009 – Nymph Oinoi # 9
According to Oinoi, a curse was a truly fearsome piece of sorcery.
Or so she claimed, because it was born from the heart's resentment and hatred toward another.
Going by Oinoi's account, the curse that had been gnawing away at my body was apparently something called the Curse of Weakening. It made its victim waste away in slow, miserable agony, like a sick hen.
"The Curse of Weakening is said to have been created in order to subdue Heracles...! A curse that dreadful and that powerful it is...!"
"Then what happens if a curse that strong comes circling back to me?"
"The victim pines away in misery... and in the worst of cases, death may well follow...! A curse is a thing born of hatred...! To hate someone is to let your own soul rot away...!"
I was genuinely taken aback by the eerie little tale spilling out of Oinoi's mouth.
Did that mean Seo Yerim, who'd received the curse back, might waste away and die?
"It'd be karmic justice if that wicked girl got a taste of her own medicine, but dying is a whole different story...."
Seo Yerim owed me a mountain of amends for what she'd done. But did any of it rise to the level of death? If you asked me—no. Not even close.
I really should have known all this before I dispelled the curse!
And if I had known in advance... would I actually have dispelled it? Or not?
...Probably would have, if I was honest.
Feeling a considerable surge of anxiety, I turned to Oinoi.
"So what happens to Seo Yerim now? Is she just going to die like this?"
"Truthfully, even this Oinoi does not know...! For it may be that the one who cast the curse was not Witch Seo Yerim at all...!"
What?
What on earth was that supposed to mean?
When I frowned, Oinoi nodded her head again and again as she explained.
"Seeing as the curse was dispelled using Witch Seo Yerim's hair, it is certain that her hair was used in the ritual.... However.... it does not necessarily follow that the one who cast it was the same person...!"
"So what you're saying is—even if someone stabbed me with Seo Yerim's knife, the hand holding it wouldn't have to be Seo Yerim's. Meaning somebody out there may have used her hair to curse me?"
"As expected, the master of the house grasps things quickly...! Someone this quick-witted, this Oinoi has not seen since the King of Ithaca...! That is a magnificent compliment, so you may rejoice...!"
Oinoi told me to rejoice, but I could hardly feel anything but grave as I sank deeper and deeper into the riddle.
There was no doubt that Seo Yerim's hair had been used when the curse was laid on me. But that didn't automatically confirm Seo Yerim as the one who cast it.
A third party I'd never once imagined had just stepped onto the stage.
Oinoi spoke.
"By nature, a curse does not spring into being from mere hatred or lingering resentment alone.... High-order sorcery must be employed, it is so.... There exists... a curse-worker of considerable skill...!"
"Seo Yerim never seemed to know the first thing about hexes or curses, though."
And besides—would Seo Yerim really curse me knowing it would blacken her own soul? Honestly, our relationship had been bad, but not that bad.
Before long, Oinoi said:
"In this Oinoi's considered opinion, there must be a nymph somewhere in this land...! Among nymphs, curses are the domain of the dreadful nymphs of cursed things...!"
So that was how it was, apparently.
It was the evening of the day I had dispelled the curse.
I picked up my phone, put it down, picked it up again, put it down again—hesitating over and over. At last I made up my mind, and with a mental ah, whatever, I dialed Seo Yerim.
Riiing—. Riiing—.
An unexpectedly ordinary ringtone droned on about five times.
"Hello?"
"Uh, it's me, Ha Ildo. Th-the thing is— I was just wondering if you were feeling okay."
I'd called to check in on her. The thought had been gnawing at me that she might be suffering from the curse reflected back off me.
But Seo Yerim's voice was utterly calm.
"Me? I'm in great shape."
Was that so.
Which meant the curse hadn't bounced back onto Seo Yerim at all. In other words, her hair had simply been used as a material for the ritual—nothing more.
I asked her.
"There's something I want to ask you. Was there ever anyone who resented you badly enough to want to curse me? Someone you know. Someone who hated me, or just plain disliked me."
"Wh-what's that supposed—"
The voice on the other end cut out for a moment. A hesitation of several seconds stretched across the line.
Then, with a long haaah of a sigh, Seo Yerim spoke.
"So you did hear me that day, from outside. Me trash-talking you behind your back. It's way too late to be saying this now, but I'm really sorry about all that. I was... just too young back then."
I hadn't wanted an apology, exactly, but having received one, I found my mood lifting a little. It was a strangely murky feeling, all around.
So getting apologized to was more embarrassing than I'd expected. Come to think of it, this was the first time in my life anyone had ever said sorry to me like this.
I opened my mouth, half to look away from my own embarrassment.
"So, setting you aside—do you know who else hated me?"
"How would I know? There were too many to count. You think the people who hated you back then numbered one or two? Yeah, sure, you're scraping by now, but back in the day you were riding just as high as I am. You got buckets of hate comments too."
...That much was true.
Back then I had been wildly popular and thoroughly hated at the same time. It wasn't because I'd done anything particularly awful—running out front just came with the territory.
