Chapter 54
"Huh?"
Watching Sodam’s live feed, Geom Mujin tilted his head.
Out in the middle of some thicket, a woman lay sprawled out like she’d been stoned to death.
Her hair was green, so she really did kind of look like a frog.
But that pose, seriously. Tsk tsk. Such a fine young lady.
Anyone looking at her would’ve said her chances of getting married weren’t just ruined — they were annihilated.
No, hang on. That wasn’t the important part.
"This face... looks familiar?"
Her features were hidden behind her disheveled hair, so he couldn’t make them out clearly, but something about her seemed familiar.
Unable to identify her by face, his gaze drifted downward on pure instinct.
And let’s be clear — this absolutely was not some weird intention. It was an unconscious flow! Just the flow!
My heart is as innocent as freshly squeezed milk.
As if declaring his innocence to no one in particular, the expedition team of his eyes set off on a reconnaissance mission.
Doo-doo-doo-doo—doo—!?
Captain! Two Song Mountain-grade peaks have been spotted ahead!
They’re too huge to get around. What should we do!?
Stay calm. Those aren’t mountains.
Huh? Then what are they?
Those are, quite simply, overflowing with milk and honey—mmph!
That’s enough! At this rating we’re all going to die...!
Feeling the danger of crossing the line, the eye reconnaissance squad took out their captain before he could go any further.
That information was instantly delivered to his brain.
That girl... she’s my fan!
Geom Mujin’s eyes widened as he pieced together the woman’s identity.
It was obvious.
People with such distinctive body features weren’t exactly common.
Sodam had even called her a truly abundant slab of meat, top and bottom.
Peck. Peck.
Sodam landed by her head and poked her forehead with its beak.
Putting aside the fact that she was generously built, it was checking whether this was rotten meat or not.
Yeah, yeah. Rotten stuff shouldn’t be eaten—hey, you lunatic!
How dare you!
"—Kii, kieek!?"
Startled by its master’s roar slamming into its head, Sodam flapped in shock.
I’m the one more shocked here.
This little punk, where do you get off trying to eat a person!!
From a wild beast’s point of view, a human might just be meat, but this was a guy who had a human as his gosujin-sama!
I did not raise you like this!
"Kii, kiii..."
No, I didn’t raise you at all—
Hiss.
—...
As befit a spiritual beast, Sodam’s sharp jab at the truth was cleanly ignored.
And now for the shocking fact!
A bloodthirsty child, a spiritual beast trying to eat humans, and a third member... well, more than half of this party could treat humans as food!
Our party name from now on is Predator.
...Damn it, I’m the only normal one here.
Don’t tell me you usually eat people, too.
Geom Mujin’s eyes narrowed.
Cooking you tonight?
Give you a little nourishment?
"Kii, kieek! Kiki-kik..!"
Shudder—!
Hearing the sound of bubbling water from somewhere, Sodam shook its head so violently it was practically a blur.
No. It had never done such a thing. It was as innocent as its white head feathers.
But Geom Mujin’s reaction was lukewarm at best.
Words alone are lighter than a feather.
Sodam bent one wing and pressed the tip of its beak against its forehead, striking the posture of true and proper innocence.
Hmm... fine, I believe you.
Geom Mujin nodded. It was the kind of pose only someone with absolute confidence could make.
Well done.
"Kiiik!"
Tch.
For some reason, Sodam looked disappointed and clicked its beak, but it pretended not to hear.
"U, ugh..."
As Geom Mujin and Sodam each let out sighs of disappointment and relief, Dang Seorin twitched.
Thanks to Sodam pecking at her forehead, consciousness was slowly returning.
Now what.
I turned my head and looked at the little girl sitting in lotus position.
She was still in the middle of regulating her qi, so I had to stand guard for her.
But I couldn’t exactly leave a person lying around like this.
Ah. Good idea.
Sodam, bring her here.
I couldn’t leave the spot, and the other side couldn’t come to me, but I did have a little click-clack—no, a means of transport that could fetch her for me.
That was the golden answer!
"Kii?"
Gosujin-sama, for real?
At his master’s order, Sodam looked at Dang Seorin.
This female seemed even heavier than the other barbarian women from the Central Plains.
Good exercise, too.
Yeah. I’m serious.
"Kii-ee..."
At his master’s sincerity, Sodam let out a helpless sigh.
When he told it to do something, it had to do it. What else could it do?
