020
A drama of revenge.
I couldn’t stop myself from gulping when I heard those heavy words, but Miss Gaen’s story made so many things make sense. I, at least, had a hard time dismissing it outright.
Did Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade come to this town during spring break not because she got lost, or because she was being chased by three experts, but because her thrall, the aberration-gathering First, drew her here? Is that what Izuko Gaen was saying?
He called aberrations to him─and one of them was a vampire.
He invited his master’s presence.
He invited a suicidal vampire into the town he’d made his stronghold─no, according to what I’d just heard, the armored warrior only acquired a firm will of his own in that old cram school. It’s not as if he’d consciously called Shinobu to him…
The hypothesis did suggest something, however.
After fifteen years, this existence that had floated into town as nothing more than ash─after fifteen years all but surviving on the morning dew, it would have at last returned to the level of being able to summon a legendary vampire. Though I’m not sure you could call it “summoning” given that she was the master and he the thrall…
And while he’d increased the probability of aberrational phenomena occurring in this town by a few percent for fifteen years now, at this point it seemed like I encountered aberrations almost monthly─or daily, depending on how you framed it. Didn’t that have something to do with all this?
That worried me. It really worried me.
But at the same time…
When I think how it was here, in this deserted shrine forsaken by gods and worshippers alike, that the First kept on living for fifteen whole years─no, in that sense, four hundred years.
Four centuries.
An unimaginable span of time─for a mindbogglingly long period.
Kept on living didn’t begin to cover it.
It was like he kept on dying.
It was─simply torture.
No more than five seconds under the sun as a vampire caused me a transcendental amount of pain─four hundred years of it? What do you have to multiply five seconds by to get four hundred years?
“No need to be on the lookout, Koyomin─the First has already left this shrine. He’s not here,” Miss Gaen said, taking out her cell phone.
A different one from the one she used a moment ago to contact Ononoki─I thought she might be texting someone else, but it seemed she was only checking the time. I realized it was morning already.
“Hm…good timing. I think I’m more or less done explaining, but Koyomin, Shinobu, Miss Suruga Kanbaru, anything else you don’t get?”
“W-Well, there’s still a ton of things I don’t get,” I said in a panic, practically clinging to her before she could bring this to an end.
“Whaaat. Can’t you figure out most of the rest?”
“Wh-What should we even do after this? What kind of job did you want us helping out on?”
“Like I said, you need to take responsibility. You’re going to pick it up. You’re going to take in the responsibility. You, Koyomin─and Shinobu.”
Miss Gaen didn’t mention Kanbaru this time─and Kanbaru said nothing in return.
“You said the plan at first was for Ononoki to handle it herself, right? That the situation now was beyond your calculations─so could you tell us what the original plan was?”
“Fine with me. There’s no point in telling you about it, though. I don’t see how it could possibly be carried out now─do you remember why Mèmè, my big brother, came to this town?”
“Because Shinobu came here, right? I want to say Kaiki gave the same reason. As for Miss Kagenui…I feel like she heard about it from Kaiki?”
“That’s right. All of those experts, each with their own unique quirk or two, came to this town for similar reasons─and the results of their investigations came to me. I am important, believe it or not.”
Miss Gaen continued.
“After scrutinizing these results─the intel I received from each of them, I came to know about the odd chain of events taking place in this town over the last fifteen years. The way the wind was blowing here. I came to know this─this friendly lady here who knows everything came to know the four-hundred-year-long tale of the First that I just finished explaining to you.”
“…”
“That’s why I sent Yotsugi here again. To lower the occurrence rate of aberrations that had risen by just a few percentage points. Her job was to clean up the ashes─to tidy up a shrine, to put it simply?”
Yotsugi Ononoki, one half of a two-man cell specializing in immortal aberrations. It seemed she still didn’t know her mission when she encountered me on the last day of summer break─but she’d been given her Cinderella-like mission right afterwards.
