An intruder had broken the window to get into the cafe, and the customers had all fled.
A group of five men and women now faced off against each other.
Sakiyama was the one who’d broken the window to enter the cafe, but now he was just standing there. The woman in the black riding dress, who had called herself Natsuki’s big sister, was standing between them and the exit. Yuichi, Natsuki, and Ende were sandwiched between the two apparently-hostile presences who’d appeared out of nowhere.
Ende was smiling as if she found all of this very exciting, while Natsuki wasn’t even trying to hide her displeasure.
Yuichi cast a sympathetic glance at her. “Um, not to butt in on your family situation, but I guess we’re both having troubles with our big sisters...”
Of course, he thought, maybe this was just how big sisters were the world over: self-righteous, arrogant, and overflowing with confidence.
“She’s not my big sister,” Natsuki replied with a scowl. “She’s one of Nergal’s fourteen servants. Her name’s Alberta.”
That meant Yuichi was definitely the one being targeted. But it also changed things.
“What do you want?” Yuichi demanded. “We had a deal with Nergal. He said he’d leave us alone.”
Yuichi had won his game with Nergal, and Nergal had said he would keep his promise.
“Mm, I think you might be misremembering,” the woman told him. “Master Nergal’s precise words were, ‘If you win, I’ll let you go. I’ll allow for you to leave this place unharmed, and for Natsuki to remain as she is. I’ll even throw in a promise to never come after Natsuki again.’ So? I’m sure it’s fine for me to come after people who aren’t Natsuki.”
“Oh, for the love of... If I’d known, I would’ve asked for a more all-encompassing promise.”
“But that means you do have to leave me alone, doesn’t it? So I think you should go.” Natsuki took a step forward and glared at her.
It was true that if the promise was in effect, the woman should never be able to touch Natsuki again.
“Well, it’s true that Nergal rescinded his order for us to search for you,” the woman said. “But I still have my own personal business with you, unrelated to his.”
“Talk about splitting hairs...” If that was possible, Yuichi thought, she could argue whatever she wanted to. He grumbled to himself about how subordinates should really be more true to the spirit of an oath. “Anyway, you said you had business with me?”
“Oh, I did... but if Natsuki’s here, I don’t need you anymore,” the woman said carelessly. “I was planning to kidnap her boyfriend to lure her to me. I thought it might be fun to chop you to pieces and show them to her, or perhaps send her a picture of the two of us making love?”
“Boyfriend...” Natsuki murmured. “You disgust me, Alberta, but sometimes I like the things you say.”
“Takeuchi... did you not hear the other things she said?” Yuichi asked incredulously. He didn’t feel like he could let an unsettling comment like that slide.
“Sakaki, be careful,” Natsuki replied. “I think they’re both dead. Sakiyama was decapitated, and Alberta was chopped to bits by Takizawa.”
“They don’t look dead to me...”
“It seems Alberta’s a necromancer. She must be moving her own corpse around.”
“How are you supposed to move yourself around when you’re dead...?” Yuichi began. It made no sense to him at all, but he decided to give up on trying to understand it. What mattered was that both Alberta and Sakiyama were his enemies, and that they were after him. That made things feel a lot simpler.
Natsuki drew into a combat stance. Yuichi stood stock still and opened his senses to everything around him. Alberta wasn’t their only enemy; there was Sakiyama behind them, too.
“It really hurt, you see,” Alberta said casually. “I wasn’t expecting to die in a place like that. I don’t know how I’ll go about living the rest of my life.”
“Why not just die, then?” Natsuki snapped.
“Oh, yes,” Alberta said smoothly, either nonplussed by Natsuki’s biting retort or simply ignoring it. “You asked what I wanted, didn’t you? Revenge, of course.”
“The way that I recall the situation is that you had me at your mercy,” Natsuki said. “I didn’t do anything to earn your ire.”
“But if I try to take revenge against Aki, I’ll just lose.”
“In other words, you want to vent your frustration,” Natsuki said.
“Mm, more or less. The body I have right now is one I stole after forcing my way into a family home — my original body was chopped up too badly to recover, you see — but it must be a bad match, because I can’t seem to stop it from decomposing.”
Yuichi felt vaguely sick as he realized what Alberta’s casual words implied.
“So I was thinking, as a fellow servant of Nergal, my compatibility with you might be just a bit better. So, Natsuki dear... give me your body, would you?” With that, Alberta flipped up the skirt of her riding dress and drew a weapon from within.
It was a whip. Despite her outfit, it wasn’t a riding crop, but a bullwhip, of the sort an animal tamer might use.
“Hey, this is getting pretty exciting,” Ende commented. “I don’t think it has anything to do with me, though, so I might just sit back and watch... wait, I know. Since it’s no fun to see a big battle setup like this interrupted, I’ll set up a ward to keep people away. I’ll even do it for free.”
As if seeing that the battle was about to start, Ende moved to the back of the cafe and sat down in a random chair. Then she pulled out her smartphone and placed a call. Yuichi wasn’t sure what she was doing that would keep people away, but all he could do was let her handle it.
Alberta didn’t even glance at Ende as she swung her whip directly at Natsuki.
But the whip didn’t reach her. Yuichi had grabbed the tip.
“Huh?” Alberta asked, agape. She seemed to have great confidence in her skill with the whip, and likely hadn’t been expecting the first attack to be stopped.
“Sakaki, you can catch whips?” Natsuki asked.
“Yeah, I’m used to it.”
There were theories that a whip’s attacks could exceed the speed of sound. In reality, it was dubious that any whip meant for attacking could exceed the speed of sound, but naturally, the fantastical concept appealed greatly to Mutsuko. Because of that, Mutsuko had developed a whip that really did exceed the speed of sound, and had used it on Yuichi many times before. Thanks to that, he’d learned how to cope with even the most unpredictable high-speed attacks.
“Takeuchi, you do something about Sakiyama,” he ordered. “I’ll handle the whip lady.”
“I will,” Natsuki agreed. “Watch out for any spikes she might throw; if they strike you, you’ll be cursed.”
“That’s not much of a warning...”
Natsuki turned to face Sakiyama.
Yuichi looked at Alberta again. There was something strange about her center of balance; she must have had even more heavy weapons under her skirt.
He estimated, from that one whip strike, that she was a little bit stronger than Natsuki. It was hard for him to say whether she was really “dead” or not, but there was definitely something awkward about her movements. Altogether, she wasn’t that strong, Yuichi determined.