“What’s your relationship with Kojou Akatsuki?”
Asagi and Sayaka glared at each other, both pairs of lips pressed tight in annoyance.
Both were putting a lot of force into it, as if the first one to look away would drop dead on the spot; the tension inside the cramped booth spiked higher. Perhaps he simply couldn’t take the dense atmosphere when…
“Now, now, now…,” Yaze interjected with a witty tone of voice. “We can all have a nice, peaceful talk about that when Kojou and Yukina are back safe and sound… Right now, though, that bastard and Yukina are off together on a deserted island… It might create a, well, you know, an Adam and Eve type of situation.”
Yaze’s irresponsible declaration gave both Asagi and Sayaka a start, their eyebrows twitching.
“…Yes. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Certainly, it is as you say, Motoki Yaze.”
The two exhaled simultaneously; seeing this, Yaze sighed quietly in relief.
Sayaka stepped out of the booth with a sway of her long ponytail. Without warning, she picked up the instrument case standing against the wall.
“You’ve been a big help. You have my thanks, Asagi Aiba.”
“You’re quite welcome. More importantly, could you tell me just one last thing?”
“…Yes, if it’s something I can reply to.”
Sayaka reacted to Asagi’s provocative gaze with a nod. Beholding Sayaka’s forthright attitude, a satisfied smile came over Asagi’s face.
“Why are you looking into Kanon Kanase, Kirasaka?”
With a bit of hesitation, Sayaka told her the truth after all. “That’s…
There’s someone who wants to meet her. Escorting that person is my proper assignment.”
There was virtually no doubt that Kojou and Yukina had visited Magus Craft for the purpose of meeting Kanon Kanase.
If that was the case, Asagi Aiba was not a complete bystander. She had a right to know the truth.
“…Escort?”
“Yes. But the person went missing while en route to Itogami Island.”
Sayaka gripped her instrument case, sounding mortified as she murmured.
She
had disappeared before ever setting foot on Itogami Island. It wasn’t Sayaka’s fault whatsoever. However, she still cursed the fact that she hadn’t been able to protect the person she was assigned to protect.
“So the reason you came here is…”
“Because I thought looking into Kanon Kanase might give me a lead into the disappearance of my assignment. Thanks to that, now I know Magus Craft is my leading suspect.”
“I see.”
Asagi nodded, though her expression showed a lack of comprehension. Then, she immediately formed the question on her lips.
“So who is the person you’re assigned to protect, anyway?”
“That’s…”
After a moment’s hesitation, Sayaka told her.
It was a name that brought expressions of shock not only to the plugged-in Yaze, but to the ordinary civilian Asagi as well.
“…Can’t sleep.”
Spread atop the hard palm branch bed, Kojou absentmindedly looked up at the dark sky.
He didn’t know the exact time, but it probably wasn’t quite eight
PM
yet. This wasn’t a time for any modern high school student to be asleep; that went double for a nocturnal vampire.
There was no sign of Yukina in the pillbox-turned-lair. She was outside on watch duty.
Yukina had insisted that they needed to take turns keeping watch, even at night, so as not to miss any ships that might pass nearby; Kojou had not made any objection. He also imagined that both sleeping together under one roof like this might make things a bit uncomfortable. But thinking about it rationally in hindsight, he could only peg it as wasted effort.
“…Yeah, we watched all day and didn’t see one ship go by, so what, one’s gonna pass now?”
Kojou slowly got up as he made a languid exhale.
He realized that his throat was getting dry and thought,
I’ll check up on Yukina and go drink some water
.
“Hey…Himeragi…are you awake?”
Kojou fumbled his way down the stairs and went out of the pillbox as he called Yukina’s name.
However, Yukina did not answer. There was only the hollow echo of Kojou’s voice in the darkness.
He couldn’t see any sign of her toward the cliff, either.
Snowdrift Wolf, which she always walked around with, was missing, too.
“Himeragi…?”
Yukina’s unexpected absence struck Kojou with an instinctive loneliness.
But as he looked around, he of course knew it was possible she’d simply gone to the little girls’ room.
But Yukina’s strangely obstinate insistence that he go to sleep first while she took watch at night bothered him as he thought about it now. He felt that she was plainly up to something.
