Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume6 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 9===

“Yes, this is the scene of the crash. I am here in front of P Block’s indoor freight monorail terminal. The monorail itself was unmanned and no one was hurt, but some of the smoke reached the adjacent passenger terminal, causing something of a commotion. It is still unknown how this largescale fire will affect the Tanabata Astronomical Observation Fair being held across Toy Dream 35, but they believe they can extinguish the fire by sunset.”

It sounded like a TV station reporter, but she did not hold a professional camera. She was probably a net reporter that used her smartphone to report on a video site. She would not be part of a reporter’s club or broadcast company, so she could only be described as a “self-styled” reporter.

Kyousuke’s group listened to her while opening the staff door and sneaking around to the back of the building. Once the protective circle reliant on the Material was gone, the summoners were normal humans who could be taken out by the fire and smoke, so nothing good would come of remaining at the scene of a fire.

They could not walk out the front entrance because they had caused the fire themselves and because they would stand out too much right now. After all, they were carrying a dazed one-armed eyepatch man (with a bird) and a snow spirit who had passed out from oxygen deprivation. Plus, they were accompanied by a girl who only wore bandages and a Y-shaped piece of lace now that she had stripped off her yukata. But the finishing blow was Biondetta who looked pure evil with the white snake wrapped around her. Not one of them was normal. They stood out far too much. Even if summoners and vessels would vanish from people’s minds once they were out of sight, they did not want to head outside when someone was waving a camera around and broadcasting it to the entire world.

The Oiran-style mini-yukata demon did not hesitate to reach for the unconscious girl’s flat chest.

“Oh, I found the Golden Master Key.”

She tossed Kyousuke the silver key with a 30-carat diamond in it. The boy caught it in one hand.

“The key and the ancient map. We’re finally back to where we started, but that means we can actually reach for the Natural History’s missing entries now.”

They felt like they had circumnavigated the globe. They stood in the exact same place, but it had taken an incredible amount of time to reach it. Azalea and Claude. Thanks to their interference, Kyousuke felt like he had gone to far too much effort. But now the path to the Founder’s Gallery and the Natural History’s missing entries was finally open.

But then Sekurtiti wrinkled her brow below her golden tiara.

“Only the key? What happened to the treasure chest?”

“Biondetta.”

“Don’t ask me. This girl’s dress is full of blades, even if it doesn’t look like it. I’m betting the steel weighs more than her entire body. But there’s nothing like what you want. What about that man? Have you tried feeling around on him?”

“This is all I found.”

Kyousuke flicked something over to Biondetta: a micro memory card a quarter the size of a stamp.

“Where was it?”

“Below his eyepatch. The format doesn’t fit my smartphone. Decrypt it for me.”

Biondetta did as she was told. Kyousuke thought about all this as he watched her stick the micro memory card into a slot on her smartphone.

“What if it’s tougher to crack than you expect?”

“We can just ask him everything we want to know, including how to get in.”

That was a trivial issue. Once someone lost the Summoning Ceremony, they could not lie, so they could be directly asked for any hidden location, safe combination, or computer password you wanted. The one exception was something with a random element such as “I stuck it in a bottle and sent it out to sea, so I don’t know where it is now”, but Kyousuke doubted the man would do anything that would prevent himself from retrieving the hints when it related to the Founder’s Gallery or the Natural History’s missing entries.

And as he went over those logical thoughts, he suddenly came to a stop in the staff hallway.

“What is it, sir?”

“Nothing.”

He wanted to deny it.

But he could not stop a certain possibility from flashing through his mind.

Where had the Golden Treasure Chest gone? Hadn’t he felt this same way when dealing with Azalea? He had assumed Azalea and Claude were connected, but that had proved untrue. Could that be the case this time too? What would it mean if Claude and the White Queen were not connected here?

Hadn’t she even said it was about time she too joined the game too? And she had taken the Golden Treasure Chest so she could take part. If those two had been connected from the beginning, she would not have needed to do that. Kyousuke needed the Diamond Master Key either way, so the White Queen had not needed a new participation ticket.

It was also a mystery why Claude was seeking the Founder’s Gallery.

