Right Arm of the Saint (9 page)

“Hey, Nagisa. Don’t fall asleep in a place like that. You’ll catch cold.”

As his little sister happily clutched her tummy, Kojou watched with an incredulous expression as he spoke bluntly. Nagisa waved him off with an annoyed look.

“Just for a little bit—I’m tired from today’s club practice, too—ah, Kojou?”

“Where are you going?”

“Convenience store. Gonna go drink somethin’ so I can stay awake,” Kojou replied while putting on his parka over his loungewear.

Nagisa, still facedown, raised her face, sounding like it took significant effort.

“Ahh, buy some ice cream while you’re at it, then. Same one as last time.”

“You can still eat? …You’ll get fat, right around the gut.”

“Oh, shut up. I hate it when you say that, Kojou.” Nagisa’s cheeks puffed up as she objected.

“Yeah, yeah.”

As Kojou thought,
She’s angry ’cause she knows I’m right
, he tied his shoes and opened the front door. Yukina was standing right in front of him.

“—Where do you think you’re going at a time like this, Senpai?”

“Whoa!” Kojou unwittingly cried out. Yukina’s eyes were narrowed, seemingly on guard as she gave Kojou an icy glare.

“H-Himeragi?!”

“Yes. What is it?”

Seeing Yukina tilt her head a bit as she asked, Kojou felt just a little relieved.

Yukina’s hair was still wet, with water droplets dripping from the tips. Furthermore, the only thing she’d thrown over her bare upper body was her blouse, looking quite defenseless. She didn’t have that guitar case on her back. He wondered if she’d been waiting outside the residence, watching guard the whole time, but apparently that had not been the case.

She’d probably been in the middle of taking a bath when she’d felt
Kojou heading out. No doubt she’d rushed out in a big hurry. That kind of stupidly blind dedication to her work was just the thing the all-too-serious Yukina would do.

“You don’t actually plan on coming with me? Dressed like that?” Kojou asked as he felt a light headache.

“It’s my duty to watch you,” Yukina replied with her usual deadpan tone, but even she exhibited a bit of timidity and anxiety.

Circumstances being what they were, she probably wasn’t even wearing panties under her skirt.

Kojou shook his head in dismay.

“Hey, it’s okay. Go…dry your hair and whatever. I’ll wait here till you’re done.”

“Really?”

Yukina blinked, looking a bit surprised. Kojou’s face continued to grimace.

“As if I can take a junior high schooler around looking like that?! I’ll get arrested!!”

“I—I suppose you’re right. Please come in and wait, then.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll wait here. Not like I’m gonna run away.”

Kojou hid the dejection on his face as he spoke. Any way you sliced it, being alone with a girl coming out of the bath was
bad
. It cranked the difficulty level too high for Kojou.

Yukina left him with a “Well, then,” seeming to flee as she returned to her own room.

Kojou looked up at the sky from the apartment hallway. He innocently counted the stars. After all, he had a feeling that he’d be assaulted by vampiric impulses if he visualized Yukina changing clothes instead.

Finally, the door to Yukina’s room opened once again, and Yukina came out, fully dressed this time around. She indeed had that guitar case over her back.

Maybe she doesn’t have any clothes aside from school uniforms
, Kojou suddenly thought.
I’m gonna have to take her shopping sometime soon.
While having that entirely natural thought, Kojou realized something and sank lower.

He felt like he’d brought a small, high-maintenance pet home.

“So, where are we going, Senpai?” Yukina asked, ignorant of Kojou’s inner conflict.

Kojou got in the elevator as he replied, “Convenience store. Don’t tell me you don’t know what a convenience store is?”

“Yes, I know what it is, but I’ve never gone to one in the middle of the night like this.”

Yukina spoke with a bounce in her voice, as if it contained expectation without any uneasiness mixed in. She had an expression like a girl keeping a prank secret from her parents.
Don’t expect that much from a convenience store
, Kojou thought with a strained smile.

“Sorry about earlier. You must be exhausted.”

“Eh?”

“Suppertime. Nagisa was really worked up.”

“No, that was fun. The pot of stew was delicious, too.”

Yukina smiled with what looked like a little blush.
Well, I’m glad
, Kojou thought as he smiled.

