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

===Part 4===

The one-armed man with a leather eyepatch over his right eye had his long blond hair slicked back and tied behind his head.

Claude Magentarain relaxed. He was in the nicest of all the sleeper trains that ran to and from Toy Dream 35. The train’s luxurious interior was designed in the European style and it remained stopped longer than it ran. Of its 15 cars, the back 5 were normal sleeper cars, the middle 5 were entertainment facilities such as a restaurant, a casino, and a theater, and the front 5 were each individual suites. Claude naturally had the prime spot of the first car. Of course, he would be the first one crushed like an empty can in an accident, so the luxury was reminiscent of the Sword of Damocles.

He looked in the mirror, poked at the eyepatch over his right eye, and shook his head which still ached dully.

''I’ve changed too,'' he thought as he looked at his face in the mirror.

He had lost an eye at the Queen’s Miniature Garden and he had lost his dominant arm in his life after that. What had he gained in exchange? The flow of time had placed years on his soul whether he liked it or not.

(What a pain. Are my thoughts growing so poetic because of the alcohol I had yesterday?)

However, a real man did not rely on herbal medicines or energy drinks at a time like this.

A hardcore man’s morning began with a cup of whisky.

Someone who ordered a single malt on the rocks with a subdued look on his face was not much different from someone who forced himself to drink his coffee black. Intentionally mixing in some kind of impurity was the best way to draw out the quality of the primary ingredient. For example, a sprig of mint or some cigar smoke. That was enough to transform the drink in any number of ways. Only a child would take everything at face value. By the time you were old enough to enjoy alcohol, you had to be a big enough person to think about how to draw out the inner side of your partner.

However…

“Huh? Where’d my Queen on the Ice ’12 go? Isn’t it usually right here? I don’t care how drunk I was; I seriously doubt I would misplace my drink bottles.”

“I threw them out. Every last one.”

“You what!?”

The expressionless girl named 3A suddenly popped in from the side and Claude yelled at her at the top of his lungs. Her hair color was more ice than silver and her eyes were colder than perpetual snow. Her body was too tiny to call delicate, but she was actually 15, demonstrating how bizarre modern technology had become. Her dress had a long skirt and a blue ribbon on the chest. It was so thin that her slender silhouette showed through in the backlight, but that was a trick. It was only an optical effect meant to hide all the weapons hidden inside.

She was an assassin who had used special breathing methods and organ movements to intentionally disturb her hormonal balance and reject her secondary sex characteristics as a way to walk right up to her targets.

Claude shouted hysterically at the demonic sword that had been honed down so sharply that it looked like it would break in two.

“Threw them out? Wh-what do you think you’re doing!? Why would you do that!? Are you stupid!? Don’t you know the amount of Queen on the Ice produced was drastically limited due to a worker’s strike, the underground reserves were wiped out by a major cold wave, South America’s cheap Sol Diablo killed the company’s stock value, and it’s only sold at exorbitant prices by professional resellers on online auctions!?”

“The window was open, so I thought...why not?”

“You didn’t even use the trash can!? That’s just plain dangerous!! ”

“Also, that absurdly high price says nothing about the quality of the drink. Nothing at all.”

No one would have questioned the large and muscular man if he had claimed to be a professional pirate, but right now his shoulders drooped like a scolded child's would.

“…Everyone’s favorite dandy can’t work up any energy without his fuel.”

“I had a feeling you would say that. Drunk Man, here is a new bottle.”

“?”

Just by looking at her, 3A’s lovely silhouette seemed to show through her dress, but she now held a bottle of colorfully green liquid in her small hand and passed it to Claude, who frowned.

“What’s this? A liqueur? This scent…is it mint flavored? What do you mix it with?”

“You swish it in your mouth.”

“Bfhhh!! Cough, cough! This is mouthwash! I just chugged like half of it!!”

