Right Arm of the Saint (3 page)

Itogami City was an artificial city built precisely for this purpose.

The majority of the island’s residents were either those very demons, researchers, or those with special powers recognized by the city.

The demons that were the object of research were of course included as well. The demonic races cooperating with the management of the special district were in turn accorded residential rights, the same as human beings, and were permitted to study, work, and live their lives.

Itogami City was a model city of communal existence between demonic races and mankind—

Or, perhaps, a giant, caged laboratory.

“—Crap, wish they’d at least do something about the heat.”

Kojou cursed as he wore the hood of his parka low over his eyes, resisting the rays of the sun with all his might.

On this hot, humid island, the body felt the heat more than the thermometer level indicated. In a certain sense, the wind heated by the midsummer ocean’s surface was harder to deal with than hot desert winds. Never mind vampires being weak in the sun—this was a pretty harsh environment even for regular humans.

Kojou’s home was about fifteen minutes away from the family restaurant by monorail. However, the small change in Kojou’s wallet meant he had no choice but to hoof it. Bathed in the setting sun, feeling like his skin was going to burn to a crisp, he walked along the seaside shopping mall.

And, checking behind him with a casual motion, he made an unamused snort.

“I’m being followed…aren’t I?”

A lone girl was walking about fifty meters behind Kojou. It was the girl with the bass guitar case over her shoulder that he’d seen when he left the family restaurant.

The girl was wearing, as Asagi did, a Saiga Academy girl’s uniform. That she had a ribbon around her neck instead of a necktie marked her as a junior high school student.

He couldn’t place the face. While she was pretty, she gave off an aura like that of a stray cat unused to having people around her. Perhaps she wasn’t used to the short skirt, but her movements threatened to leave her dangerously unguarded from time to time.

The girl was maintaining a constant distance from Kojou, walking at a pace that matched his own. When Kojou stopped, she stopped, too, hiding behind a roadside tree. All the same, she showed no sign of coming to speak to him.

She was clearly tailing him. Furthermore, she had apparently not meant for Kojou to notice.

“…A friend of Nagisa’s maybe?”

Kojou weighed various possibilities and came up with a conclusion.

Akatsuki Nagisa, Kojou’s younger sister by one year, was a Saiga Academy student as well. A junior high school student he’d never seen before taking an interest in him was likeliest to have some relation to his little sister.

But he had no idea why she didn’t just talk to him if that was the case. Tailing someone under this burning sun couldn’t be a fun thing to do.

No, to be frank, there was indeed
one
other reason why someone Kojou didn’t know might be following him around. He just didn’t want to think about the possibility.

“Guess I’d better check, at least…”

This said, Kojou entered a shopping mall he’d noticed. His destination was a video game arcade near the entrance to the mall. He didn’t know
why the girl with the guitar case was following him, but Kojou was wondering what she’d do if he went into a store.

And as it turned out, the girl was clearly thrown off. She forgot about hiding herself and stopped right outside the store, seemingly having lost her way.

She didn’t want to lose Kojou, but if she did go into the shop herself, the odds of coming face-to-face with him were fairly high. That was no good, either. She was caught between two conflicting interests.

No, more accurately, it was simpler than that; this strange and unfamiliar place called an “arcade” had her on her guard. That’s what it looked like.

The sight of the girl standing all alone in front of a beat-up shopping mall at sunset gave Kojou a vaguely miserable feeling. As he observed her from the other side of a crane game cabinet, Kojou was assaulted by guilt, as if he’d horribly wronged her.

“…”

Making a long sigh, Kojou reluctantly went back out on the street. It wasn’t like he could remain in hiding forever, so he figured he’d try talking to her instead.

But, unfortunately, it seemed that the guitar case girl had thought of the same thing herself.

The instant Kojou tried to go outside, the girl entered the shop with a determined look on her face, encountering him right at the entrance.

For a few moments, their gazes met without a word between them. Somehow the guitar case girl was the one to react first.

“F…Fourth Primogenitor!”

As the girl shouted in a nervous voice, she adopted a stance with a lower center of gravity.

Up close she still looked like a pretty girl, but that only made Kojou feel even more dejected.

