037. The Sorcery Showdown
The Hundred Ghost Tales incident — fifty thousand people caught up in it in total.
Honestly, I'd been worried about how the hopelessly incompetent Paranormal Administration Bureau would ever clean up that mess.
But lo and behold.
Against all odds, the Bureau managed to contain the Hundred Ghost Tales incident too.
And the scenario they used to do it went something like this...
'Gotcha on hidden camera~! Everything, right up to the Hundred Ghost Tales incident, was staged by us~!'
That was it. That was the whole play.
"And you think that actually works as containment?"
"Well, you see, the fifty thousand people didn't all experience the anomaly in the same place."
"So there's no way to cross-check what each person went through?"
In any case, when you flatten people under official authority, even those who genuinely experienced the anomaly can't help but doubt their own memories. And that's before you account for the broadcast itself — content that could be edited or cooked up in advance however they pleased. Practically speaking, the only anomalies the audience had actually witnessed with their own eyes were the blood they'd vomited the moment they looked away from the screen, and the few seconds of that one thing at the very end of the Vairocana Mantra Barrier.
"I see... So that's how it is."
Human beings don't believe what they cannot see. And even when they do believe, that belief is always interpreted in whatever way suits them best.
What if it can't be interpreted to their liking?
Then they distort even their own vivid memories until the whole thing never happened at all.
"Of course, in the process the Bureau did use a bit of shamanic craft to... knead public perception a little," she admitted.
"Oooh, so THAT'S the century of expertise handed down since the days of the colonial Government-General! Oppressing and hoodwinking the masses — the Paranormal Administration Bureau truly has no rival!"
"Y-you don't have to put it THAT harshly! Honestly, you love teasing people..."
"I'm not teasing."
I was, relatively speaking, genuinely unnerved. It's actually scarier when incompetent people are competent only in exactly this kind of thing.
"By the way... are you all right, Mr. Yi-yeon?"
"What do you mean? Getting cursed out online as 'a fraud who faked everything with a hidden camera and still has the gall to act high and mighty'?"
"N-no, not that— well, that too, but... what you did, at Seonhwa High and all the rest, deserved to be called heroic. And now it's been erased entirely — you're even being vilified by the public..."
"I got paid, so it doesn't matter."
Government compensation wasn't much, mind you — same as always with state payouts. Even the Seonhwa High case, provisionally rated a prodigy-class incident, topped out at nine figures in won.
...Wow. Did I just describe nine figures as "topping out"?
I've lost it.
Anyway, it would be a lie to say I felt nothing, but I didn't have any major complaints either. Like I said, I got my money — and more importantly...
That broadcast had gone properly viral. And that massive, swollen subscriber count told its own story.
Yoon Soo-ah had said that ordinary people's perceptions blur with time — that before long, they'd dismiss every anomaly as a trick of the eye.
In Yoon Soo-ah's words: even as things grew unseen, the number of those opening their eyes kept growing.
I couldn't begin to guess what that would ultimately bring. What I knew came down to just two things.
One — a dam that has begun to collapse will, in the end, collapse.
And two — the world that comes after the dam breaks is a world perfectly suited to my channel's growth.
"Ah, that reminds me — what did Cosmos have to do with this broadcast?"
Come to think of it, both the living broadcast-station anomaly and the Hundred Ghost Tales had only spiraled that far because of the collective intent that gathered in a station's peculiar environment. Fundamentally, none of it should have escalated into something this big.
Had the Hundred Ghost Tales not been broadcast live, that is.
"Well... about that."
"I'm one of the parties involved here, you know. I'd say I have at least that much right to know."
"...Understood. It's still at the suspicion stage, but — Cosmos recently acquired MBB. And they replaced a considerable portion of the broadcasting equipment, along with various aging hardware, with Cosmos-branded products."
"And somewhere in that process, devices capable of recording anomalies and the supernatural slipped in?"
"That is what the Bureau currently believes."
"And that super grandma — what was her name, Baek Gong-ju? She just stood by? I find it hard to believe the woman who once threatened to soak the President would sit still over something like this."
"A su-super grandma...?! To be honest, we had our hands full just stopping her from storming Cosmos headquarters."
Figures. I knew it.
"We managed to talk her down, and the Bureau is now filing formal protests in the name of both itself and the Masquerade Alliance — but as you know, Cosmos is such a globally entrenched corporation that it isn't getting us very far."
Just imagining that old granny on the rampage was enough to make my spine shiver.
