Chapter 10

CHAPTER 4 The Mad Oracle of Gjallarhorn Someone was there, in that dark room, shaking with ecstasy. “Yes! Success!” Their ring finger glowed red. “Thanks to that boy, my research has finally yielded results after all these years…! My greatest wish is fulfilled at last! It’s a miracle! No, it’s destiny!” They lifted their head as if to look at the sky, or maybe as an expression of bliss, as if they had just received an engagement ring from their beloved. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I don’t need that annoying girl anymore! Or that pesky vampire!” They couldn’t stop laughing maniacally, having succeeded where all others had failed. “I will be the one to bring salvation to the world…” The reflection of the ring shone in their eyes alongside euphoria…and madness. “…by remaking it to suit me!” She hated uniforms—the forced conformity. A few months earlier, not long after cherry trees dropped their blossoms, she arrived at her new school just as the new school year started. Her name was Mari Vlad Abara, fifteen years old. Her dad was Romanian, her mother Japanese. She had a sister several years younger than her. She was born in Bucharest and lived in Romania until she turned seven, when her family moved to Japan. Currently, she was living alone while her mom and dad worked abroad, her sister staying with them. She was in her first year of high school. “Nice to meet you, everyone!” She introduced herself to her classmates with a big smile. Everything she had just told them about herself was a lie. Mari Vlad Abara wasn’t a student, and all she knew about herself was that she was a world-class beauty and possessed the power of the vampire factor. Posing as a student, she had been tasked with monitoring the activities of the West Kokonoe branch of the Calamity Research Institute, and with capturing the Third Factor mythical girl. After she accomplished that, she would be assigned a new task. It was always like this. There was the preparation stage and the action stage. Standard fare. She’d be spending her energy on yet another mission in the unending conflict between the Order and the Calamity Research Institute as her own execution inevitably approached. In this worthless, rotten world where the mere fact that she existed was seen as a transgression, she had only this brief period leading up to her death to have a taste of what life was. Normal humans didn’t have to live like this—which must have meant she wasn’t human. That’s the conclusion she’d arrived at. She liked uniforms, because a uniform dress code was the perfect background against which to express her individuality. Sitting in the last row next to the window with her chin resting in her hand, Mari absentmindedly stared at the world outside. “What even is the point…? I’d be happier with everyone dead,” she muttered. She wasn’t human, but she lived among humans, pretending to be one of them. It was so comical, it was tragic. She had to do it for her mission, but this strategy didn’t seem effective to her. There was no better cover for her in this country than posing as a student; that was a fact, but she didn’t like it. Mari never dreamed about living an ordinary life. To her, her life was already over the moment the Order came to get her from a small orphanage in some insignificant little country when she began to express mythical girl abilities. “This isn’t a world for me. I’m like a fish out of water, being forced to live among land animals. It just won’t work.” But even though she moaned about it, there was a part of her that enjoyed the novelty of school life. She just didn’t want to admit it, even to herself. School wasn’t like the Order’s training facility. At school, she was surrounded by normal people. Within the school walls, she lived like them. And then she met him. A few days after Mari transferred to the school… “It’s gone.” She’d just returned to her classroom after a lecture from her earnest teacher about how she should make more effort to fit in. The first-years’ floor was deserted—everyone else had already gone home or to their school clubrooms. The orange-tinged sun was low on the horizon. Before going to see her teacher, Mari had left her schoolbag on her desk, but when she returned to the classroom, it wasn’t there. “I don’t think anyone would’ve taken it by mistake…” She’d put a key chain on her bag with a toy that looked like someone’s grossly mistaken idea of a rabbit. She’d gotten it from a capsule machine at the arcade near the train station. It was unlikely that another student would’ve taken her bag by mistake, and if they did, then their bag would’ve been left somewhere in the classroom. Mari had an idea of what had happened. “Those ugly bitches…” The faces of three girls from her class flashed through her head. They were part of a group at the top of the school hierarchy. Mari had gotten an invite from them on her first day, but she refused, and for that “offense,” she became a target for bullying. They’d talk crap about her looks just loud enough for her to hear. Now it seemed they’d escalated their bullying to