From the Warlord's Empire

by Gakuto Mikumo

  Apparently, Sayaka was enveloped by deep, sister-like affection toward Yukina. So, from her point of view, Kojou was a wicked vampire putting her precious Yukina in danger.

  Kojou was afraid to even think about how Sayaka would react if she found out he’d sucked Yukina’s blood. Now he understood quite well why Yukina had been worried Sayaka would come for his neck.

  But to Kojou, Sayaka wasn’t the real threat here.

  The stirring in Kojou’s “blood” grew even fiercer. The primogenitor’s blood that flowed within Kojou’s body told him that a vampire possessing vast power was nearby.

  Kojou didn’t know the other guy’s true nature or his objective. He didn’t think that the cease-fire agreement between the primogenitors applied to the Fourth Primogenitor, who didn’t officially exist. Depending on how negotiations went, worst case, combat might break out right there.

  He was a noble of the Warlord’s Empire. A pure-blooded vampire directly descended from a primogenitor. Even if not on the same level as the First Primogenitor, it was safe to think he possessed combat ability near the same scale.

  To the contrary, even though Kojou was called the Fourth Primogenitor, he couldn’t use the vast majority of those abilities. He figured he had next to no chance of victory in a straight-up fight.

  Feelings of unease and confusion seeping through once more, Kojou climbed onto the ship’s upper deck.

  There was a lone man there, standing in the corner of the broad deck against a jet-black sea and the night sky.

  He was a handsome young man wearing a coat that was pure white. He was tall, but his contours were refined, not overbearing in any way.

  Stroking his blond hair back, the young man looked at Kojou with his pale blue eyes.

  That moment, his entire body was enveloped on a beam of pure white light.

  “…Senpai!”

  Yukina was the first to respond. Drawing her spear from her instrument case, she leaped in front of Kojou. To shield Yukina, Sayaka moved as well. It was all in the blink of an eye.

  However, even the girls’ prompt actions could not protect them from the pure white beam.

  The true nature of the light unleashed by the man in the coat was a serpent of flame glowing with white. It was a vampire’s Beast Vassal surrounded by scorching heat. Even as the Beast Vassal shot out at the speed of a comet, Kojou made no reaction whatsoever. He didn’t even know what was happening.

  “Guo…oo…!”

  It was not Kojou who reacted, but the Beast Vassals that dwelled in Kojou’s blood. Dazzling lightning enveloped Kojou’s entire body, releasing a lightning bolt that counter-attacked the serpent of flame.

  This was one of the twelve Beast Vassals that served the Fourth Primogenitor. It was the thunderbolt of “Regulus Aurum,” the only Beast Vassal Kojou could properly control. It fended off the attack in the place of its dumbfounded master.

  Firing indiscriminately with such enormous power would have destroyed the ship, and perhaps the entire harbor with it…but apparently, this time, even the calamitous lion Beast Vassal had thought better of it.

  The moment the pure white flaming serpent was annihilated, Kojou’s lightning was annihilated as well.

  “Th…that was close! The heck was that?!”

  Witnessing the scorched deck and the burning air, the aftereffects of the violent collision of two vast magical forces made Kojou, finally back to his senses, raise his voice. That moment, the sound of light clapping echoed through the air.

  The clapping came from the man in the white coat. Having launched the attack at Kojou to begin with, he actually seemed pleased that Kojou had fended it off.

  “My, my, quite splendid. So that level of Beast Vassal was indeed unable to even scratch you.”

  The man spoke in a relaxed voice. His voice sounded innocent without a shred of tension.

  Kojou kept his center of gravity low as he glared back at the man.

  The man’s frivolous behavior concealed the vast power behind it. That’s what Kojou’s flesh instinctively told him, putting him on his guard. The flaming serpent was but a portion of his power. If he’d unleashed his Beast Vassal in earnest, even Regulus Aurum might not have been able to stop it…

  Thinking that with a shudder, Kojou stared as the other man approached.

  But the man’s subsequent behavior caught Kojou by surprise.

  He lowered himself to one knee before Kojou, bowing as a reverent noble.

