Strike the Blood, Vol. 6 (light novel): Return of the Alchemist
Page 18
“Yukina…,” Kanon breathed.
The girl sighed with relief when she saw Kanon was safe. “I’m glad I made it in time.”
The shikigami Yukina had given to Kanon under the guise of a charm had not been solely to protect her. It also functioned as a transmitter, informing the caster—Yukina—of Kanon’s location.
Amatsuka scratched at his forehead as he laughed roughly. “And so you interfere with me again, Sword Shaman… Oh well, it saves me the trouble of looking for you.”
A look of nervousness and fright came over Yukina’s eyes.
The metal deck swayed and melted away, and countless shadows emerged to surround Yukina and Kanon. They were all slender men wearing white coats—clones of Kou Amatsuka. Due to the unreasonable amount of division and growth, not a single one was able to maintain a perfect human form. But that only served to make them all the more frightening.
Amatsuka’s voice was triumphant. “Certainly those knives are troublesome, but I can fuse with anything I can get my hands on. You have no chance of victory, nor anywhere to run.”
She was forced to accept that he spoke the truth. They were backed into a corner of the deck with only the ocean behind them. Yukina and Kanon had nowhere to run, nor any weapon that could oppose the man.
They could yearn for rescue, but this was the middle of the sea. Surely there was no means of arriving all the way to the ship in the short time it would take Amatsuka to dispose of them.
Surely nothing so convenient existed in that world—
“Huh?!”
But the word Yukina let slip in her moment of crisis sounded dumbfounded, and oddly cute.
The corner of Yukina’s vision was displaying an unbelievable sight.
“What in the…?”
Seeing Yukina’s surprised gaze, Amatsuka looked behind him. Then he, too, saw it: a gray, flying object skimming the surface of the sea, a wake of steam trailing behind it. The weapon was pitiless, on a collision course mercilessly aimed right at the ferry—
“A cruise missile?! That’s insane?!”
By the time he’d figured it out, it was too late. Floaty, prototype aircraft of the Kingdom of Aldegia, had a cruise speed of Mach 2.8. By the time it entered visible range, it had all but already arrived.
But they were not immediately assailed by the impact they expected.
The moment they thought the cruise missile would hit them dead-on, it transformed into silvery mist, grazing just past the ferry’s hull. When the missile finally re-materialized, it slammed into the sea somewhere well-removed from the ferry, shattering into pieces and sinking. All that remained was the thick mist filling up their fields of vision—
Bathed in the powerful magical surge permeating the air, Yukina shouted: “That mist…?!” It can’t be?!”
It was no ordinary mist enveloping the ferry. A giant, non-corporeal, shelled beast floated up amid the dense fog.
This was one of the twelve Beast Vassals that served the Fourth Primogenitor. The thick, destructive fog was the creation of Natra Cinereus, the Fourth Beast Vassal, able to transform any kind of solid matter into mist.
A dull thud reached their ears as the ferry’s hull trembled like a leaf.
Then the sonic boom generated by the cruise missile assailed them a moment later.
When that impact faded away, there was a new silhouette appearing upon the deck of the ferry. The thick, silver particulate collected together and materialized into a teenage boy wearing a parka and a girl with bronzed skin in a school uniform.
The teenage boy was wobbly as he stood up, wiping the blood flowing down his forehead.
“—Ow… Aw, crap, screwed up the landing a bit…”
The girl stared at him, dumbfounded, and pronounced, “You are quite a careless man. I would be dead, ’twere I not immortal.”
“Couldn’t be helped, geez. We got spat out at thirty-four hundred kilometers per hour there. I thought we’d be pancakes.”
As Yukina stood rooted to the spot and stared, the teenage boy let out a ferocious laugh. “Well, thanks to all that, looks like we made it in time…!”
“Senpai…” Yukina seemed unable to believe the sight of Kojou Akatsuki in her wide-open eyes.
Then, wiping tears from their corners, she sprinted toward Kojou.
2
“Huh?!”
