Old Testament: The Chronicle of Natsugahara
From Ingolstadt in Germany, through Munich Airport, to Fiumicino in Italy. From there to Rome, and to Vatican City. Then back into Italy, and by military transport on to Yokota Air Base…….
His Holiness the Pope certainly knew how to run a person into the ground. In the middle of that forced march, Apostle Bartholomew turned the thought over. She drove off the fatigue stealing over her by degrees with the power of God, and set about finishing the work at hand.
The inside of the transport was not what anyone would call spacious. Equipment packed it to the walls. The Apostle had planted herself on the floor, and even the little free space left to her was covered with things she had laid out.
They were disassembled parts, though enough of the original shape remained that even a layman could tell they belonged to a gun—and a rather large gun, at that.
An RT-20 anti-materiel rifle. Where another hand would have used oil, she worked consecrated chrism into every piece with meticulous care, then began fitting the puzzle back together.
"Ms. Han."
A man spoke to her as she went on joining the weapon in silence. She was not the only soul aboard the transport.
"You really do seem to have more of the soldier about you than the soldiers do."
A glance. Bartholomew Margarita—Han Seoyeon—did not shift her posture. She only lifted her eyes. Fatigue had sunk into them, and for that very reason they were all the sharper, all the more unsettling.
The cabin was quite dark. What lighting there was came down to a few dim lamps, and even those flickered now and then. Beyond them, there was only the sacred light that sometimes spilled from whatever Seoyeon held.
In that gloom, the rank insignia on the man's uniform caught a glint. Two stars, and two bars. Seoyeon could not honestly say she knew the Japan Self-Defense Forces' rank structure, but she was reasonably sure it was nothing low.
"Do you know me?"
Sharing a flight was no promise of acquaintance. Han Seoyeon, at least, did not know him.
There was one soldier she knew well enough to call an acquaintance, past the point of a familiar face. There was likewise one Japanese person who met a similar condition. She had never, however, counted among her acquaintances anyone who was both.
The man in front of her was nothing more than guide and watchdog for Apostle Bartholomew's entry into Japan.
Flown in aboard a transport, with a senior officer attached to watch her besides. At this rate she was being handled as nothing short of a weapon. An absurdly lavish reception.
Well, the transport itself was partly a bed of her own making. She had insisted, quite forcefully, on entering the country with all this equipment in tow. Even so, she was the sort who made up for insufficient ability with thorough preparation—and here, for no reason she could name, Han Seoyeon remembered something her only Japanese acquaintance had once said. Natacchi, how about looking up the word "insufficient" in a Japanese dictionary again?—so there was nothing to be done about it.
"We've never met. This is the first time."
The man in uniform said it with a smile, stiff as the smile was. He seemed to be trying to treat her as if nothing were out of the ordinary, but he could not hide the tension all the way.
That a middle-aged man of some years should speak with deference to a woman who looked barely of age likely came from the same place.
"If we're speaking only of rumors, then to some extent."
A soldier of fairly high standing who also knew the hidden world. Such a man could hardly be ignorant of holy knights, nor unaware of the dread an Apostle inspired. All the more so, given the relations between Korea and Japan, when the Apostolic Seat in question was Bartholomew, and Koreans had inherited it one after another.
Because of the "halo" that warped perception, photographs of that face were few. Even so, rumors of that caliber had a way of traveling.
"And above all, aren't you showing me as much right now, before my very eyes?"
Seeing to a weapon even in transit was a rare thing. He had meant it as praise. Han Seoyeon answered as flatly as if it were nothing at all.
"I have lived a life that required it."
It was closer to duty than to diligence. Thinking it nothing worth praise, she finished assembling the rifle in an instant.
She had been raised where anything short of thoroughness would not do, and she had learned under a master of the same kind. By now, leaving a firearm unmaintained for long left her more anxious than not.
Two people whom Han Seoyeon rarely acknowledged as masters. The less tender of the two—or rather, the de facto adoptive father who had given her his name. She had learned from a man said to have been a soldier, so an assessment of "soldier-like" was perhaps only natural.
"Besides, most of the equipment is not something I mean to carry on my person. I intend to store it somewhere suitable, which makes this the last window of maintenance I am likely to be given."
Surely she did not mean to keep a transport's worth of ordnance in her house.
