Nymph Oinoi #13
"Wait, so I'm the one footing the bill in the end? Weren't you buying, Ari?"
I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd been swindled in more ways than one as I walked out of the barbecue restaurant. Lee Jeonghun had crashed in out of nowhere and wrecked my entire evening.
Would it be worth it to corner Ari later and say, "You promised to pay, so cough it up"? I'd get my money, sure. I'd just look utterly pathetic doing it. But hey—every last coin counts when you're broke!
More pressing, though, was the phone call. She'd taken it and stepped outside with a considerably grave look on her face, then left without even settling the bill. Whatever it was, it had to be urgent.
Would she be okay?
━Woof-woof!
Scritch-scratch.
At that moment, the dog-squirrel Keongkeongi poked its head out of my jacket pocket. Why on earth would Keongkeongi—who was supposed to be home with Oinoi—track me all the way to a distant barbecue joint?
━Woof-woof!
Keongkeongi kept barking as if it had something to tell me. It was a squirrel with the bark of a full-grown mutt.
━Woof-woof!
"Yeah, you just keep barking."
It clearly had something on its mind. Making this much noise, it had to be urgent, right? Had something happened to Oinoi? Had she been caught up in some disaster—say, fiddling with the gas stove and set the whole apartment on fire?
"I knew leaving them alone together was a mistake."
Except I hadn't left her behind on purpose—Oinoi had volunteered for house-sitting duty. And I had a nagging suspicion it wasn't because she enjoyed guarding the home front, but because she'd been scared of meeting Ari and wanted to stay put.
Oinoi had, after all, gone and labeled Ari one of those—what was it—nymph-phobic people. Though come to think of it, wasn't Seo Yerim the far more nymph-phobic one of the two?
Did nymphs and humans simply weigh the world on different scales?
Mulling that over, I hurried home as fast as my legs would carry me.
The one-room building was, unexpectedly, peaceful.
I scrambled up the stairs and punched in the door lock code—and the moment the door swung open, I discovered the place was in absolute shambles!
"What the…? Oinoi! Oinoi, where are you?"
The apartment looked like it had been burglarized. But what thief in their right mind would target this worthless little studio? Then it hit me—all those stories about hunters who preyed on nymphs.
What if they were after Oinoi!?
Still reeling from shock upon shock, I stepped into my bedroom, and there I was finally able to piece together what was going on.
Huuuummm—
A strange, humming mystery had opened up in the dead center of my room.
"Damn it, what now? A rift…!?"
It was a phenomenon known as a rift. Even though I was only a D-rank awakener, I had enough field experience under my belt to recognize it instantly. What puzzled me was why, of all places, it had to open in my home.
"There was no rift forecast issued, was there?"
Rifts were mysterious, yes, but the science behind them had come a long way. When space itself tore open, the distortion in mana produced detectable warning signs—or so the theory went.
Much like seismographs picking up earthquakes, there were devices that sensed a rift's formation, giving authorities time to warn residents of the affected area a full day in advance and evacuate them if needed.
"So this is an Anomaly Rift, then?"
An Anomaly Rift was a rift that opened up without warning—undetected, unforecast, just there. The D-rank rift that had torn open downtown right before Christmas had been one of them.
This one was probably the same kind. Its mouth was about the size of a single person—small.
At that scale, I'd put it around F-rank.
For reference, rifts were graded from F at the bottom to T at the top. A T(Tyrant)-rank rift required the tactical deployment of the military alongside S-rank awakeners just to shut it down.
"Anomaly rifts have been popping up a lot lately, haven't they?"
These warning-less rifts used to appear once a year, if that. But between the one at Christmas and now this, in my own bedroom, I couldn't help but feel their frequency was on the rise.
"Should I report it first?"
Protocol said that when a rift appeared, the first step was to notify the responsible agency. But when the discoverer happened to be an active-duty awakener, there were times when you were permitted to close the rift yourself and file the report after the fact.
I was still deliberating over what to do when it happened.
━Woof-woof!
Keongkeongi, curled up in my coat pocket, stretched its body out to full length—and then launched itself. Apparently fearless, the little thing dove straight for the rift, which shimmered and wavered like blue heat haze.
Well, that settled that. I had no choice now.
F-rank rifts were relatively safe, all things considered, but nothing in this line of work came with guarantees. So toward the rift that Oinoi might have entered, I wedged myself in right after the squirrel.
