Bugs
A month? Had he misheard?
"…I'm sorry, what?"
He asked it again with that hope still clinging on, but the answer that came back smashed it to pieces.
"You deaf? It's been a month."
What was that even supposed to mean? He had picked the book with the time outside squarely in mind.
In that instant, a voice spoke straight into his mind.
"Er… it would seem the fault lies with this lady."
Lilith. He turned his head, but she was already gone—slipped back inside the Chair's body, by the look of it. Well. She could hardly stand out in the open in a situation like this.
What do you mean?
"This lady's descent appears to have warped the rules you set. And so, in that ratio by which time was meant to flow apart from reality… a hole seems to have opened."
In short—a day should have passed, but the hole turned it into something like four to one? Four hours in that other world for every hour that passed here.
What the hell… A lightning bolt out of a clear sky?
His dismay must have carried straight across, because Lilith answered in a voice gone small.
"Forgive me… This lady never meant for it."
He heard the sincerity in it.
…Well. It's already done. Nothing to be done about it now. She sounded genuinely sorry, so he let it pass.
Anyway.
Bihyung looked around.
Sure are a lot of them.
Spell formations raised like barricades, and ringing them, academy staff alongside faces he had never seen. Even at a glance, they looked like people who had caught wind that something had gone wrong and rushed to the scene.
The professor in charge spoke as if he could hardly believe his eyes.
"First the Chair and you up and vanish out of nowhere. We even go crying to the Association, and there isn't a speck of either of you. Then word comes the library yokai's run wild, so everybody piles in—and you stroll out of it? What were you doing in there?"
"Uh… the thing is…"
Bihyung had no idea what excuse to reach for.
At that moment the Chair rose, brushing herself off, and bowed to the faculty.
"I had meant to borrow a junior's hands to sort and manage the library's forbidden books. We were caught in a sudden rampage."
The crowd stirred at her words. He had thought they were here to test whether the story was true, but most of them were worried about him and the Chair. You could not have asked for a truer model of a teacher.
"…You two all right?"
That was the first thing his professor asked.
"Yes. Nothing seems to be wrong."
"That so. Still, both of you get a thorough exam. Yokai domains have a way of tainting you, or infecting you, before you even notice."
"Yes."
"More to the point…"
The professor looked from the Chair to Bihyung and back.
"Like I said. The moment you went missing, the Academy started searching. Two weeks with nothing to show, and we asked the Association for support."
He had just heard as much. But even with the Exorcist Association out looking, they hadn't been found, and the puzzlement sat plain on the man's face.
"How was a thing like that even possible?"
The professor looked around the library.
"We had testimony the library was the last place you were seen, so we dug through the forbidden books. Read the things cover to cover."
And still, not a clue. Not a single trace of them. Yet now the library yokai had gone berserk, and the two of them had turned up inside it?
A doppelganger. Doesn't feel like that sort of thing.
The energy coming off them sat within the range he already knew. …No. Whatever top student Bihyung had been doing, his energy seemed more refined. Stronger, even.
"You two. Write up what happened in there and turn it in later. A report."
"Understood."
The Chair and Bihyung bowed as they answered, and the professor nodded, glancing around.
"All right, all right. Everyone, break it up. Sorry for dragging you out mid-class. We got the kids back, though, so go have a drink."
A few snorts of laughter rose at the easy bluster. Soon the gathered faculty, and the figures who looked to be from the Association, poured out in a rush.
Just as everyone was about to leave—
"Old man, Head of the Elder Council. And the rest of you fossils on the Council—hang back a minute."
The professor singled them out and stopped them cold.
"…Shinhoo. Have you truly lost your mind? Who do you think you're ordering about!"
So the professor's name was Shinhoo. Bihyung had just turned to look at him, learning it for the first time, when a sly smile drew itself across the man's mouth and he went on.
"Our dear elders were about to walk off without settling something important, so I took it upon myself to stop you. What's with the sour faces?"
"…"
The Elder Council didn't say it outright, but sourness sat thick across every face. What's that pest raising a fuss about now? The thought was plain in their eyes.
Then Professor Shinhoo spoke, bright as anything.
"Ah, ah. No need to look at me like that. I only stopped you so I could say something perfectly obvious."
"…What is it."
"Compensation."
Shinhoo's finger swung from the Chair to Bihyung.
"These kids took harm from a clear failure on the Academy's part. Am I wrong?"
He looked to the Head of the Elder Council, and the old man's head dipped in a slow nod.
"You are correct. Had we managed things with a finer hand, we might have answered the yokai's movements—and a variable this sudden—before it came to this."
They had judged that a yokai already subjugated would stay safe enough, so long as the forbidden books were kept from gathering into one, and that rule was kept. And in truth the library yokai had no intelligence of its own; divide the forbidden books, and its power dropped by orders of magnitude.
