“No, I just need it open. Now you can fight.”
Ryoma heard something else hit the ground.
“At your command, I have come,” a voice intoned.
Ryoma turned at the familiar, clear sound of the voice. A girl was kneeling there, clad in silver armor.
“Huh? Uh? I didn’t call you here...” Ryoma said immediately. He’d never even thought of calling for reinforcements.
“Hmph!” The girl pouted in response.
“Um... Regin, was it?” Ryoma asked. “What are you doing here?”
She was a Valkyrie, a girl Ryoma had met once in another world.
“Incidentally, I guess there’s no limit on things entering the barrier from outside, huh?” Ende commented.
“Is that really important right now?” Ryoma demanded.
“This is one of my abilities. By opening a book about a given story, I can change the worldview we inhabit. That means that right now, you have all of your abilities from a previous adventure.”
As usual, he felt like Ende wasn’t actually responding to anything he said. But he decided to set that aside for now. The power of a Valkyrie should be enough to deal with the Evil God.
“I don’t get this at all, but you’re saying Regin here is the real thing? Then that’s enough for me! Reginleiv! Beat that guy!” Ryoma pointed to the young man.
“As you command.”
The girl — Reginleiv — stood, drew her sword, and rushed at the young man.
* * * * *
Natsuki was resting in the waiting room of an abandoned hospital.
She’d begun her flight on Friday afternoon, had spent all night running around town, and had arrived here in the morning. She’d intended to skip town, but she hadn’t made it that far.
He had sent pursuers after her. Those who shared with her the fate of a killer... those given power by him. They seemed to have spread immediately through the city.
She didn’t have the same sight that Yuichi did — eyes that would tell her a person’s true nature — but she could at least identify others of her kind.
Fortunately, it seemed Natsuki’s recent abstention from killing had dulled her presence to the other serial killers. It meant that she could detect them, but they couldn’t detect her. However, her opponents seemed to have realize that, and simply blocked off all routes out of town.
He had given power directly to 14 individuals, including herself. That wasn’t enough people to completely lock down the city... and they weren’t all necessarily in the city, either. But they had adherents, and she had heard that some of them had special abilities, too.
For now, all she could do was hide in a place that would make her hard to find, but she knew she couldn’t remain in the ruined hospital forever. Abandoned buildings would be the first places they searched.
She could ask someone to take her in and hide her, but she had foolishly let him see her in her school uniform.
Her identity was known.
If they investigated the school, they would learn everything about her. Then they would investigate her handful of friends, and she’d be found right away.
She had a few contacts in the underworld, but seeking help in a world of betrayal and intrigue, in her current condition, would probably end with her even worse off.
If only I’d made up my mind a little sooner... Natsuki thought.
She regretted it. She had wanted to leave town to keep her comrades out of danger, but now it was all for nothing.
Against mere serial killers, Yuichi could probably handle himself... but not him. No one could do anything against him.
But despite feeling that way, perhaps she had unconsciously begun seeking Yuichi’s aid, because the hospital she was hiding in now was close to where he lived.
Mochizuki Gastrointestinal Hospital, otherwise known as the Pink Clinic. It had once been a vampire stronghold, Natsuki had heard, until Yuichi had disrupted that.
Natsuki could sense a faint enemy presence. It was heading right for the hospital.
This was the way it had been, over and over again, since yesterday. After shaking them off, she would be fine for a while... but they always came again.
Natsuki stood up from her chair.
What should she do?
If running away wouldn’t solve the problem, then maybe she should try to break through, taking out as many of them as possible on the way. But the reason Natsuki hadn’t done that yet was because of him.
He was keeping his presence masked for now. That meant he could be coming along with the serial killer. If he was, she didn’t stand a chance.
As she wrestled over what to do, her enemy arrived in front of the hospital.
Fight and break through, she decided.
At the same instant, the glass door shattered.
