From the Warlord's Empire (22 page)

“If we look around, we should be able to find an inspection ladder at least.”

As he spoke, Kojou looked around the area as he walked to a suitable place.

“H-hold on, you’re not thinking of leaving me?”

Sayaka, who seemed about to be left behind, hurried after Kojou.

“Ah!”

That moment, her legs went out from under her. Climbing up a pile of unevenly shaped debris, the seesawing angles made Sayaka lose her balance and tumble.

“Wh-whoa?!”

Luckily, Kojou was right there, reflexively catching her back as she fell faceup. He raised his eyebrows as his palms conveyed the presence of something quite ample and flexible.

“…Hya?!”

As Kojou ended up generously squeezing Sayaka’s breasts, she let out a very girlie yelp.

Realizing the true nature of what he was grasping, Kojou quickly pulled both hands away.

Thanks to the summer sweater, he hadn’t noticed, but Sayaka was apparently the well-endowed type. In spite of being so slender, the volume of her breasts was incredible.

“Er, sorry.”

Kojou felt awkward as he apologized. Sayaka pressed her hands over her own breasts while glaring up at Kojou.

“What are you apologizing for? Did you do it on purpose? So you indeed have foul, evil intentions?”

“I do not. It’s not that, but…Himeragi told me about it on the phone earlier.”

Sayaka tilted her head with a puzzled look.

“Yukina? What did she…?”

“The reason you hate men.”

Kojou looked down at his own feet as he spoke, lowering his voice.

The look on Sayaka’s face stiffened, becoming like that of a doll.

“Sorry. I didn’t know you’re
scared
of men touching you.”

Yukina hadn’t explained the fine details, but Kojou had a pretty good idea of the circumstances.

As a child born with excellent spiritual ability, she was frequently treated badly by her parents. Sayaka’s one and only father was apparently the type of man who routinely used violence against her. When her father died before Sayaka entered primary school, the Lion King Agency took her in.

However, the fear she felt toward her father at such a young age still remained in her heart in the form of a general hatred of men. Kojou didn’t want to offer some kind of cheap sympathy, but he didn’t think Sayaka could be faulted for it.

Even though it was an emergency situation, Kojou reflected on the fact he’d picked her up, pinned her down, and insensitively touched her quite a bit all around.

For a while, Sayaka gazed at Kojou, an astonished look on her face.

Then, she suddenly grabbed hold of Kojou’s lips, roughly twisting upward. Kojou, unable to brush her hand off, objected without offering any resistance.

“What are you doing?! That hurts!”

“I wonder why Yukina talked to you about that…”

Sayaka spoke as if she was posing the question to herself. His lips still being twisted, Kojou shrugged his shoulders.

“She lectured me not to do anything that’d scare you. She was worried about you.”

“It’s not that I’m scared of it, it’s more like, it’s disgusting? Gross?”

“That’s even worse. Normally that’d put me down.”

Forcefully shaking his head, Kojou finally freed his lips from her grasp. Sayaka watched his red, swollen lips with a smile. It was a gentle, smiling face with no hostility whatsoever.

“You really are a strange vampire.”

Sayaka gently touched the back of Kojou’s hand with the fingertips of her freed-up right hand.

She increased the strength of her grip, as if carefully confirming something.

Kojou watched her with bewilderment, having no idea whatsoever what she was up to.

But he somehow understood that for Sayaka, touching a boy of her own volition was very much an act of courage.

“Is that wound from before all right?”

Sayaka looked at Kojou’s leg with a worried look. The leg wounded when he’d shielded Sayaka.

Kojou lightly flexed his knee up and down. Some pain still remained, but he’d regained almost all sensation.

“It’s healed enough I can walk on it at least?”

“I see, that’s good… Um…th-thank you for saving me.”

As if blushing, Sayaka lowered her face as she spoke. Kojou’s heart made a heavy thump and blood rushed through his arteries at her cherubic, white cheeks, the refined bridge of her nose, and her long emphasized eyelashes.

“Cold?!”

“Wh-why?! I was finally nice to you and everything…!”

Sayaka’s cheeks fiercely swelled at Kojou’s completely unexpected reaction.

Kojou shook his head as he put a hand to his back.

