Fuck Off
"Are you finished?"
Dan Miryu came up to me, coated in dust.
"You had a fierce fight of your own, I see."
"If it counts as a fight, it was fierce enough."
He gave a bitter smile.
"Were you able to save many?"
"I put out the fire that couldn't wait. The rest will have to be left to the rescue teams."
His eyes dropped to the two figures collapsed at my feet.
"One of them is a Heavenly Punishment. And the other...?"
"A shrine maiden of the Shrine."
"The Shrine...? Don't tell me!"
Dan Miryu's eyes flew wide.
"Japan's Shrine, here in Korea...?!"
"Yes. I don't know when they arrived, but they didn't come as one or two."
Thud!
I kicked Amaterasu's shrine maiden. There was no reason to spare her, so I drove my foot hard into her stomach.
"Keugh!"
She dragged in a breath, and her eyes opened.
"Eeeeeeek!!!"
The moment she saw me, she slammed her forehead to the ground in a dogeza.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry..."
Japanese poured out of her like a machine gun. From somewhere rose the warm reek of ammonia.
Dan Miryu's gaze went cold as salt.
"What did you do to her?"
"I let her watch a dance with the Heavenly Punishment. I never laid a hand on her."
"What did you show her, that her mind left her like that?"
"The encyclopedia of pain. Only for a moment..."
Dan Miryu pressed a hand to his head. Made awkwardly small by it, I grumbled.
"I didn't have the luxury of looking after anyone either."
"Haa..."
With the ease of long habit, he opened his necklace first. A bright light of Life poured over the shrine maiden.
"I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die... Huh?"
Vitality returned to the eyes of the shrine maiden who had been licking my shoe for all she was worth. Then, without thinking, she lifted her head and looked at me.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."
She went straight back to the way she had been.
"...This is a first."
Dan Miryu's expression soured. He bathed her in Life several times more, but the result never changed.
"Like this, there is no asking her anything."
He looked thoroughly at a loss.
"First we must send word to Mi Soryeong and Hwang Seokgu. There is no telling what game the Shrine has been playing."
The Shrine, unseen until now, appearing in the same breath as the Heavenly Punishment. That meant the groundwork was already laid. It meant they had something to trust.
Dan Miryu nodded and moved at once.
While the time passed that way, my trousers became the property of the shrine maiden clinging to me like a dog. Secretions spilling from above and from below sent every kind of smell climbing up from underneath.
And she was a peerless beauty, doing this. If it counted as a reward, then it was a reward...
"...What exactly is this situation?"
Captain Kid arrived in the middle of my wrestling match with the shrine maiden.
"You're here."
"...Haa. I am curious, but I will ask later."
He locked cuffs around the fallen Heavenly Punishment's wrists and forced a gag between his teeth. The body he bound tight with a severed power line. Then he examined the man with care, and when the observation ended, his face creased hard.
"...What in the world did you do?"
"He isn't dead, is he?"
Hss. That wouldn't do. I had meant not to cross the line.
"If he were dead, then one might say that he is dead."
Captain Kid drew a syringe and set it to the Heavenly Punishment's arm.
"Brain death. I cannot call it confirmed."
"...Brain death?"
Hell.
"Then isn't that the same as dead?"
"It is too early to conclude. There is no equipment here, and the brain is not my specialty."
Before he was a hero, Captain Kid was a physician—a genius, no less, who had mastered both internal medicine and surgery. His judgment carried more than enough weight.
"A hospital will be required to confirm it."
"Then that'll do."
Whew. So he wasn't dead yet.
"However."
Captain Kid's eyes shone, keen and bright.
"I have not yet received an answer."
I hadn't even done anything wrong, and still I shrank. Before I knew it I had drifted to the side of Dan Miryu, who had already finished sending word.
"Mr. Dan Miryu, please save me. If it's Life, even brain death can be saved."
"I treated him together with the shrine maiden. But if that is his assessment, I suspect there is no hope."
"What are you saying!"
A sacred relic that raises the dead, unable to cure brain death? How did that make any sense!
Dan Miryu shrugged, as if the matter had nothing to do with him.
"Which is why you ought to have shown a little restraint..."
"Grkk."
No way out!
"Please calm down. It wasn't intentional. It just... ended up that way."
"Ended up that way..."
Captain Kid nodded, turning the words over.
"Mr. Dan Miryu, do you believe him?"
"I have to. What else would you have me do."
"...You do not find it suspicious?"
"This is hardly the matter of a day or two."
Dan Miryu wore the face of a man who had given up.
"Accept it as it is. He may not look it, but he fights on the side of justice."
"Mr. Dan Miryu!"
"............"
