You couldn’t know who was a fanatic just by looking at them, so caution would be the order of the day. Kyoya had learned that in the most painful way possible.
“By the way, why did you attack that boy?” she asked. “It seemed quite an imprudent action.”
Because he had defeated all his servants. Because he wanted to suck the blood of the girl who was with him. A number of reasons floated up in Kyoya’s mind, but he chose to keep them to himself.
“Well, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s just fine,” Eriko continued. “But be careful in the future. I hear there are some vampire hunters around.”
“I have no intention of skulking around in the shadows!” Kyoya snapped. But he also realized that indiscriminately attacking people would cause trouble in the long run. “Targeting a specific community seems like a fine enough idea, but those hoodlums seem rather hard to keep under control, don’t they?”
Kyoya had enslaved a group of gang bosses by sucking their blood, assuming that through them, he could take control of their organization. But the underlings in the abandoned hospital had kidnapped that girl on their own accord to try to suck her blood. In other words, those whose blood his generals drank — his “grandchildren” — were not under Kyoya’s control. It could be a sign of Kyoya’s own weakness, or a fixed limitation on the ability itself.
“I won’t use them anymore... but by coincidence, it did bear some fruit,” he said. “Those anthromorphs.” Some of those that Kyoya had drunk blood from had turned out to have the ability to turn into half-animal creatures, who had proved stronger than his other half-vampiric slaves.
“Oh, those. There’s something about that, too... retainers, I believe they’re called. It seems there are ghouls, witches, and werewolves. Some people have that potential inside them, but they aren’t always aware of it. I wonder how rare they are...” Eriko said as she flipped through the pages.
“They’ll be useful in my army,” Kyoya said.
“There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick them out of a crowd, so you’ll be reliant on luck, though,” Eriko commented. “So? What comes next?”
“I think I’ll take over my school first.” The school was the closest sealed environment Kyoya knew of. If he got the teachers under his control, the students would soon follow.
“Is this a side effect? It affects not just the body, but the mind, as well?” Eriko spoke mockingly.
“Effects on the mind?” Kyoya asked. “I guess there have been. But I think this is just the real me showing itself.”
Drinking blood had definitely affected his mind. He no longer had any scruples about attacking people. The ecstasy of exerting his will on others was a drug he couldn’t get enough of. More than anything, he no longer hesitated in indulging in his own desires. That was the reason he had attacked that man, too.
“The school, then... very well. Speaking of which... world domination, was it? I don’t intend to go with you that far.”
Kyoya couldn’t blame her; it must have sounded like big talk. He hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “If I can get the school in my grasp, I’m sure I can use it to some kind of end.”
“So it’s practice?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, do as you wish. Oh, that’s right. Make sure you count how many whose blood you’ve drank. It’s important to keep a handle on your slaves.” With that, Eriko stood up and left the room with a casual wave of her hand.
Now alone, Kyoya walked up to the window and gazed outside.
The forest stretched out beneath him. The forest that made up the Noro family’s land had sunk into darkness, without a single point of light to illuminate it.
In it, Kyoya visualized his own empire of darkness.
✽✽✽✽✽
It was a shrine to Susano-o Mikoto.
Mutsuko hadn’t know that when she’d chosen it for its size and proximity to their house, but she had been delighted by the coincidence.
Sharp noises rang out around the back of that shrine: the sound of Yuichi’s punches ripping through the air, over and over again.
It was four o’clock in the morning. It was still dark out. Yuichi was dressed in a track suit, going through his martial arts lessons.
The practice was simple. Strike out with the right arm while stepping forward with the right leg. Bring the arm and leg back, do the same with the left.
Repeating that motion over and over again carried him slowly forward, and after a certain distance, he turned, and did the same in the other direction.
Originally, he had practiced on the lawn at their house, but over the course of years, the stamping had beaten the ground down so hard that no grass would grow in it.
