Before long, Yashiro and the girls arrived at the church, which had apparently been turned into a hot spring for braves. Aki was the only one who bought that story, much to Yashiro's disappointment.
He did not clearly answer Sarah when she asked about the risk of being attacked in there. Instead, all four of them injected themselves with E3 before moving ahead.
Sarah could not sense danger accurately from that distance, but she assumed there might be two dark lords in there running high on E3, along with multiple booby traps inside. As to how bad the news actually was, she confirmed that the opponents waiting for them were as powerful as Yashiro. Aki, from the same distance, could hear humans talking, though she could not make out exactly what they were saying.
Hearing that, Yashiro instructed the girls to keep some distance from him while they closed in on the church, and told Aki so twice, since things were about to turn nasty with people that powerful inside.
They were attacked the instant they began to approach — by a sniper firing from behind a swordsman. The bullets they dodged well enough. Yashiro found himself in a pitched melee with the swordsman, in which his anticipation of the man's movements was not working the way it should have. The more he tried to move, the deeper into the mud he seemed to get, until he finally recognised who he was fighting.
Aki, meanwhile, was knocked flat by a bullet and barely injured by it, since it was a rubber round.
The swordsman was Malta, who welcomed Yashiro and the young ladies to the hot spring.
Inside, Yashiro was surprised to find the church looking more like a casual inn than anything else. While he was still surprised that the owner of this place had decided to make a hot spring here for mercenaries and braves alike, Sarah got a little upset that they could have simply taken a car to get here. Yashiro portrayed the walk as part of the girls' training.
While they were at it, Yashiro was welcomed by one of the mercenaries at the inn, who identified him at once. Yashiro identified the man in turn as the sniper from earlier, before Malta introduced him properly as Tetsu, recently back from the Mexican underworld. Yashiro still did not take kindly to being shot at, and Malta explained that there was someone here who had wanted to see how he handled a sword.
As for who that someone was, Malta ran off before he could be made to say.
So Yashiro asked Sarah immediately who the second person using E3 in the area had been, since only Malta had been using it during the fight. As for the priest, he was most likely in the guest room of the building.
On the way there, Yashiro explained to the girls how to deal with the priest, the fundamental principle being that they were to avoid him at all costs if they possibly could.
Eventually they reached the room where the priest Ayashima Hijiri was, and he welcomed them with open arms, and even had a room already prepared for the female visitors to his humble hot spring.
Yashiro's instinct proved right. Hijiri was thoroughly creepy in his approach to the girls, though Aki could not disagree with how charming a person he was. He was against having Yashiro and the girls share a room between four people, and changed his mind immediately the moment Yashiro paid him for it.
Sarah and the other two were not especially keen on staying in the same room as their sensei either, and Yashiro's jokes about the issue did not improve the situation.
What he was certain about was Hijiri's background. The man loved eliminating people, and assaulting them, and did both as a brave for the sheer fun of it — so much so that he had become wanted by the police. He had even prepared a poisoned pizza for Yashiro, being exactly the type who would eliminate an acquaintance given the opportunity. His only saving grace was that he was not a dark lord.
Hijiri then assured the girls that everything mentioned was a consecutive series of misunderstandings, and that he was a devout clergyman, as they could all plainly see.
That was how Yashiro got his point across about why he could not afford to have them stay in separate rooms, which he followed up by advising them all to remain on high alert. Hijiri's own defence of himself — the orphanage he intended to open, and so forth — only made the girls more sceptical of him.
Inspecting their room, Aki found it impressively set up. When Sarah inspected it, however, she led Yashiro straight to a set of poison needles, which earned her some points.
Aside from the fact that they could not afford to sleep outside, Yashiro had a plan for tonight's fight, and the plan included playing a card game. Sarah sounded dismissive of it. Yashiro insisted that he really did have this under control, and that he was eager to prove to King Rob that he was a warrior with enough glory to his name.
With both Yukina and Aki competing over who got to sit closer to their sensei, both of them ended up punched away.
As for Sarah, she noticed that her sensei's deck depended on quick attacks and was completely lacklustre when it came to firepower. Her analysis then developed into a full strategic lecture on which statistics he ought to be building towards.
While the two of them were playing, Aki snapped back into reality and demanded to know how long Sarah had been playing card games with Yashiro. As Yashiro was getting the pair of buffoons calmed down, Aki identified that Malta had arrived, and Yashiro let him in.
Malta had come to invite Yashiro and the ladies to visit a certain dark lord's nest. Furthermore, that dark lord had plenty of Nephilim — enough of them to have wiped out the lamplights in northern Hokkaido.
That triggered Yukina to the point that she wanted to know everything. The dark lord in question was the Count of the Venus Veil, who had been amassing power for the last decade, and whose lair was where the Nephilim had been coming out of for quite a while now. In fact, a raid had been planned for some time, and Yashiro's arrival had come at perfect timing.
Yashiro was impressed by how meticulous Malta's investigation had been. Malta tried to remain humble about it. Yashiro was well aware that he, Malta, Joe and their late comrade Ishino were all the same in more ways than one — that all of them busted their backs to look good in front of each other.
For now, Malta made it clear that they were in a race against time, because the Count of Rupturing Star Charts was waiting for them.