When Five People Gather, One of Them Is Bound to Be...? (2)
Silence swallowed the air around us for several seconds.
For reasons known only to her, Eunha was the only one wearing a faint little smile. Here I was, backed into a corner, and our Tanlangseong looked like she was having the time of her life.
The principal was the first to speak.
"Hmm. I simply cannot make sense of this. This greenhorn, single-handedly slaying a V-class Nephilim?"
Miss Botan, draped in an oversized gown over an outfit that was practically underwear, furrowed her brow in suspicion. There were eight V-class Nephilim in all, led by the First Beast, which had slaughtered over ten million people in the five minutes after its descent. They were the beasts of the gods, creatures said to be beyond anyone's power to subdue save the King of Jujutsu himself.
"Which Divine Beast was it?"
At present, confirmation is impossible—.
Hesed answered in a voice as dry as dust. It hadn't entered the barrier dungeon itself, so it apparently couldn't pin the culprit down as Byeoljubu Minogame.
"Um... perhaps Hesed has a bug? Or a virus got in, or something?"
The woman professor who had followed the principal in offered the suggestion with careful delicacy. AI Hesed was Seonggwan Academy's integrated cursed energy engine. True enough, in the original Jujutsu Gwi-hwan it went insane and put the students through an endless death game—but at present it was nothing more than a high-performance student management program.
Miss Botan flicked a look at her subordinate that made it very clear what she thought of that theory.
"Impossible, I say. They call it artificial intelligence, but Hesed is a brain imbued with an Innate Cursed Technique that stores and computes information without limit—programmed through the Giga family's technology."
Transplanting a brain into a machine. Ethically speaking, I had some serious problems with that, but anyway.
I underestimated Hesed, if it could figure out something like that.
I had been edging backward, all awkward nerves, when a pair of wolf shikigami closed in on either side of me and pinned me with their stares. Geri and Freki—Miss Botan's pet wolves. The runes she had inscribed with her Innate Cursed Technique glowed on their brows.
"Greenhorn. Do not move until I permit it."
A moment later, two black-crow shikigami settled on her shoulders and began whispering, one at each ear.
"Lord Huginn. Lord Muninn. Have you gathered the rumors? Hmm...? Well now. Ho-oh?"
Interest flickering across her face, the principal listened to the crows, then climbed up onto her steed's head. Sleipnir snorted a plume of displeasure. She ignored the divine horse completely and looked down at me, the pressure of her gaze settling over my shoulders like a weight.
"Greenhorn, there are no records of you prior to being placed in the jujutsu aptitude orphanage in District 11. It is as though you dropped out of the sky."
"Well, yeah. I was an orphan wandering the streets. Ask Tanlangseong beside me. We knocked around together."
I said it with a face so clean it could have passed inspection. The principal's eyes met Eunha's for a moment.
"Yep. It's true~. Teacher."
Eunha winked, bright as a lemon drop. The principal's head snapped back toward me.
"And then you were sold to the Namgung as a disciple...?"
"I wasn't sold. I chose it of my own will."
"I heard ruffians stormed the Namgung estate. Your junior sister was ensnared by a nightmare jujutsu, and a wanderer called the Hundred-Kill Venerable slaughtered the lot of them, which is how she was freed."
The principal stroked a crow shikigami under the chin as she spoke.
"The timing is rather convenient, is it not, greenhorn? Did you not impersonate the Hundred-Kill Venerable to save your junior sister? You were also the one who discovered the cursed spirits the Hundred-Kill Venerable had slain."
She was hitting the mark dead-on. So this was the strategist of the Seven Asterisms—Wenqu herself.
I pressed my jittering nerves down into a chair and answered as calmly as I could.
"If you watched the demonstration duel, you already know my level. Cutting down the young lady was a stroke of pure luck."
"Your effort was admirable, but you certainly did not transcend the realm of an ordinary man. What puzzled me, however, was that you deliberately raised a sandstorm."
"That was to hunt Lady Yongso through the storm."
"That would have been inefficient. The more I thought on it, the more I wondered—could it be that you used jujutsu while no one was looking—?!"
The principal's words, closing in on the truth, cut off mid-sentence.
Star-clouds shimmered and coiled around Eunha's hand as she gently shut her eyes. A moment later those clouds gathered themselves into a sphere of light. The old song about twinkling little stars did the real thing a disservice—an actual star was a sun, vastly larger than the Earth. But Hwi Eunha's Innate Cursed Technique, Cheonrangranran, spun palm-sized stars into being as freely as breathing. Mini solar systems. Mini Milky Ways. Even mini black holes. And applications like this one, too.
She opened those brilliant eyes, stars set in them like jewels, and flung her arms wide with theatrical flourish—then declared it at the top of her lungs.
"A wish upon a star."
⟨ Super Nova ⟩
A deep, rolling boom shook the air. The star Eunha had made collapsed in on itself, hurling out a savage lance of light and a surge of arrogant energy.
"Ghk—what is this?"
The yield had been scaled down by a factor of countless trillions, no doubt—but a supernova was still a supernova, and it slammed straight into me. I'd taken these almost every day as a kid, so it was weirdly nostalgic... except my consciousness felt ready to fly off beyond the far side of the universe.
Stars are spinning in my eyes.