There were baseless rumors that said swallowing mouthwash or toothpaste would give you a trippy experience or that putting eye drops in an alcoholic beverage would put it on the level of a sleeping pill, but nothing like that happened here.

3A remained expressionless but formed a small triangle with her mouth as she put a Gozaru Samurai puppet on her right hand and made it talk.

“(You reek. Whatever’s coming back up from your stomach makes you smell like an alcoholic gutter. Can’t you take proper care of yourself? And why do I have to pay for it in the form of this stench? Do you want me to cut open your gut, pull out your stomach, and wash it out with a neutral detergent?)”

“I can hear that! I can hear everything you’re saying, young girl. And Gozaru wouldn’t speak in that chilling of a voice!! A-and being told I reek by a girl really hurts this dandy’s heart, you know? Heh. But if you want to show off your femininity, could you do it in the form of boobs?”

“Ahn?”

“So is 3A your bra si-…ow!!”

A heavy thud rang out. It was the windlass pike. The storage device was more like a solid vise than a fishing reel and it had fallen right onto Claude’s little toe.

“Are you stupid!? Don’t you know the difference between a joke and-…”

“Did that wake you up, you piece of shit? Enough that you don’t need to rely on a hair of the dog?”

3A looked coldly down on Claude as he held his toe and writhed around on the floor, but she was actually sadly dedicated to him. It might look like she was rebelling against her master’s orders, but deep down she was showing her concern for his health.

And that was the opposite of what Claude wanted.

After crushing a certain criminal organization, he had happened to pick up 3A who the organization had been keeping like a pet. She had essentially been a machine that did nothing more than swiftly kill whoever she was told to. Feeling responsible for her after picking her up, he had decided to look after the girl until she was independent enough to seek freedom even if it mean killing her temporary master. But at this rate, her dependence was only going to grow and she was even working against his initial goal.

(I really need to do something about this soon…)

Claude gave that topic some serious thought, but then 3A held down her dress’s skirt as she looked down at him.

“What do you think you’re doing with that serious expression on your face? Going for the low angle like that is the absolute worst…”

“Hold on just a second. You’re the one that set things up like this. And even if I did look up your skirt, all I’d see are a ton of blades and some cute little cotton- dobwah!?”

She kicked him in the back and the pirate began mimicking a shrimp.

3A ignored that and pulled out the key hanging at her dress’s chest on a thin chain.

“Are you sure you want me to hold onto this?”

“Gh, cough… Yes, yes. After all, it’s safest with you. I can’t exactly put it in the room’s safe. Even if someone doesn’t know its value in our industry, it still has a 30-carat diamond in it. Anyone could try to steal it.”

Claude pouted his lips as he answered, but then he got up and approached the nearby amber-colored closet.

In fact, he opened the double doors.

The back of the closet and the back of the opened doors were entirely covered in paper documents.

The paper came in a variety of types: from old papyrus and parchment to modern waterproof paper and high-resolution photosensitive paper. The small writing and diagrams filling the papers were not limited to any specific religion or mythology. They included Pygmalion, crystal skulls, ''sokushinbutsu'', Joan of Arc’s heart, and organs pickled in salt. They were all legends from all over the world concerning the preservation of the human body or the creation of dolls.<ref>'''Sokushinbutsu''' is the act of self mummification practiced by Buddhists monks.</ref>

The various rectangles of paper were gathered together into a single shape.

It almost looked like a human silhouette made from pixels.

“You’ve gathered most of it, haven’t you?”

“That just goes to show how surprisingly irresponsible the world is. And I honestly thought I’d be stopped somewhere before I had all of this together.”

It was still only the silhouette.

But some letters of the alphabet were placed over its head like an angel’s halo: iu – nu – fb – a – wuh – ei – kx – eu – pl – vjz.

That name had transformed history. It was the pure white descended upon a world of vibrant color. If you still could not tell what he was trying to do at this point, you had unfortunately failed to study up on the world’s laws.

One piece was blatantly missing. There was a large hole where the heart should be.

