The Role (5)
Day four of the official exam.
Most of the cadets had more or less finished adapting to the island. By daylight things were bearable enough, but the moment night fell, everything turned—the climate, their tempers, even the energy pressing in around them. A cadet could fall asleep where he lay and open his eyes somewhere he had never seen, far from whatever place he had claimed as a base. Set a foot wrong, and the island might answer with a wound that ran deep.
Surely the exam would never drive them that hard. Not one of them had thought it would. Hadn't the Academy entrance test itself, from the very beginning, put them through every ordeal there was inside a subdued yokai? The worst of them had lost an arm, or felt pain close enough to death to be mistaken for it. Of course, behind all of that lay the Academy's arts, a safeguard so that no one actually died and no disability remained upon the body. This exam was no different.
I did think that... but this is too much, isn't it?
Even so, the cadets had to admit that beneath their resolve there had been a thin thread of relief. A mere four days had passed, and already only half of them were keeping anything like a sound mind.
"Ehehe!"
"Uuuugh...!"
Of those who had their wounds treated and were stood once more upon the exam's stage, half were crying PTSD, and half were convulsing as if their minds had snapped. They would return to normal, of course. It was only the gloom the night island sent drifting out, picking at their nerves and their spirits.
...These were not people who ought to have been reduced to this. They were cadets admitted to Yeongwol, for heaven's sake.
"Still, you could call this an opportunity."
"Right. It's an exam, nothing more."
"Climb past the kids, and our ranking only goes higher, doesn't it?"
Smiles bloomed on the lips of those who had formed a party around that thought. Their class was only Jeong—fourth among the grades of the Heavenly Stems, and no better. Raise their ranking with this, and wedging their names into the second class, rather than merely the third, would hardly be impossible. Burning with that ambition, they made for a "dungeon" they had marked earlier.
"This is the place, right?"
"Yeah. The cave behind the waterfall. The trap we set out front is still intact, so it doesn't look like any party's started a clear."
"Then we're the first."
Their party of four wasted no words. They brought their arts to bear, broke through the waterfall, and stepped into the dungeon beyond.
They closed their eyes for an instant and opened them again, and what met them was no longer the dark nightscape of a moment before. The sun was plainly up, yet fog had packed the air until everything went a milky white—a forest path that let the light in and still could not be called bright. They had been set down there, alone.
The party leader immediately wove a voice transmission and linked their minds.
"Looks like we've stepped into a formation's domain."
"It must have been built on a ghost story's domain. What's the rule?"
"From everything we've learned so far, so long as we don't break the rules, even the professors couldn't harm us. That's the law of the arts."
Which was why finding the rule mattered. They studied the character of the space once more, straining to uncover its law.
In that moment—
"...!"
One cadet's eyes flew wide. A gaze, felt at his back. That sudden stare did not belong to the party. It couldn't. Every one of them was in front of him.
"Hey. Hey, guys... don't turn around. Just listen."
He explained his situation at once through the voice transmission. Every neck went stiff.
"...For now, let's not look back. That might be the rule."
"Then do we have to shut it out completely? For how long?"
"I've heard of them. There are ghost stories where you have to cut off all attention, entirely. If you don't... you can never leave the domain."
And so they clamped their mouths shut and began to walk. They were cadets of Yeongwol Academy, after all—a party of exorcists who had reached the 2nd Rank. Their nerve was nothing like an ordinary person's, and neither was the caliber of what they had been taught about anomalous phenomena. They crossed the forest path at a measured pace, scanning everything around them, searching for a way to answer it.
"Strange. It feels like there are shards of glass scattered all over."
"Don't look at them. If something behind us shows up in a reflection, we're done."
Calmly, clutching at their trembling hearts, they pressed forward. For a little while.
Thirty minutes passed.
Then the change began.
"Hong-sik..."
A call from nowhere. And someone answered it. The cadet at the very rear of the line, the one who had caught the gaze—that was his father's name. His body flinched, only for an instant.
And then—
"Aaaagh!"
A wretched scream rang down the forest path.
"...Hey. You all right? What happened!?"
"Han-gil. If you can hear us, answer. What happened?"
The party passed judgment at once. Give up what had to be given up. In exchange, take the information. They sent the transmission with that in mind, but no answer came back.
"......"
"......"
Silence settled over them. They shut their mouths tight once more and moved their feet. Barely thirty minutes had passed since they entered the dungeon.
