A strange feeling assailed him the instant he set foot in the building.
The world changed color as if he were hallucinating. The air dried out, feeling rough against his skin. It was unpleasant, but to him, the atmosphere was somehow nostalgic, too.
Saikai Private Academy High School was rare among educational institutions in the Demon Sanctuary, for the campus did not have any special facilities for demonic research. It was a normal, mundane high school. Even so, there was a strange presence swirling on the school grounds.
Here deep at night, the campus held no sign of the students; emergency lamps and the light of the moon dimly lit the various corridors.
The empty classrooms had densely packed characters written on the blackboards. These were spells, written in magic symbols from a foreign land. They were verses from an ancient grimoire.
The countless symbols written chokingly close gave off a pale, golden light as they emitted a surge of powerful magical energy. They formed a gateway through which power entered from another world.
The young man smiled faintly, charmingly, as he muttered to no one in particular.
“…The Black Bible…”
His glasses added to the air of education and intelligence. There was a gray manacle on his left forearm with a short, severed chain dangling from it. He was one of the seven escapees from the prison barrier. He was the man Schtola D had addressed as Meiga.
The young man’s quiet footsteps echoed as he walked up the stairs; his feet only halted when silhouettes that had fallen in the corridor piqued his interest.
They were the corpses of sorcerers, cut by a giant sword.
The fallen possessed jeweled daggers, wands, and grimoires—all magical weapons possessing substantial power. However, there was no longer any glow of magical power from them; they had been turned into useless junk.
The bizarre atmosphere filling the school grounds had robbed them of their enchantments.
“Are these LCO sorcerers?” the young man asked as he turned toward the center of the room.
Hearing his voice, a young woman wearing a black-and-white ceremonial robe turned around.
It was Aya Tokoyogi, the Witch of the Notaria…
She was gripping a short piece of chalk in her hand, which she had been using to copy a verse from a grimoire onto the blackboard behind her. The characters were painfully small.
Enigmatically, Aya took in the young man, asking thoughtfully, “…An escapee from the prison ward…yes? You are the one called Meiga?”
“I am a mere Attack Mage dropout. My name is not very important.”
As the young man smiled sociably at her, the smile Aya returned was tinged with a bloodlust-filled glare.
“…Quite the words for someone who entered my world unscathed.”
The young man let Aya’s hostile gaze roll off him as he raised his left arm before his eyes.
“What happened to your manacle, Aya Tokoyogi?”
“…What are you referring to?”
“If you have stolen Natsuki Minamiya’s memories, surely the key to the prison barrier—the program to decode it—came included. Even though Natsuki Minamiya escaped, you did not pursue her…because you didn’t need to, did you?”
The young man spoke as he looked at the witch’s left arm. Hidden under the sleeve of her ceremonial robe, her wrist did not have a manacle on it as it should have. Aya Tokoyogi was already completely free of the prison barrier.
However, she hadn’t informed the other prisoners that she had the key in her possession. Thanks to that, the other jailbreakers—with the exception of the young man—were pursuing Natsuki Minamiya that very moment. She’d used Natsuki as a decoy.
However, even having this pointed out only earned a mocking laugh from Aya.
“And what of it? Have you come to be handed a sliver of the decoding program, Hell Wolf?”
The young man sighed and shook his head. It seemed he did not like the odd moniker.
“…No. I already have some idea of how to remove this, you see.”
Suspicion crept over Aya’s face. “Then why are you here?”
“I simply wanted to see for myself.”
“…See?”
“Yes, what in the world you have been doing while we escapees are being distracted by Natsuki Minamiya.”
This said, the young man stepped lightly upon the jeweled dagger that had fallen before him. The dagger, which ought to have been imbued with a powerful enchantment, broke apart with ease, sounding almost like a twig being snapped.
“So this is the power of the Black Bible?”
“Correct,” Aya said with a nod, her gaze drifting to the chalk she was holding.
“The Black Bible itself has already been lost. Natsuki Minamiya burned the book… What is written here is merely the knowledge of sorcery that existed in her memories.”
An amused note escaped the young man’s throat.