"Well then..."
I'd asked about everything I was curious about, and I had important business of my own coming up, so I was about to hang up when—
"Officer Soo-ah! We've— we've got a disaster! M-Ms. Baek, Ms. Baek has—!"
"Yes?! What about grandmother—?!"
"Ms. Baek heard that Jung Tae-min has returned to the country and stormed Cosmos's Korean headquarters alone!"
"WHAT?!"
Jung Tae-min.
The name of the young chairman of Cosmos, the largest corporation on Earth.
The heart of Seocho-gu, Seoul. At the center of the district known as Cosmos Town stood the Cosmos headquarters tower.
Through its entrance strode an imposing old woman — well over 180 centimeters tall, clad in a black suit, tinted sunglasses on her face.
"Stand aside."
The moment the old woman, Baek Gong-ju, stepped into the lobby, scattering grains of rice as she went—
"Oh, actually, I had errands outside today."
"Ah — I should take a personal day."
"Huh? Urgent business? Got it!"
—and the bustling Cosmos employees drained out of the lobby like an ebbing tide.
Having 'simply' dispersed the crowd with shamanic craft, Baek Gong-ju turned her gaze on the two men left standing in the emptied hall.
"Cosmos's guard dogs, are they?"
"Baek Gong-ju? That's her, right — Korea's so-called Special Grade?"
"You knew, and you still ask?"
The two men in tailored suits traded words with perfect composure, all the while tracking her every movement.
"Barging in this heavy-handed, you clearly didn't come with good intentions... Have you come to protest to our chairman over the MBB affair?"
"If you know, move."
"Can't do that. It's what we're paid handsomely to do."
One of the two — the man with the long braid — stepped forward. He pulled a thick piece of beast hide from the bag strapped to one arm and wrapped it around his own body.
The instant it touched him, the hide fused with his flesh and transformed, swelling into the shape of a colossal werewolf.
It was the shamanic craft of a Druid Ovate of the Celtic faith.
Grrrrrr... I'd been wanting to measure the distance to Special Grade myself. How very convenient.
Cedric the Druid Ovate swaggered toward Baek Gong-ju, flaunting his bulk, grown to nearly three meters.
"My, my. Biggest doggy I've seen in my whole life."
Who are you calling a son of a bitch!
Hooked by the provocation, Cedric lunged at Baek Gong-ju with staggering speed.
WHUMP!
A fist bigger than a human head tore through the air with a concussive crack, aiming to pulp the old woman's skull.
Gotcha.
"Huh?"
But that skin-crawlingly fast strike was caught — stopped dead — in one of Baek Gong-ju's hands.
"They say a dog that bites people gets a taste of the hawk!"
The very next instant, her right fist detonated against Cedric's solar plexus.
UGUHK—?!
CRRAAAAASH!
The blow sent Cedric's body hurtling backward, slamming him into the lobby's front desk.
Two seconds.
That was how long it took for one of the mid-tier psychics Cosmos had specially hired to defend its headquarters to go down.
"Unbelievable...!"
Watching it happen, Silas — the psychic who had stepped out alongside Cedric — clicked his tongue. He'd known there was a wall between A-Grade and Special Grade that no ordinary effort could climb.
But I never imagined it would be this absolute...!
Worse, Baek Gong-ju hadn't used anything you could properly call psychic power or shamanic craft. She'd simply thrown a fist reinforced with raw spiritual force. Nothing more.
The difference in class wasn't a gap. It was a chasm.
And that thought became Silas's last.
"Grow."
CRUNCH!
Almost simultaneously with Cedric's fall, Baek Gong-ju had closed the distance and seized Silas's jaw, crushing it in her grip.
"Gehuk—!"
Silas crumpled to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
"...So they won't make it that easy, will they?"
Baek Gong-ju lingered in the lobby for a while, waiting for reinforcements to come pouring down. But no matter how long she waited, neither more guards nor outside forces ever arrived.
Proof that Cosmos understood her capabilities perfectly well.
"Nothing for it, then."
Baek Gong-ju boarded the elevator. And on the assumption that the control room was monitoring it, she spoke in a deliberately loud voice:
"I've come to give this place a proper cleansing. Send everyone out and keep only whoever's in charge."
"Understood."
They had been listening, of course.
Through the glass walls of the elevator, Baek Gong-ju watched the panorama of Seoul falling away below.
