“Oh my, just look at you. Not even a shadow of yourself, Witch of the Void—ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Kojou called out to him with a bewildered look.
“Uh…Vattler…?”
Hostility, he expected, but laughter was way outside what he’d been prepared for. Kojou really had no idea how to deal with the guy at that moment.
Vattler wiped tears from the corners of his eyes as he asked, “From the looks of it, you’re wounded, Kojou. Can you really protect her in that state?”
He looked like he was still holding back a few more chuckles.
“What are you tryin’ to say?” Kojou growled.
Absolutely, Kojou was wounded at that moment, unable to fully employ the power of the Fourth Primogenitor. Put bluntly, he didn’t feel safe even fighting the surviving escapees.
However, the Island Guard’s main strike force was already flat on its back. Even if it was beyond him, Kojou had to try.
As if seeing right through Kojou, Vattler stated with a buoyant tone:
“I shall grant her the use of my ship.”
“…Huh?”
“Of course, you can come with her. I’m sure it’ll be more fun that way.”
Vattler’s unexpected suggestion left Kojou at a loss for words.
But he immediately divined Vattler’s true intent. After all, the prison barrier escapees were after Natsuki’s life. Sparing Natsuki meant that they’d come running all on their own.
To Vattler, a man who craved battle with mighty opponents, you couldn’t ask for a better situation.
“If the escapees are coming for her, they will most certainly attack. If it’s here in the city, civilians might become collateral damage. It’s much safer my way, don’t you think?”
“So you’re sayin’ you’ll protect Natsuki…huh?”
Kojou bit his lip and sank into thought. It wasn’t as if he intended to trust Vattler, but he felt that it wasn’t a bad deal, strings attached notwithstanding.
Surely even the jailbreakers wouldn’t be able to challenge a Warlord’s Empire noble so lightly. That’d buy them time to find a way to get Natsuki’s memories back.
The problem was, if the escapees really did take Vattler on, it was entirely possible Itogami Island would suffer massive damage next time, but even so—
Kojou sighed.
“…Got it. You have a deal.”
It wasn’t like he had any other choice in the matter. In the worst case, Kojou would be right by Natsuki’s side; that way, some way to deal with the situation ought to present itself.
Vattler narrowed his eyes, delighted, and gave a satisfied nod. He looked something like a middle school boy who’d succeeded in inviting his unrequited love to visit his house.
Maybe I spoke too soon, thought Kojou in anguish as he felt a chill run up his spine.
“Hah?! Wait, where do you get off deciding that, Kojou?! And how the hell do you know a Warlord’s Empire noble, anyway?!”
With Asagi’s hostility backing him into a corner, Kojou desperately tried to paper things over.
“There’s a lot of circumstances involved. I’ll explain it all in detail later, so please, just—”
Asagi heaved a great sigh, as if exasperated to the depths of her soul.
“And do you really think I’m gonna just let this go?”
Kojou slumped his shoulders.
“…Guess not.”
In the first place, Kojou had never thought he could pull the wool over Asagi’s eyes forever; her intuition was too good. Maybe this was when the jig would be up.
Maybe this was the right time to tell her that he’d become a vampire. To tell her that he’d become the Fourth Primogenitor. And to tell her that what was to come was no place for a normal human being like her, and thereby blow her off. No biggie. No biggie at all.
But if it meant keeping her safe, even if it meant losing her as a friend as the price—
But before Kojou could say any of that, Asagi pointed at him and declared with great fanfare, “Fine, then, I’ll put Sana in your care under one condition.”
Kojou had a very bad feeling about this.
“…Condition?”
Asagi bared her teeth as she hugged Sana to her. “If you’re going, I’m going with you.”
What?!
Kojou looked to the sky in despair. Vattler started laughing again.
The night wore on. The Hollow Eve Festival, the celebration of monster encountering man, continued on.
CHAPTER THREE
THE OCEANUS GRAVE II
1
A strange feeling assailed him the instant he set foot in the building.
The world changed color as if he were hallucinating. The air dried out, feeling rough against his skin. It was unpleasant, but to him, the atmosphere was somehow nostalgic, too.
Saikai Private Academy High School was rare among educational institutions in the Demon Sanctuary, for the campus did not have any special facilities for demonic research. It was a normal, mundane high school. Even so, there was a strange presence swirling on the school grounds.
Here deep at night, the campus held no sign of the students; emergency lamps and the light of the moon dimly lit the various corridors.
The empty classrooms had densely packed characters written on the blackboards. These were spells, written in magic symbols from a foreign land. They were verses from an ancient grimoire.
The countless symbols written chokingly close gave off a pale, golden light as they emitted a surge of powerful magical energy. They formed a gateway through which power entered from another world.
The young man smiled faintly, charmingly, as he muttered to no one in particular.
“…The Black Bible…”
His glasses added to the air of education and intelligence. There was a gray manacle on his left forearm with a short, severed chain dangling from it. He was one of the seven escapees from the prison barrier. He was the man Schtola D had addressed as Meiga.
The young man’s quiet footsteps echoed as he walked up the stairs; his feet only halted when silhouettes that had fallen in the corridor piqued his interest.
