Having reconfirmed the difficult situation he was in, Kojou deflated. He didn’t know where the fault lines were exactly, but the departments within the government for demonic countermeasures apparently had various turf wars going on. When he thought about it, Yukina was still just a junior high schooler anyway; he could understand her testimony not carrying much weight. Of course, it wasn’t likely they could get the “Old Guard” man on the verge of death to testify that Kojou engaged in legitimate defense.
The stifling atmosphere hung over them as they continued to walk, finally boarding the monorail headed toward the academy.
The devastated warehouse district was very visible from the train window. There was also the stark sight of the fracture midway along the bridge connecting the Gigafloats.
The greater-than-usual amount of chaos inside the monorail was no doubt due to the messed-up travel routes. This, too, was caused by last night’s incident. As he was the responsible party, Kojou had no right to complain. As they squeezed aboard the tightly packed train, Yukina, too, made a rather sullen face.
“…The main thing is, you overdid it, Senpai. Certainly it was a dangerous situation, but that was clearly excessive defense. Surely you had no need to go that far.”
“It’s not like I did that because I wanted to, you know,” Kojou muttered somberly as if sulking.
Perhaps taking that as him desperately making excuses, Yukina raised her eyebrows and glared at Kojou.
“So why did you command a Beast Vassal to engage in such excessive destruction?”
“I didn’t order it to do anything. It’s not like that live wire’s my Beast Vassal anyway.”
“Why are you telling me such an obvious lie?”
Yukina sighed, making an expression as if she was dealing with a wayward child.
“The Fourth Primogenitor, ‘Kaleid Blood,’ is said to possess twelve mighty Beast Vassals, each rivaling the monsters of myth and legend. Surely you are not telling me it is not so, given the damage that actually happened?”
“No, it’s not like I’m trying to paper it over or something.”
Kojou’s voice was ragged from aggravation.
“They don’t listen to any orders of mine. Now, if I could use the things like I want, that’s a totally different story.”
“…What do you mean by that?”
She must have sensed Kojou’s words were not simply something made up at random. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Yukina’s expression turned quite sober. Kojou looked like this wasn’t easy for him to talk about.
“They don’t think of me as their master. Yeah, I did inherit twelve Beast Vassals from Avlora, but they don’t accept that for themselves yet.”
“Avlora…meaning, the previous Fourth Primogenitor you spoke of before, Senpai?”
Yukina looked up at Kojou to confirm. Kojou made a sloppy nod.
“So because of that, I can’t control ’em. Usually I keep ’em under control somehow, but being attacked by other Beast Vassals is a bit much.”
“And then they’ll…go berserk like last night?”
“Well, maybe. Just because I come knocking doesn’t mean they’ll come out, I think. It’s not like I’ve put it to the test, though.”
“That is common sense. Please do not test it.”
Yukina spoke with what seemed like sullen anger.
“…But, if what you’re telling me right now is the truth, you are indeed a more dangerous being than I had thought, Senpai. If you do not somehow become able to properly control your familiars…”
As Yukina murmured, she sank deep into thought.
Kojou silently gazed at her for a while as she did so. Without thinking, he said what he really thought.
“You’re quite an oddball, Himeragi.”
“Eh? …Is that so?”
Yukina’s eyes widened as if taken completely off guard.
“Although I do not want to hear that coming from you, Senpai, what is odd about me?”
“I mean…that’s not what most people would think of if they heard me talking just now. They wouldn’t think further than ‘a vampire who can’t control his Beast Vassals is dangerous; better stay away from him, or maybe destroy him sooner rather than later!’ Stuff like that, I figure.” Kojou spoke with a pained smile mixed in.
Yukina put a hand on her own chest as if reflecting on it.
“Is that so? Now that you mention it, I do feel like that, too, but… I mean, it’s you, Senpai.”
“…What do you mean?”
“Er, there’s no deep meaning. It’s just, I don’t think you are all that bad a vampire. A little sloppy, occasionally lewd, but that’s all.”
