The Library Committee Chair (7)
Space came to a halt.
The dust of the cave, crumbling under the weight of his presence, and the beads of cold sweat on the foreigner—who had been sweating through a situation he could not begin to understand—stopped dead in the air, locked in perfect stillness. It was as if time itself had frozen.
...A voice.
Yes. The change had come the instant that voice reached him. And then, once more, the same voice returned to Bihyung's ear.
"Time Stop, is it... Humans are truly amusing. Plenty in ages past longed to halt time, and yet to spend it chasing carnal pleasure... Heh. Even this lady was impressed."
"What... are you?"
Bihyung's voice rode his presence and came out a growl. The cry of an enraged dokkaebi rang through the cave. Even beneath that presence, the other did not alter so much as the rise and fall of her distinctive cadence.
"Do you mean this lady?"
This was no opponent weaker than himself.
"If you would have this lady speak of what she is... no. It will be quicker if you see with your own eyes."
With those words, Bihyung's mind tore free of Eunyu's body. The moment he returned to his own, he realized his state was no different from that of a soul.
"What is this?"
"A spiritual body."
The instant the answer rang out, a thick fog began to fill the cave. And was that fog not dyed a vivid crimson, weaving an air of bewitching menace? It gathered into one and took a single shape: the body of a voluptuous woman, clad as if only the places that needed covering had been covered at all. The wings upon her back resembled a bat's.
And last of all—
...Horns.
The horns sprouting at the temples of her vivid pink hair were like a ram's. Bihyung knew a being of that kind rather well.
"A dream demon. A succubus."
"Oh? You know your lore. You must be a man after all. Are you fond of that sort of genre?"
"......"
The sudden, mischievous question struck him dumb, and when the dream demon saw his face, she giggled.
"It was only a jest. Do not make such a face."
"...What are you?"
"Did you not just say it with your own mouth?"
"Your name. The true name of what you are. Anyone who can pull off something on this scale... wouldn't have a shallow stature."
He might have looked, at a glance, as if he were speaking calmly, but Bihyung's mind was in considerable turmoil. This space was the committee chair's memory, realized through the library yokai, and authority over it belonged neither to him nor to the chair, but to that yokai. In exchange for creating a domain, the creature was bound to keep its rules. It could not intervene like this partway through.
Then the dream demon in front of me tore the library yokai's domain open on her own and descended into it.
How had this happened? Had she, like the dragon before, been imprisoned here?
Question chased question, raking through his thoughts—
"Your head seems to ache terribly. Would you care to rest in this lady's embrace? Such worries would vanish without a trace."
"Be quiet."
"Oh dear. And here I was rather confident in my bosom, for all that."
As she spoke, she cupped her breasts in her hands and lifted them, and the sight truly seemed to want for nothing—no. That was not the point.
"I told you to reveal what you are. You'd also do well to explain how you come to be here."
Fsssssh—!
Bihyung's presence surged and swept the thick crimson fog away all at once. A stature that yielded to none. A presence set apart. Displaying it with absolute certainty, he bluffed for all he was worth.
I can't gauge her level at all. Which means she might be stronger than I am. Then I'll at least deceive her into thinking our statures are equal.
Whether the ploy had worked or not, the succubus gave a soft laugh and traced a bewitching tongue along the corner of her lips.
"This lady's name is Lilith. Progenitor of all dream demons, and the one who brought their legend into being."
"......"
"As for why I was here... that is something you need only watch, from this moment on."
With that, Lilith pressed herself flush against his side before he had so much as a chance to act. At the same time she brought a finger to her lips, licked it briefly, and smeared that viscous saliva upon the empty air.
The world began to turn once more.
What?
But Bihyung could not return to Eunyu's body. Still a spiritual body, he watched the scene as it would have unfolded had history followed its original course. Stranger still, he could sense no energy whatsoever from Eunyu. The chair, by contrast, brimmed and surged with it.
"This is not the landscape within the memory you altered. It is Eunha's memory, as it would have flowed according to the original history."
Why show me this?
"You believe you have seen through it all, but you are wrong. You have yet to face the essential matter of Eunha."
At those words, Bihyung quietly closed his mouth. Why was it that when the dream demon spoke the chair's name, a trace of tenderness seeped through? And so he held his tongue and watched the original history.
The change began.
"Guhk—!"
The foreigner flared his pupils a bewitching red and sank his teeth roughly into the nape of the bound Eunyu.
Crunch!
Fangs too vicious to belong to any human drove into the carotid, and he gulped down the surging blood.
That's...