“Everything is here. They were right when they called the human body a miniature universe.”

“…Who are you calling miniature?”

“If you know that would refer to you, why would you-…no, never mind.”

Claude sadly retracted his opinion and poked at the missing heart of the silhouette on the wall.

His fingertip tapped on the chic wood.

“The Natural History’s missing entries, huh?”

“What do you plan to do with it once you complete it?”

Claude did not answer 3A’s question.

He instead closed the closet with both hands.

“Anyway, you take care of the key needed to reach the gallery. That’s the safest plan.”

“If you say so.”

“Well, I’ll admit I’m a little worried that your flat chest is somewhat lacking in the cushioning department. Gwa ha ha ha-…ow!! Wait, stop! Don’t climb on top of me and pin me down! There’s no ref here, so this only leads to an infinite hell!!”

The train was stopped and yet the sleeper car’s suspension began to creak, but then they were interrupted. However, it was not a righteous conductor growing suspicious of the man staying with a much younger girl who did not seem to be his daughter. For one thing, normal people could not perceive Claude while he was outside their field of vision. 3A was a different matter because she had been intentionally kept at a lower Award level (so she could kill summoners and vessels too).

The window and the entire wall around it were blown away and another summoner and vessel walked inside.

It was a nun in a graceful habit and a small boy. Unlike with Claude, the boy seemed to be leading the nun. Relationships between a summoner and a vessel came in all kinds. But in most of them, the two partners had some kind of distortion that only applied to them.

And there was no need to immediately jump to the occult just because this destruction could not be done by human hands. This was a sleeper train, but it was currently stopped and attaching an explosive to the outside wall would suffice.

They could also have set up enough to blow the entire car to smithereens, but they had gone out of their way to arrive as a summoner and vessel. Assuming they were not just dumb, that meant there was something inside the car they did not want blown up. For example, the silver key with a 30-carat diamond that hung from 3A’s neck and hid in her modest chest.

“Off you go.” Claude gently pushed the girl off of him. “That was faster than I expected.”

He sounded impressed. Only Shiroyama Kyousuke and those close to him would know that the Diamond Master Key had been stolen, but he doubted they would have let anyone else know that. It had to have been difficult to find Claude’s name in the fragmentary data and it could not have been easy tracking down his accurate location and putting together this attack plan given how many fake names and fake IDs he had used. And yet these two had done it in such a short time. Their speed was worth praising. It was a shame they would not be recognized for this anywhere.

The small boy waved his hand.

“Dorothea, explain.”

“Of course. The Founder’s Gallery is a stepping stone to allow us to better understand and better reach Her Majesty. So we have no reason whatsoever to stop. We will start by making a recovery here. We will have you tell us everything you know and give us everything you have.”

The nun spoke smoothly, bit her index finger with her canine tooth, and then brought her lips to it. When she pulled the finger away as if pulling something out, a single long and thick stick was pulled stickily out along with sweet saliva.

It was a Blood-Sign.

In a certain world, this was the same as throwing a glove at your opponent’s face.

“Hmm,” groaned Claude at length.

At some point, something like a shiny and varnished amber-colored baton had appeared in his hand. When he lightly swung it, it extended to nearly 2 meters in length. It was structured just like the special batons used by police, but due to the man’s pirate captain look, it may have reminded more people of the telescopes of an older age.

“Well, I suppose this is right in a way. Since someone like you showed up, the Natural History’s missing entries must be the real deal. If I obediently follow this thread, I bet I’ll find the ‘answer’. I can feel it waiting for me.”

And Claude was missing an arm. He could not hold a Blood-Sign accurately with just the one. He held the grip near the bottom while 3A held it between her index and middle fingers near the tip to help him aim.

It was just like a three-legged race.

But while demonstrating frighteningly smooth teamwork, Claude Magentarain sounded truly troubled.

“But, well, you look even dumber than I’d expected.”