CHAPTER 6
Cherub
1
Imperial territory. Easternmost Altoria jurisdiction.
A remote location far to the east of the Imperial capital. An underground facility.
“You’re blessed. You’ve seen Elletear, two years later, right?”
A smashed water tank. The researcher who looked up at a tag engraved with the words SUBJECT E did not attempt to hide the glee in her voice.
“Vichyssoise served as a good example. A subject who has finished fusing with the astral power will, without exception, show signs of deviating from human physiology, after all. How about Elletear?”
She glanced at Sisbell, then Rin, then the members of Unit 907 as she spoke quickly.
“Did she still look human on the outside? What color was her skin? Her eyes? Did she sprout fangs? Oh, or perhaps two heads—?”
A gunshot.
It pierced through the mist filling the vast hall and grazed Kelvina’s cheek.
A welling of blood…
Red slowly oozed out of her wounded cheek.
“Who asked for the talk show?”
The silver-haired sniper pointed the muzzle of his gun at her. They were about ten yards away. Jhin could probably snipe Kelvina accurately to a single hair on her head.
“We’re real members of the Imperial forces. We’re inquiring on suspicions you’ve broken Imperial law.”
“Yes, I suppose you are Imperial soldiers.” The researcher looked at them with apparent surprise. “I would have expected the Sovereignty’s assassins to come to retrieve Sisbell.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about them… I know about that witch Vichyssoise, though. Are you the one who made her the way she is?”
“She was such a lovely subject. Her resonance ratio with it wasn’t too high or too low.”
“What is ‘it’?”
“This planet’s nightmare.”
“Huh?”
“The thing that the Astrals revered, which they dubbed the Great Planetary Calamity. Similar to astral power, yet different. If I had to make a comparison, I’d liken it to a single poisonous moth among ten billion butterflies. Mistake that moth for a lovely butterfly, and you’ll end up all the worse for it.”
“…………”
“Very rarely, it will rise from the planet’s core through a vortex. When it manifests, we call it the Great Contact, and we abstract the energy in order to bring it here to—”
“That’s enough. You’re wasting time.” Jhin cut her off. He took a look around the gigantic furnaces lining the large hall and then the broken tank. “Basically, this was human experimentation. That’s what you were up to.”
“Conducting tests on astral bodies.”
“I don’t care how you misconstrue it. Boss, Nene.”
As the two of them readied their high-voltage stun guns, Jhin motioned at a furnace behind him with his chin.
“Take pictures for proof while we still can. We need that, and witnesses. She’s got to have people captured here to use as experimental subjects. Find them and free them.”
“You won’t find any.” Kelvina didn’t even wipe the blood from her cheek as she shook her head. “I want subjects who are purebred. Very difficult to find in the Empire, I’m afraid. That was why the Hydra’s offer was so valuable and why I was dancing for joy when Elletear offered herself. And also why…” She turned, then pointed a finger, rough from exposure to chemicals, at the princess with the strawberry-blond hair. “I won’t let you escape.”
“Eep?!”
Kelvina’s maddened eyes glistened as they locked onto Sisbell. When she felt that stare pierce into her, Sisbell unconsciously took a step back.
“Your body is invaluable. It will be a delight to—”
A gunshot. When the second one rang through the hall, the researcher staggered.
It had hit her left cheek. This time, Jhin’s bullet dug a fraction of an inch deeper into Kelvina.
“Only answer the question.”
“…………”
Drip. The mad scientist kept silent as she stared at the blood that blotted the ground.
“…”
“We’re not going along with your screwed-up fantasies, so let us take you in nice and quietly. We’ll tell HQ and hand you over to the closest base.”
“Now, that will be an issue.” The mad scientist was still staring at the ground. “The things we’re developing here are delicate, you see. Someone needs to watch over the apparatus values, and the place needs to be kept at a specific temperature and chemical concentration at all times. If I’m not around, everything will be for nothing.”
“Sounds just peachy to me.” Jhin was serious. “We arrest you and destroy this creepy facility. Seems like two birds with one stone to me.”
“…I should be the one saying that.”
Since when had she brought that out? Kelvina held a small device that fit perfectly in her hand. It was a remote control with just a single button.
“An Imperial unit will be an excellent use for this experiment. You came at exactly the right time.”
“Hey, you better not move—”
“You’re too late.”
