How Many Years?
A sound reached Dan Miryu's ears, the brittle crack of glass giving way.
"There seems to be something over that way."
"I heard it."
Sword nodded. Not a trace remained of the wounds he had taken fighting the Third Apostle, and the moment the two superhumans locked onto their target and moved, the distance between them and it collapsed.
A thick reek of blood hung in the air. His instincts said this was bad.
"I'll go on ahead."
Dan Miryu kicked off the ground. Becoming a transcendent once more, he shot forward—and met a scene of carnage. Captain Kid, his limbs no longer whole, and Hwang Seokgu, riddled with holes, lay side by side.
"Elder! Captain Kid!"
The color drained from Dan Miryu's face. He poured Life into them, and ruined limbs knit back into their proper shape while skin that had looked like a corpse's slowly regained its blood. A moment ago they might have belonged in a morgue. Now they were princes asleep in the wood. He felt for both pulses. He was not too late.
"Haa……."
Dan Miryu dropped where he sat.
"You found them. Lucky."
Sword pushed through the brush and appeared.
"Yes. They were nearly at the end, but I managed to bring them back."
"What were they like before?"
"I'll only say they were corpses."
Dan Miryu wanted to forget the sight of a moment before. The death of someone close was not a thing he had ever grown used to.
"That power really is too much of a cheat."
Sword thought of his mercenary years. Remembering the mercenaries and soldiers who had died of wounds no deeper than a scratch from a scrap of iron, Life was an irrational thing. He had felt it even when they were enemies, and seeing it again from the same side, the power was simply too much, no matter how he looked at it.
"Which is why my family has guarded it, generation after generation."
"True enough."
Sword sat down in front of him.
"Krrrgh—krrrgh."
Hwang Seokgu snored. It sounded uncannily like a tiger's growl.
"……It certainly works."
"Yes."
"Why don't you head back out, at least?"
"Pardon?"
Dan Miryu blinked.
"I'll hold this place. Go somewhere else. There may be others in the same state as these two."
"……That may be, but."
Dan Miryu smiled bitterly and lifted a trembling hand.
"I need to rest as well. Move any further, and I may collapse on the way."
"……I see."
Sword clicked his tongue.
"Did the Second Apostle give you that much trouble?"
"I went through death more than once."
Dan Miryu clenched his fist.
"And it hurt. It hurt terribly."
"Hm……."
Putting it on……. No. That couldn't be it.
Life had left him without a single outward wound, smooth as if nothing had touched him, but his mind would not be the same. Healing a wound did not mean there had been no pain—least of all a pain that went all the way to death. Even Sword had no wish to feel again the emptiness and the solitude that came when death drew close, and Dan Miryu would have met them far more often.
Ironic.
The being farthest from death, paradoxically, felt death more often than anyone. So this was what they meant. Nothing in the world came free.
"There's something I've been wondering."
Sword spoke as if only to pass the time, and the snoring laid a bass beneath his words.
"What is it?"
"I heard the Dan Clan has carried out its duty as Guardian since ages past. When, exactly, did that begin?"
"That's a rather sharp question."
"Sharp, is it?"
For a moment Sword thought it might be. The Dan Clan's history was long enough to reach back into the Joseon era.
"Yes. Outside powers mostly only suppose that the Dan Clan has been on the peninsula a long time. They don't know from exactly when. A thousand years, if one stretches it?"
"Long, at that."
A single family's history, longer than that of any nation. Setting the Roman Empire aside, was there a country that had outlasted the Dan Clan?
"The way you say it, it sounds longer still."
"Well. It is."
"How many years?"
"Hm."
Dan Miryu folded his fingers, reckoning the years.
"Roughly…… two thousand two hundred?"
"What?"
Had he misheard?
"Don't joke. More than two thousand years—how……."
"It's the truth."
Sword looked hard into Dan Miryu's face. There was not a cloud in those eyes, and he knew it on instinct. That was the truth.
"Older than Christianity itself? What kind of……."
Christianity had taken shape around the first century, which meant the Dan Clan predated the world's largest religion by a good two hundred years. Sword's skin prickled.
The years aren't what matter.
What frightened him was that across all that span they had never once stepped to the front of history. Even if they had, they had buried it so thoroughly that it never came into the light.
Is that even possible?
Look at the history books. Consider what storms the thousand-year empire of Rome had weathered across those long years, and how, in the end, it fell. And Christianity? What disgrace a faith begun with good intentions had piled up over two thousand years—corruption, schism, killing, burial, evils past counting. There were those who believed in it with their whole hearts and followed it, but the road to that belief had been built on blood upon blood. Christianity had lasted so long because it was a religion, and because its interests happened to align with those of many states. Had they not, it would have vanished.