It had been hard to believe he was blinded by the White Queen when he shared that same past. Kyousuke had forced himself to accept that people could change so drastically.

But what if that was not the case?

He heard a light electronic beep.

“Sir.”

Biondetta shook her smartphone. She had apparently decrypted the micro memory card found behind Claude’s eyepatch.

“As I expected, he was gathering information on techniques to preserve the human body and create dolls. Looks like he didn’t care if it was ancient or modern or what part of the world it came from.”

“But…wait. What is this?”

Pygmalion, crystal skulls, ''sokushinbutsu'', Joan of Arc’s heart… He had indeed been gathering information on the techniques, but the added text suggested something else entirely.

“Risk of Spreading: D. Destroying the original will suffice.”

“Risk of Spreading: C. Copies have already spread. The magic cabal calling itself a publisher will need to be destroyed.”

“Risk of Spreading: A. Impossible to erase. I’ll have to spread mistaken traditions online to dilute it.”

“Um, was he going around erasing the information on the techniques he went to so much trouble to hunt down? But why? Did he want to have the Queen all to himself???”

“If not, then this is like the definitions file for security software. He made a copy of the source information so he could identify the dangerous information still out there. Once he had determined something had all been erased, he would destroy his eyepatch to truly erase that information from the world.”

“Again: why?”

Needless to say, the doll this information could create would be an artificial vessel. And if the Natural History’s missing entries were incorporated into the foundational structure, it would allow the White Queen’s soul to remain in this world indefinitely.

He would take that from humankind.

He would erase it from the world.

“Could it be…?”

“?”

“Did I have it backwards? Claude wasn’t fighting to summon the White Queen. Was he erasing any method of summoning her to indirectly prevent her from appearing here…no, to shut her out of this world?”

It was unknown if that Queen would give up on this world…no, on Shiroyama Kyousuke if her existing link to it were broken. She could twist the laws of the world as she saw fit, so it was entirely possible she could create completely new rules and definitions on the same level as the 3rd Summoning Ceremony discovered in 1999.

In fact, crushing the possibilities of the Summoning Ceremony could easily lead to throwing out any method or possibility of opposing the White Queen. It was dangerous, but it was still a double edged sword. Breaking it in order to not cut yourself would also rob you of the means to protect yourself.

But.

What had this incident looked like to Claude Magentarain?

Azalea Magentarain and Shiroyama Kyousuke.

Two children with past connections to him had been fighting (and one side had even been willing to kill) over the Founder’s Gallery and the Natural History’s missing entries.

What if he had only been trying to confiscate that?

What if he had not been an enemy?

Kyousuke heard a footstep.

It came from directly behind him.

His heart seemed to shrink inside his chest. He recalled the fear of the White Queen’s arrival after Azalea’s defeat. And she had taken everything from him. But fear was the seed of action for a summoner. He needed to absorb it and rejoice in finding a new method. So he did not panic. Even if he found pure white evil when he turned around, he would find a way out of here. He would get through this.

He turned around with that in mind.

But what he found there was far too unexpected.

“Wha-…?”

Biondetta and Sekurtiti may not have understood his surprise. After all, most people had only ever heard the legends and few had actually seen this individual.

''Who was working with the White Queen?

This was the answer.

“How are…you alive?”

Kyousuke’s dazed comment had an entirely different nuance than when he had encountered Claude.

The other person approached.

The silhouette of a long Blood-Sign rested on his shoulder and a sensually beautiful woman stood by his side as a vessel.

A woman Kyousuke knew very well used to be the one standing there.

She had been kept in a large animal cage and treated like a mere object.

After the Queen’s Miniature Garden, this man had taken over Government and brought the entire organization together as a tyrannical king. As the strongest and cruelest summoner, he had transformed the meaning of the word “justice” to his own liking. He had traversed the three major powers, devoured countless Awards, and finally reached the 1000 Award barrier. But just before moving to the other side, that dream had supposedly been extinguished when a woman had stabbed him in the back.

And Shiroyama Kyousuke shouted his name.

“Elvast Toydream… The Thousand Eater!?”

That great evil responded by opening his mouth just once.

He did not say much.

“I will end this in 1 second.”