Lilith
The memory finished playing.
"Well? This is history as it truly was — and that child Eunha's past."
Lilith smiled, soft and knowing, and made to press herself against Bihyung. He stepped back at once, and only looked at her with a gaze gone heavy and still.
"Why? Why turn such eyes on this lady, who saved Eunha?"
"Because I don't believe you."
There was only one reason he couldn't. She had no reason to have done it.
"The presence coming off you doesn't fall short of mine. What could someone like you possibly lack, that you'd go and save the Chair?"
Honestly, he couldn't even trust the memory he had just been shown. She was a being who had barged without warning into a yokai's domain. Was he supposed to believe someone like that couldn't twist a single scene to her liking? The answer was no.
"If you want me to believe you, then put up some proper proof."
At his words Lilith stared at him for a long moment, then lifted her chest ever so slightly.
"A heart does not lie."
But Bihyung had already built up a certain immunity to this sort of thing, courtesy of Mina, a beauty to topple kingdoms. He clamped down on his focus, and her seductive aura slid right off him.
"Hmm. A dull man."
As if his reaction displeased her, Lilith puffed out her cheeks — then suddenly raised the edge of her hand. So words had failed, and she meant to use force. That thought did not last long.
A wet thud. Lilith drove her hand into her own chest, and with a heavy throb a heart split clean in two appeared in her grip.
"Well? Can you believe me now?"
"......"
Bihyung stared at the wound, eyes wide. The scar matched the one from the memory he had just seen, and so did the shape of the heart. Which meant that, at the very least, there was no lie in the splitting of it.
Judging by the caliber I feel, this is a manifestation of her true body.
So the heart, and the memory of a moment ago, were truth without a single falsehood in them. And yet —
Why?
The question remained.
What was so unprecious to a being like that, that she'd give away half her heart?
Because a yokai's heart was only a byproduct, something that regenerated even if it shattered? No. Probably not.
It didn't regenerate. It's still being maintained in that halved state.
More than that, she had forced the life back into a girl who had been on the verge of death. It could be called an act of defying Heaven, a violation of the natural order. The price of such a thing would be neither light nor small.
As if she had read the question in him, she let the air out of her cheeks and smiled, bitter.
"Do not look at it so. Yokai and humans alike are only those who live within a single world."
They had feelings. They had hearts.
"It was simply... warm."
"...What?"
"When I remembered that child — the first to worry over this lady in her nakedness, the one who covered me with fallen leaves out of a warm heart."
That heart had been so very dear to her. And so, before she knew it, her own had moved. Nothing more. Of course, Bihyung had not seen that far into the memory, and the words were only the continuation of a story he could not follow. Even so, in the face that spoke them, he could find not a trace of a lie.
...Nothing catches on my senses, either.
Void-energy rippled through the empty air as the Five Great Communion unfurled, claiming the whole of the surroundings as his domain. Even beneath that art, her words registered only as true.
It's real? Just a feeling?
For a moment Bihyung seriously wondered whether his senses had broken.
That was when it happened.
A sound like space itself cracking rang out. With it, a portion of the empty air opened, and a woman dropped to the floor.
"Junior!"
The Chair. Eunha.
"Senior?"
The instant Bihyung lunged in and caught her, Lilith let out a whistle.
"Ah, youth. Well? Shall you take the chance and join bodies as well, and see how well the two of you fit?"
He had been just about ready to trust her, and now it felt as if that trust had dropped straight back to the floor. The Chair, meanwhile, slipped gently out of his arms and bowed her head toward Lilith.
"I remember everything. All of it..."
Her voice trembled as she said it. And the eyes Lilith turned on the Chair had gone bitter, as if all the teasing until now had been a lie.
"...It would have been better if you had not remembered."
At that, Bihyung felt a small prick of guilt. Lilith caught the shift in him with uncanny sharpness and shook her head.
"It is not your fault. To undo what you believed to be a curse... there would have been no other way."
The Chair nodded at that as well.
"...Yeah. You're right. It isn't my junior's fault."
If anything, Eunha felt a gratitude toward Bihyung that a simple thank-you could never cover.
"Because thanks to you... I could remember the little sister I'd forgotten."
A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye, and in that moment Lilith and Bihyung wordlessly turned their heads aside. Everyone needed at least a little time in which to cry.
A long while later, the Chair pulled herself together as she always did.
"Yeah. I'm all sorted out. Later, once we leave this place, I'm going to make my sister a grave."
If not for the bloodshot eyes and the lids swollen thick with crying, the ease of it might have passed for her usual self. Lilith shook her head.
"If it is that, this lady has already seen to it. Next time, let us go together."
"...Yes. Thank you."
"Do not use such formal speech. From that moment, you and this lady have been as one body."
At those words the Chair felt, without meaning to, the beat of a heart.
Thump.
In time with every beat of her own, Lilith's heart was beating as well. One body. A shared fate, by another name. A small smile bloomed at the corner of Lilith's mouth.
"You became a half-yokai after the fact."
Her gaze turned, this time, to Bihyung.
"Just as you did."
The Chair's startled eyes swung toward him.
"Junior... you were a half-yokai?"
"Yes. I wasn't trying to hide it... wait, was I? Anyway. Yeah, I'm a half-yokai."
Since it had come to this, he laid his identity out plainly. The person in front of him was a half-yokai as well; the information wasn't going to leak.
"More importantly — what happened to the curse?"
Bihyung looked at Lilith as he asked.
