The Divine Envoy's Dance (1)
Pyo Do-seok watched the instructors rounding up cadets like mice with a bored gaze.
Looks like they're doing well enough.
For the record, the cadets being chewed out right now were not the subordinates he had sent to stomp Yahui into the dirt. They were the ones he'd spent the past week cataloging—not part of his faction, exactly, but cut from the same rotten cloth.
Cadets rotten enough, say, to smuggle cigarettes and booze into the academy from week one.
I gave them all that extra time. Surely they didn't fail.
The method of "stomping" he'd decided with his die roll had been physical violence.
But come on—he couldn't have them getting tangled up in school violence the very first week. A stain on the record was one thing, but the family would raise hell over it, wouldn't they?
Especially his "strict," "thorough," and " scrupulously fair" mother. She would be furious.
So Pyo Do-seok had deliberately kept his own hands out of it. He hadn't even specified how to do it.
On the surface, his involvement amounted to exactly three things.
He'd kept murmuring to his lackeys, "That bastard gets on my nerves so badly. Wish somebody would teach him a lesson. I'd love to be close friends with anyone brave enough to do it."
He'd pretended not to notice as they floundered for a way to humiliate him, then offered, "Oh, funny thing—I happen to know an upperclassman. Want me to hook you up with a little consultation?"—connecting them with pliable seniors.
And last, when his subordinates begged, "We're going to pull something today—oops, I mean, it'd be inconvenient if the instructors were on the first floor. Could you buy us a little time?", he had graciously obliged by pulling every pair of instructor eyes in the building onto himself.
That was genuinely all of it.
And from the look of it, they used the upperclassmen to crawl all the way to the Phantasm Management Facility...
That hadn't been part of any scheme Pyo Do-seok had drawn up. If they got caught, it would be a scandal serious enough to drag everyone involved into expulsion—and he wasn't crazy enough to put his hand on something with stakes that high.
What he'd hoped for, at most, was some idiot mistaking his family for his own backing and roughing Yahui up a little. He hadn't wished for anything beyond that.
Not out of any guilt—he simply hadn't thought they'd be that depraved. It was true they were dumb enough to be used by him, but he hadn't expected them to lose all grip on heaven and earth.
But his subordinates had turned out to be astonishingly stupid, and, being that stupid, remarkably good at execution. It was absurd, yet somehow satisfying in its way.
After all, he hadn't drawn up the plan, nor had he heard about it in advance. There was no evidence linking him to the incident whatsoever.
In other words, no matter how the thing shook out, none of it could land on him.
Even if his lackeys clung to him begging to be saved—without clear proof that he'd ordered it, what did it matter to him? They were the morons who'd committed a brainless atrocity just to curry his favor.
And so Pyo Do-seok waited for the soon-to-be-announced results with the placid heart of a spectator.
Eeeeeeeeeng—!
A sound arrived that would soon belong to those results: the alarm that triggered when a Phantasm ran rampant inside a building.
So much for the trouble of getting them all the way up to the fourth floor.
Or—no—maybe the instructors simply had no one at their posts, and this was how the lackeys chose to summon them. Even at their dumbest, they wouldn't have let it rampage inside the building.
"Everyone, hold position!"
Some of the instructors wrangling cadets rushed urgently outside. Pyo Do-seok followed them, sly and unobtrusive.
He wasn't among those being scolded, so it was fine.
That's...
Hwaseo Hall, the cadets' dormitory, was shaped like a , with the lobby dividing the female cadets' rooms from the male cadets' rooms. And in the lobby stood a Void Atrium, letting one look down on the first floor even from the fourth.
The reason Pyo Do-seok could watch a raging bull on the ground floor was entirely thanks to that.
"What in the world is going on here!"
The instructor didn't bother with stairs or the elevator. Vaulting clean over the railing and reaching the first floor in ten seconds, he shouted.
Right after, the bull crunched up a shard of raw beef that had been lying thrown on the floor.
The bull became a person. A vivid blond head brushed Pyo Do-seok's eyebrow line.
"A cadet? A cadet is right now—"
"There's a Yeonmae in the rear courtyard—hk."
Pyo Do-hyeok.
"One cadet is... buying, time—"
Thud.
The twin he'd never once gotten along with collapsed, coughing up blood.
Ordinarily, a swung sword belonged to the realm of physical force.
