The Fox (2)
The moment the fox finished speaking, Bihyung understood everything.
So Mina had yokai blood in her too.
The puzzle in his head clicked into place. The shape she had worn as a villain had been something beastlike, and the reason was plain enough: that blood must have awakened. She had been eaten. By her own blood. By the nature of a yokai.
“Vermin? Hah. A mere dokkaebi dares!”
Gumi cried it out and lashed her tails. In an instant a pressure rolled over him, as if a mountain were flying in. Bihyung kicked off the ground and slipped the blow.
The tail slammed into the earth, and the ground shattered, shards of stone spraying wide.
What kind of absurd power is this…
She had not even used some great art. For a human, it would have been no more than throwing a punch. And yet even that light motion set his flesh trembling.
How can she bring out strength like this?
No matter that the thing before his eyes was a nine-tailed fox, her existence had burst out of nowhere. She was not some creature that had been lingering at the academy, the way Eodugi had. She had flowed out of Mina’s blood. If she had been hiding with the full might of her true body, Mina would never have been classed as a mere 1st Rank.
Therefore—a bluff.
When Bihyung’s eyes swept their surroundings with grave care, a leisurely smile touched Gumi’s lips.
“You think just as this lady’s descendant did. And yet you cannot be ignorant of how that ended.”
Her tails surged up. Three of the nine cut across the empty air and came at Bihyung like sharpened spears.
Mina thought the same thing… and still couldn’t break through. That’s what she’s saying.
The words gave him a hint.
Every possibility she imagined. None of those laws held.
Nothing in the world was absolute. If you took one thing, it was only right that you give one thing up. All the more so for an anomaly that built its own nest and invited people inside. It had to be that way.
First, I shake her.
Shake her heart. Shake her mind. If her judgment turned rash, a way would show itself then.
The instant he decided it, Bihyung took the three spear-like tails with his body.
His body was driven helplessly backward.
Kh—!
The impact was like being hit by a dump truck. A dizzying pain raced up through his skull, but he endured it. It was not more than a half-yokai’s flesh could bear.
Move.
He drew up his dokkaebi force and set down his Roots. Into those Roots he loaded the Earth Art of the Five Elements, then at once called on the principle of mutual generation and brought forth the Metal Art.
Pain crashed in from ankle to calf, as if the muscle were tearing apart.
Adding mutual generation to the Roots was something I meant to try only after I had Mina’s buff…
He had stacked the principle of mutual generation not outside the body, but within it. The recoil was anything but light. Even so, Bihyung clenched his teeth and bore that too.
They haven’t torn all the way through.
The proof was that he still held the tail, and that he was still standing. Grinding his teeth until they seemed ready to crack, he stamped down a true step with a heavy thud.
Ghost-Judging Combat Art
Mutual Generation — Twofold Stack
Mountain Overturn
“What!?”
The fox, certain she had seized the advantage, realized in a single instant that her body was tipping. From the place where her tail was caught, her form lifted into the air. The ceiling, so distant a moment ago, drew near, and then her vision flipped all at once, and the ground became her sky.
With a savage boom, Gumi’s body was driven into the earth.
It was the dokkaebi’s yielding art that Eodugi had shown him before. Imitating it, he had taken the impact Gumi herself had displayed and, together with the strength reinforced by mutual generation, slammed the whole of it back into her.
Once… more!
As if hauling a load, he heaved the enormous tail onto his shoulder and hauled again. Mountain Overturn unfolded in succession. The Ghost-Judging Combat Art, strengthened still further by mutual generation—each blow truly seemed to overturn a mountain, and vast crashes rolled out one after another.
But Gumi was not fool enough to simply take it.
“You… a lowly spirit dares!”
She drove her tail into the ground, and her body shot upward. Bihyung tried to drag the captured tail with her, but it would not budge. At once he let go and took the demon blade in hand again. He looked into eyes whose will to fight had not broken even after he had shown her the difference in strength, and Gumi’s brow twisted without end.
