Blooming
A shockwave thundered through the air.
Afraid to face the slaughter about to unfold, I squeezed my eyes shut. Despair swallowed my heart whole. If I just kept them closed, that monster would come for me soon enough. But the sounds that reached me weren't those of an axe being wrenched from the floor, nor of heavy footsteps closing in. Just a confused, startled bellow.
I opened my eyes slowly. The axe was stopped dead against a yellow barrier. Noona sat frozen inside it, her eyes wide as saucers.
"What the hell..."
I looked from my hand to the barrier and back again.
I made that barrier.
I knew it the way you know how to breathe. The voice that had echoed through my head — that was my ability, and this was the shield it had given me. With this power, I could protect her.
The instant I started thrashing to tear free of the black arms, a sound like shattering glass split the air.
"Already!?"
I looked up. The barrier was fragmenting into glittering shards, vanishing as I watched. Two hits. That was all it had taken.
"Imperfect Guardian Shield!"
I thrust my hand toward the ox as it hoisted its axe again. I still couldn't call the skill with thought alone, so I shouted the name — and a yellow barrier bloomed around Noona, wrapping her in a perfect sphere.
Imperfect Guardian Shield
The moment I saw it hold, I ripped myself out of the black arms. They gave. Whether I'd gotten stronger or they'd gotten weaker, I didn't know, and I didn't care.
"Hey! You ox bastard!"
What mattered was that I could move. I regenerated the barrier that had already shattered again while I was freeing myself, and I ran.
The monster swung its head toward me, switched targets, and came on. I didn't take my eyes off it. I timed the distance.
A little more... just a little more...!
Just as we were about to meet, the monster twisted at the waist and coiled the axe back behind its head — a batter winding up for the kill. It was going to bring that thing all the way around.
"Bring it on!"
Adrenaline had my heart slamming against my ribs. I wasn't afraid. And I wasn't here to fight this thing head-on anyway.
— BROOOOOOO!!
"Imperfect Guardian Shield!"
I roared it with everything I had and slammed a barrier into existence right in front of the axe. The instant it caught the blow, I dropped my hips and threw myself forward, rolling under the blade and coming up in a sprint straight toward Noona.
I reached her side and tried to drop the barrier so I could get through — and my body passed straight through it instead.
"Whoa!?"
I hadn't expected it to let me in. My knees tore open on the floor. Apparently I could pass through my own barrier whenever I wanted.
I grabbed my stinging knees and cast Heal, and that was when Se-a Noona found her voice.
"Why... why... are you here... khh—!"
"Don't talk! Stay still!"
Right. This wasn't the time to worry about my knees. I checked her over in a hurry, and her condition was bad. I'd thought the axe had cut her, but there were no blade wounds at all. Instead her left arm and right leg were bent the wrong way, the way they get when a car hits you, and the gash across her back was torn wide open again, just as raw as before.
"I-I'll heal you. Right now."
I started with her back. She was still bleeding, and if I didn't stop it she was going to bleed out.
The monster kept swinging the whole time I worked. Every blow, I threw up a fresh barrier and held on. At first it went smoothly. I closed the wound on her back enough to matter, set the arm and the leg, and poured what I had left into healing her from the inside. The blood stopped coming up from her lungs.
"You're okay now. As long as it doesn't catch us off guard, we won't lose."
"No! How can you say that when you're hurt this badly?"
I snapped at her as she pushed my hands away from finishing her back. But for all the volume I put into it, my own body was falling apart. The world started to spin. I couldn't hold a thought. Something like a needle drove itself into my brain.
"Hah... hah..."
And then it all started going wrong.
"Imperfect Guardian Shi— huh?"
A wave of dizziness hit so hard I nearly folded, and something warm ran from my nose. I wiped it. Blood. I smeared it on my clothes and tried again.
"Imperfect Guardian Shield! Imperfect Guardian Shield!!"
I forced the name out through a swimming field of vision. Nothing happened. The barrier, already under the monster's axe, failed to regenerate — and shattered.
"No... Dan-woo!"
Noona's voice came from behind me. Time stretched thin. I tried to turn my head to look at her. It wouldn't move.
The massive axe lifting to crush me. The monster's ugly, delighted grin. The future about to land on my skull. I closed my eyes on all of it.
The world went black. A brief weightlessness, and then the sound cut out. A silent space. The ringing in my ears faded by degrees, and noise began to seep back in.
"If you so much as touch a single hair on Dan-woo's head."
I opened my eyes at Noona's voice, right beside me. The sound hadn't vanished. My ears had just gone out for a moment.
The monster's body had burst. What was left of it was meat. Blood radiated out across the ground in front of me in a wide spray, and the axe handle had been sent bouncing so far I could barely see it. The thing that had been about to kill me was dead instead — and it had died badly.
