She was dissecting Alberta.
Her head, her shoulders, her elbows, her waist, her ankles... human body parts, cleaved at the joints, lay scattered across the blood-stained floor.
“Has her curse lifted?” Aki, who had not been touched by a single drop of blood, addressed Natsuki.
The curse did seem to have lifted; Natsuki had regained control of her right arm and leg. But Natsuki couldn’t move right away. Not without knowing what Aki was here for.
As a denizen of the local underworld, she knew the common knowledge about Aki: her haunts, her active times, her appearance, age, name — all the necessary information to avoid her. But this was her first time actually meeting her.
Even if Aki knew about Natsuki, it was probably only what any of them knew about the neighborhood serial killers, and the two of them had no points of contact in common.
“Why...” Natsuki began.
Could Aki really have saved her? From what the rumors said, Natsuki couldn’t be sure if she could take this at face value or not.
“What’s wrong? Does it still hurt? The wounds don’t look bad... even you should be able to heal from them soon enough.” Aki walked up to her, crouched down, and examined Natsuki’s shoulder. She almost seemed worried about her.
“Why did you save me?” Even that innocuous question might be enough to upset the woman, but Natsuki had to ask it.
“Yuichi...” Aki said, then trailed off, blushing.
Natsuki was not sure how to react to hearing that name in this context.
“You’re friends with Yuichi, aren’t you? Don’t worry. Leave everything to me. I’ll help you. I’ll even kill him for you, if I have to.”
“Huh? But... what... what are you planning?” Natsuki burst out. Perhaps it was pointless to ask such a straightforward question, but again, she couldn’t help but ask it.
Aki had no reason to save Natsuki. To do so would be making him her enemy.
Which suggested she must have some ulterior motive for her actions.
“Nothing,” said the woman airily. “I just want to be of use to Yuichi, that’s all... if you’re his friend, and I help you, he’ll surely praise me.”
Natsuki couldn’t figure out what Yuichi had to do with any of this. But right now, however precarious the situation may be, Aki was apparently on Natsuki’s side.
Chapter 5: Oh, Yeah... There Were Monster Hunters, Weren’t There?
It was the day after the conversation in Nihao the China.
Yuichi had come to one of his regular haunts, the sacred forest behind a local shrine. He’d been using this place for training a lot lately, and he treasured it; it was rare to find such a large area where so few people came.
He was concerned about the Divine Vessel War, but there was nothing he could do to get things rolling on his end, so he might as well just keep up his usual routine until the resonance started again.
It was December, so it was already extremely cold, but Yuichi was only wearing a light track suit.
He’d been plunged into extreme conditions by his sister many times before, and maybe thanks to that, he could deal with severe heat and cold. Japanese winters were nothing to him.
Today, Yuichi was by himself, without his sister’s accompaniment.
At the start, she’d had to force him to train, but he’d taken to it well, and now he stuck with it of his own volition. He didn’t necessarily do it every day; it depended on how he was feeling, mentally and physically. Mutsuko herself said that there was no point to training if you just did it out of habit.
He varied the contents of his practice based on how he felt that day, too. Right now he was striking a tree. He would hit the tree with the side of his arm, then add in some footwork, moving around the tree as he hit it high and low. Sometimes he threw in a kick.
Yuichi enjoyed this kind of thing.
At a glance, it might look like he was repeating the same things over and over, but each time he was adjusting his input and angle very slightly, searching for the most efficient moves and methods of unleashing his power.
He was better today than yesterday. He’d be better tomorrow than today. Yuichi gained real fulfillment from that tangible sense of improvement.
Training is fun when I can do it at my own pace, anyway...
When he was with his sister, he had to keep on his toes, always uncertain of what she was going to throw at him next.
She’d pull some strings with some acquaintance of hers, and have him taken somewhere where he’d be ambushed by raging hoodlums, or soldiers dressed in near-futuristic equipment firing at him with shotguns while shouting at him in a language that definitely wasn’t Japanese.
Just the other day, she’d forced him to fight a group of a thousand armed men. Technically, Yoriko had been the cause of that, but he had to wonder if his big sister had somehow planned it all along. She was a true believer in the importance of fighting real opponents, and she was constantly making him do just that.
“Fighting is the best training there is! There’s no training that beats a real fight!” was her philosophy, apparently.
It was true that fighting a tree wouldn’t teach you how to handle yourself in a real fight, but Yuichi still found it beneficial. It made his arms and legs stronger, for one thing, but it also taught him how to manage the recoil from his strikes. Whether you hit a human or an inanimate object, there was always recoil, and every school had its own philosophies about how to deal with that. Hitting anything required a complex series of interactions from numerous parts of your body, so even just fighting a tree could teach you a lot.
As Yuichi focused on his strikes, he could sense somebody approaching. He stopped.
Not many people knew that Yuichi trained here — nobody except his sisters and Natsuki Takeuchi, as far as he knew.
He turned around, wondering who it was, and he saw a girl approaching.
The label above her head read “Anthromorph (Cat).” It was Yuri Konishi.