“…”
The vague unease inside Kojou’s chest grew wider still.
Yukina had said that she knew a variety of spells but that they weren’t exactly her specialty.
But that didn’t mean she was completely unable to use them. If that was the case, it might have meant she had some method of long-distance contact, like spiritual resonance or astral projection.
And if danger accompanied the employment of such spells…
Well, she’d keep quiet and do it herself so that Kojou couldn’t stop
her. Given her personality, that’s exactly what she would do. If it ended up that Kojou was just overthinking it, he was cool with that. But Kojou couldn’t think of any other reason for her to be absent.
“That Himeragi…! If you’re my watcher, watch over me till the bitter end, dammit!”
As he voiced his unfocused dissatisfaction, Kojou left the pillbox behind and headed toward the forest.
The light of the young moon was unreliable; the forest interior was thick with darkness. But if anything, Kojou’s eyes brought the landscape into sharper relief than under the light of day.
To think vampire powers that are normally just a bother would be useful at a time like this
, Kojou thought ruefully.
“Where to?”
Relying on intuition alone, Kojou headed to the center of the island. Tripping over the gnarled roots of the various trees several times, he made his way up the gentle slope when his field of vision suddenly opened wide.
There lay a spring enveloped by the trees of the forest and mist.
The water seemed to be welling up from a cavity in the rock created by a caldera. Countless stone pillars jutted out of the surface of the extremely clear water, creating a beautiful, otherworldly scene.
Suddenly, he heard a watery sound in the distance.
Kojou, shifting his gaze on reflex, sucked in his breath as he stood.
Illuminated by the moonlight, there was a woman in the spring.
For a moment, her slender, fairylike body made him mistake her for Yukina. But it was not her.
Her hair was silver; her eyes pale. Her silhouette was well removed from a Japanese person’s. A beautiful girl, she looked like a goddess of the moon.
The saintly bathing woman, her body immersed in the cold water, silently stood up.
Clear droplets of water ran down, drawing supple lines over her pale flesh.
“Kanase…” Kojou murmured the word out from his lips without thinking.
The girl in the middle of the spring resembled Kanon Kanase a very great deal. But no.
This girl’s aura was decidedly different than that Kanon’s. She was a little taller than Kanon and her facial features more adult.
She possessed a majesty reinforced with absolute confidence, enveloping her in an overpowering aura, even while playing in the water without a stitch of clothing.
Indeed, without a stitch of clothing whatsoever…
“Wa… At a time like this! Shit… Gimme a break!”
Kojou suddenly made a low groan as he covered his own mouth.
He felt his canine teeth throb and a dry sensation in his throat. His field of vision contracted and became tinged with red as he became filled with wild, violent desire. These were vampiric urges, the worst drawback of Kojou’s physical transformation into a vampire.
The silver-haired girl lifted her face, perhaps from hearing Kojou’s anguished voice.
Her pale, resolute eyes looked straight ahead at Kojou.
—Their eyes met.
A moment after Kojou had that feeling, the taste of blood swirling in his mouth brought an odd sense of relief to him.
Vampiric urges did not continue for long. The gist was, since it was love of blood and nothing more, the taste of blood made the urge vanish like it had never been there—even if the blood was his.
“…”
Kojou shook his head with annoyance as he wiped away the still-trickling blood.
His nose bled when he got aroused. It was a convenient quirk for suppressing vampiric urges, but it certainly wasn’t elegant. People who didn’t know the circumstances viewing Kojou at that moment would conclude he was just a clumsy pervert who had a nosebleed while peeking at a woman while she was bathing.
The silver-haired girl had already vanished. He regretted the fact he could not apologize to her.
Then, as Kojou raised his head, he suddenly felt something cool and metallic touch the nape of his neck.
“…Please do not move.”
It was Yukina’s voice that he heard behind him. Her voice was without
inflection, reminiscent of a blade. Kojou realized that it was the tip of her silver spear that was pressed to his own carotid artery.
“H…Himeragi?!”
“I told you, please do not move. If you look back, I’ll thrust. After all, you’ll come back to life even if I kill you…,” Yukina informed him in a tone too serious to be a bluff. Kojou knew neither when she’d gotten behind him, nor why she was this angry.
