“Yeah, I think so.”

  “Elizabeth Báthory was actually alive during the exact time frame of the historical events here.”

  “So?”

  “So what if someone took these papers back to Europe...?”

  “You’re saying the literary Carmilla might actually be based on this, instead of the other way around?”

  “I mean, it’s possible!”

  “That would be pretty amazing...” I admitted, “but we’ve got more important things to do than speculating right now.”

  Miyoshi sighed.

  “Oh, I suppose...”

  Day 2

  The three of us spent the entire night wide awake in the hotel lobby. However, even after the sun had risen well into the sky, the hotel staff still hadn’t shown up, nor had the police.

  “The hotel employees just got a whole lot higher on my suspect list,” I muttered.

  “But Kei, why would they make it so obvious?” Miyoshi countered. “They’d never be able to get away with it.”

  “Unless the rest of us go missing too.”

  “Are we gonna get rubbed out?” Saito—who seemed to have gotten at least a little sleep—suggested jokingly. She scooped up a forkful of breakfast—a preprepared meal which I had pulled out of Vault and disguised as my own cooking—and brought it up to her mouth. “I had heard rumors, but you really are a good cook, Coach.”

  I had gotten the meal from the basement food court of a department store, so naturally it was pretty tasty stuff. Of course I couldn’t just say that, so I simply shrugged.

  “So what’s the plan today?” Miyoshi asked.

  The Arthurs were acting strange. They had come back without finding any sign of Mitsurugi whatsoever, and they wouldn’t look me in the eye, perhaps out of guilt. Where did their typical unconcerned attitude run off to?

  “We know she was in Wi-Fi range, so all I can think of is to do another search within that radius. That, and since the hotel staff never came back, they probably have some kind of hideout somewhere in the village. Once I’ve checked out the manager’s office, I’m gonna try to hunt that place down.”

  “It’s always possible she’s already been taken away to some place that’s nowhere near here, isn’t it?” Miyoshi pointed out.

  “If that’s the case, the culprit will probably reach out to contact us at some point. There wouldn’t be much we could do until that happens.” At least that’s how it would probably play out if this were a kidnapping for ransom. If the kidnappers had some kind of specific business with her instead, though, that would be an issue. However, I had decided to temporarily put that possibility aside; not only did I not want to think about it, but there wasn’t really any point in doing so.

  “Got it. In that case, I’ll try and get a head start interviewing the townspeople.”

  “Sure, but are you gonna be all right?” I asked.

  “I mean there’s no way everyone in the whole village is in on this. If anyone tells me ‘This is Destiny,’ though, I’ll make sure to watch my back,” she responded with a grin.

  That was a mysterious line said to detective Hercule Poirot by the Russian princess in Murder on the Orient Express, in which it turned out everyone on the eponymous train had committed the crime together.

  “Besides,” she continued, “the Arthurs have my back. Your average human wouldn’t stand a chance against them.”

  “True enough,” I admitted, then turned back to Saito. “Are you going with her, Saito?”

  “I think I’ll head outside of town,” she responded. “It’s weird that the police haven’t shown up yet, so I’ll try to find a way to get in touch with them.”

  “Without a car...?” The car we had arrived in had somehow vanished into thin air.

  “They have some bikes here for guests who are cyclists. Believe it or not, I’ve actually got some decent stamina.”

  I was aware she had some pretty appreciable VIT and AGI stats, but her STR was by no means superhuman, which meant she would still be at some risk out there by herself.

  “Don’t worry,” Miyoshi chimed in. “I’ll send Aethlem with her just in case.”

  “Ah, okay, that works.” We weren’t in a dungeon, and Aethlem could almost definitely handle anything the real world had to offer. “In that case, let’s split up and meet back here around lunchtime.”

  “Roger that!”

  “See you later!”

  With that, the two of them departed the lobby.

  I stood up and headed over to scour the rooms used by the hotel staff, searching for clues. Most of the rooms and lockers were sealed tight, but I had the excuse that we were dealing with an emergency, so I forced them open—I did have 200 STR, after all.

  In the back of a locked desk drawer inside the manager’s office, I located a series of bound documents that appeared to be quite old. The volumes furthest back in the drawer had faded appreciably.

  “‘Six Mon Ships: Perpetual Trading Log’?”

  I pulled out a volume at random and flipped through it; my eye caught a glimpse of the date “Kanbun 11.”

  “When was the Kanbun era, again?” Unlike Miyoshi, I unfortunately had precious little knowledge of Japanese eras. I had a basic enough grasp to have gotten through high school history class, meaning I knew the eras like Tenpo and Ansei when major events took place, but anything outside of that was beyond me. I couldn’t just look it up on the internet either, since I had no connection.

  “Man, we really do rely on the internet for everything nowadays, don’t we...”

  I pulled out the newest-looking volume and opened it to the last page. It contained what appeared to be some sort of transaction records, with something being logged once every twelve years. The item itself seemed to be written in code, so I couldn’t tell what exactly was being traded, but the entries were all pretty much identical, and the quantities weren’t particularly large either.

