Atonement and Salvation
Just moments ago, I had been lying there wrapped in the cozy scent of blankets, but now a fishy stench pierced the tip of my nose.
Instinctively, she realized this was no mere dream. It was the same sensation she'd felt yesterday inside that red room.
The five senses felt as if she'd possessed someone else's body.
"This is... inside that man's memories...."
But the timeframe was different from the memory she'd seen yesterday.
Chwarararak—
The scenes began to replay from the day he'd first vowed revenge.
After his family was brutally massacred, the young man—still boyish—wandered alone through the ruined polluted zone in his school uniform.
In the fog-shrouded silence more oppressive than death, the one who took him in was an old man digging up grotesquely mutated plants. A mysterious shaman sustaining himself on toxic weeds from the polluted zone. The bitter, nauseating taste of the nameless herb the old man handed him lingered vividly on Acturus's tongue.
In the old world, it would've sounded absurd, but in this era where magical girls were real, it couldn't help but spark curiosity.
The boy nodded without hesitation. From that day, his training began—a desperate self-mutilation to confront magical girls.
In an underground pit teeming with the cries of monsters mutated by polluted magic. To a transformed magical girl, they were mere mongrels that burst with a single punch, but to ordinary Mun Tae-seong, they were beasts.
Ulgeuk ulgeuk.
Even when his side tore open and guts nearly spilled. Even on nights poring over forbidden magic tomes, shedding bloody tears.
He staggered on, muttering the same words every time.
"Acturus... Acturus...."
Dozens, hundreds of times a day. The name that burst from him like a groan started as burning hatred, twisted into bone-deep rage, and finally warped into a grotesque, formless obsession.
Even as poison blackened his veins and consumed his body, he smiled at my hallucination. Wanting to kill me, possess me, destroy me. That single venomous obsession forcibly held his rotting flesh together.
The previous memory had been mere motivation for revenge, but this one was madness made flesh.
"Hah...! Heuk...!"
A crushing pressure squeezed her heart, forcing her eyes open. The basement's cold air stabbed deep into her lungs, but the man's desperate obsession from the dream was seared into her mind like a brand.
"Urk...."
Nausea surged from the pit of her stomach. It wasn't an illusion from the memory of 'that day' she'd seen before.
Like a guilt she'd postponed and ignored rearing its head, intense self-loathing—for her role in dragging one man's life into hell—twisted her guts.
"U, uweeeek!"
Vomit more violent than the day she'd been captured and punched in the gut erupted from her.
Judging by the uniform, he'd been just a high schooler.
Three years. That endless time, with only me as his guiding star through hell.
She'd vaguely assumed he was an adult, but the boyish innocence lingering on his face had its reason.
Through the hand of that auntie I'd carelessly kicked away, his entire world crumbled. From those ruins, with the sole conviction to make me and the other magical girls his 'family,' he'd become a monster.
The bottomless madness and twisted love that treated his mother's killer—me—as the most precious thing in the world was so thick she could barely breathe.
"He's insane... That man was truly insane...."
The teary eyes he'd turned toward her. The pathos as he whispered love and kissed the scars on her wrist. Knowing it all wasn't an act to scare her, but the raw truth squeezed from a soul rotted over three years, made her shudder even more.
Every time she felt his obsession, goosebumps prickled her skin, yet guilt like a knife gutting her chest constricted her.
Now she knew for sure. What she'd felt before was guilt.
Jureureuk—
Suddenly, tears streamed from her eyes. Since becoming a magical girl, her tears had dried up strangely.
Even yawning or eating spicy food yielded nothing, as if her tear ducts were broken.
Panicking at these first tears in years, she frantically wiped her eyes with her nun habit's sleeve.
"Why...?"
She didn't know. Nothing made sense since coming here. Not even her own heart, which she'd thought she knew well.
Now even tears flowed in ways she couldn't comprehend.
What was drawing her here?
In this abyss of uncertainty, she had nothing to cling to but the faith she'd held her whole life.
"Lord...."
A trembling confession spilled from her parched lips. Wiping tears with her sleeve, I knelt on the floor, clasping my hands. My fingers whitened, knuckles locked tight.
"Look upon this sinner...."
Bible verses swirled chaotically in her mind.
'Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'
Words she'd deemed worthless in her life now stabbed her heart like a dagger. The terror that the mother's hand she'd kicked might have been the Lord's touch. The fact that the son's three years of suffering was fully her karma—it shattered her.
Why?
Why hadn't she recalled this most obvious teaching until now?
It felt as if she'd lived with eyes open but blindfolded by someone.
Yet simultaneously, a strange conviction bloomed in her heart. That red room. The grotesque sensations showing her Mun Tae-seong's hell.
I bowed my head to the empty air.
"I thank You for not abandoning me, for showing me this ugly chronicle of sin. Holy Spirit, lead me to walk the path of atonement at this man's side. No matter how he destroys me, if it be Your will, I accept it gladly...."
The entity that forced her to face the truth was surely heaven's angel guiding her right. An angel with a flaming sword, come to punish and save her.
Believing that, as she closed her eyes in prayer—
"...Kek, kekek. Kyahahahaha!!"
"Holy Spirit, you say! I've never heard such a thing before."
"......!"
Space rippled, red mist swirling before her eyes. What emerged wasn't a winged lion. It was a decadent woman floating midair, legs crossed like a model, shirt buttons undone precariously.
"Demon...?"
No, it couldn't be a demon.
A demon would whisper sweet lies to cover her sins. One who awakened her sins and opened her eyes couldn't be.
As she thought that, the woman before her burst into laughter again, clutching her belly, then lifted her chin with her shoe tip.
A acrid sulfur scent wafted.
"A girl with two traits I despise."
She flicked Isara's cheek with a finger, smiling brightly.
"Planning to atone?"
"...Of course."
"By bearing his child?"
"Th-that...!"
Impossible.
"Why not? Since ancient times, when a bitch atones to a stud, she offers her body. Basic protocol."
"B-bitch? Stud? You mustn't speak so vulgarly!"
This Holy Spirit seemed intent on testing her continually.
"The viler the atonement, the more it satisfies the stud's heart. Or was it just lip service? Too chicken to follow through?"
"...No. I am the enemy of that man's mother. Moreover, for filth like me—who committed such sins and lived carefree—to leave him a seed and bear his child would only make his life more wretched."
Though as a nun she'd known little of such matters, a child was one's future incarnate.
"You saw his heart. How badly he wants you. Sure, it's... a bit twisted, but he really likes you tons. No problem, right?"
"A bit twisted? It's way beyond that!"
She snapped before she knew it. She couldn't play coy and accept it when his soul had been so shattered because of her.
"Hehehe... Think it'll go your way?"
...I'll atone somehow and save him.
And end that twisted love, let him take my life with his own hands, severing all evil ties cleanly.