The Amphisbaena (16 page)

However, La Folia quietly shook her head.

“They are after my body…of the Aldegian royal bloodline.”

“…Bloodline?”

“Yes. Girls born to the Aldegian royal family are, with virtually no exceptions, powerful spiritual mediums.”

“Spiritual mediums…like shrine maidens?” Kojou glanced at Yukina as he said the words.

Yukina, discovered by the Lion King Agency, was no doubt a powerful spiritual medium as well. Indeed, with a front row seat, Kojou was well aware of the strength of her Spirit Sight and divine possession abilities. But even Yukina hadn’t had someone show up to try and snatch her. That being the case, Kojou couldn’t even fathom how great La Folia’s ability as a spiritual medium had to be.

La Folia continued, seemingly in response to Kojou’s doubts.

“…Kensei Kanase, who is employed by Magus Craft, was once the court sorcerous engineer at the Aldegian royal palace. Many of the magical secrets known to him require the spiritual strength of the Aldegian royal family. That is no doubt why they underwent the risk of attempting to capture me.”

“Kensei Kanase… You mean Kanon Kanase’s father?”

Kojou drew in his breath at the unexpected mention of his name.

La Folia looked back at Kojou, her expression never wavering.

“That man is not Kanon Kanase’s real father.”

“I know that. Kanase told us she lived in an abbey when she was little, after all.”

Kojou made a heavy sigh and turned squarely toward the princess. He glared straight into her pale blue eyes.

“…What’s your relationship to Kanon Kanase? Why do you look so much alike?”

“We look alike, you say? I have heard that Japanese people have difficulty distinguishing between foreign faces.”

La Folia blinked her eyes as she replied with a question. She didn’t really look like she was dodging the issue on purpose.

“This ain’t no passing resemblance! You look
way
too close to each other!” Kojou shouted without trying to as he drew close to the princess.

La Folia gazed at Kojou in silence. Rather than trying to hide something, it was a silence one made while hesitating to speak to another about a secret of grave import.

“Kanon Kanase’s father…is my grandfather.”

“…Grandfather? Your granddad?”

Kojou parroted the word back to her while unable to fully grasp its meaning.
La Folia’s granddad, meaning, what, the last king of Aldegia?

“Kanon Kanase is a child my grandfather had with a Japanese woman living in Aldegia fifteen years ago.”

“…Huh?”

“Of course, this meant he was unfaithful to my grandmother…who reigned as queen at the time. Kanon Kanase’s mother returned to Japan right after giving birth to not cause my grandfather difficulties. Learning this after the fact, my grandfather built for her…”

“…The abbey Kanase was raised in…you mean?”

Yukina finished La Folia’s sentence. Perhaps she’d sensed it was something like that from the moment she’d encountered the foreign princess who greatly resembled Kanon.

Kojou thought back to the abbey standing in a deserted corner of the park.

La Folia had said the abbey had been built for the benefit of Kanon’s mother.

If that was so, her mother had to have lived there with her.

In other words, Kanon might well have been living with her biological
mother. Even if she’d never declared herself such, Kanon’s mother might have been watching over her daughter from nearby…but…

“Wait a minute. Your grandfather’s the last king of Aldegia, right?! If he’s her father, then Kanon Kanase’s…”

“It would make her my aunt, yes.”

All La Folia’s answer did was plunge Kojou into deeper confusion. Based on appearance, the princess was probably seventeen or eighteen years old. She was clearly older than Kanon. But from Kanon’s perspective, La Folia was apparently her niece. At any rate, the two were quite close blood relatives. In other words…

“She possesses no right of succession, but she is most certainly a member of the royal family.”

“R-royal family…?”

“Several days ago, a minister and trusted confidante learned of Kanon Kanase’s existence from my grandfather’s will. My grandfather fled and my grandmother flew into a ram… Ahem, the royal court is in a slight state of uproar. However, we cannot simply let the matter of Kanon be.”

The princess made what was for her a rare, frail-sounding sigh.

Kojou silently gazed up at the before dawn sky. Kanon was the daughter of a king of a foreign country. The scale of it was so huge that it didn’t feel real to him. That was why he felt oddly calm.

“So that’s why you were heading to Itogami City?”

