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Strike the Blood - Volume 22 - Chapter 2.3




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Itogami City General Sorcerous Hospital was a medical agency specializing in demons directly overseen by the Gigafloat Management Corporation.

The medical wing was near the center of Itogami Island, giving it a great across-the-canal view of the Keystone Gate lobby Aradahl had destroyed with his Beast Vassal. The giant spherical fortress floating in the sky above was also highly visible.

“Hah…that bastard really put on a show.”

Gazing at the sorry sight of Keystone Gate from his patient room window with a sardonic smile on his face was Schtola D, paroled sorcerous criminal. The youth had a crude look on his face reminiscent of a street gang member.

Thanks to being wounded all over his body, his foul look didn’t seem very imposing at the moment. The night before, he’d challenged Shahryar Ren to combat, only to suffer critical, near-fatal wounds himself.

“That Necropolis is Castle Kalenaren of the Ren family. Damn it all…!”

Schtola D’s cheeks twisted as he gazed at the fortress floating in midair. The blatant foulness of his tongue was just as rumored, but it didn’t feel all that scary since he came off as a pouting child.

“Necropolis?”

Asagi parroted back the unfamiliar term. She’d come to visit Schtola D, a fellow Deva, to wring out information on Ladli Ren.

“…The castles where Deva royalty and nobles hold court. According to legend, they’re phantom cities that wander the borders between the real world and another, I think? The Devas left on the surface during The Great Cleansing dream for eternity inside the Necropolises, biding their time until their eventual return…”

Motoki Yaze, tagging along with Asagi, explained in an overdramatic tone, but…

“Ain’t nothin’ as high an’ mighty as that. They’re just monster mansions of useless geezers who won’t hurry up and die already…”

“Keh,” spat out Schtola D as he spoke.

By rights, he was a fiendish criminal who should’ve been shut inside the Prison Barrier, but contrary to expectations, he’d been cooperative with Asagi and Yaze. He probably was desperate for any visitor he could talk to. He was bound to his bed, unable to move a muscle, and the other occupant of the room, Bruté Dumblegraff, was a man of exceedingly few words, apparently leaving Schtola D bored stiff.

“Geezers…aren’t those your buddies?”

Asagi asked with a suspicious tone. Schtola D and the Ren siblings were both self-declared Devas. Asagi and Yaze didn’t know how to distinguish between them.

For his part, Schtola D’s face suddenly went red with indignation.

“Haah? Who’s whose buddy, you stupid jerk! I’ll kill ya, Priestess of Cain or not… damnit, that hurts! These wounds hurt!”

“Gravely wounded patients shouldn’t get all excited, then…!”

Asagi turned a pitying look toward Schtola D as he trashed around on the bed.

“Oh, shaddap, shit-jerk. Look, after the piece-of-shit Great Cleansing, proud Devas, you know, like me, cut off all ties with the human world and created a highly developed spiritual civilization on an isolated plateau in South America, unlike you monkeys! And that was thousands of years ago!”

“Highly developed spiritual civilization…?”

“You got a problem with that, haaah?!”

The dubious expression coming over Asagi’s face made Schtola D angrily shout with teary eyes.

“Well, fine. And?”

Asagi bluntly prodded him to continue. Schtola D’s fists trembled from obvious irritation.

“The crappy folks left in the Necropolises are like livin’ corpses that ain’t taken a step forward in thousands of years. They think the whole unaging and undying bit is grand and stay locked up in their flyin’ tombs, obsessed with their pathetic authority and tryin’ to retake their past glory. So don’t you dare lump me together with those shitheads beyond saving, you idiot!”

“Well, now I know the gist of it…”

“Ahhh, that so?”

Worn out by his own anger, Schtola D slumped back against his bed, closing his eyes and taking several moments to put his breathing in order.

“…So you wanna know the Necropolises’ weaknesses?”

“Eh?”

“Didn’t ya come all this way to talk to me to get me to tell ya? Hey, if you don’t wanna hear it, that’s fine with me.”

“Wait, Schtola D, tell me about it. Ahhh, right, want to eat some jelly?”

Asagi picked up a cup of jelly sitting on top of the table, dangling it in front of the young Deva. For a moment, Schtola D looked back at Asagi in abject shock.

“No, I don’t! An’ that’s my leftover hospital food, ain’t it?!”

“You don’t need it? I can have it, then?”

“What, you’re gonna eat it?!”

“I like this brand of jelly. They served it a lot at the cafeteria in primary school way back…”

Asagi cheerfully explained as she began digging into the jelly. Schtola D gazed at her with an exasperated look for a time, finally sighing with an offhanded air.

“First, it goes like this. Physical attacks don’t work against a Necropolis. It’s like Spiky-Face said earlier, even if a Necropolis appears in the real world, half its existence is still in another one. No matter how showy the attacks you pound into it from this side, it ain’t gonna do damage through the otherworld wall in the way.”

“I see…so it’s constructed like a vat made with a vacuum insulation spell…”

“I got no idea what the hell that is.”

Whether appropriate or not, Asagi’s example was so difficult to understand that it left Schtola D replying with annoyance.

“If attacks don’t pass through from the outside, would attacks from within work?”

Yaze inquired in a sober tone.

Among the Beast Vassals serving Kojou Akatsuki was a twin-headed dragon, a Dimension Eater that could inflict damage regardless of dimensional walls. The effects on surrounding space would be too great to let it chew its way through an entire Necropolis, but it might be viable if they could open no more than a breach to invade the Necropolis’s innards.

