Strike the Blood - Volume 19 - Chapter 1.1

CHAPTER ONE

THE ELECTORAL WAR

1

Kojou Akatsuki was utterly bewildered.

He was ten thousand meters in the air, traveling at a thousand kilometers per hour. He was in the cabin of a private jet flying from the Northern European kingdom of Aldegia to Itogami Island. It was a charter plane Princess La Folia Rihavein had arranged for Kojou and the others, heroes and saviors of the nation, as a surprise.

The cabin came equipped with everything: a dining room on par with a restaurant, large beds and shower rooms, and even multimedia entertainment. Kojou had just woken up on the leather-covered sofa in the theater room. He’d gone there with Yukina Himeragi, who was—though she would never, ever admit it out loud—afraid of sleeping on airplanes and had started watching an animal comedy targeted at children only to fall asleep.

Yukina was making quiet sleeping sounds right at Kojou’s side.

Or perhaps it would be more precise to say, against Kojou’s side.

Her arms remained wrapped around Kojou’s arm as she slept, almost like a swimmer on the brink of drowning clinging to a life guard. She was also like a cat handed off to a familiar neighbor for safekeeping, looking reassured as she snuggled in a blanket left behind carrying her owner’s scent.

If it was just that, he might call the scene heartwarming.

However, having their arms entwined together meant that Yukina’s body was making direct contact with Kojou’s in several places. Plus, in contrast to her unawareness of the fact, Yukina was beautiful.

Her body was quite slender and delicate to the eye, and her breasts felt very soft as they pressed against his upper arm. He couldn’t put into words the scent that wafted up from her glossy hair. Her eyelashes were long. Her lips were pink. Her neck was exposed and defenseless. And he could see her blue veins right through her white skin—

Kojou hastily averted his eyes, feeling like he might lose himself if he kept staring.

He tentatively thought he needed to do something about their being so close together, but Yukina’s arms had such a firm grip that he couldn’t pull away. One false move and she’d end up dislocating Kojou’s shoulder. It seemed that Yukina had put Kojou in an armlock while she was unconscious.

No matter how afraid of flying she is, does she have to hold me so tightly? Kojou couldn’t help feeling exasperated. He agonized over how to free himself from her arms without waking her.

Consequently, Kojou’s face ended up drawing very close to Yukina’s.

“What are you doing?”

Kojou’s eyes bulged, his movements halting as he heard a frigid voice from behind.

When he looked back, he saw a classmate with an extravagant hairstyle, her body clad in bold, almost comically fashionable clothing.

“…Oh, it’s you, Asagi. Don’t scare me like that.” Kojou sighed with relief and glared with half-lidded eyes.

Asagi Aiba sourly puffed up her cheeks. “Whaddaya mean by that? Is hearing my voice a bad thing somehow?”

“That ain’t it. I’m just in a pinch here ’cause I can’t move my arm.”

“Hmm… So your arm’s numb from Yukina using it as a pillow the whole time?”

“I don’t know how the heck an armlock looks like a pillow to you. More to the point, gimme a hand here. I can’t move at all like this,” Kojou pleaded, slightly teary-eyed from the extreme pain in his locked-up joints.

Asagi shrugged lightly and grudgingly began helping Kojou escape. Gazing at the side of Yukina’s face as she slept defenselessly, Asagi exhaled with a twinge of envy.

“I know everyone has one or two things they have a hard time with, but to take it this far, that’s not so much a flaw as a talent. Who’d think she’d be scared of airplanes that much…?”

“If you ask her, she’ll stubbornly insist she’s not afraid, though.”

Kojou, finally freed from the armlock, made a strained smile as he stretched his stiff arm.

Yukina, a Sword Shaman of the Lion King Agency, could not show weakness before others. After all, that would constitute an obvious weakness in the Fourth Primogenitor’s observer. That was why she absolutely would not acknowledge her fear of airplanes despite it being blatantly obvious. Because he understood all that, Kojou pretended he didn’t notice her fear.

