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The place they’d arrived at was a cafe with a modern atmosphere.
“I feel like we come here a lot... well, I guess we couldn’t exactly have an all-day stakeout out in the cold, anyway...” Yuichi murmured. It was the same cafe the truck had crashed into during summer vacation, and the one he’d brought Kanako to during her research outing.
“If you sit next to the window, you can see all kinds of people pass by!” Mutsuko declared.
“That seat, huh?”
Mutsuko was pointing to the same seat Yuichi had been sitting in then, the exact same spot the truck had crashed into. It felt a little like a bad omen, but sitting by the window would also let him deal with attacks coming in from outside. In a way, it was a pretty safe place to be.
“It’s looking pretty packed, though,” Yuichi said. “Maybe we should look for another place instead of waiting—”
Peering in through the window of the cafe, Yuichi was suddenly struck dumb.
“Evil God.” A young man with that label over his head was sitting in the seat Mutsuko had recommended. He was smiling a placid smile and chatting with someone in the seat opposite him.
“Hey... an Evil God would be pretty evil, right?” Yuichi asked.
“Probably? It is right there in the name,” Yuri responded condescendingly.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Also, he’s sitting right there.” Yuichi pointed to the young man, feeling very slightly like he was being made a fool of.
“What should we do? Should we contact Shinomiya?” Yuri asked.
“We’ll have to tail him! Right now, we don’t know anything about who he is! Let’s follow him back to his hideout!” Mutsuko burst in.
“Um, I’m not sure finding something like that would help us at all...” Yuichi muttered.
The group moved to a place where they had a good view of the cafe’s entrance. Before long, the young man left the restaurant, followed by a boy who looked familiar.
“Isn’t that... the kid from your class, Sis? Rokuhara?” Yuichi asked. Above the guy’s head was the label “Host.”
“That’s definitely Rokuhara, yeah,” Mutsuko said. “He’s the one who attacked Noro, right?”
Hiromichi Rokuhara. With the label “Apprentice Monster Hunter,” he’d attacked the vampire Noro.
The test to become a monster hunter was to kill a monster all by yourself. He’d ended up failing, and he’d said he didn’t want to get involved anymore, but Yuichi had remained on his guard to see if he might still try something.
The guy and the man parted ways after leaving the cafe. Hiromichi went on by himself, while the young man remained near the entrance to the restaurant, thinking about something.
Yuichi already knew Hiromichi’s deal, so he decided there was no point in tailing him. He was watching to see which way the man might turn when suddenly, the man began to walk towards him.
“Hey. You think he’s found us out?” Yuichi asked.
“He’s looking right at us, so I imagine so,” Yuri said, completely calm. Perhaps that unflappability was a sign of her high-class upbringing.
It wasn’t as if they were hiding, and he didn’t know anything about them, so Yuichi had been convinced that as long as they pretended they were talking, that would be enough.
“What should we do?” he asked.
“Go somewhere else?” Mutsuko suggested. “If this leads to a fight, there could be a lot of casualties if we stay here.”
Yuichi remembered the incident over summer vacation. There had been quite a few casualties then, and he didn’t want to end up repeating the same mistake.
“Okay. I think that direction would be best, given where we are.”
Yuichi began to lead them into the same back alleys he’d taken during the incidents over spring and summer vacations. It was apparently the turf of serial killers, so most people never came anywhere near it.
Yuichi and the others proceeded deeper down the twisting back streets. After a while, he stopped, and told Mutsuko and Yuri to wait a little further in.
“Hey,” the young man addressed them casually.
He seemed perfectly friendly, with no signs of malice about him. It was hard to believe his label was really an “Evil God.” At a glance, he seemed to be a completely ordinary human. It would have been difficult to find him no matter how good your enemy-radar happened to be.
Yuichi was at a loss for how to respond. At the moment, the man hadn’t done anything to make himself his enemy.
As a result, silence fell over them.
For once, Mutsuko was able to read the mood, and she remained quiet, too.
As Yuichi was trying to think of what to say, suddenly, his phone rang. Judging by the ringtone, the call was probably from Chiharu.
“It’s ringing. Why don’t you answer it?” the man prompted.
Yuichi answered the phone.
“Yuichi Sakaki! The resonance has begun!” the voice on the other end said.
Yuichi gasped. “Do you know where?”
“Indeed I do, for I have become quite sensitive! The closest target would be close to Seishin Station’s north exit!”
“I’m near Seishin Station’s north exit...”
Yuichi looked at the man. It seemed likely that he was a Divine Vessel host, which would explain how he had found him so easily. He’d discovered him with the resonance and followed him right there.
“Not letting it possess you suggests a half-hearted approach,” said the man. “I’m not even sure whether to classify you as a participant or not...”
“Are you... a Divine Vessel host?” Yuichi asked uneasily.
“No.”
“Right, so you want to fi— wait, you’re not?!”
Yuichi was baffled. Who could the man be, knowing about the Divine Vessels without being a host?
“Well, I am connected to them,” said the man. “It means I always know where Divine Vessels are, whether or not there’s resonance. I detected one nearby, so I came to investigate, but now that I think about it, this is all rather strange. You seemed to be looking in on us before the resonance even started, and you didn’t go after Hiromichi, the one who does have a vessel. Does that mean you have other business with me?”
“I... I wouldn’t say that, exactly...” Yuichi stammered. He hadn’t expected this to happen, and as a result, he was finding it hard to find words.
“This is pathetic,” Yuri said in a scathing tone. “Stop mumbling and assert yourself.”
“But...” Yuichi didn’t know how to respond.
If the man had been clearly hostile, he’d be able to fight him, but what was he supposed to do about being pleasantly addressed? He couldn’t just call someone evil and pick a fight with them when they weren’t actually doing anything wrong.
“Aw, darn!” Mutsuko cried. “He’s really got you stuck, huh? Hey, could you do us a favor and say or do something evil?”
They didn’t have any particular business with this man right now. Even if the man was evil, they couldn’t really condemn him when he wasn’t doing anything.
“Something evil, eh?” the man said. “I’m not sure that I can... You don’t have a Divine Vessel in you, so I see no reason to test you... and if you have no business with me, I should probably be on my way.”
As the man turned to go, Yuichi opened his mouth to call him back.
If he didn’t want to fight, he thought, maybe he could tell him something useful about the war. But he wouldn’t get the chance as he was interrupted by the sound of a gunshot.
The young man dodged the attack effortlessly.
“How violent,” the man said. “You know it’s not polite to surprise people like that.”
The man was looking at a girl who had the label “Hero” over her head. Her right hand, holding a gun, was wreathed in black flame.
Yuichi recognized her. It was the girl he’d met in these same back alleys during summer vacation. She’d appeared during his battle with the “Immortal” giant, been killed, then disappeared. As a result, he hadn’t learned much about her except that a Divine Vessel had found a host in her right arm.
In other words, she was a participant in the war. She was their enemy.
“Where’s Natsuki? What did you do to Natsuki?!” the girl shouted.
“Natsuki, eh?” the man asked. “I have an idea of where she went off to. I was just thinking about going to see her.”