Yukina, half in tears, leaped right into Kojou’s chest.
With both hands, she was still firmly gripping the knife. The expression on Kojou’s face froze stiff when that sunk in.
“What on Earth were you thinking, senpai?! How could you do something so dangerous—!”
Yukina repeatedly slammed her fist against Kojou’s chest. The action itself was rather endearing, but her hand around the grip of a blade made the square blows quite painful.
Gbah! Kojou gasped as the air was forced out of his lungs, and he somehow managed to get ahold of Yukina’s wrist.
“Ain’t it obvious?! I came to save you and the others!!”
“I didn’t ask you to do any such thing!”
Kojou groaned as Yukina rejected his benevolence. It was a bit deflating.
“So then you put yourself in danger, too?!” she continued. “And what kind of person comes to the rescue charging in with a missile?!”
“Er… It’s not a missile, it’s apparently a prototype aircraft…technically.”
“Don’t tell me an easily disprovable lie like a little child!”
“Um, no, it ah, it really is an air—”
Yukina fiercely raised her eyebrows as she glared at Kojou. Kojou, thoroughly at a loss, looked up at the sky.
“Could you save your quarrels for later? Kanon seems quite beside herself.” From Nina’s tone of voice, her annoyance was clear as day.
Yukina gave the woman a guarded look. It wasn’t the first time they’d met, but it was the first time the two were properly exchanging words. “And this is…?”
“The great alchemist, Nina Adelard,” Kojou introduced. “She’s the proper owner, or caretaker you could say, of the Wiseman’s Blood.”
Indeed, nodded Nina, quite full of herself.
But Yukina was staring straight at the woman’s unnaturally large breasts.
“…Why does she look like Asagi? And what’s with that chest…?”
Upon hearing Yukina’s strangely sullen question, Kojou awkwardly replied, “There’s some pretty deep circumstances involved. Don’t worry about it.”
“Akatsuki!”
Kanon had let out a desperate shout.
Having recovered from the missile’s sonic boom, Amatsuka glared at Kojou and the others with a look of naked rage.
Kojou took the guitar case off his back and shoved it into Yukina’s hands. “Himeragi!”
Yukina’s eyes widened in surprise. “That case…!”
“Special delivery from Professor Kitty and Kirasaka.”
“From Master and Sayaka—?!”
As Kojou smiled back and nodded, Yukina drew her silver armament from the luggage. The blade slid out from the grip, its side blades deploying to the left and right. The spear had elongated into its familiar form.
All at once, the Amatsuka clones surrounding Kojou and the others launched their tentacle attacks en masse. The elongated strands poured in from all directions. However, Yukina no longer felt a need to be hasty. The outcome of the battle had been decided the moment Kojou had arrived with her spear.
“Snowdrift Wolf!”
As Yukina shouted its name, the silver spear emitted a pale glow. This was the radiance of the Divine Oscillation Effect, which nullified all magical energy and could rend any barrier.
With ease, she severed the metallic tentacles born from alchemy, returning them to their proper, original form—in other words, mere piles of metal.
Kojou summoned a Beast Vassal in turn:
“C’mon over, Al-Meissa Mercury!”
It was a two-headed dragon with flickering, quicksilver scales. This was th
e Dimension Eater, able to consume space from any dimension. It consumed one supposedly immutable Amatsuka clone after another, erasing them from the world.
Kojou pretended not to notice how parts of the deck were being consumed in the process. It was futile to hope for surgical control of the super-powered Beast Vassals of the Fourth Primogenitor. As long as the ship didn’t sink, it was good enough.
With all his clones soon lost, Amatsuka’s face twisted in abject humiliation. “Erg…!”
It was Nina who stepped before him. Desolately gazing down at the man she once called an apprentice, she declared in a cruel yet gentle voice: “Stop this, Kou Amatsuka. Hand over the Wiseman’s remains, now.”
Amatsuka gripped a golden skull as he let out a halting voice.
