It wasn't even noon and Soma had a splitting headache. He'd passed out, woken up somewhere completely different, and now some asshole in a suit was snapping at him.
The weird part was, the asshole in the suit looked kind of...familiar, in a way Soma couldn't quite place. Which was weird, because he didn't really have much contact with men in that level of fancy tailored suits. (It wasn't weird to notice. He might not be able to pull one off for a decade or so, but Soma had aspirations, dammit.) But something about the expression, the eyes...it nagged.
Asshole in a suit had stopped talking and seemed to be waiting for a response. What had Mina said his name was...? "Uh...Mr. Arikado?" That felt even more familiar. He'd met someone named Arikado before, or something like it, and it was not that common a name. Sounded fake, actually. "Look, before I answer your questions...have we met before? I've just got this weird feeling tha-"
There was a sword in his chest.
"-I know you...what?"
He hadn't even seen Arikado move. One second he was five meters away, the next he was right there and Soma had a sword in the chest.
It didn't hurt. Or it did, but...it was shock. Mina had explained this to him once. It was shock from being run through by someone he'd literally just met.
God, but he was mostly upset about his jacket. The shirt was a cheap rag from Uniqlo, but the jacket was over 150,000 yen. He'd saved and begged for years for it and it was impossible to get bloodstains out of white fabric.
Mina was screaming and no, Soma was actually mostly upset about that. He never wanted to hear her scream like that again.
Oh. Right. He never would.
He distantly felt like he should be screaming himself right now, but something in Arikado's eyes made him want to face death with dignity. The weird familiar feeling told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was not supposed to add to Arikado's grief by whining about it..
"I am sorry," Arikado was saying, so softly Soma could barely hear. "But I cannot risk it. Not with you. Please, just rest. Forever."
That made sense. And it was all right, even if Mina was still screaming. He wanted to comfort her, say he was just going to see an old friend he hadn't seen in years and missed terribly, even if he wasn't entirely sure who the old friend was. But his body didn't seem to work right.
He collapsed slowly, in stages. By the time his head hit the stone, the familiar darkness was there to welcome him home.
Probably the nicest explanation for Alucard's extremely transparent disguise is that he's testing Soma so he can do...well, this.
But we all know the real reason is that he's lazy and bad with cover names.