“So you stole her memories so that you could recreate the Black Bible like this…? I see, that is why you are called the Witch of the Notaria…”
He smiled as he looked over the text on the chalkboard.
The books of power known as grimoires were collections of sorcery-related knowledge and spells that had taken on a life of their own and become powerful magic themselves. These magical devices, in book form, granted power beyond human comprehension to the reader at the cost of courting great disaster.
Aya’s special ability, and why she was called the Witch of the Notaria, was to copy these grimoires. What she wrote were not simple copies of the text; she completely recreated the magical power and dark spells of the original tome she worked from.
And she had brought the Black Bible, the most abominable of all grimoires, back to life from Natsuki Minamiya’s memories. Each character Aya wrote on the blackboards around the room became part of a new grimoire, emitting vast magical energy in their own right. No doubt normal human beings would no longer be able to look directly at the blackboards, even if they could touch them; the entire Saikai Academy campus had been turned into a new Black Bible.
Aya glared at the young man. “Do you intend to interfere as well?”
Behind her, the air wavered as a shadowy knight encased in black armor floated up. It drew its giant sword and thrust the tip forward until it was right before the young man’s eyes.
Her conversation partner calmly grabbed the tip of the sword pointed at him with his bare hand.
“No, I merely find your experiment to be unexpectedly valuable.”
As he finished speaking, the black knight’s form warped, as if it was turning blurry.
The young man had done nothing more than give it a light touch. That was enough to warp the very being of the witch’s Guardian. Aya scowled in annoyance as she pulled the black knight back.
“I see. You…you are the Lion King Agency’s…”
Aya’s black gaze narrowed as she looked at the face that the young man hid behind his glasses.
The youth turned his back on the witch, leaving himself defenseless. And then he walked straight out of the classroom.
“I pray for the success of your experiment, Aya Tokoyogi. May you find the festival a pleasant one…”
Those words were all the young man left behind as he entered the darkness and vanished.
Left behind, Aya crushed the chalk she’d been gripping in a fit of pique. She used the white dust left on her fingers to write symbols on the blackboard—the final characters that made the Black Bible complete.
Having been made whole, the Black Bible activated.
Her world began to encroach upon the world beyond.
The berobed witch let out a piercing laugh, as if she was a harbinger of death itself.
The people of the Demon Sanctuary had not realized that their destruction had begun at that very moment…
The ship was moored in the calm waters of the expansive wharf known as Island East.
Even among the many large ships docked at Itogami Island, this was an extravagant vessel that stole glances from everyone.
It was a private ocean cruise liner—a megayacht with tonnage rivaling a military destroyer.
Standing still inside the ship and feeling distinctly uncomfortable, Kojou Akatsuki gripped his cell phone.
It was Yukina on the other end.
“Ah? The Oceanus Grave II…you say?”
Having lost contact with Kojou when he went to save Asagi, Yukina called him out of concern, from a phone booth near Keystone Gate.
And when Kojou relayed to her his current location, there was an unconcealed echo of anger mixed in.
“You mean, the Duke of Ardeal’s megayacht? What are you doing there, senpai?”
“Well, it kinda…ended up this way.”
The displeasure in Yukina’s voice only grew.
“Excuse me?”
Apparently, signs of combat with the jailbreakers were still fresh all around Keystone Gate, which was where she and Sayaka currently were. Even over the phone, Kojou could clearly hear the sirens of ambulances carrying injured guardsmen, various people shrieking, and officers yelling orders for onlookers to disperse.
No doubt Yukina and Sayaka had both been furiously trying to find Kojou and the rest.
Small wonder Yukina was upset when Kojou and the others turned out to be leisurely spending time on an extravagant cruise ship; though, from Kojou’s point of view, being with Vattler was more than enough to keep his heart far from peaceful.
Sayaka apparently grabbed the receiver from Yukina and butted into the conversation.
“Kojou Akatsuki, do you even understand what you’ve done? The Duke of Ardeal’s ship has diplomatic immunity so Yukina and I can’t set one foot on it! Why did you bring the Witch of the Void to a place like that? Are you a moron? Do you want to be turned to ash?!”
Kojou found himself scowling at the upbraiding.
