Hide-and-Seek (1)
"—Hide tight. Hide away."
"S-stay back!!"
A soldier was running, lost to panic.
"Hide tight. Hide away—"
"Stay away!!! Save me... I don't want to die!!"
No matter how hard he ran, he only seemed to circle the same ground. His legs had already given out beneath him, and he staggered.
"Hah... hah..."
When the little girl's skin-crawling voice sank away, the soldier clutched at his own hair and collapsed where he stood.
"Please... please, stop... I'm begging you..."
"Why won't you come find me...?"
"I don't know... please... please, just let me go!!!"
The voice drew off, and the soldier's mind scattered with it.
"I want to go back... I... I..."
A wail with nowhere left to go echoed, hollow, through the dark. By the time the echo died, the soldier's eyes had long since gone out along with his mind.
I pulled in a deep lungful of the cold dawn air. Cold, all right. From somewhere far off came the soft crunch of footsteps in the snow, and the team leader drew toward us, leaving a trail of small prints behind her.
"You rascals slipped out early."
"We've been out for twenty minutes."
I would not make the same mistake again. We had trained ourselves half to death — I wanted her to see what that training had come to, and I was going to keep Hana alive through to the end.
"The gear and supplies are all loaded. We were going over the operation outline again."
The team leader stared straight through me for a long moment before she spoke.
"Good. Shall we have a test, then?"
"Yes."
"Tell me the greatest trait of the mid-grade short-form aberration, Hide-and-Seek."
Arms folded, she wore a strange look of expectation.
"Hide-and-Seek isn't a powerful aberration in herself, but the narrative rules she carries are the real threat. The Flooded Zone under her dominion becomes a kind of maze. Reaching the main body quickly, without wandering lost inside that maze, is the heart of this operation."
I finished without a single hitch. I caught it anyway — the team leader, letting a flicker of admiration slip before she could stop herself.
"Ahem... Excellent. Then, Hana."
She tried to brush past the praise, and still a faint color rose in her cheeks.
Was a little praise really that embarrassing? Cute. I'd pretend I hadn't noticed.
"Yes, ma'am!"
"You will be separated from Jaehee. That much is certain. Are your countermeasures ready?"
"They are."
Hana opened her hand and closed it again, as if calling back the feel of their last training.
"Good. Be ready to board at once."
As if she couldn't hide it any longer, the team leader climbed into the vehicle without bothering to conceal a proud smile.
"Move out!"
The nearer we drew to Hide-and-Seek, the thicker the settled dark became. A mire of heavy shadow seemed to climb as high as the knees and drag, slick, at every step. Seoul's garrison had been bright beneath a dawn sun. Here, even the sunlight drowned. A forest of buildings that must once have thronged with people had become a resting place for dead ghosts.
Hana had threaded a little laugh through the words, as if to let the tension out.
"Hana. See you in a bit."
"Yeah!"
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was standing in a room I couldn't place. I swept it once, calm. A closet, a bed — nothing more than an ordinary room. I opened the door, and a long corridor ran on and on. However far I looked for the end of it, there was no end. Only dark.
I was still weighing which way to go when something came running out of that darkness. The sound beat along the corridor, and at last a shape showed itself. It had no face. One hand was warped into something grotesque, and its arms thrashed without sense, keeping time with its body.
Slowly, I drew my sword.
"You lot — what is this, out of nowhere? You want me to train you...?"
"Yes. Thinking on it, we have seven whole days, and spending all of them resting seemed like a waste."
The team leader's brow creased, and then one corner of her mouth lifted.
"How admirable. Assemble on the parade ground at six tomorrow morning."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Time to show what the training was worth. We had drilled without mercy, and against small fry like this I didn't even need to call on purification. I laid a thin coat of white imagery power along the blade and cut. It parted as cleanly as a knife through tofu. The aberration that had been charging me went down limp, without a resistance worth the name.
Right after, from the end of the corridor, came the sound of a swarm. As the vibration turned violent, the wave of them grew clear. I had no intention of waiting for it to break over me. I gathered imagery power into the sword, and in a breath the corridor began to brighten — no. Past brightening. The black behind it seemed to be losing its color altogether.