"What's more, the Association President himself is the one who subjugated the thing, so everyone here must have felt perfectly at ease. Ah, if he handled it, there's nothing to worry about… Isn't that so?"
Shinhoo looked around the Elder Council. No one answered. They only hung their heads, and the reddening of their ears was all that confessed their shame.
…The Association President.
Bihyung suddenly recalled the Association President who had appeared as a setting in the Reader's Chronicle.
I've never actually seen him, but… he was supposed to be absurdly strong. Close combat, spellcraft, barrier arts, subjugation arts, purification arts. Proficiency maxed in every field, and he wielded them as he pleased, carving out a path that was his alone.
When the main story handed down the quest to become the strongest exorcist, not a single person ever beat him. Not Bihyung, and not one of the veterans. I always figured the reason was the Association President—the one who was never made public.
Thinking about it again, the man was a monster in a class of his own. How did a single human life raise every field, across the board, into the realm of the peak?
…Maybe he's already set a foot in the realm of myth.
He hadn't seen it himself, so he wouldn't swear to it, but he was halfway convinced. After all, even the character who had reached the 9th Rank, even the character who could put down three great houses alone, had never reached the Association President.
While Bihyung was turning it over, Shinhoo looked at the elders of the Council and asked,
"So. You still mean to say this wasn't the Academy's fault?"
In that moment one old man stepped forward. The Head of the Elder Council. His cold gaze swept the surroundings, and when it came to rest on the Chair and Bihyung, something startling left his mouth.
"I am sorry."
"…Sir?"
"Shinhoo is right. The fault is plainly ours. I offer you our apology."
He bent deep at the waist as he said it, and for a moment Bihyung could not get a word out.
This is the Head of the Elder Council? The man filthy with cold, whose walls were harder than any fortress?
And that man was apologizing, and meaning it. The feeling reached him with surprising ease.
"…Please, there's no need."
"Thank you for forgiving us."
The Head straightened and looked straight at Chair Eunha and Bihyung.
"The Academy will see that the two of you are compensated separately. If there is something you want, we will obtain it. If not, I will grant you something precious from among what the Academy holds."
"Ah, yes…"
"We have kept you too long. Shinhoo. See these children to the infirmary at once."
"On it."
Shinhoo, as if the Head's bearing rather pleased him, let the earlier sharpness vanish without a trace. Instead he swallowed a grin, scooped Bihyung and the Chair up on a tide of energy, and took off.
Tadat—!
Shinhoo tore down the corridor at a dead run, reached the infirmary, and handed the two of them over to be examined. It wasn't long before they were pronounced unharmed, though they were told a little rest would do them good.
"Then I'll mark you both out sick for a while. Take the chance and rest."
So saying, Shinhoo dragged a chair up beside the bed where Bihyung lay and dropped into it.
Bihyung looked at him.
"You're not going to class?"
"Found a sub and stuck them up there. Nothing to worry about."
"Who?"
"The second seat."
"…What?"
Mina? Why?
When Bihyung's face showed his confusion, Shinhoo cackled at the sight of it.
"You know that after you went missing, that kid's eyes went pure venom? Whew. I don't even have the words."
Right after he said it, his expression settled, calm.
"Student Bihyung."
"Yes."
"You remember the materials you gave me before?"
He did. He had handed them over right before going to see the Chair, hadn't he? So why this?
"Did something happen?"
Shinhoo, who had been staring straight at Bihyung's face, smoothed his expression again as if nothing were wrong.
"Just throwing my weight around, kid. Nothing happened."
Everyone on the list had been saved, and they had asked that their thanks be passed along to him.
"I wanted to tell you that. That's all."
"Is that so?"
"It is."
With that, Shinhoo stood, brushing himself off.
"Tch. I did leave a sub in place, but I'm still a professor in name. Ought to at least show my face, yeah?"
"I'm off, then."
He waved and stepped out of the infirmary. And the moment he was down the corridor, his face hardened back to what it had been.
…Tsk. How am I supposed to tell a kid who's already hurting that I couldn't save them.
No. More precisely, the instant he received the list he had given up sleep and moved to save every person on it. And he had, in a sense, managed to save all the families the dead children left behind.
They all killed themselves along the way.
No art had been worked in the process. Only, in the hollow of their innate true qi, the chill of death's energy had hung in the air.
And… I felt that energy again. The one from back then.
Ten years ago. He remembered when the Association had launched a full investigation into the kidnappings. Shinhoo had taken a request then and gone to help, and what they found was a cave hardly anyone visited, and a wall inside it soaked in blood. The vicious blood-qi he had felt there had turned up again, in small measure, on the bodies of the families who had taken their own lives.
Shinhoo's eyes went cold.
A shaded place, where light did not reach. And down there, it seemed—
The bugs are writhing.
New bugs, it seemed, had laid their eggs.