Night Outing (4)
Glug... blub, blub. Bubbles climbed from somewhere deep inside him, and with them came a hunger so profound it seemed to hollow him out.
On any other day he would have gone rigid at the growl of an anomaly. Yu Gyeongsu no longer bothered.
"A fine resonance."
Far from fear, the anomaly's voice rising out of his own gut left him quietly satisfied. This was the creature he had researched and cultivated. By swallowing it, he had stepped beyond the limits of a human being.
"The ones who looked down on me... those arrogant bastards who clawed their way into the high ranks and strutted about as if the whole world already belonged to them."
Soon they would be crawling at his feet. The anomaly he had made would only grow stronger, feeding on people's fear and on their souls.
"And all of that potential will come to me as well."
Was that not what they called a virtuous cycle?
"Some will curse me as a villain, or as a walker of the Outer Path. Let them howl. It is only the clamor of ignorant rabble who understand nothing."
Envy and naked slander, from fools who stared at a single tree and never once saw the forest. Yes, many lives would be spent to raise this power. What did that matter? Grow stronger still, and he had only to save more people than he sacrificed.
Kyaaaak...
A little girl's crying rang at his ear. No—a hallucination. Once, he would have ignored it. Not now.
"Yes, yes. You bless the road ahead of me too. Count it an honor. You'll be climbing to the heights right along with me."
The words had barely left him.
"Hm?"
A sensation struck all at once. Like a spider spinning its web, he whipped his subjugated anomalies into a rampage and spread them through the area in a dense lattice—stabilizing them, since the fusion was not yet complete. Something snagged in that net.
"So he's coming."
Yu Gyeongsu thought of the moth who had granted him a new way of seeing, and who was now hurling himself into the fire to die.
"Shin Bihyung."
The corners of his mouth climbed higher than any human muscle could manage.
"But tell me. Can you really break through the domain of the anomalies I rule?"
No one could.
"Hahaha!!"
A laugh of pure arrogance shook the dark around him.
Hwoooong—! Bihyung's presence crushed the ground flat. This was the stature of a dokkaebi who had touched the supreme realm, and mere anomalies had no hope of enduring it. And yet, strangely, they neither gave way nor showed the slightest fear.
One look, and he was certain.
He drove his subjugated anomalies into a rampage.
It was a tamer's trick: destroy the creature's reason and drag nothing but raw output to the surface. Never an easy thing. Subjugation did not erase an anomaly's danger, and once it rampaged it ceased to heed its master at all, reverting to something primal—no, worse. Until that power burned out and the creature settled, it could exert strength beyond even its original limits.
Which was why tamers saved a rampage for the last of last resorts, when they had already resolved to die together with their enemy, and only after calculating that no civilian or comrade would be caught in it. It was not a method one unleashed a short distance from the Academy.
He's really decided to go feral.
Something else was wrong, though. How could rampaging anomalies stand in ranks that orderly?
They aren't even backing away from my presence. They don't look afraid at all.
Did that mean their terror of Yu Gyeongsu outweighed whatever fear they ought to feel toward him? Bihyung's face had just begun to set like stone.
"...Bihyung. There's something over there."
Mina pointed—above the anomalies' heads, at a place where nothing was visible. She was certain something waited there.
"I don't know why... but I feel like I can hear it."
The moment the words reached him, he summoned the Dokkaebi Gamtu and stepped into the spirit realm. The world went half-translucent, and against that wash certain shapes burned far too clear.
"Waaah!"
"Mom... I'm so cold..."
"Where is this? Mom! Dad!!"
Children, crying. Their faces were twisted, their skin ruined past any decent telling. One stood without a stitch of clothing, rime crusted over bare flesh. Another sobbed as they limped along on a leg gone necrotic. And to describe them that way was to account for less than a tenth of their number.
Bihyung looked, and bit down until his teeth ached. He went to them, sank down, and gathered the little bodies into his warmth.
"Hiek...!"
"Hic... please don't hit me... I was bad..."
How much had it hurt? How long had they suffered? He could not truly share a pain like that, so he did the only thing left to him and tried, in silence, to understand. Without a word he offered his embrace, and he did not stop until not one cold body was left outside it.
"...It hurt a lot, didn't it."
"..."
"It's all r—"
He could not make himself say all right. So he changed the words.
"I'll get you out of this."
"...Really?"
"Yeah. I swear."
Only then did they slowly lift their faces from his chest to look at him.
"The bad guy? I'll be the one to punish him."
He grinned as he said it, and a thin smile began to settle over the children's faces. Their eyes were still crying. Their mouths were smiling. Someone might have called it grotesque. Bihyung knew better: the face of a person struggling to stand and smile through grief was always that desperate.
At those words their forms began to thin. Then, all at once, they moved toward his body—toward his lower dantian, the yodan, his yokai core.
What— this isn't me eating them—
He meant to shout it. The words died in his throat.
...The yodan isn't eating them. The children—their souls—are coming this way on their own.
