Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume7 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 5===

“Hey!!”

“Nyahh!?”

Kyousuke heard a bizarre cry and then saw Biondetta grabbing onto Olivia’s skinny hips. The little girl was facing forward with her butt sticking out and Biondetta was preparing to spank her. Even if she was wearing a swimsuit below, Olivia seemed worried about her miniskirt and pareo in this pose, so she kicked her skinny legs around, blushed, and tried to bite at the older girl.

“Wait, what do you think you’re doing to me!?”

“What am I doing!? You’re the one that tried to sneak over and remove the fuse to my Incense Grenades so they wouldn’t activate! That really is a life or death issue!!”

“…Tch.”

“That click of the tongue settles it: I’m definitely spanking this ass!!”

“Nyahh!?”

“Those are the laws in my country!!”

“What country is that!?”

The two of them argued back and forth, but Olivia skillfully escaped Biondetta and fled toward Kyousuke. She circled behind him and used him as a shield. Her swimsuit must have gotten oddly twisted while in the waitress demon’s grasp because she messed with the shoulder straps inside her decorative collar and the butt within her pareo.

“Look at that incarnation of violence, Onii-chan! You need to keep away from someone like that!!”

Olivia was not contracted with anyone, so she could not maintain her memories without a summoner or vessel in her field of vision. That meant she could not sneak around when no one else was around and would have to use bold pickpocketing techniques and prestidigitation if she was going to do anything.

Vigor seemed to escape Biondetta’s mouth like steam.

“Sir, please move out of the way. It is my duty to deliver a finishing blow to that insolent ass.”

“Nn! The White Queen is definitely the only person for you, Onii-chan. The Queen is kind, so she wouldn’t get mad about something as trivial as this.”

Kyousuke did not have it in him to correct her ridiculous assessment, but that was not his focus at the moment anyway.

“Aika, have you managed to check with the satellite yet?”

A military satellite might sound like something quite special, but the satellite network was not actually all that sturdy.

The bikini girl responded via his smartphone.

“Well, no matter how advanced things get, they can’t escape the nature of wireless connections. They can strengthen the directionality all they want; the signal still scatters in other directions and the opposite is just as true. I can read from and write to the signal all I want. Although no matter how useful this is, I’m still stuck in the position of logistical support…”

“Meaning?”

“You need to give more credit to your proud shut-in here. And with my eternal rival Olivia Highland showing up while I was out of the loop, I am seriously worried about your future, Onii-chan!!”

That put a smug look on Olivia’s face as she clung to his arm.

“Ee hee hee. Even if we’re on other sides of the world, there is no separating two souls who were truly meant to be together. Grin, grin.”

“You thief!! Do you want me to fire the seven space station tools on top of your head!?”

“Tee hee. And a school swimsuit is the standard…no, it’s justice. I mean, a bikini little sister is just mixing up the symbols to the point of incomprehensibility.”

“Via.”

“Agrbrbrbh!! O-Onii-chan, you’re not blameless here either! When did you two get so close again!? I-Is there really magic in a school swimsuit!?”

“Please, Aika, don’t you go crazy, too.”

“Pant, pant, gasp, gasp… Okay, okay. Here’s the satellite feed. Remember that I’m the truly useful little sister of your soul. Bridesmaid has hacked into and altered the records in the government and private satellites, but they shouldn’t underestimate the true administrative privileges of Government…”

When they saw the image sent from Aika, Kyousuke’s group had very nearly accomplished their goal.

Houbi Village had been overwritten.

Bridesmaid had used their landing Repliglass, which resembled sports kites, to carry supplies from the beach and they had set up their own camp using synthetic tents. Each tent was the size of a harbor warehouse and they had also built some diesel power generation bases and a labyrinth of trenches and seawater-filled ditches.

The silver-haired shrine maiden, Meinokawa Aoi, sounded exasperated.

She pressed her soft cheek against the boy as she peered at the small screen from the side.

“This is incredible. There is no sign of the original village.”