Reflecting that he had never, at least in Japan, seen a home with a tank parked in the courtyard, the man stole a glance at the caterpillar tracks sitting right beside him.
"The equipment you entrust to the military, at the very least, we do intend to manage with all due care. However..."
"Even so, there is no harm in seeing to it now."
If the maintenance proved perfect, so much the better. If it proved sloppy, then because she had already put her own hands to the work, serious degradation would at least be avoided. Considered that way, there was no reason not to do it. Resting and doing nothing would not make the journey any faster.
Han Seoyeon reached for the next target: a box stacked full of talismans, a good several hundred of them. Drawing out one bundle, she called to mind what had come before.
"Seoyeon."
Han Seoyeon Margarita, otherwise Apostle Bartholomew. She had, of course, accomplished more than a few things worthy of that station, and she was a soldier's daughter.
Strictly speaking he had not been a soldier but a holy knight who had once been one, and she was not his daughter but his adopted daughter. Few of the people around them bothered to point that out. Han had been a soldierly man in the good sense and the bad alike, and from the time Han Seoyeon was still small he had taken her about as if she were his own.
In any case, it was no great surprise that Han Seoyeon, with such a man for father and master, had grown stiff in all things. The man facing her now knew that very well. Which was to say that when the woman he had summoned dropped into parade rest the instant she saw his face, Dionysius II was not particularly surprised.
"Yes, Your Holiness."
"I didn't call you here as the Pope, Seoyeon. There's no need to stand quite so rigidly on ceremony."
He smiled wryly and tapped his hat, the Cappello Romano, with a fingertip. The Pope had every right to wear a Cappello Romano, of course. A black hat banded in cyan, however, was another design entirely. It was a kind of declaration: that he stood here not as Pope Dionysius II, but as Apostle Peter.
"...If that is what you wish."
Only then did Han Seoyeon ease her posture, and only by a fraction. She seemed to accept that she was not facing her superior the Pope, but a fellow Apostle, more or less her equal.
Thinking on it, even a summons in his capacity as Pope hardly seemed to call for frozen attention at the moment of contact. But she was not the sort to listen merely because she had been told. That friend of mine, Han—he's gone and thrown the girl's whole personality away, he thought, and kept it to himself.
At any rate, Dionysius set the pointless talk aside and went straight to the matter.
"Seoyeon. You could manage Japanese well enough, couldn't you?"
"Yes. I can."
There had been a girl once counted as another candidate for Bartholomew, a girl who had brushed against Han Seoyeon's path now and then since the civil war. Because that girl was Japanese, Seoyeon was understood to have learned a fair amount of the language herself. Han Seoyeon nodded, as if to confirm the information was not wrong.
"Good. I had it in mind to post you to Japan for a while."
The Pope then gave her a brief account of the incident unfolding there.
"—And that is the explanation of what we are tentatively calling Vampire Syndrome. Any questions?"
"May I ask why I, of all people, was selected?"
"A matter of aptitude. On the point of Japanese alone, Matthias—Miss Alejandra was a candidate as well. But if we mean to keep this from spreading, I thought your 'nose,' and your miracles, would serve better."
"I see."
Han Seoyeon nodded once more.
"Any further questions?"
"Nothing else in particular. I should make contact beginning with the idol group, the most recent victims. Is that correct?"
"That understanding ought to be right. If there's to be an investigation, they come first. As for your departure..."
"I will prepare at once."
Dionysius smiled wryly again.
"I thought you would. And you'll be taking a great many weapons along, won't you? I've had a transport arranged, one belonging to the Japan Self-Defense Forces."
Even so, at a reaction that said he had expected as much, Han Seoyeon inclined her head a fraction in thanks.
"Then I will depart immediately."
"May the peace of the Lord go with you."
Rena, ReM, Yuta, Neru—the four-member group called Placeholder.
Vampire Syndrome had driven them to slaughter one another, and a holy knight nearby had put them down. The sole survivor was ReM: a woman named Natsugahara Hina.
They said the holy knight on the scene had barely managed to save her when she was already half dead. Whether to call that luck, or to point out that a truly lucky person would never have come to such a pass in the first place—Seoyeon turned it over even as she drew up, once more, the contents of the chart she had crammed into her head.
The patient's condition was more or less stable. So one could say, though that was only true in retrospect.
