Chapter 56
"Then take it off."
"...Huh??"
At Geom Mujin's brief, flat command, Dang Yulin's face froze into something absurd and helpless.
Take it off. Take what off?
Was that really what she just heard?
The word "take it off" meant removing clothes from the body, didn't it...
Unless she'd misheard him somehow, or there was another meaning she didn't know...
In the slow-motion crawl of her panic, she turned the word over and over in her head, dissecting it from every angle, but no new meaning turned up.
"Um, th-there..."
With no answer in sight, Dang Yulin was about to ask again.
"Heh, hihit...!?"
But then her eyes met his through the faint shadow beneath the bamboo hat, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
There was no joke in that gaze.
He was seriously planning to strip her!
"What are you doing? Hurry up and take it off."
When he pressed her, both of Dang Yulin's hands flailed uselessly in the air.
They moved so fast they left afterimages behind them.
Was this the Hundred-Handed Arhat from the Shaolin Seventy-Two Arts?
"I-I-I... I still need a little... mental preparation...!"
Whoooosh-!
The panic line shot straight up.
Dizzy-eyed and spiraling, Dang Yulin started blurting out whatever came to mind.
"Mental preparation?"
Geom Mujin tilted his head.
What, was this the kind of thing a Sichuan Tang Clan girl couldn't handle?
"Listen, Young Lady Dang. You may not like it, but didn't you say it yourself?"
"M-me? What did I say..."
"That you wanted to save your sister and Maedu."
"I-I did, but..."
What did that have to do with taking off her clothes right now?
"So hurry up and change. Got it?"
"N-no, that's not what I meant..."
Dang Yulin could not keep up with his logic, no matter how hard she tried.
What, exactly, in that conversation was she supposed to understand?
"If you're going to keep dithering, then I'll start first."
Apparently tired of waiting, Geom Mujin began untying his outer robe.
Swish—
As he shrugged it off and his pale skin was revealed, Dang Yulin's panic line blew past the limit.
Bang—!
"D-Dangkiyaaah...!!?"
She screamed and leaped in place.
In this stern Confucian society, a man and woman who weren't even married showing each other their bare skin was unthinkable.
Men and women over seven shouldn't even share the same mat!
Thud—!!
"Kkheh!?"
Of all things, she had jumped straight up inside a cave, and her head smashed into the ceiling.
The result...
Winner! The ceiling!
Its victim, that commoner of a skull, soon went tumbling back down.
Thump-!
"W-What the heck?"
"......"
She'd jumped so hard the whole cave shook for a moment.
And that shock finally woke the child.
Good thing he'd already finished arranging things; otherwise, he might have gone mad from qi deviation and become a wreck.
"Hey! Young Lady Dang! Snap out of it!"
Geom Mujin grabbed Dang Yulin by the shoulders and shook her awake. A huge lump had risen on her head, turning her from a three-headed monster into a 3.3-headed one.
"Uuugh... uuugh...."
"Are you okay!?"
Flash-!
Dang Yulin came to at once and snapped her eyes wide open.
Shasa-shaak—!
And then her figure vanished like smoke.
She'd gone full throttle with the Sichuan Tang Clan's stealth art—Dark Snake Hidden Trace Art.
Of all things she did well, stealth was the one thing she had that surpassed even her sister.
For the family's signature poisons and hidden weapons to be less her specialty than stealth instead... honestly, it had the faint whiff of a bottom-tier build.
The elders of the clan always scolded her for being good only at hiding, but not right now.
I-I have to get out of here...!
Dang Yulin intended to flee the cave immediately.
She might look absentminded most of the time—no, almost all the time—but she wasn't stupid.
There was a reason she'd gone to Geom Mujin, a complete stranger, and asked for help in the first place.
The first thought was the Sichuan Tang Clan, of course, but she had ruled it out.
It was the easiest place to ask, but the distance was too great; it would take time.
The next possibility was Cheonmu Academy.
If they said a student was in danger, Cheonmu Academy would move at once, but that too was rejected.
After all, these Tang Clan twins had come out here claiming they were entering closed training at the academy.
A student who was supposed to be in seclusion at Cheonmu Academy was now in Hubei Province?