His family lived in an imported house, with a stylish design that his mother had chosen. As one might expect, then, she was quite fastidious about the appearance of the lawn and the exterior.
His usually easygoing mother had fallen into a deep sorrow when she had learned that their lawn was now barren. They had quickly worked to dig it up, change the dirt, and replenish the grass, but the normally willful Mutsuko had felt a rare sense of remorse about what she had done. Thus, they no longer trained at home.
Instead, Mutsuko went looking for large, isolated spaces nearby to run his training regimen, and they changed the location periodically to keep a repeat of that incident from happening.
Yuichi and Mutsuko were currently the only ones at the shrine. Mutsuko was in a track suit as well, sitting on a rucksack that converted into a chair and watching Yuichi’s movements.
If she saw any issues, she’d point them out, but lately she hadn’t needed to. It was mostly up to Yuichi to pay attention to how his body felt.
“Hey. Hey!” Mutsuko spoke up, clearly bored with just sitting.
“What?” Yuichi replied as his fist ripped through the air.
“I hear the shrine owner has a daughter! I wonder if she’s a miko!”
“A miko? I don’t see any reason why she would be just because she’s the owner’s daughter.” It seemed an extremely shallow thought to Yuichi.
“Oh? I think they usually hire family to be miko. Well, I guess sometimes they recruit from the employment office, too.”
“Why would anyone recruit a miko from an employment office?” Yuichi asked, focusing fervently on how little he cared.
“Maybe she’s secretly watching you practice, waiting to bring you some provisions!”
“I really hope not!” He was doing this in secret because he didn’t like people watching him. He didn’t like the thought of anyone finding him.
Yuichi looked out over the quiet forest behind the shrine. It was full of dead trees. This, too, was the result of Yuichi’s overzealous practice, a type of training where you went around striking a tree, pretending it was an opponent. Many of them had gone barren as a result.
“Ah, look, someone’s there!” Mutsuko said, pointing to the forest.
“What?” Yuichi quickly stopped training and looked in the direction Mutsuko was pointing. Someone was definitely approaching from out of the twilight forest.
Yuichi’s first instinct was to run, but he stopped as he recognized the face. “Oh, it’s just you. Don’t scare me like that.”
Indeed, it was Natsuki Takeuchi. She was wearing a skintight black leotard. It was certainly a provocative mode of dress, but to Yuichi, who knew she was a serial killer, it was equally evocative of an assassin’s garb.
“Hey, can’t you do something about that outfit?” he asked. “I know it’s probably easy to move in, but...”
Natsuki came around from time to time to join Yuichi in his training, and this was what she usually wore. It hugged her body lines so tightly that Yuichi had a hard time knowing where to look.
“What’s the big deal? She looks like Orin the Fugitive! It’s cool!” As usual, Mutsuko’s examples didn’t make things any clearer to Yuichi.
“If
it distracts you, Sakaki, then it’s all the more to my advantage,” Natsuki said. It seemed she was wearing it specifically for Yuichi’s benefit. “Now, shall we fight?” she added, cutting quickly to the chase.
“Sure, but show a little mercy, okay?”
“I can’t. I fight on killing instinct alone.” Immediately, Natsuki leaped at him, extending her fingers to aim straight for his eyes.
There was not an ounce of hesitation in her movements. She was moving so fast that if her fingers struck his eyes, they would pierce right through to his brain.
Most people would hurt themselves trying to attack the eyes like that, but Natsuki wasn’t most people.
Fortunately for Yuichi, he could see the attack coming a mile away. He brushed her arm aside with his own to throw the attack off target, then got around beside her with a diagonal step, and struck lightly with his palm at her exposed side.
Natsuki, annoyed, began a rapid flurry of attacks, but Yuichi dodged each one. He could easily predict Natsuki’s instinctive attack patterns by now, and keep her at bay even without furukami. She was far too telegraphed in her movements.