“Very well. So you trust in your strength, do you? Just like a dokkaebi who knows nothing but his body.”
In that case—
“I shall show you a realm you could not reach though you died and woke again!”
The instant she said it, something caught in Bihyung’s senses.
Left. Something’s coming.
He wrenched his body aside in a hurry, but it was too late to dodge. He threw up an arm to guard his face.
Blue flame burst and swallowed the arm. Pain followed that did not lose even to the tail.
…Kh. If that had hit my head dead-on, I’d have lost consciousness on the spot.
How had she done it? There had been no warning at all.
I can see… a flow. But I can’t catch it.
His yokai force was lacking. The mimicry that ran in a dokkaebi’s blood could copy an opponent’s technique. But the smallness of his yokai force had only let him perceive the trick the nine-tailed fox wielded. It had not let him understand it.
If I had just a little more yokai force… I feel like I’d have a sure grip on it.
Then he would fill it.
Having reached that conclusion, Bihyung set his feet moving at once and sprayed arts without restraint. Flames leapt. Walls of earth rose, and from within them ore came forth. The effect of the Path of the Apex stacked atop it all, power that had slipped the limit of the 1st Rank. More than that, the yang energy held in his dokkaebi force had activated every last bit of it. The far end of the 2nd Rank—it was force enough to look like that much, at least.
But the nine-tailed fox blocked every assault with her tails at her ease, then sneered.
“Is that all?”
Know your place. Her tone said as much. Yet contrary to what she expected, the corner of Bihyung’s mouth had lifted, if only a little.
“Who said this was the end?”
His gaze fixed on a single point. The moment the nine-tailed fox noticed, she turned her senses there as a matter of course. She felt the domain of an anomaly.
What…?
The arts that had never reached her, the ones that had only brushed past, struck the anomaly’s domain dead-on. It was a domain already half-destroyed by Bihyung’s steps. It had no means of enduring a barrage of arts.
You don’t like her either, do you?
To the feeling in his heart, the yokai nature flowing in his blood answered in kind.
A low beast-growl, thick with irritation, as if the nine-tailed fox’s conduct displeased it.
An alliance.
And then, in the instant Bihyung and the yokai nature aligned their wills for the first time—
The anomaly, Dream Within the Mirror, is swallowed!
Delight of Gluttony is applied.
The anomaly, Dream Within the Mirror, has been digested without a trace!
The Ring of Gluttony added its effect. This was… not something he had expected.
Almost two anomalies’ worth. No. As much as exorcising three.
He had not planned it, but the yokai force that swelled in him now let him seize, with certainty, the trick the nine-tailed fox had spread across the area.
…The way she handles yin energy looks similar to the Five Elements, but something’s different.
Bihyung immediately mimicked the technique Gumi wielded.
Flame spread through empty air. But Bihyung was already long gone from that spot. The attack he had not been able to see finally settled inside his senses and began to be known.
“I see. Emptiness? Or space? Either way, she was slipping formulas into places that were empty.”
It was a trick that deserved to be called a yokai art.
What a cheat…
With only this, she could hold the advantage in any space at all. The very height of unfairness. But Bihyung realized that the formulas of yokai, which had taken the place of the Five Elements, had a flaw of their own.
The flame and the space were both different arts. But the power didn’t rise, and they carried no extra effect either.
In other words, they could not wield the principles of mutual generation and mutual overcoming.
It’s only that a yokai’s long life has piled up such vast yokai force that the power never falls short.
…Wait.
In that same breath, a question rose.
Then why is her yokai art so weak?
To put it bluntly, it was not weak. It had been enough to punch through the durability of a half-yokai body and deal damage. And yet—
If she has nine tails, that means she’s lived at least nine hundred years.
For an attack from someone like that to be this weak? It couldn’t be.
The natural disaster the dragon showed. I didn’t see it with my own eyes, but… I felt an enormous wave of power.