“No, it’s not you… There’s something cold against my back…”

That moment, a delicate cry of “Hya!” came out from Sayaka’s mouth.

When she pressed on her uniform’s shoulder, it had somehow become thoroughly drenched. Water was falling like rain from all over the sub-float’s framework.

“What’s this? Seawater?!”

“Shit…this float’s goin’ all to hell!”

No matter how stoutly constructed a sub-float, Vattler’s Beast Vassal recklessly severing it, the Nalakuvera’s rampant laser fire, and the finishing blow with Regulus Aurum, had apparently exceeded its limits. Kojou and Sayaka simply hadn’t noticed how water was already leaking in from all quarters.

“This isn’t the time for complaints! We have to find a way back to shore and fast!”

Sayaka coolly pointed out the situation. The water wasn’t leaking in
especially strongly, but if the seals of the anti-flooding bulkhead were to rupture, escape would become far more difficult. It didn’t feel very good being dripping wet and holed up in a place like this.

“So how ’bout we walk along one of the walls like when you’re lost in a maze?”

“Anything’s good as long as it’s fast!”

As they traded silly banter, Kojou and Sayaka began to walk forward.

That moment, the thin darkness beneath the sub-float was bathed in a dazzling, crimson light.

The beam slashed apart the darkness in every direction, indiscriminately slicing its way through the sub-float’s framework. It was the large-caliber laser of the Nalakuvera.

A mountain of debris came crashing down with a roar.

Within, the ancient weapon emerged, surrounded by a pale white light. The shapes had been slightly altered, but the armor and legs that were surely destroyed had been repaired.

“No way?! Why’s it moving after we damaged it that much…?!”

“It can’t be transmutation?! It merged with the sub-float’s building materials to regenerate! It doesn’t seem to have regained its flight, but…”

The ancient weapon had fused with the debris all around it to repair the damage it had sustained.

Its two feelers pointed above its head, it had no doubt concluded it could not escape by going up.

The Nalakuvera inclined the barrel of its large-caliber laser toward its own feet.

The outer wall of a sub-float extended thirty meters underwater. The incandescent beam blasted through the steel-alloyed wall, dozens of centimeters thick, in an instant, opening a huge hole.

Seawater accelerated by water pressure gushed high like a geyser. It suddenly became a muddy stream advancing on Kojou and Sayaka’s feet.

“Shit…seriously?!”

The Nalakuvera escaped through the hole of its own making. However, neither Kojou nor Sayaka had any time to worry about that. Thanks to that laser attack, fierce flooding had begun all over the sub-float.

Hand in hand, the two made a run for it. They were entirely drenched in seawater from head to toe.

Asagi continued deciphering the command codes in the room with a refrigerator-like chill. The smooth way she tapped the keyboard looked less like a programmer and more like a well-trained pianist.

Blowing white breaths, Asagi used the chat mike to call her “partner” across the network.

“Mogwai, no need for more morphological analysis. Apply ER algorithms, reassess all preliminary parameters, execute speculative process based on zeta distribution, and after that, begin step-by-step data comparison.”

“You’re as hard a taskmaster as always, young lady. The system bus is at its upper limits. Any more than this and it will interfere with Itogami Island environmental maintenance.”

It was a mechanical composite voice that responded to Asagi’s call. It was the voice of the five supercomputers that held all of Itogami Island’s urban functions in its grasp. Asagi had dubbed the AI “Mogwai.”

Judging that using the single Souverän Nine inside the ship would take too much time, she’d used the network to call Mogwai and enlist the brain of Itogami Island itself to decipher the command codes.

“Keep it up even if the buffers all go to hell. We’re settling this in under fifteen minutes.”

“
Ku-ku-ku
…feels good to have you back to your old self.”

“Oh, shut up,” Asagi said, a fierce smile coming over her face. “I finally get the rules of this puzzle. They keep calling it a weapon of the gods, right? This is why the linguists all threw in the towel. They never imagined a language that doesn’t need logic or thought processes.”

Logic was unnecessary. In other words, the Nalakuvera did not assess the situation. After all, it was a weapon that existed solely to destroy. The ancient weapons did not think for themselves any more than a gun or a bomb.

