant of anomalies.
Vampire Syndrome was that sort of furtive creature. As a mastermind, exceedingly well suited to the part—and exceedingly irritating.
So the pursuit at hand amounted to little more than a formality. There was no fear the other party would flee, and she expected to dig up very little. She had not the slightest reason to hurry.
"Um... would it be all right if I took just one photo?"
"A photo, you say? ...Yes, well. I don't see why not."
Which was why she nodded at the offer without any particular refusal. She wasn't so busy that she couldn't spare that much.
Being asked out of nowhere for a photograph was a little surprising, but when it came down to it, Han Seoyeon was an Apostle—a public figure, which was to say a celebrity. She had been photographed a few times already by paparazzi, "lunatics who aren't even afraid of the Church," as they were sometimes called, and so someone who asked permission first struck her as rather the better sort.
It never once occurred to her, however, that the request had anything to do with her clothes. She was dressed in what looked like cosplay, granted, but she did not imagine anyone would look at her and dare ask whether they might photograph the costume. Surface-dwellers who didn't know Seoyeon's true nature were no exception to that; most humans, even those who lived their whole lives on the surface, retained at least the instinct to sense a menacing presence.
Where she was mistaken was this: the moment other people filed you under the sort of otaku who went so far as to cosplay at Comiket, a frightening impression ceased to mean anything at all. If one had to name it, that appearance had crossed into the territory of gap moe.
For her own part, she seemed to believe that no one had approached her until now because of her overbearing air, but the reality was a little different. It was only that photographing cosplayers outside the designated zones at Comiket counted as bad manners. And now she had simply walked into one of those zones.
"Excuse me! Could I get a photo, please!"
"Would you mind striking some kind of pose?"
"Yes? ...Yes?!"
A rabbit, in short, that had walked of its own accord into a pride of lions. No—a fish that had salted and vinegared its own head and climbed up onto the table.
Han Seoyeon was laboring under one further misconception. Because she wasn't actually cosplaying, she had assumed that no such character existed... but creative works were, truly, without end. Search long enough and one was bound to turn up at least a single hat-wearing heroine who fought with a Japanese sword and firearms. The impression was considerably different, of course, but that could be written off as the limit of cosplay.
The synergy between a character with a certain cult following and Han Seoyeon's looks—which drew the eye for good reasons and bad alike to begin with—proved considerably explosive. She watched the people closing in one after another, wearing an expression of fluster that was nothing like her. For someone whose face was so thoroughly vicious, receiving friendly attention from this many people at once was rare indeed, and she hadn't even done anything particularly worthy of praise.
That the gathering was plainly from the surface made any forceful response harder still. A paranormal citizen would not have seen a cosplayer in her, but a dangerous Holy Knight walking a public place armed with live rounds, so these people could only be surface-dwellers. In the end she was swept under before she quite realized it. Highly unusual, for Saint Bartholomew.
"...A chance to see that Bartholomew Margarita this rattled. You think we can just let it go?"
"You don't value your life, you bastard?"
"We do it first and get down on our knees later. That ought to work, right?"
"This is insane. ...Let's do it right now!"
Once things had reached this pass, even the paranormal citizens began to join in. At the rare sight of an Apostle—an instrument of violence on a thoroughly unreasonable scale—looking genuinely at a loss, a few anomalies with their livers hanging halfway out of them feigned ignorance and quietly took up the work of stirring the crowd. With people set on egging everyone along, expecting the situation not to grow was asking the impossible.
"Ah, sorry, everyone. This one isn't used to places like this and isn't any good at saying no, so I'm going to have to ask that the photos stop here—"
One thing had led to another until Han Seoyeon had drawn her sword and settled into a high stance. The one who saved her was a considerably unexpected person.
Pink hair, and horns. Even the smiling, narrow eyes. She had taken the form of Kitayama Maya.
The height was wildly off, of course, so it was easy to tell this was cosplay and not the real person—no, strictly speaking the real one was a cosplay too, but even so.
"...Thank you."
"Put one on the tab."
Led clear of the spot by the wrist, Seoyeon offered her thanks without protest, then gave the other a light once-over.
"Keep your eyes nearly shut like that, and you really could hide those blackened eyeballs."
"Just as you say, dear customer. This is considerably convenient."
Asmodeus. The great demon who held the thirty-second seat in the Lesser Key of Solomon.
She grinned, and wound a lock of her hair around one finger.
"Setting that aside—is cosplay a hobby of yours?"
"Not as such, but if I'm coming to an event like this anyway, a little side income couldn't hurt, could it? Praise counts as a kind of faith."
In other words, she meant to earn a bit of faith by playing the cosplayer.
"Is there a reason it had to be Miss Kitayama Maya?"
"Pink hair. Saves me the cost of a wig."
The cost of a wig. A phrase that would have placed comfortably among the top ten words least likely to ever leave a great demon's mouth.
"But, dear customer. Weren't you on your way somewhere?"
"Ah. So I was. I very nearly forgot."
"...You're surprisingly weak to people making a fuss over you, young lady."
Ride the mood a little further and she might have shown them a miracle. Asmodeus swallowed the rest of that thought. To think that Bartholomew, of all people, had a weakness (?) like this.
"I'm merely unused to it."
"The rest of us usually call that being weak, dear customer."
Well. For the time being, this was something only the two of them needed to know. There was no point scattering interesting information around and cheapening it—all the more so because, just as Seoyeon said, it was a problem that would solve itself once she got used to it.
"...Anyway. Why is your hand going for the sword?"
"Well... I had the sense, somehow, that you were harboring an irritating thought. It was unconscious."
"Would you please stop debating, on nothing but a hunch, whether to put a draw-cut through someone's neck?! You thanked me a second ago!"
"That was that, and this is this..."
"Kieeeek! Neighbors! The Apostle's trying to catch a demon!"