The news hit his inbox like a cold blade: an Intelligence Department facility had been raided, and the captive "demon" had been liquidated.
After reading the message, Tatsuya felt a momentary impulse to contact Mayumi and pry for details, but he suppressed it. Instead, he headed for the bathroom. He needed the sting of a hot shower to wash away the sweat of his training and, more importantly, to give himself a moment of solitude to organize his thoughts.
He hadn't told Miyuki yet. Returning from Master Yakumo's temple and heading straight for the shower was his usual routine; she wouldn't suspect anything was amiss just because he'd checked his mail beforehand.
(No... hiding it is likely a fool's errand.)
He briefly considered keeping her in the dark, only to discard the idea immediately. His sister was far too intuitive to remain oblivious for long. Had this been a matter he was entirely detached from, it might be different, but Miyuki was as deeply entangled in this incident as he was.
Rather than slinking around behind her back, he decided to investigate openly. With his mind made up, Tatsuya shut off the water.
Minutes later, Tatsuya sat before the workstation in the basement, his fingers flying across the console. If one were to describe his movements, "elegant" wouldn't be the word; they were "rapid" and "precise"—a mechanical efficiency that served as a perfect mirror for his personality.
It was Saturday. Though only for the morning, they still had classes to attend. Tatsuya had already considered skipping school if the investigation proved time-consuming, but he knew that if he stayed home, Miyuki would inevitably insist on a "voluntary holiday" of her own. He decided to delay that decision until the last possible second.
Fortunately, he found what he was looking for almost instantly.
Tatsuya had launched an unauthorized intrusion into the National Defense Force's distributed servers. It seemed that even for a specialized Intelligence Department branch, their local security was no match for a hacking system forged by the "Electron Sorceress" herself, Kyoko Fujibayashi.
As he pulled up the recorded footage, he heard a sharp intake of breath beside him. Even without looking, he knew Miyuki was watching. The images appearing on the screen were nothing short of jarring.
It wasn't "shocking" in the sense of being merely gruesome or cruel. Rather, it was the nature of the act—and the identity of the one performing it—that struck Miyuki with the force of a physical blow.
A petite silhouette slipped through the darkness of the facility. The alarm lights flared to life, illuminating a girl in a mask with hair the color of fresh blood. With a single, piercing glare from her golden eyes, she blew back the plainclothes soldiers standing in her way. She turned toward a door etched with dense, complex warding patterns and lashed out four times with a heavy combat knife. As she stepped aside, the door collapsed outward into the hallway.
Beyond the threshold lay a cramped cell, barely wider than two single beds with a suffocatingly low ceiling. A triple-bunk bed was pushed against the wall. A man lay bound in the middle bunk, his arms forced into a straightjacket and his legs shackled together. His face was deathly pale, giving him a ghoulish cast, but there was no mistaking him: it was the Parasite who had called himself Marte.
A puff of white breath escaped the girl's mask; the room was being kept at a sub-zero temperature. In place of the knife, she now wielded an automatic pistol.
A single round erupted from the barrel, piercing Marte's chest.
Instantly, the man's body went up in flames.
The only possible catalyst was the bullet itself. It was likely a combustion magic programmed to trigger the moment the projectile came to a halt inside the target's body. The crimson-haired girl—Angie Sirius—fired again into the top and bottom bunks.
She wasn't checking for "contents." She was purely focused on the destruction of the "vessels." It wasn't a fight; it was an execution.
Watching the girl make her composed escape on the screen, Tatsuya let out an unconscious sigh.
He was well aware that the duties of Sirius included the "purging" of rebel and deserter magicians. He knew all too well that the "humanitarian treatment of magicians" was a hollow prayer in the military world. And yet, he couldn't stop the heavy feeling rising in his chest.
What were the USNA high-ranking officers thinking, forcing the role of a hitman onto a sixteen-year-old girl? Even the mafia would show more discretion in their personnel choices. To Tatsuya's eyes, they were no better than religious fundamentalists who goaded children into acts of terror in the name of a holy war.
"Brother... was that... Lina?" Miyuki's voice was small, trembling.
"Most likely."
Tatsuya had already shared the secret of Sirius's "Parade" with her. Even through the grainy security footage, she had recognized her friend.
Miyuki seemed even more shaken than he was, but Tatsuya found himself reaching for words that weren't there. He had no intention of moralizing the act of killing at this late stage, nor did he believe he had the right to. In the world of black-ops, assassination was—ironically—one of the "cleaner" jobs.
But it was also a lonely, soul-corroding profession. Unless one possessed a specific, chilling aptitude for it, the weight was too much for a teenager to bear. It was the kind of burden that broke a heart, piece by piece.
And as far as Tatsuya could see, Lina had no such aptitude for being a killer. He could tell from Miyuki's gaze that she felt exactly the same.
"Brother, why would Lina do something like this...?"
"I don't know which one was the specific target, but one of the Parasite hosts must have been a USNA deserter. Purging them is part of Sirius's mandate."
"But if the host is destroyed, won't the Parasite just move on to a new one?"
"You saw the footage. They aren't worried about the 'contents.' Their only goal is to eliminate the magician who became the 'vessel.'"
Tatsuya spoke with the clinical calm of a man who possessed very little emotion, but Miyuki didn't have that luxury. A deep-seated revulsion toward the USNA military—the organization that forced such work on her friend and rival—began to fester within her.
Allowing her to dwell on such dark thoughts all day would be detrimental to her mental health, and by extension, a problem for Tatsuya as well.
He began to consider how to soothe her, but the thought was cut short. Someone had just forced an override into the very video feed he was hacking.
Next time: That guy who keeps pestering Shizuku finally makes his appearance…
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