“Nina Adelard…”
Nina’s gaze fell to his chest, and the black stone embedded within. “You gradually realized it, did you not? You are a homunculus created by vestiges of the Wiseman’s Spirit Blood. He implanted your craving to ‘restore’ your humanity, but he is merely using you.”
Amatsuka glared up at Nina with bitter hatred in his eyes. “So even you…would say such a thing, Master…”
However, Nina gently accepted Amatsuka’s gaze. “It is not the body that decides whether someone is a person. It is whether you have a soul. Both I and the vampire there have lost our human bodies, yet we both struggle to live as people. There is no reason whatsoever for you to obey Wiseman.”
“Reason… My reason… To obey…”
Drained of energy, Amatsuka let the golden skull fall from his hand. It made a dull metallic echo as it rolled onto the deck, rattling.
“Ka…ka-ka…ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka…”
And then, the vibration began to emit a bizarre sound that resembled laughter.
Nina suspiciously raised an eyebrow. Amatsuka stared at the skull, completely dumbfounded.
Kojou and the others had no idea what was happening. All they sensed was the malevolent aura that accompanied the skull’s eerie laughter.
Then, they clearly heard the skull speak of its own volition:
“Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka… It is too late, Imperfect Ones.”
It was an eerie voice that seemed to be speaking directly into their minds.
“…Wiseman?!” Nina shouted, looking around the area in alarm.
Kojou kept the two-headed dragon materialized as he stepped in front of her, brushing her aside. “Nina, is that golden skull the Wiseman?! If so, I’ll—”
Just when Kojou was going to order his Beast Vassal to attack, annihilating it and the very space with it, Kojou realized: The golden skull’s open jaw was drawing in an incredible level of energy.
“—Regulus Aurum!”
Kojou summoned his Vassal on instinct. The giant lion, enveloped by lightning, materialized in front of Kojou and the others at around the same time the golden skull emitted a bright beam. It seared their vision white, and an explosion shook the entire ship.
The air distorted so fast and hard that it physically hurt; it was like being next to a lightning-bolt strike. However, Kojou and the others were unharmed. The damage to the ferry was also rather light—but only because the lightning lion had deflected the torrent of energy.
Yet, the raw power of the golden skull’s attack remained, evident from the heat and the stench of ozone fresh in the air.
“Senpai…! That’s…?!”
“The heavy metal particle cannon…?! Shit…!”
The golden skull’s attack was identical to the assault on the Itogami Island pier: a beam weapon that sucked in a vast amount of energy to spew out energized heavy metal particles. Since it wasn’t a magical attack, even Yukina’s spear couldn’t fend it off.
But fortunately, Kojou’s Regulus Aurum was a Beast Vassal that controlled vast amounts of electrical energy in its own right. The lightning lion had deflected and neutralized the particle beam with an electromagnetic field.
However, put another way, it took a Beast Vassal of the Fourth Primogenitor to block the Wiseman’s attack. It was a monster entirely worthy of the man-made “God” moniker, but…
Like an afterthought, Nina let out a murmur:
“No…”
She shot Kojou a bewildered look. “No, Kojou. That is not the Wiseman! If that is the Wiseman, then where is the Wiseman’s Blood?!”
“—Aah?!”
Kojou stared in shock at the little skull that had rolled onto the deck. It was just a skull; it was merely one piece of the Wiseman’s body. It didn’t have a single piece of the living liquid metal that constituted the body of the man-made “God.”
Yukina shifted her gaze to her own feet. “It can’t be!”
Her focus was not at the damaged hull of the ferry, but farther beneath them—
“The Wiseman targeted this ship not only because Kanon and I were on it, but because…!”
Nina let out a cry of horror. “Seawater?!”
Seeing their reactions, Kojou belatedly remembered something. He’d heard it before from somewhere: The ocean’s water had precious metals like gold and uranium in it. Some said there were hundreds of thousands or even millions of tons in total, enough to build your own artificial island either way. That was why the Wiseman had set his sights upon the sea.