What power did it have anyway? (Actually, plenty, but its master was just too strong for that to matter.)
No matter how it thought about it, it seemed like it had made a terrible choice in contracts.
With the weary expression of a hawk that none of its kind could ever make, Sodam gripped Dang Seorin’s shoulders with its talons and, squeezing out even the strength it had used to break free from its shell, took off into the air.
Let it be said again: the one who’d been lured in by blood sausage soup that day was the real Sin Hawk.
* * *
"Hey. Open your eyes."
"Mm... five more minutes... five more minutes... Hayoung..."
At the voice tickling her ear, Dang Seorin flailed her hands through the air.
"Doesn’t seem like the time for that. And I’m not someone named Hayoung."
"!?"
At that, her eyes, still half-lost between dream and reality, snapped open.
Right. This wasn’t the time for this, was it!?
"S-sister..! Hayoung!"
She jerked her upper body upright.
Despite appearances, she was surprisingly quick on the draw, and Geom Mujin reflexively leaned back.
He narrowly avoided getting hit by a punch that, in all likelihood, would’ve been the first proper one he’d ever taken from another person.
"Feeling better?"
"H-hyah, hya-hit!?"
Startled by the casual question after he thought she’d regained her senses, she scuttled away with spiderlike movements.
Scritch-scratch!
Ground-style boxing?
It was a rare martial art in Murim, a kind of grappling style.
Come to think of it, there’d once been a wandering swordsman who’d learned a martial art called Jidangkwon and moved like that.
That guy liked rolling around on the ground so much I cut off his arms and legs. Maybe?
Just as she was demonstrating Jidangkwon, she stopped when the back of her head bumped against the cave wall with a thunk.
"Ahh!"
"Calm down. I’m not your enemy."
"Y-you are..."
"We know each other, don’t we?"
I gave her a lazy wave in greeting.
"Ah, uh... yes... hello..."
Having met Geom Mujin before, she slowly began to recover her composure.
Her face was still hidden by the bamboo hat, but her voice was the same as before.
And over his shoulder, she could see the child who had been with him at the tavern.
"W-where am I...?"
The last thing she remembered was rolling down a mountain, so why was she in a cave?
"I picked you up on the way."
Using brute eagle force, obviously.
"More importantly, I’ve treated the obvious injuries. Anything else hurt? Anything still bothering you?"
"Ah..."
Only then did she look over her body.
Medicine for wounds had been applied to the places scraped up from tumbling down the mountain.
Thanks to the safety cushion she seemed to carry around with her, she hadn’t been hurt as badly as expected.
"Thank yo— wait, no..! This isn’t the time for that!"
Shaking her head hard, she got to her feet.
"W-we need to ask for help as soon as possible..!"
"Help? Did something happen?"
"My sister and my sister-like maid, Meydu, were captured by the enemy..."
"What?"
When Geom Mujin looked puzzled, Dang Seorin sat back down and began explaining.
"S-so, the thing is..."
...
...
"...and that’s how it happened..."
"......"
The more she spoke, the more Geom Mujin broke out in a cold sweat.
Because as he listened, he realized it wasn’t completely unrelated to him.
A craftsman named Lia-rudol, who had been forcibly made to create prisoner-shaped figures.
Masked men who’d compelled him to work.
And the resulting delay in the commissioned goods.
When they’d gone to fetch it personally, the masked men’s leader had beaten them down instead.
They’d said masked men, but for some reason there were some suspects already in mind.
Like that express agency that started with Baek and ended with Mun.
Tracing all this back to its source, one black-haired barbarian eventually appeared.
I had no idea the little bit of trouble I’d stirred up would spiral into this.
I just wanted the demonic cult moles and the remnants of the demonic cult to kill each other, that was all.
"Umm... are you listening to me...?"
"Hm? Ah, of course. I was listening the whole time."
I answered without so much as showing the slightest sign of panic, with reflexes beyond human.
"S-so, there’s something I’d like to ask of you, great hero... would that be all right..."
Dang Seorin asked while fidgeting with her fingers.
"That is..."
Geom Mujin was about to say something, but she was too anxious to wait and kept going.
"P-please help me save my sister and Hayoung...!"
She gathered the courage to make her request, forcing strength into her lower dantian.
Her momentum was like that of a brave guinea pig.
"Hold on, let me—"
Once again, she didn’t finish giving him his turn.