stealing her stuff. “Argh, what a pain. When you’re pretty like me, you make enemies wherever you go.” She’d been ignoring her bullies when all they were doing was saying mean things about her. They were just weak humans, jealous because she was prettier than them. Taking her stuff, though, was too much to turn a blind eye to. Mari went out into the hallway. “What the…?” The moment she stepped out of the classroom, she got an intense head rush. The world spun in front of her eyes, her mind fogged up, and she was so dizzy, she had to sit down. “Ungh… Nnh…” The symptoms resembled those of anemia, but Mari knew it wasn’t that. It was her vampiric urges awakening. Soon enough, she was overcome with bloodlust, which felt like simultaneous hunger and thirst. “No way…” Mari pressed her hands to her chest, her eyes widened. The vampire factor was ranked higher than the other factors, and it wasn’t just because of the vampire mythical girls’ useful ability to manipulate blood, auto-regeneration, or superior mobility. The main reason was that it was a very stable factor, predictably degenerating into the berserk status over time, but not at random. The vampiric urges were the only real drawback, but they were easy enough to suppress through regular consumption of blood. That day, as usual, Mari went to the rooftop after lunch to have her pouch of medical blood, but for some reason, it hadn’t satisfied her bloodthirst. She had an extra pouch of blood just in case, of course, but it was in her schoolbag. “This is…the worst timing…” The vampiric urges couldn’t be overcome through sheer will. Unlike thirst or hunger, they weren’t urges of the body, but of the soul. And Mari had never felt bloodthirst this strong before. She could deal with it by drinking somebody’s blood, but she could hardly do that without revealing she was a mythical girl, and the Order might execute her for letting that secret out. Mari wouldn’t do that for another, more personal reason, too. “Drinking some random human’s blood…is totally gross.” The idea of indiscriminate feeding on any human she could get her hands on was repulsive to Mari. Historically, there had been mythical girls who did that. Mari thought of them as barbarians. “Oof… Uh…” She felt cold sweat on her back. “Hey, are you okay?” someone asked her. She was almost seeing double, but she turned toward the voice and saw a boy. His face seemed familiar. She recognized him as the student council member with an old-fashioned name. Even though he might be relatively well-known for his role on the student council, to Mari, he was like a generic background character. For reasons unknown, his clothes were all wet, his face was covered in bruises and scratches, and he was carrying a schoolbag with that ugly excuse for a rabbit key chain—it was Mari’s bag. “I was just searching for you. You’re Abara, the first-year? You’re not looking too good, if I’m to be honest. Should I walk you to the nurse office?” It made her sick to hear that this dude knew her name. She just wanted him to leave her alone. If she wasn’t feeling so out of it, she would’ve told him rudely to get lost. “Uh…? Why’re you…soaked…? What do you…want…?” She wasn’t even in a state to talk. The boy was concerned about her, which she found humiliating. “I’m the vice president of the student council, in my second year here. The name’s Ryuunosuke Dazai. Let me help you stand up.” He extended his hand to her. “Whoa, your hand’s ice-cold! Are you not well enough to stand? Hmm, piggyback won’t work, from the look of things. Sorry, your clothes may get a bit wet.” Without waiting for her answer, Ryuunosuke put one arm around her torso and another under her knees. “Hup!” He lifted her up. Being carried like a bride by this random guy was even more humiliating for Mari. She thought angrily that having a weakling like him carry her made her look heavy. At the same time, she felt her bloodlust grow in intensity. She looked at his neck—not too thick, not too thin. She wanted to sink her teeth into it so badly, it was driving her crazy. His smell made her salivate. “The nurse isn’t in…” He carried her into the nurse’s office and put her down on an empty bed. “Give me…my bag…” She took her bag from him and opened it with shaking hands. “It’s not there…” Quite a few items were missing from her bag. The spare blood pouch looked like a squeezy juice pouch, so nobody would think it suspicious, but losing it was a problem. “Something missing from your bag? I could go look for it.” “No… I’m…anemic. Just…leave me here…” “What? No way. You’re a first-year student; I’m your senior! You can rely on me. I’ll stay with you until the nurse gets back.” She wanted to tell him to mind his own business. “How did you know…it was my bag?” “Huh? Ah, right. It’s this weird rabbit key chain. Never seen anyone else with one like that.” “You’re a creep…who goes around…checking out younger girl’s bags?” “No, but you stand out from the crowd, so I noticed. I randomly walked in on these girls trying to throw it into the pool. I guessed at once that they were bullies and jumped in, catching