"We came here to solve the curse at its root. But her life went on because she took your heart, so that problem ought to be tied to you too, shouldn't it?"
The corner of Lilith's mouth sank, if only a little.
"Correct. The curse of which Eunha speaks originated from this lady."
"Then..."
"To be precise, it would be the fault of this lady's faction."
Lilith. Progenitor of the dream-demons, and the origin point of all lust.
"This lady's faction, the Realm of Pleasure, is a place born from this lady's Transmission. Every succubus who dwells there is, in the end, no different from one body with this lady."
Bihyung grasped the meaning at once.
"So the Realm of Pleasure entered Senior's body as well?"
"Correct."
"Then why have you been doing something like a curse to Senior's body all this time?"
At that, Lilith's expression went cold in an instant.
"...This lady gave a portion of her life over to Eunha. But that was an act that dealt a grievous blow to one's caliber, even for this lady."
A rebellion had risen.
"With the incubi, the male dream-demons, at their head, there came those who coveted this lady's seat. Of course, they too..."
"Are in the Realm of Pleasure?"
"Yes. Should Eunha's life run out, this lady's life would run out with it, and so they meddled with her dantian and her meridians, seeking to gnaw that life away."
"Then why don't you just stop them? Aren't you the progenitor of the succubi?"
"...I cannot."
Lilith shook her head.
"This lady has already become one body with Eunha. The Realm of Pleasure exists within this lady's Transmission, yes — but from the moment we became one, freely governing it was impossible."
To put it in a figure.
"Let us say Eunha is a cup of about this size."
Lilith brought her hands together and formed a small circle.
"And the Realm of Pleasure is... this large."
Then she crossed her arms and drew an enormous circle in the air. The difference between clasped hands and arms flung wide. No — in truth, it might have been greater still.
"Had this lady tried to govern the Realm of Pleasure, Eunha's body could not have endured the caliber, and she would have died on the spot. And so I could not."
Which was why she had kept a final method in mind as well.
"I meant to force her caliber to burst and make Eunha a complete yokai. Then I would have taken her into this lady's Realm of Pleasure."
Only then did Bihyung understand the end the Chair had met as a villain.
So that was a body warped when her caliber burst.
No. It was hard to even call it a body. She had simply turned into something vague and foglike.
...No wonder neither physical attacks nor spellcraft did a thing.
It hadn't seemed like a boss made to be broken. He had only now found the reason.
Thinking about it that way, the veterans who cleared that thing were seriously insane.
They had rolled and dodged through the attacks until they realized that, as time passed, a little damage was getting through. And so the villain called the Chair had met her end.
Because as time went on, her caliber burned away, and she was becoming a complete yokai.
He was nodding to himself, the shape of the incident finally clear before and after, when one important fact surfaced.
"Then what about now? Why do I still feel the curse?"
"Feel? Do you mean pleasure?"
Lilith tilted her head.
"Those who plotted rebellion were, the other day, crushed beneath your presence in the library, and they have been unable to so much as raise their heads. Thus this lady withdrew every plan, and could devote myself wholly to Eunha."
In that process, no pain worthy of the name of curse had followed.
"How could a woman's pleasure be a curse? It is a natural thing — a fate fixed, inevitably, from the moment she accepted this lady."
Lilith looked at the Chair.
"Do not think ill of it. Rather, if only you can master that power, you, Eunha, may rise to a supreme station. This, this lady guarantees."
"...I don't think poorly of it anymore."
A smile bloomed at the corner of the Chair's mouth. Eunha's.
"It's... the second chance you gave me."
"I told you not to speak so formally."
The two of them looked at each other and smiled, faint and soft.
"......"
Bihyung watched them in silence, then looked down at his own hand.
Could we become like that someday, too?
He asked it of the yokai nature steeped in his blood. No answer came back. A short laugh escaped him.
Yeah, figures. With a temper like yours.
Only then, ignoring the low growl thrumming through his blood, did Bihyung turn back to the Chair.
"Senior. Would you join my Baekgwi Yahaeng?"
"...Huh? What's that?"
"It's similar to the Realm of Pleasure. An organization that half-yokai like me belong to, or yokai. I'm the boss."
"Even so... would that be all right?"
"Why wouldn't it? If someone like you joined, I'd be the one who's glad."
Bihyung held out his hand to her.
"Will you join? The Baekgwi Yahaeng."
She hesitated for a moment.
Would it be all right for me... to enter a place like that?
There was a great deal that made her hesitate. Whether it was right for her alone to become happy, when her sister was dead. Whether her existence would do him harm. And above all, the greatest of them —
...Lilith. The one who gave me a second chance.
Whether this would bring harm to her. She was still turning it over, unable to take his hand, when a voice came without warning.
"Ordinarily you are sharp enough to cut clean through, and yet only at a time like this do you act like a child."
With Lilith's voice, Eunha's consciousness was shoved in an instant to the very edge of her flesh. Her head sank. And when it lifted again, Eunha's hair was dyed the same vivid pink as Lilith's.
"There!"
She snatched Bihyung's hand before he could pull it back.
"If you take our Eunha, this lady is bound to be taken along. To think you would hold two women at once — a man of bold ambition indeed."
"...Ah."
Now that he thought about it, this one would be coming in too. Did he need a refund? He was somewhere around that thought when a message rose and filled one whole side of his vision.
...Huh?
Accomplished what? A Myth?
This one?
His startled eyes turned on Lilith for an instant, and as if she had caught wind of something, she smiled — smug, and faintly pouty.