  Tracing things further back, I found that the same entry appeared in August—twelve, twenty-four, and thirty-six years ago. The entry from twenty-four years ago had a strange mark next to it. I got the feeling that the trading had taken place every twelve years without any issues all the way up to that point, but evidently something unusual had happened that year.

  Then there was the entry from only twelve years ago, dated August 17, 2007. The quantity for that date was marked with a zero. I could only suppose that meant nothing was traded.

  “Were they dealing drugs or something? No, it’s way too infrequent for that...”

  If the village could prosper through trade with such long intervals in between transactions, whatever they were trading had to be both rare and special. The quantity traded seemed too low to be something like jewelry, though. Maybe it was antiques, or possibly some kind of artwork, like paintings...?

  Then, on the page after that entry, one last date was written down: August 10, 2019. The same coded word was listed as the item to be traded. Judging by how far back the transaction history went, it made no sense for the current hotel staff to be the only ones involved.

  “A village that prospered through international trade, huh...”

  When I checked the time, I saw that it had just hit eleven a.m., and I suddenly started to get worried about Miyoshi, whose first stop had been to check out the village. I gathered up the documents that were scattered about, put them all into Vault, and headed out after her.

  I stopped for a moment on the road from the hotel and gazed at the desolate village below. It somehow felt even more deserted than it had yesterday when we’d arrived.

  Just as I had made my way close to the entrance of the village and was about to shout for Miyoshi, the faint sound of singing reached my ears. Cautiously, I began to make my way in the direction of the voice.

  From a distance, most of the houses looked like Japanese-style homes, but when I examined them up close I could see that they incorporated features from both Western and Japanese styles, forming sort of their own unique architectural blend.

  “This bizarre atmosphere could be a tourist attraction in its own right...”

  The air was permeated with the scent of fish, as one might expect from a fishing village. However, there was this slight note of sludgy pollution mixed in, which strangely upset my senses.

  As I walked down the narrow cobblestone path, every once in a while I heard sounds coming from the closed windows of some of the homes. Suppressing the urge to start knocking on doors and interrogating the people inside, I continued searching for the source of the singing.

  The trail led me to a building that looked like a very old stone church. Considering the number of massive earthquakes that must’ve struck the Wakasa area from the Sengoku period through the Edo period, starting with the great Tensho Earthquake of 1586, it was a mystery how a building made of stone could’ve survived for such a long time. Did they rebuild the church after every earthquake? If so, it must’ve had a good number of followers—and it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if its influence was a part of the struggle mentioned in the priest’s personal notes.

  Despite all that, though, the music didn’t sound much like a church hymn at all. It was something more primitive, using peculiar words and intonations that were oddly unsettling.

  “Kei?”

  The sudden voice made me jump, and I turned to look behind me.

  “Oh, it’s you, Miyoshi. Don’t scare me like that.”

  “Were you lured here by the siren song too?”

  “I guess you could say that. What is this song, though?”

  Miyoshi put a hand to her chin.

  “Well, it’s not a Catholic or Protestant hymn, that much is for sure.”

  “It sounds almost like a more refined version of the chanting you’d hear in some early Southeast Asian religions...”

  “It’s got an air of mysticism about it, like when Pietism first started to become a distinct movement in Christianity,” Miyoshi noted.

  Paying careful attention to our surroundings, we approached the church entrance. That was when I noticed something absolutely astounding.

  “No way...” I murmured.

  Miyoshi blinked.

  “Kei?”

  A symbol was engraved into the entryway—a triangle with an eyelike shape drawn inside it, with the words “ESOTERICA ORDE DE DAGON” written around it.

  I looked up at the symbol in utter disbelief.

  “Either this is some kind of movie set, or someone’s messing with us.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I mean, look for yourself!” I pointed at the age-worn metal panel above the door. “Even if certain lunatic occultists out there happen to be right and Lovecraft actually was writing about real-life occult phenomena, the Esoteric Order of Dagon still wouldn’t have been around until 1840!”

  An organization created in 1840 facing off against people who lived in the early 1600s? Of course, it wasn’t too far-fetched for a Western church to change hands and get repurposed over the course of history—

  Hold it. Stop right there, brain. Sure, the world may have dungeons and magic, but that’s no excuse to start confusing fiction with reality. I need to derail this train of thought right now.

  I looked up at the panel again. As best I could tell, the words around the symbol were written in Galician. If the panel had been made in the 1600s, I would’ve expected it to be in Spanish or Portuguese, but Galician wasn’t completely out of the question either. If the building was repurposed by other groups sometime after it was constructed, the panel would’ve been from 1840 or later, and the words probably would’ve been written in English.

  “It seems almost plausible, then immediately starts getting super fishy—”

  Suddenly, the song stopped, and I caught a glimpse of someone inside rising shakily to their feet.

  “Shit!” I grabbed Miyoshi’s arm, picked her up, and bounded up the wall of the neighboring building before leaping onto the roof of the church and landing lightly.

  Miyoshi gave a little shriek of surprise, which I immediately shushed. I pressed myself flat against the roof, then pushed her down to match.

