A Hell Called School [7]
What a disaster. An utter disaster...
Gong No-sa. Gong the Elder. Gong-gong. Gong the Diviner. Gong the Guard. The names used to describe him — the master of Faye Merlion and once one of Singapore's special-grade paranormal practitioners — were many.
That was because, in his bid to slip beyond the limits of human lifespan, he had kept himself in a state of suspended animation through the Art of Constant Simulated Death, dragging out two full centuries of existence.
Living so long in that perpetual half-death, Gong No-sa had lost nearly all the peaks and valleys of emotion. And yet, right now, composure was beyond him.
How far beyond? So far that a man who ordinarily prized discretion above every other virtue could not bring himself to leave the scene of an exceptional-grade anomaly incident.
Please...! All the other implements are fine! They're things I brought along expecting to use them up anyway! But not — not that one! I must have it back!
Gong No-sa was a pragmatist: a tool existed to be used, and anything used long enough would eventually break. The ritual implements he carried were all chosen with that wear in mind, and losing any of them was an acceptable cost.
Except one. Of everything he owned, exactly one thing was the exception.
Because that item was not a mere ritual implement, but a true dharma treasure — a treasure beyond price.
No. No, no. What is there to fret over? Is that something anyone can simply pick up and use because they wish to?
Hadn't Gong No-sa himself, after all, once tried to wield it without permission and ended up with one arm turned to charcoal?
Right. I'll grant that this Kim Do-sa fellow has some skill, but he's hardly qualified to use that.
So he reassured himself — and yet a thread of anxiety, fine as a strand of silk, remained coiled in a corner of his heart.
Because Kim Do-sa was not one of the countless frauds who called themselves daoists. He was the real thing, and then some — the genuine article among genuine articles.
...It's been a few decades since I last met a true daoist... no, was it more than a hundred years?
And that fact stirred in Gong No-sa a cold unease. Could it be...?
Then—
"Hm!?"
He felt a powerful presence surveying Seonhwa High.
There were only two paranormal practitioners in Korea who carried a presence of this magnitude. One of them never strayed from her own domain, so by elimination, the source of this aura could only be Baek Gong-ju.
Damn it all...! Already...!
To be sure, Gong No-sa was confident he would not lose to Baek Gong-ju in an even, one-on-one fight. But inside Seoul was another matter entirely. Fight her in Seoul, and his odds of losing climbed sharply.
Come on...! Come out already, before that monster of an old hag gets here!
Just as he was praying—
Crack!
Fissures began to spider across empty air. It was the sign of an Inner Space on the verge of collapse.
"Finally!"
With Gong No-sa's cry of relief, the barrier shattered completely. And from within the crumbling world—
"...This has become a bother."
A golden-haired, handsome man descended from the sky, riding a winged horse of gold. It was Seire, the demon ranked seventieth among the seventy-two demons of Solomon. A high-ranking demon — a being beyond argument — had manifested in the mortal world.
Even the descent of a high-ranking demon was, by itself, a disaster at least on the exceptional-grade scale. With the barrier broken, the moment that thing touched the ground and fully incarnated, everyone within a radius of several kilometers would collapse unconscious — and a third of them would die of cardiac arrest.
To face it, you needed a special-grade — and among special-grades, one whose specialty was demon hunting.
Then, as if trading places with the collapsing barrier, a chain of fire wreathed in flame erupted from the ground. The golden chain coiled around the body of the demon descending from on high and bound it fast.
"The Vairocana Mantra Barrier? You narrowed the barrier's range into a single chain to multiply its force. Not bad."
Seire's specialty was movement and transport. Inversely, he was weak against his opposite concept: binding. Restraining him with golden chains charged by the Vairocana Mantra Barrier was a rather clever move.
But a high-ranking demon was not so tame a creature that something like this could stop it. In truth, Seire's descent had only slowed slightly — he appeared to have taken no real damage at all.
"Tsk. Nothing for it, then."
The moment Gong No-sa clicked his tongue and moved to step in—
"Hm!?"
An immense flood of yang energy, as if someone had dragged the sun itself down to earth, burst outward in every direction.
Impossible—!
Only then did Gong No-sa find Kim Yi-yeon — the presence he'd failed to notice until now, drowned out by Seire's overwhelming aura — standing on the playing field, returned from the Inner Space.
Kim Yi-yeon stood at the center of the field. Like a javelin thrower, he gripped a red spear in his right hand and pointed at Seire with his left.
"That's impossible······."
As if answering his will, the spear surged with ever-fiercer yang energy and flame. The heat climbed explosively with every fraction of a second, until the fire enveloping the spear billowed hundreds of times larger than the weapon itself.
