Bbya!
"How are you holding up?"
Dan Miryu and Hwang Seokgu were in the office of the Temporary Hero Association.
"Don't even ask. I feel like I'm dying."
Hwang Seokgu drained his beer.
"Chairman, the drinking..."
The secretary beside him broke into a cold sweat.
"Just the one."
"Haah. All right."
Long used to it, the secretary withdrew at once.
"You really shouldn't drink too much."
"This is my tonic."
Hwang Seokgu said it as if he were sick to death of the world. "If I don't at least drink this, I'm going to explode and thrash the lot of them."
"I understand."
Dan Miryu did understand. Without the necklace, he might have caused a disaster of his own.
"At my age, brawling with children."
Hwang Seokgu's sigh went deep.
"Don't worry. The hero bill will pass before the year is out."
Dan Miryu grinned.
"Every rotten one of them is going to taste the mace."
Hwang Seokgu let out a short laugh.
"There won't be a day the blood runs dry."
"It'll be that way for three years."
"Three years... Aye. That's cheap enough."
How many years had they spent crouched low, heads bowed? They could wait a mere three.
"Easy does it. You're already moving fast."
"As a Dan, I can't be satisfied stopping here."
At that, Hwang Seokgu threw back his beer.
The Dan clan...
The old days came back. The nation boiling under the Crime War. The ones who had stood at the very front and caught the villains—and who, in the end, had trampled the first sprouts of heroes.
Well. This fellow probably has little to do with that.
He had never learned what stance the Dan clan took back then. He had been too busy staying alive.
Brrring.
"Excuse me."
Dan Miryu begged pardon and answered the phone.
"S-something terrible's happened! Something's happened to Yumin!"
"Honey? What's wrong? Calm down."
"Come right now! Phantom's gone off somewhere with Yumin!"
Dan Miryu's face hardened by the second. Helpless, he looked to Hwang Seokgu.
"Go on. I'll be fine."
Hwang Seokgu waved him out. "The longer you dawdle, the worse she'll rake you over the coals."
"Thank you."
Dan Miryu bowed and hurried out.
As if to take his place, Yeongsik burst in, gasping.
"Chairman!"
Hwang Seokgu frowned.
"What's got you in such a lather? You're pouring sweat."
"The news—look at the news!"
"Eh? What news?"
Yeongsik snatched up the remote and switched it on. Hwang Seokgu watched, and then—
"Yeongsik. Round up the youngsters."
"Yes, sir!"
Hwang Seokgu's eyes went sharp. Instinct warned him: go there, and he would die. But he had to go. That was what a hero was.
On the news, a disaster was unfolding.
Watching the road beside them locked solid, Dan Miryu felt a prickle of dread.
"What's going on?"
It was nearly dawn, nowhere near quitting time. Traffic had no business jamming now. The road he himself was taking, by contrast, lay wide open.
"Miryu, look at this."
Mi Soryeong held up her phone and played the news.
"...What is this?"
Dan Miryu could not look away. Whatever the news was showing, it was anything but natural.
"It started after Yumin left."
"The master?"
Surely not. A stretch of country flashed across the screen, and his face set hard.
"That's where the master's house is..."
"Yes."
A low sound escaped him. Then every car beside them was a refugee.
They flinched. At the thunder rolling out of the speaker, both of them trembled.
Dan Miryu said nothing. Phantom's words rose in his mind.
Hong Yumin is an immortal.
Think of the very concept of an immortal, given human shape.
Anything you picture when you think of an immortal—she can do all of it.
"This is insane..."
Even if she was an immortal out of a story, he had thought she still fell inside the bounds of a superpower. He had been wrong. Hong Yumin called the wind and the rain and struck with lightning. She was a genuine immortal, and the scale of it was simply too different. That was no human. It was a natural disaster.
"Miryu..."
The worried voice snapped him back.
"Honey, you right now—"
"No."
Mi Soryeong shook her head, absolute. "If you're about to tell me to turn back because it's dangerous, I won't hear it."
"Honey, this isn't a game."
The landscape on the news alone made a life hard to swear to. For an ordinary person like Mi Soryeong, it went without saying.