The precious metals in seawater amounted to trace levels; no technology existed to efficiently extract them, so they stayed in the ocean. But if the magical creature could make use of alchemy through a large enough amount of its energy—
Hiding in the bowels of the ship, it had probably assembled a rather large amount of precious metals in just the time since the ship had left Itogami Island. The Wiseman probably had more than enough raw resources to make a complete comeback.
“Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka— O World, become part of my perfection!”
Piercing through the ferry’s hull, a gigantic mass of Wiseman’s Blood rose from within the sea. It swallowed the golden skull that had fallen upon the deck and finally took a completely humanoid form: a giant, some six or seven meters in height—
“Like hell you wiiiiill!” yelled Kojou.
He commanded his Beast Vassal to attack right when the golden giant unleashed a beam of light—
And enveloped in the incredible explosion that followed, the hull of the ferry was easily ripped into two.
3
“U…gh…”
Enveloped by soft, crimson fluid, Yukina finally regained consciousness.
Opening her eyes, she saw the raw edge of the wrecked hull alongside the blue sky. Apparently, she’d fallen into the ship from the edge and blacked out.
Debris bobbed all around, and the wrecked hull was still giving off considerable heat.
She’d only been out of it for two or three minutes since the explosion, which should have been a fairly short length of time.
And yet, the situation around her had completely changed.
About one-fourth of the ship had been torn away from the bow. The students taking shelter at the boat’s stern were likely safe for now, but the ship would inevitably sink.
Furthermore, the question of what had happened to the Wiseman tugged at her mind, as well as Kojou, who’d clashed with the creature head-on—
Yukina gasped and sat up. “Senpai—!”
Her five senses were operating normally, her body was virtually without a scratch, and she was still firmly gripping her silver spear. She’d fallen some seven or eight meters from the deck, but the crimson fluid had apparently served to cushion her fall.
Yukina was bewildered, until she realized just what the fluid was. “This is the Wiseman’s Blood…? Ah, Miss Nina?”
Likely, Nina had returned her own body to liquid metal the instant Kojou and the creature had clashed, in order to protect Yukina and the others. Yukina was safe as a result.
However, Nina made no reply to her call. That gave Yukina pause.
Also, Kanon was lying directly beside Yukina, unconscious. “Oh, Kanon?! I’m so relieved…”
But the next moment, Yukina’s relief suddenly inverted to complete despair.
“Sen…pai?”
From behind, she saw Kojou, illuminated by the sun’s rays falling on the break in the deck. He hadn’t moved a muscle since releasing his Beast Vassal. His body had stopped, frozen like that—
“Senpai?! Senpai, get it together!”
Yukina rushed to his side—only to be shocked beyond words.
What she found there wasn’t Kojou. It was a lead statue that looked like him.
She didn’t even have to think about it; what had happened was all too clear. Kou Amatsuka had attacked Kojou, whose full attention was focused on the Wiseman, transmuting him. The immortal, immutable vampire primogenitor was neutralized, frozen in time as metal.
“N-no…”
Yukina fell at Kojou’s feet.
Several times, she had witnessed Kojou suffer mortal injuries firsthand. He’d revived from those like nothing had happened, all thanks to the bizarre regenerative ability that all primogenitors possessed. Even if a primogenitor suffered grievous wounds that would instantly slay even an Old Guard vampire, he or she wouldn’t die, for that was their curse: the curse of immortality, imparted by the gods themselves—
However, Kojou’s current situation was different. He hadn’t been killed. He’d simply been changed into an inanimate object. He couldn’t move; he couldn’t think—he was simply a mass of metal.
If he wasn’t dead, he couldn’t come back to life.
It was simple, even inane logic. But the very fact it was so simple meant there was no way to escape it. Kojou would live on forever…as a metal object.
“I won’t let that—”
Yukina bit her lip as she gripped the silver spear. Perhaps Snowdrift Wolf, able to nullify magic, could save Kojou from his present state. If the Divine Oscillation Effect injured Kojou’s body, Kojou would recover from that as he had done so before. If he returned to his flesh and blood, surely he could be saved.