Apologize
"Ah..."
Ayeon had been craning up at Eunha hard enough to snap her neck, and the sound left her lips smaller than the rain.
The drops came down too thick to keep one's eyes open. Ayeon stared at her anyway, rigid, as if the water had frozen her where she lay.
For a long time the two gazes stayed knotted through the downpour—Ayeon sprawled in a wreck across the ground, and Eunha watching that wreck without a word. Then Eunha turned. Past her own shoulder. Toward Verde.
"...And what is that look supposed to mean?"
Verde drew his brows together, faintly displeased. A witness would change nothing.
The Hunter Auction was held every year in cities across the world, Korea among them. Gather that many ability users in one place, and incidents great and small were simply part of the season.
Killing that insolent Korean hunter outright would of course become an international problem. Discord of this degree would not. Carlos's summoned dogs were already ringing the perimeter; if the police came, he would be told. Which meant—
No point getting spooked over nothing.
Least of all by a hunter no one had ever heard of.
"Unni, just go."
Ayeon hauled her torso up, swaying, and spat. What hit the ground was red.
Eunha's eyes left Verde and came back to her. She said nothing. Even so, the look asked it plainly enough. Are you hurt? Are you all right?
"...I told you to stay out of it. Go."
Ayeon said it again to the woman who still had not moved.
The status ailment will lift soon.
By now she had the full measure of their abilities. Let her skills return and she could slip free of them with ease. Revenge could come whenever she pleased.
She only had to endure a few more minutes. Yes. Only a few.
There was no world in which an F-rank Concept Hunter could stand against them besides. Before Ayeon's Silence even broke, the woman would be left in worse shape than she was.
Fighting while I try to protect this unni is going to be rough.
Ayeon's skills and traits were built for a fight between two. In a match already tilted against her, an F-rank hunter would only get in the way. So—
"Just g—"
"I told you. I came to return the pamphlet."
"I don't need it. I gave that to you, unni."
"I'm saying I came to pay a debt."
The reply died in Ayeon's throat. She stared, and Eunha's face gave her nothing—expressionless, unreadable—as she folded the parasol in her hand. It closed with a soft click. Then she turned.
"Hunters these days seem awfully free about turning a Unique Ability on another hunter."
At the murmur, something odd stiffened in Verde's face. It did not last.
"A hunter? In my country, we do not call a person who steals what belongs to others a hunter."
A thin smile on his mouth, he took one step toward her.
"Only a thief."
"A thief?"
"The girl you are shielding stole our items."
"How do you know that?"
"Because there was no one else. No one else who made contact with us today."
He said it as if the matter were obvious. Eunha's black gaze moved from him to Ayeon.
"Did you hear? During first-period gym, Class 2 got cleaned out."
"It was Kang Ayeon. She always says her stomach hurts and goes to the nurse's office every gym class. Lines up perfectly, doesn't it?"
"Ayeon. Will you tell just the teacher the truth? Why did you do it?"
The moment their eyes met, Ayeon only smiled. She did not confirm it. She did not deny it.
Those pitch-black eyes stayed on her a long time. At last Eunha's lips stirred, barely.
"Did you do it?"
"No."
Ayeon gave a light shrug, flicked her gaze somewhere else as if none of it concerned her, and added no excuse after the word. It would not have mattered anyway.
And yet.
"She said she didn't."
Ayeon flinched. She looked at Eunha with startled eyes. What is this unni even saying?
"You believe that?"
Verde asked it as if he could not believe his ears.
"Your claim that the items were stolen is no easier to believe. All I can know is that the three of you did this to her."
With that, Eunha lifted the parasol and leveled its tip at them.
Over the silence, the rain came down harder still. Not one of them apologized to Ayeon.
Ayeon stared holes through Eunha's back, her face the face of someone struck from behind.
"I said apologize."
Eunha said it again. The sharp point of the parasol had not moved.
"...Ha. What a nuisance."
The hollow laugh had barely left him when vines lashed out of nowhere and cinched the wrist that held the parasol.
"You seem to be under some misconception. This is a legitimate accounting. And an apology? For what? What do you intend to do if we refuse? Report us to the police?"
Eunha did not answer.
"Allow me to say this in advance. Do you imagine this is the only place a fight has broken out during the auction? It is routine. Where hunters gather, and money gathers, is it not stranger for there to be no trouble at all?"
"You call this routine?"
Eunha's eyes cut to Ayeon. Hair and clothes were a ruin from being rolled through the water pooling on the ground. Her cheek was a raw red under a smear of mud, as if a shoe had been ground into it.
"You think we would kill the girl? We are only saying we want our property returned."
"Didn't you hear her? She said she didn't steal it."
Verde's face crumpled. This woman. There is no talking to her.
The vine around the wrist clenched harder—pressure enough to powder bone.
"You really don't listen."