Captain Kid said nothing. I turned a gaze of pure emotion upon Dan Miryu.
"That is burdensome. And change the mask, quickly. It is blinding."
"Ah. Yes."
I swapped the mask of overwhelming emotion for my original one.
"Haa..."
Captain Kid let out a long sigh.
"I hope you are able to handle him."
"For the moment, I am managing."
Somehow I seemed to have been filed under problem child.
"Hieeeek! Save me!!!"
"Aaaah! What are you doing!"
The mad shrine maiden had climbed past my trousers and seized my waist!
"Mr. Dan Miryu! Please take this woman! I have to get to Hong Yumin!"
Phantom Thief: Emergency Escape
I tore free. The moment I vanished, the shrine maiden went into convulsions, and Dan Miryu opened the necklace at once.
"Hweeeek!!!"
"I'm counting on you!"
"Mr. Phantom! You are not to cause trouble over there as well!"
"I won't!"
The rest I left to the professionals.
I ran the streetlamps and kicked off the buildings, retracing memory in search of the shortest route. One Heavenly Punishment remained. I wasn't worried. It was Hong Yumin and Pele—a god and an immortal. With two divinities together, who alive could answer them?
Except.
"So long as it isn't the First Apostle."
Surely not. But if, by some chance, the First Apostle had come, the danger might face the other way. I could not throw even that sliver of a possibility aside.
I ran with everything I had.
"Oh. What a precious guest has come to call."
Pele's face hardened. So did Hong Yumin's.
The time it took the two divinities to reach Hong Yumin's former home was not long. What met them there, however, was anything but welcome.
An old man in the robes of an immortal, white-bearded, had come out to receive them as if he were master of the house. Behind him stood a black-haired man, attendant-like. And all around them lay a landscape of devastation.
Crosses thrust up like weeds. Some were no larger than a finger; some stood vast as soaring trees. On the crosses, the corpses of beasts and insects were mounted like specimens, and the blood they had spilled dyed the earth red. It made a cruel contrast with the clear sky.
"You wretch. What do you think you're doing here."
It had been her whole life. The place where those she loved had remained, steeped through with memory.
And it had been defiled.
Wretched? Don't be absurd.
By the time she fought Akho, it was already ruined past any mending. There was nothing left to say about that.
This was something else. This had been made entirely new. The years one person had lived, all of it, because some lunatic had crawled in without the sense to know his place.
Rumble.
Rage boiled. Only the altitude of her emotion had climbed, and yet scars were scored into the earth, a tremor into the sky, killing intent into the air. Inscribed. As if to scour away the colors daubed over what had been, the immortal's own color was painted across the world.
"Ooooh!!! This— this is!"
Even as that vast killing intent split his skin, the old man swallowed the blood and laughed like a man unhinged.
"You— it was you! I feel it...! I feel Heaven...!"
Kyak, kyak, kyak!!!
"I have searched through so many long years. From that day! From the very day I went about bearing the Stone Tablet!"
"I have no interest in the likes of your story."
Green broke into bloom across the blood-soaked earth. Flowers opened, grasses rose, and drove the wickedness out. The air grew radiant.
"I define it."
"By cold and by heat, the world is divided in two."
"Two into four. Four into eight."
"Beneath these eight, the laws of all things are accomplished."
"Yet how should the world end at a mere eight?"
"The five of mutual generation. The twelve beasts."
"The twelve constellations, and eight stars besides."
"Put in, and put in, and mix—"
⟨ Sixty-Four Laws ⟩
"How can such a thing be!"
Vooooom!!!
Dozens of laws, enough to hide even a clear sky, knotted themselves in the heavens.
"Magnificent..."
Even a god's wonder, she took as a blessing.
"This is as far as I can go. You rotten thing."
Even the immortal's breathing came to resemble law.
The old man marveled.
"As expected. You are the child born of Heaven!"
He flung himself flat upon the ground. The iron mace that would kill him was waiting, and still there was not a shred of hesitation in the movement.
"Come with us! If you stand beside us, we can accomplish the Great Cause!"
"Get out. The only thing any of you need is death."
"That cannot be!"
He poured out his fervor.
"There is no one but you fit to be the great Receiver, heir to the will of Heaven!"
Tears streamed as he begged.
"O divine maiden! Please, I beg you, be with us!"
"Divine maiden?"
The immortal twisted one corner of her mouth.
"Never did I think I would hear that accursed word again."
Not that it mattered.
"Even if the world should end."
She was not following the likes of them.
"Ah..."
The old man's head sank. And when he lifted it once more, a smile of flawless radiance had been set upon his face.
"Then I shall simply have to take you by force."
The immortal swung the iron mace she had held ready.
They poured down upon a single frail human.