“I couldn’t help it! That nut ball wants to use Natsuki as a decoy to draw the convicts out. The way it was goin’, I thought it was a hell of a lot safer if they throw down over the water rather than in the middle of the city.”
“Well, I suppose you do have a point there, but…”
Sayaka grudgingly agreed, though marked dissatisfaction remained in her tone.
Apparently, she’d tentatively accepted that there was a decent amount of logic backing Kojou’s judgment for once.
There were still a number of escaped prisoners after Natsuki. If they fought Vattler in the middle of the city, Kojou couldn’t even dream of how much damage would be inflicted around them. That being the case, surely the damage would be minimized if they tangled over the water instead.
He heard Yukina’s voice from the phone once more.
“So Aiba and Ms. Minamiya are both all right?”
Well, sorta? replied Kojou in his mind, a bad taste in his mouth.
“Um, they don’t look too beat up to me,” he continued aloud. “I’m not sure I can really describe how Natsuki is right now as all right, though…”
Yukina sighed weakly. “I suppose not…”
She had seen for herself on TV that Natsuki had been turned into a preschooler.
“I think that…it’s best if you at least send Aiba back to her own residence. After all, if she stays there, she’ll be wrapped up in fighting for certain.”
“I agree with you one hundred percent about that,” Kojou muttered bitterly. “But she just ain’t listenin’ to me. She’s more stubborn than she looks. She’s totally fallen for Sana, too…”
Yukina fell into a silent, dubious pause.
“Sana…you say?”
“Her nickname for ‘Small Natsuki.’”
“Ahhh…” Yukina exhaled, seemingly ready to fully accept that for some reason. But her tone of voice immediately turned to unease. “Anyway, Sayaka and I will get as close to you as possible. Please do not create even more difficulties.”
“Whaddaya mean…difficulties?”
“Like, ah…getting vampiric urges in front of Aiba and assaulting her…”
“Like hell I will! There’s a little girl watchin’!”
“I certainly hope that will stay the case.”
Yukina seemed worried down to her final word as she cut off the call. Kojou stuffed his cell phone back in his pocket and leaned against a nearby wall, exhausted. And then…
“Who were you calling?” Asagi asked.
“Uwaa?!”
Kojou blurted out a shout as he turned toward Asagi and Sana, having never realized they were standing right there.
“A-Asagi?! Weren’t you changin’ clothes? Vattler said the maids would give you somethin’ to wear?” Kojou rambled, a desperate attempt to change the subject.
Asagi and Sana were still in the ripped, dirtied clothes from when the jailbreakers had assaulted them.
Ah, this? Asagi seemed to say, as she lifted up the sleeve of her muddy shirt.
“They said they’re preparing a bath.” She shrugged.
“Bath?”
“They said there’s a big bath here on the ship. Vattler sure doesn’t do half measures. That’s a lord for you… He’s seriously loaded.”
Asagi spoke with visible admiration as she looked around the showy interior of the ship.
“I suppose he is,” Kojou agreed. He kept forgetting, due to the guy’s personality, but he was a nobleman from the Warlord’s Empire—a lord of high standing. He’d normally be wined and dined as a guest of the state.
Asagi drew close to Kojou and peered up at him as she asked, “So, Kojou, why do you know someone like that?”
Kojou averted his eyes without thinking.
“Well, ah, we have similar physical condi… Er, we have some common issues, you see.”
Asagi’s half-lidded eyes drew even closer to Kojou.
“Oh, really…?”
Before Kojou knew it, he’d been backed up against the wall, with Asagi’s thorny gaze silently piercing him. Apparently, half-baked excuses weren’t going to cut it here.
“You know, Kojou…lately, when I talk to you, it feels like you’re trying to hide something from me, and sometimes it really ticks me off…”
Kojou suddenly felt extremely guilty as he listened to her honesty. Excuses weren’t going to cut it, precisely because Kojou was hiding something from her. But Asagi made a light shrug of her shoulders that said, Well, whatever, easily letting Kojou slip the noose.
“Anyway, I’ll drop it until after the bath. But after that, you’re gonna fess up to everything this time. Let’s go, Sana.”
