025. A Hell Called School [5]
Watching the lump-of-meat anomaly burst and die from a single strike, I let out a whistle.
“Well, well. The dharma instrument certainly delivers.”
The dharma instruments that had come spilling out of Gong No-sa's instrument-storage jiangshi had been a varied bunch, and from among them I'd narrowed things down to three that could serve as full combat power on the spot. One of them was the Black Lotus Vajra, the very tool that had just exorcised the meat-blob anomaly.
A vajra is a Buddhist dharma instrument shaped after lightning itself—the weapon of Indra, lord of the Eight Legions of devas. The difference between the ordinary vajras monks wave about in their dharma ceremonies and Gong No-sa's Black Lotus Vajra was simple: the latter actually spat out real lightning.
Krrzzt-krrzzt-CRACK!
Feed the black vajra some Daoist spiritual power, and it disgorged black lightning to match, bolt for bolt. As you could plainly see, its power was borderline transcendent—the average anomaly dissolved from nothing more than making contact with it. And when you flung a vajra wreathed in that black lightning with the Environment Transmutation Technique, what you got was a railgun and Indra's thunderbolt rolled into one.
“Are you okay?”
“Wh-who... are you?”
“Someone here to save you.”
“R-really!?”
“You're actually here to save us!?”
At my words, the students who'd been hiding in the bathroom stalls came pouring out all at once. One girl in particular stood out—brown curls, and a way of walking that kicked aside anyone in her path. Her name was Lee Min-hee, granddaughter of President Lee Jin-seok, who even now had not been found.
“Ugh, seriously, what took you so long? You're with the Paranormal Administration Bureau, right? Do you have any idea how many people died because you people were late? Now hurry up and escort me somewhere safe.”
How should I put this—though it feels strange to say it, she was the textbook specimen of a high-ranking official's child, in the worst possible sense. There was just one problem. I wasn't with the Paranormal Administration Bureau. Which is to say, I was not a public servant.
“Done spouting your bullshit? Because you seem to be mistaken—I'm not with the Bureau. Which means I have zero obligation to play along with your crap.”
“Wh-what did you just say!? D-do you even know who I am...?”
“Don't care, and don't want to. You've got two choices: shut your mouth and fall in behind me like everyone else, or figure out how to survive on your own. Pick one.”
“Ugh... Tch!”
For all her insolence, she could read a room fast. Min-hee shut her mouth and backed off immediately. Just then, a student who'd nearly died to the meat-blob anomaly came up and bowed his head.
“Um, I don't know who you are, but thank you so much! You saved my life!”
“Jung Sung-ho? So you're that Jung Sung-ho.”
“Huh? How do you know my name...?”
“I have my ways.”
We'd never laid eyes on each other before, but meeting him like this made me oddly glad.
“So, are you all who's left?”
“Well... we heard fighting coming from the staff office, and when we went to look, we all got scattered... the others, we don't really—”
“It's all right.”
I patted the shoulder of Jung Sung-ho as he hung his head in shame. According to Yu Min-seo, Sung-ho was one of the few surviving third-years, and he'd been the one holding the surviving students together. Watching him bow his head over something that wasn't even his fault, I could see that sense of responsibility plain as day. And truly, he had nothing to apologize for.
I pulled out the second dharma instrument I'd borrowed(?) from Gong No-sa.
Diiing—
This one was called the Soul-Seeking Bell—a bell inscribed with an art that spread sound waves steeped in spiritual power to sweep and detect across a wide area. Up to there, nothing special. What was astonishing was its detection range.
Diiing~
The number of survivors had dropped by three from what Min-seo had told me. They died in that short a span...? I offered a silent prayer for the students who hadn't made it.
“Wang Lingguan, take these students to the temporary HQ, then stand by under In-hyuk.”
“Grrr.” A deep, rumbling nod.
I handed the students over to Wang Lingguan—but just as I turned to head back into the school, Jung Sung-ho caught hold of me.
“Pl-please be careful! I-I know you're strong, but there's one monster in this school that's on a completely different level! Most of the people who came to the staff office fell to that thing!”
“Thanks for the advice.”
Without turning around, I threw him nothing more than a thumbs-up. After we parted at the stairwell and I saw the students off with Wang Lingguan, I drew out the last instrument I'd swiped from Gong No-sa's bundle of treasures. It was a long spear, black-red from the base of the shaft to the tip of the blade, forged whole from a single piece of iron. Honestly, I'd never learned the way of the spear and had meant to use a different weapon, but...
For some strange reason, it fit my hand like it belonged there.
And it still did.
FWOOROOROOSH!
The instant I wrapped my fingers around the shaft, crimson flames—redder than blood—bloomed up along the spearhead.
“Now, then...”
Time to find out what proper gear can really do.
