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Yukinari ran as fast as he was able, Dasa in his arms. As an angel, his body was capable of superhuman feats of mobility and endurance, even without taking on the form known as the Bluesteel Blasphemer. A normal person could keep up a real full-tilt run for only ten seconds or so at most, but Yukinari could easily go for an entire minute. And that was while carrying another person.
Hence, he arrived at the belltower not long after hearing the shot.
“Yuki, put me down,” Dasa said before they began climbing the staircase. They would ultimately need to use a ladder to get to the rooftop, so even Yukinari couldn’t have reached the lookout with Dasa in his arms.
Yukinari set the girl down and began bounding up the belltower stairs. Anxiety and panic swirled in his mind. He knew how reluctant Berta would have been to shoot anyone, even someone who appeared to be their mysterious killer. True, in the battle with the Missionary Order, she had managed to shoot one Church person, but only with a great deal of reluctance.
What was more, this time she would have been picking her target out of a crowd, which made the technical difficulty of the shot much greater. No matter how talented she was, Berta hadn’t spent more than a month with her gun; predicting how people would move and then finding a space for the shot—essentially, seeing the future—would be tremendously hard for her.
That was why Yukinari had felt it would be enough if she could confirm that someone had had a strange reaction to the sign. And yet, there had been a gunshot. He was sure it had been Derrringer, and that it had come from the direction of the belltower. It was almost certainly Berta.
I hate to think it, but...
In all his time in this world, Yukinari had never dealt with anyone who knew what a gun was. Neither the humans nor the xenobeasts and demigods recognized the weapons. They certainly had no concept of long-distance sniping. No one knew that an attack might come from much farther away than was possible with a bow and arrow, or that a scope might enable such an attack to be very accurate.
So it was possible Berta had forgotten to be careful. Careful of the angle of the sun—or more precisely, the reflection of the light in the scope’s lens.
Nobody in this world would have seen the gleam of something on a rooftop and thought “sniper’s scope.” But if the killer was his older sister Hatsune, and if she knew that Yukinari had introduced guns to this world...
In deference to Yukinari’s interests, Hatsune had frequently watched action movies with him. Westerns, in particular, often had scenes where the hero would notice a sniper drawing a bead on him because of the reflection from a scope.
“Berta!” Yukinari powered his way up the ladder with such force that it seemed he might break the thing. He feared the worst—that Berta had been drawn into a one-on-one confrontation with the killer. They already knew that the criminal used something like a rapier in their attacks. If this person had gotten close enough to strike, then Berta, with her big, heavy gun, would be at a severe disadvantage. The belltower didn’t provide good footing, either.
“Berta—”
As he reached the top of the ladder, Yukinari saw a lone figure on the roof.
“Was that you who fired? What hap—”
His first thought was that he needn’t have worried. But he realized with a twisting in his stomach that the light had made it hard to see what was in front of him; he saw now that his first impression had been wrong.
There only appeared to be one figure because both people on the rooftop were in profile, so that their silhouettes overlapped from where Yukinari watched. Berta was there, along with someone else, a girl.
Yukinari immediately moved to get closer, but he noticed his feet slipping. He didn’t want to look away from the two people in front of him, but just for an instant, he glanced down. He saw a rivulet of blood at his feet. He followed it back, back to Berta and the girl.
With the sun at her back, the girl’s face appeared to be stained black—but her purple eyes were looking straight at him.
Calm down...!
He tried to talk himself down, and meanwhile he moved to one side, hoping to get a better look at what was going on. The movement changed the angle of the sun relative to where he was standing, stripping away some of the shadows that had ensconced the two women in the belltower.
Berta appeared limp, all but leaning on the young woman. The other girl was shorter than Berta, yet her hands were not up very high. She was clearly using some kind of tool. But what? Was that a stick? No...
“Bertaaaa!” Yukinari howled. Her generous chest had been pierced through by the rapier the girl was holding. And then...
“My dear Yuki...”
With the twilight sun behind her, the girl’s face was awash in shadows. The face of...
“Hatsune... Is that you...?”
My dear Yuki.
That was what she always used to call him. For as long as he could remember, she was the only one who ever called him that. And yet...
Her face... But of course it’s not like I remember. They gave her a new body when she came here.
It was an utterly ordinary face. It looked almost as if it had been designed not to leave an impression; it was pleasant enough, but confoundingly indistinct. It wasn’t the face Yukinari remembered his sister having.
Was this face the result of the preferences of the person who had created this angel, or had it been done deliberately to make her a better assassin? He had no idea. And the girl was so clearly young. Hatsune had been older than Yukinari. The last time he had seen her, when they both died when their house burned down, she had been eighteen. Yet this girl was obviously in her early teens. She was smaller and younger even than Berta and Dasa.
Yet the girl said, “My dear Yuki... Have you forgotten what I look like?” With the palm of her left hand—the one not holding the rapier—she began to rub her face. He could see a bluish-white light leak out from behind her hand, the light of physical reconstitution. The pale fingers moved as if stirring a soup, and the girl’s face changed completely.
Now it was the face he remembered. It looked somewhat like Dasa—yet not exactly. It was a face he knew much better than Dasa’s, one he could never forget. One familiar and beloved to him.
A face sweet and lovely. But to see that kind, gentle smile against this blood-soaked scene was completely bizarre. The feeling was only intensified by the spatter of red against the white hair and white clothes. The blood must have come out of Berta’s mouth when some internal organ had been ruptured by the rapier. The girl appeared unfazed.
It was unmistakably Amano Hatsune. But no—she was no longer human. She wasn’t even Japanese. Rather, like Yukinari, she was a soul sealed inside an angel’s body. Perhaps it was more appropriate to think of her as Hatsune Amano.
“Hrgh...” Yukinari put a hand to his chest, which was in agony, as if he were having a heart attack. He had expected this, but he had wished desperately to be wrong. His sister—his dear, sweet sister, the sibling he adored—was the killer, his enemy.
Time and time again he had suspected this, then tried to overcome his doubts, only to be filled with them again, the repetition of it all like a prayer. But now all that was over. There could be no more question.
“Why? Why...?” he groaned. “Are you acting on orders from the True Church of Harris?! If so, sister, then they’re deceiving you!”
The members of the True Church of Harris had ample reason to want to kill both Yukinari and the people of Friedland. But Hatsune didn’t. And if Hatsune had really come to this world with her memories intact, just like Yukinari, then she should have realized that she had no reason to fight him or to let the Church use her as its pawn. She ought to have refused.