Asagi walked off toward the facilities, preschool Natsuki’s hand in tow. Kojou watched her back disappear before exhaling deeply.
He was grateful for the time to put his feelings in order, but put another way, it might well have been Asagi’s ultimatum. It seemed Kojou’s continued attempts to hide the truth about himself from her had reached their limit.
Besides, it felt like there would be nowhere to hide from Asagi tonight—she was especially suspicious of Vattler being an acquaintance of his, apparently. Kojou still had no idea why she was so nervous about that part when she was the one who came on board, already well aware of the danger.
Well, Vattler was dangerous either way, so Asagi’s wariness of him was a good thing—or at least, that was the harmless conclusion Kojou forced himself to accept.
As he thought this, Kojou suddenly lifted his head. Someone unknown to him was approaching, as if replacing his departed companions.
It was a young man wearing a silver-colored tuxedo. Appearance-wise, he was fifteen or sixteen-ish. He was small in stature and had a gentle look to his face, making him quite the pretty boy.
His hair was gray; his eyes were jade green. His eyelashes were long. Maybe that’s why he had a fragile air about him that stirred Kojou’s protective instincts, even though he was of the same gender.
During the time his chiseled facial features had stolen Kojou’s eyes, he asked, “Akatsuki, is it not?”
Having his name called by the youth’s voice, which apparently hadn’t broken yet, finally brought Kojou back to his senses.
“Er, and you are?”
“I am named Kira Lebedev Voltisvala of the Lost Warlord’s bloodline. I apologize for not having introduced myself to the lord of the Far East Demon Sanctuary sooner; I ask that you forgive me, Fourth Primogenitor.”
The boy calling himself Kira flashed a beautiful, charming smile, even within his reverence.
“It ain’t like this is my territory, so you didn’t really have to come and say hi… But anyway, nice to meet you. Ah, you can call me Kojou.”
Upon saying this, Kojou gave Kira a friendly smile. Being of the Lost Warlord’s bloodline meant that he was probably a Warlord’s Empire aristocrat, just like Vattler. Even if they were the same age—at least outwardly—Kojou wasn’t quite comfortable being spoken to with such stuffy, polite language.
“…As I might have expected,” Kira murmured in awe, his gaze moving up Kojou’s form. “You are indeed a frightening man, ruling the populace from the darkness through fear and chaos rather than through overt displays of might… I am deeply moved.”
“Uh, no, it’s not like that at all… Really.”
As Kira gave him a look of pure admiration, Kojou quietly sighed.
Apparently, Vattler had given the boy an obviously mistaken impression of Kojou. Kira seemed completely unaware of the fact he was being toyed with. Probably has one a them super-serious personalities, Kojou thought, pitying the lad. He thought the newcomer resembled Yukina somewhat, in that respect.
“So, whaddaya want with me, anyway?”
Kira conveyed his business with Kojou in fluent Japanese, almost too fluent—
“Yes, if I may be so bold, we have prepared a change of attire. If it pleases you to cleanse yourself first, then—”
Apparently, they’d arranged clothes for Kojou to change into.
“‘Cleanse’…? You mean take a bath, right?”
For some reason, Kira turned bashful then, even as he shot a small, wry smile in Kojou’s direction.
“Yes. Though the sight of you covered in blood does have a certain…ferocious charm to it.”
Kojou was a bit thrown off by the faint throb that came to his chest. Hey, hold on here, the cute face might be throwin’ ya off a bit, but this is a dude. Definitely a dude.
“Ha! ’S not for me. But I’d be grateful for a bath. You’ll show me where it is?”
“Yes, if it is not a bother to you, Master Kojou.”
“Of course, it ain’t a bother. This ship’s so huge, I’d probably get lost on my own.”
Kira gave another bow of acknowledgment before walking ahead. Kojou tried to follow in his footsteps when the stab-like gaze he felt from behind him made his feet go still.
A young man Kojou didn’t recognize was standing at the top of a flight of stairs, looking down at Kojou.
He was probably the same generation as Kojou. His height was pretty much the same, too. He was wearing a silver tuxedo very similar to Kira’s, but the antagonistic air that enveloped him gave off a completely different impression. The young man’s face was very handsome, reminiscent of a cold steel blade. Hostility was plain on his face as he glared at Kojou.
