A Night Outing (2)
The Hour of the Rat was drawing to its close. By a modern clock, it was a late night creeping up on one in the morning.
Well past midnight, the academy lay bleak and uneasy.
"......"
The cadets had already gone to bed for the sake of tomorrow, and even those still training deep into the night moved only as shadows within the lights of the indoor halls. Down those desolate streets blew a wind colder still.
"......"
Baekgwi Yahaeng—the Night Parade of a Hundred Ghosts.
They did not number a full hundred, yet not one of them could be dismissed as some vulgar, common ghost. Bihyung's hundred ghosts hid themselves in the dark and stepped out for a night stroll through the sleeping academy.
"Bihyung."
Only Mina, the sole one enrolled as a cadet, walked at his side, matching him stride for stride.
"Yeah?"
"...Do we actually know anything about who we're up against?"
An instructor. They might not be full professors, but they were people rigorously chosen by clans under the Association. Their rank, and their strength, would be nothing slight. Watching Bihyung march off to pick an open fight with someone like that, Mina couldn't help the worry crowding in from every side.
Bihyung only smiled, perfectly at ease.
"Yeah. I know exactly who he is."
How could he not? In the game, catching that bastard had chained into a branching story, and through it he had scorched the man's entire clan to ash.
"The Gwiryeong Yu Clan."
The house this villain belonged to—and a clan whose whole focus lay in subjugating anomalies and putting them to use.
"His rank's high, so he'll be decent enough with spellcraft and the rest. But his real strength is formations, and commanding the anomalies he's tamed."
Know that much, and you could fight him a full step below his ordinary rank.
Even so, an instructor is 6th Rank at the least. Drop him a step and he's still 5th Rank.
And he had to go hunt a man like that, starting now. It wasn't hopeless, though. If anything, their chances ran over.
"Mina. Just remember one thing."
"...What?"
"We're a hard counter to anomalies."
Half-yokai, the both of them. The nature of a yokai dwelt in Mina just as it did in him—and not the blood of some weak thing, but of a yokai bearing a formidable grade.
"Can you put out your presence?"
"Uh... I'm not really sure."
"Want to try touching your yokai core?"
At his words Mina nodded and turned her awareness to the core. In the lower dantian, spiritual power had gathered, and above it a yokai core circled like a satellite, spilling a bright radiance.
Strange.
Until now she had deliberately left it alone. She still didn't really know how to use it, and she had no wish to create a situation where her yokai power was exposed. She was one of Bihyung's hundred ghosts. The thought that her very existence might bring harm down on him had been enough, all on its own, to keep her hands off the core.
But not anymore. His permission had been given, and Mina looked into the yokai core as if nothing remained to hold her back. She was a little surprised. No—she was very surprised.
...The density of this energy is higher than the spiritual power I've built.
It wasn't only denser. Its purity was extraordinary too. Cleaner, maybe, than most spiritual power... no. Would thinking that be rude to exorcists?
"Boss."
While Mina was fixed upon her core, Dueogsi spoke from within Bihyung's shadow.
"That... it couldn't be a fox bead, could it?"
A fox bead?
Bihyung knew of the thing as well. Wasn't that how the old tales went? Live nine hundred years, and a fox yokai becomes a nine-tailed fox, and they possess a fox bead, the equal of a dragon's wish-fulfilling pearl.
Obtain one, and it grants the ultimate truth of a single field. Wasn't that it?
Hold it and look upon the earth, and you could read the flow of the earth's veins—which land was fertile, and which would rise in value. Hold it and look to the sky, and you could read the designs of heaven. A legend forged by those fox yokai had, with the passing of years, come to settle in the body of Mina, descendant of the nine-tailed fox.
Did she gain that too, awakening the two-tailed fox and absorbing it back into herself?
"Even so, it still falls far short of what one would call a fox bead. If I may compare it, the level is closer to two tails than to nine."
Bihyung nodded at Dueogsi's words.
So it'll grow along with her rank.
