At the same time, a woman named Vasilisa, head of the Russian Church’s special forces team Annihilatus, kicked a sorcerer who was once her subordinate and sent him flying, slamming him into the locked double doors like a cannonball and destroying them.
She was in a palace in Moscow.
There was a massive ga-bam!! It made the person confined in the room jump out of his skin.
This person was a boy about fifteen years old. He was slender and had a more curvaceous beauty than even Vasilisa, an already beautiful woman, and he was so thin he’d probably go to his eternal rest in three days if abandoned out in the wild. Even his majestic attire, created for the Patriarch, fit him even worse than a little kid wearing his father’s suit for fun, dragging it around behind him.
Spitting the blood in her mouth onto a random spot on the carpet, Vasilisa gave a sweet smile. “Why, hello there, revered leader of the Russian Catholic Church. What a luxurious birdcage they’ve thrown you into—it looks like they took good care of you. Fairy tales would normally have reversed the positions of the young man and heroine, but in any case, I’m here to rescue you from the evil demon lord’s castle now!”
“…To think anyone would still call me the Patriarch. I never had any real power. No matter how much I shouted, nobody would even leave me a weapon. Everyone held up my forged signature as an indulgence and didn’t listen to me when I asked them to withdraw.”
“I’ll forgive you, since you’re cute,” interrupted Vasilisa in an obviously jocular tone. “And there’s still something you can do. Something only the Patriarch can do.”
“?”
The Patriarch tilted his little head so adorably that even Vasilisa, who only ever thought about Sasha Kreutzev, nearly felt her mind swaying. The method she used to decide what side to take was very simple. While unconsciously putting a hand to her face to make sure she didn’t have a nosebleed, she thought, Jeez, would you stop that? I’ve already lost more blood than I can probably afford…
“Can you see that?” Quelling her impulse to agonize over his cuteness, she pointed out the window.
Even from here, they could physically see the fortress floating in the golden skies. It had just that much scale and altitude. It was the temple of Fiamma of the Right, of God’s Right Seat, which had come to be called the Star of Bethlehem from remaining fragmented sources.
“That fortress was formed from the necessary parts in the necessary quantities from Crossist churches and cathedrals throughout the world. But each of those buildings has its own form. You can’t fuse them all just by collecting them in one place.”
“What are you…getting at?”
“There’s a spell to connect them.” Vasilisa waggled her finger. “Fiamma used the Roman Church and the Russian Church. He used both kinds of spells to their maximum effect to give that fortress its structure.”
“Which means…”
“If you analyze it, you can break the fortress’s joints. I’m sure Nikolai Tolstoj was the one who provided the Russian Catholic spell, but there was no evidence of it in his palace. Still, though, that doesn’t mean we have to give up. Understand what I’m saying now?”
Naturally, the spell being used was probably a secret among secrets of the Russian Church. It was unthinkable that Fiamma would use something so easily analyzed as the keystone to his final plan.
However…
“I get it.” The Patriarch moved a slender finger and rubbed his cheek. “There’s a facility nearby for reproducing and managing scaled-down versions of phenomena, right? It runs all sorts of experiments by making one-to-one-hundred-scale building dioramas to figure out what conditions cause ghosts and spirits to appear…”
“If we remove its limiter, it can be used for Russian Catholic magic, too—the kind people use. And if the simulation goes well, we could go backward and figure out which spell Fiamma used.”
“And you want me to remove it.”
“Mm-hmm! Think you can? I do have the man-eating woman in a one-legged house, but that doesn’t mean I can guarantee your safety.”
The Patriarch, on the verge of having his head patted, deftly moved his head to escape Vasilisa’s hand and headed for the room’s exit. Not realizing how his behavior had actually caused her to shudder, the Russian Church’s leader asked, “The Star of Bethlehem’s joints use a Roman Orthodox spell in addition to our Russian Catholic one, don’t they? We might not be able to weaken it all by ourselves.”
“…Things will be fine on that end. I got a stubborn old man to help me—a weird one, who had a weird number of contacts—and had him connect the teeny-tiny threads.”
“Ah?”
Accompanied by the shade of an old, wrinkly woman as she followed the Patriarch, Vasilisa gave him a simple answer.
“What I mean is that it turns out those people aren’t as rotten as everyone thought.”