Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume9 Stage2 (section)

===Part 7===

Also in Toy Dream 35’s international airport, something was happening inside the ordinary passenger plane the Kingdom F royal plane had just barely grazed.

<Oh, wow. I didn’t expect to run into someone here of all places.>

The ponytailed researcher named Shigara Masami sank down extra far in her business class seat so there was no chance of seeing her through the window. If she was here, then two other VIPs had to be here as well.

“Urp. Why does Shigara reek of alcohol?”

“You can blame that on the in-flight all-you-can-drink service. But why do they have these lost Japanese whiskies like a Hamazaki 12 year and a Hakuzu 18 year? Anyway, she is working off her frustration at them stopping her from bringing her own drinks with her.”

Biondetta Shiroyama.

And the White Queen.

The rioters pouring into the runways were ordinary people, but they would not show up here for no reason. The world was unaware of the Summoning Ceremony, but they were still being subconsciously crushed by the pressure of the White Queen and Colorless Little Girl. There may have been so many rioters here because some half-formed sixth-sense had informed them of the Queen’s presence nearby.

If the Colorless Little Girl broke loose after storing up power in response to the cocoon, the world would end. It was no surprise that the people with more sensitivity to such things would break first.

“Down with the Queen, is it?”

The silver twintail girl repeated their words while looking out the window and rubbing together the thighs sticking out from the bottom of her short casual dress.

Yes, if they just wanted a quick resolution so they could escape the pressure, it made sense for those ordinary rioters to attack the White Queen, who was the weaker of those two powerful beings. Just like a gas pipe rupturing at its weakest point. Of course, they could only attempt something so reckless because they were unaware what they were doing.

Even a weakened dinosaur was still a dinosaur.

It was obvious what would happen to the fool who thought they had a chance just because it was lying down on the ground.

Biondetta (who wore her chest-accentuating waitress uniform even on the plane) shrugged.

“Honestly, I say just let the rioters and knights do their thing. If we do much of anything around here, Kyousuke is going to find about it somehow or another. This is Toy Dream 35, so we’re already on his home turf.”

<nowiki><It</nowiki> would be bad to run into him now. ''Especially if we had attacked some vessels he once protected.'' He would probably mistake it for some strange cruelty by the White Queen.>

Shigara Masami chuckled at the thought, but the White Queen’s bare shoulders jumped a bit. Biondetta found it unusual for the Queen to be shaken – in other words, to appear hurt – by the words of someone other than Kyousuke. The dangerous part was how she might just summon a downpour of spears if someone mentioned a delay due to weather.

<What should we do?>

“Let’s find a way to slip out of here.”

They viewed this differently than the pure and innocent Kingdom F knights. As a demon, Biondetta was skilled in using bluffs, tricks, and detours to grant people’s wishes.

Luckily, an announcement told them the plane had decided to have the nearly 300 passengers disembark immediately. It might seem odd to send them outside where the rioters were, but airplanes were built to be light and so their hulls were surprisingly flimsy. Large passenger planes had their engines exposed and the fuel tanks were located on the thin main wing. The flight crew feared the worst if the rioters surrounded them and trapped everyone inside. An explosion was not out of the question.

“This way.”

But with her tail flipping behind her, Biondetta did not guide the other two toward the plastic escape slide the other passengers were using. Instead, they used the confusion to slip into the off-limits cargo area. One reason for this was to retrieve her silver Blood-Sign (“How careless of them to overlook that I can use it as a gun!”) and her animal vessel which was being handled as a pet. The second reason was…

“Where is it? Oh, found it. This is the wheel storage space!”

This was the place that Hollywood liked to use and that had had led to much debate: “You could sneak into the plane through there.” “No, you’d be caught in the gears and killed if you tried.” “No, no. You could totally do it.” “The hell you could!” “Oh, you wanna fight!?” At the moment, the wheels were out and the plane was stopped on the runway, so the storage space’s door was open. Biondetta, Shigara Masami, and the White Queen used the thick shaft to climb down onto the runway separate from the ordinary passengers.

<Be careful, Queen.>

“Hm? I really don’t think anything could harm me.”

<Not that. I can see right up your dress!>

The cicadas were crying, but this was not the time to enjoy the summer atmosphere. At an airport, the cicadas could easily get sucked into an engine and cause problems.