“This way! Over here, please!”
“Well done, all of you—surviving!”
As the surviving students ran toward the Bureau's temporary HQ, Lee Min-hee—the girl who'd been cursing Kim Yi-yeon only moments ago—was scanning the crowd for one particular face.
Yu Min-seo... tch, that girl is tenacious as hell, too...
Yu Min-seo flinched the moment her eyes met Min-hee's. Toward her, Min-hee pressed a finger to her lips and drew it sideways—the universal sign for zip it. White-faced with fear, Min-seo dropped her gaze. Taking that as a yes, Min-hee brushed right past her and stepped into the temporary HQ.
Meanwhile, Jung Sung-ho didn't go into the tent. He stood looking back at the school, worry written across his face. He said he'd be fine, but... No matter how he turned it over, he couldn't shake his worry for Kim Yi-yeon.
“Student, don't stand out there—come inside, quickly.”
“I... I just can't stop thinking about how we left that Mr. Kim Yi-yeon behind.”
Jung Sung-ho answered Kang In-hyuk's question with an anxious look. Kang In-hyuk smiled at him.
“Have no fear. That man is a Vajrayana master. Keeping his own skin intact will be no trouble for him.”
“R-right...”
The moment Sung-ho gave a puzzled nod, the third-floor corridor windows blew out all at once.
KWAAAAAAAAANG!
“KYAAAAAAA!”
“Wh-what now!?”
As everyone reeled, a single crystal-clear voice cut through the roar and bloomed in every ear.
“Wang Lingguan! I'm throwing them—catch!”
And with those words, through the blast-cleared corridor window, one of the scattered students came sailing out.
“KYAAAAAAK!”
Wang Lingguan lashed out his whip and plucked the screaming, free-falling student from the air. But that was only the beginning. After that, one student after another came hurtling out without fail.
“Unbelievable...”
“What on earth is happening?”
These were students who had spent a week in a school turned hell, weathering one impossible thing after another. And yet what was happening now left even that hardened common sense far, far behind.
“Is... is being a Vajrayana master anything like being a bombardier...?”
“No, that is...”
Even as Kang In-hyuk searched for an answer to Jung Sung-ho's question—
KUUUUUUUNG!
—the explosions showed no sign of stopping, and next, things that were not students began to be flung out of the building as well.
“These ones have undergone partial transformation—place them at the center of the barrier at once!”
They were the Deva survivors who'd been part of the advance team. Wang Lingguan, unfailingly, stretched out his whip and passed each free-falling figure safely into the secure zone. The explosions and the human artillery carried on for a full ten minutes, and with the final blast, Kim Yi-yeon leapt from the school's window.
Thud.
Touching down lightly on the schoolyard, Kim Yi-yeon turned to look back at the school behind him. The Vairocana Mantra Barrier, the Primordial Talismans, and even the flames of the crimson spear. Seonhwa High, lashed by every manner of fire and explosion, no longer held any trace of what it used to be.
After all—hadn't the Korean peninsula, since the old days, possessed a perfectly good exorcism for houses that bred more ghosts than anyone could handle?
“Should a house breed more ghosts than it can bear, let it be driven out by cannonfire.”
“This is what a Korean exorcism looks like, you anomaly riffraff.”
How to put it—it felt like every frustration that had been choking me until now had blown wide open in a single stroke. But I couldn't simply celebrate. Because for all that I'd burned the school to the ground and torn apart even the principal's office, the unusually strong boss anomaly Sung-ho had warned me about was nowhere to be seen. Worse—
I hadn't found the President, either.
It seemed the anomaly that swallowed Seonhwa High still kept secrets I hadn't uncovered. But for now...
“I need to rest...”
Wielding three dharma instruments at the same time had left me dead on my feet.
“That was truly incredible skill, Mr. Yi-yeon! Exorcising that many anomalies entirely on your own—someone of your caliber could stand shoulder to shoulder with the elite. A national-power-class psychic and no less!”
“It wasn't all my own strength, you know.”
More than half of the firepower that had burned the anomalies away along with the school had come from Gong No-sa's crimson spear and the Black Lotus Vajra. Granted, part of that was my good compatibility with the two instruments, but it didn't change the fact that they were monstrous pieces. The Black Lotus Vajra, the Soul-Seeking Bell, the crimson spear... frankly, every one of them was far too good to be politely handed back to Gong No-sa.
Well, that was a worry for after we got out, but...
“Anyway, with this much off my plate, I can take my time...”
“I'm afraid there will be no time for that.”
“Sorry?”
“What I mean is...”
“Right—the main body of the anomaly that generated this Inner Space hasn't taken so much as a single hit.”
And that wasn't the only problem. The survivors had already eaten through nearly all the food in the school. And the people now gathered in the safe zone—the Bureau, Deva, and the surviving students included—numbered close to fifty. If things dragged on like this, people would start dying of hunger before any anomaly ever got to them.