Schtola D went hmmm as he thought about it.

“Well, I suppose so. I ain’t heard of anyone gettin’ into a Necropolis and comin’ back alive, though.”

“Why not?”

“The shitty bastards livin’ in those Necropolises have been holed up in those cramped castles for thousands o’ years. Their retainers have some pretty damn tweaked-up defenses for those castles. It’s a way for ’em to kill time.”


Murmuring those words, Schtola D lowered his eyes as if enduring a memory haunting him all over again.

“They got most of the bunch from my village, too. That guy—that bastard Shahryar Ren—lured us into his castle on purpose so he could have fun with us! He was watchin’ while my pals died!”

“That so…”

Yaze’s expression grew graver as he sank into silence. He felt like he finally understood why Schtola D hated Ren despite both of them being Devas. Apparently, the whole reason he’d been captured as a sorcerous criminal was because ordinary civilians had been caught up in his repeated attacks on MAR for the purpose of defeating Ren. That collateral damage couldn’t be undone, but Yaze could empathize with him to a fair extent.

“What happened to that dragon…?”

Bruté Dumblegraff, who’d kept silent up to that point, spoke from the adjacent bed through the thin curtain separating the two.

“Dragon? You mean the flame dragon called Kreyd?”

Yaze remembered the copper-colored dragon he’d encountered back at the warehouse district in Island East. They’d thought he was a member of the Order of the End, but the dragon was actually a coconspirator of Shahryar Ren.

“Pretty sure that dragon went to Nod along with Shahryar Ren.”

Asagi calmly answered Dumblegraff’s question.

Upon hearing this, the dragon slayer man fell silent on the other side of the curtain. He’d lost his battle with Kreyd and had been unable to stop the flame dragon from crossing over to Nod. He apparently felt responsible for the result.

“Hey, you, you’re a dragon slayer…a Georgius, right? Why do you have that much of a hate-on for dragons?”

Asagi followed up, her interest piqued. She thought he might ignore her, but Dumblegraff was unexpectedly open about it.

“There is no reason. I am a Georgius built by the Church for that purpose.”

“Even so, there have to be extenuating circumstances. What did the Western European Church make the Georgiuses for?”

“…Because dragons are invaders, or so I was told.”

After a silent pause, Dumblegraff quietly spoke. Asagi narrowed her eyes with a dubious look.

“Invaders…?”

“The dragons on this planet are scouts; therefore, we kill them before they can carry information back to their kind.”

“…Scouts…like recon troops? So they came as spies…but where from?”

Dumblegraff’s explanation was so lacking in words that Yaze felt a strong sense of bewilderment. At present, it was impossible for Yaze to judge if he was speaking the truth or simply false dogma that had been fed to him long ago.

For some reason, Asagi readily nodded.

“I see. It makes sense.”

“Eh…?! Asagi, you buy his story?”

Yaze pressed the point with his childhood friend in a tiny voice. Asagi looked apathetic as she spoke.

“I don’t completely buy it, but to me, it doesn’t look like he’s lying.”

“Well, I’m with you there, but…”

“Either way, we’re putting dragon countermeasures on the back burner. We have to do something about these Necropolises first.”

“I guess you have a point… Otherwise we won’t be able to send Kojou off to Nod.”

It didn’t sit well with Yaze, though he had no choice but to accept that Asagi was right. Yaze’s brow creased as he sighed deeply.

Either way, they’d gotten the information they needed. There seemed to be no reason to stay in that hospital room any longer. Yaze and Asagi nodded to one another, about to head out the door at virtually the same time.

That was when Schtola D opened his mouth once more.

“Wait, Priestess of Cain. You said the Fourth Primogenitor…Kojou Akatsuki, was it? Tell that jerk something for me.”

“Tell Kojou what?”

Asagi stood still and looked back. Schtola D nodded with a sulky look on his face.

“Yeah. It’s pathetic, but I’m stuck in this bed, so tell ’im to kill that shit bastard Shahryar Ren for me, would you…please.”

Asagi raised her eyebrows, somewhat surprised as she saw Schtola D reverently lower his head. Then a powerful grin came over her.

“…Okay. Even if it’s not killing him, it’ll be half killing him for sure. I’ll make Kojou take responsibility.”

“Fine with me.”

Schtola D murmured in satisfaction and closed his eyes. Turning their backs to him, Asagi and Yaze left the hospital room.

“…You sure you should be making a promise like that? Half killing Shahryar Ren… If he knew we were in negotiations to sell Itogami Island to MAR, wouldn’t he totally flip his lid?”

Yaze asked Asagi this as they walked down a dreary hospital corridor.

Asagi nodded without any change in expression.

“I suppose so.”

“Er…even you suppose so…”

“It’s all right, though. That’s not gonna happen.”

Asagi showed off a toothy smile. Asagi’s behavior perplexed Yaze.

“How can you be so sure?”

“MAR…or rather Ladli Ren has a huge misunderstanding about one thing.”

“Misunderstanding?”

“Yeah. She thinks Kojou’s someone who’ll budge from weighing the pros and cons in purchase negotiations.”

The instant she spoke Kojou’s name, Asagi’s smiling face was enveloped by a bright, vibrant glow.

Somehow, the tone of the words she spoke sounded loving and proud.

“It takes a complete idiot immune to that kind of logic to rule this island.”



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