Strike the Blood, Vol. 7: Kaleid Blood

by Gakuto Mikumo

  In haste, Kojou leaped off the bed and picked up the intercom receiver.

  “H-Himeragi?!”

  He heard the voice of an all too serious girl from the microphone at the front door.

  “Good morning, senpai.”

  It was Yukina Himeragi, a girl in her third year of middle school at Saikai Academy—and Kojou’s watcher, dispatched from the Lion King Agency.

  In contrast to the flustered Kojou, Yukina was calm and composed. Thanks to her being a federally licensed stalker, she was always monitoring Kojou’s activities through the use of mysterious ritual spells. She had known from the start that he’d been asleep. And having waited until the last possible moment for him to wake up, she had no doubt begun ringing his doorbell rapid-fire in exasperation.

  With Yukina waiting for him at the front door, Kojou offered a tentative suggestion.

  “Sorry, I overslept. I’m getting ready right now, so go on ahead, Himeragi.”

  An honors student like her doesn’t need to be late on my account, he thought with, for him, great consideration.

  Yukina brushed off his words and said, “No, I will wait.”

  “But that might mean you’ll be late with me—”

  “Surely you are not thinking of skipping the first hour of classes, senpai?”

  With a quiet “ugh,” Kojou was lost for words as Yukina hit the bull’s-eye. If he was going to be late even if he rushed, he thought the damage would be lessened if he just accepted his lateness and got to school on his own time, but…

  She tolerated no dissent.

  “Get ready as fast as you can. I will be waiting right here.”

  He abandoned further resistance. He ruefully felt like Yukina’s stalker tendencies had grown even fiercer of late, which scared him a little.

  Kojou put the intercom receiver back down and headed for his little sister’s room. Normally, she was the one who’d be waking him up if he overslept. It was rare for her to be in bed this late.

  “Nagisa, I’m coming in!”

  Deliberately knocking loudly in rapid succession, Kojou opened the door to his little sister’s room.

  The bedroom was scrupulously neat and tidy, unsurprising for a neat freak like her. Nagisa Akatsuki, lying atop a bed next to the wall, her belly on display and her pajamas in disarray from sleep, lifted up her head, rubbing her eyes.

  “Mm… Kojou…what’s wrong? Had a nightmare or something?”

  “Wake up. It’s morning.”

  “Mm?”

  Roll. Nagisa did a 180-degree turn and looked up at the digital clock on the wall. Then her eyes suddenly snapped wide open.

  “Wha—no way?! Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?!”

  “I only just woke up myself. Get changed fast or you’ll be late.”

  “R-right. That’s right!”

  Nagisa raised a shrill yelp as she rolled off the bed in a panic. Her long, sleep-disheveled hair swished wildly as she retrieved her uniform from its hanger.

  For his part, Kojou offhandedly mused, No breakfast, huh, and began to return to his room when—

  “Oh, right. Himeragi’s waiting out front, so—”

  He stopped right before leaving his sister’s room and suddenly looked back.

  “Hyaaa?!” Nagisa shouted.

  Though he didn’t mean to, he saw that Nagisa had stripped off her pajama top. Apparently, she was so flustered at being almost late that she’d begun changing before he’d even left the room.

  Nagisa, taken by surprise a second time, tried to turn around, but her ankle got caught in the pajama top, making her lose her balance and tumble forward. Her pose thrust her panties straight out toward Kojou, giving him an eyeful.

  Nagisa, rubbing her forehead after bumping it against the bed, made an even bigger fuss in a loud voice.

  “Hey, why are you looking?! Kojou, you pervert!”

  How’d it turn into that?! He unwittingly stared all the more.

  “How am I the bad guy?! You’re the one who started stripping before I’d even closed the door—”

  “Shut up! And get out!!”

  Nagisa righted herself and hurled a teddy bear Kojou’s way as he left her room.

  They caught sight of the Saikai Academy campus moments before classes were set to begin.

  They could still see students filtering onto the school grounds from the street in front of it. Kojou and the others, judging they had somehow managed to avoid being late, slowed the pace of their run. Nagisa panted heavily as she said, “Looks like we made it…somehow.”

