“My dear Yuki.” Hatsune produced a new rapier and began to attack again. She mostly stabbed at him, but sometimes, almost randomly, she would slice as well, so he couldn’t let his guard down. It was like a machine gun spitting a hail of bullets at him.
Yukinari didn’t sustain any serious injuries, but she grazed him repeatedly. And then, to his immense surprise, he felt his knees give out.
Somehow, he managed not to tumble to the ground.
“Wh-What the hell?!”
What had suddenly caused him to go so limp? He forced off a shot from Durandall to keep Hatsune at bay, then he retreated and tried to get a look at his body. Something strange had happened, there was no doubt. What in the world had it been?
He gasped. His wounds weren’t healed. They had stopped bleeding, but they should have repaired themselves—yet there they were. He had been focused on Hatsune, not paying much attention to his healing processes, so he hadn’t noticed.
What did this mean?
Hatsune stopped and spoke. “Oh, you’ve noticed?”
“What do you mean, noticed? Hatsune, what have you—” Was this some trap? “What have you done to me?”
“Oh, now I can’t just go giving it away.” She sounded as if she were chiding him for asking for the answers to his homework. “Try using your head.”
“You’ve... You’ve interrupted my powers somehow.”
“Certainly,” Hatsune said with a nod. “Just like those people with the horns that I found in Friedland. I stopped them from moving the same way. There was some strange power controlling them.”
“Horns—?”
She had to mean Ulrike and Yggdra’s other familiars. She’d stopped them from moving. Ulrike and the others were in something like a coma—so that had been Hatsune’s doing as well. But again, how...
“Is it... that sword?”
“Correct!” Hatsune said with a happy smile.
He had thought it was strange. She had to know Yukinari had a gun, and that she would need one, too, if she were going to fight him. Of course, unlike Yukinari, who had obsessively disassembled and reassembled his model guns, Hatsune didn’t know much about the construction of such weapons. She wasn’t likely to suddenly produce a Durandall or a Red Chili. But it was possible to make a single-shot weapon with nothing but a barrel and a firing device. An angel could easily produce a series of such disposable weapons. It wouldn’t exactly be a machine gun, but it would in practice be possible to fire successive shots.
And yet Hatsune hadn’t done it. She knew Yukinari would have a gun, and yet she had deliberately confronted him with a sword.
That suggested her sword was special.
“I call it the Blood Rose,” she said.
Now that she said the name, he noticed that, indeed, the hilt of the sword, which looked like a white cross, was worked with a pattern of roses red as blood. He had thought they were mere decoration, but he was wrong. They served some sort of purpose. Whatever they were, they could stop an angel’s powers from functioning, and sever the connection between Ulrike and Yggdra.
Angels and familiars had something in common—spiritual power. Most likely, the sword was capable of doing violence to the places of spiritual power in anyone it struck. Or perhaps absorbing the spiritual power of its victims.
Blood Rose... blood... Holy Oil... I get it!
The crimson alchemical liquid was capable of absorbing and storing spiritual power. It also served as the angels’ “blood.” If it could be quickly cycled, it would absorb unstable spiritual power, causing changes in the waves and concentrations of such power.
Meaning, if he were struck with this blade, Yukinari wouldn’t be able to heal himself as usual. Really, it would only slow down the function of his healing, but in light of the fact that Hatsune, also an angel, was capable of healing instantaneously, it could be the decisive difference.
Perhaps this was the great anti-erdgod weapon the True Church of Harris had ordered the alchemists to create. The problem of an opponent’s speed and sheer physical strength would remain, but with that weapon a single person could potentially face down a xenobeast or a demigod.
“My dear Yuki...” Hatsune jumped at him, as sure a strike as if she had transformed into an arrow. Yukinari twisted out of the way, but the rapier stabbed him in his foot, which he hadn’t been able to move in time.
“Hrgh...!”
“Dear, dear Yuki. You mustn’t lose your focus,” Hatsune said, smiling sweetly.