Eunha seemed to have reached the same conclusion. Without changing a single line of her expression, she raised her other hand, slow. And then—
Red flame flowered in her palm. For a heartbeat she wondered whether she ought to have come in a dress after all. The thought passed.
This is enough.
She closed her hand on empty air. In the same instant the vine binding her wrist crackled into ash and scattered.
Nature-type?
Verde's eyes, fixed on the sight, drew thin.
If Awakeners were the chosen of humankind, then those granted a nature-type Unique Ability were counted as something more particular still. A nature-type could be turned to uses far beyond an ordinary ability, and at the right rank it was said to hold the potential to clear a respectable Gate in the space of a blink.
Through the rain, Verde looked at Eunha and did not speak. She did not look away.
She means to fight. Troublesome. He could not read her rank, nor any epithet she carried, but a nature-type hunter alone was enough to be wary of. Worse, the matchup itself was foul. Plants against fire.
He finished the thought in a breath and flicked a glance at his companion—and an arrow came knifing through the rain. Impossibly, the woman caught it bare-handed.
The shaft, which had flown with vicious speed, snapped helplessly in Eunha's grip. Blood ran the lines of her fingers and pattered to the ground. The head had only grazed her. It was not a deep wound.
Even so.
I'm finished.
Ayeon bit down on her lip. She knew that arrow was no ordinary arrow.
Once they understood Eunha held a nature-type Unique Ability, sealing that ability would have been the most rational choice they had.
The Blocker.
His was the presence that had been trouble from the start. Without him, Ayeon would never have been driven this far into a corner.
The vines did not waste the opening. Stems rushed her like living snakes. Eunha opened her palm toward them, the same as before—and the flame did not come. In that hitch of surprise she looked at her own hand.
Got her.
The corner of Verde's mouth lifted.
A Unique Ability was a power set apart, granted by the System. The Blocker's ability, stated precisely, was a temporary shutdown of that System. Which meant more than the loss of a Unique Ability alone. Even the bodily strength the System had bestowed at Awakening would drop for a time, until the body was scarcely different from that of an ordinary person who had never awakened at all.
And yet—
She sprang, clean and quick, out of the vines' reach. Nothing about the movement belonged to someone who had been Blocked. She moved like a cat.
How?
The Blocker's color changed, and so did Ayeon's, both of them thrown by a turn neither had expected.
"Carlos!"
Verde's shout cracked out, and in the same moment fighting dogs massed like a thunderhead, growling, barking, short and savage. The instant Eunha came down from the height of her leap, the summoned dogs closed around her without a gap. Teeth bared, they hurled themselves in to tear—and the parasol she swung wide drew a round arc through the air. A dull crack. The dogs yelped and went down like candles set in front of a wind.
It was over in an instant.
Among the dogs that no longer moved, Eunha lifted her head.
Gold met him. Verde's throat worked, a hard rise and fall.
What?
She had made contact with the arrow. Her abilities ought to have been sealed. Then what, exactly, had that movement been?
Don't tell me. An Incarnation?
A Block did not take on an Incarnation, the one who carried a divine beast's favor entire. More precisely, it did not take as it should.
The gods a hunter contracted changed with the culture, but the patrons shared one thing, whether they were the Twelve Divine Beasts of the East or the twelve Olympians of the West. God or divine beast, they wanted as many contractors as they could hold—and among those contractors, a single Incarnation, one they favored above the rest.
An Incarnation was a soul bound to a divine beast. There were reaches even the System could not enter, and so an ability could be sealed only in some thin outer part.
But.
So far as they knew, the only Incarnation among Korean hunters was Maestro.
The first hunter, and the only Incarnation, had transferred his nationality to the United States long ago. Among the hunters working in Korea now there was no Incarnation at all, not even among the S-rank. Even Korea's famous White Night, Shin Gwihun, had not been one. That was one reason the country's standing sat lower than other nations' in the age of great hunters.
Then where had this woman come from? Was she not Korean at all, but Chinese? Had the arrow missed? No. He was certain it had struck.
While Verde floundered in that confusion, Eunha—sprung into the air—came down with a sharp crack of impact, close enough that they could feel it. Not merely in front of them. In front of the Blocker who had shot her.
The broken arrow fell strengthless from her grip and struck the ground. The Blocker, staring at it in a daze, lifted his head again.
Within the golden iris, the black pupil split long and vertical. From the black parasol in her hand, something dripped—rain, or blood. There was no telling which. She took a step closer.
"So you won't apologize?"
Flame took both her shoulders again. Between rain fierce enough to wipe the world from sight, it shook and shook, and it did not die.
The Blocker retreated a step before he knew he had. He could not believe it. Was she truly an Incarnation? No. Even if she were, a Blocker's seal should never have broken this quickly.
He stared into the flame burning vast and high, and his lips fumbled.
"M-monster..."
Yes. A monster.
She felt like a monster from inside a Gate. Or like something past even that.