“We used to take turns cooking way back, but Nagisa’s way better at it lately, so…”

“It’s nice, being a brother and sister. I don’t have any family, so I kind of admire it.”

Yukina conveyed that with a casual tone.

“Don’t have a family?”

Kojou looked at the side of Yukina’s face in surprise. “No,” replied Yukina, shaking her head without showing any real sentiment.

“Everyone at High God Forest is an orphan. The organization gathers children with potential together from all over the country and raises them to become Counter-Demon Attack Mages.”

“That so…?”

Yukina’s unexpectedly weighty personal history left Kojou at a loss for words.

“Then you were raised from the start to be an Attack Mage…?”

“Yes. Er, but it’s not that I was lonely from not having family, or anything like that. All the staff at High God Forest are very kind; I didn’t mind the Sword Shaman training, either.”

Yukina amended herself in a hurry. It didn’t feel to him that Yukina
was lying; Kojou accepted her words at face value. He figured Yukina couldn’t have learned martial arts at a high enough level to utterly dominate demons if she’d hated the training, anyway. But—

“What’s…a Sword Shaman?”

Kojou tilted his head at the unfamiliar term.

“An Attack Mage who serves High God Forest. I think it’s
supposed
to mean a shrine maiden trained in the art of the sword, though.”

Yukina spoke with an unsure look. Apparently she didn’t really understand it herself.

“Shrine maiden… Hey, Himeragi, does that mean you can do prayers and tell fortunes?”

“I can go through the motions. It’s not really my specialty, though…”

“Hmm.”

I see
, Kojou thought, somehow accepting it. Now that she mentioned it, Yukina seemed prim and proper but had the air of someone who found stiff formalities difficult.

Either way, you could call her animalistic, or rather, the type to move based on instinct and intuition. Perhaps those were the very qualities that qualified her to be a Sword Shaman to begin with.

“Senpai… You were thinking something rather rude just now, weren’t you?”

She unnerved Kojou with the timing of her question, as if she’d been looking right through his mind.

“Er, no, not at all.”

“I am a rather skilled medium, you see. It is useless to lie to me.”

“Eh…?! You really are like an animal…”

“So you were indeed thinking something like that…”

At some point during that conversation, the two of them arrived at the convenience store that was their destination.

Island South, the main residential Gigafloat where Kojou and Yukina’s apartment complex was located, did not have many people walking about at night. Even so, things were fairly lively as they approached the train station.

Fast food and coffee shops. Even manga cafés and game centers—

“Ah…”

When they passed in front of the game center, Yukina suddenly came to a halt. That drew an over-the-shoulder look from Kojou. There was no way she didn’t know what a game center was, for goodness’ sakes, but…

“Ah, sorry. It’s nothing.”

“Something about that crane game there?”

Kojou asked as he realized Yukina was fixated on a cabinet at the front of the store. Yukina tilted her head a little.

“So that’s a…crane game. It has a Nekoma-tan in it…”

“Nekoma-tan? That mascot plushie thingie?”

“Yes. Er… It was really popular at my old school.”

Yukina made a small nod. It was a two-headed cat mascot waving a paw like a beckoning cat.

It featured a tail split in two, which probably accounted for the name. Yukina tried to speak like it wasn’t anything special to her, but she looked at the mascot in the glass case with shining, glittering eyes.

“Well, we can nab it if it’s just that.”

A slightly strained smile came over Kojou as he took out a five-hundred-yen piece. Yukina looked up at Kojou with a surprised expression.

“What do you mean by
nab
? You can’t mean…”

“No, no. I don’t mean that in the sense of stealing; I mean, that’s what the machine’s for.”

This said, Kojou inserted the coin into the game machine. As Kojou used button controls to make the crane’s arm move, Yukina grasped the general idea, too. She gave the movements of the arm a much more serious look than when she’d fought those demons.

Since he’d been with Nagisa when she’d made plenty of high-handed requests, Kojou’s skill with crane games was pretty decent. With precision, he placed the arm where it could easily grab, targeted the individual plushie, and lowered the crane.