When something for it to destroy was found, the Nalakuvera destroyed it, and that was that. It was the same fundamental logic of a god—
“Let there be light,” and light appeared
—the words of gods that fundamentally differed from men.

“But if you understand how it’s put together, it’s just obsolete architecture like any other.”

Having finished debugging the analysis program, Asagi let out a “hmph” through her nose.

There were fifty-two stone tablets containing the Nalakuvera’s command codes in total. The analysis would be complete in fifteen minutes. That meant the fearsome ancient weapon would come under the complete control of terrorists. But now that the Nalakuvera was active, this was the only way it could be stopped.

Since the Black Death Emperor Front wasn’t a pack of fools, they were surely monitoring Asagi’s work from somewhere.

In the current situation, with Nagisa, Yukina, and Itogami Island itself taken hostage, there was no point slowing her work down or trying to pull a fast one.

But it wasn’t Asagi Aiba’s style to just let herself be bossed around like this…

“What should I do now, I wonder…?” Asagi murmured while subconsciously stroking her earring.

How would she get back at a bunch that had deigned to make her work
for free
?

As a bloodcurdling look came over Asagi’s face, Yukina quietly slipped out of the room, leaving her behind.

Yukina didn’t really know what Asagi was doing. However, her unsurpassed genius was obvious, even to Yukina’s untrained eyes. Asagi’s sense and insight about programming was not really a product of a logical thought process; it was closer to Yukina and Sayaka’s Spirit Sight or even divine possession.

To her surprise, had Asagi been raised by the Lion King Agency, she might already be a Sword Shaman surpassing even Yukina. She, too, was very much a resident of the Demon Sanctuary.

“…Why?”

Against her expectations, there were no guards keeping watch outside the girls’ room.

Yukina had slipped out of the room because she’d had suspicions about that.

Even on a ship with nowhere to run, it felt a little too careless, not something one would expect from the highly trained Black Death Emperor Front. As she pondered such doubts, Yukina headed down a corridor along the ship’s side. But she just couldn’t make out guards anywhere.

The
Oceanus Grave
was so quiet that it almost seemed like a ghost ship.

She realized that one of the
Oceanus Grave
’s lifeboats was being lowered onto the surface of the sea. The ship’s crew and Black Death Emperor Front noncombat personnel were boarding the lifeboat one after another. No doubt that was the reason why there were no soldiers standing guard.

“…Why evacuate noncombatants at a time like this?”

Yukina was perplexed, but of course no answer came to mind. Right now the
Oceanus Grave
was in no special danger. She saw no reason why they should abandon ship on the verge of seizing the Nalakuvera, creating a decisively favorable situation for them.

If there was any kind of danger, it wasn’t from outside the ship…

“It can’t be…?!”

Following her Sword Shaman instincts, Yukina sprinted. Her destination was not up to the bridge, but down, toward the cargo bay at the bottom of the ship. Though the
Oceanus Grave
was a cruise ship, it also had a stern gate like a freighter. In other words, it was capable of transporting a huge amount of cargo.

As if to confirm Yukina’s expectations, the corridor that continued to the cargo bay had armed Black Death Emperor Front troops standing guard: two beast men armed with automatic pistols.

She had no time to hesitate. Yukina leaped down the corridor, sprinting with all her strength to close the distance with the soldiers. As she expected, the soldiers were unprepared for this, their reactions dulled.

Yukina soared in midair before they could aim their guns.

“…Crouching Thunder!”

She delivered a ferocious roundhouse kick to the temple of one of the soldiers as he turned.

Though beast men had exceptional endurance, their anatomy was identical to that of human beings. If you rattled the brain around, you could inflict a slight concussion, especially if you did it before they bestialized.

“Raw Lightning!”

Crouching to use the unconscious soldier as a shield, she continued with a thrust to the solar plexus of the other soldier, releasing the ritual energy inside her body in the process. The stout beast-man soldier fainted in pain from the single blow.

Yukina turned toward the cargo bay, not even glancing at the fallen soldiers. She pushed open the heavy metallic door, her eyes widening in shock at the sight.

“This is…”

The vast cargo bay contained densely packed, thickly armored weapons. Each had six legs, two feelers, and a crimson, glowing laser-gun eye.