  As one might expect, she, too, had survived the full-strength morning scramble. She was incessantly fussing over how her loose hair, usually bound in a ponytail, was a mess from sleeping.

  “But how strange. You usually don’t oversleep.”

  In contrast to Nagisa, Yukina, carrying her black guitar case on her back, had an invigorated expression. Her breathing was perfectly calm even though she’d run the same distance as Nagisa. No doubt it barely qualified as a warm-up by her standards.

  As someone hiding his own true nature, Kojou would have preferred it if his watcher put a little more effort into pretending to be an ordinary high school girl, but—

  “Looks like I fell back asleep after I turned the alarm clock off the first time. That’s not something that happens often,” Nagisa said. “It’s, like, even monkeys fall out of trees—wait, I’m not a monkey! Oh, by the way, they say you can tell monkeys and humans apart because monkeys have tails. And because humans swim. A bit of trivia there. Also—”

  With his little sister functioning as both comic and straight man, Kojou lightly bopped her on the head to shut her up.

  “Cut it out, Nagisa. You’re scaring Himeragi stiff and being annoying.”

  She was a comparatively well-rounded little sister, but one of her few flaws was her chattiness. Apparently, she’d put aside the shock of oversleeping and had returned to her usual self. If anything, she was even more hyper than usual.

  For no reason at all, Nagisa looked up at the sky, suddenly changing the subject.

  “Oh, right, it’s going to be winter soon.”

  Thanks to Itogami Island’s eternal summer, the four seasons looked the same, but it was nearly the end of November. Winter vacation was less than a month away.

  Kojou felt a vague sense of unease. “Yeah… Come to think of it, Himeragi, what do you do for New Year’s?”

  He wondered if the Lion King Agency intended to have Yukina continue her surveillance of Kojou even on the holiday.

  “New Year’s Day…?”

  “Err…I mean, like—you’re not going back to see Professor Kitty or anything?”

  “No. I do not have any special plans at present, but…”

  Yukina looked up at Kojou. Based on her reaction, it was plain that she indeed intended to continue her mission to watch Kojou during winter vacation.

  Incidentally, “Professor Kitty” referred to the sorceress who was Yukina’s mentor. Kojou had decided to call her by that name on his own.

  “Do the two of you have plans?” she asked.

  “Kind of… If the Public Corporation gives us a permit, I’d love to go up to see our grandma, but…”

  As Kojou murmured, Nagisa piped up in obvious agreement.

  “Wow, I really wanna go see her! I mean, we haven’t seen her in four years. I hope Grandma’s doing all right.”

  At Nagisa’s fond comments, Yukina tilted her head with a questioning look.

  “By your grandmother, you mean…?”

  “Yeah. She does some kind of religious work at a little shrine in the Tanzawa Mountains,” Kojou explained.

  “Religious…work?”

  Yukina blinked her eyes in mild surprise. Kojou scowled with a hint of a bitter smile.

  “She’s really sweet on Nagisa, but she’s a strict old lady… She’s pretty scary when she’s angry, and rumor has it she used to be some unregistered Attack Mage or something.”

  “Eh…
?”

  Yukina’s face stiffened as she stopped in place. Kojou followed suit and halted, with Nagisa promptly colliding into his back. She’d apparently been strolling along with her head in the clouds and hadn’t even noticed Kojou had stopped.

  “Owww!”

  “What are you doing…?”

  Nagisa, still on the ground after grandly falling on her butt, glared at Kojou unhappily.

  “Ugh… It’s because you stopped all of a sudden, Kojou…!”

  It was apparently Nagisa’s destiny to randomly fall down that day, perhaps a jinx because of her oversleeping. Kojou was lending his little sister a hand when he saw the car parked in front of the school gate and frowned.

  “…So what’s that? Is something going on around the school here?”

  It was a luxury car manufactured in Europe, the sort of thing you didn’t see much on Itogami Island, and a black, armored limousine at that.

  “Perhaps there’s…been an incident?” Yukina muttered in concern.