Through a particular shamanic rite, Baek Gong-ju could draw a virtually unlimited supply of spiritual power — but only from within the bounds of Seoul's soil. In other words, no matter how much craft or psychic force she expended, what she spent was refilled in an instant. It was for exactly this reason that Gong No-sa had turned tail and fled rather than face her while the Hwacheom barrier stood.
But that unlimited supply held only within Seoul. And the restriction applied not merely along the horizontal axis, but the vertical one as well. Even within Seoul's boundaries, rise above two hundred meters and the link to the land severed — and with it, the endless flow of power.
And the chairman's office Baek Gong-ju had business with sat at the very top of this Cosmos tower, on the 120th floor.
Well beyond two hundred meters, naturally.
The elevator stopped at the 100th. To reach the chairman's office, one had to transfer here to the private express elevator that led there alone.
"Tsk tsk tsk. Whoever built this blasted tower had no regard for convenience at all..."
As she adjusted her tinted glasses and stepped out of the elevator, the smile vanished from Baek Gong-ju's lips in an instant.
She'd braced for, at most, a squad of A-Grade psychics. But—
"We meet again."
Waiting for her on the 100th floor was Gong No-sa.
"So it's the old crone who ran away with her tail between her legs..."
Banter forgotten in a heartbeat, Baek Gong-ju flashed a smile that was pure provocation.
"Hmph. Back then I merely acted rationally, avoiding that fraudulent ability of yours."
But—
"This place is over two hundred meters above ground. That irritating, unlimited supply of yours is severed. At last, we can fight on equal footing."
"Kukukuku. Then allow me to disabuse you of a misunderstanding — what earned me my Special Grade was not an anomaly case in Seoul. It was the one that broke out on Jeju Island."
With those words, Baek Gong-ju lunged at Gong No-sa.
"Let's see just how impressive that lofty skill of yours really is!"
In that instant, Gong No-sa's shadow rippled and spread in a vast tide across the floor around them. From the shadows that swallowed the entire corridor, monsters of every conceivable shape came boiling out.
"The Ghost-Shadow Dark Curse Art... You're one of the Mosan sect, aren't you?"
"Think whatever you like!"
The shadow monsters bared fangs and claws, closing in on Baek Gong-ju from every direction. And then—
"Hup!"
Baek Gong-ju stamped her foot down hard.
But the power packed into that single stomp was anything but brute force.
FWAAAAAASH!
Baek Gong-ju had used the footfall itself as the trigger for her spellcraft.
"The Treading-the-Star Steps—?!"
"Did you think step-craft belonged to Daoism alone, you half-dead hag?!"
Stomping and leaping in rhythm had always been the most fundamental rite for summoning the gods in Korean shamanism. Naturally, it had its own spellcraft — the Nalli art, the Donning of Shoes.
The spell that burst outward with her stomp scattered the shadow monsters that had been converging to shred her. And immediately after—
"Hup!"
Baek Gong-ju stamped down once more. This time, though, the purpose of the stomp was not to repel an attack, but to destroy the floor itself.
"You deranged old woman—!"
Under the Nalli art, the floor of the 100th story turned to sand from the point of her stamp and caved inward. Baek Gong-ju and Gong No-sa plunged down along with it.
"You lunatic...! Do you have no awareness that you're supposed to represent the Paranormal Administration Bureau?!"
"I already raised a barrier to keep people out. And seeing how they prepared to greet me, they'll have their evacuation drills sorted too. Which means there's no reason to hold back, now is there? Heheheh!"
"You're a madwoman, through and through! Between you and that cult-leader charlatan, not one Korean Special Grade has a functioning brain!"
Even as he spat the words, Gong No-sa wove a hand seal. Not a mudra of Buddhism or Esoteric Buddhism, but a seal unique to the Mosan sect — and with it, the shadows bound by the Nalli art rose up around Baek Gong-ju once more.
"Die!"
The shadows sprouted jagged spikes, enclosing her in a cage of darkness. But in that very moment—
"O Great Lord of the Jakdu Blade, descend!"
KWAGAGAGAGAK!
With Baek Gong-ju's cry, the shadows were shredded apart.
Slash.
"...Weren't connections supposed to sever above two hundred meters?"
Thud.
"Drawing spiritual power from Seoul's ley lines carries a distance limit, true..."
Baek Gong-ju rested the meter-long jakdu blade — somehow already in her hand — casually across her shoulder.
"But when you borrow the power of a god, what does distance have to do with anything?"