At last the flames began to shift from red to blue — and the power contained within them was not the least bit inferior to the demon prince descending from the sky.
And no wonder. Because that spear was—
"I never even allowed you to touch it — so why!? Why have you granted your favor to that somewhat tall, somewhat handsome little daoist, the first proper one I've seen in a hundred years!?!"
The myths told of it: it was the weapon of Nezha, the beloved weapon of Huaguang Dadi, god of fire, and the guardian treasure of Hong Hai'er. People called the spear by this name:
"······The Fire-Tipped Spear!!!"
In that instant, the azure spear of myth erupting from the ground pierced the demon prince through the chest.
Blue flame blotted out the noon sun, drowning every direction in blue.
"Huuuuoaaaooong...! How could you do this to me...!"
In a world dyed blue and silenced, only Gong No-sa's hollow wail lingered, circling desolately in the air.
"Holy······."
Seire, the high-ranking demon who had descended radiating a presence vast enough to crush the air itself, was burning away — gone in a single strike.
All the countermeasures the Paranormal Administration Bureau personnel and I had prepared for dealing with Seire turned out to be unnecessary.
"This spear... what exactly is it?"
I looked down at the red spear that had returned to my hand of its own accord — I hadn't even recalled it. I'd known it was a fine implement before, but the power it had just displayed was so far past the usual scale it wasn't even funny.
Hmm... at this rate it's getting harder and harder to justify giving it back, isn't it?
-······.
Then the burning, dissolving Seire opened his mouth. The demon swept his gaze across the blue-drowned field, and his eyes came to rest on one spot.
The place where Yu Min-seo stood.
There's no way— I whipped my soaked-cotton-heavy body forward, ready to hurl the spear again—
-...Good.
"What?"
With that single word, Seire vanished completely.
A high-ranking demon wouldn't die from something like this — he must have simply returned to wherever he came from.
"Wh-what!? Ahh!?"
Just as the world was slowly reclaiming its original colors, black chains erupted from the ground and coiled around Yu Min-seo's body.
I still had no idea whether Lee Jin-seok was alive or dead, but thanks to my little performance, Lee Min-hee had recognized her contract as fulfilled.
When a contractor herself believed the contract complete, a demon — a master of unfair terms and backstabbing — would never let that opening slide. With the main body already gone, this was the contract being temporarily suspended so the debt could be collected.
But at that moment, the steel chain constricting Yu Min-seo shattered like glass.
And then—
BOOM!
The jiangshi Gong No-sa had used to deceive Lee Min-hee — his implement-storage jiangshi — exploded.
"The substitute-doll sorcery really does work."
The substitute doll is one of Daoism's warding arts against misfortune and calamity. True to its name, it makes a doll receive a person's ill luck or disaster in their stead. Even the curses and channeling rites people commonly perform with dolls trace back, at their root, to this substitute-doll art.
This time, Gong No-sa's jiangshi had served as Yu Min-seo's substitute doll.
He gave us an implement, helped with the performance, and now even a substitute doll. A jiangshi that gives without reserve. Farewell, and be happy wherever you've gone.
A story that began with a substitute ending with a substitute — a tidy bit of symmetry, if I said so myself.
Of course, a contract with a high-ranking demon isn't something you can wave off with a single doll. But this was a special case. Because if Yu Min-seo failed to fulfill the debt, there was a subordinate debtor waiting who could take her place at once.
"Wh-what is this!? What is this!?"
Lee Min-hee convulsed as the black steel chains wound their way up her body.
But whether Lee Min-hee seized up or threw a fit, the pathetic little chain didn't know or care. There was someone to fulfill the debt, so it simply came to collect.
Yu Min-seo had merely been first in line for debt repayment — but Lee Min-hee, too, bore responsibility for the contract. And with the first in line, Yu Min-seo, deflecting the debt onto a substitute doll, responsibility naturally passed to the next party: Lee Min-hee.
Even if you name a guarantor, if that person dies and leaves no heir, the law says you pay up yourself.
"No! NO! I don't want this, I don't want this! It hurts, it hurts it hurts! K-Kim Do-sa! No — Mr. Kim Do-sa! Please, I'm begging you! Save me too!"
"Why? You brought this on yourself."
"Fuck!! You think I wanted it to be like this!? You — you already know everything, don't you!? You know my whole situation, that's how you had everything prepared, right!? Damn it! I suffered too, losing my mom and dad because of that rotten bastard Lee Jin-seok! I only did what I had to do to survive! And — and there are emergency evacuation rights, aren't there! Actions taken to survive should be forgiven, shouldn't they!?"