Yukina’s eyes narrowed as she spoke, as if replaying her memories since the moment they met. She wasn’t speaking in a joking tone whatsoever. Apparently this was truly what she thought of him.
As any rebuttal would only kick up more trouble, Kojou twisted his lips without a word.
The monorail arrived in front of the academy; students wearing the same uniforms as Kojou and Yukina got off the train. Yukina took out her train pass case.
“But, if you inherited the power of the Fourth Primogenitor, Senpai, why can’t you control the Beast Vassals, I wonder?”
“That’s probably ’cause I’m a blood-drinking virgin.”
Yukina tilted her head and looked at Kojou.
“Blood-drinking…virgin? What do you mean by virgin?”
Did she seriously just ask me that? Kojou thought, looking sharply at Yukina. However, Yukina simply blinked her eyes with a mystified look. Kojou remembered that she’d been raised at an all-girls school somewhere, and on top of that, she’d been training as a Sword Shaman from dawn to dusk.
“In other words, I have no experience. I’ve never drunk another person’s blood before.”
Kojou explained, picking the least offensive words he could find.
Actually, the fact that beside the Beast Vassals, Kojou couldn’t use a single proper vampiric power was no doubt connected to that. Not that this had particularly bothered him until now.
“Ah, so that’s what you meant by virgin…eh? You haven’t done it?”
Yukina asked back in apparent surprise. Kojou’s confession that he’d never experienced drinking blood was apparently hard for her to connect to her image of a vampiric Primogenitor.
“No ‘experience,’ Senpai…? Is that so…?”
“Come on, it can’t be that strange. I mean, I was a normal human being till just lately.”
“Well…that may be so…but…”
While perplexed, Yukina seemed vaguely pleased for some reason. For his part, Kojou’s expression twisted in displeasure.
“Anyway, could you stop saying how I have ‘no experience’ and ‘haven’t done it’ so loud in a place like this?”
“Eh, why? You said those things yourself, Senpai…”
“Er, well, that’s because, um…”
As he made anguished thoughts about how he should explain this, Kojou drew his face close to Yukina’s ear. A moment later…
“Heya, Kojou.”
A sudden impact assaulted Kojou from the rear. A very familiar arm wrapped around Kojou’s neck as an equally familiar voice spoke.
“Don’t go sayin’ suggestive words to a girl first thing in the morning like this, man.”
“Y-Yaze?”
The voice speaking this cheerful, energetic tone first thing in the morning belonged to a male student with short-cropped hair and headphones down around his neck. He seemed to have been riding the same monorail.
Yaze went through the turnstile, still grappling with Kojou’s shoulders.
“Heya… Wait, that’s not Nagisa-chan. Who is that? We had a girl like this in our junior high?”
Noticing Yukina walking beside them, he looked at Kojou’s face in what seemed a bit of surprise. Kojou gloomily thrust Yaze away.
“Transfer student. She’s in Nagisa’s class.”
“Ohh, I see, I see. �
��So, Kojou, why are you going to school together with the little transfer here?”
“I just bumped into her on the way ’cause she lives close to us. A bit of talking’s normal, geez,” Kojou replied while keeping his cool. It’s not like he was lying. He might’ve met her when leaving the entrance to his apartment, but that was still on the way to school, technically.
“I am Yukina Himeragi. And you are Yaze Motoki, right?”
Yukina spoke while lowering her head in perfect courtesy. Yaze suddenly made a very pleasant expression.
“Oh, what’s this? So he’s been talkin’ about me?”
“No, there was information on you in Akatsuki-senpai’s file.”
“Ah? File?”
Looking at the question mark that came over Yaze’s expression, Yukina apparently realized her mistake. Her blank expression twitched faintly as she shook her head.
“No, it’s nothing at all. I’m kidding.”
“R-right. Well, nice to meet ya.”
Yaze made a friendly, smiling face while giving her a thumbs-up.
“Hey, so you’re a musician girl? What kind of genres do you do?”
“Musician… Ah yes. Er, actually I’m not very knowledgeable about music.”
