Unshaken
Demons parasitize the human heart.
They goad whatever is weak in a person, whatever is wicked, and nudge them toward the kinds of acts that make demons laugh. In that sense, you could say a demon has a self. It interacts with human beings toward a clear purpose.
And yet a demon is a phenomenon. The shape it wears is only something it assumes for a moment, so that human eyes can see it. Wherever people exist, it appears, settles into their hearts, and turns their guns on one another.
There is no angel's salvation in a place like that. Even those who style themselves as gods, founding religions and laying down doctrine, do little more than cheer humans on to endure it. At best they occasionally bestow a miracle flashy enough to bewitch a crowd — and even that surfaces only now and then, and only for those commonly said to be loved by the gods.
Then it works exactly the way it does when someone who always dates the worst men, or the worst women, gets treated kindly once and becomes addicted to it. That is how they end up praising a god. A lifeline flung out at the moment of utter desperation, after being nowhere in sight through all the ordinary days, is the perfect ingredient for making fanatics.
The vast majority of ordinary people, on the other hand, have to stand against those demons on their own. They have to meet the temptation toward ruin with a heart that will not break. And when the demons come to harvest their prey, they have to raise a gun, or be eaten. Saint or sinner, it made no difference. You had to keep a gun loaded with silver bullets in your hand.
Except that was only ordinary in that other world. Not here. In my memory, demons in this place were nothing more than symbols — things that lived in religious texts and in every kind of story. They did not actually appear and run rampant. Well, even on the other side, a demon only showed itself in person when the harvest had ripened.
So why was a demon appearing here?
Of course, it might only look the same and be an entirely different creature. But listening to it talk, it was no different from the demons I had known in that other world. It came on in a grotesque shape of black shadow, writhing with terrible clarity, and asked what you wanted.
An ordinary person would never answer that. The voice itself was enough to raise the hair on your neck, and the air around it reeked of ill omen. But a human carrying a thick, gloomy wish would slip easily into a bargain that was obviously headed for ruin. They had nowhere else to lean. And as it devoured their desires, the demon only grew stronger.
So of course I recognized it. When I was nothing but a single wandering soul — or a mind — there had been countless pitiful children who fell for that coaxing. Back then, all I could do was stand still and watch those heartbreaking scenes unfold. The reason I went to the dying, drawn by the fierce intensity of their wishes, was actually that. The resentment. The hatred. The desperate hope that bloomed out of that despair. To a demon, those things were the most delicious prey. So I reached out first, and kept the demons from nesting there.
In fact, that is also why most of my followers were women. The lovelier a girl looked, the more often she was left helpless inside some unreasonable cruelty. Of course, if they were men I simply turned them into girls, but that was purely a matter of personal taste.
Anyway. Had it simply come through a passage to another world, like that? The people here said there were a great many other dimensions. So among all those countless dimensions, that other world had been connected again? Well, it was not impossible that demons existed in other worlds too. Still, it stung more than a little. I could not help wondering whether I had torn the boundary of the world, and whether that was why the border between this place and that other one had come apart.
"I see. So you lot gnaw your way through worlds without discrimination."
Or maybe it was as Helena said. Maybe they wandered from dimension to dimension hunting for prey and had simply happened to reach this one. And Helena was not the sort to leave them be. Even when her heart had been at its weakest, my heroine had never once made a bargain with things like these.
"Lady Helena, the bullets...!"
Yegyeong had flinched for a moment at the demon's shape. Then, as Helena stepped forward to meet it, she belatedly dug the rounds out of her handbag. Helena did not look back. She tipped the cylinder out with a single flick, and the empty chambers began to take on the same color as her eyes. She snapped her wrist to finish loading, and gold leaked from the gaps.
Yegyeong stared at that, dumbfounded, then looked down at the case in her hand. The six bullets that had been rattling inside it were gone without a trace the instant Helena finished loading.
"Uh, the bullets...?"
She murmured it blankly. Apparently it had not occurred to her that ammunition might simply vanish on its own. Well, under ordinary circumstances that would be the reasonable assumption. As if Helena would have handed those rounds over without any plan of her own.
"I dunno what the hell's going on, nyang, but we just gotta fight and see, right, nyang? Miso Cheonsa, you stay in the back, nyang. Don't you dare hog the contribution and steal my lunch money, nyang!"
"Yes, do fight well. I'll step in if it gets dangerous."
Nyangnyangbeam had no intention of leaving Helena to fight alone. She stepped forward and took her place at Helena's side. Left standing behind them were me, Miso Cheonsa, and the two handlers.
...I felt a little guilty, as if we were dumping the whole thing on those two. But Miso Cheonsa had said to leave Helena as free as possible to do what she wanted. So I meant to stay still unless Helena was actually in danger. Ah — if the others were in danger, I would step in a little for that too. Well, there was that barrier app Yegyeong had been so proud of. It would probably be fine.
Meanwhile the demon kept leaving spam in the air like a robocall that would not hang up. I was fine — I knew nothing good waited for anyone who fell for that. Yegyeong and Suhyeon, though, already looked hooked, their faces gone slack and far away.
Hmm. Even if it claimed it would grant every wish... was something that reeked of that unpleasant aura really that tempting?
"Handlers, please snap out of it. Hmm. They seem completely gone."
"It's a hypnosis civilians fall for easily. Once Helena and Nyangnyangbeam take care of it, they'll be fine, so let's just sit here and cheer."
"Hmm, so it's hypnosis. Then if we fed these people onions and told them they tasted like apples, would they actually taste apples?"
"Feed them about five and they'll be sobbing that they taste like apples."
I see. So even someone who would not drop under at a word — someone who would need to eat five onions first — could still be taken this easily by a demon. That was why so many humans in that other world had been deceived and twisted. Which was exactly why Helena was even more impressive, wasn't she. Armed with nothing but a pure, undiluted will for revenge, she had never left a gap for that kind of temptation to slip through.
Helena leveled her gun at the writhing shape of the demon without a flicker of hesitation. Nyangnyangbeam matched her, raising a glow of pink light. The demon seemed to understand, then, that they meant it harm. The instant the muzzle found it, it sprang back and scattered black fog in every direction, laying a sinister voice over the whole field.
Helena spat it out without a shred of regret. Yes. That had always been the engine in her. She had raged that even if she killed the bandits, she would kill them with her own hands. There was no world in which she would fall for a demon offering to do the killing for her. Even the offer to give her the power to kill them had not shaken her. She had called that revenge by someone else's hands, too.
And so Helena pulled the trigger.
The muzzle roared, coughing flame with the crack of powder. The golden trail that leapt from it punched through the black fog and, with a dry crunch, pierced something beyond. Through the scattering mist, something could be seen moving. They had arms and legs, unmistakably — but the limbs were twisted the wrong way, or grafted on in shapes that should not have held. Things seized by the demon through mistaken wishes.
Helena turned her gun on them and began to pull the trigger again and again, without the slightest hesitation.