Strike the Blood, Vol. 3: The Amphisbaena by Gakuto Mikumo and Manyako

Author:Gakuto Mikumo and Manyako [MIKUMO, GAKUTO / MANYAKO]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yen On
Published: 2016-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

8

“…Can’t sleep.”

Spread atop the hard palm branch bed, Kojou absentmindedly looked up at the dark sky.

He didn’t know the exact time, but it probably wasn’t quite eight PM yet. This wasn’t a time for any modern high school student to be asleep; that went double for a nocturnal vampire.

There was no sign of Yukina in the pillbox-turned-lair. She was outside on watch duty.

Yukina had insisted that they needed to take turns keeping watch, even at night, so as not to miss any ships that might pass nearby; Kojou had not made any objection. He also imagined that both sleeping together under one roof like this might make things a bit uncomfortable. But thinking about it rationally in hindsight, he could only peg it as wasted effort.

“…Yeah, we watched all day and didn’t see one ship go by, so what, one’s gonna pass now?”

Kojou slowly got up as he made a languid exhale.

He realized that his throat was getting dry and thought, I’ll check up on Yukina and go drink some water.

“Hey…Himeragi…are you awake?”

Kojou fumbled his way down the stairs and went out of the pillbox as he called Yukina’s name.

However, Yukina did not answer. There was only the hollow echo of Kojou’s voice in the darkness.

He couldn’t see any sign of her toward the cliff, either.

Snowdrift Wolf, which she always walked around with, was missing, too.

“Himeragi…?”

Yukina’s unexpected absence struck Kojou with an instinctive loneliness.

But as he looked around, he of course knew it was possible she’d simply gone to the little girls’ room.

But Yukina’s strangely obstinate insistence that he go to sleep first while she took watch at night bothered him as he thought about it now. He felt that she was plainly up to something.

“…”

The vague unease inside Kojou’s chest grew wider still.

Yukina had said that she knew a variety of spells but that they weren’t exactly her specialty.

But that didn’t mean she was completely unable to use them. If that was the case, it might have meant she had some method of long-distance contact, like spiritual resonance or astral projection.

And if danger accompanied the employment of such spells…

Well, she’d keep quiet and do it herself so that Kojou couldn’t stop her. Given her personality, that’s exactly what she would do. If it ended up that Kojou was just overthinking it, he was cool with that. But Kojou couldn’t think of any other reason for her to be absent.

“That Himeragi…! If you’re my watcher, watch over me till the bitter end, dammit!”

As he voiced his unfocused dissatisfaction, Kojou left the pillbox behind and headed toward the forest.

The light of the young moon was unreliable; the forest interior was thick with darkness. But if anything, Kojou’s eyes brought the landscape into sharper relief than under the light of day. To think vampire powers that are normally just a bother would be useful at a time like this, Kojou thought ruefully.

“Where to?”

Relying on intuition alone, Kojou headed to the center of the island. Tripping over the gnarled roots of the various

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