“Yes. I had planned to welcome Kanon Kanase to the family in place of my grandfather.”

La Folia made a casual nod. Kojou remembered the phone call from a few nights before.

“Come to think of it, Kirasaka mentioned some kind of trouble with a VIP from Aldegia. Guess she meant you?”

“Sayaka Kirasaka of the Lion King Agency, yes? Your mistress?”

La Folia looked at Kojou with a look that straddled the line between inquisitiveness and mischievousness.

“…Mistress?”

“I heard that she is one of the lovers of the Fourth Primogenitor and that your relationship is one of intense, obscene passion.”

“Gwuh!” went Kojou, ferociously clearing his throat. From beside him, he could feel Yukina’s frigid gaze pricking his skin.

“…Like hell she is! Who’s spreading an irresponsible rumor like that?!”

“Dimitrie Vattler, a nobleman of the Warlord’s Empire.”

The princess readily divulged her source, though it was not a name he’d expected to hear.

“Aaah, why that…! And how the hell do you know him, anyway?!”

“Diplomatic relations. Aldegia shares a national border with part of his territory.”

“Ugh…”

Kojou couldn’t even say a word. Now that she mentions it, that frivolous, annoying combat maniac is a— He realized that the names of the two lands—the kingdom of Aldegia and the duchy of Aldeal of the Warlord’s Empire—were a bit similar, too.

“You said that the spells Kensei Kanase employs require the power of the Aldegian royal family?” Yukina asked in place of Kojou, who had not yet recovered from the shock.

La Folia, too, had a serious expression as she nodded.

“I know that there was an incident at the abbey where Kanon Kanase was being raised five years ago. I wonder if perhaps the young Kanon Kanase’s spiritual medium abilities, of which she was unaware, ran wild? Then, perhaps Kensei came to realize that she was of the Aldegian royal family as a result of that incident.”

“So that’s why he adopted Kanase as his own daughter. He wanted to use her for his magic ritual.”

Kojou murmured with a bitter expression on his face. His worst fears about the relationship between the Kanase father and daughter had been confirmed.

“…Do you know what kind of magic ritual Kensei is performing, Kojou?”

In La Folia’s question, Kojou heard a grave reverberation that hadn’t been there before.

Overwhelmed by her dignified presence, Kojou’s expression hardened as well.

“When we saw her, Kanase had…changed into something like a monster and was killing her own kind.”

“Is that so? So Kensei is indeed moving forward with Faux-Angel.”

“…Faux-Angel?”

Kojou raised his eyebrows at the ominous sound of the unfamiliar word.

“A magic ritual Kensei was researching. The objective is to force an artificial spiritual evolution so that a human being is reborn as a higher form of existence.”

“
That
was Kanase in a spiritually evolved state…?”

Kojou seemed in a daze as he widened his eyes and made a weak shake of his head. The sight of Kanon, her mismatched, ugly wings spread, tearing out the throat of her comrade with her own teeth, wouldn’t leave his mind. Who would ever believe that could be a spiritually evolved state, let alone some kind of angel…?

“…!”

In the midst of the awkward silence as Kojou and La Folia stared at each other, Yukina suddenly stood up. With a smooth, sliding sound, she deployed the blades of the silver spear she gripped.

“Yukina?”

“A hovercraft,” Yukina informed Kojou and La Folia as they turned in surprise. She was looking at a black ship in a corner of the horizon, kicking up sea spray as it advanced. It was identical to the amphibious landing ship that Kojou had destroyed.

“That hovercraft… More Automata?” Kojou felt acute annoyance as he groaned.

Mechanized soldiers came to assault them several times over, but the result never changed. Kojou’s Beast Vassal destroyed them with extreme prejudice.

La Folia’s lifepod came equipped with a distress signal transmitter. She apparently hadn’t used it until now for fear of Magus Craft picking up the signal, but now that she’d joined up with Kojou and Yukina, they no longer had any such concerns. No doubt a search and rescue force had been dispatched to nearby waters to look for the princess; if they transmitted a distress call, the force would probably pick it up and come running right away.

That was why they could destroy the unmanned Magus Craft boat, useless to them even if they took it over, without a shred of restraint. With that thought, Kojou began to summon his Beast Vassal. But…

“No, that’s…”

Yukina spoke, as if to stop Kojou before he did so.

