Rumors of a disembodied killer, although unsubstantiated, continued to spread throughout Friedland. Neither Fiona nor the community watch had publicly acknowledged the string of murders, but it was now regarded by most residents as an established fact. Yukinari continued to remain in Friedland, not returning to his sanctuary, while the community watch along with Arlen and his knights beefed up their patrols. For better or for worse, all of this was plainly visible to the townspeople, and it had allowed them to keep their heads—but only just.
Everyone was tormented by fear. The people of Friedland didn’t really believe in invisible monsters—and the monsters they could see, such as xenobeasts and demigods, weren’t given to using swords. The only ones who used weapons in this world were humans. That meant this was the work of someone hiding somewhere in town. That was clear enough to everyone.
But then who was the criminal? Suspicion and mistrust had begun to spread among the populace. They were reaching their limits. It would only take a small number of further victims, perhaps two or three, before they could take no more and their fear gave way to violence.
Yukinari wanted to do something as quickly as possible.
It’s... It’s about me...
On top of that, he was probably the only one to have grasped the import of the killer’s clues. The community watch recognized that the same “symbols” or “characters” were being left at each of the crime scenes, but of course they didn’t know what they meant. Yukinari alone understood.
And yet, he could tell no one. He couldn’t reveal that the murderer might be his own sister, Amano Hatsune.
It seemed very likely, but he was loath to admit it. If he carelessly let something slip about his sister, he worried that everyone else, groping for an answer, would jump on the possibility, assuming his sister was the criminal without giving it due consideration.
But then, everyone’s at their breaking point.
Even Yukinari, the guardian deity of Friedland, found himself cornered. With his back against the wall, he was left with no choice but to consider the possibilities.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that Hatsune really is the killer. If she came to this world just like I did...
It implied that she might have been brought here the same way Yukinari had. In other words, as an angel.
In order to win people to the faith, the True Church of Harris had created homunculi that they called angels to perform miracles. These were very similar to humans, but rather than being born from the loving union of a man and a woman, they were artificial life forms, conceived in cold glass test tubes.
Angels had the power of physical reconstitution. They couldn’t create something from nothing, but they could produce bread from stones, or wine from water. They could even produce something as complex as a gun, if they understood how the object was constructed.
If there was something that could sever the spiritual link between Yggdra and her familiars like Ulrike, someone with such a power could create it, and put it between Friedland and Rostruch.
We call it spiritual power, but it feels an awful lot like the electricity of my former world.
So what if spiritual power was transmitted in pulses or waves the way electricity was? If you were to take some material that was a good conductor of spiritual energy and place it in the path of those pulses, maybe it would naturally distort or absorb the unstable spiritual energy. And Yukinari knew of one material that was an excellent conductor of spiritual energy.
Holy oil.
Holy oil looked like blood; it was what made the statues of the guardian saint move, and it was what flowed through Yukinari’s own body. It was the fuel that powered everything the Church did.
The True Church of Harris wants to expand its influence in the remote regions—out here on the frontier. The fact that they had begun sending units of missionary knights to the area was proof enough of that. They were investing in technology that would allow them to forcibly convert the people in these areas. Of course, the Church had several alchemists besides Jirina, and they were worked like slaves, forced to develop new technologies. It wouldn’t have surprised Yukinari to learn that they had developed some device that could interrupt the connection between an erdgod and the land.
If he knew what such a device was and how it was made, Yukinari would have been able to make one, too.
I suppose something similar could be said of becoming disembodied. But invisibility seemed unlikely from a number of angles. So the criminal wasn’t invisible. Most likely, they could be seen. But if people didn’t recognize them as the culprit, then it would be almost the same as being invisible.
Sort of like... the way I change my entire body when I become the Bluesteel Blasphemer.
This was a particular transformation Yukinari performed in order to take full advantage of his powers of physical reconstitution. When he used his powers to their utmost, it was possible for him to neglect to maintain of his own body, so he first surrounded himself in armor like a carapace, much like an insect, in order to prevent himself from coming apart.
To change his face, or the length of an arm or leg, was not difficult for him. The only concern was that he might get confused—for example, wearing taller shoes than he was used to, he would find his vision elevated a little, and that small change could make it difficult for him to walk. Or if he thoughtlessly changed his face, his smile might appear fake. Unnatural.
Yet if he didn’t need to maintain the appearance for very long, it might be enough to fool someone. To take them by surprise. It was the ultimate quick-change act.
So it’s not a killer without a face...