They were the corpses of sorcerers, cut by a giant sword.
The fallen possessed jeweled daggers, wands, and grimoires—all magical weapons possessing substantial power. However, there was no longer any glow of magical power from them; they had been turned into useless junk.
The bizarre atmosphere filling the school grounds had robbed them of their enchantments.
“Are these LCO sorcerers?” the young man asked as he turned toward the center of the room.
Hearing his voice, a young woman wearing a black-and-white ceremonial robe turned around.
It was Aya Tokoyogi, the Witch of the Notaria…
She was gripping a short piece of chalk in her hand, which she had been using to copy a verse from a grimoire onto the blackboard behind her. The characters were painfully small.
Enigmatically, Aya took in the young man, asking thoughtfully, “…An escapee from the prison ward…yes? You are the one called Meiga?”
“I am a mere Attack Mage dropout. My name is not very important.”
As the young man smiled sociably at her, the smile Aya returned was tinged with a bloodlust-filled glare.
“…Quite the words for someone who entered my world unscathed.”
The young man let Aya’s hostile gaze roll off him as he raised his left arm before his eyes.
“What happened to your manacle, Aya Tokoyogi?”
“…What are you referring to?”
“If you have stolen Natsuki Minamiya’s memories, surely the key to the prison barrier—the program to decode it—came included. Even though Natsuki Minamiya escaped, you did not pursue her…because you didn’t need to, did you?”
The young man spoke as he looked at the witch’s left arm. Hidden under the sleeve of her ceremonial robe, her wrist did not have a manacle on it as it should have. Aya Tokoyogi was already comple
tely free of the prison barrier.
However, she hadn’t informed the other prisoners that she had the key in her possession. Thanks to that, the other jailbreakers—with the exception of the young man—were pursuing Natsuki Minamiya that very moment. She’d used Natsuki as a decoy.
However, even having this pointed out only earned a mocking laugh from Aya.
“And what of it? Have you come to be handed a sliver of the decoding program, Hell Wolf?”
The young man sighed and shook his head. It seemed he did not like the odd moniker.
“…No. I already have some idea of how to remove this, you see.”
Suspicion crept over Aya’s face. “Then why are you here?”
“I simply wanted to see for myself.”
“…See?”
“Yes, what in the world you have been doing while we escapees are being distracted by Natsuki Minamiya.”
This said, the young man stepped lightly upon the jeweled dagger that had fallen before him. The dagger, which ought to have been imbued with a powerful enchantment, broke apart with ease, sounding almost like a twig being snapped.
“So this is the power of the Black Bible?”
“Correct,” Aya said with a nod, her gaze drifting to the chalk she was holding.
“The Black Bible itself has already been lost. Natsuki Minamiya burned the book… What is written here is merely the knowledge of sorcery that existed in her memories.”
An amused note escaped the young man’s throat.
“So you stole her memories so that you could recreate the Black Bible like this…? I see, that is why you are called the Witch of the Notaria…”
He smiled as he looked over the text on the chalkboard.
The books of power known as grimoires were collections of sorcery-related knowledge and spells that had taken on a life of their own and become powerful magic themselves. These magical devices, in book form, granted power beyond human comprehension to the reader at the cost of courting great disaster.
Aya’s special ability, and why she was called the Witch of the Notaria, was to copy these grimoires. What she wrote were not simple copies of the text; she completely recreated the magical power and dark spells of the original tome she worked from.
And she had brought the Black Bible, the most abominable of all grimoires, back to life from Natsuki Minamiya’s memories. Each character Aya wrote on the blackboards around the room became part of a new grimoire, emitting vast magical energy in their own right. No doubt normal human beings would no longer be able to look directly at the blackboards, even if they could touch them; the entire Saikai Academy campus had been turned into a new Black Bible.
Aya glared at the young man. “Do you intend to interfere as well?”
Behind her, the air wavered as a shadowy knight encased in black armor floated up. It drew its giant sword and thrust the tip forward until it was right before the young man’s eyes.
Her conversation partner calmly grabbed the tip of the sword pointed at him with his bare hand.
“No, I merely find your experiment to be unexpectedly valuable.”
As he finished speaking, the black knight’s form warped, as if it was turning blurry.
The young man had done nothing more than give it a light touch. That was enough to warp the very being of the witch’s Guardian. Aya scowled in annoyance as she pulled the black knight back.
“I see. You…you are the Lion King Agency’s…”
Aya’s black gaze narrowed as she looked at the face that the young man hid behind his glasses.
The youth turned his back on the witch, leaving himself defenseless. And then he walked straight out of the classroom.
“I pray for the success of your experiment, Aya Tokoyogi. May you find the festival a pleasant one…”
Those words were all the young man left behind as he entered the darkness and vanished.
Left behind, Aya crushed the chalk she’d been gripping in a fit of pique. She used the white dust left on her fingers to write symbols on the blackboard—the final characters that made the Black Bible complete.
Having been made whole, the Black Bible activated.
Her world began to encroach upon the world beyond.
The berobed witch let out a piercing laugh, as if she was a harbinger of death itself.