“Eh? Ah, I mean, that’s a guitar on your back, right? Maybe a bass?”
“Ah…yes. You’re right.”
Remembering she had a “guitar case” on her back, Yukina hurriedly tried to gloss over it.
And, when Yaze suspiciously raised an eyebrow, she awkwardly averted her eyes.
“Um, I’m sorry, Senpais. I have to go now.”
“R-right. Later, Himeragi.”
Kojou waved in recognition as Yukina ran off like that to the junior high school campus.
Yaze silently gazed, watching her for a while like that.
“Hey, Kojou. That girl, she’s kinda mysterious, ain’t she?”
“Nah, she just transferred, she’s just a bit scrambled about stuff still.”
“Is that so… Hmm. If this doesn’t become trouble of some kind, then great,” Yaze murmured in an oddly serious tone. Kojou shot his friend a doubtful look back.
“Trouble?”
“Yeah. Make sure you pull this off right, Kojou, for your sake and the sake of not messing up my peaceful, lively school life. I mean, you are kind of my precious childhood friend and stuff.”
What’s he talkin’ about? thought Kojou, shifting his gaze to Yaze with a perplexed look.
Yaze was looking at the high school campus, at Kojou and Yaze’s classroom on the second floor. Asagi, sitting right at the window, was waving her hand, having just noticed them arriving at school.
2
“Good morning, Kojou. You’re really looking laid-back here first thing in the morning. Well, you always do.”
Homeroom, right before classes began. As Kojou sat in his own seat, Asagi, sitting just ahead, spoke to him.
As usual, she was dressed in a gorgeous way with a hairstyle to match, but today, her usual liveliness served to conceal a shadow, as if an aura of ennui hung over her somehow.
Kojou waved back with the same listless expression.
“Gee, thanks. Hey, you look sleepy yourself.”
“I am. Thanks to that, my makeup isn’t sitting well… You saw about yesterday’s explosion on the news, right?”
Asagi spoke while fussing over imperfections under her eyes with a hand mirror.
Gulp. Kojou was somewhat suspicious as he responded.
“Y-yeah. A little bit.”
“Right after that, a big shot from the Gigafloat Management Corp was crying to me over the phone. Their mainframe for disaster countermeasures got blown away, and they had to put together a replacement system from scratch. That’s what happens when you buy your hardware from the lowest bidder. It’s not tuned at all, and its inbound filtering is like a sieve.”
“I don’t really follow, but…sounds like a big mess… Sorry.”
As Kojou appropriately ignored Asagi’s technobabble, he was tortured by a guilty conscience. To think that even people this close to him had been harmed by yesterday’s incident.
Asagi shot Kojou a dubious look as he sunk into silence.
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Uh…no reason. So anyway, you’re helping people across the whole island, then, Asagi?”
“It—It’s not that huge a deal, though.”
Asagi spoke quickly, seeming to blush a little. Then her usual leering grin emerged.
“But, maybe you should be thanking me all the same. There’s a restaurant at Keystone Gate that has a cake buffet…”
“Yeah, sometime, sure. I’ll think about it once I get my summer break homework settled.”
Kojou tried to paper it all over. Keystone Gate was the section where the four Gigafloats connected—the giant building literally at the center of Itogami Island. It was the island’s most fashionable spot, brimming with high-end brands and specialty stores. And this restaurant was right there. An expensive one, no doubt.
“Homework, huh.”
As Asagi rested her chin on her hands, she muttered in an indifferent tone, seemingly on purpose. For some reason, she was glancing sideways at Kojou intermittently.
“B-by the way Kojou, I thought I’d ask… Whatever happened after that?”
“After that?”
“You know, yesterday, the girl you were at the station with. Nagisa-chan’s classmate, you said?
“I mean, not that it matters to me either way.”
“Oh yeah.”
Something like that happened, too, didn’t it? Kojou recalled. Thanks to the intensity of the disturbance that followed, he felt like it was already something in the distant past.
“Oh, we just went home like normal.”