  Certainly, he could understand the girl’s worry. No respectable commoner would come to school in a car suited for a shootout. Kojou and Yukina traded glances and hesitant musings.

  “Nothin’ to do with me…right…?”

  “That…would be good, but…”

  Heedless of their concerns, a clamor spread among the students on the school grounds when they noticed people coming out of the limousine, obstructed from view by the gathering flock of curious onlookers—

  3

  Despite the difficulty of getting to school, the first class of the day was study hall. Apparently, seven short-term exchange students had shown up without prior arrangements, throwing the school administration into chaos. The morning staff meeting must have dragged on for a while. The armored limousine in front of the gate had dropped those students off. Naturally, the exchange students warranting such a high level of security posed challenges in the classroom as well.

  Kojou, in a classroom separate from Yukina and Nagisa, was bewildered when he heard:

  “…Oceanus Girls?”

  He wasn’t familiar with that group.

  Asagi Aiba pulled out her beloved pink tablet computer and held it out to Kojou.

  “Haven’t you heard? They’re a girl group that’s been popular lately on some video-sharing sites.”

  The screen displayed a group of foreign girls clad in adorable outfits. Their ages ranged from the low teens into the early twenties. He felt like he’d met them somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  “The singing and dancing seem pretty amateur, but those five are pretty by Japanese standards, right? They show up in magazines a lot, too,” Asagi said.

  Motoki Yaze wedged himself into the conversation. “Incidentally, I recommend the blond.”

  To leave no room for doubt, he pointed to the shortest girl at the edge of the image. He instantly broke into a falsetto, singing a catchy techno-pop song as he began a robotic sort of dance. His singing was nothing to write home about, but his dancing was surprisingly good.

  Yaze’s got some talent for that, Kojou thought in silent admiration.

  “Ahh, yeah, come to think of it, I’ve been hearing that song all over the place,” he remarked.

  “Gotta say, Motoki, you’re copying that dance way too well. Totally gross,” Asagi chimed in.

  “Why?! What’s wrong with me being good at it, dammit?!” Yaze seemed genuinely wounded, raising a tearful objection.

  Truth be told, Kojou thought it was a bit creepy, too. He gazed at the tablet’s screen with a dubious expression. “So why is this girl group studying here at Saikai Academy?”

  “Dunno. Isn’t it just a coincidence?” Asagi sounded uninterested.

  Yaze, stubbornly continuing his dance, nodded along. “The timing is a little odd, but it’s not exactly rare Itogami Island gets short-term exchange students from a Dominion. Just happens to be some famous people this time.”

  Kojou relaxed his expression and exhaled.

  “Well, that’s certainly true.”

  The fact they were popular mainly on a video-sharing site meant they were on the amateur end of the scale. It wasn’t exactly strange for them to go to school like normal people. Given that only a Demon Sanctuary would be accepting exchange students from the Warlord’s Empire, the chances of Saikai Academy being chosen to receive them was actually pretty decent.

  But in spite of all that, Kojou wondered why he still felt an undercurrent of unease—

  As if in support of Kojou’s premonition, a group of unfamiliar girls poured into the classroom, a bright, cheery voice leading the way.

  “Ah, he’s here. Master Kojou!”

  The five foreigners were wearing the Saikai Academy girl’s uniforms. They seemed like sisters who got along nicely, but their faces and hair color had nothing in common. If there was a commonality between them, it was that all the girls were beautiful, suggesting they had been high-class from birth.

  “It has been a while, Master Kojou.”

  “I-I wanted so much to meet…you.”

  With the other classmates paying rapt attention, the five surrounded Kojou and lavished words of passionate affection upon him. His eyes remained wide open in shock as he stood as stiff as a statue.

  Someone in class murmured in a quiet voice, “The Oceanus Girls…?!”

  That signaled everyone inside the classroom to erupt in envious surprise.

  “Eh? No way? The real deal?”

  “Oh, damn, they’re cuter than I thought.”

  “But why are they around Akatsuki…?”

  “…Him! Again!!”

