The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume7 Opening2
One-Way Ticket from Strongest to Hell, Unreserved Seat
“But in that case…”
“Yes. When things are going too smoothly, something always intervenes.”
(Opening X-02 Open 07/19 00:33)
One-Way Ticket from Strongest to Hell, Unreserved Seat
They left Toy Dream 35 using the Ultraloop which used the power of permanent magnets to travel through a vacuum tunnel that looked a lot like an oil pipeline. Linear motor trains? What are those? When travelling 1150kph in a world where air resistance and rail friction resistance did not exist, travelling down the archipelago’s backbone to a regional city had been easy enough, but the problem had started with the connections after that.
“How many connections is this now, Biondetta?”
“I know you’re not that stupid, sir. It’s the 5th one☆ We saved a ton of time with the Ultraloop, so we should be able to arrive in just half a day.”
“…”
Midnight had already passed, so it was 12:33 AM of July 19.
After the school’s closing ceremony ended in the morning, they had supposedly left the cruiser he used as a home in the early afternoon with plenty of time to spare, but the next thing he knew, they were surrounded by the late night darkness. They had been making connection after connection between slow trains the entire time. For the first time in Kyousuke’s life, he had eaten station bentos thrice in one day: lunch, dinner, and late night snack. Once you were sick of the scenery, there was nothing else to do, but once you knew the pattern, there was nothing left to surprise you. Kyousuke had once only eaten supplements and gelatin drinks, so he understood that your ticket to life was nearly torn apart once you stopped receiving any stimulation from your food. So this was his conclusion: Ahh, I miss my cereal and milk…
And Kyousuke was not going to go easy on someone from the same miniature garden.
“You suck at navigation.”
“Oh, dear. But if we used your cruiser, it would have been a 14-hour trip of staring at the GPS sea chart and fighting the ship’s controls while it rocks in the waves. And a land route is a lot safer than using a passenger ship or airplane, isn’t it? This should be the easiest route for a variety of reasons.”
Biondetta explained all that while smiling and holding a travel bag in each hand. Kyousuke had stuffed everything he needed into the knapsack he wore over his right shoulder and he did not like how much luggage she had with her, but she had refused to say anything but “A beautiful big sister needs a wide variety of supplies☆”
“The final down-train of the Seiryu Line will be leaving soon. This will be the final train. If you need that train, make sure you do not miss it. I repeat…”
And this was truly their final connection.
That announcement could only be heard once a day and it was made in a long, drawn-out fashion.
This route passed through a tunnel in a precipitous mountain region and approached a fishing village on the coast. The 10-car slow train was nearly empty despite being the last train, so it was a mystery how it made any money. The only person inside was a very compact old lady returning home from who-knows-where.
“Sigh.”
Kyousuke breathed a small sigh as he sat in the kind of 4-person box seat never seen in a city train designed for the rush hour crowds. The relaxation effect of the train’s regular shaking could be good and bad. If that was all he had, the poisonous boredom would only accumulate inside him. Biondetta watched the boy as she sat in the seat across from him, crossed her legs despite her miniskirt, and giggled.
“…What?”
“Nothing. I was just noticing that you let your air of perfection slip when you’re alone with your big sister. Does that mean we’re still close enough for that?”
“…”
“If so…”
A wicked color seeped into her smile.
In the past, the Queen’s Hatred had taken root in her soul and it made an appearance here.
“Then just how deep is your bond with the one and only being who can get you to expose your true self without worrying about who might be watching? It makes me jealous, Kyousuke-chan.”
He could almost hear the cracks running through the solidified atmosphere.
If his gaze had produced pressure, he might have broken through the reflection of his face in the train window.
“Biondetta.”
“Yes, sir?”
“…Let’s use this chance to review.”
He intentionally changed the subject.
If he did not distract himself somehow, static threatened to fill his vision from the outer edges.
“The White Queen can’t be defeated by normal means. Not even if we check through every last one of the Regulation-class, Divine-class, and Unexplored-class including the Three. And of course, challenging her without using the Summoning Ceremony or a Material is even more out of the question. That would simply be suicide.”
