The Six-Tailed Fox Who Entrusted Her Hopae
There are things people find themselves staring at blankly without even realizing it.
Fireworks.
A campfire.
Or the charcoal and firewood quietly crackling away inside a barbecue burner.
There’s even a product called a “fire-watching kit,” for heaven’s sake. Whether it’s because humans are simply born with a natural admiration for flame, people really do end up zoning out in front of fire more often than not.
And this was no different.
“Whoa, shit….”
“Whoa, divine beasts really are something else. Miss Hae, you can’t do anything like that?”
“I-I’m still in the adaptation period, okay?”
I had just finished whipping out my Dragon Tail to snatch a hard-fought win against a first-class assassin of the Assassin Gate and was catching my breath when it happened. Hari rose like a living meteor, wreathed in fox fire, then slammed back down into the ground again and again, wringing screams from the assassins every time she struck. Namgung Lin and I both let out involuntary gasps of admiration.
I might be able to pull off something similar someday, but not yet. Besides, fire has a beauty all its own.
We stood there staring for a while longer before I finally snapped out of it.
“Ah, this isn’t the time.”
“R-right.”
Namgung Lin and I shook ourselves free of the trance and turned toward the senior and junior Taoist priests of the Wudang Sect.
The battle looked razor-close. The senior priest had managed to sever one assassin’s arm, leaving the man howling and pouring blood, but the junior priest was barely holding his own against two-to-one odds.
“I’ll take that side.”
“Then I’ll go help the senior brother!”
The distance to the junior priest was a little greater, so it made sense for me—fresher and with better raw physical ability—to cover him. We split the roles in an instant and charged back into the heart of the fight.
“Hyaaah!”
I kept the full momentum of my run and launched myself into a midair somersault, tumbling like a rolling wheel. The Sea Dragon’s Dragon Tail packed enough force to shatter an adult man’s jaw in a single blow. If I charged, rolled, and coiled the tail protectively around myself at the same time, it would be roughly equivalent to firing a person-sized circular saw.
The prediction hit dead-on.
“Wh-where the hell did this come from?!”
-Crack!
“Keheuk!”
I smashed straight through the sword the assassin had raised in a desperate block, crushed his nose bridge, and left a vivid red tail-print branded across his face. That single strike knocked him out cold; he twitched on the ground with scale-like patterns etched into his skin.
“H-hey!”
“Hraaaaaah!”
The remaining assassin faltered for a split second. The junior priest seized the opening, cut him down, and that was the end of our side of the fight.
“Th-thank you, Miss. I thought I was finished for sure, yet you intervened at the perfect moment.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“We won too, Miss Hae!”
“It’s been a long time since my blood ran this hot. Well done, all of you.”
Namgung Lin and the senior priest finished off the last of their assassins and rejoined us.
“I told you, didn’t I? I can get the job done when I put my mind to it. From now on there will absolutely never be another hollow defeat like the one in Hyeongmunhyeon. You can rest easy.”
Even in the middle of all this, Namgung Lin still seemed hungry for a little recognition.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. You’re the best.”
“Haha.”
If she wanted praise, handing it out wasn’t hard. These little exchanges of reaction were mutual by nature. Later, once I could actually breathe Sea Dragon Breath, I would need an audience; building goodwill in advance never hurt.
“Any injuries?”
“None, Senior Brother.”
“Good work. Let’s share a cup at the Armed Mask Inn.”
“Oh, that sounds excellent, Senior Brother.”
The Wudang brothers were still savoring victory in their own fashion when a new voice cut in.
“Whew. I’m finished cleaning up too.”
Sleeves lightly singed and charred, Hari strolled over as if she had always been one of us, dragging seven assassin corpses strung together like dried fish.
The senior and junior priests simply stared at her, eyes full of doubt and confusion.
“….”
“…?”
They had known someone was professionally eliminating the ambushers who kept throwing hidden weapons. What they had not known—and still could barely believe even after seeing it with their own eyes—was that the someone was the very same woman who had opened the battle by flinging fox fire. After a short delay those same stares slid over to me, clearly demanding an explanation.
Unfortunately…
I don’t really have anything to say. I can’t exactly tell them I persuaded her because we’re both Murim Gallery users.
Which left only one option.
“She’s my friend.”
“You claim to be acquainted with this fox divine beast?”
“Yes—my friend. I was too flustered to recognize her at first either, but once we started trading blows up close I suddenly realized. Wait, this is my friend?”
Playing the friend card was the only move I had. It was the sort of testimony that lived at the level of “believe it or not,” but just as there was no way to prove it true, there was also no way to prove it false. If Hari simply played along, we could ride out the Wudang brothers’ suspicion.
“R-right? Hari?”
I gave her an awkward little wink and a nod.
“Y-yeah. We’re friends, right?”
“For friends, your opening attack was aimed straight at my junior brother’s head.”
“Hey, I didn’t know. If I’d known she was with my friend I never would have attacked. Sorry, sorry. Still, I took out seven of the assassins who were bothering you guys, didn’t I? Let’s call it even with that—even.”
“Hmmm….”
Of course the senior priest’s wary gaze did not fade so easily.