“But it’s a simple matter.” Kyousuke sighed. “This is a temple. And on an urban planning level.”

“You mean like Edo or Kyoto?” asked Waitress Biondetta as she tilted her head and gave a food pellet to her white snake.

“That’s right,” confirmed Kyousuke. “It can be feng shui or whatever else, but they’re using the terrain itself to guide the flow of a great power and gain a special advantage from it. A temple uses four walls to cut itself off from the world and opens an entrance in a specific direction to allow the wind through in order to invite in a higher being with a divine name belonging to a specific element, and there are countless examples of pulling it off at the level of a city like this. By creating their fortress according to plan, Bridesmaid seems to have successfully invited in the White Queen.”

Their landing operation had involved 18,000 rockets and plenty of landing craft.

But Bridesmaid had not wasted anything.

“Hm? But, sir, but they only built up their temple of tents after firing all those rockets on the city. Then what about the rockets that should have fallen on Olivia’s head?”

“They came from the ocean.” Kyousuke’s expression remained unchanged. He did not even bother questioning Olivia about it. “We just have to assume they prepared in advance. I’m guessing they built a temple on the ocean floor so it couldn’t be seen by satellite. Then they extended that to include Houbi Village on land. I mean, that labyrinth of trenches is filled with seawater, right?”

Of course, if the ocean-bottom temple was enough to fulfill their needs, they would not have needed to remake Houbi Village. It may have been like a bridgehead giving them a foothold from the sea to land versus the actual fortified line taking them deeper inland.

“That would be how we were controlling fate and manipulating probability. They were building a royal capital that invites good fortune.”

(But good fortune for whom…?)

It all seemed to be on such a grand and exaggerated scale at first, but it only made sense if it connected to the White Queen who they worshiped.

And only about a day had passed between leveling the village and constructing their fortress. Bridesmaid had done an incredibly speedy job of laying out the groundwork and remaking all of Houbi Village into a temple for the Queen. It normally took centuries to build a grand temple, so this alone was an extraordinary accomplishment.

“The permanently summoned Queen in the center is different from the infected Queens who are spreading out like a house of mirrors,” said Kyousuke. “And if we tear down the temple structure, the permanent summon system will malfunction. So unlike the infected Queens, the permanently summoned one will blur with static. There should be a slight lag before it reaches the infected ones. …Let’s use that to locate their core. The infected Queens are a false reflection, so we don’t have to fight them. Destroying the one at the core should cause them all to disappear.”

“So it’s sabotage, is it? Oh, this is sounding right up my alley.”

“Biondetta.” Kyousuke made sure to calm down the vengeance demon who could not stop grinning. “We need to use multiple observation methods. I’d like to use Aika’s satellite image and also send out a few drones. As long as you know how they’re made, you just need to take apart a smartphone and an electric shaver to make one. Even if Bridesmaid interferes, I want to at least get a blow in.”

“…What if they use Incense Grenades? No ''cam-er-uh''s or ''sen-ser''s work inside an Artificial Sacred Ground, right?”

“Wherever they concentrate the Incense Grenades will be where they’re protecting the core Queen.”

But that left another problem.

“Boo.”

Olivia puffed out her cheeks, fidgeted with her double braids, and spoke up while showing no concern for the undeveloped bodylines showing through her school swimsuit.

She wanted the two people she loved to make up(?).

“Even if you know which one, the Queen is still the Queen. Can you beat her, Onii-chan?”

“…”

Yes, that was the biggest problem.

Just because she had multiplied did not mean each individual White Queen’s value had dropped. The Queen was still the Queen. Challenging her head-on without a plan was a fool’s errand.

Identifying the core Queen was the same as finding a deadly precipice. Approaching that Queen was no different from reducing his own lifespan. This place was more frightening than a jungle roamed by a man-eating tiger. Misjudging his distance from death would get him eaten in the very first attack.

He could not think of himself as special.

No matter what, he had not left the category of human.

“We’ll just have to cheat,” said Kyousuke.

He turned back toward the silver-haired shrine maiden named Meinokawa Aoi.

