The Goddess Who Slipped Away
Only after I'd somehow managed to calm Seoa down—flustered to a degree that bordered on strange—could I finally turn my steps toward the Association.
But once again, things refused to go smoothly. By the time I arrived, the place was in the full swing of an uproar.
On the surface, of course, nothing looked amiss. The staff processed their paperwork as ever, and the hunters darted about with their assignments in hand.
Except for one thing. Men in expensive suits—people who would rarely if ever deign to descend to the first floor—kept flitting in and out, and that alone kept catching my eye. They weren't kicking up a fuss or issuing directives to the working staff, either. If anything, plenty of them simply accepted a cup of tea like genial old uncles and moved along.
But the Association's employees were human, too. On practical matters, they were naturally the ones who knew the ins and outs best—yet with their de facto superiors constantly materializing around them, sitting still and handling visitors as usual was easier said than done. Which was why the Association's main floor was now brimming with an unseasonal bustle.
The situation I found myself in at that very moment made it plain enough.
"Thank you for accepting the invitation."
And so it was, in one of the Association's own lounges, that I sat in private audience with the current head of the Hunter Association.
It goes without saying that I hadn't been the one to ask for the meeting. I had followed the established procedure and filed a discreet request for a visit, and the Director had come down himself with a word to wait just a moment.
For my part, that much alone was already quite unexpected. To put it bluntly, whether one got an audience with Tiamat at all rested entirely, absolutely, on the goddess's own decision.
It was true that requests passed through the Association for the sake of its face, since it nominally attended to her. But at bottom, there was no way for the Association to play games—scheming between the goddess and those who sought her out—or to allot her schedule so as to favor their own friends and family. Hers was an authority that could ignore even matters the Association had approved, if the mood struck her. And then there was the fallout to consider, should the goddess ever catch wind of such maneuvering. She may have first come to them over matters concerning Kim Mincheol's upbringing, but that was long since no longer the case.
Absolute power on one side, absolute dependence on the other. If I had to sum up the relationship between Tiamat and the Association in a single phrase, that would be it.
Above all, there was no guarantee anyone could fool Tiamat. For all anyone knew, she had any number of Authorities tucked away—and no one could say for certain that she lacked the power to keep watch over the petitions funneled her way.
Which meant that the Director coming out in person the moment I requested an audience could only mean one thing: something unusual was afoot right now.
"If I may dispense with the preliminaries—the goddess is refusing all audiences at present."
The Director opened his mouth with a studied gravity. But the very first thought that popped into my head at those words was: do Constellations get their period too? Naturally, I kept that to myself.
...Quietly, I scanned my surroundings.
The first-floor lounge of the Association. Officially, it was open to anyone, and in fact a few employees had been resting here right up until we arrived. But though it had been phrased as a courteous request, it had in effect been an order to clear out, and no two ways about it.
In other words, what was happening now was a closed-door conversation of sorts.
"And that's precisely why I asked to see you, you see."
What I couldn't wrap my head around was another matter entirely. Because my own audience request had gone through without a hitch. Or, to put it more precisely, they had failed to block it in time.
It dated back to when I first closed my deal with her—when I negotiated for the woman, then cooped up on the Association's top floor day in and day out, to at least be able to go out into the world as her avatar. Among the privileges she granted me was the right to meet with her in person, without limit.
Honestly, at the time I'd wondered what on earth I'd ever use that for. Frankly, part of me still did. Now that she could roam about as her avatar, there was hardly any need for me to go seeking her out.
And Tiamat's refusal of all audiences was meant in the most literal sense. That is: every meeting already on the books was rejected, and every future request would be too. Interpreted generously, it meant my request could still be sent up. It goes without saying that this was sophistry at best—ask the Association whether it made an ounce of common sense, and they'd have no answer. And yet the Association, for its part, seemed positively eager to give my back a push.
"In that spirit, might I ask one small favor of you?"
"What would that be?"
"Keep an eye on the goddess's mood for me. One never knows what might have upset a capricious goddess this time. Perhaps her last audience was the problem—or perhaps it's simply the bad weather. So do look in on her spirits for me..."
If the request had been nothing more than that, I wouldn't have minded much. I wasn't thrilled about it, but either way I'd be the one smoothing her mood. And if I could put the Association's jangled nerves at ease while I was at it, well—everyone came out ahead. It wasn't as if I could dodge it anyway. When it came to the matter of Tiamat's true identity, that was another story, but the contents of our conversations themselves carried no duty of confidentiality. If anything, people more often shamelessly dressed up their silence as discretion when it served their own interests.
Except. What took me aback was the worry glinting in the Director's eyes as he said it.
That's not to say there was no political calculus in it. For all I knew, I could name several plausible motives off the top of my head. Even so, I couldn't deny that the clearest emotion radiating from the man before me was plain, unvarnished concern.
"...Are you, er, close with the goddess?"
Which meant I couldn't exactly sit there going 'that woman' this and 'that bitch' that right to his face. The forced courtesy in my own voice felt so unnatural it was almost eerie. But the Director, the man in question, seemed scarcely to mind; he simply curled his lips into an amiable smile.
"One is in no position to quibble over who is and isn't close to her, I'm afraid."
"Ah—sorry."
"Still, it is true that most of those fretting over the goddess's current mood owe her a great debt."
Hearing that much, I began to piece it together. What Tiamat had been conducting under the name of 'audiences' was no mere rubber-stamping. Revelation—the power Constellations so often wielded in myth, the power to carry their word to mortals.