To anyone watching, my face must have looked completely ridiculous. In a blink I was out of the fight, and Eunha hooked an arm around my shoulder and yanked me in against her. Crocodile tears and all, she nuzzled her cheek into my chest while I couldn't so much as twitch a finger. What did she think I was, a teddy bear she dragged to bed? I was going to get her back for this someday.
"Teacher, you can't! My Beom is such a weakling—if you crush his spirit...!"
Caught flat-footed by her favorite pupil's outburst, Miss Botan flapped her arms.
"Why did you interfere?! I was going to interrogate him thoroughly, and you knock him out?"
"Aww~. If he were actually strong, would he have taken a Super Nova head-on like that?"
"Even granting that this old body's conjecture was somewhat of a stretch... the record of a solo Divine Beast subjugation remains, does it not? Unless Hesed has gone mad—"
Something seemed to click. Miss Botan's face twisted.
"This would be a first, but perhaps he happened to slay a stray of the Seventh Beast? After all, even the King of Jujutsu could not seal every last Aporian."
A V-class Nephilim. The Seventh Beast that swarmed and rent, Aporia. Unique among the V-class, it existed as many bodies at once. Each one was weak—but together they became a calamity.
"How troublesome. I shall have to look at the system." She pressed a hand to her head. "Still, the greenhorn has already been selected for the special lecture. That much cannot be helped."
"Haha. I'll guide him well~."
Eunha covered her mouth, smiling with a look of perfect innocence.
Glad it worked out somehow. Hurts like hell, though.
Maybe the tension finally let go of me, because the feeling in the body that had taken that blast head-on only now began to blur and fade. In the last instant before my consciousness cut out completely, the hearing I had left caught Eunha's voice, soft as a whisper.
"Nn... mm..."
When I opened my eyes, I was in a dormitory bed. I found myself missing the smell of the Namgung estate's bamboo mats. I remembered passing out—but who had carried me here and put me down?
I blinked a few times and glanced around without thinking. Two feet that were not mine were sticking out of the blanket. Two of them were mine, so whose were the other two?
I pulled the covers back. Eunha was asleep in nothing but her panties, breathing in soft little puffs, dead to the world.
This brat. She planted a supernova on me without so much as a word, and now she's got the nerve...!
Seeing her this unguarded could only mean one thing: she didn't even see me as a man, let alone a human being. Stars were still spinning lazily through my skull, and I was trying to get my thoughts in some kind of order, when—
"Pardon the intrusion. This is my junior brother's room, is it not?"
The dormitory door opened on Junior Sister Hanran's bright voice. Of all the times. She must have already been discharged from the clan hospital. But if she walked in right now, then surely...?
The smile she'd worn as she opened the door froze solid on her face.
"Disgusting."
"It's not like that—this girl climbed into the bed on her own...!"
"Disgusting."
"Listen to me! You know what Eunha's like, Junior Sister!"
My junior sister staggered, caught herself against the wall, and spoke with a face full of grief.
"Tanlangseong stole the lead from me again. To think—to actually think something like this would happen.... That's why dorm life made me so anxious. Seonggwan Academy dormitories are one to a room, so a boy and a girl who've fallen for each other, at night—it's disgusting, I tell you."
"Junior Sister Ran, you're reading way too much into this."
"No. I'll go find a room for the two of you to live in together, even now, until a new residence is built."
"You're broke—what are you even talking about?! Junior Sister!!"
Junior Sister Ran wiped her tears, whirled on her heel, and walked away.
"What were you doing with the gunslinger girl?"
Behind me, the walking disaster who had started all of this sat up, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. She fumbled her beret on first, mashing it down over her hair, and asked the question with a faintly sharp edge in her voice.
"Because of you, Junior Sister got the wrong idea."
"Aha☆ Totally fine! You don't even need to worry about it~."
I was pretty sure I did need to worry about it. If word got out that a non-sorcerer had shared a bed with a star of the Seven Asterisms—in more ways than one—I was going to be executed.
"If you're Tanlangseong of the Seven Asterisms, show some restraint. You each get a palatial mansion, and you're sleeping in a dump like this?"
"Ehh~. Then when I get lonely in the middle of the night, come sleep next to me~—that was Beom who said that, you know."
"That was when we were seven-year-old kids."
My glorious tale of failure shimmered in the air right in front of my face. I never should have decided to raise a transcendent powerhouse as a spoiled childhood friend.
I buttoned her shirt for her as naturally as breathing and managed a wry smile. She brushed back a lock of that hair that flowed like the Milky Way.
"Just kidding, just kidding. More importantly, I'm so excited for the special lecture. This year, I'm Beom's teacher~."
The girl in front of me laughed, soft and pleased, and smiled like sunlight.
For some reason, she didn't press me about Minogame. Fine by me—though I had to wonder if she'd simply bought the principal's wild miss.
"It's not at the school like last year? It's being held somewhere else?"
"──! Yep. The barrier dungeon Lost Paradise. A gorgeous tropical island~!"
Having said that, Eunha started humming like a child counting down to a trip. "Swimsuits~ coconuts~☆"
Never mind the idea of going for a swim in a dungeon crawling with Nephilim. My eyes twitched upward in spite of myself.
Why did we only ever end up going to places like that?
Just like the Blue Jade Forest, where the turtle god had been—it was another place where a Divine Beast had been sealed.