“Well, seems like she finally got some sleep, so let’s leave her like that for a little while.”

Asagi glanced at her wristwatch. “That’s fine, but we’ll be landing soon. It’ll probably be only another thirty minutes or so.”

Kojou’s eyes turned toward the window. However, the ultramarine night sky outside made it hard to track the passage of time. The plane was scheduled to land on Itogami Island before daybreak.

“Landing sooner than I thought.”

“It feels like that because it was a smooth ride. We really must thank the princess.”

“Feels to me like we deserved this much, though,” Kojou murmured to himself as he glanced around the cabin of the extravagant private jet.

During their stay in the kingdom of Aldegia, Kojou had not only ended up being used by La Folia as her purported fiancé, but he had also nearly ended up being cleaved to death by her father. Additionally, he’d been caught up in an international-scale conspiracy, fighting against terrorists. Even if La Folia showed a little consideration after all that, he didn’t think it was anything to feel guilty about.

“Well, fine. So…did anything happen?” Kojou put on a serious expression. Surely she hadn’t come to check on him solely for the sake of freeing him from Yukina’s armlock.

“Well, a bit.” Asagi nodded vaguely. It felt like a half-baked reaction coming from her. “This aircraft, as suits a high-class private jet, has its own Internet connection, but I lost my connection to Mogwai a little while ago.”

“Mogwai? Ahh, that thing… The badly sewn teddy bear…”

Kojou recalled the sight of the AI avatar serving as Asagi’s partner. Even charitably, he couldn’t call the design very cool, but Mogwai was apparently a highly capable agent even so.

Asagi opened her eyes wide with incredulity. “What do you mean badly sewn?! He’s cute!”

“Huh? Uh, well, if you think so, then that’s great… So what about it?”

“I’m saying he won’t respond no matter how much I call him. It’s not just Mogwai, it looks like all of Itogami Island is having network hiccups. At the very least, all communications with the Gigafloat Management Corporation HQ have been cut.”

“They were cut…?” Kojou replied, perplexed. He didn’t have a single clue whether that was a grave issue.

As Kojou and Asagi moved from the theater room to the main cabin, a third party interjected himself into their conversation. Motoki Yaze was sitting in a seat in a reclining position as he held a sturdy mobile communication terminal in his hands.

“Doesn’t look like problems cropped up in just the computer networks,” he said. “Satellite phones and my family’s private line are no good, either. Seems like the submarine communications cable got cut, so there’s no way it’s a simple hiccup. Thanks to that, we’ve got no idea what’s going on back home.”

“…Don’t tell me this is Juranbarada’s doing?” Kojou had no particular basis for that suspicion, but he had a ferociously bad feeling nonetheless.

Asagi furrowed her brow. “You mean that First Primogenitor guy supposedly heading for Itogami Island?”

Just before departing the kingdom of Aldegia, Kojou had met a man calling himself Ki Juranbarada back at the airport. Immediately after the man left for Itogami Island a step ahead of Kojou and the others, they learned Juranbarada was the Lost Warlord, the First Primogenitor.

Kojou didn’t think it would be all that surprising if a man like him, bored of a long life as an immortal vampire, would kick up a disturbance on Itogami Island on a whim. Furthermore, the First Primogenitor’s loyal confidant, Velesh Aradahl, had warned him to absolutely not let his liege become bored. If he did, there was no telling what Juranbarada might do.

Yaze calmly shook his head as if to brush Kojou’s worry aside. “That seemed the likeliest story, but the timing doesn’t match up. From the little bit of digging I did, it seems like Itogami Island’s communications issues started before we even left Aldegia.”

“Oh… Then it’s got nothin’ to do with Juranbarada?”

“I’m not sure we can say it’s completely unrelated, though. We don’t actually know the reason why the First Primogenitor is heading all the way to Itogami Island.”