With that one utterance just now, he knew very well the reason why she’d been following him. She was searching for the vampire known as the Fourth Primogenitor. She didn’t seem to be a demon after the life of a Primogenitor, or some kind of bounty hunter, but there was no doubt she was a troublesome opponent. No one sane was part of a group that would address Kojou as “Fourth Primogenitor.”

For only a moment, Kojou silently pondered what in the world to do.

“Oh! Mi dispiace! Auguri!”

And suddenly he spread both his arms in an exaggerated gesture.

As Kojou recited foreign words he barely remembered, the guitar case girl looked up at him, dumbfounded.

“Huh?”

“I am…an Italian passing through. I do not…know Japanese very well.
Ciao! Arrivederci! Grazie! Grazie!
”

Yelling such things rapid-fire, Kojou quickly made his escape. He slipped past the side of the dumbstruck girl and left the store. A moment later…

“Wha…?! Wait, Kojou Akatsuki!”

Suddenly regaining her senses, the girl called out Kojou’s name loud and clear.

Annoyed, Kojou looked over his shoulder with a grimace. He’d inherited the title of
the world’s mightiest vampire
a mere three months prior. Since he’d worked hard to conceal it, only a very small number of people knew of the fact.

At the very least, here in Itogami City, only a single person besides Kojou himself should have known that Kojou Akatsuki was the Fourth Primogenitor.

“Who the hell are you?”

Kojou glared at the girl to display his wariness.

The girl returned Kojou’s gaze with serious eyes, replying with a hard, somewhat grown-up voice.

“I’m a Sword Shaman of the Lion King Agency. By the command of the Three Saints of the Lion King Agency, I have come on assignment to watch over the Fourth Primogenitor.”

Ha
, thought Kojou, listening to the girl’s words with a stale face. He had no idea what the girl was saying. Lion King Agency. Sword Shaman. He’d never heard of those terms before.

The only thing conveyed was that his premonition that this was trouble had been exceedingly prescient.

Utterly perplexed as to how to deal with this, Kojou finally decided to act like he hadn’t heard any of it.

“Ah… Sorry. You’ve got the wrong guy. Go try someone else.”

“Eh? Wrong guy? Eh…?”

The girl’s gaze wandered about, looking confused. Kojou had just made up the wrong-guy thing on the fly, but she seemed to have actually bought it.

Perhaps she just had an unusually frank personality.

As Kojou seized the opportunity, turning his back to her and running off, the girl hurriedly called out to him.

“W-wait, please! I don’t really have the wrong guy, do I?!”

“No, keeping watch and stuff, that’s got nothing to do with me. I’m busy, so…!”

Kojou made a sloppy wave as he left the place in a rush.

The girl with the guitar case on her back stood in place where she was, a dumbfounded, bewildered expression still on her face. Whether his assertion of mistaken identity had done the trick or not, she seemed to have given up on tailing him. Even so, he still had no idea what she really was, so the matter remained fundamentally unresolved, but that was still better than being sucked into something troublesome on the day before a make-up exam.

Arriving around the entrance to the shopping mall, he looked back one more time to make sure the girl wasn’t following him. The scene that greeted his eyes startled him.

Two guys he didn’t know were standing together in front of the guitar case girl from earlier, obstructing her path.

They looked twenty years old, give or take. They had long, extravagantly dyed hair and gigolo-style black suits that didn’t suit them all that well. They seemed to be frivolous, easy-to-understand men.

“…Hey, you there, baby. What’s wrong? Guy-hunting didn’t work out?”

“If you’re bored, how ’bout you come play with us? We just got paid, so we’re loaded…”

He heard bits and pieces of the men’s voices over the wind. They seemed to be hitting on the girl he’d distanced himself from.

The girl brushed the men off with a cold attitude, but that only seemed to make the atmosphere stormier. One of the men yelled at her in a rough voice; Kojou saw the girl talk back with a sharp expression.

“…Little old to be layin’ a finger on a junior high schooler, aren’t you, geezers?”

Color faded from Kojou’s face. He knew he should let things be, but the girl knew of the existence of the Fourth Primogenitor and had been following him around. If by some chance this got out of hand and became a law enforcement matter, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t lead straight to Kojou.