From one end a black wave drove in like a tide. From the other, an achromatic brush broke into a run, wiping away the color around it as it came.
"Jaehee. The purity of your imagery power is high, but its density is low."
"It isn't that yours carries some particular attribute, the way Hana's does."
"Nearly achromatic. Pure imagery power. Like mine."
The team leader opened her hand and showed a power tinged with a slightly darker light.
"In a case like ours, the advantage is that you never need to force an attribute conversion. The trouble is how lost you feel about what, exactly, you're meant to be looking at. Someone like Hana only has to reach the far edge of cold. And us?"
"What scenery are we supposed to run toward?"
Every swing stripped the color from the black. The sword's arc left behind a strange white wound. An arm reached for me, and this much was nothing now. I tipped my head back with room to spare, let it pass, then turned and drove the whole of that momentum into a kick that shattered the aberration's skull. At once I set both hands on the sword again, drew them far back, and gathered the force.
"And so this high purity is both a blessing and a curse. Most never give this imagery a concrete form, and they never break the wall of Grade 7 or Grade 8."
The team leader wrote a 7 and an 8 on the blackboard, then turned sharply to face me.
"But you are not merely high-purity. Purification. A power without peer. A power that purifies black imagery — no. A power that erases it. Able to become anything, and for that reason, far too vast."
"It will be hard. But you have to reach it. Jaehee — the scenery you want to see, the scenery you want to touch — what is it? In that scenery that will one day become your unique concept, what is there?"
"The scenery I want to reach is..."
Imagery Origin Purification — Single Point
Imagery power, compressed to an extreme, burst from the sword — a blast and a shock that rocked the building. From the point of the blade erupted one immaculate point, and it lanced on, leaving a tremendous glitch in its wake. I drew my extended hands back. The Single Point had punched clean through the wave of aberrations and left a single enormous hole, and an instant later the whole pack came down together in a roar of noise and dust.
When the dust settled, the end of the corridor was visible. The wall had been torn open onto a bleak stretch of outside, and everywhere the point had raked, color had bleached away in a hiss of noise. Even so, strength overflowed in my grip. My breathing was utterly steady.
So. One step forward.
"This toy looks sturdy."
I was steadying my breath, wiping a fine bead of sweat from my brow, when a girl's chilly voice reached me.
"Want to play hide-and-seek with me?"
A laugh that raised the hair on my neck slid down my ears and chilled my spine. The black imagery, which had stood at my knees, climbed a little higher. It did not take long to find my calm again. I gave her no answer. I had to last until Observer Seoyoung could get a fix on us.
"Boring. Haaahm— I'll go find someone besides you, big brother. Wait for me."
Hana first, then?
A thin prickle of impatience tried to start. Hana — again. Too much strength was gathering in my fist.
But I had to trust her.
Observer Seoyoung's transmission came through at a moment I hadn't looked for.
Already?
Her ponytail had already turned sky blue.
Breathing out white, Hana came down the stairs to the floor below. Frost whitened the boards at every step and trailed after her. As she passed a mirror the glass filmed over with ice, and in that clouded pane she herself showed only faintly. Down the corridor behind her footprints, petals of frost were drifting onto statues locked in ice, and the crack of splitting ice filled the plaza in time with her steps.
Odds and ends of every kind lay strewn through the corners of the vast plaza. Beneath a great chandelier, at the exact center, one large box sat all alone.
"What is this?"
Hana swung the sniper rifle onto her back. She drew the pistol at her waist into her right hand and a small dagger into her left, braced the pistol with her off hand, and started slowly toward the box.
In that instant, one of the Flooded burst out of it.
"Graaagh—"
A sharp blade drove for her face. She knocked it up with the dagger, calm, and answered at once with the pistol. After a few sharp reports she opened the distance fast. Where the rounds had landed, small flowers of frost began to bloom.
Her gaze slipped, of its own accord, to the shoulder.
Team 2
The calm left Hana's face. It twisted.
"Graaah..."
A cry tangled with a wail — the voice of someone who had lost their self — filled the plaza, thin and spent.