Asagi kept an optimistic view, though she sounded only half-convinced. “At minimum, it seems the First Primogenitor has nothing to do with the communications trouble.”

Kojou agreed, but there was still a fundamental problem: They still had no idea what the cause behind the loss of contact with Itogami Island was.

“Somehow, it feels like something like this happened before, too…,” Kojou murmured offhandedly as he continued glaring at the darkened window.

He remembered the Roses of Tartarus incident from three months earlier. During that incident, the Eight Trigrams Formation employed by the sorcerous terrorist group Tartarus Lapse had cut Itogami Island off from the rest of the world, obstructing the import of goods. That was certainly different from network communications, but in the sense of isolating Itogami Island, the current situation was much the same.

Tartarus Lapse’s objective had been to stir up anxiety within the island’s populace—to then complete the destructive ritual magic they called the Roses of Tartarus. So he had to wonder if this obstruction of communications was no more than the prelude to a much graver incident.

His thoughts were erased by Yukina’s voice as she suddenly raced into the cabin.

“Senpai!”

“…H-Himeragi?”

Kojou nervously looked back at Yukina to see her abnormally flustered. He assumed Yukina was angrily chasing him down for having abandoned her in the theater room while she slept.

She grabbed his arm and forcefully dragged him off.

“Senpai, please come with me right now!”

“Ahh…calm down, Himeragi. You don’t have to worry. Planes don’t fall out of the sky just like that.”

“Right, right. This model of aircraft is popular because of its safety rating,” Asagi added to try to put Yukina at ease, “and I heard the pilot was handpicked from the best of the Aldegian Air Force.”

That did not ease Yukina’s irritation. She glared at Kojou. “That is not the problem! Nagisa is—”

“What about Nagisa?!”

Kojou’s expression tightened the instant his little sister’s name came up. The way he hung on Yukina’s every word made Yaze and Asagi glare with exasperated faces that practically screamed, You and your damned sister complex.

“Over here!”

Yukina dragged Kojou by the arm toward the main bedroom located at the back of the cabin. His younger sister was wearing her vacation clothes and sitting on the edge of the wide double bed. Kanon Kanase was sitting close to her with concern. The two should have been deep asleep in that bedroom until moments before.

A ferocious choking feeling seized Kojou the instant he entered the room—it was the spiritual essence filling the bedroom. This powerful energy scattering out from Nagisa was a burden on Kojou’s vampiric body.

Realizing her brother had entered the room, Nagisa raised a frail voice. “Kojou…”

Kojou approached her, ignoring his discomfort. “Nagisa?! What happened?”

“Kojou… I’m scared, Kojou…”

Nagisa’s entire body was shaking as she put her weight against him. She wasn’t meaning to hurt him with that spiritual essence. She just couldn’t control it.

“You felt something? Like from before…?”

Kojou slowly stroked Nagisa’s hair as she trembled in his arms. Nagisa weakly gave a vague shake of her head.

“I don’t know, but…on Itogami Island…there’s something’s scary… There’s all kinds of bad emotions swirling… Bloodlust… Madness… It’s like a war is starting…”

“A war…? Why there?”

Kojou was shaken. Judging by the timing of Nagisa’s words and the communications troubles, certainly something was going on. If the First Primogenitor, Ki Juranbarada, had caught the scent of war brewing, Kojou could see how he’d take that as a reason to visit Itogami Island.

“No… Kojou… If you return to Itogami Island…”

Nagisa gripped Kojou’s collar. A huge amount of spiritual energy shot out from her entire body. Her own fears had triggered the explosion. Unable to withstand it, Kojou staggered back. Her power was so incredible that any normal demon would have been knocked out cold from being in the same room.

Even though this explosion could not directly harm Nagisa’s body, she could not endure a prolonged intense release of her spiritual essence, because its source was her very own life force.

“Oh no…!” Yukina gasped.

“Nagisa!” Kanon exclaimed.