In any case, Seo Yerim seemed to know nothing about the curse.
It all left a bad taste in my mouth, but with nothing further to say, I decided to just end the call.
"I see. Got it."
"Hey. Th-that technique you taught me actually worked pretty well. Focusing on one single thing. I want to name my newly developed ultimate skill Single-Minded Spirit. So... what do you think?"
Single-Minded Spirit.
It meant pouring everything into one thing—and my name, Ildo, was woven right into it. I said, "Then pay me a royalty every time you use that skill."
The call cut off with a click.
S-Rank hunters, it seemed, were too busy to even manage the courtesy of a proper goodbye.
"Seo Yerim seems perfectly fine. So it really was someone else after all...."
Swish—.
I turned my head to find Oinoi sitting at the computer desk, swinging her legs back and forth. She was pecking at the keyboard with fingers like an eagle's beak.
"When you tap this thing called a keyboard.... letters come into being...! This Oinoi has never handled a tool so wondrous...! It is terribly, tremendously fun...!"
Oinoi was having the time of her life, like a kid who'd begged for a game console and received one. Her typing was glacial and riddled with typos, but she looked happy, and that was what mattered.
"Hyaaah...! A shower of letters keeps falling upon this Oinoi...!"
"Yeah, that's how it works."
"Truly...! Master of the house...! You have this Oinoi's deepest thanks for teaching her about the computer...! This Oinoi was always slow at learning new things, and was forever being scolded by her teacher for it...!"
So Oinoi had a teacher, huh.
Interesting.
Come to think of it, I'd always been pretty good at teaching myself. Honestly, half the S-Rank and A-Rank hotshots active today were kids I'd personally dragged up the ladder back when I was stuck at D.
You could even say I was the one who raised Seo Yerim, couldn't you?
Not that everyone took to my instruction equally well, of course.
There were clumsy ones too.
Back in those days, the situation was so desperate that high schoolers who'd barely awakened—barely had time to learn to close their hands around their own power—were forcibly conscripted and shoved straight into rifts. It was a genuine emergency at the time, sure, but looking back on it now....
Come to think of it, whatever happened to that high school kid—.
It was right in the middle of that thought that Oinoi operated the Squirrel. For the record, Squirrel was what Oinoi called the computer mouse.
Apparently a squirrel beat a mouse any day of the week.
Click—.
Oinoi opened the internet with the Squirrel.
Before long, she was typing her own name, one letter at a time, into the search bar. Searching your own name on the internet, it seemed, was a universal instinct—nymph and human alike.
"Greece.... a country that is immensely nymph-friendly, possesses a hotel named in this Oinoi's honor...! It is very wondrous...!"
Huh. It really does.
Anyway, Oinoi spent the whole night searching the internet for this and that. She seemed to believe, without a shadow of doubt, that somewhere in this land there existed a nymph just like her.
"This Oinoi.... is sleepy...!"
Having stayed up all night at the computer, Oinoi yawned again and again. I was on my way to the government facility that handled awakener affairs, Oinoi in tow.
Vwoooong—.
"...This cold is... immensely nymph-phobic...! This Oinoi.... cannot possibly tolerate a winter so nymph-phobic as this...!"
Blame it on the sleep deprivation—Oinoi was spouting the strangest nonsense. Cannot tolerate winter. And where on earth had she picked up the phrase nymph-phobic?
Maybe I should put a time limit on her internet access—I was in the middle of that thought when I arrived at the agency.
A public institution dedicated entirely to the administration of awakeners—in practice, it functioned roughly like a district office and a public health center fused into one.
I pulled a number ticket at the counter and waited.
The reason I'd come was to have my newly acquired C-Rank mana capacity officially tested. Once my promotion to C-Rank was formally recognized... a whole host of benefits would open up to me.
Access to facilities for training my mana, for one thing.
"Heh heh... you're all dead."
I was busy daydreaming about mana techniques when a cheerful ding— sounded.
Following the drowsy-looking clerk's wave of right this way, I walked down a dim corridor until a sign reading Examination Room came into view.
Inside, a woman with long hair tied back, dressed in a white coat, was studying a chart. One of the public health physicians? She looked remarkably young.
Her height was perfectly ordinary, but her chest was large enough that my eyes darted there before I could stop them. She sat with her legs crossed, and the black stockings sheathing those long legs looked very, very sharp.
"Ha Ildo.... Ha Ildo? The Ha Ildo?"
A doctor who knew my name?
Well, I was a man of some renown—was the thought I was still entertaining.
The doctor's face lit up as she looked at me.
"Senior! It's been forever! It's me, Yu Ari!"
"Yu Ari?"
I was still drawing a blank on the name when it came to me.
The high school girl who'd fumbled everything inside the rifts. And the fact that at some point she had overtaken me, reaching B-Rank at the very same moment as Seo Yerim.
"Weren't you working field duty?"
"Circumstances came up. But more importantly—what on earth happened? C-Rank?!"