“Yes.”
“But at the same time, the Regulation-class was artificially embedded in that world as a foothold for humans to reach the more obvious Divine-class and Unexplored-class. That means Materials can be created. Everything in the three-way stalemate between the low, middle, and high sound ranges may have succumbed to the White Queen, but there still aren’t any Materials that use the vowels of the lowest sound range. If we can create an Unexplored-class from that nonexistent sound range, we might be able to embed a new law in that world. And that will act as a rule letting us kill the White Queen.”
The last train finally began to move.
Everything continued as before. He had supposedly had enough of the slow trains and he was supposedly sick of their regular shaking, but it gradually soothed his irritable mood.
Biondetta pushed up on the window to open it, letting in a chilly wind that had not been poisoned by a heat island. It was a small thing, but it was a luxury not found in the air-conditioned city trains with unopenable windows or the Ultraloop that ran through a vacuum tunnel.
“But that is easier said than done, isn’t it? I mean, the Unexplored-class is made up of the very rules that govern the world of the gods. Humans creating and embedding a new one is the greatest form of arrogance.”
“Probably so,” he agreed. “I’m talking about something similar to messing with the entire system that divides the world’s gods into categories such as mother goddesses or destruction gods. And all so we can rearrange it for our own purposes.”
“Let’s not forget the vessel that must contain this Material and let it appear in this world.”
“That’s the biggest problem.”
Kyousuke sighed.
As the train shook, the somewhat faded hanging banner for a regional bank swayed back and forth. It seemed to use a small child’s drawing of a cat and rabbit as its mascots. It had a different sort of warmth than something from a highly-calculated product of a professional designer working for a global corporation like Toy Dream.
“Most everything related to the Summoning Ceremony can be set up by us summoners. Ultimately, we can even create artificial Materials: Deus ex Machina, Frankenstein’s monster, Homunculus… But with vessels alone, it is highly reliant on innate talent. To be blunt, vessels require a talent we lack, so our Awards don’t matter. Gathering some summoners and thinking long and hard on it isn’t going to give us an answer.”
“And that’s why we took the Ultraloop and these slow trains all the way out here: To recruit someone the old-fashioned way.”
“If a normal vessel won’t cut it, we just have to ask an abnormal vessel,” stated Kyousuke.
And who was the oddest vessel he knew of?
“The Meinokawa Series. They have the Joruri Method which led to the creation of mankind’s only fully-artificial vessels. To get their help, we first have to speak with the world’s oldest and first successful product: Meinokawa Aoi.”
To sum it all up, that Aoi was apparently worshiped as the Meinokawa Shrine’s secret object of worship.
She had the same warmth and suppleness as a human, but she could survive as long as an ancient text or a Buddha statue. She was a strange being of a different sort from the Materials.
“If only you had been able to contact those twins.”
“That’s kind of our fault for going too far in Toy Dream 35 and stealing their summoner job from them. Especially when Freedom provides no real support as an organization.”
It was pitch black outside the window. There was no bright nightscape like there was in the city. It was said true darkness inspired fear, but everything had its good and bad sides. From the train, that darkness felt almost soft.
“So this…Meinokawa Aoi? Is she the ultimate vessel?”
“Maybe so. Maybe not. She’s manmade either way, so as long as she can reveal the Joruri Method to us, maybe we can embed the traits we need inside her and maybe we can create an entirely new one from the ground up.”
He recalled those twin shrine maidens.
Their level of freedom had been pretty ridiculous. Creating an artificial vessel was a historic feat in and of itself, but the Meinokawa Shrine had tried to remove the unwanted vessel talent from human Higan while also preparing Renge as an artificial summoner in case Higan did not work out. The pair had ended up the opposite of the intended arrangement.
The Joruri Method could create a vessel or a summoner.
If it was that adjustable, then it might be possible to design a vessel which could contain a never-before-seen Unexplored-class like Kyousuke and Biondetta wanted.
Still sitting in the 4-person box seat, Biondetta looked up at the ceiling and Kyousuke sighed quietly once more.
“But in that case…”
“Yes. When things are going too smoothly, something always intervenes.”