"A thrall. A slave kept by those mosquitoes who do nothing but drink blood."
A thrall?
"Yes. Things commanded by vampires—neither human, nor yokai, merely something in between. Wretched dregs that cannot even amount to a half-yokai."
Lilith's eyes, as they regarded such a thrall, had sunk so cold one might fairly call them frigid.
"...Keep watching."
The story that followed began to play.
"Teacher. Any further, and the worth as an offering will fall. You know this as well as I."
Only after the family head seized the teacher's shoulder did the thrall come back to himself and smile.
"Hoo. It has been so long since I tasted a child's blood that my mind nearly spun away from me. Truly... it was sweet."
"You haven't forgotten, have you? We open the Hall of Demon Subjugation; you will go to your domain, and we will call forth the Hall of Pleasure."
"But of course. I shall begin presently."
With those words, Eunyu's blood, scattered across the floor, began to rise and float. The blood gathered in the thrall's grasp became a keen spearhead and pierced the chair's body.
"......!"
Sunk in enormous shock as she watched her younger sibling's corpse grow cold, the chair could not even scream. With only a choked sound, as if her lungs had seized shut, she rolled across the floor, her abdomen run through.
At the same time—
Vmmm—
A pentagram wrought from their gathered blood filled the walls of the cave. However much children's blood had been drawn before this moment, the stone was stained past red into a blackened crimson.
"Come forth!"
The family head flung both arms high, his face full of rapture.
KrrrRRUMBLE—
With a grotesque tremor, the space that was the wall collapsed, and a vast gate of bone appeared. A grin wide enough to split his face bloomed at the thrall's lips as well.
"At last!"
"We have prepared a nest for you here! We beseech you—descend upon the present world, dispel the bewilderment of the people, and fill it to the brim with ecstasy..."
The family head never finished.
Pop!
A sound that came without warning.
And then—
Kreeeeak...
With an ominous groan, the gate opened.
"Humans are a truly amusing breed."
The face of the woman who emerged with those words was familiar. Bihyung turned his head and looked at Lilith, floating gently at his side.
That...?
"'That'? How cruel. The name Lilith exists quite plainly."
Don't dodge. Is that you?
"To be precise, it is this lady of the past."
Her gaze indicated a moment of that past, as if telling him to keep watching.
"No. It is not humans that are amusing, but desire itself. Heh. To think one can grow this cruel... this cruel, merely to fulfill one's own desire."
Her gaze had already turned, cold, upon the family head, dead with his head burst apart.
"Kyaaaak!"
The family head's wife screamed, and the sound filled the cave.
"Darling!"
She collapsed to her knees. Emotions beyond description stormed through her trembling eyes—resentment, bewilderment, denial, rage. But the instant she beheld the fiend who had descended before her—no, the Demon King—every feeling blew away, and only a single bewilderment remained.
"...Why?"
"You ask why I killed him?"
By then a cold smile had formed on the lips of Lilith, progenitor of the dream demons, who had already crushed the thrall to death with presence alone.
"That, you see..."
Despite herself, the family head's wife leaned in to listen. But in the next instant—
"it is nothing you need know."
Bang!
With a crooked grin, she aimed a finger like a pistol, and the wife met the same fate as the family head.
Silence swept in.
The thrall. The family head. His wife as well. All who had led the great rite met their deaths, and the sacrificed child was dead too. Yet one person still remained.
"So it is you."
Lilith's gaze turned to Committee Chair Eunha, collapsed upon the floor with nothing but death before her.
......
The instant her abdomen was pierced, every organ within had been wounded. Even her heart was damaged; there could be no return from such a state. That she endured without dying was thanks to the experience of having accumulated energy all this while, and to a talent that let her store far more of it than the thrall had ever expected.
"My. We have only just met, and already it is nearly farewell."
Lilith quietly bent down and looked into Eunha's unfocused eyes. And she asked, softly. Like a devil's whisper.
"Do you wish to live?"
"......!"
The dying body flinched.
"In truth, your will matters very little to this lady."
"......"
"I shall be honest. This lady wishes for you to live."
And so—
"Live."
With that—
Shunk!
Lilith drove a hand into her own chest. Her heart came free with it. She cut that heart in half and set one half inside Eunha's body.
...Thump!
A little time passed, and the heart began to beat fiercely once more. The wound in her abdomen, and the pallor brought on by the blood she had lost—all of it began to return to normal. At last Eunha's eyelids fluttered, as if sleep had come over her.
Lilith gazed at her quietly, then smiled, ever so gently. It was a warm smile, quite unlike the one she had shown the family head and his wife.