"How does our Eldest Young Lady see Su Yuzu?"
Reverent, lowered, she bent down.
Tsukimisato Somehana knelt on the floor, gathering up the scattered pages.
Calling them pages wasn't quite right, though.
Thick, yellowed, coarse paper — sheet after sheet of illustrations, each from a different angle, at a different age, in a different state.
Line after line of exquisite, neatly ordered writing that even Tsukimisato Somehana couldn't read.
It looked like an art collection that had never been bound.
Most of the illustrations had the same subject: the girl who had once stood in the Prosecutors Office looking down on them all with such haughty arrogance, and who had now been carried off by someone—
Su Yuzu.
Now and then there were other figures, other scenes.
Blue sky, white clouds and a brilliant sun. The Eldest Young Lady's personal maid. And herself.
It seemed the Eldest Young Lady had a habit of setting down everything she saw, heard and thought in pen and ink.
She squared the loose sheets and laid them back on the girl's lap with careful reverence, and even then Tsukimisato Somehana didn't dare lift her head and look Shingai Hitomi in the eye.
It was nothing like the terror other people felt toward Shingai Hitomi.
What held Tsukimisato Somehana back came from somewhere far deeper — reverence, and faith.
"Cat and rat, most likely—"
"The hunter and the hunted."
"Marked by the Eldest Young Lady twelve years ago—"
"Su Yuzu, with that kind of ability and that kind of Talent, became prey the moment she was noticed. Prey to be toyed with in the palm of the Eldest Young Lady's hand, cupped there, taken out and played with whenever the mood struck."
So… yesterday, at the amusement park.
When Su Yuzu had said to her, "The greedy girl — you mean Shingai Hitomi?"
"She doesn't seem nearly as greedy as you made her out to be, Senior Somehana—"
"If anything… she's rather cute, and she blushes easily."
With the air of someone who had the Eldest Young Lady thoroughly figured out, ready to use the Eldest Young Lady's own name to launch an offensive against her… that was exactly why Tsukimisato Somehana's face had gone so twisted and strange.
To dare say out loud that the Eldest Young Lady was rather cute and blushed easily.
Su Yuzu really was fearless.
Tsukimisato Somehana could practically see her Eldest Young Lady putting those very words into practice — except turned back on Su Yuzu, until it was Su Yuzu who became "cute" and "blushed easily," bullied until there wasn't a scrap of greed left in her.
She passed the pages back to Shingai Hitomi with painstaking care and kept her head bowed, her eyes on the toes peeking out beneath the girl's hem.
"The Eldest Young Lady… is she truly angry?"
As far back as Tsukimisato Somehana could remember, she had never once seen her Eldest Young Lady this angry.
Not even when the Shingai family's power was at its lowest ebb.
Back then a man had spat filth at the Eldest Young Lady, and the Eldest Young Lady had only smiled… then had her cut off his head, then asked the ones still standing, in the softest voice, whether anyone else had any bold ideas.
The Eldest Young Lady had never been furious enough to hurl the book in her hands across the room.
"The Eldest Young Lady… really does care about this piece of prey."
"She really does care about Su Yuzu."
Which made sense, when you thought it through.
The Shingai family had been watching Su Yuzu for close to twelve years.
Their attention on Su Yuzu had been closer even than the Soga clan's.
And now — the fruit called Su Yuzu had finally awakened, ripe and on the verge of blossoming, ready to be picked. And at precisely that critical moment, someone had cut in and stolen her away.
Of course the Eldest Young Lady was angry.
Although… Tsukimisato Somehana still found it faintly unbelievable that a being like her Eldest Young Lady could actually get angry at all.
"Cough — cough — cough—" Shingai Hitomi pressed her sleeve to her mouth as the coughing tore out of her.
Under Tsukimisato Somehana's worried gaze, the cold-faced personal maid drew an extremely fine silver syringe from a heavy black case.
With practiced ease she sank the blood-dark serum into the vein of Shingai Hitomi's arm, and only then did the girl's condition ease, and only a little.
"What exactly happened!?" Shingai Hitomi's eyes fixed on Tsukimisato Somehana.
Head down, speaking as fast as she could while staying perfectly clear, Tsukimisato Somehana reported everything she had learned from the Investigation Bureau and the Traffic Department.
Su Yuzu had been seized and taken away.
The perpetrator was a woman in military dress with long, pale violet hair.
Tsukimisato Somehana had even secured relatively clear footage of Kujou Iruka's face.
The woman raising her head to the surveillance camera, tilting her chin up, wearing a smile of contempt and mockery — the sight drained every trace of fury from Shingai Hitomi's expression, leaving it flat and calm.
"Kujou Iruka."
"Yes." Tsukimisato Somehana kept her head lowered. "We ran a comparison against the database…"
"The probability that this woman is Kujou Iruka is nearly eighty-five percent."
"The Abyss of Eternal Smiles actually shut down a domain that has almost never gone dark in her entire life, and came to the Tokyo metropolitan area."
"She even—" Disbelief crept into Tsukimisato Somehana's voice. "She even went to the trouble of a disguise, just to carry off Su Yuzu."
"There's no 'nearly.'" Shingai Hitomi only watched the screen, calm. "She is Kujou Iruka."
"The only person who could walk into the Tokyo metropolitan area and take Su Yuzu away that openly—"
"—is Kujou Iruka."
"And another thing—"
"There's no 'just,' either."
The anger surged back into Shingai Hitomi's face. "I've told you—"
"Su Yuzu is important!"
"She's important!!!"
"Are the Investigation Bureau and the Assault Department nothing but freeloaders eating for free?"
"Kujou Iruka's domain vanished from satellite surveillance for that long, and not one of them thought to ask where Kujou Iruka actually was?"
"And that Kujou Katora."
"Her sister's domain disappears, and it never once crossed her mind to guess what Kujou Iruka might be doing?"
"And the 'Seat of Evil'?"
"Didn't Soga Yura stand up in court and swear blind—"
"—that she'd use the Sixth Sequence 'Seat of Evil' to threaten people?"
"So when it finally matters, what use was she?"
"Not the slightest bit of use."
"Is she the 'Seat of Evil' or the 'Seat of Hunger'!!!" Shingai Hitomi was picturing Kirishika and the "Seat of Evil" the way she'd seen them the day she ran into Su Yuzu at that restaurant.
"Nothing but a glutton!"
The girl's chest rose and fell with her temper.
The cold-faced maid and Tsukimisato Somehana both kept their heads down, breath pressed flat, not daring to speak.
They didn't even dare urge the Eldest Young Lady to calm down.
All they could do was let the girl vent her rage until it ran out.
A long while later, her anger apparently spent, Shingai Hitomi finally went quiet.
"Pass the word down."
"Full-spectrum capture of every fluctuation in Kujou Iruka's erosion domain."
"Find me where she is!"
"And…"
"Go tell the Investigation Bureau and Keigunen Private Academy."
"We can offer them a teensy little bit of help. A hundred million teensy little bits."
At that same moment—
Similar scenes were playing out in any number of plain tatami rooms, in lavish villas, in severe offices, in old-fashioned wooden Japanese houses.
The maid, as inorganic as a doll, pushed the girl's wheelchair out of the room and stopped at the edge of the long wooden veranda.
The girl lifted her head to the bright sky, the warm sunlight.
Behind her, Tsukimisato Somehana still knelt, trembling.
Tsukimisato Somehana looked at that serene, peaceful picture in front of her, and knew better. The skies over this world—
were about to change.
____
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