After a bit of similar back-and-forth, Natsuki collapsed on the ground. Her expression was one of perfect satisfaction, suggesting she had gotten whatever she needed from the combat.
It seemed that being able to move with killing intent was enough to sate Natsuki’s murderous urges. So as long as there was someone who could really dodge her blows, she could do without the kill itself. And right now, Yuichi was the only one who fit the bill.
“This is a pretty basic thing, but you should really stop fighting with your body lines exposed,” he told her. “It makes it really clear how your muscles are moving. You know why people wear hakama in Japanese martial arts? It’s there to mask their movements.”
“I see. You’re running your eyes all over my body, are you?” Natsuki, on the ground, hugged herself as if to hide her chest. It was a bit of a theatrical gesture.
“Hey, don’t put it that way. You said it yourself: you can’t fight someone if you don’t look at them. It’s communication, right?” Yuichi decided to lay off the advice, though. He really didn’t want her to get any better at fighting.
It was Friday after class, six days after Yuichi’s shopping trip with Aiko. He came to the survival club room to find the usual members already assembled.
“Okay! Regarding our subject from last week, the summer training camp... Any new thoughts?” Mutsuko proclaimed in her usual bold tones, standing in front of the whiteboard.
Their provision that money was no object hadn’t given Yuichi any new ideas. While he remained silent, Aiko raised her hand and gave the first suggestion.
“Um, we have a summer house near the beach. Could we go there?” Aiko turned to face Yuichi. “It’s okay if it’s just using a summer house, right?”
He figured she was asking him because he was the one who had objected to using her family’s money for the trip.
“If it’s something you already have, I guess it’s okay to use it,” he said. It still felt like relying on her family’s wealth, but it was different from just having her pay for everything.
“I like it!” Mutsuko said gaily. “Going to a wealthy friend’s summer house is such a trope!”
Yuichi had no idea what sort of trope she was talking about.
Mutsuko wrote “Noro’s summer house” on the whiteboard, which still contained the other suggestions from last time.
“The Unmarked Land,” Natsuki whispered. Another strange location. “A region outside the jurisdiction of Japanese law. A city of inhuman monsters, where you must keep your wits about you at all times.”
“You can do that one without me!” Yuichi objected forcefully. There was no way he was going to a place like that.
“Is this different from the junkyard you mentioned before?” Mutsuko asked with intense curiosity.
“The Unmarked Land is out in the Pacific Ocean. It’s pretty far away, so it might be hard to get there. You might need to charter a helicopter.”
“I see. So we’d need the money for that, huh?” Mutsuko nodded and wrote “the Unmarked Land” on the whiteboard. “What about you, Orihara? Have you found us a way to get to an isekai?”
“What? Are we seriously discussing the isekai thing?” Yuichi asked Mutsuko, just to be sure. The idea of offering up an isekai for a training camp discussion just seemed bizarre.
“We spend a lot of time talking about isekai, so we really should visit one sometime!” she said cheerfully.
“You make it sound as easy as visiting a public bath!” Yuichi was growing more and more uneasy. He was starting to believe they really did exist.
“Um, what about the Mayoiga?” Kanako asked.
The Mayoiga — in other words, the House of the Lost — was a legendary house hidden in the mountains that was said to appear before lost travelers and bring them riches. You could never visit it twice, so some people thought it existed in an isekai. That must be why Kanako was bringing it up.
“I get it! That’s like an isekai! The Tono area, then?” Mutsuko fell easily into the idea.
Yuichi had a bad feeling about this. Tono was a region in northern Japan with a strong tie to folklore. It seemed a likely place for oni, as well as kappa, tengu, zashiki-warashi, and other forms of mischief.
“Well, I think that’s enough candidates,” Mutsuko said. “We have until summer vacation to decide. So if anyone has any more ideas, let me know!”
The candidates for their training camp filled Yuichi with nothing but anxiety.
