Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 9 - Chapter 3.04

  King and Queen

Leaving Saikawa in Drachma’s care, Natsunagi and I headed for the roof of the hospital to see what had exploded. Once we’d taken the elevator to the fourth floor, we took the stairs the rest of the way to the roof.

“Let’s go, Natsunagi.”

I opened the door to see the dark roof of the hospital spread out before us. The sun had already set. Come to think of it, I’d met Reloaded the Magical Girl up here last Christmas. The current situation was completely different, though; pale-blue flames, the remnants of the explosion we’d just heard, flickered across the roof. In their midst was the enemy.

The woman was wearing a blue dress. She was kneeling, her hands clasped tightly and her eyes closed, as if she were praying. Her long, pale-silver hair fanned out over the concrete.

She was the Necromancer, Elizabeth. She hadn’t introduced herself, but I instinctively knew who she was.

She didn’t match Scarlet’s “red and black” image of vampires. Elizabeth was blue and white, and the flames that covered her looked almost like ice.

“What is your goal here, Elizabeth?” I asked, keeping my distance.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. They were a blazing red.

“—Never mind your questions. Let me eat you.”

Elizabeth’s rouged lips parted.

The murderous intent that assaulted me seemed to make the air vibrate. Elizabeth got to her feet, and it was only then that I noticed her right leg was missing. Had she lost it in a fight somewhere? Did she no longer have the ability to recover it?

Even so, Elizabeth rose to stand on her one remaining leg. She leaned sharply forward, gazing at me with eyes that seemed locked onto her prey. It was obvious what she planned to do next, but I had no illusions that knowing about it in advance would let me avoid it.

“—You can’t move one step from that spot.”

Words rang out sharply, and red eyes flared. But the voice wasn’t Elizabeth’s—it belonged to the girl next to me.

“……!” The vampire froze up, her expression anguished.

Natsunagi had used her word-soul ability.

“—! Lowly human. Come out, all of you!”

But Elizabeth promptly regrouped, issuing orders to someone.

“…Oh, huh. It’s you guys.”

The being that seemed to crawl out of the pale fire was the same sort of emaciated mummy we’d encountered at the park the other night. Others came crawling up the walls of the hospital, reaching the roof one after another. All of them had hair as long and white as Elizabeth’s, though theirs was disheveled.

“I heard undead come back to life with their base instincts intact.”

These mummies all seemed to be obeying Elizabeth’s orders, with no thought or will of their own.

“Ha! Typically, yes. However, I devour those instincts down to the marrow before I revive mine. Minions that won’t take orders from their master aren’t suited to being soldiers.”

Even though the word-soul still held Elizabeth in place, she gave a cold, bewitching smile.

“…Is that why these mummies are so thin?”

Ms. Fuubi had said they’d been finding a lot of mummified corpses around the area. They must have belonged to people who’d died when Elizabeth had drained too much of their strength.

“Elizabeth, have you killed people in this neighborhood and made mummies out of them?”

“I don’t remember where I make them. Once I’ve turned them into puppets, they follow me wherever I go, even across the ocean. Come, you lot, dance for me!”

The next thing I knew, Natsunagi and I were surrounded by a dozen mummies. Natsunagi glared at them with her red eyes, ordering them to stay back with word-soul, but the mummy soldiers kept moving.

“Ha-ha! As if human speech would work on them,” Elizabeth said with a mocking smile. Apparently, the mummies would only obey their creator.

“You know, I really don’t think I want things to end like this,” Natsunagi murmured, edging closer to me.

“Same here.” Drawing the gun I’d borrowed from Drachma, I fired at one of the mummies as it crept closer—but even though I hit it in the leg, it didn’t stop.

“Listen, Kimizuka. Why don’t we at least make some memories?”

“Right—if this was a foreign drama, we’d kiss right about now.”

Natsunagi and I exchanged looks, smiling at each other a little. However…

“That’s gonna make things awkward if we manage to live through this, so let’s skip it for now.”