The enemy had thrown something through the door, which rolled to Natsuki’s feet.
It looked familiar...
It was Sakiyama’s head.
Natsuki froze in shock. That meant she couldn’t fully dodge the next thing that came flying...
A spike.
The spike, fifteen centimeters long, struck Natsuki through the right shoulder. She glanced at Sakiyama’s head again and noticed several spikes were rammed into it, as well.
“Hello! Big sister’s here!” A woman stepped through the broken glass that used to be part of the door.
“Alberta... since when did you become my big sister?” Natsuki asked as she pulled the spike out of her shoulder and tossed it aside. Fortunately, the damage was minor; she could move her arm, which meant she could still fight.
“Well, we are like sisters, aren’t we?” the woman asked. “And I became his disciple first, which means I’m the big sister.”
The woman was wearing a top hat and an old-fashioned riding uniform. The long-skirted black dress also resembled a mourning costume.
Her name was Alberta, and she was a serial killer just like Natsuki.
“How did you know I was here?” Natsuki asked as she reached for the medical scalpels hidden in her uniform and gripped one in each hand. Alberta might not tell her everything, but she might let slip enough information for her to get away.
“That,” Alberta said as she pointed at Sakiyama’s head. “You know your big sister is skilled in magic, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know that, actually.” Natsuki knew almost nothing about Alberta’s specialties. The only thing she did know was her sadistic personality.
“Oh? What a shock! Well, if you don’t know, you don’t know, but there’s a spell for getting runaways to come home,” said Alberta. “I used a form of that, you could say. I cut off his legs, stuck talismans on them, and buried them at a fork in the road. Then, since his body was going to waste, I drove a spike into his navel and stuck spikes around his body to give it a more human form. Of course, in the end I ended up having his head tell me.”
She must have run into Sakiyama while he was searching for Natsuki. Sakiyama had been good at stalking, but other than that, he’d been an ordinary human with no special skills. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against a serial killer.
Natsuki felt bad for Sakiyama just a little bit. He might have been a stalker creep, but if he hadn’t gotten involved with a serial killer, he wouldn’t have met such a gruesome fate.
“You took the name Natsuki Takeuchi, right?” Alberta asked. “Then I suppose that’s what I’ll call you.”
“What do you want?”
“I was told to bring you back,” Alberta said. “Come along now, would you? Of course, I don’t even know why you ran away. It’s so strange. You should be glad he came here especially for you.”
To Natsuki, they were the ones who were strange, but it would be no use pointing that out.
Alberta produced an axe from beneath her long skirt. “I was told not to kill you, but it seems to me that I can do anything as long as you’re not technically dead. Of course, even if you die, it’s no big deal! Your big sister is skill
ed in necromancy, as well!”
With her long skirt fluttering, Alberta charged right in. She raised the rather heavy hand axe with ease, then swung it down.
Natsuki dodged it.
A medical scalpel couldn’t exactly block an axe, and while Natsuki’s scalpels were stronger than most, so were Alberta’s axes. She couldn’t cut the axes while she was attacking with them, and their weight was overpowering.
But the weight of the axes gave Natsuki an advantage, too. Both weapons were easy to use, but they differed in their speed.
Once she’d swung the axe, Alberta couldn’t heft it again that quickly, and even if she could, it would be slower than the scalpel. Which meant that Natsuki could counter quickly after she dodged.
Natsuki watched the path of the axe, then tried to swing her scalpel in the brief opening created before Alberta brought it up again.
Instead, though, Natsuki ended up jumping away with a gasp.
The scalpel hadn’t reached Alberta — she hadn’t even been able to swing it at her.
Her right arm wouldn’t move. Rather, it seemed to have a mind of its own, as it moved to cut at herself instead. Natsuki released the scalpel in her left hand so that she could restrain her right arm.
“Oh, sorry to tell you!” Alberta said mockingly. “This battle was actually decided after the very first hit.”