"It's not 'A-grade evacuation rights,' it's emergency evacuation. How did you even get into a special-purpose high school with that brain? Oh, right — the president's connections. Anyway... yeah, fine, your circumstances really are pitiable. I understand."
"Th-then...!"
"So what of it?"
"...Huh?"
"Whatever circumstances you had — do they give you a reason to torment Yu Min-seo?"
Even before Seire turned the school into hell, school had already been hell for Yu Min-seo. Hell, made by none other than Lee Min-hee.
"And above all — the one whining this much about being made a substitute made Yu Min-seo her substitute? Put your hand on your heart and tell me you're not even a little ashamed."
The moment she draped the yoke she'd clawed her way out of — killing any number of people to do it — onto someone else's shoulders, Lee Min-hee became a nauseating evil not worth a shred of sympathy.
"You — you fucking bastard! Orphan piece of trash! Rotten, festering bitch! Die! Die, you son of a bitch! Bastards like you fall straight into hell when you die!"
"I see you really don't know what a daoist is?"
"What?"
Well, the legends came later — making rain from a clear sky, folding the earth to run a thousand li, that sort of thing.
"Zhong ren gui sheng" — to prize human life above all. Living well while alive is the alpha and omega of Daoism; the whole goal is to reach immortality without dying in the first place. When you're this busy just staying alive, what kind of daoist worries about what comes after death?"
"······Th-that..."
"Time's about up. Get lost."
"Agh! AAAAGH! AAAAAAAAAGH!"
The black chains binding Lee Min-hee drew taut, then tore her limb from limb.
SPLAAASH!
Lee Min-hee's shredded corpse dissolved into black viscous fluid and seeped into the ground. Whether she was dead, or dropped into some demon's domain instead, was none of my business to know.
"Whew...!"
Thud.
Maybe the tension finally catching up with me — my legs gave out and I plopped down onto the ground without meaning to.
"M-Mr. Kim Do-sa!"
I waved off Yu Min-seo as she rushed to support me.
"I'm just sitting down for a bit. That's all."
"Oh — oh, really? Thank goodness. I'm so relieved you're safe, Mr. Kim Do-sa."
Yu Min-seo let out a sigh of relief, then her face clouded over, and she asked:
"...Um."
"What?"
"······."
"Worried about what happened to Lee Min-hee?"
"······Yes."
Really. What's so pretty about the girl who bullied her and tried to feed her to a demon in her place...
Being kind is good, but too kind is a problem. Makes life harder to survive.
"Who knows... whether she died, got dragged off, or ended up as the demon's slave — I couldn't say. But one thing's certain."
"Wh-what's that?"
Tap.
"We got some absolutely killer footage. Not bad for a substitute cameraman."
I pointed at the phone Yu Min-seo had been filming with the whole time without my noticing.
"Oh······Right!"
Only then did the smile return to Yu Min-seo's face.
Come to think of it, this kid had kept filming at every spare moment, hadn't she? During the fight with the horse-head statue at the start, through the purge of every anomaly inside the school, and even now—
Well, none of it would've come out properly anyway.
Whatever it captured came out warped, like a cheap composite photo — a handy side effect. When I used the Ksitigarbha Ten Wheels Mudra, things like the scattering petals would show up, but that was about the extent of it.
And for an anomaly this high on the scale, forget capturing it — the screen itself would have been completely distorted.
"I refuse to accept this..."
Just then, a familiar voice reached us — that strange, metallic tone, neither man's nor woman's.
I turned to see Faye Merlion's jiangshi gatekeeper No. 2 — no, Gong No-sa, standing there.
A man this thorough about hiding his identity — that form can't be his real one either.
"I put your item to good use. It saved our lives."
"You dog of a whore, you husband-stealing wretch...! Womanizer...!"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Damn it all...!"
With nothing but those parting words, Gong No-sa dove into the shadow of a building — and melted into it, gone.
"Wait, aren't you taking your things back?... Still, that's a sorcery I'd love to have."
I should really learn a trick like that... Maybe I'll look for it in Dongbin's Dao Study Room later.
SCREEEECH!
Just then, a car pulled in through the front gate of Seonhwa High. And out of it stepped an old woman.
No — an old woman?
Could you really call someone like that an old woman?
A muscular crone well over 180 centimeters tall pushed her sunglasses up and strode across the field — toward me, precisely.
The super-grandma stopped in front of me and asked:
"Where's that piece-of-shit president?"
"I'm looking for that son of a bitch myself."
Speaking of which, where the hell is that bastard?
It's all over — why hasn't he come out yet!?