The lie would be exposed instantly.
She had no good solution, until her eyes landed on him.
The man she had met at McDaria at lunchtime today.
He had treated her after she'd rolled down the mountain and passed out.
If it's this person...
People had something called a sixth sense.
It was the ability to make decisions through instinct and feeling rather than logic and reason, and Dang Yulin's sixth sense—so very much like its owner—had, unusually enough, worked.
Gripped by an attraction she couldn't explain in words, she'd revealed her identity and asked Geom Mujin for help.
It might have seemed rash to decide so quickly on so little, but Dang Yulin had seen something.
His hands.
The calluses and little scars embedded in them.
They were the hands of someone who had used a sword for a very long time.
Those hands were like a work of art.
When she thought of the hands of that person she'd yet to meet, and imagined they might be similar, the pull only grew stronger.
Someone with hands like that couldn't possibly be weak.
To anyone else it might have seemed random, but there had been deep calculation and careful thought behind it in her own way.
Dang Yulin believed the answer to this crisis was with him.
At least until he went out and came back.
Shasha-shaak—!
It's dangerous to stay here...!
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, they say, but this apparently wasn't one of those two times.
Now that he'd made that request, she couldn't stay with him.
Rather than stay here and risk it, she'd rather take a punishment and warn Cheonmu Academy.
She was just about to slip out of the cave when...
"Where do you think you're going all of a sudden?"
"Keh!?"
Not even her stealth art could hide her from the eyes of a Seven Martial Star.
Dang Yulin was caught by the nape of the neck and jolted into a coughing fit.
Geom Mujin lifted the hand that held her by the scruff.
Dang Yulin dangled like a kitten.
"Uuugh... let go, please...! Don't strip me...!"
She whimpered and flailed all four limbs wildly.
"Why are you acting like this all of a sudden?"
"N-no... no pure love...!"
"Pure love?"
There was a reason Dang Yulin was freaking out like this.
When Geom Mujin had taken off his outer robe, he'd also removed his bamboo hat, revealing his black hair.
The infamy of the black-haired barbarians had spread all the way to Sichuan, despite the enormous distance.
I-I'm so clumsy and useless, I could never be a good mother to a baby... I might even starve the child every day....
If a black-haired man who was said to stare at a woman and turn her into a bitch through clubbing said to take it off, it made sense she'd panic.
Other than the black-haired Great Swordmaster who never committed such acts, black-haired people across the world were dangerous beings.
"I won't be starving any baby for life, that's not what I— no, what the hell are you even talking about?"
Geom Mujin stared at her in utter disbelief and took stock of the situation.
"Calm down first. I'm not trying to pure-love you."
"B-but... I heard that unless you're the Seven Martial Star Great Swordmaster, black-haired men all raise their swords the instant they see a woman and force them into womb inspections..."
Womb inspections?
The phrase combination from another universe made his head spin.
Black-haired people, what the hell have you all been up to?
Still, I'm glad my own image is normal.
"...Even black-haired people have differences. And that's not what I meant."
"Huh??"
Dang Yulin made the face of a guinea pig whose food had just been stolen, while Geom Mujin pointed to one spot.
Where he pointed, the escorts from Baekmun Escort Agency were lying scattered on the cave floor.
The two men, after having their pressure points sealed by Geom Mujin, were unconscious.
"I meant take off the clothes you're wearing and change into these."
As his explanation sank in, Dang Yulin's expression changed in stages.
"......"
Stage one: a blank face as she tried to absorb the situation.
".....!"
Stage two: shock, once her brain finally processed it.
"Uuugh...! Ugh!"
And stage three: a tomato-red flush of self-disgust at her own spectacular misunderstanding.
"I-I need to find a hole to crawl into..."
She wanted to crawl into a rat hole right this instant.
"Quit making noise and change already. We still have to go save your sister."
"...Y-yes...."
* * *
"Finished?"
Geom Mujin and the child, who had briefly stepped out to check the little one's condition, came back inside.
"Y-yes... I changed clothes..."
Dang Yulin, now dressed in the escorts' clothes, nodded without daring to meet his eyes.