Natsuki didn’t know the underlying principle — perhaps it was part of the magic Alberta had mentioned — but the first spike Alberta had hit her with appeared to be the cause.
“Natsuki dear, ready to give up?” Alberta smirked. “Or do you still think you can turn things around?”
As Alberta was suggesting, it would be difficult to recover from this. The inability to use her arms was a fatal blow to her. She could still attack with her legs, but she couldn’t really hope to defeat Alberta with that alone.
“I guess I should probably dismember you. Then you can’t possibly get away.” Alberta began advancing slowly, her manner triumphant.
Natsuki kicked at Sakiyama’s head at her feet. It was a cruel move, perhaps, but if Sakiyama had been alive, he would probably have gladly let her kick him.
Sakiyama’s head didn’t hit Alberta, but she hadn’t dodged it or knocked it aside. In fact, it hadn’t even gone flying at her. Sakiyama’s head bit Natsuki’s right foot, causing a spike in its mouth to stick into her flesh.
“Natsuki dear... I gave you a hint, you know?” Alberta said. “I told you I was a necromancer. Why are you being so careless?”
Her right leg now had a mind of its own, too. Unable to stand now, Natsuki fell over.
“Natsuki dear, you’re so weak. Is it true you haven’t been killing at all lately? You used to be stronger, didn’t you?”
Maybe it was true that she had gotten weaker. It was possible that she couldn’t have beaten Alberta back then, either, but she would have at least put up a decent fight.
“Well, I’ve taken your right arm and right leg already, so let’s do our cutting on the left side first,” said Alberta.
Natsuki began racking her brain for a plan, but nothing came to mind. She couldn’t think of any way to fight back with the parts of her body she still had control of. She didn’t want to give up, but there was nothing she could do.
Alberta raised her axe high.
Natsuki glared at her attacker.
That was all that she could do — but even if she was about to die, she wouldn’t turn her eyes away from it. Natsuki still had her pride.
Alberta’s axe came down.
There was a high-pitched sound of something whistling through the air, and then the axe went flying in a different direction.
Natsuki saw it happen. The axe, and Alberta’s right arm, had both gone flying with the same force with which she’d brought them swinging down.
Natsuki and Alberta looked at each other.
They both seemed equally surprised.
The arm and the axe hit the wall with a bang.
“Hello, there,” came a voice from behind Alberta.
Alberta turned back. Natsuki could see the speaker, as well.
It was a young woman who looked like an office worker, holding a pair of blood-stained scissors in her hand.
Chapter 3: It’s Kind of Like a Prologue, I Guess
It was Saturday, a little while after noon. Yuichi had come alone to this restaurant, Nihao the China.
It was a Chinese restaurant near the back gate of the school, and it was where his classmate, Tomomi Hamasaki, lived.
He opened the old door and entered to find four people waiting inside.
One was a man, sitting past the counter in the kitchen and reading a newspaper. The label above his head was “Nihao the China,” the same name as the restaurant, and he wore his hair in a braid that seemed ridiculously inappropriate for both the time period and the country he lived in.
Two customers sat at a round table across from each other. One was Aiko Noro. The other was Monika Sakurazaki, leader of the Monika Army.
Monika was a girl dressed in an elementary school uniform, wearing her hair in a ponytail. She looked like a young girl, but only because she had stopped aging — her actual age was around Yuichi’s own. As an Outer, a being that existed outside of destiny, she had no label over her head.
The last person was the waitress, who was standing in the back, dressed in a cheongsam, looking restless. This was his classmate, Tomomi Hamasaki.
She lived upstairs and helped out at the restaurant. She wore glasses at school, but she seemed to take them off while she was working. Yuichi wasn’t sure why she wore the glasses, which appeared to be strictly for fashion purposes.
Above her head was the label “Real.”
Huh? Yuichi hesitated.
Normally, Tomomi’s label was “Fake,” and this had never changed in all the time he’d known her.
