The Spirit Beast
"UAAAAAGH! No! Don't come over here, you lunatics!"
Shrieking, Seo Jinwoo planted his golden shield—a slab of metal nearly as big as he was—across the mouth of the canyon, desperately trying to plug the gap.
Beyond the shield, the black-uniformed Japanese Awakened hurled themselves at him again and again, without pause.
Not that anyone could blame them. On the far side of the ravine, a madman who had been popping people's heads like overripe fruit with his bare hands was running completely wild, so from their perspective, charging the comparatively soft target in front of them was clearly the best option available.
The trouble was, Seo Jinwoo was in no position to be charitable about anyone's circumstances either.
Every time one of them gets through, you take a hit. Just one.
That was exactly what Kang Samsik had told him. One hit. As if a single blow from those monstrous hands wouldn't mean the end of his entire life.
"Doke! (Move!)"
One of the Japanese hunters shouted, and Seo Jinwoo—someone who'd grown up on anime—got the gist well enough.
In that instant, the hunter's hands twisted in an eerie pattern, and a massive centipede came crawling up out of the earth.
A shikigami.
He knew it was one of the abilities granted to Japanese Awakened. Seo Jinwoo was himself, after all, one of the few returnees representing South Korea, and he'd at least heard rough descriptions of what the Japanese Awakened could do.
The problem was that shikigami were notoriously difficult opponents. The ability was similar to monster-summoning classes, but unlike monsters, very little information about shikigami had ever been made public.
"Sorry! But I don't feel like getting beaten to death today!"
Staring at the enormous centipede crawling toward him, Seo Jinwoo poured every last drop of his divine power into his shield.
Even as he did, he could hear things constantly bursting apart somewhere behind him, and each time, the back of his neck went cold. Honestly, the thought even crossed his mind that getting bitten to death by the centipede shikigami in front of him would be less painful than taking one hit from that lunatic.
Ssssssshhhhk—.
Then something astonishing happened.
The moment the centipede touched the golden light radiating from Seo Jinwoo's shield, it began to melt away, limp and boneless—like ice dropped onto a scorching frying pan.
"Uso daro? (That's a lie.)"
One of the Japanese Awakened, his features twisted into an expression straight out of a manga, muttered those words with a stunned, vacant look.
"...Huh?"
And Seo Jinwoo was just as shocked.
He was the so-called Iron Wall of Hyunmoo Guild, one of the rare returnees of Korea—but at heart, Seo Jinwoo had always been a timid soul. Even the Iron Wall nickname was nothing more than the product of desperate, back-breaking effort.
In that other world, he had struggled simply to survive, and from the moment he returned to Earth, his brother's tyranny had forced him to hold the very front line, day after day.
But after meeting Lee Jaeseong, that taut, frayed cord of tension inside him had loosened all at once. Beings so strong he could never hope to match them surrounded him now, and in circumstances like those, there was no reason to risk his own neck.
No—truthfully, he'd even concluded that risking his life wouldn't help much anyway, and that very thought had laid bare the coward at his core.
But that moment, just now, had flooded that deficit of confidence to the brim.
The shikigami of a Japanese Awakened—an ability wreathed in dark, clamorous, creeping energy—had vanished the instant it touched his divine power.
Maybe, he thought, the Japanese Awakened—famed for wielding the strangest abilities of all—were precisely the opponents against whom he held a perfect advantage.
Hey, this might actually be doable.
Life was slowly kindling in Seo Jinwoo's eyes.
The Awakened before him, meanwhile, could no longer hide their bewilderment. This euphoria was something they were feeling for the very first time in their lives.
"Nobody gets past here! Not a single one of you!"
Rapping his knuckles against his shield, Seo Jinwoo called out to the enemy.
And then he wanted, more than anything, to boast to the monster who had flung him into this place. To tell him that he, too, was pulling his weight.
"Mister, you're watching, right? I've got this entrance covered, so—huh?"
That was the exact moment his confident proclamation cut off mid-sentence.
"Hey, quit messing around!"
Kang Samsik—who mere moments ago had been slaughtering the Chinese Awakened single-handedly—had vanished without a trace.
And with a good number of them still left standing.
"...I don't know where the brute went, but break through! We head for the tower as well."
"UAAAAAAAGH! No! You're NOT getting through! I said nobody passes!"
Facing the Chinese Awakened charging at him, Seo Jinwoo hardened his shield with every ounce of strength—no, every ounce of divine power—he possessed.
Because it felt like Kang Samsik might be watching him from somewhere, at any moment.
"...My sister was alive."
With trembling fingers, I traced the letters scrawled on the tower's inner wall. There was no telling when they'd been written, or how much time had passed since—but the mere fact that my sister had left those words was enough for hope to begin stirring in my chest.
Seoyeon, Seojun, and my own name.
Staring at those names on the wall, I felt my emotions surge beyond control. It was surely because of that that my concealment—a state of formless shadow in which I'd been in perfect harmony with the surrounding air—had come undone.
Wuuuuuum—.
In that instant, the silent interior of the tower began to shake.
And from the darkness of the central hall, a pair of yellow eyes flashed open.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
Focusing my inner power into my eyes, I beheld the owner of those eyes—and a curse escaped my lips before I could stop it.
It was on an entirely different level from the crude lumps of stone guarding the tower's exterior. A colossal frame of silvery-white mineral and blue crystal. Its sheer size was shocking enough, but what truly stunned me was its shape.
A crisp V-shaped antenna atop its head. A body of blue and white.
The boss of an S-rank gate stood before my eyes in a form no golem had any right to wear.
It looked exactly like the legendary mech my sister had once been willing to die over—the First Gundam.