When she was found, her abdomen had been split open on a diagonal. Worse, while the vampires were being put down—which was to say her colleagues, ReM's own—their blood had poured into the wound.
Given the nature of Upsilon-2 vampires, it would have been no surprise if she had turned on the spot. Even here, though, her luck had followed her, subtly.
A number of conditions had to be met. The anomaly had to enter by some means other than a bite. The subject had to be at the edge of death. Rejection must not throw her into shock. A host of other premises had to gather, and a thin chance had to fall in her favor besides, before such a thing could take.
The anomaly had mutated her body, and yet she had not become a vampire. She felt no urge to drink blood, and her reason remained intact. A half-vampire, of a sort.
Analyze her blood and her tissue, then, and there might be a thread to pull on Vampire Syndrome. That was part of why the first investigation after entry into the country concerned this woman.
The problem, if there was one, was that the trauma of the incident had left her with a considerable case of anthropophobia. She seemed, in particular, to harbor a great terror of baring her skin to anyone else.
Well. That was no reason not to investigate.
"Hyaaaaaah?!"
Bang! Han Seoyeon flung the hospital-room door wide. The sound was so sudden and so loud that the woman propped against the bed screamed.
Seoyeon burst into the room and went straight for her. Her right hand drew a pistol from its holster even as she seized the woman—ReM—by the collar. The grip was rough enough to tear a button from the patient's gown.
"Ah...?"
Click. With the other woman's movement sealed, she leveled the muzzle at the point between her brows. Not pressed flush—held just off the skin. Exactly far enough that the one on the other end could see it, and understand that this was a gun.
ReM's eyes flew wide a beat too late, as the situation caught up with her. Dark crimson eyes, the border between iris and white gone vague, twitched and rolled. Tension and terror snarled together, and her whole body shuddered in fine spasms.
A voice shaking apart muttered something, though none of it could be made out. It was safe to guess the sense was please, spare me, or something close.
A moment later a sharp smell stabbed at the tip of Seoyeon's nose. Holding her posture, she turned only her eyes toward the bed. A stain was spreading, slowly, across the sheets.
The threat... is this much enough? Only then did Han Seoyeon slowly lower the muzzle and return the pistol to its holster.
"Let us talk for a moment."
"...I'm sorry, what? The moment you met her?"
Hearing the story, Ninomae asked it back in a dazed voice. A glance toward Hina showed her giving a small nod, so it did not appear to be a lie.
"I mean, no matter how I look at it, the Shion in that story just doesn't line up..."
"At the time, I had something of a... tendency to pursue efficiency."
Han Seoyeon answered in the most roundabout phrasing she could manage.
"And it was not, for what it is worth, a threat without a reason."
There was, at least, enough of a reason for an excuse to stand.
"I judged that an ordinary interview would be impossible with someone whose anthropophobia ran that deep. So I induced an artificial fear with the gun, resolved the situation, and used that as a means of releasing the tension..."
It was the same principle by which the strength goes out of a body all at once, once a person comes out of a moment when their life had been in danger. Even after hearing it, of course, Ninomae's eyes stayed sharp.
"...Yes. I know. I know perfectly well. Honestly, looking back on it now, even I can see that the method was extreme."
It was not that her nature had been wicked, even then. But she could not deny that consideration for others, and empathy, had been in short supply.
The memory had gone hazy, though she thought her feeling at the time had amounted to something like, If the tension breaks quickly, isn't that better for her in the end?
"...Hm. Akaba?"
In the midst of that self-reproach, Han Seoyeon felt another gaze and turned her head. It was Akaba Akane.
The look was not quite rebuke, and not quite blame. It was filled with some feeling Seoyeon could not readily name.
"That business..."
Akane opened her mouth, slowly.
"I don't care how I turn it over. The anthropophobia, fine, I'll set that aside. But the masochism—that was your doing, wasn't it?"
"Pardon?"
At what followed, Seoyeon cocked her head. What on earth was this supposed to mean?
"You know Dostoevsky."
"Yes, well enough."
"Then that mock-execution business of his, and the gambling addiction?"
"Those as well, I suppose... ah."
Dear God. Han Seoyeon pressed a hand to her brow.
The moment had come when the culprit stood revealed—the one who had left a person saddled with a proclivity like that.