But what if the sword being swung was no ordinary sword? What if it was the Twin Dragon Blades, of all things?
Swoosh!
Heuk-ah cleaved the Yeonmae in two. It happened because I willed it so.
The authority carried by the Twin Dragon Blades made even strikes that should have failed against a being of lower rank strike true.
'Hun... gry...'
The Yeonmae ranked among the most vicious of all curses, but against the Twin Dragon Blades, a single stroke was more than enough.
The Yeonmae's body began to crumble. It was a little pitiful, and also a relief.
'Hungry...'
"...I'm sorry. There's nothing to eat."
A curse born of deliberately starving a child—starving it just short of death, over and over, until, on the very brink of dying, it was killed and made into a curse. That was the Yeonmae.
Of course, this was merely an entity born from such a folktale; no real victim had ever existed.
"I hope you're never hungry again."
'Hun...'
Even so, my heart ached for no good reason. It was a shallow feeling.
I had chosen living, even in pain—but what about the Yeonmae? The most I could wish was that its suffering, at least, was over.
I watched the Yeonmae dissipate. Soon the twisted infant monster that had been its core crumbled into gray ash and vanished.
The funeral jar that had held out until the very last began to fall apart as well.
"Hah."
My knees buckled along with it. It was a strange sensation—on one hand, brimming with power; on the other, so drained I wanted to simply collapse.
It felt like swapping nothing but the battery on some ancient, worn-out machine. The energy was unmistakably there, but my body wouldn't keep up.
'Mind your breathing.'
Heuk-ah gently steadied me. I didn't refuse the advice.
Rather than forcing myself to move, I caught my breath and took stock of my condition. And there it was: a ferocious power churning through the inside of my body, unmistakable now.
"...You're actually holding together."
'You may stand proud. This is a feat.'
It might be an arrogance bordering on narcissism, I thought—but measuring the power packed into my own body, I found it easy to accept.
Yeah. This was a feat, all right. I had done it, though I honestly had no idea how.
"But other than just holding on, I can't do much more..."
'Your flesh is not yet complete. This alone is enough. Do not reach for more.'
"I suppose..."
True enough—you couldn't fill your belly with the first spoonful.
Suppressing the urge to faceplant right then and there, I tried to adapt to the power stored inside me. Releasing the power back? If it happened instantly, I'd have done it ages ago.
Right now, even returning the power to the Twin Dragon Blades was a nearly impossible task.
'Yes, just so. Move it slowly.'
If I fumbled even slightly, this violent, destructive force would tear my body to shreds.
Faced with a fact I'd grasped by pure instinct, I grew as deliberate as I could manage. The power that had flowed into me trickled slowly back toward Heuk-ah.
"One surviving cadet confirmed! Moving in for resc—what?!"
That was about when the adults arrived.
Frankly, it irritated me a little. If this was how it would go, they could have come a bit earlier. They show up the moment I've clawed my way through it? This is closing the barn door after the horse has bolted!
"The Yeonmae is nowhere in sight! Sir, could you tell us where it went—"
But what could I do? Better than never showing up at all.
"I just eliminated it."
"...What?"
"What did you just—what did you say—"
At my single remark, the bustling instructors... froze mid-motion.
It felt like a game of freeze tag. Despite the urgent situation, everyone stood rooted like statues, staring only at me.
Even in the dark, their rock-stiffened eyes were clearly visible.
"You... eliminated the Yeonmae?"
"Yes."
"How on earth—no, that's not what matters right now. First, get him to the medical—"
"Ah, that won't be possible."
Instructors were instructors, after all—they swallowed their shock and tried to manage the scene. A form of management that would have been welcome an hour ago, and was now a bit of a problem.
"I've partially absorbed the Twin Dragon Blades' power in order to fight the Yeonmae. And it's... a little hard to control. If I move around carelessly..."
I spoke in fits and starts. Whether the instructors found it agonizing was not my concern.
I was dying just trying to keep my own body in one piece. It was their turn to exercise some patience now, the latecomers.
"Hold on, what? He used the Twin Dragon Bl—good heavens."
Some began sweeping the surroundings against every possibility, while others approached me.
That last remark had come from one of the latter. Light flickered at his iris—the mark of a Phantasm dealing with 'seeing.'
"...How? How are you alive?"
"Pardon?"
