The Assault (1)
The place Dueogi led him was set apart even from the island—somewhere you reached only by wading a little way out from the shore. Seawater lapped at his ankles, and ahead of them lay nothing at all. Even so he followed, and before long Bihyeong realized that what met his feet was no longer the give of sand.
A long creak. The unmistakable groan of timber.
He was standing on the deck of a ship.
A vessel sunk beneath the sea. Fitting, for the Bermuda Triangle's reputation.
When he looked down, he saw that the ship under his feet was only the tip of the iceberg. Below it stretched the wreckage of ships and airships, stacked like a mountain of refuse until it formed the footing he now stood on.
Gathered into one place while the island was taking shape, maybe.
It looked like the thrashing of yokai fleeing a calamity as vast as the Association President. If the man was at least a 9th Rank, as they estimated, then even to a yokai he was a disaster.
"Where's the entrance?"
"This way."
At the question, Dueogi drove a heavy step into the deck.
With a thunderous crack, the planks gave way. The darkness that yawned open through the breach was so empty it was hard to believe it had been made of piled wreckage at all. It felt as if the souls of the forgotten—of those who had died for no reason anyone could name—were beckoning him in.
Bihyeong looked into it and let out a short laugh.
"I'm not falling for that."
It was only an aura a yokai was putting out. The moment he asserted his presence, the power that had been waving him closer turned pitiful, as if begging him to leave. The corner of his mouth lifted, and he threw himself into the pit.
A splash. He had gone into the sea, and yet, past that first burst of water, he felt no moisture at all. If anything, the air was dry. Parched.
He opened his eyes and found a passage stretching ahead like a cave.
"There are a great many paths."
As Dueogi said, appearing at his side before he knew it, what greeted Bihyeong was a host of cave mouths—easily a hundred or more. Each one was a fork, pressing him for an answer.
"...It works much like the spellcraft the cadets were caught in."
Dueogi was right. The degree was far worse, but what welcomed Bihyeong now was a rule of the same kind: find the way, and advance only along the correct one.
And so Dueogi grew curious. If it was the boss, how would he approach a rule like this—and how would he break it? He turned that expectation on Bihyeong's back, and in that moment Bihyeong took one confident step.
"...Boss?"
He didn't so much as look around. He simply went forward. He hadn't even checked where the cave mouths led, and yet his stride was heavy with the weight of a fixed goal.
When he had gone on, what greeted him was a smaller number of openings than before.
"...It's like a maze."
"It is."
Bihyeong answered mildly, and did not slow.
Did he already know the way? The question had barely formed when the openings in view dropped by more than half, down to a few dozen at most. Bihyeong kept walking, until at last the cave mouths split into two and offered him a choice of one or the other. He advanced once more, and found a single object waiting for him as if it had been set out in expectation.
"That is..."
"Right. A curse doll."
At the deepest reach of the cave sat a curse doll woven of straw—the sort of tool that passed suffering on through a lock of the victim's hair, or a photograph.
"If I remember right, it was one of the Japanese arts."
Dueogi gave a heavy nod.
"...Yes. Shuten-doji kept one who used that technique among his subordinates as well."
"It's a good technique. Pushed to the extreme, it can even shift pain meant for you onto someone else."
In effect, it forged a kind of armor out of spellcraft. The efficiency, of course, was nothing extraordinary. To transfer an attack onto another—or to erase it—you needed a sacrifice equal to its force. The stronger the blow, the better the art looked, and the more sharply its limits showed.
"But that one... I would class it as the highest grade."
As Dueogi said, the object was one of the things lost when a shrine maiden once active in Japan tried to unravel the Bermuda Triangle's secret and died a violent death. They said she had been a figure of considerable renown in her day, but the game had never gone that far, so he couldn't be sure.
"Yeah. It could probably block even the force of a 7th Rank art."
"...Hah. A remarkable item."
Dueogi's admiration for the doll was brief. His admiration for Bihyeong lasted longer.
"I am endlessly astonished by the insight with which you found such a thing at once, Boss."
"......?"
All Bihyeong could think was, Why is he like this?
No, seriously. Why?
"......?"
Dueogi's head tilted, as if he too had realized something was off.
"You didn't already know?"
"I didn't."
"...What?"
No. What was he even—
"There were more than a hundred forks, and at every one of them you had to choose a path. That alone was enough to say you weren't meant to find it—and yet you broke through all of it and did."
"That's true enough. But I didn't find it."
He had found the object, yes. He had not found the path.
"More like I made the path come looking for me."
"What?"
"You said it yourself. Finding the way in here was on the level of don't find it."
Hundreds of entrances. Enter one, and hundreds more waited beyond. The destination was a place you could reach only by seeking the way and sorting out nothing but the correct answers. And could a place like that really be found with ease?
Impossible.
Even an exorcist who used spellcraft would struggle. This interior was a yokai's domain, and their rules held sway here. They warped the senses and rendered any search by art useless. Which was why, inside a yokai's domain, what an exorcist had to focus on was finding the rule and shaving down the power the domain held.
"I shaved it the same way. Whoever set this domain up did it so you wouldn't find the thing—so, in reverse, they also left a rule that made finding it unavoidable."
It wasn't a social contract, exactly. For a yokai, it was closer to a discipline they were bound to keep. Their domains surpassed cognition and crossed into mystery. To govern a space like that, a sanction equal to it was required.
You know how they say great power comes with great responsibility. Exactly that.
"When I first came in, I thought, what's the rule here? Then I saw all those entrances and settled it. Ah. It's a trick of the eye."
The thought hardened for good after he walked out through any cave mouth at all and saw the host of new openings revealed beyond it.
"I mean, there wasn't even a hint of which way to go. Not with an entrance that vast."
No gouge in the earth. No crushed patch of brush. Not even the direction of a breeze. Nothing. And that only confirmed it.
Ah. This is a place where Will matters.
"After that I just walked while thinking of nothing but what I wanted to obtain."
And in the end, Bihyeong obtained what he had been seeking.
"...Hah."
Hearing it, Dueogi felt a sudden chill. Even he had not been able to move his feet lightly through a domain of so many mouths.
Hadn't they said this was a place where countless people had vanished?
Mystery had gathered thick there, and an uncanny air rose off it in waves. That alone made it ominous, cruel, and vicious—and his boss, walking the belly of such a baleful thing without the slightest hesitation, was cut from entirely different cloth.
The Academy, was it? What the professors there wanted of the cadets was one thing: to know fear.
More precisely, it was less fear itself than an order to hone the survival instinct to its limit. Fear, that primal emotion, paralyzed human reason—but it grew the hunger to survive by just as much. And that hunger could become the force that carried a person into ideas they could never have reached otherwise.
The boss has none of that. And yet he seems to have seen through everything already, as if he knows the way forward before he takes it.
That, truly, sent a thrill through Dueogi.
Of course, if Bihyeong had heard it, he would have muttered, What nonsense is that? I know because I played it that way in the game. Unfortunately, Dueogi's inner thoughts did not rise up in front of him as a comment.
"Then, Boss. Do you mean to leave now?"
"We got what we came for, so we should. There are other opportunities here, but... nothing that can't wait."
He would take them when he could, of course. For now, though, sitting the regular exam came first.
The path to the summit. He had to reach it. He absolutely had to.
"All right. Take a few more exams, pile up some points, and come back?"
He was ready to count the curse doll and the location as today's harvest and turn to go—when the world shuddered.
A vast, grinding roar. The immense tremor let out a cry as if it meant to smash the great frame called the Bermuda Triangle itself.
And then a single message rose.
Contamination has begun.
At the sight of it, Bihyeong's eyes sank low.