Welcome
"The house is a shambles."
Dan Miryu tapped the ground with his foot, as if he might press flat the desolation he was trying not to show. That the main house of the Dan Clan could fall was something no one, in the old days, would have been able to imagine. He looked at the collapsed gate and sighed, long and heavy, again and again.
"......Stay at our house for a while."
Phantom offered it from beside him. Dan Miryu gave a bitter smile.
"Would that really be all right?"
"What else is a good neighbor for? My house is still standing, so you can stay in comfort. There are plenty of rooms."
"Very well. We'll be in your debt."
Dan Miryu and Phantom climbed over what was left of the gate and came to the entrance. The old door that had once welcomed guests in its stately way was gone. Only the scorch of the blast remained, and a chaotic scatter of broken marks—the remnant of an entryway.
Dan Miryu went in without a word.
"The television, the vacuum, the air conditioner. All of it will have to be replaced."
In the living room he began running the numbers. Appliances and furniture were punched through with bullet holes, and Hawaiian souvenirs still lay strewn about where no one had found the time to put them away. Among them, a shirt torn by rough hands caught Phantom's eye.
He picked it up. AW was still legible, but the first letter was too badly damaged to read. Even so, between the label and the place the souvenirs had been bought, the missing letter was not hard to guess.
"......H."
Phantom folded the shirt away with care. Too good to throw out. He would mend it later and give it back.
"Haa...... There's no saving this. We'll have to tear the whole place out and start over."
Dan Miryu raked a hand through his hair, stifled by the sight of it.
"Remodel, while you're at it."
"I suppose I should. This is going to cost."
Setting that hassle aside, the two of them began with what mattered. A laptop, photographs, documents, bankbooks, cards—by the time each item had been gathered, their arms were full.
"This should do."
Dan Miryu lifted a box.
"There's still something we haven't taken."
Phantom trudged into the master bedroom and rapped beneath the bed.
"We ought to bring the man down here with us, shouldn't we?"
Dan Miryu looked thoroughly unwilling.
"Do we really have to?"
"We need every hand we can borrow. Even a cat's paw."
"He can't fight."
His strength, Dan Miryu granted. The man had been a dangerous enemy, one against whom even he could not promise the outcome. But he had been broken. Above all, the sword that had once been so keen could no longer cut so much as a straw.
"He is a man who fell into emptiness of his own will. Even if we asked him for help, I doubt he would amount to any real force in a fight."
"Mr. Dan, it's a waste to let him rot down here. Talent and skill like that—you won't easily find such a man, wherever you go."
With practiced ease, Phantom opened the lock concealed in the bed and entered the code.
"You said he fell into emptiness, didn't you? I'll have him walk out of it himself."
"Do you mean that?"
"Yes."
With a low grind, the bed rose, and a staircase showed itself underneath.
"The note I gave Ms. Mi Soryeong had a magic sentence written on it. Words that would have moved him. Fortunately, they were never used."
"Hm."
Dan Miryu thought of his wife, lying unconscious in a hospital bed, and a low sound escaped him.
"And you, Mr. Dan. Are you truly all right with this? You feel no reluctance at all?"
"If I said I felt none, I'd be lying."
He set his foot on the stair.
"If he had harmed only us, I would have buried the matter quietly. But he didn't."
People crushed beneath buildings. People whose bodies had been torn in two. People who had lost their families, and people left with broken minds. People Dan Miryu had done everything in his power to save, and still could not.
"He left deep wounds on innocent people."
"I understand his reason. I can't swear I wouldn't have done the same."
"But that doesn't absolve him."
Step by step, Dan Miryu went down.
"He has to pay for what he did. If there is no way for him to pay, then he can never be brought out."
Phantom followed him down.
"Which is all the more reason to bring him out. If he's to serve society until the day he dies."
"And do you think he will?"
"He'll have to be made to."
As he had said a moment ago.
"I have a magic sentence."
At that confident answer, Dan Miryu held his tongue. As always, he simply trusted him.
Inside the bunker.
A man sat watching television within a crude iron cage. He stroked the shaggy beard he had never bothered to trim, and felt a presence.
"So the master of the house has come."
He switched off the television, shifted where he sat, and looked out past the bars.
"Alexei."
Green hair lent a stroke of color to the drab bunker. Alexei smiled thinly and jerked his chin.
"What business brings you all the way down here?"
"I've come to let you out."
"Oh ho......"
A strange light came into Alexei's eyes.
"And why would the great head of the Dan Clan come looking for a worthless man like me?"
"Spare me the pointless contest of nerves. You've been watching it all on the news anyway, haven't you?"
"You mean Heavenly Punishment."
Alexei rolled the name around in his mouth.
"So you couldn't even handle two of them?"
"It wasn't two."
Dan Miryu drew a breath, then spoke as if the air itself were too tight.
"All of Heavenly Punishment came."
"......What?"
This time, even Alexei could not brush it aside.
"......How?"
"The leader of Heavenly Punishment, the First Apostle, is said to possess the ability to summon every member of Heavenly Punishment, no matter where they are. He came to Korea and called them."