“Have you examined the boundary of the Inner Space?”
The boundary of the Inner Space that had swallowed Seonhwa High ran precisely along the edge of the school grounds.
“Yes... but dismantling it from outside and dismantling it from within are two very different matters...”
“I see...”
“But do not worry. Once the situation is noticed and reinforcements arrive, the boundary can be torn down from outside. Gong No-sa will lend her strength as well, if only to reclaim her instruments—and with no anomalies left inside the Inner Space anyway, there is no reason to hesitate.”
That was what Kang In-hyuk said, but somehow... the whole thing left a strangely sour aftertaste. A feeling that I was missing something. The President, still not found. And the anomaly's main body, which had annihilated the advance team and wrung from their dying lips an entirely new grade: Prodigy. Neither of these two riddles had been solved in the slightest.
Just then—
“Um... could I borrow you for a moment?”
Jung Sung-ho, who should have been resting in the safe zone, stepped outside.
“What is it?”
“There's something I need to tell you.”
Sung-ho said, darting glances at the temporary HQ.
“I'll head back in, then.”
Kang In-hyuk, quick on the uptake, vacated the spot. Jung Sung-ho took his place.
“So, what did you want to tell me?”
“Um... about what happened at the school—I think I know who's behind it.”
“...What?”
“October eleventh—the day before all this began. I'd finished evening self-study and was on my way home when I realized I'd left something behind, so I came back to the school.”
“Left what?”
“A student, carrying a robe and candles, performing some kind of strange ritual.”
“...Who was it?”
Sung-ho hesitated a moment before speaking.
“Yu Min-seo.”
The last name I expected. My voice caught for an instant.
“...Why would Min-seo do something like that?”
“Well...”
Sung-ho wrestled with it even harder than before, then glanced around and continued in little more than a whisper.
“To be exact, one person was ostracizing Min-seo, and the rest of us were going along with it because we didn't know how not to...”
“Who?”
“Lee Min-hee... the President's granddaughter.”
“......”
I'd expected Min-seo's school life hadn't been smooth, because compared to the other survivors, her body bore far too many old scars. Even the anomalies I'd swept away like trash mobs were dangerous enough that an ordinary person's odds of dying on the spot exceeded eighty percent. In other words, short of being outright killed, there was no way to pick up those little cuts and bruises from them. Which meant Min-seo's wounds had been made long before this anomaly incident, entirely unrelated to it.
Ah, come to think of it, there was that, too. Sung-ho's claim involved quite a logical leap, but it held a certain persuasiveness. The first time I met Yu Min-seo, she'd called the bull monster a “Bull-Headed Monster-Man.” Think about it normally: anyone who saw a bull-headed giant would call it a Minotaur. That's simply what people do. Which meant a fixed, concrete image of a “bull-headed monster” had taken root in Min-seo's mind. It was the same with the Trench-Coat Woman with a Knife. The original of that urban legend was a trench-coat man with a knife, and the anomaly that actually appeared was built too ambiguously to tell male from female. Even so, Min-seo had declared with total conviction that it was the Trench-Coat Woman with a Knife. And sure enough, when I examined what was left of the trench-coat anomaly Wang Lingguan had carved to pieces, the thing had in fact borne a woman's body.
All this time, I'd assumed the anomalies haunting Seonhwa High were the school's native ghost stories, warped out of shape. But what if they weren't? What if they weren't corrupted legends at all, but things constructed on the memories of someone who knew the legends wrong?
Checking was simple. All I had to do was ask Min-seo directly about the school's ghost stories. If the versions she knew matched the anomalies that had appeared at Seonhwa High—well, QED.
But one question remained before that. Namely—
“If all of this traces back to Min-seo, what's the point of it?”
“Sorry?”
If it were revenge for being bullied, Min-hee should have been the very first to die—that's what would make sense. Yet Min-hee, cockroach that she was, had clung stubbornly to life while person after person died around her. His story didn't add up.
“Well... that's true... but what I saw that day was real, I'm sure of it...!”
“I'm not doubting you. I'm just saying there's a piece that doesn't fit, logically.”
To confirm the truth, first—
“Can you show me where Min-seo held that strange ritual?”
The place where Min-seo had held her ritual was the rooftop. What Sung-ho had actually witnessed, to be precise, was Min-seo coming down from the rooftop, the ritual already finished.
“Hm...”
By some stroke of luck the rooftop had escaped the inferno, and the scene remained just as it had been. And dead center on the rooftop sat a pentagram that, to any eye, had clearly been drawn to summon something you did not want summoned.
“Well, what next—every star and stray dog in creation is crawling out of the woodwork, huh?”