He recalled each piece of lab equipment and the explanations Aoi had given in that cruise ship.

“How long will it take to complete?”

“Hm. I adjusted it for the expanded components seen in your plans, but you can see how much is in glass container there.”

With a cry of “oryah”, Aoi leaned against Kyousuke to turn him around using her soft warmth.

“Blood worship can be found all across the globe. Some see shed blood as unclean, but others see the blood of important and holy people to be holy. There are simply too many examples to list off.”

“So by adjusting the balance between good and evil from the outside, you can create an affinity for a specific Material, right?”

“Blood is a biometric and an individual identifier, but it can also be readily altered by your eating habits or by drinking perfume. Just how many products are advertised as giving you clean blood? You can even go further and directly alter the quality of your blood by transplanting a heart or marrow. We just have to take that even further.”

Her eyes were directed toward a thick, wet sound.

That kitchen contained a variety of lab equipment and a roller coaster of glass tubes. A red liquid floated in a clear cylindrical container that held nearly 20 liters.

“We have no time,” said Meinokawa Aoi. “I would normally like to create an artificial organ or marrow to produce the blood and then directly implant that in my body, but that would take too long. Our only option is to directly create the necessary artificial blood, inject it into my veins, and temporarily change the quality of my blood to tune me to the Material. …It should be finished soon. The contents need to be compressed until they glow like a red jewel.”

“Jewel Blood, hm?”

“That Western name doesn’t fit the traditional atmosphere, but there’s no helping that. We were always greedy.”

It looked like it would take about an hour longer.

The Blood-Sign method was a contract between a human and a Material, so the better the human would fit in the pages of a biology textbook, the easier the Material could recognize them and synchronize with them. Olivia with her royal blood, royal flesh, and royal soul was the extreme form of that. Aoi was using that to consider the traits of an individual Material and create a vessel that would best be recognized by it. It was not the best comparison, but a carnivore’s sense of smell was quite different from an herbivore’s. The silver-haired shrine maiden was apparently greatly altering the amplitude of that.

The smaller the discrepancy between them, the less the resistance and friction. This was necessary to summon a non-existent Material into her body.

“This will complete the artificial vessel you need, but what about the all-important Material? You plan to create a new Unexplored-class and embed it in the other world for the sole purpose of defeating the White Queen, don’t you? And its divine name will be constructed only from the vowels which are not dyed by the Sound Ranges of the Three. You showed me the theoretical anatomical drawing, but that isn’t enough to create it. Are you going to use a secret life-creating technique such as the alchemical homunculi or Kabbalic golems used for the Regulation-class?”

“I have an idea in mind.”

“…Hm. Whatever it is, the trick will be how to shave off time and prioritize efficiency.”

Aoi glanced over at the collection of equipment filling the kitchen.

She was saying those tools could create most anything, but you could not use them for more than one thing at a time. While creating the Jewel Blood needed to alter her own body, they could not construct the anti-Queen Unexplored-class. That said, they could not win without both, so they could not just ignore one or the other.

“This is going to be tricky.”

“I agree with you there, but physical work is not all a summoner needs to do. While I’m resting my body, I can start on some mental work.”

The most important piece of mental work was running strategy simulations against the opposing summoner.

“Biondetta.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think Doctor S is still alive? Or did he die when all those White Queens showed up?”

“Hmm. That’s not an easy question to answer, but I’d like to suggest 7-to-3 that he’s still alive.”

“Why?”

“Based on the satellite images, the fortress temple created on top of Houbi Village has maintained order. If a group of White Queens was on a rampage, it should be filled with the corpses and blood of Bridesmaid now that she doesn’t need them.”

“Well, I suppose that is what would happen.”

“Of course, I can’t deny the possibility that Doctor S ''personally incurred the Queen’s wrath'' and got himself killed, so that’s why it’s 7-to-3. It is extremely difficult to predict the White Queen’s actions using logic and efficiency, but she does seem to provide unrestricted use of her power to anyone who will allow her to have fun with you, sir.”