Vampires are like the poster children for immortal aberrations, so cleaning up after one of their thralls does seem like her kind of job.
Okay, maybe I could have figured that much out without having to ask any questions─but why did she fail?
Did Ononoki ever fail when it came to her work?
We’re talking about that workhorse who saved not just my life but Shinobu’s over the course of one night here.
“Well, Ononoki does have an airheaded side to her…so maybe she fails now and then?”
“You’re making it sound like it’s someone else’s problem, Koyomin. Yotsugi failed because of what you, plural, did.”
“What we did?”
Who was included in this you?
A look at Miss Gaen’s eyes answered this, though─she looked only at me and Shinobu.
“Just a guess, but does it have something to do with me and Shinobu using the…‘bad things’ gathered in the air pocket─which Oshino’s talisman had sealed so they’d disperse over time?”
A blind guess.
I honestly didn’t have the first idea about what we’d done, but that was about the only thing Shinobu and I did after we met Ononoki on the last day of summer break.
We used the “bad things,” precursors to aberrations, left behind in this shrine to travel through time like we were in some sort of horror, or maybe more of an SF story. Had that backfired in some kind of way? No, those careless actions had already backfired plenty─but even more?
“If anything, if we came in and swiped the energy that could potentially serve the First’s ashes. Wouldn’t that delay his resurrection? I don’t see it speeding things up, at lea─”
I looked back at Shinobu as I said this─to find her biting her nails.
Hey. Isn’t that what you do when you’re irritated?
Did you think of something?
We’d used the shrine’s gathered energy to return from eleven years in the past to the present, too…if we’d messed up by doing that, what did it mean?
“Shinobu didn’t do anything,” Miss Gaen said. “Anything─she didn’t need to do anything. Coming to this shrine was enough on its own.”
“…”
“To correct you on one point you might be misunderstanding─when I say the First drew Shinobu here, that was only by way of their master-servant relationship formed four hundred years ago. It’s not as if he asked her to show up the way you might ask someone with a text or call. In other words, he didn’t know he was doing so until then. He had no idea─that his master had come close. He had no idea that the monster that had made him into a monster had come.”
“…”
“To be honest, I don’t know how much my dear older brother, Mèmè, had figured out─he doesn’t say a whole lot, and even his reports only contain the bare minimum. All I really know is that he used that talisman to carry out first aid on this shrine─which you can say ended up starving the First out, but in his hungry state─”
Pushed once more to his breaking point.
Just then, in that state of mind.
“He found out. He─saw her. Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade. For the first time in four hundred years─he witnessed her.”
A quiet gasp.
Shinobu stopped chewing her nails─and looked up.
Stunned, clear shock painted on her expression.
Right.
Right─when I visited this shrine with Kanbaru on an errand for Oshino, and again because of Sengoku, Shinobu Oshino had yet to start living in my shadow.
It wasn’t until then that she first stepped into this air pocket─
“In other words,” Kanbaru said pensively.
When we started talking about time travel, she could have lost the thread, as if I was talking about some dream from the night before. Commendably, she was keeping up.
“Seeing Shinobu for the first time in four hundred years gave the First strength, and this stimulation made him rouse himself despite being nothing more than ashes─resurrecting him despite his starved state?”
“Who ever said anything that romantic?” Despite Miss Gaen’s high estimation of Kanbaru up until this point─she seemed to be unimpressed with this one opinion. “Why would ashes be roused back into life for a reason out of a teen rom-com? An existence close to his appeared in physical proximity, that’s all, causing his aberrational nature to be rapidly excited. You know how putting a magnet against some iron for a while magnetizes it for a bit, so it can suck up iron sand? It’s more or less like that.”
“I see…” Kanbaru nodded. She seemed to want to press her point, but swallowed the words─an attitude you didn’t see very often from someone as unreserved as her. “But it’s true that Shinobu coming here had the effect of exciting…or booting up the First?”