  Cold sweat rolled down Kojou’s brow as he stood exposed to his classmates’ curious gazes.

  “…”

  Finally, he remembered who the Oceanus Girls really were. These were the daughters of royals and high ministers of nations neighboring the Warlord’s Empire. At first, they were “hostages” handed over to Dimitrie Vattler in exchange for the safety of their homelands, but the combat-manic Vattler took no interest in female hostages, so he treated the girls as simple guests, or so Kojou had been told.

  Along the way, the Warlord’s Empire noble had used the girls as bait to try to awaken Kojou’s Beast Vassals, and the girls themselves had aimed to use the power of the Fourth Primogenitor as a tool to rise above their station—things that made dealing with them extremely difficult for Kojou.

  Asagi glared at the bewildered Kojou and asked in a foul mood, “Kojou, these girls are acquaintances of yours?”

  He stiffly shook his head in denial.

  “Errr… I don’t know them well enough to call them acquaintances…”

  The real problem was that Kojou had no idea what the girls were doing there. On Vattler’s cruise ship, the Oceanus Grave II, they enjoyed a lavish lifestyle and wanted for nothing, didn’t they?

  The blond girl acting as the group’s leader forcefully hugged one of Kojou’s arms and said, “Whaat? You’re horrible, Master Kojou!”

  She was probably twenty years old, give or take, but the outfit suited her. While her figure was nothing glamorous on its own, even a regular school uniform looked oddly risqué on her.

  Dressed in that seductive uniformed look, she gently entwined her arm with Kojou’s and said, “Have we not already bathed together?!”

  “B-bathed together?!” Asagi shouted in a shrill voice over the rest of the class’s eruption.

  Kojou shook his head as vigorously as he could. “It’s not like that! When we were on Vattler’s ship a while back, they barged in all on their own!”

  “No way! That ship’s bath was where I joined you, wasn’t it…?!” Asagi insisted.

  Her careless statement only increased the classroom uproar. Yaze quietly said, “Ohh,” to himself.

  “Ah…?!”

  Seeing her childhood friend’s reaction, Asagi realized her own verbal slip. She clutched her head with both hands. With an “Ahhh!” she turned deep red to the tips
of her ears. “No! It wasn’t like that! Aw, just shut up!!”

  Asagi shouted defiantly and vented her rage with a smack to Yaze’s head. Unable to react to the sudden surprise attack, Yaze spun and sailed straight into the nearest wall.

  During that time, the five Oceanus Girls were clinging all over Kojou, completely reducing the study hall to a hopeless mess. But the voice dripping with hostility brought the chaos in the classroom to a screeching halt.

  “Pathetic. Do not get overly excited, Kojou Akatsuki. The girls merely tagged along because they were bored.”

  Kojou reflexively turned his head and retorted, “I’m not excited! I’m seriously in a bind here—!”

  Standing in the doorway to the classroom was a silver-haired exchange student with a demon registration bracelet on his left wrist. He was a handsome young man as cold and sharp as a naked blade.

  “Wait, you’re that vampire from Vattler’s ship…!” Kojou exclaimed.

  “Tobias Jagan. We shall be attending this school for a little while from today onward.”

  The exchange student named Jagan gave his uniform a malevolent glare as he spoke. Apparently, it wasn’t his idea to attend the same school as Kojou.

  “What are you all doing as exchange students…?!”

  On the surface, there wasn’t much difference in age between them, but Tobias Jagan was an Old Guard vampire. His actual age was probably in excess of two centuries. Having to pretend to be a high-school student had to be humiliating for him. But the true reason for his irritation was because he would be at this particular school.

  Jagan approached Kojou and said aggressively, “I’ve heard that Japanese schools are very strict about senior and junior hierarchy…”

  He showed off a sophomore badge on his uniform. Apparently, he intended to pull rank as a second-year student.

  Kojou glared back at him with such force that they seemed ready to physically butt heads. “Sorry, this is a shut-in island nation. It’s Japanese tradition to give the new guy a hard time, y’see?”

  Jagan continued scowling at Kojou at point-blank range, clenching his teeth.