Whether the goddess Tiamat truly possessed any gift of prophecy, even I couldn't say. But still—those who hesitated. Those who feared. Those who trembled, dumbstruck. For souls like that, how much strength must the goddess's voice have been, a hand at their backs?
In far more corners of life than one would think, people waver and reach for certainty. And each time, how many must have taken courage from the goddess who silently stood behind their judgment? Whether it was the authority bound up in the very name of 'goddess,' or the persuasive force her revelations wielded—either way, far more people than I'd expected seemed to have found help in her silver tongue. The gentleman sitting across from me now was evidently one of them.
...To me, the man before me had been nothing more than a stranger I'd glimpsed in passing. Worse, he'd been only too happy to send me off to Tiamat—a monster—for her blessing. Honestly, he hadn't left the best impression. And yet the way he opened his heart and spoke like this was more than enough to earn him a far kinder mark. Put bluntly: if our positions were reversed, I could never be that gracious with the bastard who'd sliced off the goddess's horn right in front of me, bolted, and blown the whole contract to hell.
"Well, alrighty then. So there's nothing in particular you'd like me to ask her?"
"Nothing of the sort. I doubt she'd take kindly to that anyway."
"Strict as ever."
"Now, now."
At his gently coaxing tone, a laugh burst out of me before I could stop it.
Well then, let's see. What questions should I bring with me? First, I'd have to call her to account for why she'd pulled a stunt like this. Add a few words asking after her health. I ought to pass along all that concern people had just been voicing, too. And if something was genuinely wrong, I'd need to compare notes with Lee Joongoo, Choi Seungjun, and the rest.
Before I knew it, a low sigh escaped me. To think I'd live long enough to become a mediator between monsters and mankind. Constellation or not, it made precious little difference. What was any of this to the lot of a man who'd never been some god-chosen champion?
Then, unbidden, I recalled what Choi Seungjun had said to me before I came here. 'That she plays favorites with you,' was it.
Certainly, judging by the present situation alone, no one could be blamed for thinking so. Evidently the others read it that way too—otherwise they'd never have come to me. At the very least, it was proof positive that not one other soul held the same standing with Tiamat that I did.
A tangled creature, you might say. The creator goddess of Mesopotamian myth. Mother of gods, and mother of monsters. And in truth, at her core, a successor who had inherited the name of a goddess long dead. A Constellation who had descended to the surface under a monster's nationality to escape the strife of heaven. A foreigner who had smuggled herself in alone for the sake of a place to live, and the mother who had taken in and raised a child toward that end. A being who had borrowed my hands to send her own child off by her own will—and our ally. A goddess of cunning who welcomed those who worshipped her, and at the same time a victim who, having once been tormented by that very worship, recoiled from unconditional devotion. Every human life is like that, I suppose, but she was a hard one to pin down in a single word.
Which was exactly why I couldn't begin to guess at this sudden move of hers, or what had set it off. A conclusion reached as the mother of gods? Or as the mother of monsters? Or an idea conceived behind yet another face entirely? Either way, I'd know only when I saw her—
Son of a bitch.
The moment I stepped onto the Association's top floor, the Director's parting request still in my ears, I realized that something was wrong—thoroughly, irretrievably wrong. In a word: fucked.
At first glance, the scene before me looked no different than always. The stairwell that opened up the top floor's entire expanse, invisible from outside, just as it had ever been. And on the sofa at its center, Tiamat lay stretched out in quiet repose. ...Or, to put it more precisely: her avatar did.
Others might not have been able to tell. I could. The figure lounging there was not her true body but her avatar—the presence I sensed from her was different to the bone.
I had known it in my head, of course. Her remaining on the Association's top floor had always been a kind of self-imposed confinement; she'd felt the need to keep some distance from society after the incident with Kim Mincheol. Which, flipped around, also meant that within the Association itself there existed no means whatsoever of physically restraining Tiamat.
They could debate accountability all they liked over Kim Mincheol's turn to terrorism. But had they tried to crush her head-on, the raw gap in power alone would have been the problem. Nowhere in the Hunter Association was there a soul who could face Tiamat's true body with the leisure of mere subjugation—never mind a kill. Setting aside the likes of me, Lee Joongoo, and Choi Seungjun, no one else's odds were even assured. The very apex of S-Rank monsters. An opponent against whom the full strength of an entire nation might fall short. That was her true power.
And so, if she truly set her mind to slipping the Association's gaze, she could walk out of this top floor without a single hitch. I knew that much. I had simply never wanted it confirmed quite like this.
A vivid picture assembled itself in my head of what must have happened in this room not long ago. As she always did, Tiamat had dispatched her avatar to the surface once more. And then she had poured into that avatar every last drop of power she could—enough, literally, to surpass her own true body. Mana that cleared even the avatar's limits with room to spare. Pushed that far, the hierarchy between avatar and original could invert; it was far from impossible. A positional exchange by way of the avatar, so to speak. Create the avatar, invert the balance of power between it and the original—and the true body takes the avatar's place while the avatar takes hers. With nothing more than that cheap sleight of hand, Tiamat had left her 'self' sitting quietly in place and walked clean out of the Association's top floor.
In truth, her escape from the Association was not, in itself, the problem. It would certainly give them a headache, and the dread that the goddess's existence might be laid bare before all the world would no doubt gnaw at them too. But the way I read it, what this situation actually signified was something else entirely.
"What—?! Why now, of all times, wouldst thou—?!"
Her reaction said it all, plain as day: she hadn't dreamed I would come up here. Which meant—she had left the avatar behind and smuggled her true body out of the Association. Then refused every audience. To put it plainly: Tiamat intended to leave this country.