Jhin hadn’t even had time to shoot. The moment the mad scientist’s finger touched the button, groans issued from the furnaces in the hall.
Klunk.
Like fireworks, the glass lids on the furnaces burst away.
Steam bellowed out of them. Then astral energy erupted from their containers, lighting the hall as though they were in broad daylight.
“What is this?! What’s with this light…?!”
They covered their eyes with their hands, but it was still too bright. The astral glow was so strangely powerful that they couldn’t stare directly at it. Faced with that, Iska felt a cold shiver travel down his spine.
“It couldn’t be……”
He had seen this before.
He was sure he had seen this astral energy before. And he hadn’t been the only one. In the independent state of Alsamira, Nene and Sisbell had also witnessed it alongside him.
“Iska. There has definitely got to be something in the machinery in there!”
“Object! What are you hiding inside you?!”
It was the same light that had come streaming out of the witch-hunting machine that had gone after Sisbell, the Object. Back then, the thing that had been hiding in the mechanized soldier must have been…
“Arise, Beasts of Katalisk.”
At Kelvina’s order, the furnaces burst to pieces. Indistinct bodies of light leaped from them. They had humanoid silhouettes and glittered violet; light similar to astral energy poured out of them.
“…It’s the same as back then!” When Sisbell beheld the things resembling astral power overhead, her voice cracked. “Iska, it’s the monster that was in the Object!”
“…It looks that way to me, too.”
Iska readied his black astral sword and sucked in a breath.
He never would have thought this would happen. Not in his wildest dreams would he have thought he’d discover the mystery of that unidentified mechanical soldier in a place like this.
“So you were the one who made these things, Kelvina?!”
“Oh, so you know of them?”
The redheaded mad scientist lifted an eyebrow.
“Their name for the time being is Beasts of Katalisk. As you can see, they are artificial astral powers. They’ll serve as next-gen energy for the Imperial forces’ weapons. Though I just call them my pets.”
“…Pets?”
“Yes, come to think of it, I do remember the Eight Great Apostles provisioning me with an Object into which to load one of them. If you witnessed it, you were given a very valuable experience.”
…Seeing her pet, she says?
…That thing isn’t cute or cuddly!
One of the Beasts of Katalisk had attacked Sisbell and nearly destroyed an entire country in the process. He couldn’t help but feel a chill, realizing that these things had been mass-produced.
“I get it now.”
He heard someone kick forward off the floor. Rin held a dagger as she headed straight for Kelvina without so much as glancing at the pet above her.
“Taking care of you first will be quickest.”
“Disperse.”
“Rin, get down!”
Iska grabbed her arm from behind and forced her to the ground.
It had been an order to self-destruct.
There was a flare.
The pet above them swelled and immediately burst into a ball of violet flame.
“…Why, you!”
Rin looked indignant as she rose to her feet. Kelvina had already disappeared.
She had slipped into the mist. Her fluttering coat disappeared farther into the hall.
“Sisbell, we need to get outside now while we still can! The other artificial astral powers might start going on the move.”
The embers from the explosion flitted as Iska turned around. He faced the woman standing there dumbstruck.
“Commander, you know how to get out of here. Take Nene and Jhin, too. Once you escape, send a message to the closest Imperial unit you can!”
“W-wait, Iska! What about you?!”
“I can’t just leave that woman be.”
“But…!”
“Let’s go.” Jhin grabbed Sisbell’s shoulder.
He stared at the steam still coming from the furnaces. “There’s no point to this if you don’t make it out alive. Why do you think we came all the way here?”
“……Ugh.”
The princess bit her lip.
Then she immediately started running, her strawberry-blond hair undulating as she went.
“Iska, you’re not allowed to die until you become my guard! Jhin, please do all in your power to take me to the exit!”
She raced into the fog. Iska wasn’t even able to watch her go. He turned in the opposite direction. The way Kelvina had escaped.
He started to sprint. Beside him ran a certain brunette.
“Rin?”
“If I leave you on your own, Lady Sisbell will scold me later.”
The furnaces groaned and shuddered. As they passed them, Alice’s attendant added, “Also…
“I don’t want to admit this, but it is clear the first princess is connected to the Empire. Just like the Hydra, she is a traitor to our country.”
“…………”
“I must report this to the queen. And to Lady Alice as well, of course.”
There were at least two conspiring with the Empire.