The people of the Demon Sanctuary had not realized that their destruction had begun at that very moment…
2
The ship was moored in the calm waters of the expansive wharf known as Island East.
Even among the many large ships docked at Itogami Island, this was an extravagant vessel that stole glances from everyone.
It was a private ocean cruise liner—a megayacht with tonnage rivaling a military destroyer.
Standing still inside the ship and feeling distinctly uncomfortable, Kojou Akatsuki gripped his cell phone.
It was Yukina on the other end.
“Ah? The Oceanus Grave II…you say?”
Having lost contact with Kojou when he went to save Asagi, Yukina called him out of concern, from a phone booth near Keystone Gate.
And when Kojou relayed to her his current location, there was an unconcealed echo of anger mixed in.
“You mean, the Duke of Ardeal’s megayacht? What are you doing there, senpai?”
“Well, it kinda…ended up this way.”
The displeasure in Yukina’s voice only grew.
“Excuse me?”
Apparently, signs of combat with the jailbreakers were still fresh all around Keystone Gate, which was where she and Sayaka currently were. Even over the phone, Kojou could clearly hear the sirens of ambulances carrying injured guardsmen, various people shrieking, and officers yelling orders for onlookers to disperse.
No doubt Yukina and Sayaka had both been furiously trying to find Kojou and the rest.
Small wonder Yukina was upset when Kojou and the others turned out to be leisurely spending time on an extravagant cruise ship; though, from Kojou’s point of view, being with Vattler was more than enough to keep his heart far from peaceful.
Sayaka apparently grabbed the receiver from Yukina and butted into the conversation.
“Kojou Akatsuki, do you even understand what you’ve done? The Duke of Ardeal’s ship has diplomatic immunity so Yukina and I can’t set one foot on it! Why did you bring the Witch of the Void to a place like that? Are you a moron? Do you want to be turned to ash?!”
Kojou found himself scowling at the upbraiding.
“I couldn’t help it! That nut ball wants to use Natsuki as a decoy to draw the convicts out. The way it was goin’, I thought it was a hell of a lot safer if they throw down over the water rather than in the middle of the city.”
“Well, I suppose you do have a point there, but…”
Sayaka grudgingly agreed, though marked dissatisfaction remained in her tone.
Apparently, she’d tentatively accepted that there was a decent amount of logic backing Kojou’s judgment for once.
There were still a number of escaped prisoners after Natsuki. If they fought Vattler in the middle of the city, Kojou couldn’t even dream of how much damage would be inflicted around them. That being the case, surely the damage would be minimized if they tangled over the water instead.
He heard Yukina’s voice from the phone once more.
“So Aiba and Ms. Minamiya are both all right?”
Well, sorta? replied Kojou in his mind, a bad taste in his mouth.
“Um, they don’t look too beat up to me,” he continued aloud. “I’m not sure I can really describe how Natsuki is right now as all right, though…”
Yukina sighed weakly. “I suppose not…”
She had seen for herself on TV that Natsuki had been turned into a preschooler.
“I think that…it’s best if you at least send Aiba back to her own residence. After all, if she stays there, she’ll be wrapped up in fighting for certain.”
“I agree with you one hundred percent about that
,” Kojou muttered bitterly. “But she just ain’t listenin’ to me. She’s more stubborn than she looks. She’s totally fallen for Sana, too…”
Yukina fell into a silent, dubious pause.
“Sana…you say?”
“Her nickname for ‘Small Natsuki.’”
“Ahhh…” Yukina exhaled, seemingly ready to fully accept that for some reason. But her tone of voice immediately turned to unease. “Anyway, Sayaka and I will get as close to you as possible. Please do not create even more difficulties.”
“Whaddaya mean…difficulties?”
“Like, ah…getting vampiric urges in front of Aiba and assaulting her…”
“Like hell I will! There’s a little girl watchin’!”
“I certainly hope that will stay the case.”
Yukina seemed worried down to her final word as she cut off the call. Kojou stuffed his cell phone back in his pocket and leaned against a nearby wall, exhausted. And then…
“Who were you calling?” Asagi asked.
“Uwaa?!”
Kojou blurted out a shout as he turned toward Asagi and Sana, having never realized they were standing right there.
“A-Asagi?! Weren’t you changin’ clothes? Vattler said the maids would give you somethin’ to wear?” Kojou rambled, a desperate attempt to change the subject.
Asagi and Sana were still in the ripped, dirtied clothes from when the jailbreakers had assaulted them.
Ah, this? Asagi seemed to say, as she lifted up the sleeve of her muddy shirt.
“They said they’re preparing a bath.” She shrugged.
“Bath?”
“They said there’s a big bath here on the ship. Vattler sure doesn’t do half measures. That’s a lord for you… He’s seriously loaded.”
Asagi spoke with visible admiration as she looked around the showy interior of the ship.
“I suppose he is,” Kojou agreed. He kept forgetting, due to the guy’s personality, but he was a nobleman from the Warlord’s Empire—a lord of high standing. He’d normally be wined and dined as a guest of the state.
Asagi drew close to Kojou and peered up at him as she asked, “So, Kojou, why do you know someone like that?”
Fiesta for the Observers Page 11