The mummies stopped in their tracks. Both Natsunagi and Elizabeth looked startled. I knew something they didn’t, though: A hero had left a certain something on the roof of this hospital.

“You just saved our butts, Reloaded.”

A faint aqua-blue light shone from the top of the water tower.

There was a wooden spell tablet up here that banished all sorts of bizarre phenomena. Last Christmas, when I’d almost been possessed by Parasite, one of the hundred demons of Pandemonium, Rill had left it here as a countermeasure. That blue light was a barrier that stopped evil spirits from running wild.

“You’ve held out well, humans.”

And there was another hero who could help us out of the situation we were in.

The wind blew, sending the heads of several mummies flying.

“You’re late, Scarlet.”

Our ally, the king of vampires, had finally arrived. I’d directed my complaint at his back…but then I noticed his white suit was dyed red with blood.

“I didn’t mean to let my guard down; however, I was delayed longer than anticipated.”

“Did the mummies attack you on your way here?”

“No, the opponent I encountered was far more troublesome. The enemy seems to have resorted to petty tricks,” Scarlet said, glancing at Elizabeth.

She glared back at him coldly. “Judas, the traitor.”

They were past the point of exchanging pleasantries.

Their eyes spoke of the long history between them more eloquently than words ever could.

“That’s quite a serious wound, Elizabeth.”

“Take a look at yourself before you say that, Scarlet.”

The injured vampire king and queen faced off across the distance.

“So it was a lie that you could only create those pitiful imitation mummies, hmm?” Spitting out blood, Scarlet glared at Elizabeth. “Their numbers may have been significant, but even so, no ordinary beings should have been able to wound me this gravely. What was the mob that attempted to detain me on my way here?”

“Death row prisoners from around the world,” Elizabeth snapped in response. “Or I should say, former prisoners.”

“Right. So their instincts in life lent themselves to murder. No wonder they kept trying to bite through my neck, even when I tore off their arms and put holes in their bellies.” Scarlet gave a wan smile, as if it all made sense to him now. The wounds on his neck hadn’t fully healed yet. “It seems you came quite well prepared. It was also you who tried to contact the sapphire girl indirectly, was it not?”

“Ha! You seemed quite taken with the child. I put my minions in contact with her to see how you’d react, but this only attracted some entirely unrelated people,” Elizabeth spat, glancing toward me.

Had Scarlet known that all along? That explained why he’d left guarding Saikawa to me and the Men in Black, and had shown himself as little as possible…

“And you intentionally chose this hospital as our final battleground because a number of people connected to me are gathered here?”

“Yes. I’m not leaving any room for error. I’ll make sure to put you down here.”

Elizabeth leaned forward as she began to break through the restraints of Natsunagi’s word-soul.

“I see. Then it appears I was wrong about the sort of woman you are,” Scarlet murmured. He took a few steps forward.

Elizabeth frowned. “Why are you smiling, Scarlet?”

The white demon had his back to me. I couldn’t see his expression.

He was smiling, though? This guy?

“Ha! It’s only natural I would be smiling. Elizabeth—you’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

Elizabeth’s red eyes widened.

“Why did you go to the trouble of using the sapphire girl as bait to lure me out? Because you weren’t confident that you could defeat me without a hostage. Why did you have your powerful undead soldiers ambush me? Because you had no hope of defeating me on your own, and wanted to damage me as much as possible beforehand.” One black wing appeared from Scarlet’s left shoulder. “You made plans to target me indirectly, sent enslaved soldiers to me in your place, and came to meet me on a battlefield where you would have many hostages—all while neglecting to polish the most vital thing: your own skills.” Scarlet laughed, as if to say he had nothing to fear from a woman like that. “You could never be the queen of the vampires.”

“Enough talk. Let me eat you!”

Elizabeth sprang at him on her one remaining leg, and Scarlet moved to meet her, a single wing unfurled behind him.

The fight between the world’s last and strongest vampires had begun.