“Who’s that?”
Kira looked conflicted as he replied to Kojou’s question.
“Tobias—Lord Tobias Jagan. He, too, is a noble of the Warlord’s Empire, but—”
“Uh…have I done somethin’ to get on his bad side?”
“No… It’s not that,” Kira replied quietly. “It may be, ah…jealousy.”
“Jealousy…?”
For some reason, Kira’s cheeks reddened as he spoke, and he lowered his eyes with an even more conflicted look.
“Yes. After all, Duke Ardeal is always paying great attention to Master Kojou, so…”
The hell, thought Kojou in bewilderment. Yeah, Vattler had “sworn his undying love” to Kojou or some stupid thing like that, but that was purely his lust for the powerful blood of the Fourth Primogenitor. Surely that was no reason for this man to view him as an enemy. That said, if he indeed was “jealous” of Kojou even so, that must mean—
As Kojou considered the question with great and earnest intensity, he felt a strange chill up his spine.
“…Sorry. I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear a word of that,” he muttered weakly.
Tobias Jagan continued to glare at Kojou and Kira without a word for as long as he was within view.
Kojou, wearing a sauna towel, sighed with admiration as he took stock of his surroundings.
“This bath ain’t big—it’s huge.”
Though not as large as a Japanese hot spring bathhouse might have been, it was such a fine bath that it almost made you forget you were on a ship. The water level was somewhat shallow, but you could fit ten people in with room to spare.
Even without the pompous ornamentation, the pure white covering the bathroom conveyed an air of high society. It wasn’t hard for Kojou to imagine a rich man in the tub, surrounded by young, doting lovers.
Thanks to indulging in such thoughts of excess, Kojou immediately imagined Vattler there, served by Kira and Tobias…and promptly went into meltdown. He suffered a surprising amount of mental damage from the image.
Even so, Kojou was pretty grateful for the chance to wash the grime away. His entire body was a mess from the sweat and blood from multiple bouts of combat.
Kojou had his own blood caked on him, and Yuuma’s too from when he was carrying her—
“…Yuuma…wait for me,” Kojou whispered to himself, as he scrubbed at the dried blood, losing it under heavy soap lather.
The image of his childhood friend, wounded and in tatters, sent pain through his chest.
Even if it wasn’t a race against the clock, that still left Yuuma hovering on death’s door. To save her, they needed to first save Natsuki, but Natsuki had lost her magical power and had the escapees after her, too.
He was worried that Aya Tokoyogi was nowhere to be found, as well. Plus, he had no idea when or where Vattler would run amok as he pleased. Kojou’s brain capacity was close to overload from the sheer number of problems. Even so, there was no way he was going to cut and run with Yuuma’s life on the line.
Calm down, Kojou thought, taking several deep breaths. It was precisely at times like these that he couldn’t just shove it all out of his mind. First, he needed to calm down and deal with the problems one by one, or—
Before Kojou could finish that unusually serious thought—
“Is the temperature of the bath to your liking, Fourth Primogenitor?” asked a girl’s voice.
“Uwah?!”
The sudden presence behind him ripped Kojou’s inner calm to tatters.
With a patter of bare feet, some unfamiliar young girls came into the bathroom.
There were five of them, each wearing a different color swimsuit. Their ages ran from the low teens to mid-twenties. They seemed like a bunch of sisters who got along well, but their races and body types had nothing in common. The only commonality was that they were all really good-looking. Each had a beauty to her like she’d been born to high society.
Of course, the bare-naked Kojou hastily wrapped a towel around his loins and stood up.
“Wh-what the heck?”
The beautiful brigade of girls in swimsuits surrounded him without mercy.
A blond woman, twenty years old give or take, leaned in close to Kojou as she spoke.
“We are a maid troop serving the Duke of Ardeal. We thought that we would wash your back.”
She had a red hibiscus bikini covering her glamorous body.
“Nah, it’s all right, you don’t need to wash my back or anything…”
Kojou had no idea whatsoever why Vattler’s maids had trespassed upon the bathroom.
“The front, then?” she countered.