  “I apologize from the bottom of my heart for behaving rudely in testing your strength. My name is Dimitrie Vattler, he who has been granted the title of Duke of Ardeal by our primogenitor, the Lost Warlord. I am extremely delighted that you have come to visit this evening…”

  Kojou was completely thrown off by the man’s exceedingly eloquent manner of speech.

  Yukina, with her silver spear poised, and even Sayaka, were dumbfounded as they stood in place.

  “So you’re Dimitrie Vattler…? The guy who called me over here?” Kojou asked in a halting voice.

  Vattler raised his face in a broad grin. It was an affable smile broadcasting slyness and mischief in equal measure.

  “Perhaps I should say, it is a pleasure to meet you, Kojou Akatsuki. Or rather…‘Kaleid Blood,’ the Fourth Primogenitor, my beloved!”

  As Vattler spoke, he gave Kojou an affectionate, longing look. He opened both arms wide as if welcoming Kojou. “So it’s like this after all,” went Sayaka with a shake of her head. Yukina was beside herself.

  “…Huh?”

  Unable to comprehend the meaning of the words directed at him, Kojou let out a frail murmur. In one sense, Kojou Akatsuki, the Fourth Primogenitor, meeting Dimitrie Vattler, Duke of Ardeal, was a fateful encounter indeed.

  11

  “Eh? And then you just ran away?”

  She heard the exasperated voice of her childhood friend over the phone.

  Asagi, who’d been lying down on her bed, was somewhat peeved as she vigorously sprung up. The time was just before midnight. She was in familiar surroundings at her residence. She was dressed in a tank top and underwear, not a look she really wanted others to be seeing. She’d wrapped her hair, still damp from getting out of the bath, with a bath towel.

  “I-it’s not like I ran away. It was so stupid, it just pissed me off a little so I couldn’t stay there anymore.”

  The other party to the long phone call was Motoki Yaze. Though there were no intimate feelings between them, he was a precious friend she could have pleasant, frank conversations with thanks to having known each other for so long. She’d meant to air her complaints about the sports festival incident, but at some point, it’d somehow changed to complaining about Kojou personally.

  “Certainly I never expected a middle school transfer girl to go on the attack with a cheerleading outfit. You had a tennis skirt on, though, so you should’ve been equally matched. And you should’ve had even more of the element of surprise than she did.”

  “Equally matched…what are you talking about?” Asagi asked in irritation at Yaze’s teasing-like tone of voice.

  Yaze said, “How to put this?” thinking a little. “A no-holds-barred fight between two girls about who owns Kojou?”

  “It is not!! Whoever goes out with Kojou has n-nothing to do with me.”

  “Doesn’t look like it to me.”

  Yaze spoke in an oddly serious voice.

  “Oh, shut your trap,” Asagi said in a low voice.

  “What I don’t like is how the idiot’s sneaking around hiding something. If he’s dating that Himeragi girl, he should just do it out in the open. How he’s keeping secrets even from us is really annoying me. It’s really fishy.”

  Asagi sought Yaze’s agreeing as a matter of course, but Yaze replied with unexpected words.

  “That’s if they’re really dating, ain’t it?”

  “Eh?”

  “I mean, Kojou seriously thinks of you as just a friend, so there’s no reason for him to keep dating li’l Hi
meragi a secret from you.”

  Asagi reluctantly agreed with Yaze’s surprisingly logical statement.

  “Mmm…yeah. You’d think he’d be bragging about it.”

  “Having said that, I don’t think he’s got the balls to go two-timing girls.”

  “Ah…no. Definitely not.”

  This time Asagi immediately concurred.

  “For sure,” Yaze went, proudly continuing. “So yeah, Kojou doesn’t have any reason to hide dating li’l Himeragi from us. But all the same, he’s been sneaking around with li’l Himeragi with a guilty look on his face…”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s only one possibility I can think of, then.”

  “…What?”

  “That transfer student’s got something on Kojou, I’m sure of it.”

  “H-huh? Something on him?”

  Asagi was taken aback for a while at Yaze’s off-the-wall suggestion. But Yaze spoke in a very serious tone of voice.