Guardian RX-78 — Minhee Custom
My head spun as I read the lettering etched into the Gundam's shoulder.
One of my sister's few hobbies had been collecting gunpla. And the moment I saw my sister's own name written on that Gundam's shoulder, I moved past the conclusion that this tower was connected to her in some fashion and arrived at another entirely: she had built this thing.
Of course, even as that realization hit me, the Gundam was closing in to attack the intruder—namely, me.
And it had drawn its signature weapon of light while it was at it.
Unbelievable. What a nutcase.
Watching the golem swing the weapon called a beam saber—no, watching the Minhee Custom swing it—a curse slipped out of me on its own.
Given the will, crushing a mere golem would have been no trouble at all. And yet my hand wouldn't move.
Don't touch my Gundam. If you break it, you'll be sniffing incense from behind a funeral portrait for the rest of your days.
Childhood trauma resurfaced—the memory of snapping the waist of a Gundam model my sister had built, and of getting beaten black and blue on every rainy day thereafter.
That wasn't the only reason I hesitated, though.
I wondered whether I was even allowed to just destroy the thing—the one and only clue to my sister's fate I currently possessed.
For that matter, why isn't it touching the walls?
As I dodged the Gundam's attacks with a complicated expression, the thing was displaying a strange pattern of its own. The golem, so perfectly modeled on the Gundam, moved oddly whenever it drew near the wall—exactly as though it had been ordered never to damage the message written there.
"Well, that settles that."
I made up my mind in a heartbeat. They'd said there was no way out of the gate without defeating the boss, after all.
What mattered was not the Gundam guarding the gate's interior, but other things. My sister's pendant had been found here, and my sister had survived in this place. On top of that, she possessed the skill to craft a high-tier golem worthy of serving as an S-rank gate boss.
If she could do that much, the odds are good she's still alive.
I nodded, my face full of conviction. I'd always believed she wasn't the type to die easily no matter where she was—but I hadn't imagined she was capable of sculpting an S-rank gate boss to her own personal taste.
A wry smile crossed my face as I watched the Guardian RX-78 come charging at me yet again.
"Sorry, sis. This one's an act of God."
Dodging the giant Gundam's strike in the same breath, I fired the hardened qi drawn from my fingertips straight into its chest, fast as a lightning bolt.
The qi lancing from my hand punched clean through the Gundam's torso.
Why I aimed there, of all places? Simple. I could see the magic power concentrated in that one spot.
Stripped of its magic in an instant, the Gundam's glowing eyes slowly dimmed, and the machine began to collapse in on itself entirely.
The Guardian RX-78 "Minhee Custom" has been destroyed.
You have acquired the title "Creator Destroyer."
The title's effect grants you dominion over the summons and creations of others.
I skimmed the message hanging in the air before me, then began photographing the writing left on the tower's inner wall, one section at a time.
This joyous news had to reach my brother-in-law and the kids as well.
"Wait for me, sis. I will find you. No matter what."
I murmured the vow aloud in the empty hall, as if to bind myself to it.
"Oho. Now this is an interesting place, isn't it?"
Kang Samsik was grinning from ear to ear as he surveyed the strange space around him.
As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but writhing darkness in every direction.
The reason Samsik had stepped into this place was simple. The instant he'd burst one fellow's head—a fellow who'd looked to be from Murim, no less—he'd spotted a rabbit-like beast up in the empty air, peering down at him.
That was a spirit beast, no question about it.
The reason Samsik had abruptly abandoned the Chinese Awakened and shot up into the sky was to catch that very spirit beast.
A spirit beast, by its nature, would carry an inner core within its body—and he had intended to offer that core to the Cult Leader.
The trouble was, the moment his hand closed around the creature, the scenery around him had changed in a heartbeat, just like this.
Naturally, Kang Samsik didn't bat an eye at anything so trivial. If anything, watching the beast wield its peculiar sorcery only stoked his anticipation for that inner core all the more.
"Let's see where you're hiding, shall we?"
Closing his eyes, Samsik began spreading his qi-sense slowly through the surroundings. Anyone seeing him for the first time would have assumed he was a master of external body cultivation—but in truth, the discipline Samsik felt even more confident in was the handling of qi itself.
"There you are!"
That was the moment Kang Samsik's figure vanished completely from where he stood.
And when he reappeared a hundred paces away, clasped in his hand was a large, rabbit-shaped beast.
[I-Impossible. How can a human find me this easily?]
At the sound of Samsik's voice, the Kamikakushi, in its white rabbit form, muttered the words without meaning to.
"Oho, it TALKS? Looks like I've caught myself a genuinely remarkable creature. The Cult Leader will be delighted."
[Unhand me! Unhand me at once, you ignorant human! I am the sovereign of space itself—]
CRACK.
That was the moment the talking rabbit's neck rotated a full turn.
Gazing at the rabbit's limp corpse, Samsik wore a contented smile as he drew hardened qi from his fingertip.
"Now then, let's see where the Cult Leader's inner core is attached, shall we?"
The strange letters appeared before Kang Samsik's eyes the instant he moved to slice open the rabbit's belly.
The Rift Yōkai "Kamikakushi" has died.
You have acquired the title "Rift Traverser."
The title's effect grants you the ability to use spatial movement.
"The hell is this?"
Samsik could only furrow his brow at the messages floating before his eyes. What he wanted wasn't this—it was the spirit beast's inner core.
But all that came out of the Kamikakushi's belly was a single mana stone, somewhat larger than average.
"Tch. Busted."
Tossing the rabbit's limp carcass aside wherever it happened to land, that was all Kang Samsik had to say about it.