And yet.
The Dan Clan, possessed of a vast power that could set even death aside, had held their breath and kept their mission to the last.
For more than two thousand years.
Not gods. Human beings.
The will concealed inside that frightened Sword.
I nearly ended that history with my own hands.
A hollow laugh escaped him. They did say a man's fortune turned without warning…….
"……Are there records?"
"The history of the Dan Clan is set down in books, without a gap."
"Was any of it ever lost?"
"There were losses. Even so."
Dan Miryu tapped his necklace.
"Our ancestors did all they could to carry the records down to later generations. They spared no method."
He shrugged.
"Well. More of it was lost than kept."
"Why go that far?"
Preserving a store of records that large would have been no ordinary labor. Even raising a library might not have sufficed.
"Leaving a record is a fine thing. History is the track we leave for those who come after. But was there any need to go so far?"
"There was."
His fingers creaked tight around the necklace, gripping it until it threatened to crack.
"My family has a long history, and just as many turns of fortune. A clan head who wished to rule the world. A clan head who thrashed to seize eternal life. A clan head who meant to make the family into a nation. Rebellions out of the branch lines, and their suppression. The reach of foreign powers……. We have come to the edge of annihilation many times, and we have come back from it many times as well."
Even the Dan Clan was hardly a perfect house. People lived there, the same as anywhere.
"The reason we left records with such obsession was that they were warnings the ancestors sent to their descendants."
Do not forget the mission of our clan.
When the mission is forgotten, what returns is not success, but ruin.
"Members of the Dan Clan live for the guarding, from the day they are born until the day they die."
From childhood they were taught the history, made to act as members of the family according to their roles, and cut off from any vain way of thinking. All of it to protect that shining Life.
"That's……."
Nothing short of brainwashing.
"No. It's worse than that."
Human sacrifice, wearing a mission for a mask. How many had died for that shining stone? A Life that could save anyone was a Life that could save no one, because the number it had killed was greater than the number it had saved.
"Were you the same?"
"Yes."
Dan Miryu's voice was even.
"They aren't particularly good memories."
"And your son? Did you do the same with him?"
"Would I? My son doesn't know much of it. I did what I could to raise him as an ordinary student."
"I see……."
Sword guessed that the reason was bound up with the Dan Clan's present decline.
"In this world…… nothing comes free."
"That's right. All this commotion over a single stone……."
Silence.
A cold quiet settled over them.
"Setting that aside, Elder."
A flinch.
"Krr—krrrgh."
"Pretending to be asleep won't help you."
"Ahem. Sorry. Wasn't looking to eavesdrop."
Hwang Seokgu scratched his head, sat up, and brushed himself off.
"Caught in the middle of getting up."
"Ah, um. Good morning."
Captain Kid got to his feet, blurting out the first thing that came to him.
"How much of it did you hear?"
"W-well, hard to say. Head's still half in a dream."
Hwang Seokgu made a clumsy show of looking elsewhere.
"I don't really…… either."
Captain Kid was no better.
"Haa……."
At Dan Miryu's sigh, both of them let their eyes dart.
"Do not speak of this anywhere. I am serious."
"I'll take it to the grave."
"I won't tell anyone but Captain Earth."
"You—."
"This much I can't help……."
Captain Kid bowed his head again and again.
"It's all right. If it's Captain Earth, I can trust him."
"Thank you."
Dan Miryu brushed the dirt from his legs.
"Can you stand? I've healed the external wounds, at least."
"I'm right as rain."
"As am I."
Captain Kid rolled his arm in a circle.
"A miracle. I watched my arm fly off at the end, and it's healed without a single aftereffect."
"You must not speak of this, either."
"I'll bear it in mind."
Those who had been unconscious were awake. It was time to move.
"I'll tell you as we go. How our fight went."
"I'll speak as well."
The four of them set off at once.
Something shifted in the air. A gaze that had been resting on them held a moment longer, and then it was gone.
⊳ Roadman, San-gunvs. Tenth Apostle
⊳ Great Shrine Maiden of the Two Gods, the Onivs. Sixth Apostle, Fourth Apostle
⊳ Hong Yuminvs. Heavenly Road
⊳ Dan Miryu, Sword — Hwang Seokgu, Captain Kid: PICKED UP
⊳ Pele has sensed an uncanny earthquake. Moving toward it.
⊳ First Apostle — UNCONFIRMED
⊳ Phantom Thief — UNCONFIRMED