You Trust Your Brother?
Dan Miryu gathered his belongings, took the car headquarters had prepared for him, and raced up toward Seoul.
An empty road opened ahead of him. Hardly another car was in sight. The rest stops that had always bustled with people now held nothing but flies, and with the smell of humanity gone from the highway, the road itself seemed to be aging into ruin.
Vroooom!!!
There was no one left whose eyes he had to mind, and Dan Miryu put his weight into the pedal. The needle on the gauge slammed against its limit at once, and the world outside tore backward.
It was a speed an ordinary person could not have endured. Even a professional racer would have found it too much on an ordinary highway.
But Dan Miryu was one of the foremost superhumans in the world. Over a short distance, his body would have outrun the car. No—perhaps even over a long one, he would still have been faster.
At this speed, it was nothing more than a run after a meal.
Even so, he insisted on the car. He already knew the subjugation had driven his body to its limit. The power in the stone at his throat could have let him ignore even that, but using it would only swell the price he would have to pay afterward. He might not rise from a bed for a long while.
In the window, Dan Miryu's eyes had sunk to a depth that raised the skin. The gaze that was usually bright and steady looked ghastly enough to be mistaken for a corpse's.
Crrrack.
The grip of the wheel crumpled. The car lurched hard. He rode the lane on the edge of disaster and did not so much as blink. Only the engine, howling rough, spoke for what he felt.
Who.
His eyes turned toward a past far behind him. He put his back to a place that had been shining, and a long shadow stretched out ahead of him. Dan Miryu walked into it. Squelch—dank blood-water splashed his ankles.
Who came after my family?
From within the blood he felt a gaze fixed on him. Dragon eyes he had only ever imagined flashed.
This attack was aimed at the Dan Clan. No question.
Scraps of flesh lurking near the shadow twitched and crawled toward him, little by little. Blood dripped from both his hands. The flesh hungered for it, as if it had found the body it had lost.
The Dan Clan has many enemies. It always has. To reign for thousands of years is the same as saying you cut down every rival who tried to climb.
The shadow boiled. Blood-water vaporized and stained the air darker still, until he could not see an inch ahead. Anyone else inside that space would have dropped to their knees and begged, terror surging up from the bottom of instinct. Or they would have looked away and run.
Dan Miryu did neither. He did not look away, and he did not run. He simply endured.
The falling blood increased. What he had been wading through now climbed to his ankles.
…Is it that kind of enemy again? Someone whose life the Dan Clan ruined?
Something rose out of the sea of blood. Bones, organs, and dead heads—and every one of them was looking at Dan Miryu.
…Someone the previous generation crossed? Or else…
Thump. One of the heads knocked against his knee. Without thinking, he looked down.
A face delicate enough to be mistaken for a woman's. Eyes that put people at ease. Green hair spilled long past a severed neck. Vacant green irises held him. The head worked its mouth.
"Miryu. I'm leaving them to you…?"
"Kh—!"
Screeeeech!!!
The car spun. A whirling skid mark burned itself into the asphalt.
Thud!
It stopped only when it struck the guardrail.
Face buried in the airbag, Dan Miryu dragged in small, ragged breaths.
"Huff. Huff."
"Miryu."
He had thought he was past it.
"There's no one else your brother can ask but you."
…He had thought he had forgotten.
"I'm sorry. And thank you."
His head burned. The back of his skull ached. With shaking eyes he looked below his waist, and there a head was smiling wide.
"I'm counting on you."
Crrrunch.
Dan Miryu shoved the airbag aside and started the engine again. It caught with a spit. He threw the car back onto the empty road, and the engine, surging as if it might explode, drowned the voice lingering in his ear.
…It let him pretend that it had.
Bang.
The moment he reached the hospital where his family was, the car died. Parked any which way on the shoulder, Dan Miryu rose, slamming the door hard enough to break it.
"…Yes. It's scrap. Please come collect it."
As he entered the hospital in its uproar, he had someone called to retrieve the car. That, too, was a small effort to keep hold of his reason.
He picked his way carefully around the patients lying on the lobby floor. The terror in Seoul had left casualties beyond counting, and the hospitals were taking in the wounded far past anything they could bear. This one was no exception. Doctors and nurses ran themselves ragged, and the sound of weeping never stopped.
Dan Miryu approached a nurse at the counter who looked half dead as she took a call, and when it ended he gave his family's name.
"…There should be someone admitted under the name Mi Soryeong. Where is she."
"…Pardon?"
The nurse froze at the cold of his voice. That vacant look set something black burning in his chest.
"…A person named Mi Soryeong. Is she here, or isn't she? She should be in a VVIP room."
"…And what is your relation?"
"I'm her husband."
"…Do you happen to have papers proving—"
She flinched, and could not get the rest out. Like a mouse set before a beast, she could not even breathe properly.
"Hik! Hik!"
"Call up there. Tell them a man named Dan Miryu has come."
He turned smoothly away. The nurse clutched her heart and bowed from the waist.
Dan Miryu sat in a chair that had just emptied. The news was playing on the television.
The anchor carried the report on in a somber voice.
Dan Miryu did not take his eyes off the dragon.
If a voice calling for him had not risen, he would have stayed in that seat.
He would have stayed.
Dan Miryu reached the VIP floor.
A scene wholly unlike the battlefield below opened before him. Quiet. Still. A view that only those who had bought the difference with money could have.
Step. Step.
"Are you Mr. Dan Miryu?"
The guard at the entrance spoke, his face stiff.
"I am."
"…Confirmed. Please go to Room 4."
He returned the identification and went silently back to his work.
Dan Miryu checked the plaque that read Room 4 and opened the door. When he looked inside, his time stopped.
Beep. Beep.
Hsssss. Hooo.
Hsss. Hooo.
The signal he had not wanted to hear. The breathing he had not wanted to hear.
His child lay where a child should not have lain, something plastered thick over the whole body, dependent on the machines, and breathing. Alive.
He forced back the scream that tried to come out, drove legs that wanted to fold, and moved. He set a hand on the shoulder of the woman who had bowed her head over the blanket, clutching it.
"…Soryeong."
She flinched. Her head turned, slowly.
"…You… came?"
Drip. Drip.
Mi Soryeong wiped her eyes with her arm and smiled. Dan Miryu hauled at muscles that wanted to crumple and lifted the corner of his mouth.
"You… went through so much."
"Yeah…"
Drip. Drip.
Tears kept coming from Mi Soryeong's eyes. They had run so long they had worn a path down her face, and along that path one drop crossed, then another. She did not wipe them as she had a moment ago. She could not. She had not even noticed that she was crying.
"…You went through a lot too."
…Don't you resent me?
Dan Miryu could not bring himself to say it.
How could she not resent him? He was already guilty. Cause and consequence meant nothing, even if the work had been saving the earth. What did any of that matter to a mother with her dying child beside her?
He was the head of the house, a father, a husband. A duty that should have come before anything else.
"It's all right…"
Mi Soryeong covered the hand on her shoulder with her own.
"…As long as he's alive, isn't that enough?"
Dan Miryu's face broke. How much pain had it cost her to put those words in her mouth? She was too merciful.
He closed his eyes and opened the necklace.
Cool, clear Life swept the room.
Mi Soryeong stepped aside. Dan Miryu could not bring himself to look at his son.
Whoooosh.
Life drove into the wounded one's breast. The moment that boundless vitality sank into a single person, the wounds began to close, as if to ask when they had ever been hurt.
"Haa…"
A light sigh struck the ventilator from within.
Having put out the worst of the fire, Dan Miryu went to Mi Soryeong.
"It's done…"
She looked down at her two bandaged arms.
"Useless arms. They couldn't even cover him when he was in danger."
"Soryeong…"
"Please. Just leave them."
Dan Miryu closed Life. What remained of it in the room glittered like fireflies.
"…What happened."
Mi Soryeong turned her head away for a moment. She bit her lip until it bled.
"…Dan Miryong."
"…What?"
"That's the name of the child who attacked us."
Dan Miryong…?
"A child? What do you mean?"
His breath came short.
Dan? The surname Dan? No. It has to be a coincidence.
"Honey…"
Her face twisted as she seized his collar tight.
"That child… They say he's your older brother's son."
"…What?"
"He said so. Himself."
Himself. Dan Mihyeong's son.
"Miryu."
Dan Miryu turned his head toward the voice. A pool of blood had welled up beneath the door.
In that pool—
Still smiling, his brother's head was there.