“A six-tailed fox must have killed a great many people. Had it been some other divine beast I might have reacted favorably, but the fact that she is a fox still sits poorly with me.”
“That’s why I live in Gangnam.”
“What do you mean by—ah.”
“Gangnam’s a den of the unorthodox and the black path, isn’t it? I’ve been living by cleaning up mainly the enemies of you orthodox Murim folks. If you treat me this coldly even north of the Yangtze, I’ll be hurt for real. Right?”
“Right, right. She’d be hurt. Our Hari’s been working so hard trying to go vegetarian, you know?”
I ran my mouth with everything I had, defending Hari and trying to smooth the suspicions away.
“….”
Namgung Lin, the Murim Alliance investigator who had already more or less guessed our real identities, watched the whole performance with a sullen look that clearly said, What the hell are you two even doing?
No, but seriously—
If you have any sense at all, throw us a few words of cover.
If she hadn’t singled out and eliminated only the ambushing assassins, this really would have turned into a muddy free-for-all. If she had kept latching onto me, you, Namgung Lin, would have taken a hidden weapon to the back of the head and been in serious trouble. At least she isn’t hostile toward us, so give us a little cover. The more members in the Murim Gallery cartel, the better, right?
Once the immediate chaos had been roughly sorted, there was still accounting left to do with Hari—who had at least managed to avoid being labeled a hostile entity that needed to be killed on the spot.
Namgung Lin in particular finally unleashed the words she had been holding back, pouring them out like a sudden storm.
“So, are all the assassins chasing us taken care of now? I understand you say you’ll cooperate, but if you don’t prove it with your attitude I still can’t trust you.”
“Well, at least there shouldn’t be anyone who can chase us right this second. Every one I confirmed has been dealt with.”
And even if a few had slipped through and the information leaked—
-Point.
Hari’s fingertip indicated the southeast, following the waterway.
“Unless you lot crawl along at a snail’s pace, you’ll reach Muchang several times faster than any assassins can call for reinforcements. And there aren’t idiots dumb enough to stage an assassination-and-kidnapping drama inside Muchang itself.”
“That’s true. At this point concealing information has already lost all meaning. All that’s left is killing for the sake of killing, and the place would be Muchang in Hubei Province—the holy land of orthodox Murim. That would be suicide.”
“Right? You get it. That’s exactly how it is.”
Through the conversation Namgung Lin naturally came to accept Hari’s logic. As long as Hari had promised to cooperate with us here, there were no further threats. Physically reaching us in time was impossible. It wasn’t as if they could zoom down an empty eight-lane highway in a car, and even using lightfoot techniques, racing along unpaved mountain paths and dirt roads would never get them there on schedule. Besides, if Hari had wanted to pull some scheme, simply sticking with the assassins would have been far easier. Suspecting more than this was simply unreasonable.
Yeah… that makes sense.
I quietly nodded in agreement. The experiences I had lived through with my own body had piled up enough to give me some objective standards for judgment.
Even though we spent a night on Wudang Mountain in the middle, the fact that they only found us now means the assassins’ net wasn’t as thick as I thought. What Hari’s saying doesn’t sound like words just to wriggle out of the moment.
But then the senior priest spoke again.
“The assassins were never the real problem to begin with. It simply took time; we would have resolved it eventually. What I—and the investigator—ultimately wish to ask is only one thing.”
“I already said it was because we’re friends.”
“That may be reason enough to lower our guard, but it does not explain everything. In the end you must have joined us for some purpose. You need to come clean about that purpose before we can offer you our trust.”
“It would be best not to try building a castle named ‘trust’ on sand. Now that we are entangled like this, it is not as if we will only see each other for today, is it?”
The lofty senior priest and the polite yet forthright junior priest both needed a far more solid explanation. Namgung Lin and I at least shared a certain internal closeness with Hari as fellow Murim Gallery users; those two had none of that.
“Hmmm….”
Hari shot me a sidelong glance, then smirked and opened her mouth.
“You two ever heard the saying that when your cousin buys land, your stomach hurts?”
“There are those who regard the happiness of people close to them as their own misfortune.”
“Not a good mindset, of course.”
“Same idea. I was annoyed that some dumb friend of mine was getting a divine-beast hopae, and then an opportunity to save that friend just dropped into my lap. In that situation any other divine beast would’ve wanted a spoon in the pot too, right?”
“Honesty is good.”
“Right? Good, right? I think living honestly is way better too.”
So.
“You there. You’re a Murim Alliance member, right?”
“That’s correct, but—?”
“Give me a hopae too. A hopae. I’ve never killed any orthodox people, and I even saved you three this time. Isn’t that enough qualification to receive one? What’s given should be returned.”
“….”
“I won’t ask for anything more—how about it? Conscientious, right? I’m a model divine beast at this point, so think it over.”
Sensing that the conversation would simply keep circling if left alone, Hari chose a frontal breakthrough. Her real meaning—If you’ve roughly gotten the idea, just hand over the hopae and I’ll take it and leave—was laid completely bare.
Honestly, the way she acted was identical to SixTails, the resident spirit of the Murim Gallery, and the real Hari. That fact was actually reassuring. She couldn’t be an imposter, and if she wasn’t an imposter she wasn’t going to betray us either.
She was trustworthy enough to take along.