  “W-Wow... Back to being stuntmen, are we?” she stammered.

  “Quiet! Just keep your head down!”

  As a light rain began to fall yet again, the door directly below us creaked open, and a bunch of people wearing some kind of black raincoats came filing out, walking with strange gaits.

  “Ugh... They’re even walking like they’re straight out of the story,” I muttered.

  Miyoshi squinted.

  “Care to explain?”

  “Look at them. A bunch of them look like they barely know how to use their legs.”

  “Huh. Now that you mention it...”

  “That means they’re probably on the verge of becoming Deep Ones.” The Deep Ones sacrificed their ability to walk properly on land in order to transform into immortal beings that lived in the ocean.

  “Deep Ones?”

  “Humanoid denizens of the deep ocean. The eldest of their race is known as Dagon.”

  “Kei... You’re talking about horror novels, right?” Miyoshi asked, her brow furrowed. It was difficult to tell which she was more concerned about: the situation we were in, or my mental health. “You realize it would make more sense to assume they’re worshipping the god of the Philistines from the Old Testament, right?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “You mean like in the story about Samson and Delilah?”

  “I watched the Plácido Domingo version on DVD, with James Levine conducting the Met.”

  “I’m pretty sure the Philistines in the Bible didn’t walk all weird though,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe it’s just complications from one of the diseases that ravaged the area...? Possibly?”

  “I get where you’re trying to go with that, but it doesn’t explain the symbol and name on the church entrance.” The Esoteric Order of Dagon did not show up in the Old Testament or other stories about the ancient Philistines. Though that should’ve gone without saying.

  Miyoshi let out a sigh.

  “We’re definitely not in a dungeon, right?”

  “Definitely not. Which means these guys are either cosplayers who got way too into the part and lost their minds, or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Or they’re the real thing.”

  I told Miyoshi about the accounting ledgers I’d found back at the hotel.

  “So you think they record some kind of trading transactions?”

  “Sure seems like it. They even mentioned something called the ‘Six Mon Ships,’ so they had to be dealing with some kind of underworld figures.” According to Buddhist tradition, it cost six coins called “mon” to cross the Sanzu River and reach the afterlife.

  “Y-You don’t think they could’ve just been trading with the Sanada clan?” She was talking about the Sanada clan’s family crest, which famously featured six mon coins. Nobushige (aka Yukimura) Sanada was one of the clan’s most well-known historical figures.

  “They were based in the Shinano province, which was landlocked,” I reminded her.

  Sighing in resignation, Miyoshi flopped over onto her back and looked up.

  “So what kind of benefits could devotees to Dagon expect, anyway?”

  “In the story, they were blessed with prosperity. The fishing village always ended up with large hauls of fish, and sometimes they found bits of precious jewelry along with the fish.”

  “And in exchange, they needed to provide human sacrifices?”

  “That, and produce offspring.”

  When Miyoshi heard that, she rolled onto her side and stared at me while I continued to focus on the ground below us.

  “Excuse me?”

  “In other words, adherents were supposed to produce mixed-blood offspring with the creatures to perpetuate their species.”

  “Ewww.” Miyoshi’s face scrunched up in disgust for a moment, but then fell back into a serious expression. “I just had a thought, Kei...”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “If Wakasa supposedly has some kind of mermaid legends, you don’t think—”

  “Stop right there. I’d rather not think.” The rural spiritualism and local legend aspects lent a bizarre feeling of realism to the absurd ideas facing us. However, there was absolutely zero scientific merit to any of them—even if they somehow ended up being true. I felt myself losing patience. “You know what, maybe it doesn’t matter if they’re real or fake. Maybe I should just blast them all with Inferno, and send them straight back to the infernos of hell—”

  “Wh-Wh-Whoa there, Kei! You can’t use magic outside the dungeons without a good reason—and forget about actually attacking people with it! Not only would your license get revoked; they’d throw you in jail!”

  “If our lives are in danger, it’d be justified self-defense, wouldn’t it?”

  “We don’t have any evidence yet! Plus, if you did that and it turns out you were wrong, an ‘Oopsie!’ isn’t going to cut it! We need to investigate more first!”

  “Mitsurugi’s life is at stake here!” If things continued to play out as they had in the book, she would end up being a sacrifice to Dagon, without a doubt.

  “That’s exactly why we need evidence!” Miyoshi insisted.

  Sighing, I focused my senses and activated my Life Detection skill.

  “I’m detecting six people still inside the church. But, well...” I couldn’t detect if any of them were Mitsurugi. People with incredibly high stats, like Team Simon or other top rankers on the WDARL, stood out on Life Detection. Mitsurugi’s stats were relatively high, but not quite on that level. “Can we send out the Arthurs to see who these people are?”

  “We can, but no tossing people randomly into shadow pits, okay?” Miyoshi warned. “Size-wise, it’d probably have to be Glas or Gleisad, but Gleisad is over at Cathy’s, so we can only rely on Glas this time, which will limit how quickly we can gather info.”

  “Not a big deal. Let’s just focus on the people inside the church, then—ASAP, preferably.”