"This—this is no longer something you could call human—"
"Hey! Get a grip! What are you saying to a cadet who barely survived!"
"Ah—right. You— you are still..."
Another instructor cut off the man spouting dialect like a lunatic. Only then did the light-eyed instructor come back to himself.
"...Are you all right? You are, at this moment, in a state no different from carrying a natural disaster inside your body."
"It's a bit rough, but I'm fine."
"That was a reckless gamble! One wrong move and your body could have burst apart and no one would have blinked! Thank God the result was good..."
"Can't a man do whatever it takes to survive?"
I hadn't known it would be this dangerous, but it wasn't as if I'd never anticipated it either. It was a gamble either way—all or nothing, so I'd simply placed the bet.
Besides, was this my fault? If they didn't like cadets making dangerous gambles, they should have shown up sooner.
I let that resentment leak into a slightly sulky remark. The instructor scrubbed a hand down his face.
"...Fine. It's true, none of this is your fault. You held out remarkably well. Truly, truly well."
"Hey, chatting is all well and good, but we really need to move him now. If the curse worsens like this, his life—"
"No. This cadet—this cadet is fine."
Through the gaps between his fingers, the instructor's pupils fixed on me. Inside those glowing eyes flowed something intangible—a wordless plea for my consent.
"However deep a ghost's grudge runs, it cannot crush a typhoon or a tsunami. Would you not agree?"
Uh, hmm. Now that he mentioned it, the curse that had been rotting my body had vanished entirely ever since the Yeonmae died—but wasn't that simply because the curse's source was dead?
Still, I couldn't just wave it off. The instructor's gaze was too intense. He was looking at me the way one might look at something miraculous—something that should not, could not, exist.
"No, the kid's arm is rotting off right now, what on earth are you—"
"Look closely. Is that truly 'rotted'?"
"What?"
At the instructor's words, another man leaned in to inspect my forearm.
My gaze naturally followed, down to my own arm. The Yeonmae had corroded and torn my clothes to shreds, so there was no need to roll up a sleeve.
Bare skin filled my vision and... what is this.
"Huh??
Scales... are those? Actual scales? Then why are actual scales growing out of my arm??"
"Wha—?!"
Seriously, what is this?!
WAAAAAAH!!!
Instructor Choi Ye-na of the Fantasy & Mystery Course.
Faced with an event that would have scrambled anyone's mind on first hearing, she had barely managed to hold onto her reason.
"A Yeonmae restricted to fifth-years and above was leaked to a first-year."
"Yes."
"And that first-year then deployed it in a fight against fellow first-years?"
"Yes."
"The uncontracted Yeonmae promptly went rampant, producing seven primary infection victims and forty-three secondary victims? Tertiary and quaternary cases are still being traced?"
"Yes."
"And as if that weren't enough, the whole thing happened precisely while the instructors were away from their posts, so support was delayed, and a cadet—unable to bear it any longer—destroyed the Yeonmae single-handedly?"
"Yes."
"Damn it."
This was a clear-cut human disaster. Not merely the students' fault—the school's own failure of management was layered on top!
What would happen if a death came out of this? No—there might already be one. The Yeonmae's curse could kill while people sat around receiving reports!
Choi Ye-na prepared to bolt for the scene at once. The man delivering the report hurried after her.
"The primary victims—what's their condition?!"
"One is in a coma. The rest have entered recovery."
"What? Wait, you mean the primary victims?"
"Yes."
"...How is that possible?"
No deaths—pure luck. Genuinely pure luck, and yet... how it was possible remained a question. The reason the Yeonmae was called a curse of the cruelest order was precisely that destruction was not the cure.
Destroying the Yeonmae did not heal the sickness it sowed. The curse broke only when its released Yeonmae was recalled with a command to take the illness back with it.
In other words, the primary victims should have been at least seriously wounded, at minimum. That was everything Choi Ye-na had learned and lived through.
"Even if they'd recalled it instantly and begun treatment, the curse-breaking would still take time..."
"We're still investigating that part, but the prevailing theory is that it's due to some peculiarity of the cadet who destroyed the Yeonmae."
"Ah, right. Who is it? Of all things, some first-year goes and takes on a Yeonmae—"
"That cadet. The one with the Twin Dragon Blades."
"...Ah. Right. Okay."