Deep inside the yodan they clasped one another's hands and took their place, and in that moment he understood. Avenge us. Use our strength, and bring heaven's punishment down on him. They had stepped into his yodan themselves for that alone.
"...All right."
He gave one firm nod and rose. The Gamtu came away. Back in the material world, he closed his fist. The steps he had been taking on nothing but rage toward a wicked man gained another layer over them: responsibility.
"So get out of my way."
The rampaging anomalies filled his eyes, and now he understood why they had kept obeying Yu Gyeongsu even in that state.
He planted the children's souls inside them and bound the creatures to himself.
That was how they had been able to move with such order. Not anymore. Their souls had entered his yodan, and the link between Yu Gyeongsu and the anomalies was gone.
His presence poured out, thick and heavy. Hwoooong—! At the same time the grudges lodged in the yodan seeped upward and steeped themselves into that presence. Clear intent crystallized upon it, and form was born.
A presence that carried an Intent-Form was no longer formless. It rimed his footsteps and crushed the anomalies underfoot, because it had become a weapon.
Brrrk... krrrrk... Step. And another step. With every pace he took, the anomalies barring his way foamed at the mouth and drove their own heads into the dirt. Then, as if some gigantic foot had come down, their existences burst apart and left only scraps upon the earth.
When the last of that wall was broken, Yu Gyeongsu's face hung clear in the distance, stark with shock.
"Yu Gyeongsu."
Bihyung's voice went cold, a bleak resonance that soaked the air around them.
"Wh-what...!!"
Yu Gyeongsu could not make sense of it. Rampaging anomalies. The children's souls he had planted inside them. They were supposed to heed his command alone and stand in the enemy's way. Why, then, had they slammed their own heads down and chosen death?
And worse—
The trembling in my body... why is it worse than before?
That cold gaze—why was the anomaly fused into his flesh shaking harder at the sight of it?
"...I see. So you have learned the heretical arts as well!"
Did he even realize? Those words were an admission that he himself had learned them.
He fell silent. The hole Dueogsi had blown clean through his abdomen sealed shut. His color had gone bloodless, and yet the internal injuries seemed wholly mended; nothing obstructed the flow of his energy. Regeneration no ordinary human could show. A road walked by mastering heretical art, and one that could rightly be named evil—unmistakably a branch of the Outer Path.
"A man about to die doesn't need to know."
Bihyung did not indulge the question. Instead he settled slowly into his stance and watched the change taking place inside his own body.
Because I took the anomalies, maybe. My yokai power has grown a great deal.
Yang energy had always held the advantage. Now his yokai power had edged slightly ahead of it. For an exorcist, that was no good thing. Right now, he didn't care. It would be the keen blade that cut down the thing Yu Gyeongsu had become.
Click. Something seemed to open, and the yokai power that had slept quietly within the Jeoksu Bullu soaked through his entire body.
Hwoooong. The presence breathing off him, quiet as it was, made it impossible to mistake him for human. A yokai, through and through. Something plainly beyond humankind. For this moment, he would not mind it. He would simply go forward.
With that resolve, he called his yokai art up.
The fastest thing I can move with. Wind.
Wind, of the Five Great Yokai Arts. He laid it over his body and took a step.
Paang! His foot kicked the earth, and his body accelerated. He draped Eodugi over himself like a living shroud, drew the Guiokdo from within the Dokkaebi Bat, and closed his hand around it. He looked like a dark wind blowing in.
"Wasted effort!"
Yu Gyeongsu jolted back to himself and worked his hands in a rush. A body fused with an anomaly, and power swelling still further on fear and grudge—yet instinct spent that strength on the arts he had polished all his life.
In the end, it was the right choice. Had he simply spewed the anomaly's power raw, Bihyung's presence would have crushed it out of existence before it ever touched him.
A 6th Rank art flew straight and true, aimed at Bihyung's throat.
He watched it with an indifferent eye, then called out.
"Dueogsi."
"Yes, Boss."
No sooner asked than done. Dueogsi kicked off the ground and loosed a fist-wind, and the art driving in on Bihyung skewed off its line. A hairline gap. Bihyung, eyes fixed on it, poured more strength into the foot already driving against the earth.
Hwarreuk! In that instant the yang energy in his lower dantian—crushed until now beneath the yokai power that served as yin—answered, and thrashed. Strange. He ought to have been alarmed. He wasn't. Feeling the yang energy move, he thought he knew exactly what it intended.
It wants to keep up.
As if refusing to let the yokai power run wild alone, the yang energy clenched down and chased the yin's heels. And that force made real a possibility Bihyung had once only imagined.
Pajijik—! The crossing of yin and yang. Explosive force, born in a single instant. It lasted no longer than a blink, but his body rode that fleeting moment.
Paaang—! He accelerated again. The black wind became a storm, and he moved at will along the hairline flaw in the art's path.
Whoong! Before he knew it, he had already passed Yu Gyeongsu, flicking the blade clean.
Chwareuk! Blood along the edge spattered the ground. And with it—
Puhwaaak! Yu Gyeongsu's upper body split open, and blood poured down like a waterfall.