"Are you okay? You're not hurt?"
She turned toward me with a gentle smile, and she looked like an angel. I wasn't being cute about it. She really did.
"What happened...? Those rings, and the wings — what are they...?"
"Ah. These?"
She smiled, bashful. The circular ring above her head brightened, and the white wings at her back gave a little flutter, as if they answered to whatever she was feeling.
"Looks like you awakened t... huh? D-Dan-woo!?"
I didn't make it to the end of her sentence. My body swayed. The truth was, I'd been finished from the moment the skill stopped answering me. The fear of dying had gone, and relief had rushed into the space it left — and I couldn't hold myself up anymore. I went down right where I stood.
Had she ever hated her own powerlessness as much as she did in that moment?
Not even under her mother's demands, which had bordered on abuse. Not even in the years she hadn't had the strength to meet those expectations. Se-a had never resented her own weakness then.
It's because of me... because I was weak, Dan-woo is...!
He was healing her with everything he had, but she'd lost so much blood she could barely keep herself sitting up. Even when she tried to push his arms away and tell him to stop, she was the one who got pushed.
And it was while she was drowning in that resentment that Dan-woo swayed.
The barrier shattered in the same breath. The hideous monster raised its axe, and in the split second she thought she was about to die, her body moved on its own.
The healing had given her motion back, at least. The strength that wouldn't come, she wrung out past every limit she had. With nothing in her head except the vow that she would protect him no matter what, she seized Dan-woo by the nape of the neck and hauled him behind her, setting herself to take the axe that was already coming down.
She was probably going to fail. There was nothing wrong with the movement itself, but the blood loss had her head ringing, and her stance was a mess. This was power squeezed out past the point of breaking. It would not have been strange if she had simply collapsed.
She focused anyway. She would not let his courage and everything he had just done come to nothing.
"Kh—!"
She slipped a fraction off the line of the axe as it came down perfectly straight, and drove her fist into the flat of the blade.
Three seconds. From the instant the barrier broke to the moment she had Dan-woo behind her and the attack dealt with, without a single cut — three seconds. The fragments that kicked up when the axe bit the floor scraped her open, and she didn't feel them. What mattered was getting him out of here. Killing the monster would have been fine too, but she couldn't stand the sight of him collapsed and bleeding from the nose. She couldn't bear it.
There was one thing she had failed to see.
From the moment that barrier had started stopping its attacks, the monster's target had stopped being her. It was him.
It didn't need an axe for someone already unconscious. It left the weapon buried in the floor and charged straight at Dan-woo.
The shock of watching it go for him instead of her sent her stumbling after it, hand outstretched. She caught nothing. The distance only grew.
Surprise and despair drained the last of the strength from her body. She hit the ground and still didn't take her eyes off it.
"Don't go! Don't you dare go!!"
Dan-woo had been thrown farther back than she'd realized. The monster would need a few seconds to reach him. Se-a could do nothing with those seconds. She whipped her dead legs and dead arms and forced herself up, and went straight back down.
As if the sight of her amused it, the monster slowed its pace and bared a mouthful of black teeth, making sure she saw.
"No... you were fighting me! So why are you going after him!!"
It ignored her completely. It strolled up to Dan-woo as if it had all the time in the world. One punch from a fist that size, and that small boy would never get up again. That much was obvious. The monster thought so too, as it raised its arm — but there were two things it had failed to account for.
The first was that something was protecting him, unseen by anyone. A black hand rose out of a black puddle that this presence had opened in the floor, and caught the monster in mid-punch. The fist that had been a hair's breadth from Dan-woo's face trembled there, shaking, and that was as far as it got.
The second was the potential sleeping inside Special Escort Officer Lee Se-a.
Before the puddle. The instant the monster threw that punch.
"NO!!"
The cry that tore out of her was all grief and all despair. The need to protect him. The horror of being unable to. The helpless, bitter hatred of a self that did not have the strength. All of it gathered in her at once, and called a miracle down.
A voice she had never heard in her life rang through her head, and she understood what it was the way an animal understands fire. It was announcing her blooming. Something was growing from her back, and with it her body surged — strength, speed, everything, all at once.
The limbs that wouldn't answer her became light. She put her whole self into a single thrust, and the monster came apart.
It was so frail she had to wonder if this was really the same D-Class monster she hadn't been able to finish.
At last, she had power. The power to protect him. As his Escort Officer. As the woman who loved him. The power to stand at his side and keep him safe, whenever he needed it, for as long as he needed it.
She folded the wings that had opened toward the sky and turned to look at him. At some point he had opened his eyes, and he was staring at her with them round and wide.
That look took her all the way back to the first time they met.