And Kojou had another reason for concern: the metal bracelets around both men’s wrists. Those were Demon IDs, with biosensors, magic sensors, and transmitters, etc., inside them. Those who wore them were not human. They were special registered citizens of the Demon Sanctuary. In other words, inhuman. “Freaks”—that’s what they were sometimes called.

It wasn’t often that bracelet-wearing registered demons caused harm to human beings. If they did, the Island Guard’s Counter-Demon Agents came after them in force. Therefore, the girl was in no immediate danger.

The problem was, it was possible the fact that he was the Fourth Primogenitor might slip from the girl’s lips.

If that happened, the name Kojou Akatsuki would be on every demon’s lips in no time. And naturally, there would no doubt be those who wanted to make an ally out of Kojou, those who’d want to use him as a guinea pig, and perhaps even those who wanted to kill him to raise their notoriety. Any way you sliced it, it’d herald the end of Kojou’s days of peaceful living. He had to smooth things over here somehow before that happened.

With a deep sigh, Kojou began to run back toward the guitar case girl.

The next moment, the skirt of the girl’s uniform fluttered up.

One of the men, having flipped the girl’s skirt, spit out a reckless remark that sounded like, “Well, ain’t you all high and mighty.” Kojou unwittingly stiffened, the checkered pastel colors that had appeared filling his field of vision. Then…

“Young Thunder!”

The girl’s beautiful eyebrows raised high, she chanted a spell; the next moment, the body of the man who’d laid his hand on her skirt was blown away with enough force to flip a truck.

Probably an open palm strike
, he thought.

But whatever had actually occurred, there was no way Kojou had an accurate understanding of it. What he
did
understand was that with a single blow, the small girl’s thrusting arms had blown a grown man away.

He hadn’t felt any flow of magic. He had not sensed the work of spirits. Of the remaining possibilities, some kind of qigong or arcane art perhaps. At any rate, there was no question the girl had considerable skill.

Kojou surmised that the girl might be much older than she appeared to be, but he immediately corrected himself: No, couldn’t be. There wasn’t—
couldn’t be
—any long-lived species that would wear cute panties like that.

The man who’d been blown away seemed to be some kind of anthropomorph; in other words, a werewolf or close cousin thereof. Though he didn’t seem all that powerful, his physical strength and toughness still far surpassed that of a human being. Yet receiving a single blow from a delicate girl had sent him smashing into a wall, from which he did not move.

“This brat’s an Attack Mage—?!”

The other man had been in shock, and finally shouted once he regained his senses.

Counter-Demon Attack Mage
was a catchall term for human beings who possessed various skills, such as sorcery and spiritual power, to oppose demonkind. Be they employed by armies, police S.W.A.T. units, private security corporations, or yet other organizations, they belonged to many groups, and the skills they used came in numerous varieties, but whatever the case, there was no doubt they were the worst enemies of demonkind. No small number of Attack Mages made a living exclusively as demon hunters, much like assassins.

Of course, in the Demon Sanctuary of Itogami City, the activities of Attack Mages were as strictly regulated as those of demons. At the very least, one didn’t get attacked just for talking to a girl on the side of the road.

But, the man was surely unnerved because it had happened so suddenly.

His expression twisted by fear and anger, his true, demonic nature asserted itself. Crimson eyes. And…fangs.

“A D-type—!”

The girl’s expression turned grim. Among the various types of vampires, D-type referred to those who claimed the “Lost Warlord” as their Primogenitor, chiefly seen in Europe. They were the vampires that best fit human beings’ common perceptions about vampires.

What’ll you do?
Kojou asked himself, bewildered.

By normal thinking, you should go rescue a girl being attacked by a vampire, but it seemed that this girl was no ordinary middle schooler.

The girl had been following Kojou around, to begin with. Worst case, she was Kojou’s enemy. The chances of an Attack Mage targeting Kojou were certainly not zero.

But even so, he couldn’t just let her be.

Her opponent was no ordinary demon. He was a vampire. No matter how skilled an Attack Mage she was, he didn’t think she could defeat a vampire all by herself.

Even if this was before sunset, vampires had physical powers far surpassing common sense, and resisted magic as well. And they had incredible regenerative abilities. Moreover, they had one other, overwhelming trump card to play, suited to those called Lords of Demonkind.