“Is that…so?”
“Yeah, I was just helping her carry back the stuff she bought.”
“Th-that so? Hmm… I see.”
Asagi’s expression seemed to brighten as she lifted her face.
Right around then, in a corner of the classroom, there was a small commotion punctuated by oohs. Several boys had gathered in the corner around a single raised cell phone.
“What’s that all about?”
Kojou watched his worked-up classmates looking as if he’d spotted something unpleasant in a train station washroom.
Asagi called out to Rin Tsukishima, a friend of hers who just happened to be passing by.
“Hey, Rin. What’s up? What are the guys getting all worked up about?”
“Ah, that? Seems some girl transferred into junior high.”
Rin Tsukishima was the class representative. She was a student whose height and style made her seem very adult.
She had meager social graces and was a girl of few words, but there were surprisingly many boys who went for that. Among first-year high school boys, she was number one in the Girls I Wanna Be Walked All Over By rankings by a rather glowing margin; she had apparently been rather shocked to learn of that result.
“A junior high school transfer student…?”
Kojou’s face grimaced a bit as he made a low murmur. “Good grief,” Rin murmured, watching the boys in exasperation.
“Apparently the rumor is that she’s extremely cute, so they’ve ordered the juniors in their clubs to send them pictures.”
As Asagi’s brow furled, she drew her face close to Kojou.
“Hey, this transfer student, is that the one in Nagisa-chan’s class?”
“Yeah, probably.”
Kojou nodded with a pained expression. It was a pretty safe bet it was Yukina.
Rin watched the exchange between Kojou and Asagi with mild amusement.
“Not going to go and look, Akatsuki?”
“Nah, not interested.”
As Kojou tossed his reply, Rin said, “I see,” nodding with apparent satisfaction.
“I suppose. You have Asagi, after all, Akatsuki.”
“Huh?”
Kojou looked u
p in surprise. He met the very close Asagi’s eyes, and both hurriedly separated simultaneously.
Asagi, even with her cheeks reddening, maintained her cool attitude as she looked up at Rin.
“There you go again, Rin… Kojou and I aren’t like that. We’re just friends from back in junior high. Right?”
“R-right. Asagi hangs out with me and Yaze a lot. It’s just natural.”
Kojou, too, conveyed it as the plain truth. For some reason, Rin made a disappointed-looking face as she listened.
“So, in the end, no progress this summer, either? Even though Yaze seems to be making out fine with an older girlfriend?”
“That’s ’cause Yaze and his girlfriend are both weirdos.” Kojou nonchalantly asserted it like it was inconvenient to be compared to either.
Certainly, in spite of appearances, it was a fact that Yaze had a girlfriend. As soon as he’d graduated to high school in April, he’d fallen in love at first sight with a third-year senior. After a number of passionate approaches straight out of a romantic comedy, they’d finally become a couple just before summer vacation.
“I suppose so,” Rin agreed, looking at Kojou with a meaningful expression.
“Certainly I think she is a bit eccentric, too, but, Akatsuki-kun, I don’t think I want to hear you calling anyone odd. I have the feeling you have some very interesting secrets yourself.”
“No idea what you’re talkin’ about, Tsukishima.”
“Heh-heh.” As Rin watched Kojou feign ignorance, seemingly sulking, she narrowed her eyes and laughed.
Her grandfather was a famous scholar of demonic ecology. Perhaps due to that, Rin was very learned about the characteristics of various demons; sometimes she acted as if she realized Kojou was not a normal human being.
However, Rin did not regard Kojou with enmity; she seemed disinclined to raise any special fuss in any case. It seemed like she was observing Kojou simply because she found him interesting. Here in Itogami City, where there were more demons, etc., than foreign residents, it wasn’t a big deal.
Saikai Academy had a number of demonic students, after all; they weren’t looked at in any special way, enough that a beautiful girl transferring into junior high attracted far more attention.
That said, even Rin would surely be surprised to know that Kojou was actually the Fourth Primogenitor.
Right Arm of the Saint Page 12