“Not the front, either! And takin’ care of someone in the bath ain’t a maid’s job anyway, is it?!”
The oldest and tallest of them, appearing reserved and ladylike in her blue swimsuit, replied to Kojou gently.
“…I see that the cat is indeed out of the bag.”
Kojou mentally dubbed her Bikini Blue.
“Out of…the bag?”
“Actually, we’re not maids at all, see,” said Red.
“Huh?”
A brown-skinned girl spoke with a tone of indifference.
“We’re hostages, actually.”
She had a rather young-looking visage and a yellow swimsuit. The swimsuit design had a sporty feel to it, matching her young physique.
“…Hostages?”
Bikini White replied first.
“Yes. We are the daughters of royals and high officials from countries bordering the Warlord’s Empire, including a few princesses from countries the Duke of Ardeal personally destroyed… The bottom line is, we were sold to him in exchange for the preservation of our native lands.”
Bikini Black added, “The saving grace is the fact Duke Ardeal swings that way, so he’s let us pretty much do as we please. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in women, you see…”
The latter two each whispered into one of Kojou’s ears. They were the closest to Kojou in age, as well, which only magnified his embarrassment.
The blond beauty in the red bikini put her hands on her hips and thrust her chest out with pride.
“So, we figured we’d climb up in the world here and get revenge on the motherlands that sold us out.”
The sudden, fierce dryness in Kojou’s throat made him nervous.
The predestined flaw of being a vampire was that lust awakened one’s vampiric urges. A vampire in the throes of such urges lost himself until he had tasted someone’s blood. Being seduced by a small army of swimsuit-wearing beauties with faces in the same league as gravure idols was more than destructive enough to stimulate Kojou’s brand of said urges. Getting sucked into their pace would be very dangerous.
Kojou averted his eyes from the girls and asked in as serious a voice as he could muster, “‘Climb up in the world?’”
Bikini Red pressed a hand to Kojou’s chest, as if trying to wreck all of his desperate efforts.
“Yes, such as by bearing the Fourth Primogenitor’s children.”
Kojou fiercely cleared his throat.
Black and White shot Kojou smoky looks from the left and right.
“The possibility is quite strong that a direct descendant of the Fourth Primogenitor would be a vampire surpassing Duke Ardeal in power,” said Black.
“Or we could drink the blood of a primogenitor and become Blood Vassals ourselves—” White pointed out.
“…So, how ’bout you give me a shot?” said Red, standing right before Kojou and pointing to herself. Kojou was in shock at how overly blunt her statement was.
A Blood Vassal was a pseudo-vampire; they could only be created through vampiric contract by first-generation vampires. They were said to possess combat capability sometimes surpassing that of pureblood vampires and lived with their masters for eternity.
The girls’ objective seemed to be to become Kojou’s Blood Vassals and to gain combat power on par with the Fourth Primogenitor himself. Kojou actually felt relieved that their behavior to this point was coldly calculated and not based solely on sexual desire.
Perhaps thinking she might have come on to Kojou too strongly, Red suddenly lowered her eyes shyly.
“Ah, but it’s our first time, so please be gentle…”
She began to cuddle against him when Kojou shook his head, trying to brush her off.
“I’m not doin’ anythin’ to anybody!”
The youngest girl, the one in the yellow swimsuit, uneasily looked at him with upturned, moist eyes.
“…You don’t like us?”
In the first place, Kojou thought laying a hand on a girl like that was a crime in and of itself.
“No, that’s really not it at all—”
As Kojou sighed and stroked his wet hair back, his eyes rose as something suddenly nagged at him. How did these girls know that Kojou was entering the bath to begin with…?
“Wait, did Vattler put you up to this? Did he order you to come seduce me?”
Kojou’s question, aired in a low voice, made every face of the pretty girl brigade stiffen.
If the girls were acting on Vattler’s orders, Kojou could easily understand why they were after him while he was bathing. Siccing them on Kojou to alleviate his boredom seemed like exactly the kind of thing Vattler would do.
Bikini Black turned away to flee from Kojou’s suspicious glare.
“Er…it was not an order, more like, our interests coincide…?”
White excused herself with an awkward but charming smile.