your bag in midair! I saved your bag, but I fell into the pool. That’s why I’m wet, and why I had your bag.” “And why are you bruised?” “The bullies called their boyfriends, who are a year older than me. We got in a scuffle. I know I look like I got a real bad beating, but they were the losers. I picked them up one by one and threw them into the pool. The girls, too. I bet they won’t bully you again after that. But if they do try something funny, let me know, and I’ll take care of it.” He laughed, then sneezed loudly. “Achoo! Uh, feeling kinda cold after that unplanned swim.” Mari understood then that this boy was an idiot. There was still one thing she didn’t get, though. “Why did you…help me?” “Why…? What?” “You had no reason to do any of that…” “Why would I need a reason?” Mari saw pure honesty in his eyes. “I helped you because I wanted to. I don’t need a reason to help people.” Nobody else had ever said anything like that to Mari. She’d never had anyone go out of their way to help her, nor had she ever done that for anyone else. There had been no room in her life for random acts of kindness. Ryuunosuke’s words and sincere smile became permanently burned into her memory. “You go to the trouble for nothing…” “I don’t see it as trouble. You’re lucky I was in the right place at the right time!” A sensation like an electric shock went through Mari’s brain as the realization hit her that she wouldn’t mind sucking his blood. It was an instinctive, not logical decision. Everyone in the world was her enemy, or so she used to think. She had to keep living in that world, all alone. Ryuunosuke changed her thinking, though. When she imagined him becoming her only ally in this crappy world, everything went white in front of her eyes. “…Nngh…” She lost consciousness—that’s how strong her bloodlust had grown. “Ugh… Nnn…” She came to not long after. Her thirst was still tormenting her. She looked around and saw Ryuunosuke had fallen asleep in his chair, resting his head on a table. The nurse must have been taking her time coming back to her office. A few items were laid out on the desk next to Ryuunosuke—Mari’s blood pouch, and other things that had been missing from her bag. Not that she cared at that moment. The last rays of the setting sun were shining into the nurse’s office. Mari could hear the school brass band having a rehearsal, and shouts from the gymnasium. She was alone with Ryuunosuke, and she couldn’t take her eyes off his neck. He was so exposed, defenseless. So naive. Mari’s self-restraint reached its limits. She wanted his blood; she wanted it so bad. The thirst overpowered her. She walked over to Ryuunosuke on unsteady feet, like a ghost in a horror flick. She didn’t even spare the blood pouch a glance. Drinking the boy’s blood was too risky; she shouldn’t do it—but she wasn’t thinking logically anymore. She had given in to her instincts. “Huff… Huff…” Her desires drowned out all rational thought. “You want me to rely on you, you said. Fine, Mr. Upperclassman, I’ll have you help me…” She bit into the neck of this boy she had never spoken to before that day. He’d feel no pain, she knew. Vampire saliva contained a substance similar to morphine. If he woke up before she was finished, he might even feel pleasure. He didn’t wake up, though, which was the best for both of them—if he had awoken, Mari would have to kill him. For the first time in her life, she was sucking another person’s blood. The sensation of warm blood filling her mouth was electrifying. It was just so good. She saw sparks, feeling as if her brain was buzzing with electricity. The rich aroma of the blood made her heady. Blood wasn’t supposed to have sweetness to it, or umami, but that’s how it tasted to Mari. For some reason, it had both an intoxicating and an energizing effect on her. In comparison, the medical blood for transfusions the Order gave her to drink was like watered-down milk. She sucked Ryuunosuke’s blood ravenously, lapping it up with delight, reveling in the elation it brought her. After a while, she realized her bloodthirst had faded away. “Mmm…” She let go, satisfied, and the punctures on Ryuunosuke’s neck closed immediately, thanks to another component of vampire saliva that stopped bleeding as soon as the vampire withdrew their fangs. Mari took out a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped both her mouth and Ryuunosuke’s neck. “Thank you for the lovely meal,” she whispered into Ryuunosuke’s ear as he slept. After that, Mari packed her things into her bag and left the nurse’s office. The light of the setting sun illuminated her with its red glow. She felt happy, and there was a lightness in her step. “Ryuunosuke Dazai,” she repeated the boy’s name to herself. “What a weird name.” For the first time in her life, she was interested in a boy. The fish out of water suddenly longed to live on land. She wondered about Ryuunosuke’s personality, his likes and dislikes, what he did after school, whether he would like her. Her curiosity had been piqued and couldn’t be suppressed. The emotions she was experiencing were so unfamiliar.