To escape the inner demon called black history, she was going to have to kick her blanket every night like a martial arts fool.
"Um... but why did you tell me to change clothes?"
At last able to suppress her inner demon, Dang Yulin asked the question that had been bothering her.
"We're infiltrating them from here on out."
"Huh?"
They were going to sneak in and take the two of them back out.
At that, Dang Yulin slowly raised a hand.
"W-wouldn't it be easier to just charge in and rescue them?"
"Oh? A head-on assault? You've got a fiery side, Young Lady Dang. You got some bite?"
So beneath that timid exterior, she'd been furious over her family's crisis after all.
That was the Sichuan Tang Clan for you. Blood ties were strong in that house.
"N-no... I don't really know much about anything else, but fighting is kind of..."
But contrary to his expectations, Dang Yulin shrank back immediately.
In truth, she'd been expecting Geom Mujin to smash everything apart for her.
"We can't go in head-on because we don't even know where the two of them are being held right now. If we make a scene before that, we might end up putting them in danger."
He didn't think Dang Yulin and Maedu were already dead.
The fact that they'd sent out search teams meant they believed someone had been missed, which meant they weren't going to kill the two of them just yet.
And they still need to be intact until they make contact with the demonic cult.
He didn't bother saying that part aloud.
"So... you saved those people because you wanted to get information from them..."
Dang Yulin glanced at the escorts, now stripped down to their underclothes.
They had regained consciousness at some point, but with their pressure points sealed, all they could do was roll their eyes around.
"We can't just blend in as we are."
If it had only been me and the kid, I would've turned them into servants and squeezed them for information.
Too bad.
It's been a while since I've used dismembering the tendons and crushing the bones...
"Um... if that's the case, I have something useful..."
Then Dang Yulin started rummaging through her bio-inventory.
"Here, take this."
"Oh, o-okay."
He took the small bottle she handed him, and it was strangely warm.
"What is this?"
"I-it's a confession drug..."
One of his eyebrows rose.
"You apply it to your saliva and stick it into the Baihui point..."
The Baihui point is the center of the skull.
"But doesn't this have side effects or something?"
Drugs like this usually had nasty side effects.
"Well, there's about an eighty percent chance it'll damage the brain and nearby pressure points, so they could end up an idiot. Does that matter?"
For someone who looked so airheaded, she sure couldn't fake blood.
When it came to anyone related to her enemies, she had a blade for a heart.
"It doesn't matter. Let's do it right away."
Taking the saliva from her, I stepped toward the escorts.
I opened the bottle and coated the saliva with the drug.
"Mmmph! Mm-mmmph!"
"Mmph! Umpb!"
Even if they couldn't move their bodies, their ears were open, so the escorts had heard the conversation and started squirming.
The two of them, eyes bloodshot, twisted their heads toward the side at nearly the same time.
I could tell what they meant.
-Do it to that bastard, not me! That guy knows everyone!
-No! That bastard knows more!
The two praised their companion by listing his virtues.
Too bad it didn't matter one bit to Geom Mujin.
"Easy, easy. Calm down."
I raised a hand to soothe them.
At that gesture, both their eyes locked onto him.
"You're both getting hit anyway."
"!?"
"!!"
Geom Mujin's hands moved like lightning.
Thuk-thuk-!
* * *
"How'd it go over there? Find anything?"
"No, nothing on this end either."
"At this point we've searched so much we could die from searching. Let's head down soon."
After collecting the bodies of the escorts killed on Chilseongsan and finishing the search, the scouts began gathering one by one at the meeting point.
"Yeah, that sounds good. Is everyone here?"
"No, I think one team is still miss— ah, there they are. Hey! Hurry up!"
As the escort counting heads shouted, the two escorts who had been ambling over suddenly broke into a run.
"Everyone else is already here. Why are you so late?"
"Sorry, sorry. This guy was late because he was taking a dump. Right?"
"......"
As the chuckling escort jabbed him in the side with an elbow, the escort beside him, his face reddening to the point of bursting, nodded along.
"Now that everyone's here, let's head back."
And so the escorts descended the mountain.
Unaware that a stranger had slipped in among them.