Night Outing (5)
Blood burst free in a hot rush, gushing in thick pulses from the upper body split clean apart.
"Ghk—!"
Yu Gyeongsu's eyes bulged as his hands fumbled over his own torso.
The wound... it won't regenerate easily...!
The blade-path had ridden his ribs and severed the heart along the way. Blood kept surging backward, soaking his lungs, and neither a groan nor a proper breath would come.
Khh...!
Even so, Yu Gyeongsu's life did not snap. His flesh had been made one with an anomaly. He had already walked far too long a road to still be called human.
The heart... I only have to regenerate the heart!
Shuddering violently, he forced himself up from where he lay. It was in that very instant, as he made to flee this place in desperation—
"Hurts, doesn't it? It won't knit back together so easily."
Bihyung came up behind him, breathing out a chill killing intent.
"The power I've cultivated is rat poison to anomalies."
It was a nature that held even against the greatest yokai under heaven. There was no chance his sun would fail to take on some anomaly of a lower grade than that, and it was precisely because he held that certainty that Bihyung had struck Yu Gyeongsu with his own attack, rather than with Dueogsi's.
"But no matter how much you hurt—did you hurt worse than those children?"
Yu Gyeongsu crawled wretchedly across the floor, his whole body trembling, and still Bihyung felt no pity. Only revulsion. How could a wretch who understood pain so well have done such vicious things to others? The disgust ran deep.
"Hurt a while longer. Atone for those children, and die."
At those words, Yu Gyeongsu's twisted brow turned toward him. Why in the world could the man not understand his great work? The bastard clearly housed a subjugated anomaly in his own body.
"That's the face of a man who doesn't understand."
Bihyung read the thought with ridiculous ease. Ugly selfishness. A nauseating, wholly self-centered mind.
"Don't bother trying to understand. For the likes of you, even dying satisfied would be a luxury."
As he spoke and lifted Guiokdo, Yu Gyeongsu's eyes flew wide.
With a wet, rupturing burst, the man's flesh exploded outward and began to change into some vast black mass of slime.
"I... wasn't... going to... go this faaar...!!"
The resonance of the voice. The syllables of the words. Each and every one of them sounded like an anomaly. He had abandoned being human—handed the reins of his flesh to the anomaly and become, barely but truly, such a thing himself.
"I-I'll... k-kill... youuuu..."
His head didn't seem to be turning properly; the ends of his words stretched absurdly long. But it was not only the tails of his sentences that were lengthening.
His energy's amplifying, too.
Like his swelling frame, the anomaly's presence—scarcely felt a moment ago—grew steadily thicker, raising over the whole area a domain in which formations lay tangled together.
Every path is a road to death.
The scenery around them burned a seething red. Whichever way one set a foot, the world in every direction was red, as if it led straight into death. Of all the anomalies he had ever met, this was the most arrogant, the most self-centered domain there could be.
Even so, Bihyung looked at the thing with an utterly unbothered face.
"You done? All that thrashing."
Did Yu Gyeongsu know? From the moment he cast off humanity and became one with the anomaly, he had ceased to be any match at all.
His internal injuries improved and his body grew sturdier, so he must have gotten the wrong idea.
With a single roar from Dueogsi, the anomaly the man had been wielding had chosen death of its own accord, out of fear. The surroundings lay reflected in Bihyung's sunken eyes. Had the man still been intact it might have been different, but fused into one body with an anomaly, he was Bihyung's natural counter. A dokkaebi's presence pressed anomalies down, so a man who had originally been 6th Rank could no longer bring his true power to bear. At best, 5th Rank. Perhaps lower still. And amid all that, Bihyung had seized the crossing of yin and yang and brought to bear a Play-Spirit Command on par with the very peak of the 5th Rank. The man's body was critical. It was hanging by a thread.
"Let's wrap this up. He's not the sort to repent."
At the sound of Bihyung's voice, the Night Parade of a Hundred Ghosts nodded, their faces hard.
⟨ Bewitching Fox Art ⟩
Foxfire drifted up within Mina's grasp, rising together with her voice. It was the gift of the bloodline she carried, the kin of the Bewitching Fox—sorcery of the sort fox yokai wielded, taking shape at last.
⟨ Phantom Fox ⟩
As in the space a nine-tailed fox had shown them once before, the foxfire changed into a bleak mist, and the anomaly's domain that had blanketed the area was gradually neutralized.
Within that mist, three dokkaebi under Dueogsi sprang into action.
"Strike up the music!"
"Eolssu!"
They fell short of a fox yokai's transformation arts and sorceries, yet dokkaebi too were a tribe that loved to trick the eye and play their pranks. Inside Mina's illusion they swelled their own bodies and spread a playground wide.
"Die, you fiend!"
"A bastard like you needs a beating!"
"Eolssu!"
Each of them seized a dokkaebi club and began to thrash the Yu Gyeongsu who had become an anomaly. He tried to strike back, but strangely enough, the moment he pierced a dokkaebi's body the thing turned into a broom, or a shovel, or a hoe. In the end, his vision thrown into chaos, he could not so much as twitch. All he could do was take the beating.
"Dueogsi."
"Yes, Boss."
"Let's go."