She was Yuichi’s classmate, who on the first day of class had proudly boasted of her personal wealth. In addition — not that he was eager to drag this up again — she had tried to kill him once before.
As she approached, Yuichi could see that she was wearing a fur-lined white coat, which even someone as fashion-ignorant as he was could tell was extremely expensive. His second thought — that if anything got on that coat it would be extremely visible — was a sign of his middle-class mindset.
Yuri’s golden hair, bound up in a complicated style, was not something any middle class person could imitate, suggesting she had her own personal stylist, and while the object she was holding in her hand looked like an ordinary basket, Yuichi had no doubt that it was a luxury item of some sort.
“Oh, it’s you, Konishi...” Yuichi spoke up as she arrived in front of him.
“Is that any way to greet a person?”
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I just thought maybe it was Takeuchi...”
His sisters would still both be asleep, so Natsuki was the only other person he would have expected to see here. Although lately, for some reason, Natsuki had been acting distant. She wasn’t even showing up for club meetings.
“So, how can I help you?” he prompted.
“What kind of a question is that? Aren’t you the one who said you needed to get to know me better? Why have you been avoiding me?” Yuri scowled unhappily.
She had asked him out once before and he had turned her down. At the time, he had told her that he wouldn’t go out with her because he didn’t know her well, so Yuri had declared she’d try again after he got to know her.
“Part of it is that it’s awkward, but I was also never very social to start with,” Yuichi said.
“I’m well aware of that. I can see that you rarely interact with anyone outside of a small group in class. So I’ve decided to take initiative in coming to you in this place at this time of day, specifically!”
The fact that Soul Reader let Yuichi see things he
didn’t want to see had led to him studiously avoiding interaction with others. He had never exactly been a social butterfly, but ever since entering high school, he had probably started coming off like a total misanthrope.
“I don’t mind you coming to visit, but did you even consider my own situation?” he asked. “I’m in the middle of training right now... but okay, fine. I’ll hear you out, at least.”
“Yuichi Sakaki... will your insolence towards me never cease?”
He wanted to resume training, but it would be hard for him to hear her out if he was moving. Instead, he spread his legs to shoulder width, then dropped his hips, thrust his fists in front of him, and lowered his elbows.
“What is that ridiculous posture?” she demanded.
“I told you, it’s training. Chinese martial arts. It’s called zhan zhuang. You’re basically sitting in an invisible chair. It’s good for strengthening legs and glutes.” In truth, it was more complicated than that. But to someone who wasn’t interested in martial arts, that explanation was probably good enough.
“I cannot believe I’m wasting my time with someone like this...”
“Seriously?” Yuichi furrowed his brow. It was Yuri who had proposed spending time together.
“How do you expect to eat breakfast in that position?” she demanded. Yuri showed the basket in her hand to Yuichi. It apparently contained breakfast.
“What, you brought food? I was planning to eat after I got home, but...”
Despite his grumbling, Yuichi broke his stance and returned to normal standing posture. If she’d gone to the trouble to bring food, it would be rude to refuse.
As he looked around for a place to sit, Yuri pressed the basket into his hands. “There’s a plastic sheet inside. Why don’t you lay it out for us?”
“You want me to do it?” Yuichi thought she should really be the one to do it, but he did as he was told, spreading out the sheet.
Once they were both sitting, she produced drinks and sandwiches from the basket.
The sandwiches were varied, with a lot of different things inside them. He took a bite of one sandwich, impressed by the amount of time she must have put into them.
It was good.
This one was a katsu sandwich, and the crispiness of the fried pork was definitely professional level, suggesting an expert’s hand had gone into making it.
“They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, after all,” Yuri said loftily.
“I wouldn’t say you’ve grabbed my heart, but it really is good. Is cooking a specialty of yours, Konishi?”
“Why are you asking about my cooking skill?”
“Huh? Didn’t you make these?”
“Of course not. I had my chef make them, naturally!”
“Which means it’s your chef I should be appreciating...”
Yuri’s attempts at earning his affection certainly seemed half-baked. Even if it had turned out badly, she really should have done the cooking for herself, Yuichi thought.
“So, is breakfast the only item on the agenda?” he asked.
“That was merely the icebreaker, naturally. As I told you before, my real objective is to let you get to know me.”
“Okay. Regardless of who made it, you still brought me good food, so I’ll hear you out, at least.”
“Good. My name is Yuri Konishi.” Yuri straightened up, giving an unnecessary introduction.
“That’s where you’re starting?” Yuichi asked in disbelief. “I know your freaking name!”
“My first name aside, what do you think of my last name? It seems a rather mundane name for someone so wealthy, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve never really thought about it...” He wasn’t entirely sure what she was asking him. It certainly was a common enough surname, but he couldn’t imagine how that was supposed to tie in with a person’s income level.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I don’t particularly care for it myself. My surname comes from my adoptive family. My real parents have another last name.”
“Your adoptive family? Wait, you’re adopted? Are you sure you want to tell me something so personal?”