Which meant that when Mina reached 9th Rank, a complete fox bead would take form. Perhaps, like the peculiarity dwelling in his own yokai core, something of that kind would arise in her as well.
The reason it still isn't showing on the asset list might be that it isn't finished.
Looking ahead to that future, Bihyung watched her. Little by little her air grew bleak—and bewitching.
Ugh. This again.
Aloof, and alluring: an atmosphere that could charm a person with a look alone, without a single word. Her bloodline, rated all the way up at SSS—Beauty to Topple Nations.
"Bihyung?"
Only after he raised a measure of his own presence against that haughty question could he barely drag his wits back together.
God. What is this, a fox charm? She's just straight-up bewitching people.
"Well? How'd it feel, letting your presence out?"
"So this is my presence... it feels mysterious, somehow. Like I'm wearing clothes that fit, and also like I'm wearing clothes that don't."
She was half yokai. It couldn't be helped. For the record, what Bihyung felt was nothing like that—more as if some enormous garment were settling over him. What could he do? It was a dokkaebi's presence, and it reached EX-grade.
"You'll get used to it, bit by bit. Anyway, your presence is on the special side too. Anomalies tamed by the Gwiryeong Yu Clan—you should be more than able to handle those."
And above all, he had a trump card of his own. So Bihyung walked on with Mina. Far ahead. Until the hidden laboratory came into view.
A space subtly warped out of true. A place where things seemed to show through the gaps between shards of broken glass.
There, Instructor Yu Gyeongsu gazed at the small capsule in his hand. An experiment the Gwiryeong Yu Clan had been preparing of late. No—more precisely, an experiment Yu Gyeongsu himself was leading.
The secret art of Gudok.
Long ago there was a tale: venomous creatures—centipedes, wasps, poison toads—were driven into a single jar and made to devour one another, until only the deadliest poison remained. That poison's name was Gudok. Through anomalies, Yu Gyeongsu was recreating it.
Complete this, and it would be no stretch for my name to rise to the very top of the Association.
But for that, the secret had to be kept all the tighter. To finish the art of Gudok, he had already set one foot, ever so lightly, past the bounds of the human.
Kyaaaah—
In that instant, a young girl's scream seemed to ring from inside the capsule.
"I'm tired. Did I keep her shut in too long?"
Yu Gyeongsu, however, persisted in playing dumb, and turned his head to the monitor on the wall. His own day's work was finished. Now came the orders his clan had handed down.
"Hmm. The anomalies I planted in the cadets are functioning as they should."
He had spent a long time preparing this space, and from this year on he had approached the cadets while playing the kindly instructor, secretly planting anomalies in them. He wasn't worried about being caught. An urban legend of a parasite that might kill its host—the anomaly had been born from that tale, so it would not be easily discovered.
"Just as I thought. Most of them are asleep."
The screen was pitch black. That meant the parasitic anomaly could see nothing through its host's eyes. This was how Yu Gyeongsu gathered information on the academy, and how he had been collecting weaknesses with which to seize the cadets and shake them.
"Tsk. My experiment matters more than drudgery like this. The clan doesn't seem to understand priorities."
It was for the sake of taking, ahead of time, the leashes of cadets who would become future strength. He knew it was important. It simply wasn't very pleasant. Or rather—not until a certain female cadet stepped into someone's room.
"Hm? That one... the Library Committee chair?"
The woman who also chaired the Disciplinary Committee. Dressed in pajamas, she was receiving a female cadet. Judging by the two of them, they seemed to be friends. The friend who carried his anomaly slipped naturally into the chair's dormitory, and they were deep in cozy talk.
"......"
Yu Gyeongsu couldn't bring himself to listen to a word of it. Only the chair's figure, glimpsed now and then—a slim waist, and the wide hips that set it off all the more. Lust stirred in him at the sight.
"Hoh? I had no interest, so I never got a proper look. To think she looked like that. She's my type."
He smacked his lips and leaned closer to the monitor, meaning to drink in a little more of her.
That was the moment.
"Hm? You..."
On the screen, the chair spoke those words and stared hard at her friend—and then her eyes turned ice-cold.