Huuuuum—
It felt like a roller coaster plunging straight down, my stomach and everything inside it lurching upward—and in the same instant, my world changed.
The disaster zone that had been my studio room vanished without a trace, and I found myself standing in the middle of a field.
Yes. A field.
Whether it was barley or wheat I couldn't say, but an endless expanse of the stuff swayed majestically in the wind—shaaaah——like waves on an open sea.
"A grassland-type field, huh?"
I ran through what monsters tended to spawn in grassland rifts. There were those quadrupedal hounds with six eyes, the ones that looked like feral dogs—what were they called, Garm? Those usually showed up first. And then there were the fields that swarmed with giant, large-breed-sized mantises—Kil Mantises.
I looked around, wondering which category this place fell into, but nothing that qualified as a proper 'monster' was in sight.
Instead, a brown-furred dog-squirrel emerged from the brush.
━Woof-woof!
Keongkeongi.
The squirrel went hopping off in a particular direction, bobbing and bounding. Was it guiding me somewhere?
"Hey, wait up—I'm coming!"
I ran hard, keeping pace with Keongkeongi.
Maybe five minutes of that.
Then, up ahead, I spotted something strange half-buried among the reeds—an odd ruin of a building. It appeared to be carved from white marble, but the brush had grown up thick and wild all around it, suggesting it had been abandoned for quite some time.
Just as I was marveling at the structure, something twitched in my peripheral vision.
It was a red tracksuit.
"Oinoi!"
I called out. A moment later, Oinoi's head popped up from between the fallen marble columns where she'd been hiding.
"Master of the house…! How glad Oinoi is to see you…!"
"Oinoi, what are you doing here?"
"A nostalgic scent drifted in, so Oinoi came to investigate…! This place is, in all likelihood, the grounds of an abandoned temple…! Which god it once belonged to, Oinoi cannot say… but it is a thoroughly nymph-friendly place…!"
Whiiissshhh—
The wind came sweeping through. Under the warm sunlight, the undulating fields made for a genuinely beautiful sight. So this was what counted as a nymph-friendly place, then.
Unfortunately, the rift still had to be closed. Leave it open, and all sorts of things would start getting sucked through the hole like a drain.
"Oinoi, we're leaving. I'm closing the rift. Before that, though, I want to find whatever's anchoring it. Anything ring a bell?"
A rift formed around something with a kind of 'cohesive force' at its center. That something might be a powerful monster—or a treasure imbued with a special power.
We called those sorts of things a Rift Core.
So what kind of rift core was waiting for us here?
Before long, Keongkeongi began hopping back and forth, left to right.
━Woof-woof!
I watched to see what the fuss was about—and noticed something small and black, thumbnail-sized, wriggling across the ground.
The identity of that strange little creature was…
"An ant?"
Had ants ever been found in an F-rank rift before? In D-rank rifts, dog-sized ants called 'Genocide Ants' had given awakeners plenty of trouble. But this one was tiny compared to a Genocide Ant.
Small enough, honestly, to look harmless.
Then Oinoi cried out.
"Ahh…! These are Honey Ants, without a doubt…! No ant but the Honey Ant shines so black and glossy as this…!"
Honey ants? What on earth were those now?
Just as I was getting curious, Oinoi continued her declaration.
"Honey Ants are, quite literally, ants of honey…! Magnificent workers blessed by the Goddess of the Harvest…! Like bees, they love to gather nectar—and they tend to flowers and plants, making them splendid, nymph-friendly ants, they are…! We must hurry and find their leader, the King Ant, forthwith…!"
The King Ant?
Shouldn't the leader of an ant colony be a queen?
Before long, Oinoi was scanning the ant procession this way and that, and Keongkeongi hopped around the marching column, taking in the sights with equal curiosity.
Left with little choice, I resigned myself to helping them hunt down the Honey Ant procession's 'king.' But in a field this vast, how was anyone supposed to find a single ant?
After a long moment of head-scratching, Oinoi offered a clue.
"The King Ant is a most distinguished-looking ant…! With its sharp mandibles, it makes a crisp tak-tak sound…! If you can hear that sound, you shall surely find it…!"
A sound?
Better than nothing. I stood still, let the wind wash over me, and poured all five of my senses into my hearing.