They had more or less speculated as much was the case since they had been in the Sovereignty.
“There were two people behind the coup. That was Elletear and you—the one who invited the Imperial forces here.”
Jhin had been the one to see it.
The Hydra’s head of house, Talisman, had all but confirmed it at the Lou’s villa.
…How awful for Rin and Alice.
…That someone from their own family was responsible for the assassination attempt on the queen.
It was of no relevance to Imperial soldiers. Try as he might to remind himself of that, he still imagined Alice in a deplorable state. At the same time, he also shuddered.
“Former Saint Disciple Iska. Won’t you become my subordinate?”
“I want to crush present-day Nebulis into smithereens. I want to overturn it from its roots.”
She had told him everything. It had been so illogical that he had convinced himself it had to be a joke.
…It happened at the Lou’s villa.
…We were alone together, but would any normal person really be able to declare that so openly?
He couldn’t see the point of this. What was it that First Princess Elletear wanted? What could be so worthwhile that she’d join the Empire and offer up her body to undergo a ghastly process to become a witch?
“There she is!”
Iska turned when Rin said that. Passing through a corridor the hall led into, they ran deeper in after the redheaded researcher. As she went through the mechanized doors, they closed.
“She’s planning on locking herself in?! Wrench it open!”
The earth doll leaped out, wedging its fingers into the entrance as it slid shut before prying the door open by force. Iska and Rin both leaped through the opening.
There was another large hall. Ahead of them, they saw a furnace that was larger than the others. It was likely two times bigger than the dozen or so machines in the other hall. Turbulent, roaring astral light was emitting from it.
And farther away from that furnace…
“We’ve cornered you.”
Rin was closing in on Kelvina, whose back was facing them.
“You’re not doing astral power research. What you are carrying out is blasphemy to the astral powers.”
“…”
“I wish I could take you into the Sovereignty, but at the very least, I will have you pay for the crimes you committed against Lady Elletear.”
“ ”
“Do you know of a bird called the crossbill—an iska in our tongue?”
The mad scientist turned around.
Her white coat still clung to her as she did so.
“It’s a tiny bird. No one would give it a passing thought if it flew by them. But that bird has a very unusual feature—its upper and lower beaks don’t match. Because of that, there are many folktales about the iska and its mismatched beak. That it pulled out a lance that had gored a sage or that it stopped the arrow of a demon.”
Kelvina’s eyes.
They were trained on Iska.
“Your astral swords are very similar, former Saint Disciple Iska. Black and white. Even their lengths are different. They don’t match at all. They’re just like an iska’s beak.”
“…What are you trying to say?”
“There’s a secret story to them. Those astral swords.”
B-bmp.
Was that the sound of a gigantic monster’s heartbeat? For a moment, Iska nearly believed that as the hall quivered strangely from a palpitation.
That sound had come from Kelvina’s chest.
B-bmp, b-bmp…, it went.
“I am an Imperial. I’ll have you know I wasn’t born with astral power. It takes time to force someone to become a witch. Based on my third attempt, it takes six minutes and twenty-nine seconds to reach stability.”
A howl echoed throughout the area. Violet flames erupted from the mad scientist and engulfed her whole body.
“Wha—?!” Rin’s eyes opened wide. “Iska, this is the same as Vichyssoise…”
“Get back, Rin!”
The two both leaped away at the same time. A purple blaze swelled from the floor where they had been standing and engulfed it.
“Ah, I see. So you’ve already fought Vichyssoise, then.”
Beyond the flames, what was once the astral researcher Kelvina Sofita Elmos began to transform.
The wicked star mutant, Katalisk’s Angel.
The clothes she had been wearing blew away. Her red hair stiffened before their eyes, and her body turned half transparent, like clouded glass.
…She’s the same as Vichyssoise.
…No. If she is, then what are those thorns on her back?
As Kelvina transformed, black things started to protrude from her spine. The thin, needlelike protrusions grew steadily until they formed what looked like distorted wings.
“Not a witch but a malevolent angel…”
The former human being spread her wings.
“I progressed with my research using the same surgery performed on Vichyssoise. After changing the concentration of the agent, this was the result. Though the cost of rejection is greater.”
It was as if she was ogling them. Malevolent angel Kelvina looked down on the pair who had followed her from the hall.
“The era of astral power will soon end. With the dawn of a new power.”
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