“Setting that aside, I think it’s time we started up our normal activities.” As she spoke, Mutsuko wrote on the whiteboard: “Isekai Survival Discussion 4: Psychological Resistance to Killing in an Isekai War.”
It was part of a series.
The second discussion had been “A Developmental Psychology Approach to Learning Isekai Languages”; the third had been “NAISEI: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Crop Rotation.” Yuichi had forgotten most of what they entailed.
Incidentally, NAISEI was a term mocking the use of anachronistically modern knowledge of governance in isekai portal fantasy stories.
“Now, today’s ‘what do I do if I end up in an isekai’ is about war!”
“Now that you mention it, isekai don’t tend to be very peaceful places, do they?” Yuichi thought back on many different isekai fantasy stories he had read. They always had some kind of fighting in them.
“We tend to think of isekai as being less civilized than modern Japan, with a high mortality rate!” Mutsuko said.
“That’s right. I spend a lot of time worried about what I would do if I ended up in a world like that...” Kanako said worriedly.
“You spend a lot of time worried about that?” Yuichi asked. It seemed like a strange thing to spend your time thinking about.
“Yes!” Kanako responded earnestly. “You never know when a portal to an isekai might open!”
She really believed in this stuff, apparently.
“Anyway, it’s possible that an isekai will be rampant with magical creatures and dangerous life forms, but the most dangerous predator is man, right? If you’re in the middle of a war zone, or thrown out onto a battlefield... what would you do, Noro? Could you kill someone?”
“Huh? Me? Probably not...” Aiko said after some thought.
“What if it’s kill-or-be-killed? They’re isekai people. They have nothing to do with you, right?”
“Even so... I don’t think I could.”
“That’s right. That’s probably the answer most people would give!” Mutsuko had likely asked Aiko because she would give the answer she was looking for. If she had asked Natsuki, things would have gotten a bit more complicated. “I think this is rather well-known, but you may not have heard it, so I’ll explain it! The question is: can people kill other people?”
“Well, people kill people all the time,” Yuichi said. “The news is full of stories about wars
all over the world, and individual murders, too.”
“Those are exceptions. Well, I guess it happens too often to just call them exceptions, but... For now, let’s take ‘people can’t kill other people’ as our conclusion, and work backwards.”
“Is that really true?” Aiko asked doubtfully.
Yuichi felt the same way.
“Let’s start with this. The discharge rate of firearms from the American army during World War II was between 15 and 20%. Most people couldn’t fire, even when there was an enemy soldier in front of them, which suggests a strong resistance to the idea of killing another human being. They say that even under orders, most soldiers intentionally missed.
“When we think about war, we usually think about soldiers in a berserker frenzy, bloodily tearing through other soldiers, but the truth isn’t really like that. In other words, humans have an instinctive resistance to killing each other. This is something we’re proud of! It’s why we use the word ‘inhumane’ to describe serial killers! We’re saying people who kill people aren’t really human. They’re basically monsters.”
“I agree that it’s something to be proud of, but that’s not very convincing coming from you, Sis!” Yuichi snapped. Given the savage things she tended to spend her time thinking about, and the dangerous ideas she came up with, he couldn’t help but question her talk about the human resistance to killing.
Yuichi cast a glance at Natsuki beside him. She was looking pretty despondent.
“Takeuchi?” Yuichi asked, worried. It wasn’t as if she had chosen to be a slave to her killing urge, after all.
“I’m okay. Don’t worry,” Natsuki responded, though her voice was unusually monotone.
“And if you think that’s just because we were more culturally sophisticated by World War II, well, it’s believed to have been the same in ancient times. The casualties in hand-to-hand combat back then were a lot lower than you’d expect.”
“Tons of people died during Japan’s Warring States period, though,” Yuichi offered, thinking back on scenes from the countless period dramas he’d watched. Movies weren’t shy about showing people killing each other during war.
The Half-Baked Vampire vs. The Strongest Little Sister?! Page 8