When he looked a bit closer, he noticed that she seemed restless and troubled somehow. And when he looked her over more closely, he sensed that her aura seemed a bit different from the Tomomi he usually saw in class. In other words, she was a different person.
Yuichi looked at Aiko. Aiko looked back at him with an uncomfortable frown.
“W-Welcome!” Tomomi called out, her voice slightly shrill. The voice itself was the same, but the tone was completely different.
Yuichi sat down next to Aiko.
“Sakaki! Doesn’t Tomomi seem weird somehow?” Aiko asked him immediately. She looked like she desperately wanted to talk to someone about it.
It was true that Monika didn’t know Tomomi very well, so she probably wasn’t well suited to talk to about it.
“Definitely weird,” said Yuichi. “Actually, I think she’s a totally different person from the one we usually talk to.”
“I think you’re right... but she looks just like her, doesn’t she?” Aiko asked.
“Yeah. Appearance-wise, they’re identical. Her body is just like it was when we saw her yesterday.”
“Her body... have you been staring at her, Sakaki?!” Aiko’s expression suggested he was looking at her in some improper way.
“I wasn’t staring!” Yuichi retorted. “She just puts herself in my line of sight, that’s all.”
“Well, fine. But why has she changed? Did the real Tomomi go off somewhere?”
“Well... this might complicate things, but the label on the Hamasaki we usually see is ‘Fake.’ The one standing here right now has the label ‘Real.’” It had occurred to him that if there was a fake, there must be a real one. Of course, he’d only ever seen the fake, so he’d never thought he’d end up meeting the real one at this point.
“Hey! Would you two knock off the insider chat already?” Monika seemed angry that she was being ignored now. “Yuichi, you said you called us here because you had something to talk about!”
“We’re trying to work out a mystery, but I guess it’s not that important right now,” Yuichi said. It was true that the presence of the “real” T
omomi wasn’t actually relevant to the subject at hand.
He decided he would just ask her about it later, and was about to move on, when he saw it: the “Fake” label.
Another Tomomi had appeared.
Nihao the China was a two-story building. The first floor was a store, while the second floor was their living space. The fake Tomomi was walking down the stairs from the second floor.
“Huh? Two Tomomis?” Aiko was openly surprised.
Wearing the same cheongsam, their hair in buns, they really were perfectly identical.
The fake Tomomi walked up to the real one and whispered something to her. The real one nodded in response and headed up to the second floor in her place.
“Um... do you have a... twin sister, Tomomi?” Aiko asked without hiding her surprise. That did seem to be the rational explanation.
“Oh, no, I don’t!” Tomomi said. “So, thanks for coming! What’ll you have?”
It was plainly suspicious, but Yuichi didn’t press the issue. He’d had plenty of chances to ask about the “Fake” label in the past. If he finally asked now, he’d feel like he’d lost some sort of battle. “I’ll have soy sauce ramen.”
“You’re not gonna ask? We were being really obvious about it...” Tomomi said, a little irritated.
“Because I’m pretty sure the story’s gonna be complicated, and I’m in no mood to get mixed up in it!”
“Tsk!” Tomomi clicked her tongue, behavior unbecoming of service staff.
“Besides, aren’t you trying to hide it? You shouldn’t try to be obvious about it...”
“I guess not,” she said. “If you’d asked, I was gonna put on airs about it, though.”
Yuichi winced in response to Tomomi’s frank words. It didn’t especially matter to him if Tomomi was a “fake,” anyway. If she was ever in trouble, then he’d be happy to help her, regardless.
Of course, I doubt she’d ever be willing to ask for help...
Aiko and Monika put in their orders, and Tomomi went to the kitchen to convey them.
“So, what was it?” Aiko asked, stunned.
“I’m not interested in asking. Noro, do you want to ask next time?”
Humanity's Extinction Actually Happens This Time With the Evil God's Revival?! Page 5