There was a good reason for moving away from the other passengers.

“That fear and chaos is infectious. The passengers were separated from it by the plane’s hull, but now that they share the same space as the rioters, they might be ''infected'' and join in.”

<Thanks for the explanation. But I really wish you had paid more attention to our surroundings.>

“Yes, I see them.”

Just as the white dress and bare legged White Queen said that, some silhouettes stepped out from behind the passenger plane’s giant tire. More and more of them appeared as if they were duplicating.

They formed groups of two.

And one member of each group held a skinny stick measuring 150-200cm long.

Shigara Masami sighed in her suit and lab coat.

<What do you think?>

“All but one pair is a bluff. They’re probably extras hired with some money. But guinea pigs know the risks when they agree to participate in the experiment.”

Summoners and vessels with a certain number of Awards would disappear from the memories and awareness of normal people when outside their line of sight, but contact could be maintained as long as they remained in that line of sight. And from the moment the battle began to the moment they were literally killed instantly, they would have no clue what kind of world this was. Biondetta herself had used a gadget known as Girl’s Backdoor to mess with Kyousuke.

''Because they all acted at once, their opponent could not tell who the real summoner was.

If they were using a bluff like that, this summoner would be the quick-attack variety that ended the battle with their first strike. That meant a battle between the lowest level of Regulation-class, but if that was enough, that was enough. And that meant they would have trouble with a longer battle.

Biondetta shook her waitress uniform’s miniskirt and unfolded her collapsible Blood-Sign she had retrieved from the cargo space.

“In Toy Dream 35, there was someone from Illegal who sounded like an expert in this sort of thing. Illegal Award 891, Puppet✟Theatre✟Crime✟Device.”

Down with the Queen.

Was this a summoner and vessel who had succumbed to the pressure despite understanding the Blood-Sign System?

The rogue summoner was a lot like a lunatic being controlled by the extraterrestrial signal beaming into their brain.

The White Queen rubbed her index finger against her temple.

“The panic has reached a puppeteer too? I kind of feel sorry for the poor people drawn in by money without anyone explaining the danger.”

“Queen, the incidents caused by you and your worshipers were a lot like that.”

All of them used identical movements to pull out some kind of round sphere. Needless to say, these were Incense Grenades. Upon seeing them, Biondetta clicked her tongue and the White Queen frowned slightly. A fight here was fine, but opening an Artificial Sacred Ground and summoning a Material would draw the attention of the Kingdom F knights fighting on the runway. And it would all fall apart from there.

The White Queen sighed once.

She tugged down on the bottom of her casual dress which was shorter than she had thought.

She did not swell out with muscles or anything, but the pressure grew enough to make people imagine something was growing from her slender body. Even lying down, she was still the Queen. In fact, ''she could not afford to hold back'' at the moment. Whether to indicate that simple fact or not, she tilted her head and thought for a moment, so Shigara Masami reached out a hand to stop her.

<Don’t worry.>

The ponytail woman smiled.

And then something happened.

There was a deafening boom and then a single person was blown back from the crowd of people.

But not from one of Biondetta’s bullets.

When the lab coat researcher flicked “something” with her thumb, it flew forward with the force of a gunshot, hit her target right in the forehead, and gave them a concussion. Once the precariousness of their situation finally dawned on them, the many extras scattered and fled. The woman had apparently been correct, but despite Biondetta’s expertise in trickery, she had no idea how the woman had figured out which one was the real summoner.

The waitress demon had only figured out what had happened after seeing them lying on the runway.

It was a sunflower seed.

This was not even a part of the Blood-Sign Summoning Ceremony. But the idea of ending the battle before summoning a troublesome Material seemed like the foundation and origin point of Kyousuke and Biondetta’s fighting styles.

<nowiki><Illegal</nowiki> Award 891. Well, you probably could have made a fair amount of money in ''a more peaceful era''.>

Shigara Masami winked while she took some food from a small container and gave it to the small squirrel-like animal that crawled out from the neck of her lab coat.

<But unfortunately, I am Freedom Award 3000. If you want to challenge me in the Summoning Ceremony, at least reach the same number of digits first☆>