Perhaps because my mana had grown richer, amplifying my physical abilities beyond their usual limits, all kinds of sounds began flooding into my ears.
Rustle—
Rustle—
"Oinoi wonders whether you can hear anything…!"
━Woof-woof!
"Shh. Quiet, both of you."
I hushed everyone, then focused my senses once more. And there, threaded between the sounds of wind-blown grass blades busily brushing against one another, something strange began to emerge.
Tak. Tak.
Hard things, clicking against each other.
It wasn't far from where I stood.
I took maybe five steps and rummaged through the brush—and there it was. Something the size of my palm, and then some.
An ant with three towering horns, like some foreign rhinoceros beetle. It was big, solidly built, and its coloration—a gleaming gold—was honestly gorgeous.
"This is the King Ant?"
When I grabbed hold of its back, the golden ant squirmed in my grip. It was stronger than it looked, which caught me off guard.
"Ahh! Oinoi has never seen a Honey Ant so large…! The horns are magnificent and the color is gold—this is no mere King Ant but an Emperor Ant, without question…! Truly remarkable…!"
The Emperor Ant.
The Kaiser Ant, was it?
A fitting name, admittedly.
From the creature, I felt an intense strength and a faint, steady pulse of mana. My own theory: this thing was the 'Rift Core' anchoring this strange field and the abandoned temple.
Kill it, and the rift closes.
Or I could take it with me instead.
Killing something this magnificent seemed like a waste, so I decided to simply carry it out.
Shloop—
About ten seconds after I brought the Emperor Ant out, the rift closed.
So this little guy really had been the core all along.
"Well, how about that."
"Hieeeek…! The house is in ruins…!"
Oinoi gaped in horror at the wrecked studio. Apparently, the room had been perfectly fine right up until the moment she'd entered the rift.
I was busy fretting over when exactly I'd ever clean all this up when—
━Zzzt-zzt—
The Emperor Ant, still held in my hand, scuttled down my knee toward the floor, where it began tidying up the rumpled blankets and strewn-about clothes.
As I stood there stunned by the remarkable sight, Oinoi spoke up.
"Honey Ants once helped Princess Psyche sort the goddess's temple granaries, it is said…! In other words, Honey Ants are masters of tidiness and order…!"
"Is that so?"
Well. Seeing was believing.
Anyway.
I reported the Anomaly Rift and its resolution to the agency through the app. About twenty minutes later, an investigator was dispatched—and it was a face I knew.
"Seo Yerim, you came all the way out here to verify an F-rank rift yourself?"
"An Anomaly Rift gets handled by the highest-ranking officer on duty. That's protocol. Don't you know anything? I'm on duty today, so what do you want from me? Wait—this is where you live? There's a squirrel, and is that… what even is that, an ant? An ant?"
"An Emperor Ant. This guy was the core of the Anomaly Rift."
I held the Emperor Ant up for Seo Yerim to see, but she was too busy gawking around my apartment to give the ant more than a glance. The look on her face was exactly that of a silver-spooner seeing the inside of a goshiwon for the first time.
I said to her,
"I have to file a report on what happened, so come inside. It's a bit of a mess, but you're a busy person—might as well wrap this up quick and go."
At my words, Seo Yerim looked down at the floor, which was caked with dust kicked up by the rift's aftermath. And then she made to step inside with her shoes still on, and that made my blood boil.
"Hey. Shoes off. No matter how busy you are."
"These stockings are made from Foxford's heat-insulating material. They cost around five thousand five hundred dollars. If they get dirty, are you going to hand-wash them for me?"
"Then just… come in wearing your shoes. I have to clean this room anyway."
My entire floor, flooring included, probably cost less than the stockings on her feet.
Shloop—
I told her she could keep her shoes on, but Seo Yerim slipped them off anyway and stepped into the dusty room in her black stockings.
She asked,
"So. What exactly happened here?"
Explaining what had happened was the easy part. Like any veteran who'd spent years in active service, I walked her through the whole affair in meticulous detail.
"I didn't catch the moment the rift opened. I was out at the time. You know Ari, right? Your classmate. I was having dinner with her when Keongkeongi suddenly showed up. Keongkeongi's the dog-squirrel that lives here, by the way. Anyway, I followed Keongkeongi back home, and there was the rift—"
"Ari? You had dinner with that Ari?"
Seo Yerim's brow instantly knotted.