As Kojou looked where she was pointing, he understood why there was indecision mixed in with her voice.

There was a familiar silhouette standing on the deck of the unstylish hovercraft.

There was a tall, beautiful woman and a man who seemed a little too thin somehow. Beatrice and Kirishima.

Kojou got a light headache as he realized what Kirishima was waving at them: a large, plain cloth. It was a white flag indicating a cease-fire.

By a quirk of fate, Beatrice and Kirishima’s landing craft was coming alongside the same inlet that the Automata had landed from but a few short hours before.

No doubt they picked the place that Kojou’s Beast Vassal had scorched simply because its flat terrain, with bare basalt rock showing, was suitable for landing a hovercraft on.

The first to disembark was Beatrice. She was wearing a red leather bodysuit that only accentuated the voluptuous lines of her flesh.

A man came onto land behind her, dressed in black clothing that made him resemble a clergyman.

The last, Kirishima, popped his face out from the deck as he carried a stupidly huge flagpole.

“Hi, lovebirds. You look like you’re in good shape. Did you kiss and make up…?”

“…Lowe Kirishima. …You’ve got some balls, crawling back here…”

He furiously waved his white flag as Kojou glared at him with bloodlust-filled eyes.

“Hold on a sec. I told you, if you’re gonna hate someone, hate
her
. I’m just an errand boy here!”

Beatrice listlessly flicked her hair back as her subordinate pushed all the responsibility onto her.

Her display of alluring, corrupt sensuality made Kojou forget all about the complaints he was about to air.

Yukina glared at Kojou with eyes that somehow seemed reproachful. Then…

“It has been some time, Kensei Kanase.”

Defenseless as she walked forward, La Folia spoke as she looked at the man in black clothing.

Kensei Kanase reverentially brought a hand to his own chest.

“It would seem you are in good humor, Your Highness… It has been seven years, I believe? You have become very beautiful indeed.”

“You have quite some nerve to say that after using my blood relative as the offering for your ritual,” La Folia replied with a frosty tone. However, Kensei’s expression did not change.

“I must object, Your Highness. I have treated Kanon with the utmost reverence. Surely, you of all people understand why I must utilize a girl who is like a daughter to me.”

“So you must remake this girl into something inhuman, in spite of her being like a daughter to you?”

A tinge of scorn was mixed into La Folia’s tone.

“No, I would say, it is
because
she is like a daughter to me that I must.”

The silver-haired princess made a sigh as she listened to Kensei’s unapologetic words.

“Kensei. Where is Kanon Kanase?”

“We prepared seven Faux-Angel samples. Of these, Kanon defeated three by herself, obtaining for herself their spiritual nodes and those of the ones who were defeated along the way. Combined with the seven spiritual nodes people are born with, that makes thirteen. By linking them together, they become thirty. That is the minimum number for human beings to raise their spiritual consciousness to the next level.”

Kensei relayed his words in a polite tone. Certainly, his unfaltering manner of speech and tenor was worthy of a former palace magical engineer. Listening to his explanatory monologue, Yukina suddenly went pale.

“That can’t mean…?!”

“Yukina?”

“You made Kanase slaughter her own kind…for
this
?! How dare you…!”

The look in Yukina’s wide-open eyes registered fear, shock, and anger toward Kensei. It was rare for her to express strong emotions toward other people like this. Even if Kojou couldn’t understand Kensei’s explanation himself, Yukina’s reaction was more than enough to shake him.

“The Faux-Angel ritual is a practical application of spiritual infusion. The candidates are made to fight and consume the others’ spiritual nodes, absorbing them into one’s own flesh. By absorbing them, I mean in a spiritual sense… And thus, an optimal body is produced from the survivor,” La Folia explained for the sake of the befuddled Kojou.

“Spiritual nodes are also called chakras. In other words, circuits of energy for the spiritual energy from which miracles are wrought,” Kensei continued where she left off.

“All humans are born with an equal number, but precious few can make use of them. Even first-rate spiritualists consider utilizing thirty percent of that potential to be a praiseworthy feat. A man who becomes enlightened enough to employ them all shall wield power equal to Buddha himself.”

Kensei smiled as an expression resembling sad resignation came over him.