  “Well…something like an embarrassing secret she’s threatenin’ to expose… Anything come to mind like that?”

  “Come to mention it…his behavior when he’s with that transfer student is definitely not natural.”

  Asagi groaned as she recalled Kojou’s behavior of late. They were unpleasant memories all, but she could accept that behavior as the result of Yukina Himeragi’s intimidation. Come to think of it, Yukina had said something herself.

  That she was Kojou’s watcher or something…

  “Yeah. Y’see?”

  On the other side of the phone call, Yaze raised his voice in apparent triumph, really annoying Asagi in the process.

  “So what should I do about it?”

  “Hmm…how about you throw a wrench in her plans by seducing Kojou?”

  “Huh?! Why do I have to s-seduce…?!” Asagi yelled back in panic at the line, irresponsible even by Yaze’s standards. But even now Yaze spoke with a serious tone of voice.

  “Now, now, the sexy approach is one of your intel-gathering basics. Y’know, honey traps.”

  “Motoki…you’re having a really good time with this, aren’t you?”

  “Oh no, what are you saying. I’m thinkin’ serious for once for the sake of my childhood friend. I wanna help Kojou as a friend, too, seeing he’s all worried and can’t talk to anyone ’bout this.”

  “R-right…as a friend. Friends through and through.”

  Though well aware that Yaze was up to no-good scheming, Asagi had a hard time disputing his logic when he put it like that. But even if she did try the sexy approach, she was at a loss how she should go about it given her and Kojou’s relationship. If it was that easy to rope in that blockhead, Asagi wouldn’t have had this much trouble to begin with.

  “Well, it’s time for me to call Hiina. We’ll talk about this another time.”

  Suddenly interjecting, Yaze cut the call short from his end. Hiina was the name of the older girlfriend Yaze had met on summer vacation and was currently dating.

  “Wai—I wasn’t finished tal—Is that how you behave toward your precious childhood friend?!”

  In spite of Asagi’s vehement objections, the call was already over. Asagi crudely discarded her cell phone, tossing it onto the bed.

  “Geez, if it’s not one thing, it’s another…”

  Grumbling to herself, she sat in front of her desk. Western clothes poured out of her closet.

  There were magazines, cosmetics, and stuffed animals here and there. Asagi’s home was a very girlie room.

  But the corner around the desk was the sole exception. A spartan office-use monitor was connected to a rack-mounted, parallel PC cluster. The computer was on par with those used at IT corporations or university lab rooms, but here it rested on a simple study desk. It was something of a surreal scene.

  Though none but her closest friends knew, Asagi was a highly gifted computer programmer. Of course, she didn’t call herself this, but the world of hackers had granted her the embarrassing nickname of “Cyber Empress.” She put her personal hobby to good use doing part-time, high-paying work for enterprises on Itogami Island and the Artificial Island Management Corporation.

  That said, she didn’t feel much like working today. Thinking she might complain to Rin Tsukishima, too, if she was still awake, Asagi checked her messages and noticed the existence of an unfamiliar e-mail.

  The sender’s address was from the Kano Alchemical Industries Corporation. It was a large-scale enterprise that had contracted Asagi to do work numerous times before.

  But this wasn’t a request to do a paying job. The message contained only a pair of words.

  “Requesting Decipher…”

  “What’s this? Doesn’t feel like a virus e-mail, but…”

  As Asagi inclined her head, she opened the attached data.

  An assortment of bizarre characters of unknown origin was displayed before her. The system was exceedingly complex, the arrangement completely bonkers. It differed from any language known to exist among the peoples of Earth. But it differed from the spells used in sorcery and ritualism. No doubt any linguist, or even teams of magic users, would find this difficult to decipher. But…

  “A puzzle? You have a lot of guts to be challenging me.”

  Asagi chuckled amusedly, repositioning herself before the monitor.

  Her hacker instincts told her that these were not characters that existed for the sake of men. That’s why they couldn’t be deciphered by any ordinary linguistic approach.

  This was a language written for something that was not human. It was a program…command codes for controlling something with special architecture unknown to modern man.