"Honey. She's the first friend I've ever had."
Tears ran down her face. "That friend is in there. In a place where she might die..."
She caught his collar. "My friend is hurting. She's hurting, and I couldn't help her at all."
Blood spilled across a courtyard wavered behind her eyes. A pale face flickered past.
"I can't leave her alone."
"There's nothing you can do!"
Dan Miryu shouted.
Mi Soryeong dug in.
"I don't care—I'm going! I'm going to help!"
"This isn't something you decide on feeling—!"
"You... You helped me when I was like that."
At that, Dan Miryu closed his mouth.
"Even when it was impossible, you saved me."
Thud!
He slammed the wheel.
"Once. There won't be a next time."
"Thank you."
Mi Soryeong took his hand.
"If there's any comfort in this," Dan Miryu sighed, "it's that Phantom is there. That's what it comes to."
"Will Phantom be all right?"
He was not worried about that man.
"He'll be fine. He's Phantom."
"He is the sort who could turn up in the back seat this very moment, and no one would think it strange."
That isn't all of it.
His wife did not know. Dan Miryu did. The phantom thief he had seen on Jeju—no, that thing. Neither human nor monster. Only a thing that existed. He could not make himself believe it would die.
"Honey."
"What."
Mi Soryeong was angry. "That Phantom—he knows every bit of it, and he still won't say a word. I know he won't."
"He won't."
He had done the same last time. What else was new?
"He handles it all himself and doesn't breathe a word to us."
Her eyes burned.
"I'll make him bleed for it."
"I'll join you."
Dan Miryu laughed under his breath, taking a little comfort in the sight of his wife with her fighting spirit up.
Where was this?
The mind was muffled and warm. Nothing could be seen. The body would not move—no, sensation itself seemed to have gone. Was he even moving? Was he even thinking? Was he even alive?
He didn't know. What he had been doing. Why it had come to this.
A voice spoke inside his head. The instant he recognized it, his mind was dragged off somewhere.
In a small village, a baby was born.
"Waaah! Waaah!"
"Good heavens. A girl!"
"Pretty even as a baby. She'll have plenty of men crying when she grows."
In a sparsely peopled country village, a birth was a joy—a great blessing on a household, and, in a smaller way, a blessing on the village itself.
"Are you all right?"
"No... I think I'm dying..."
The woman who had borne the child poured sweat. Her breath came harsh and ragged. She was in a bad way.
"Mother. My body..."
"None of that nonsense—steady yourself!"
"Breathe! Breathe!"
The old woman who served as midwife started in alarm and bore down on her.
"Stay with us! Collapse here and you die where you lie!"
"Water! Someone outside, bring water!"
A clatter of feet—the able-bodied men outside, running. The door flew open, and a gourd of water came in.
"Here, here it is!"
"Give it here!"
The mother drank from the gourd, but her eyes rolled, and she fainted.
"Mercy! Get up! Get up!"
"Death's taking another one!"
It was a common enough thing. Mothers who died giving birth. Mothers who died with the child. Households where only the child was lost. To bring a baby into the world was to stake one's life.
"Nnh?"
Through the confusion, the baby in the wet nurse's arms looked at her mother. She felt an ember guttering out. Wanting it to burn brighter, she reached.
"Bbya!"
And the ember lived.
"Huk—!"
"She's up!"
"Pull yourself together, you wretched girl!"
Clutching her head, the mother drank again from the gourd.
"Ptoo! I really thought I was dead!"
"We nearly died worse than you!"
"Heaven, thank you."
She looked far livelier than she had before she collapsed.
"You can thrash around like that and you're fine?"
"No trouble at all."
Amid the warm laughter, the baby fell asleep.
"Aigoo. Sleeping sound through all this mess."
"May I hold her?"
"Here."
The baby was gathered tight into her mother's arms.
"Truly lovely."
The mother brought the child close to her cheek. Even in sleep, in her mother's arms, the baby smiled.
"Oh, precious thing."
"Another mouth in the house. That's a good thing."
"The place will have more life in it."
Amid the people's blessings, an immortal was born.