"Hup—!"
Yu Gyeongsu toppled backward before he knew it and burst the parasite linked to the friend, killing it.
"W-what? Was I found out?"
...No. That couldn't be. Even the faculty had failed to notice the anomaly he had tamed. No matter that her talent surpassed her years and contended for the very top among every cadet, his anomaly ought not to have been discovered.
...Still, it's dangerous. I should make a note.
His hands flew as he set it down on a memo slip. It was around then.
"......!!"
A killing edge, felt all at once at his back. Yu Gyeongsu swept the notes aside in a hurry and flung his own body after them.
Shhk!
The wall sheared clean through, and with it the rift in the space split a little wider. From within spilled a voice thick with regret.
"Ah, so close. I could've taken the head off in one hit."
The voice was far too familiar to Yu Gyeongsu.
"...Cadet Shin Bihyung? Why are you..."
"Ah, well. I stepped out for a bit of a night stroll, took a wrong turn, and what do I see but you, secretly filming female cadets."
Bihyung grinned.
"So I gave the blade a swing."
"...Do you even know what kind of nonsense you're spouting?"
"Hm? Which part is nonsense?"
Bihyung tilted his head as if he genuinely couldn't understand. Yu Gyeongsu removed his characteristic glasses and looked at him with eyes far colder than usual. By then his manner of speech, too, had slipped the act and returned to what it truly was.
"That isn't what I'm asking. Shin Bihyung. How did you get in here? You would have had to cross an anomaly's domain."
It was an anomaly he had tamed. If someone meant to attack him, a warning ought to have reached him. And yet there had been no ripple at all—which meant his anomaly had never been attacked.
How?
Then how had the boy been able to enter this place? No matter how he turned it over, Yu Gyeongsu could not understand. As if that feeling were leaking out of him, Bihyung watched the trembling eyes and let out a low sneer.
"I snuck in, obviously. Is your head not working?"
Where the laboratory was. How the inside was laid out. Bihyung knew it all, clear as day.
How many times do you think I've cleared this?
Unbelievable, honestly. But the man wouldn't know that, so Bihyung, ever helpful, set about explaining how he'd gotten in.
"Thanks to this."
Blue flame rushed together, and the Dokkaebi Gamtu took shape. A single horn of blue fire grew along one side of his brow, and with it a presence of overwhelming weight surged up.
Vooooom—!
"What..."
Yu Gyeongsu could not string another word together. Shock upon shock. That the boy had found this place. That he had never once met the anomalies posted as sentries along every approach. But more shocking than any of that...
...My hands are shaking? Me? At nothing more than a cadet?
The tremor crawling little by little across his skin came, unmistakably, from fear.
How can he unleash a presence that oppressive? Shin Bihyung is 3rd Rank at best.
A rank a full half lower than his own 6th Rank. A gap that could not be expressed in mere numbers. Consider the wall between them, and one might as well call it earth and heaven.
...It's all this grotesque, uncanny aura. I don't know what it is, but it keeps wringing my spirit...
Even so, he couldn't simply stand there and take it. He worked his circulation method, sent the energy within his body up into his mind, and at last pulled a step free of the pressure bearing down on him. He let out the breath that had clogged in his chest, forcing the feeling out of himself, and his eyes shone cold.
"You bastard. So you were the same kind as me."
"Who the hell said trash like you could compare yourself to me?"
At those words, Bihyung's brow furrowed.
"I'd rather not get lumped in with some creep who secretly films cadets."
"That isn't what I—"
"And."
Bihyung's voice dropped, hard. As if he had packed the wailing of ghosts from the very floor of the underworld into each syllable, it raised the hair on the skin.
Blue spiritual flame blazed up in Bihyung's eyes. From that moment his shadow dyed itself dark—darker still. As if to swallow the cracked space whole, it spread.
"Dueogsi."
The hour of the hundred ghosts had come.
"Yes, Boss."
From the shadow burst a single arm of small stature. It pierced Yu Gyeongsu through the abdomen.