They embraced Nagisa from both sides in an attempt to restrain her spiritual energy. Having experienced going right to the brink of transforming into angels, Yukina and Kanon both possessed top-class spiritual energy by the standards of humankind. Of course, their control was excellent as well.

The pair jointly deployed a barrier, which barely managed to keep Nagisa from running amok. Losing consciousness from the exhaustion of her strength, Nagisa collapsed onto the bed.

Asagi patted her chest in relief. Yaze was deflated as he squatted down to the floor.

Nagisa calmly slept as Kanon carefully watched the side of her face with visible concern. Then, Yukina shifted a serious look toward Kojou.

“Senpai, just now…”

“Y-yeah…” Kojou coughed painfully as he spoke. The dregs of lingering spiritual energy still inside his body were making it a little tough to breathe. He felt like a fish out of water. “Nagisa was a powerful spirit medium to begin with. Way back, she regularly went off to Grandma’s for training. That was to keep troublesome stuff like Spirit Sight and premonitions from wrecking her body, but…”

Yaze had a pensive look as he sank into thought. “Seems like an abnormal situation, maybe even a war, is taking place on Itogami Island…”

After witnessing a release of spiritual essence on that level, it was difficult to brush off Nagisa’s Spirit Sight as a figment of her imagination, all the more after they’d already confirmed the Itogami Island communication blockage.

“Even if Nagisa’s Spirit Sight is right,” Asagi said bluntly, laughing, “it’s not like we can just stay away, you know.”

No one spoke a single word in refutation. Everyone present had precious family and friends back on Itogami Island. It was the same for even Yukina, dispatched to Itogami Island in the course of her duties.

“In either case, it would seem best to emotionally prepare ourselves, so that we might respond to whatever situation presents itself,” Yukina said, taking on a sober, serious tone. Her words also seemed to carry a sense of duty; as a professional Attack Mage, she needed to hold herself together.

However, the private jet was assailed by a dull thud before her statement had ceased to reverberate. The frame heavily tilted like a rowboat tossed about by a storm.

“Kyaaaa!” Yukina shrieked.

“Th-the hell?!”

Catching Yukina before she tumbled to the floor, Kojou shifted his eyes beyond the window. It was just for an instant, but he felt like he could see a wingtip light against the pitch-black sky. “Is anyone hurt…?!”

An officer wearing an Aldegian Air Force uniform rushed into the cabin. She was a young lieutenant accompanying Kojou and company, attending to their needs during the flight. “I have a message from the captain. A civilian airplane deviating from its flight path is approaching. We have engaged in emergency maneuvers due to the danger of a near miss.”

“N-near miss…?” Yukina’s voice was shaking as she haltingly echoed the words. She was half in tears at the fact two planes had nearly collided in midair.

The officer confirmed with a sober nod. “Currently, we believe the cause is a cessation of communications from the air traffic control room at Itogami Central Airport.”

“Not being able to contact the airport control room… That’s pretty bad, ain’t it…?”

The latest news made even Kojou pale. If his memory was correct, an air traffic control room was a facility that granted landing rights to aircraft, monitored an airport’s airspace, and managed traffic in order to prevent accidents from occurring.

He didn’t think a safe landing was possible as long as the air traffic control room was beyond reach. If there was another aircraft on the runway when they landed, they ran the risk of a horrific collision.

“Please rest at ease. We have altered our flight plan, and we are expected to land according to visual flight rules at a coast guard airbase in Itogami Island’s southern district.”

“The coast guard? Hmm…,” Yaze murmured.

“VFR without radio guidance… In other words, a manual landing,” Asagi said just as quietly. They both did not conceal their anxiety.

“Rest at ease” my ass, thought Kojou as he lifted his face toward the sky.

Suddenly realizing that Yukina had gone rigid, Kojou cast a sidelong glance at her.

“You okay, Himeragi?”

“Yes… It’s not a problem… I’m all right… I’m all right…”

Yukina was still staring at the wall with hollow eyes, repeating the same phrase like a broken doll.