Yukinari reeled backward, and although he had escaped from the rapier, no matter how hard he concentrated, his wounds didn’t seem to heal. His powers were agonizingly slow to activate. It was all he could do to stop the bleeding.
This was bad. This was very bad.
“Dammit...!”
He hopped backward, opening distance. Yukinari was hard-pressed; he had been fighting a singularly defensive battle for some time now. If Hatsune had been more interested in finishing the fight, he might already be dead. It looked like Hatsune was still enjoying her long-awaited reunion with her brother.
“Sweet Yuki. I do love you,” Hatsune said placatingly as she came closer. She stabbed repeatedly with the rapier, left and right, almost like a hail of bullets. “With all my heart. Won’t you die with me?”
“Grrh! You—!”
He swept the strikes away and fired Durandall. He didn’t have time to aim carefully, but given the close range he was still able to plant the .44 Magnum bullet square in Hatsune’s chest.
She stumbled back, and a large red splotch like a blossoming flower appeared on her white dress.
But an instant later, like a clockwork doll, she sprang forward as quickly as she had retreated. Her dress was torn and stained with blood—no, with Holy Oil—but there was no sign of a wound on her exposed skin. It had vanished almost instantaneously.
“Hrk...”
The rain of blows began again. He couldn’t forestall her movements. He was somehow able to avoid taking any strikes to his heart, his neck, his head, or his other most vital places, but shallow gouges appeared in his arms and legs. His movements slowed, making it all the more difficult to respond to the continued attacks.
The gun wasn’t having much effect. It would be one thing if he’d had an anti-personnel rifle that could shred a person to pieces from point-blank range, but even his Magnum was ultimately a handgun—it barely had the energy to blow Hatsune back, and her injuries healed immediately. Yukinari could see that it would hardly be useful even to buy him time.
Yukinari’s weapon allowed him to both shoot and cut, and that should have given him more strategic options and with them the advantage—but things were not turning out the way he’d expected.
“My dear Yuki. Dear, sweet Yuki,” Hatsune chanted, like a lullaby, like a spell, always attacking. Yukinari was on the back foot now; he had no opportunity to use either his gun or his blade. The two rapiers that he had dismissed as an amateur mistake early on now made terrifying sense. Hatsune didn’t need to repel her enemy’s attacks; hence a main-gauche or other defensive accessory was unnecessary. Neither did she need to reach in from outside her opponent’s range to strike. Simply by lashing out with the Blood Roses, wounding her opponent a little bit at a time, she would ultimately emerge victorious.
All she needed to do was harry her enemy, and that was what the second rapier was for.
“Hrr... Gah...”
Slowly, oh so slowly, the swords chipped away at Yukinari. Several times he tried to force an opening for his gun, but either his shots went wide, or they landed and Hatsune immediately healed herself. Durandall’s magazine was soon exhausted, and of course there was no time to reload.
Finally Yukinari could hardly hold himself up any longer; his legs gave out, and he collapsed where he was.
“Giving up already?” Hatsune asked, cocking her head quizzically. “In that case, I’m going to cut off your limbs, okay, Yuki?”
Her kindly-older-sister smile didn’t slip for an instant as she spoke.
“Otherwise, you’re just going to get violent again, aren’t you? We really have to be together when we die this time, so I’m going to pierce us both through the head with the Blood Rose.”
Logically, she was right. The brain was what allowed an angel to control its powers; stab it through with a sword that was specifically created to suppress those powers, and even an angel would certainly die.
“My dear Yuki. I love you,” Hatsune said, and raised her rapier.
This was bad. She was going to kill him.
But even as the thought occurred to him...
Boom.
“...What?” This time Hatsune was the one to sound uncomprehending. A second later, Yukinari’s vision was drenched with dripping blood—no, Holy Oil. He saw Hatsune collapse even as he rose to his feet.
“Hatsune...” Yukinari blinked. Then he turned around—and there was Dasa, Red Chili in hand.