“Right, right. And it’s totally true that we’re hostages.”
Kojou had no sense that the girls were lying to him. So, at the very least, the girls had entered the huge bathroom of their own volition. That didn’t change that Vattler had prompted them to do so, but—
“…Why does he want me to drink blood that badly, anyway?”
The lady in the blue bikini replied to Kojou’s murmur seriously.
“I truly wonder. It feels like he’s waiting for something, though…”
“Waiting?”
“Yes. It is as if he seeks the power to fight something more dangerous than a primogenitor—”
Kojou gasped.
On the one hand, you had the Nalakuvera that terrorists brought back to life; on the other, Kensei Kanase’s Faux-Angel—either way, Vattler had displayed interest in weapons that had the potential to surpass a primogenitor in combat capability. And Kojou, the Fourth Primogenitor—the World’s Mightiest Vampire—certainly qualified as a being in possession of power “greater than a primogenitor.” It might have been mere coincidence, but it oddly added up.
Though given the kind of man Vattler was, he might have simply wanted to play with a powerful opponent…
Red had the last word as the girls left the bath:
“Well, since that’s how it is, call us anytime if you change your mind about this. We’ll let her take over for today…”
Kojou reddened as he heard conversational lines like “He’s cuter than I expected” and “For sure!” from the changing room. He felt very tired as he curled up into a defensive ball.
He’d barely kept his vampiric impulses under control, but his heart was beating strongly even then. He wasn’t in any condition for thinking about things rationally.
But deciding that he could leisurely immerse himself in the bath in the meantime, Kojou unfolded and began walking toward it. But as he did so, he suddenly recalled the brigade’s final words.
“‘Let her take over’…? Who?”
As Kojou stopped to consider, his ears picked up the sound of new footsteps approaching from the changing room. What came next was a familiar voice.
“—Wait, Sana! Watch out, the floor’s wet!”
“Eh…?” echoed Kojou.
Two human silhouettes emerged from the opposite side of the white steam. One was a very small girl with a bath towel covering virtually her entire body. The other was a high school girl with gorgeous facial features.
Noticing Kojou’s presence, Asagi stopped then and there in obvious surprise.
“Eh?!”
Her eyes opened wide as she stood stiffly, gazing dumbfounded at Kojou.
For a time, both of them gazed at each other without a word; then, they raised two great shouts of horror simultaneously.
Kojou muttered incoherently as he sank into the shallow Turkish bath.
“A-Asagi, why are you…?”
Asagi sat down, but with her back facing his.
“K-Kojou, why are you here?!”
With both of them diving into the water to hide their bodies, neither were in any position to leave.
For her part, Sana was enjoying herself, swimming in the bathwater, perhaps excited to be in such a wide bath for once.
It was then that Kojou realized there were changing room doors to both the left and right. “So, uh, maybe this is a…mixed bath? And it’s only the entrances that are different for guys and girls?”
He’d never expected a ship flying the flag of the Warlord’s Empire to have been built like that.
Kojou had no doubt that Vattler, well aware of this from the beginning, had kept quiet on purpose. That bastard, Kojou thought as he silently shook his fist.
Asagi asked meekly, “Um, d-did you…see?”
Kojou’s reply was not, however, the innocent See what?
“N-nah, not at all. Was just one second.”
“Th-that so.”
Kojou and Asagi laughed politely, dry and stiff, at the same time. As if on purpose, the bathroom echoed their voices off its walls, after which only an uncomfortable silence remained.
As the silent pause continued, Kojou heard a plop, like something was sinking down.
Kojou and Asagi traded glances with a questioning look when each suddenly went pale. In the instant they’d taken her eyes off her, Sana’s body had sunk to the bottom of the bath. The only thing on the surface of the water was a few small bubbles.
“H-hey?!” shouted Kojou.
“S-Sana?!” cried Asagi.
They both rose up in surprise, rushing over to the sunken girl.
However, in contrast to Kojou and Asagi’s nervousness, Sana, leisurely swimming in the bath, poked her head above the water’s surface like nothing had happened. Then, she began to dog paddle around once more. The splash back made the rose petals on the water’s surface sway.