“Hime…ragi? Er, what are you doing here?”
“That’s my line. I thought I asked you to sleep ahead of me, senpai.”
Yukina sighed as she reflected the question back at him. He sensed that the slightest sway of her hair sent water droplets tumbling down.
Why is she dripping wet?
Kojou thought, wrapped in suspicion.
“Er, I tried to sleep, but…when I came to, you weren’t there, so I got worried…”
“So you came to peek, then?”
“N…no!”
“I-I really will be angry if you turn around right now!”
Kojou felt the pressure of the blade increase against his neck as Yukina spoke with a flustered tone. He pondered as to the reason her hair might be wet and why she’d be so unsettled.
Come to think of it, getting that seawater in her hair seemed to really bother her
, he recalled.
“Wa… Um, Himeragi, does that mean you were taking a bath, too…?”
As Kojou timidly asked the question, Yukina’s hands, gripping her spear, twitched and trembled.
The nighttime mist around the spring had been heavy, and the stone pillars and boulders jutting out of the water created numerous blind spots. It would have been very easy for Kojou to have missed the sight of Yukina bathing.
“If that’s what it was, you could’ve told me in the first pl—”
“Since it’s you, I thought if I told you that, you would come to peek. Just like you actually did.”
Yukina spoke in a tone full of confidence. “The heck,” went Kojou, quite naturally offended. There’s no way I’d come to peek on someone like you!”
“…
Someone like me
…is it? Is that so?”
Yukina spoke in a very frigid voice. Kojou no longer had the slightest idea what the girl was angry about. Yukina sighed a silent
goodness
, and then, as if suddenly getting a bad feeling… “…So who was it that you peeked on, senpai?”
“I was saying, there was a girl who looked like Kanase right there… Wait, it’s not like I peeked on her! We just happened to meet eyes, that’s it!”
Yukina sighed as she gently let Kojou’s rebuttal slide.
“Kanase, you say?”
“Well, she was bigger than Kanase, though… Ah, er, by bigger, I mean…development-wise… I don’t mean like
that
, I mean, you know, age…”
Kojou felt Yukina’s cold gaze on him as he struggled to begin some kind of excuse.
“A grown-up Kanase, is it? Bigger…?”
“Er, I’m just telling it like it is, you don’t need to get all upset…”
“I’m not particularly upset.”
Yukina pressed and ground the spear against him as she spoke in a voice very much full of anger.
“R-right.”
“So, where is this lady right now?”
“Ah, er, she was here until right before you got here, but…”
As Kojou spoke, he shifted his gaze to the opposite wall of the spring. But all that stood there was the calm, mirrorlike surface of the pool.
“…seems she’s gone.”
“So it would seem.”
Yukina spoke in a calm voice.
Kojou groaned as he stared at the mist-enveloped spring. There was no trace whatsoever of anyone having ever been there. Kojou felt like even he should start wondering if it had only been an illusion.
“Senpai… Can I borrow that parka from you?”
“Ahh, I don’t really mind, but…”
Thus speaking, Kojou handed the parka he wore behind him to Yukina. He sensed the faint sounds of clothes rustling and fasteners snapping.
“You can turn this way now.”
The weight of the spear upon the back of Kojou’s neck finally vanished.
The sudden sense of relief drained Kojou’s strength as he looked back. With the dark nighttime forest as her backdrop, Yukina gripped her spear as she stood in the moonlight. Her supple, bare legs stretched down from the hem of the white, baggy parka. It seemed that she really wasn’t wearing anything at all under the parka.
Kojou was unintentionally staring when Yukina thrust the spear toward him once more.
“P-please do not stare. My uniform is not dry yet, so it cannot be helped. It’s all because you drenched me with seawater, senpai…”
“Y-yeah. I’m really sorry about that.”
Seeing Kojou earnestly apologize, Yukina replied, “It’s fine now,” and made a sigh.
Then, still barefoot, she began to walk along the edge of the spring.
“Himeragi?”
“There is a trail suggesting someone passed here. Let’s follow.”
“You believe what I said earlier?” Kojou asked in a bit of surprise. Yukina looked back at him, seeming surprised Kojou would think otherwise.