From one who bore the name of nine-tailed fox, he felt nothing of the kind. Only that it hurt. That was the whole of his impression.
…That’s it. This space itself was an illusion.
He had grasped the essence of the domain.
As expected. It really was a bluff.
The corner of Bihyung’s mouth twitched.
“…What is that.”
From that trace of a smile, the nine-tailed fox felt something ominous.
“What is that face, as if you have already won!”
Her tails shot upward. A fire-demon surged, scorching the whole area hot. The ground shuddered and gave birth to an earthquake. And a storm—and within it, the naked malice of a driving rain—bared its teeth at Bihyung.
……
Bihyung watched it all, and then—
The Gamtu.
Slowly, he called the Gamtu forth.
I draw in every presence I kept concealed.
The dokkaebi horns wreathed in blue flame became, in the next breath, a mighty presence, and crushed everything around them. The nine-tailed fox’s eyes flew wide.
Wh-what…
The space was breaking. No—cracks were running through the domain she herself had built. By none other than the caliber of a dokkaebi she had thought wretched.
Impossible.
How had a dokkaebi, treated as nothing more than a stray ghost of broad daylight, attained a stature like that? Even Dueogsi, who at times had commanded such things, had never reached a caliber of this kind…
Gwoeryeok Nansin…
In the nine-tailed fox’s eyes, Bihyung no longer looked human. He was the aggregate of every ghost. Each time his shadow wavered, it seemed as though the souls of countless spirits cried out.
With a sharp, ringing chime, the domain the nine-tailed fox had built shattered completely. She was no longer inside it. There was only a fox the size of a boulder, with two tails.
“So that was your true form.”
The agony, and the stature that had pressed down on his shoulders—all of it had been illusion. Nothing but phantom pain, felt inside the domain of the yokai art she had spread.
“Y-you dare… against this lady…”
The fox’s voice shook with fear. Looking at her, Bihyung smiled, quiet and small.
“If I had a mirror, I’d want to show you. How ridiculous you look right now.”
As he said it, he closed his hand around the demon blade. The fox’s trembling grew worse.
“M-my descendant rests within this lady’s belly! If you cut this lady, the descendant you cherish will not come through unscathed—”
“Then.”
Bihyung’s cold eyes took the fox in.
The pitch-black blade leveled itself at the fox and slowly drank in the presence that had been crushing the surroundings.
With the ability Bihyung originally possessed, it would have been impossible. The fox that had swallowed the body meant to use Mina’s soul in place of a shield. He had to avoid that and cut only the fox. A difficulty as tangled as difficulty could be.
But why?
In this moment, Bihyung felt that he could.
Ghost-Judging Combat Art.
He added more. Into the Roots, a human’s arts—and a yokai’s arts as well.
Even the presence that broke the domain. I pour that in too.
His presence soon stood behind him like a black shadow, wavering. Clear killing intent rested in those red eyes.
His lower dantian heated with violent speed, and dokkaebi force and yokai force erupted at the same time. Enduring even the pain born of their collision, he made the two energies coexist within the demon blade. Last of all, through the Gamtu, he gathered the spirit realm into his eyes.
Ghost-Judging Combat Art. No…
He gave his body over to that technique, now rising into something higher, something that could no longer be called by that name.
His demon blade split the empty air. A stroke swung from a good distance away. Even so—
“K-kh…”
The neck of the two-tailed fox was cut, and her abdomen split open. As if there were no longer anything to fear, Bihyung put the blade away and walked to the fallen fox’s corpse. He tore into the belly. The soft give of organs. The heat of blood still warm. Warmer than any of it was the warmth of a hand clasped in his.
From the belly of the boulder-sized fox, he drew out Mina, her eyes closed.
“…Mm…”
The moment the outside air touched her skin, her blood-crusted eyelids twitched, little by little. Mina’s eyes opened.
“B-Bihyung…?”
Through the blur of her vision she saw him: Bihyung, with blue horns half-burning.
“…I’m glad.”
He was smiling.