Yukina held her breath as she watched the arm’s unfaltering aim as it gripped the mascot, pulling it up and carrying to the drop box. Finally, the pseudo-beckoning cat mascot plushie dropped into the box. That moment…

“—You two there. You’re Saikai Academy students, aren’t you? What are you doing here at this hour?”

When Kojou and Yukina heard the calm voice coming from behind, they froze as if zapped by electricity.

Geh.
Kojou sucked in his breath as he saw the silhouette reflected by the game machine’s glass.

There stood Natsuki Minamiya. He didn’t need to get a good look at her face; no one else on the Island of Everlasting Summer was crazy enough to wear something as stifling as a frilled dress. The parasol she held raised was out of place at night, but it seemed she was in the middle of making the rounds to give students proper guidance.

“You there, the boy. I think I’ve seen you before. Pull your hood down and turn toward me.”

Natsuki spoke with a tone that somehow sounded amused. She seemed intent on cornering Kojou bit by bit, as if strangling his neck with silk lace.

When he glanced at Yukina, she was paralyzed with a pale look on her face. Having been raised to take being an honor student for granted, this situation was probably hitting her pretty hard.

This is bad
, thought Kojou with a cold sweat.

It was already approaching midnight. Even if it was a game machine at the head of the store,
We were playing at a game center
wasn’t any excuse. This was totally against school regulations.
And
he had a middle schooler with him.

“What’s wrong? If you’re going to be stubborn about turning around, I have ways to make you comply—”

It happened right after Natsuki spoke with a tone like she was toying with her prey.

Thump.
A low vibration rocked the entire man-made island. A moment later, the sound of an explosion thundered.

“What the—?!”

Natsuki, also an Attack Mage, turned around in reaction to a strange presence.

Sounds of explosions continued to roar without end. No simple accident or natural phenomenon could account for this.

Someone was engaging in deliberate destruction. That was also conveyed
by the fierce wave of magical energy that even normal people were able to sense. The moment Natsuki’s attention was fully drawn away by that…

“Himeragi, run!”

Kojou instantly grabbed Yukina’s hand and broke into a run.

“Eh, ah… Right!”

Understanding Kojou’s intent, Yukina gripped his hand back.

“Ah, wait, you two—”

Natsuki yelled something at their backs, but both Yukina and Kojou possessed athletic ability incomparable to that of a normal person’s. Kojou sensed a flash from Yukina, destroying the barrier Natsuki instantly stretched before them. Natsuki, taken completely off guard, no longer had any means with which to follow.

We made it
, thought Kojou with relief. That moment…

“I’ll remember this, Kojou Akatsuki!”

Natsuki’s words, like those of a recurring villain, echoed throughout the night.

However, her voice vanished as the intermittent sounds of huge explosions continued once more.

Kojou’s expression twisted as they ran. It wasn’t that Natsuki’s words bothered him. It was that he realized the true nature of the strange explosions occurring within the city.

This was a mass of sentient, overwhelmingly strong magical power running wild. An incarnation of destruction.

And a being all too close to Kojou Akatsuki’s current existence—

A vampire’s Beast Vassal.

“Senpai… Those explosions…”

Having continued to run all the way to the Gigafloat’s cliffs, Yukina finally came to a stop. Her breathing was largely regular, but her cheeks had a slight redness to them—perhaps because she’d realized she was still holding Kojou’s hand.

But she did not pull her hand back. From her posture, she seemed concerned Kojou would pull himself out of her grasp.

“Yeah. That was a Beast Vassal. Plus with that magic energy… The master’s probably pretty up there.”

Kojou spoke as his face continued to grimace. The next moment, a huge explosion erupted once more.

In the sky above the Gigafloat, a fireball several meters in diameter appeared; a sudden gust assaulted them a moment later. It was like a nighttime storm when white waves crashed against the artificial ground, making it creak and shake.

Bathed in exploding flames, they saw a jet-black bird-phantom rise up.

Kojou only saw it for an instant, but that was enough to know for certain: It was indeed a summoned beast born from dense magical energy. A vampire’s Beast Vassal.

It wasn’t a little one like the one Yukina had fought a few days before. Based on its having enough destructive power to shake the whole island, no doubt it was the familiar of someone from the Elder Days, with a name even wise men and nobles dared not speak.