“That’s right, which is why Kita-Shirahebi Shrine was an empty husk by the time Yotsugi came here on her mission. A job that should’ve required little more than a duster got a little more difficult. She had to start by finding where the First had gone off to. While you two were out having fun time-traveling from this shrine gate, we were having all kinds of trouble.”
“…”
We weren’t having fun, but I couldn’t blame her for thinking so.
“By now, you must’ve figured out my task for you. Hunt for the First─and it’s not just that I want more hands on deck. Sheer manpower could result in casualties… Rather, as her second, you’re suited to finding her first. The First and the Second, slave and slave, should end up attracting each other.”
Don’t worry. It’s not like I want you to clean up the ashes, Miss Gaen assured.
“Though it’s a little too perfect that you encountered the First before I gave you the deets, Koyomin─not to mention that you helped him grow.”
“Grow…”
True─I’d helped him.
The armored warrior, sluggish and heavy when he first appeared, could even speak well after draining my energy and Kanbaru’s.
If anything made us responsible, that would be it─right? Though it didn’t seem like we could’ve avoided that outcome even if we’d known all this beforehand…
“Oh, sorry, did I make it sound like I was blaming you? You did make fairly irregular moves, but at this point, I’m almost grateful. You made the job easier for me in some ways─especially by endowing him with speech. That one’s big. If he can understand words, that means we can negotiate─we can go carrot-and-stick.”
“Carrot-and-stick…”
Miss Gaen was truly Kaiki’s senior in that everything she said sounded like a lie, but this was the part that made her Oshino’s. He did hate the idea of exterminating aberrations, for the most part.
But─I laid out in my mind the clear, the oh-so-clear profile of the armored warrior.
The vampire thrall who made use of every aberrational phenomenon that occurred in this town over fifteen years.
A legendary vampire’s first slave.
The First─which made him my senior.
And Shinobu’s as well, in terms of the title of Aberration Slayer, as the original wielder of the enchanted blade Kokorowatari.
Most of all.
Immortal.
“Isn’t it Miss Kagenui you should’ve asked for? You know, Ononoki’s master, the violent onmyoji who specializes in immortal aberrations?”
If Oshino was a pacifist, Miss Kagenui was a warmonger.
I never ended up having to face off against her directly, but she was skilled enough in combat that she could probably go toe-to-toe with Shinobu─however, Miss Gaen only shook her head.
“I can’t control her,” she said. “I’d prefer it if she has to spend the rest of her life complaining about never seeing action.”
Getting Miss Gaen of all people to say this was kind of impressive.
Something about the onmyoji did strike me as unconventional, even among the various experts I knew, and I guess there really was something special about her.
“Will Ononoki be enough as far as combat reserves go?”
“No. When I got my status report from Yotsugi yesterday─which is to say when I heard that you and the First had come into contact, I already went ahead and called in another helper. Who’s waiting to meet up with me.”
So that’s why she was concerned about the hour.
My being slow to understand must have eaten up more time than expected─so she was right, things don’t always go exactly as planned, even for someone of Miss Gaen’s level. Let alone for someone of mine…
“B-But a helper? Ononoki really isn’t good enough on her own?”
“She’s not, because I’d like to settle this before today is over,” replied Miss Gaen, as unhurriedly as always─but for once, I sensed her determination as a professional. “Now that he has a will, and now that he’s conscious, and now that he’s able to use that energy drain as he wishes, the longer we leave him be, the stronger he’ll get─doubling up and up and up and up and up and up. He’ll make a full recovery if we aren’t serious about tackling this. He’d be too much for me to handle at that point─that’s when I really would have no choice but to call in Yozuru.”
“…”
She spoke about Miss Kagenui as if she were some sort of inhumane weapon…
I nearly cracked a smile for the first time in a while, but the words that came from Miss Gaen’s mouth next were more than enough to make me pull it back in.
Whatever the case.
“What I want─is to kill him before he eats a human.”
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