“—Shakti! Take her out!” the vampire man yelled out; a moment later, something spewed forth from his left leg.

It resembled fresh blood, but it wasn’t blood at all. This was black fire, shimmering like yin and yang.

From that black fire finally emerged the distorted shape of a horse.

Its high-pitched neigh made the air shudder; the flames that enveloped it scorched the asphalt.

“To employ a Beast Vassal in the middle of a city—!” the girl shouted with an angry expression.

The bracelet the man wore on his left hand, having detected offensive magic, emitted a noisy alarm. A siren blared, urging those at the shopping mall to evacuate.

A Beast Vassal. Yes, the monster that the man had summoned was a familiar called a Beast Vassal.

The existence of Beast Vassals was the very reason Attack Mages feared vampires.

There were numerous demon races that matched vampires in brute strength, agility, and innate special powers. In spite of that, why were vampires alone feared as the Lords of Demonkind…?

The answer was Beast Vassals.

Beast Vassals came with a variety of forms and abilities. However, even the least powerful among them surpassed the combat strength of an attack helicopter or a state-of-the-art main battle tank. It was said that the Beast Vassals employed by the “Elders” were capable of blowing away entire villages.

Naturally, the Beast Vassal of the young man was not quite that capable. However, no doubt the incandescent ghost horse could do enough damage merely running around to take out an entire shopping mall.

He’d turned and set loose a dangerous summoned beast like that against a single girl.

Surely the man who was its lord had never turned a Beast Vassal on a human in the flesh outside of a laboratory setting. His expression was gripped by fear, the strain of magical feedback apparently heavy.

The Beast Vassal he’d let off the leash was in a quasi-berserk state, mowing down trees along the street and melting down metal streetlights. It was literally a mass of destructive energy with a mind of its own. Surely a single graze would turn a human being’s body to ash in an instant.

In spite of that, the girl’s face showed no sign of fear whatsoever.

“Snowdrift Wolf—!”

The girl drew something out of the guitar case still on her back.

It was no musical instrument, but a silver spear with an icy sparkle.

In an instant, the spear’s shaft slid longer, and at the same time, the main blade stored within thrust out as a spear tip. Side blades extended to the left and right of the main blade like the wings of a variable-geometry fighter plane. Its appearance was that of a weapon refined for modern times.

But there was no doubt this was a primeval thrusting weapon. He didn’t think it could oppose the Beast Vassal scattering tremendous flames all about. Indeed, he had his doubts a girl of such small size could
even swing the thing around. However, the girl’s alert eyes glared coldly at the Beast Vassal as it pressed near.

Whew.
A quiet exhale escaped the girl’s lips.

The girl easily controlled the beautiful spear’s nearly two-meter length, thrusting it toward the flaming ghost horse running amok. However, the ghost horse did not halt its charge.

A vampire’s Beast Vassal was a sentient mass of magical power so ultradense as to take physical form. In other words, it was magic itself. Once released, there was no way to stop a Beast Vassal except by smashing it with an even more powerful magical force.

For the girl to attack it would be like turning a single spear against an overflow of lava.

The man laughed because he knew as much. It was not a laugh confident of victory. It was a straightforward laugh of relief. He was simply afraid of her. Afraid of the unknown Attack Mage girl who’d blown away his pal with a single blow—

But, in a single instant, the man’s laugh of relief was drenched in fear.

“Wha…?!”

For he saw his Beast Vassal had stopped, impaled by the silver spear.

The girl had wordlessly thrust her spear in a flash. The ghost horse’s giant body warped, ripped apart, and vanished without a trace.

It had been as quick as snuffing out the flame of a candle. The form of the Beast Vassal had completely vanished. All that remained was the scorched asphalt.

“N…no way! Wiping out my Beast Vassal in one shot?!”

The man gave a much-delayed shudder at the loss of his familiar. However, the girl’s expression remained a grimace.

She glared at the man with anger-filled eyes, poised her spear, and charged his frozen, unmoving form. And, just as the silver spear was about to impale the man’s heart—

“Whoa there!”

The spear’s tip suddenly veered up, changing course.

“Huh?!”

The girl’s eyes, brimming with cold rage, widened in surprise.