Alexei had no way to judge whether it was true. The First Apostle was a being known only through rampant rumor, and everything about him lay under a veil. Attach any claim to the man and it might be a lie, or it might be the truth. But Alexei believed Dan Miryu. He was not the sort to lie about a thing like this, and his eyes looked genuinely urgent.
"......So you mean to spend me as fighting strength."
"You ought to earn your keep. We fed you and housed you. We did all of it."
"And who asked you to?"
Alexei was listless. It was a crisis, yes, but a crisis from another world entirely, nothing to do with him.
"You know something? Locking me up like this is the wrong thing to do. By rights I'd have been deported to Russia to rot in a camp, or to die. Or I'd be shut in a villain prison in the United States."
"I know this isn't right."
"Then why talk like that? I have neither the will nor the strength to help you."
Alexei gripped the bars tight.
"Do I look alive to you?"
Denial stormed inside that cage. He had lost the will to go on living, and lost every spark of life with it. What remained here was an evil spirit reduced to a slab of meat that happened to breathe on two legs.
Dan Miryu drew closer to the spirit.
"That's enough wasted feeling. Even if you won't help, I have my ways."
"Ways? What ways? You'll hand over that necklace, then?"
The spirit stretched a filthy hand toward Life. Even this near to death, the obsession he could not abandon still seethed and reached.
A soft tap stopped it.
"The games end there, Mr. Alexei."
Phantom's hand had caught the spirit's clinging grasp.
"You......"
He froze. The evil spirit became Alexei again.
"Good to see you. It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm relieved you look more intact than I expected."
The mask came in close. Alexei flinched as if struck.
"Get the hell away from me!"
He scraped together strength he did and did not have and swung a fist at the mask. The mask avoided it by taking a single step back.
"Ooh. Still strong as an ox."
"Hah. Hah."
Alexei panted, spent by the effort.
"You, you...... Hah. Hah."
"Now, now. Calm down and take a deep breath."
In... and out. In... and out.
At the sound of that breathing, playful as a taunt, Alexei's eyes went bloodshot. He clenched his teeth.
"I didn't know you were with the Dan Clan......"
"We've been working together since that day. Next-door neighbors, even."
Alexei's teeth ground together.
"Hah. Hah. Damn it! Goddamn...... goddamn......"
He clenched his trembling hand and forced it still. The other hand would not obey. Nor his legs. Nor his throat. His whole body had slipped his control. It played again whether he wished it or not—that day's nightmare. Himself, denied the right to be a father. Himself, unloved by his daughter.
"Ghk. Khhk."
Alexei clawed at his throat. Blood came away under his nails.
"Step back."
Dan Miryu opened the necklace. A fathomless Life stained the air.
"Hak. Hak."
Sweat pouring off him, Alexei stopped hurting himself and glared at Dan Miryu.
"So this is how far you've gone. Keeping company with a monster like that, of all things."
Dan Miryu shrugged.
"He's a good man. He keeps to the line."
"Suka blyat. You fucking bastard."
Phantom approached again.
"Mr. Alexei. I hear you're a famous mercenary. So I'd like to hire you."
"There is no job I would ever take from you!"
He slammed the bars.
"Before I'd take a commission from you—!"
"Even if it's about your daughter?"
Iron shrieked. Alexei bent the bars in his rage.
"What nonsense is that?! Why—as if my daughter is even alive!"
"Yes. She is."
"Yes?"
Those words startled Dan Miryu as well.
Alexei screamed.
"Liar! You're lying!"
I saw it clear as day that day! I saw her!
"Did you find the body?"
Phantom closed in until his body met the bars. Alexei toppled backward and landed hard on his rear.
"Mr. Alexei. In some bar or other, you met a man with the Darkness wavering through him."
Alexei clamped his hands over his ears. Don't listen. Don't be taken in by that viper's tongue.
"That Darkness told you about the Stone of Resurrection, and urged you that you could bring your daughter back. And you bit down on it without a second thought."
Phantom shook his head.
"How pitiful. You, believing every word from the very man who has your daughter, and moving like his puppet."
"......What?"
Alexei's thoughts stopped cold.
"What are you saying......?"
"Exactly what I said."
Phantom held out a hand.
"Your daughter is alive, and the wrong man has her. You were used by that wrong man."
Alexei was silent.
"Does it sound like a lie? Then help us, and count it as being fooled just this once. I'll give you what I know about your daughter. And when it comes to saving her, I'll lend a hand."
Alexei fixed his eyes on the mask.
At last he rose on his own. He seized the pencil lying on the table and swung it at the bars. Steel screamed under the stroke. With a single swing, the bars were cut.
Before he stepped out of the cage, Alexei's eyes flashed.
"......If you've lied to me, I'll chase you to the ends of hell and kill you."
"I doubt it will come to that."
Phantom spread his arms wide.
Alexei clicked his tongue.
From behind him, Phantom whispered.
"Welcome."
"Mr. Alexei."
"No."
"Mr. Sword."