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Yukinari was in the reception room of the Schillings mansion with a group of people he had personally chosen. Dasa, Fiona, Veronika, Arlen—and Angela.
Yukinari had decided that, with respect to Angela, he would have to act as a tyrant toward her. That seemed the best way to keep her from being troublesome; it appeared to cause her to do as he said. So when he brought her here, he did so not in manacles, but in an iron collar he had created for her.
Truth be told, he found this tyrant act immensely draining, but as it seemed to make Angela more willing to give him information, perhaps it would be worth it in the end. When he had gone to fetch her from the basement room, she had looked like a young woman receiving an engagement ring from her lover. All Yukinari could do was sigh internally.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t have time to fret about the little things.
“All right.” Yukinari looked around at his gathered companions. He had brought them all here so that everyone could get on the same page when it came to what they knew.
There had been more than ten victims, and Friedland was paralyzed with fear. Ulrike and the other familiars were no longer active, and Berta was unconscious, her recovery questionable. There was no more time to hesitate. Yukinari had to set aside his personal feelings or nothing would ever change. If Berta never regained consciousness, it would be his fault, for refusing to act despite his strong suspicion about the culprit.
“I’ve called you all here today because I want all of you to know what I know about the killer stalking Friedland.”
“Yukinari, have you learned something?!” Fiona looked anxious and excited. Yukinari found it painful; her expression showed an immense confidence in him. But he deserved no praise.
Dasa, and Dasa only, was looking at the ground. She probably had a good guess as to what Yukinari was going to say. For that matter, having heard the conversation between him and Hatsune, she probably knew perfectly well who the killer was. Dasa, of course, knew all about how angels were made.
“To begin with, our killer is in fact an angel.”
“An angel...” Angela whispered. Everyone else was simply struck dumb.
Fiona in particular seemed shocked by this. When she heard the word “angel,” she thought not of the miracle-working puppets created by the True Church of Harris, but of Yukinari. She knew firsthand how powerful Yukinari’s abilities were, how much they had contributed to Friedland. So something inside her resisted the notion that their enemy could be cut from the same cloth.
“Let’s be clear,” Yukinari said, glancing at Arlen and Angela. “Angels are created by alchemy.”
The Church taught that angels were the messengers of God, given flesh in rituals of fervent prayer; alchemy certainly had nothing to do with it. But in reality, the angels were homunculi, artificial life forms created by alchemists. The Church had hunted down the alchemists as heretics, and for generations they had been forced to work in complete secrecy, creating tools that would do miracles for their kidnappers.
Alchemy was responsible for a great many things in the Church. Angels, holy oil. Most likely, the statues of the guardian saint, as well.
Neither Arlen nor Angela looked pleased about this, but they didn’t try to shout Yukinari down, either. Both of them had parted ways with Church headquarters, met Yukinari, and spent time here in Friedland—perhaps they had come to harbor their own suspicions.
“What I’m going to say next is secondhand knowledge from the alchemist who made me—or more precisely, made my current body.”
He proceeded to give them a brief explanation of the way angels, or rather homunculi, were created. How a lump of flesh was given life by summoning a soul from another world. How a homunculus with a sense of self would be difficult to use as a tool—too much risk of rebellion or flight—so the Church ensured that once the homunculus was activated, its memories and personality were wiped out, leaving only a living puppet behind.
Fiona looked closely at Yukinari. “But that means... That means that after they breathe life into it using the soul of someone who already died once, they kill them again.”
“If you consider the erasure of personality and memories to be murder, then yes,” Yukinari nodded.
“That’s awful...”
“B-But they’re already dead, so you can’t really kill them a second time...” A glare from Fiona silenced Arlen’s attempt to defend the Church.
“We can argue about that later,” Yukinari said, and looked around again. “Whatever the case, that’s how angels are made. I died in an accident in my previous world. My soul left that body behind and was used to activate this one—I guess. The difference is, Jirina didn’t eliminate my personality or memories after that, so I’ve continued to exist as myself.”
Then, the Church had killed Jirina for the crime of creating a self-aware angel. Yukinari, enraged, had slaughtered everyone who had carried out the execution, everyone who had ordered it, as well as anyone related to the Church who happened to be in his vicinity at the time. The Harris Church, naturally, deployed angels to try to stop him, but because they lacked Yukinari’s self-awareness, they couldn’t act autonomously. They were literally nothing more than puppets, and in a one-on-one battle their reactions were always going to be slower than Yukinari’s. In addition, the Church used the angels to perform miracles, not fight battles, so they had neither experience with nor strategies for this situation.
As a result, Yukinari perpetrated a mass slaughter, then fled the capital with Dasa in tow, neither the royal army nor the shattered Church able to pursue him.
“Now... here’s the problem. I mentioned I died in an accident. Well, my older sister died with me.”
“You had an older sister, Yukinari?” Fiona asked in surprise.
“Yeah. Hatsune Amano.”
As he spoke the name, Yukinari unrolled a piece of paper on the table in the middle of the room. On it, he had written Amano Hatsune and Amano Yukinari in kanji.
Arlen leaned over the paper, blinking. “We saw this at those crime scenes...”
“This is how we wrote things in my previous world. This is my name, and this is my sister’s.”
“No...” Fiona was always a quick study, and she immediately seemed to grasp what Yukinari was getting at.
“I’m afraid so,” he said, trying to ignore the ache in his heart. “The angel attacking our town is my... my sister.”
“Yuki...” He felt Dasa’s fingers brush his own. He was seized by the desire to take her hand, but he pushed the feeling away. This was no time to be leaning on her kindness.
“When Berta was attacked, I met her, however briefly, and confirmed all of this.”
“Your sister...” Fiona whispered, her hand to her mouth. “But then, why...? If you really talked to her, that means she still has her memories and personality too, doesn’t it? So why would she see you as an enemy? And after what happened with you, why would the Church make another angel with its personality intact?”
Angela, who had been silent until then, spoke up. “In that case...” Everyone turned to look at her, which caused her to frown and fall silent again. But at an encouraging nod from Yukinari, she blushed happily and continued. “Could this be an angel created by some force other than the Harris Church?”
“It’s true, my sister—Hatsune—never said anything about coming here on the orders of the Church. But she didn’t say she didn’t, either. In theory, I suppose there could be some enclave of alchemists outside the True Church of Harris, making their own homunculi, but...”
But if so, it begged the question of why they would have made Hatsune.
“I still think it makes more sense to think that the Church created another self-aware angel so they would have a better chance of disposing of me. My existence is a scandal they want to wipe out at any cost.”
Angela went quiet, but she didn’t seem too upset to have her opinion shot down. If anything, she looked rather pleased. The thought crossed Yukinari’s mind: could it be that her masochism extended even to intellectual matters?
“In any event.” He thought back to his conversation with Hatsune. “We still don’t know exactly why she’s doing this.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dasa look up at him with a hint of surprise.
“But we know for a fact that the killer is my older sister. She admitted as much herself.”
“So we know what’s going on now.” Fiona nodded, but then she looked at the paper on the tabletop. “But Yukinari... This would mean that when you put that sign up, you already thought it might be her. Could you really not have told us any sooner?!”
Yukinari couldn’t answer.