“…”

Overall, her thoughts were the same as Kyousuke’s.

That meant he probably was not letting his hatred cloud his judgment, so he would go with that.

“Who is he?”

Biondetta had shared a portion of his past, but she had to ask about this part.

She had only shared the Queen’s Miniature Garden portion of his past, so she knew nothing of what came before that.

“…My father. But not as part of the Fifteen Siblings Project. I mean my real father.”

Shiroyama Kyousuke slowly sighed as he answered.

His thoughts turned to the surname of Shiroyama.

“We lived in an unremarkable house in an ordinary Japanese city. It was me, my dad, my mom, and then my little sister. It was exactly the kind of normal life anyone could imagine.”

“?”

Biondetta and Meinokawa Aoi were both already frowning.

What he described was perfectly normal, but it was strange to think of ''the'' Shiroyama Kyousuke placed on rails like that.

The silver-haired shrine maiden summed it up in a question.

She pressed the back of her head against his temple as she did so.

“But that wouldn’t teach you your excellent combat technique, would it? And where did you and Doctor S come in contact with the Summoning Ceremony?”

“That’s right.” Kyousuke cringed but readily admitted it. “That life was clearly strange. Everything I had thought was normal had been linked to my elite training. Everything from the food I ate to the positions of the mechanical pencil and eraser on my study desk.”

“…”

“And that was frightening enough. I mean, special facilities like the Miniature Garden try to hide, but they can’t really. Anyone who can see the underside of the world will notice them. What Doctor S did was like building a missile using parts from a hardware store.”

He called himself a missile.

A precision-guided missile that had once cornered so very many people.

Kyousuke recalled the inner voice that had guided the Miniature Garden to destruction.

“So…what was Doctor S?” asked Aoi.

“Who knows. The name Shiroyama may not have had any real meaning to it. His behavior has a Government scent to it, so he may have been using household goods to stably produce an unofficial unit for use alongside the government ones. I mean, if he had succeeded, it would have created an age where any house or apartment could be used to mass-produce people on my level.”

Anyone who knew Shiroyama Kyousuke would feel their minds going blank at that suggestion.

That could seriously have thrown the world into disorder.

“I don’t know if Doctor S succeeded or failed and whether he gave up or was stopped by someone else, but he abandoned the project after bringing me fairly close to completion. In the confusion of the divorce, the entire family fell apart. Since I had no relatives left, I was collected by the appropriate organization. After proving my worth by completing a few jobs with the knowledge and skills already placed inside my mind, I was sent to the Miniature Garden. …And it all went so smoothly that it may have all been predetermined.”

“What…do you think?”

“It’s on such a large scale that it’s impossible to grasp the whole of it. I know my memories of that single house are not going to guide me to the answer.” Kyousuke breathed a heavy sigh. “And I don’t know if this was planned as well, but a few of the faces are blotted out and I can’t draw out that information. Like my mom and little sister. Who were they? I hope they were simply part of the cast and they were able to safely withdraw.”

That meant he did not know much about Doctor S.

But if that researcher had “created” Shiroyama Kyousuke’s foundation, some things could be deduced from that foundation.

“You can’t implant in someone else what doesn’t exist in yourself,” said Kyousuke. “No matter how insane he is, he is still my parent. And as his child, he created my skill as a summoner.”

“So he’ll use similar tactics?”

“We can’t say much since I’m sure we have our individual idiosyncrasies and preferences, but we can think of our skills as about the same. And he should be able to predict all of the choices I will make. Because he created me this way.”

The previous battle had been settled by Meinokawa Aoi, not Kyousuke. She had used her position as a fully artificial Joruri Method to remove her head, which Doctor S had failed to predict.

Even if Kyousuke planned everything out in advance, it was impossible to know what would happen.

“It’s also easy for me to predict what Doctor S will do,” said Freedom Award 903. “I just have to imagine what I would do using my skills if I used such a long sword. Since the skills at the foundation are the same, the differences will come from the surrounding environment.”