“Yes. My goal is to have you know me better, after all.”
This was all far from what he was expecting. She had been put up for adoption, or she had ended up adopted... Either way, it all sounded very complicated, and it left Yuichi at a loss for how to respond.
“My father’s surname is Sumeragi,” said Yuri. “The Sumeragi family ruled Japan in the past and in the present, and shall continue to do so in the future. The information about my mother is not public, but as you may surmise from my hair, she is most likely a foreigner.”
“Um... is this a behind-the-scenes thing?”
Yuri had said they’d controlled Japan, but Yuichi had never heard the name before. The name suggested a connection to the emperor, but it was hard to believe Yuri could be related to the royal family.
“You may think of it that way if you like, but ever since ancient times, Japan has been ruled by anthromorphs,” Yuri said grandly.
“This is a little hard to buy...”
“Anthromorphs have heightened combat abilities, so we used to lead commoners into battle. You can safely assume that all of the powerful clans throughout history, both noble and warrior, consisted mainly of anthromorphs. Even now, the leadership of the country’s largest corporations still do.”
It was at this point that Yuichi realized that she was really talking about the worldview to which she belonged. It was the story of a world he wasn’t a part of, which he would never have known about if not for Soul Reader.
“At the moment, I am a nobody — merely one candidate to inherit the Sumeragi name.”
Yuichi was getting a bad feeling about this. All this talk of heirs and candidates smelled like a sort of trouble that he wanted no part of.
“Have you never wondered why a person of my stature should be attending a school as ordinary as Seishin High?” Yuri asked archly.
“I figured it was like Noro’s situation; they wanted it to be a part of your education or something.”
“The answer is simple,” Yuri said. “It’s because my adoptive father is an ordinary office drone. He doesn’t have the money to send me to a private school.”
“Uh? But you said you were rich, didn’t you? Didn’t you spend the first day bragging about your family’s money?” Her story was completely opaque.
She had said it, and she had that air about her. She even had a chef. It was clear she had a lot of money, so he didn’t know how to react to being told that she didn’t.
“To be more precise, it’s my real family that’s rich,” explained Yuri. “As long as I’m a potential heir, my care will be paid for, and I’m given an individual allowance and servants. However, my adoptive mother and father are not particularly wealthy, and it’s the parents’ job to pay for their child’s school expenses. So no matter how much money I have, to pay for my own schooling would be overstepping my authority.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me...” Yuichi couldn’t see how it mattered who paid, as long as they had the money, but perhaps she felt differently about it.
“I am but one of my father’s one hundred children. Said children all come from different mothers, and have been adopted out to branch families.”
“Hold it!” Yuichi finally put a stop to Yuri’s lecture.
“What?”
“Look... I really don’t need to hear about all this.”
“Why not? You’re the one who refused to date me because you didn’t know me!”
“I meant more like... I don’t know a lot about your personality, your hobbies, your interests. I’m not interested in your whole family background...” As a matter of fact, hearing about it made him extremely uncomfortable.
“But part of the reason I tried to kill Noro was because of the Sumeragi family inheri—”
Just as Yuri seemed about to embark on another litany of things h
e didn’t want to hear, Yuichi heard someone scolding them from behind.
“You two! What are you doing here?”
He turned to see a girl with dark hair, dressed in a camel-colored duffel coat, looking at them angrily. “Monster Hunter” was the label above the girl’s head. He felt like he’d seen it somewhere before.
“Um... who are you?” Yuichi asked with trepidation.
“I’m the daughter of the owner of this shrine you’re trespassing on,” she announced.
“Ah...” Yuichi froze up beneath the girl’s glare. He’d never thought anyone would approach him about that, but now that she mentioned it, of course they would.
“What is all this? Didn’t you have permission to train here?” Yuri asked, looking at him in confusion.
“Well, it is a shrine, and there’s a fairly out-of-the-way forest behind it, so I thought anyone could enter without permission...” Yuichi averted his eyes awkwardly.
“It is true that we’re a shrine, and the gate is wide open! But that’s for pilgrims only! We can’t just have people coming here for reasons other than the shrine’s intended use!”
“It doesn’t exactly qualify as trespassing, but I certainly can’t approve of using the premises here without the owner’s permission,” Yuri agreed.
“Wait, are you criticizing me too, Konishi? I thought you were on my side!”
“Why should I defend a man I’m not even dating?” she demanded.
Yuri didn’t seem to understand the concept of scoring points with someone.
“Anyway! I’d like to go somewhere we can discuss this more easily,” the unfamiliar girl said.
It would have been possible for Yuichi to run away, but he knew he really was at fault, so he did as he was told and went along with her.
✽✽✽✽✽
Yuichi and Yuri were taken not to the shrine’s main hall, but to a standalone building a short distance away.
It was a two-story, four-bedroom house, likely where the head priest lived.
Yuichi and Yuri followed the girl to the front door. She opened it, stepped inside, and urged them to follow, but Yuichi remained rooted to the spot just outside the door.
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