  Asagi immersed herself in deciphering the characters; in part, it was out of spite and to escape the realities of real life, and also, because she’d been stimulated out of pure intellectual curiosity. The dismantled, bizarre characters formed a translated word on-screen.

  “Nalakuvera…?” Asagi muttered brusquely as she gazed at the single word that came over the monitor’s surface.

  In the Demon Sanctuary of Itogami City, the night wore on…

  CHAPTER TWO

  REVELATION OF THE TERROR

  1

  It was a room in an apartment building overlooking the sea. Bathed by the rays of the morning sun leaking in from the window, Kojou Akatsuki awoke.

  “Kojou! C’mon, Kojou!”

  The voice that had awakened him was Nagisa’s, ringing in his ears with 50 percent more shrillness than usual.

  Having long changed into her school uniform, she wrenched open the curtains of Kojou’s room, stripping away the towel blanket under which he tried to escape from direct sunlight.

  “It’s morning. Wake up. You’re gonna be late. What’ll you do about breakfast? Aaah, you turned off your alarm clock again, didn’t you?! Did you get your textbooks in order? Your homework? And your clothes are all over the pla—Wait, what’s this?! Why is this tuxedo all burnt?!”

  “Sorry, Nagisa…can you lemme sleep thirty more seconds?”

  Kojou made a vague moan in a broken voice as he buried his face into his pillow.

  By the time Kojou and Yukina had finished their meeting with Dimitrie Vattler and gotten home, it was past three in the morning. Of course, he was short on sleep. The charred tuxedo was naturally the fault of Vattler’s attack; that had only added to his fatigue.

  “You said that just earlier, Kojou! Geez, it’s not my fault if you really are late!”

  He felt Nagisa leave the room, sighing in apparent resignation.

  Covering his face with the towel blanket he’d recovered, Kojou made a sigh of relief. As he heard his little sister’s footsteps grow more distant, Kojou’s sleepy head recalled the details of their conversation with Vattler the night before.

  “…That aura just now, Regulus Aurum, eh…? How unexpected. It seems coming to confirm the rumors of an ordinary human having consumed the Fourth Primogenitor was very much worth my time.”

  So spoke the a
ristocrat from the Warlord’s Empire, completely lacking any concern despite having suddenly attacked Kojou.

  The upper deck of the cruise ship Oceanus Grave was huge. As the night breeze made the edges of his coat flap around, a look of pleasure came over his face.

  “…You know about Regulus Aurum…?”

  With a bewildered look, Kojou glared at Vattler’s innocently smiling face.

  Though he looked like a young man in his twenties, he was an Old Guard vampire through and through, a monster who had lived many times longer than he appeared to be. Of course, he possessed a far greater amount of memories than Kojou. Vattler had to know a great deal of things Kojou did not. And it was likely that knowledge concerning the Fourth Primogenitor, in other words, Kojou himself, was no exception.

  “It’s the fifth Beast Vassal of Avrora Florestina, the Kaleid Blood, yes? I’d heard it is quite wild and difficult to control, but you’ve tamed it rather nicely. The spirit medium’s blood must have been very nice, indeed.”

  Kojou wordlessly scowled his face at Vattler’s casually delivered words. “Kaleid Blood,” Avrora Florestina…the ring of those words unsettled Kojou’s psyche, bringing a headache that was difficult to endure.

  Though he must have met her sometime in the past, Kojou could not recall even a shred of it. Kojou’s memory had been stolen, as if sealed by a powerful curse.

  “What relation did you…have with Avrora?” Kojou asked while he endured the fierce headache with no apparent cause.

  Behaving like an actor onstage, Vattler put his palm to his own chest, a yearning in his narrowed eyes.

  “Did I not say that at the start? I love her. I swore my eternal love to her.”

  “Swore love…? Aren’t you part of the First Primogenitor’s clan?”

  “Well, yes. But our primogenitor is not the sort who cares much about that kind of thing, you see.”

  As Vattler spoke, his grin exposed his white canine teeth.

  “If the ‘blood’ is strong, it’s all good. Strong blood families survive, regardless of who their ancestors were. Is that not how it is with vampires? So, shall we speak fondly of love, Kojou Akatsuki?”