What followed did not come undone so easily.
The forest path stretched on and on. Perhaps it was the fog packed thick on every side; strangely, walk as they might, the path never seemed to end. Even so, they had no nerve left for looking back, and so they kept their mouths shut and let the silence fold them into the air around them.
And so—one step. Thud. Another step. Thud. ...Crack.
Into that simple footfall a dissonance had slipped, a little different from before.
Huh?
His head jerked up before he knew it, and he regretted it at once. What he saw was a tree grown in a grotesque twist, and, where the leaves ought to have been, mirrors crowded in their place. In the gaps between those mirrors—
"......"
A black silhouette was staring straight through him.
"Aaaaaagh!!"
What came after was the same as the first elimination. A scream tore out without warning, and the party had to listen, without the faintest idea why, to the grief-soaked wailing of the one who had fallen.
"Damn it. It got us again."
"So it's just the two of us now?"
"...No. Three."
"Ah... right..."
One of them, following the thought through, suddenly froze. Their party had been four. The ones who had dropped out were two. Then why was there one more voice?
......
His eyes turned, unbidden, toward the leader at the front, and he saw it—between shoulders trembling faintly, teeth clenched, eyes shut, the man pretending he had not heard.
...Ah.
Only then did he understand, and manage to turn his head. The black silhouette watching him was smiling.
Time since they had entered the dungeon: not even a single hour.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it...!!
He had not expected the dungeon to be this difficult. And with reason—over the past four days, they had cleared two of them. Find the law, give the rules a reasonable share of attention, and clearing the place was surprisingly not that hard. But what in the world was this dungeon? The rule was simple, and that was precisely what made it so cruel. Being told to shut the opponent out of one's mind completely and walk on looking only ahead was never a simple condition to begin with, was it? Let something flutter past your eyes and your gaze goes to it on its own; at the smallest noise, a human ear moves without meaning to. All the more so for them. They were exorcists who had raised their Rank, and their five senses far outstripped an ordinary person's. This was a place that seemed to demand even stray thoughts be folded into that control—that they sever their emotions entirely, if they meant to achieve what they had set out to do.
This place is plainly beyond all common sense...
While the party's sole survivor was thinking as much, the corner of his eye twitched. He could clearly feel a presence behind him. ...Then what was that, up ahead? A black silhouette was looking at him. A whole body wavering like a shadow, and within it, unmistakably, blue eyes.
Why on earth...
He did not know the reason. And in that state, he simply fainted at a gesture from the one who had already drawn up before his very nose, and collapsed to the ground.
Looking down at the last party member sprawled on the floor, Bihyung let out a heavy sigh.
"You look like you got a raw deal. Don't hold it against me, though. I've got points to earn too, don't I?"
They had looked fairly sure of themselves, so they were probably people who had cleared dungeons before. But the dungeons they had faced and his own were worlds apart—the difference between a dungeon that held a professor, someone who handed points out, and one that held a cadet, someone who had to earn them the same as everyone else.
The professors can afford to cut them a little slack.
They called it preparation for the second semester, but they could hardly brand real PTSD into the cadets, could they? Which was why the dungeon Bihyung occupied and the ones the professors occupied differed in difficulty from the very start.
"Elder! Elder!"
And the subordinates of the Hundred Ghosts, helping him as they were, had done their share and then some.
"Just as you ordered, we've been swelling our presence and putting the pressure on those kids!"
"Good. Well done, Eoduk."
He had turned the Hundred Ghosts' subordinates loose to scramble the senses every which way, slipping into the gaps of the arts and making the exam several times harder than it had any right to be. If the professor in charge had seen it, they would have snapped at him for griefing. Who cared? He was the one who had drawn this place.
"Boss."
At that moment, Dueok's voice reached him. Bihyung turned his head, and Dueok—wearing the form of a child—was approaching from outside the formation.
"I found the terrain you mentioned."
"You did?"
"Yes. It looks mostly like a shipwreck, and there's a thick energy filling the inside. I confirmed it."
The shipwreck he had been looking for. No—the fortuitous encounter of the Bermuda Triangle. Dueok had found it.
Hss. About time I headed over, then?
He had been stacking points steadily across the past four days. He could afford to let his attention wander a little now, couldn't he? From the cadets' side, that would be better too.
Fortuitous encounter. Here I come.
It was time to go farming.