The Yeonmae was a vicious curse, certainly—but next to the Twin Dragon Blades, it was a firefly before the sun.
So Choi Ye-na accepted it, for now. She did not fully understand. Understanding came after seeing everything with her own eyes and interrogating every detail.
「Ye-na—pardon, Instructor Choi. You've heard the news, I take it?」
"Yes, Instructor Kang."
Just then, word came from her senior and direct superior. He too had apparently only just received the briefing.
「Confirm the Yeonmae's destruction with Instructor Kim, and once that's done, you both head to the hospital and link up with Instructor Park. Instructor Min and I are taking the Management Facility.」
"Understood."
The formal casework would fall to the Inspectorate Safety Office and the military police and Phantasm management battalions—but the Phantasm Training Division could hardly sit on its hands.
Checking cadets' Phantasms overlapped with part of their duties. If this went badly, blood could splash on their side too.
How many heads are going to roll over this...
This was absolutely not going to end in a reprimand. Students involved would face expulsion and prison time; those who'd failed at containment would face at minimum confinement to quarters, at worst demotion or reassignment.
And anyone reassigned over an incident like this was sent forward, without exception—to the extreme front line, no less, the kind directly tied to combat. To people who had come to the rear precisely because they could no longer fight, or were deemed unfit—deliberately shipped back out to the front.
Damn it! This is exactly why you don't just hand Phantasms straight to a bunch of seventeen-year-olds...!
Choi Ye-na resolved that once this was over, she would—please, please—file a formal proposal to stop handing out Phantasms immediately. Give the kids at least a week, even just one week, to be taught how dangerous a Phantasm was before it was placed in their hands.
Would delaying the Selection Rite by a week change the world? No. But it had to be better than nothing! Better than this idiotic disaster breaking out in the very first week!!
In any case, she hurried toward the cadet dormitory where the Yeonmae had appeared.
The first-year dormitory was, remarkably, dead silent. The cadets had all been locked in their rooms to seal off any possibility of curse infection.
Until they were judged free of transmission risk, the first-years would not be leaving their rooms. Until tomorrow, if they were lucky; for days on end, if they weren't.
"For the nation."
"For the nation."
Where cadets should have been, soldiers wrapped head to toe in protective gear now patrolled the lobby and corridors. Most would belong to the Inspectorate Safety Office or the military police battalion.
"Instructor Choi!"
"Instructor Kim."
Instructor Kim, the senior who'd ordered her to join him, was already there. Whatever else could be said of him, his purification Phantasm—an exceptional one—floated serenely at his back.
"How far along are you?"
"We've fully mapped every spot the Yeonmae passed through. And now we're examining the site of its destruction..."
Instructor Kim glanced at his own Phantasm.
One wore an indigo skirt and a long-sleeved baekjangsam robe, a red kasaya, and a white peaked hood. The other was dressed in ceremonial mourning garb and a fresh jeonbok, holding an Obang sinjang standard in each hand.
"The Seungmu dance and the Sinjang-gut. Would you recite it for me again?"
'When dragon and death stand assembled in one place, how could a mere ghost endure before them?'
'There is no grudge left in this place, no resentment—so the curse, too, has no reason to remain.'
"That is what it says."
For starters, it was not bad news. Only, it wasn't only good news. Choi Ye-na was in no position to celebrate the curse's disappearance—she had to investigate.
"The gap in authority is enormous, granted—but is the Twin Dragon Blades truly capable of nullifying even a curse? Not only did it purify the ground around the Yeonmae, they say it broke the curse on victims standing far away."
If the Twin Dragon Blades had at least carried legends of cutting down ghosts, of erasing vengeful spirits, she could have accepted it on the spot.
But the Twin Dragon Blades' legends said no such thing. And that was the problem. Explaining it away with 'authority' alone left a faint wrongness somewhere in her gut.
'...'
'...'
At Choi Ye-na's question, the Seungmu and the Sinjang-gut exchanged a look.
'What we are permitted to tell you is this, and nothing more.'
'There are times, after all, when not knowing is the kinder fate.'
There it was again.
Just like the Sannang, Seongju, and Teuju gods of old, they would resolve the problem—yet when it came to the full truth, they sealed their lips once more.
In the end, Choi Ye-na had no choice but to walk away with nothing, bound for the hospital. It was time to take the cadets' testimony.