"Of course, I’m not asking you to help me for free..."
No matter how foolish or airheaded she might seem, she was still the daughter of a martial family.
She knew better than to expect free kindness in the martial world.
"If, if you help me, I’ll give you this as a reward..."
Dang Seorin took a small token from her chest-level bio-inventory.
It was the maximum she could offer right now.
"This is..."
It was a jade identification plaque emitting a luminous glow, and the character Dang was engraved on it.
"You’re from the Sichuan Dang Clan?"
Geom Mujin’s eyebrows twitched.
"Y-yes... my name is Dang Seorin..."
Wait a second. A jade identification plaque?
As far as I knew, jade meant...
"By any chance, is your father’s name written with the characters for Tang Ji-mun?"
"Ah, yes, y-yes... that’s my father..."
Oh, shit.
A chill ran down his spine.
Tang Ji-mun, the One Thousand Poison Pillars.
That was the name of the current head of the Sichuan Tang Family.
A jade identification plaque was reserved only for the direct bloodline of the clan head.
This is really getting tangled now.
Swallowing hard, I stared at the young lady—Dang Seorin—who looked up at me with tense eyes.
From her own perspective, she was only desperate for help, but asking me for it of all people was no ordinary thing.
That was because the one who had crippled her older brother, the Tang Family’s young clan leader, was none other than me.
* * *
"Clan Lord!"
As Bang Dupil descended the mountain, Ma Song—who had recently been promoted from squad leader to total commander—ran up to him.
"To come all the way out here yourself... you really didn’t need to. We’ve been managing things well..."
"Ha. Managing them yourself?"
Looking down at the crown of Ma Song’s bowed head, Bang Dupil gave a snort.
"If you’re that confident, why don’t you go up there yourself and see what sort of mess is waiting now?"
"Pardon? The report I received yesterday said there were no problems at all..."
"Everyone who wrote that report is dead."
"What!?"
Ma Song flinched at Bang Dupil’s words.
One look in his eyes told him it wasn’t a lie.
"That little chestnut-sized girl made a complete slaughter of them. If I hadn’t come in person on a hunch, we would’ve botched this again."
In his two hands, he held different things: in his left, a figure of the White-Headed Heavenly Awakening Eagle; in his right, what looked like a handful of hair.
There were two women and one old man, and among them, the green-haired girl was surely the one he meant.
"That chestnut and the blue-haired one were from the Sichuan Tang Clan."
"Y-you must have misheard me, sir. Where, exactly?"
In truth, he had heard perfectly fine, but he desperately wished he hadn’t.
"The Sichuan Tang Clan."
But of course, nothing you desperately wished for ever went the right way.
At Bang Dupil’s flat reply, Ma Song looked at him like he was a madman for a moment.
No — this was the look of a madman, all right.
"C-clan lord, even if that’s true, this is..."
Ma Song didn’t know how to say it.
Maybe Bang Dupil thought all he needed was revenge for his son, but Ma Song didn’t.
Loyal as he was, of course he would join in the revenge — but this...
He and the others were thinking about what came after that, too.
And yet they’d gone and picked a fight with the Sichuan Tang Clan, the most vicious of all when it came to grudges and enmities!
At this rate, they’d never be able to eat a meal or drink a sip of water in peace again, not until the day they died.
"Don’t freak out."
As if reading his thoughts, Bang Dupil spoke.
"Even the Sichuan Tang Clan can’t point to the culprit if they’ve got no mouth left to tell the truth with."
"......"
Just as he said, unless the Tang Clan could somehow read memories the moment they touched something, that would be impossible.
"So go and search the mountain with whoever’s still able to move."
"And why is that?"
"Looks like there may be a rat that slipped out in secret."
Bang Dupil recalled the hidden weapons that had flown at him during his fight with Dang Yulin.
At first he’d thought they’d been thrown by that servant, but it still nagged at him.
He’d deal with the rat first, then take care of the Tang Clan brats after that.
"Understood. I’ll move at once."
"Good."
"Ah, Clan Lord."
Just as Bang Dupil was about to head back toward the express agency, Ma Song called after him.
That was the real reason he’d come looking for him.
In a low, subdued voice, he said, "…And they sent word back. They want us to come to the designated place by midnight tonight."
"......"
"Our departure preparations have already been handled by Chief Administrator Jeong."
At those words, Bang Dupil’s grip twitched.