Bihyung, who had been staring straight at that wretched shape, released Eodugi's shroud and turned his eyes to Dueogsi. It would be the first time he wore Dueogsi, newly inducted into the Night Parade.
"...Yes!"
It was a first for him as well, and Dueogsi hesitated for a breath. Then he met Bihyung's eyes and nodded.
A moment later Dueogsi's body wrapped around him, covering Bihyung as he held Guiokdo forth.
A heavy boom rolled out.
A middle-rank yokai—no. A yokai whose true body's caliber had reached somewhere higher still—closed around him. It felt as though his reason might be devoured at any moment. Even so, Bihyung's presence tuned that force and, of its own accord, wound the fierce power along one edge of Guiokdo.
Yu Gyeongsu recognized it and jerked his head around, a moment too late. Bihyung's blade was already raised high, and already falling.
Guiokdo, clad in Dueogsi's hegemonic might, came down. A single straight line. Its trajectory was dazzling to the point of cruelty, and chilling to the point of beauty.
"U... ah...!!"
Yu Gyeongsu twisted in desperation, trying to throw himself clear. But why was it that no matter how he rolled this way and tumbled that, the path of Bihyung's falling blade never once left his head?
A flash in the east. A flash in the west.
He, whose footsteps could not be carelessly traced, was one of the greatest terrors among the common folk.
The passage he had seen when Dueogsi was inducted into the Hundred Ghosts—or rather, the original text that had built the fellow's folklore. Befitting that power, Bihyung's blade roamed through the void and dealt only in a result already foreseen.
A clean, dry cut.
Guiokdo passed through and clove Yu Gyeongsu's body. There was no wetness of blood, no death-rattle of a life ending. That was the last of the one who had become an anomaly.
Bihyung looked at the corpse, sheared by Guiokdo's keen edge and burst apart beneath that hegemonic force. He gazed at it for a long moment, then closed his eyes and whispered to the souls of the children still waiting beyond the river of the dead.
Be at peace.
Please—in the next life, may you never meet a human like that. May you live a happier one. He wished it with all his heart.
...Thank you.
Hyung. You were seriously amazing!
Strange. The children's weeping, which had carried from beyond the river, could no longer be heard. In its place came the sound of them laughing, bright and tumbling, and voices thick with tears, as if they were forcing themselves not to cry for his sake. Then, little by little, that sound too was erased.
"It's... over, right?"
Mina came up beside him and asked.
"...Yeah. It's all over."
The villain was dead, and the children's souls had passed on in peace. Only then did Bihyung loosen his hardened expression and manage a smile close to his usual one.
That was the moment.
"Lord!"
Eodugi, released from the shroud some time ago and returned to his proper form, came bouncing over with something held in his mouth.
"Hm?"
"I found it where that wretch's laboratory was, I did!"
Bihyung took it from him. The pages were thick with records of where the children had been procured, and of whether any of them had originally had homes.
This... I'll have to entrust it to someone I can trust.
He knew a person who could use these pages to pressure the clan and exact a thorough revenge. Leave them in those hands, and he could secure, at least in some measure, the safety of the children's parents—and of the orphans being kidnapped even now.
He was thinking of that person, tucking the research materials into his robes, when something else caught his eye.
"Hm?"
A line, as if written only a moment ago, its ink still wet and slightly blurred.
— A singularity discovered in the Library Committee Chair.
— A probability exists that she noticed the hidden existence within the Parasite Ghost Story.
— Even the faculty failed to notice it, so how......
Nothing followed after that. Judging by the contents, this was what the man had been writing in the very moment Bihyung burst in.
The Library Committee Chair noticed the Parasite Ghost Story? How?
Looking at the line, Bihyung was caught by a doubt much like Yu Gyeongsu's own.
Even the faculty didn't notice. Even I wouldn't have, if a half-yokai's senses hadn't told me something was wrong.
What was more, the Chair was clumsier in detection arts than others of the same rank. For someone like her, noticing the Parasite Ghost Story ought to have been a distant impossibility.
Then... surely not?
"...It can't be. Can it."
Bihyung shook his head. Even granting everything else, the Chair being a half-yokai was a step too far.
She must have had some other means. Or been carrying an object tied to it.
That was the more likely possibility. Even so, he could not help the shred of suspicion that remained.
I'll have to see her soon.
He still owed her the favor she had asked, in any case. Thinking so, he slipped this document into his robes as well.
"Enough. Let's go."
The anomalous space Yu Gyeongsu had made was gradually collapsing. The domain existed inside the Academy, and yet it was a place that had never been recorded—a place that would vanish forever together with Yu Gyeongsu's death. What Bihyung had done here, the Guardian Corps would almost certainly never notice.
"Then, it's about time we..."
It was right around then. The moment he released Dueogsi and slid Guiokdo away inside the Dokkaebi Bat, the world before Bihyung's eyes seemed to spin.
...Huh?
Then, regardless of any will to hold on, his body tilted and fell.
"Bihyung!"
Even at Mina's urgent cry, he could not come back to himself. The crossing of yin and yang, and the reckless outpouring of power beyond his rank—the backlash of both had come for him.
Ah... damn it...
Have to... get out...
And so Bihyung's eyes closed, and his consciousness went out.
Thus he neither heard nor saw it. A familiar chime, and the messages rising one after another in its wake—and there, along one side of those messages: