I'll Keep It a Secret
Scientist collapsed, eyes rolled the wrong way in his skull.
Do Kyungsoo let the countless sour stares boring into his back slide off him.
"Someone was waiting their turn, and I cut ahead. I'm sorry."
Hwang Seokgu and Elder Wildflower cleared their throats.
"Nonsense. If it's you, I can leave it in your hands. I'll see a surer result than if I did it myself, at the least."
"......I've no particular objection either."
They knew Do Kyungsoo's transcendence well enough. He had lived through a storm of death and flown all the way into space to fight an enemy. A man like that had worked some nameless measure upon their nemesis, and a beast's instinct hammered the alarm like a mad thing. Pour out every grudge you possessed, and it still would not equal what the human before them had done.
It was not that they felt no regret. But the two of them — men with no particular specialty beyond putting down the clones — were not children who couldn't govern their own feelings.
Even so.
"That really is all right, is it?"
Elder Wildflower watched Scientist thrashing like a madman and did not hide his unease. Bloody foam poured from the man's mouth, and his eyeballs bulged as if they might burst. Pus welled across his face like acne, burst, and welled again, while his forearm split as if drought had cracked it and spouted a fountain of blood. It was a freak occurrence from which dying on the spot would not have been strange, and all of it had happened in less than a minute.
"He's fine. With the sins he's piled up, would I let him die over this much? Even if Heaven punishes him, I won't let him die. Above all, a phantom thief doesn't kill."
Do Kyungsoo shot a thumbs-up. It was not a pose that inspired much confidence.
"Well, as the Child of Man says, he is alive — barely. The pain must be tremendous."
"Even while he's bleeding like that?"
"Look. It's going back in."
Pele jerked her chin at Scientist.
His blood flowed back into the places it had left, as if time were rewinding. The wounds sealed as smoothly as if an iron had pressed them shut, and the skin grew plump and taut. In a matter of seconds Scientist was whole again. More than that, the body that had been addicted to death had grown healthy.
"How......"
Dan Miryu swallowed a groan. He hadn't even used the Stone of Resurrection. How was such a thing possible?
"Don't be curious. Don't even think about it."
Pele's voice had gone hard.
"That child is paying for what he's done."
The sin of killing lives beyond numbering. The sin of manufacturing artificial death in order to study death. The sin of unethical experiments upon werewolves, upon Korea, and upon nations and peoples beyond count. And every petty sin besides.
The crimes were so atrocious that a death sentence would have been a tap with a feather duster. It was not as if Pele failed to know them. She declared it all the same, flat and final: he was paying. Not one person present missed the weight of those words.
And they understood something else. What they had just witnessed was only the prelude. The true punishment had not even begun.
The freak phenomenon returned to Scientist, who a moment before had been as clean as a baby in a nursery.
Krrrk.
His limbs twisted into shapes no limbs should take, as easily as if someone had seized a doll's arms and legs and snapped them. Shoulder joints burst free and broke. Elbow bones sprang out and rolled across the snow. His legs folded backward into a V and framed his head, and his feet dangled, barely hung from muscle. From his abdomen a spider tore through the organs and drove its fangs into the soft inside of his groin, and larvae squirmed along his gums.
"Hrrk!"
Two high-schoolers with weak stomachs staggered off and retched. Even those who had weathered every kind of hell went gray in the face. Roadman himself, a veteran of the Second World War, could not look the carnage straight on.
Pele sighed.
"Haa. Come on. Don't watch something this foul. We've still got plenty left to do."
Goddess or not, she soothed them as one of their own.
"She's right. We still have to search the laboratory buried under here, and seize whatever remnants might be left."
"Shall I call Terra for support?"
"Can they get here at once?"
"A single phone call will suffice."
Dan Miryu and Captain Kid turned the talk to business on purpose. The others slipped into the conversation and looked away.
"You're not coming?"
"I have to keep watch."
At Pele's question, Do Kyungsoo gave a bitter smile.
"I told you. I won't let him die."
"......All right. Rest."
Pele looked at him with worry, then turned away. For some reason he gave off the air of a man who wanted to be alone.
The party descended the passage toward the laboratory, and Do Kyungsoo stood by himself in the Arctic wind.
"Hoo!"
He opened the pores he had been clamping shut. Sweat soaked him from head to foot in an instant.
"Haa. Haa."
The world spun. Unable to stay on his feet, he dropped onto the snow and panted out hot breath.
Drip. Drip.
Even in a wind below freezing, the heat in his sweat melted the snow. He barely forced down the bile climbing his throat.
"Did I push too hard......"
Uniting the three powers lodged in his body into one had succeeded. The success, however, was so unstable it almost made a mockery of itself. Calling them one was generous. In truth he had crammed them together by force and handled the mess as if it were a single thing.
Any one of them alone was a power no one on Earth could match. They were only bound inside the category called Phantom Thief; each nature was nothing Do Kyungsoo could touch lightly. If this had not been in the near reaches of space by the moon, and if the three powers had not been well disposed toward him, he would have been caught in their rampage and destroyed himself. Ending with a body that merely ached and struggled was fortune enough.
"If I mean to finish this, I'll have to put in a great deal of work."
The fight on their date had taught him he could never beat Another One — not if he died and woke again. In his Phantom Thief state he had been beaten without recourse, and even as Do Kyungsoo■ he had failed to deal any meaningful harm. He had not drawn Phantom out, but set that old gentleman against Another One and leaving Earth would not be enough; the universe itself would be in danger.
In the end he had been forced to invent another way, and that way was the fusion of three powers that otherwise went their own roads. He had joined vast, separate strengths into one. Their potential could not be guessed. The flaw was that wielding it still required conditions, but those would fall away with time. What he needed was training, and will.
Do Kyungsoo did not want this world to perish as the original had. As one reader who had loved that original. For the sake of the bonds he had tied so tightly in this world.
And......
"........."
He shook his head, as if to fling the idle thought away. A useless fancy was an ugly thing in a man.
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
A timely distraction arrived to clear his head: the sight of Scientist's hands and feet turning into teeth and eating him. Grotesque, horrific — and yet it brought back the scent of a dead tree.
Poor thing. Why did you have to get caught by a bastard like that?
Bad luck, nothing more. Scientist and the tree alike.
"So. When were you planning to get up?"
Do Kyungsoo turned a cold gaze on the figure lying in the snow.
"......You noticed?"
Death One groaned and slowly pushed himself upright.
"If you'd been dead, I wouldn't have brought you."
"I hadn't known that. I thought you had taken me along as a trophy."
"Anyone who knows whose replica you are wouldn't even imagine you'd die from so little."
"That is the real one's affair. A frail newborn such as I drops dead in droves amid the quarrels of adults."
"Spare me the whining."
Death One laid it on thick.
"It is nothing but the truth. A consciousness that was mere lingering thought had its very soul seized, and still came back alive. Is that not a miracle?"
"That much is true."
He hadn't intended it, but Death One was unexpectedly intact. That was only because Death One had taken no direct harm from anyone but Another One.
"You happened to keep your life. What do you mean to do with it? Care for a second round with me?"
Do Kyungsoo's air went bleak. Death One flung up his hands at once.
"You jest too cruelly. Would you do such a thing to a babe not yet a year old?"
"If the babe is a death god, then yes."
"Show a little mercy. I have committed not a single sin. Even fighting you was, in my own fashion, the repayment of a kindness."
Death One pleaded and pleaded. He had no wish to make an enemy of a being who had struck down even a reproduction of the original body.
Do Kyungsoo hesitated. Death One was a life whose self had taken root — too much simply to kill — and shutting him away somewhere would mean nothing. Alexei had confined himself of his own will, and could have been caught again had he escaped, but no one but Do Kyungsoo could stop Death One. Sending him off as he was left a bad taste as well. There was no telling what that voyeur would attempt once his own replica was loose in the world, and a monster on the order of a god could not be turned loose among humans.
Taking him in themselves was out of the question too. The Book of Death and the Stone of Resurrection would loathe it without end, and he could not leave a fault line inside the group.
I'll have to dump him on Terra.
At last he settled it. If he could neither do one thing nor the other, better to leave the creature somewhere he could at least halfway trust. Captain Kid would seize him by the collar, but he would understand.
Do Kyungsoo opened his mouth.
But Death One was nowhere at all.
"???"
Where the hell did that bastard go?
"While you were deliberating, he vanished from the empty air, as if he had been switched off. I believe he fled."
Sipsado, who had remained as the dragon's guardian, answered the question for him.
"Ha......"
He'd been had. The back of his skull went numb. His condition was a wreck, granted — but to flee, openly, from right in front of his eyes. Or perhaps the plan had been laid from the instant the other woke. Let himself be noticed on purpose. Loosen the string of tension. Then, the moment Do Kyungsoo's mind slid elsewhere, strike with a ghost's timing.
He felt a presence thinning away beyond the edge of his senses.
"Don't spend the life you've got doing nothing but evil."
Born was born. He might as well enjoy what there was to enjoy.
Do Kyungsoo flopped onto his back.
And then —
Creak.
He turned his stiff neck, slowly.
"......How long have you been there?"
"I have been here from the beginning."
"Ah......"
Now that he thought of it, no one could haul an unconscious dragon down into the laboratory. Someone had to remain. Sipsado had stayed as a matter of course, the dragon's guardian, and the others had gone down and left her behind as if that were only natural. He was mortified. She faded into the background so often that he hadn't noticed her at all.
"Listen, um......"
"I will keep it a secret."
"Thank you."
From where he lay in the snow, Do Kyungsoo looked up at a night sky like the Milky Way. Sipsado watched him without a word. A strange heat smoldered in her eyes.