Demon versus Do-sa? That would be its own flavor of fun. I gave the pentagram a slow, careful look-over. But...
“No good. Not the faintest clue...”
My major was Eastern sorcery, not Western magic. Which meant...
“I don't actually need to identify this magic circle.”
When it came down to it, I'd simply have to do the thing I did best. I opened Dongbin's Dao Study Room. My one true specialty: cram-studying sorcery overnight. Browsing the site, I found a spell that fit the current situation perfectly.
Read the Memories Held in Objects: The Resonance Art!
We've all had that moment—“If only there were a security camera right here!” Haven't you?
The Daoist art prepared for exactly those moments is none other than the Resonance Art!
The Resonance Art reads the memories and lingering thoughts left behind in objects, revealing what happened there!
The lost TV remote! The vanished bottle cap! The girlfriend who may or may not exist!
Let's track them all down with the Resonance Art!
“...That one landed a little too close to home.”
It stung, sure, but there was no time to sulk—I put the Resonance Art to work on the spot. Fortunately, it wasn't a particularly difficult technique. By their account, even my habit of peeking into the memories of the souls I exorcised counted as a form of it. I'd been using it unconsciously all along, so all that remained was to switch the target from souls to the lingering traces left in objects.
“All right...”
I gathered my focus and tried it. And the memories lingering on the rooftop began to pour in. I skimmed fast through a week's worth of them and hauled out the night of October eleventh. The memories that came through weren't sharp—whether from the passage of time, or simply the Resonance Art's limit, I couldn't say. But one thing was certain.
That night—October eleventh—there had been two people on the Seonhwa High rooftop, not one.
And yet something was off... From the body of the other one—the one who wasn't Min-seo—I could feel two distinct presences at the same time.
“What in the world is going on here?”
And that presence... it was one I knew very well.
“When in doubt, there's a tool for this.”
Just in case, I took out the divination tube I'd packed away in my dharma-tool case. Then I cast the turtle-shell I Ching on the other person's condition.
“A scapegoat sacrificed for the ancestors.”
“A proxy that bleeds in another's stead.”
“One who inherits karma and passes it on.”
The verdict of the casting. I began fitting the omens against everything I knew. And bit by bit, one breathtakingly absurd hypothesis took shape.
“...Can this possibly be right?”
Even retracing my own steps, it sounded like nonsense. But reality, as a rule, is always more dramatic than imagination. Which meant the time had come to find out whether my deduction was right or wrong.
Yu Min-seo sat tucked in a corner of the Bureau's temporary HQ, letting the time slip by in a daze.
“Ugh, seriously, what is even wrong with that guy?”
“But Min-hee, seriously—you're amazing? Right up until all this happened, I couldn't have imagined a world this surreal actually existed?”
“I'm the President's granddaughter. The level of information I have is a different class from you people.”
Watching Min-hee flaunt her grandfather's office at the friends who'd survived beside her, Min-seo clicked her tongue where no one could hear.
Bullshit...
For Min-seo, who knew exactly what Min-hee was really like, the spectacle was beyond absurd. Then her eyes met Min-hee's. Min-hee held her gaze with eyes like frost, then began walking toward her, slow and unhurried. To Min-seo, that advance looked like the Grim Reaper closing in.
“Hey, Yu Min—”
“Yu Min-seo.”
A heartbeat before Min-hee could finish the name, Kim Yi-yeon, returned from the school, called for her instead.
“Y-yes!”
“Could you come with me a moment? There's something we need to talk about.”
“Ah—yes... yes!”
Min-seo stepped out of the tent on a long breath of relief. Kim Yi-yeon led her somewhere far from the tent. Then he said:
“I came here knowing everything.”
“S-sorry?”
The color drained from Min-seo's face. Because she could guess exactly what he knew, and what he was about to press her for.
“Wh-what do you...”
She tried to buy even a minute, a single second, to steady herself. Kim Yi-yeon gave her nothing.
“The one who performed the ritual on that rooftop was you, Yu Min-seo. Wasn't it?”
At the question, tears welled along her lashes. She had so much to say. So much she needed to say. Excuses—if excuses were what she wanted, she could produce them by the dozen. But too many people had already died for excuses to carry her past it. Tears spilling over, Min-seo spoke.
“I-I'm sorry...! I'm so sorry...! I-I never knew it would turn into this! I... I never—”
“You don't need to say any more.”
“...What?”
“I told you. I came knowing all of it.”
“Knowing all of it...”
To Min-seo's blank, stunned face, Kim Yi-yeon drove in the final nail.
“You were forced into that ritual by someone else. And the one who forced you was Lee Min-hee.”
“...H-how could you possibly...”
“And the wish Min-hee made to the something she summoned through that ritual... was the death of her own grandfather. The President. Am I right?”