Signs of Collapse (4)
I moved with Simon to the emergency stairwell of the Unique Cathedral.
There were no CCTV cameras there, and because it sat tucked away in a corner, it was the perfect place to avoid prying eyes. I stood face-to-face with Simon. The space was so cramped that I could feel the heat of his breath through the mask.
“Judas. What do you want with me?”
His voice was rough, as if it were clogged with phlegm. Among the Twelve Apostles, Simon had the smallest build. The mask he wore was especially sealed at the front, so tightly that I couldn’t even make out the contour of his face.
Peter had died in his forties. Is this one older than that?
I exhaled and chose my words carefully.
“About earlier….”
Where should I even start?
Simon had helped me. That was the conclusion I’d reached for now. But what if I was wrong? The blood-written letter placed beneath Matthew’s neck had cleared me of suspicion, but what if Simon hadn’t known anything about it either? What if a third party had interfered?
My thoughts tangled together in a mess.
For now, I decided to test him.
I wanted to see how much Simon knew about me.
“How did you know the handwriting on the blood letter wasn’t mine?”
“I checked the guestbook in the waiting room.”
The waiting room inside the Unique Cathedral was used as a lounge where the cult leader stayed before attending mass. Oddly enough, everyone who entered or left that room, except for the cult leader, had to sign a handwritten guestbook. It had been a tradition since the cathedral was first built.
The Twelve Apostles, the twenty-four elders, and the high-ranking believers were all no exception. My name had been written there too.
Judas Iscariot.
If he had compared that to the blood letter, it was enough to make sense.
At least on the surface.
Simon let out a sigh.
“You done talking? I’m busy, so I’m leaving.”
He turned away.
This wasn’t enough. I had to know whether Simon was on my side or not. I had to know whether he was an enemy. I reached out and grabbed his wrist.
“Where was the blood letter found? Under the neck? Or tucked deep inside the throat?”
Simon clamped his mouth shut.
“…….”
His voice turned even rougher.
“What the hell are you playing at?”
He tore his arm free and didn’t stop there—he slammed the scabbard into my abdomen. I reflexively knocked it away.
“Judas! You insolent bastard! Are you trying to interrogate me?”
Simon, now thoroughly agitated, showed no sign of calming down. His elbow shot toward my jaw.
Shit!
It was a fight that had broken out in an instant, leaving me no time to talk him down. I ducked quickly, avoiding the blow, and struck his throat with the edge of my hand.
“Hhk!”
Simon staggered back.
That felt… weird.
The sensation in my hand was wrong. I had clearly struck his Adam’s apple, but something hard had been there beneath it. Some kind of solid object.
Suspicious. Definitely suspicious.
“Nggh!”
Clenching his teeth, Simon seized my left elbow and turned his body.
A judo throw?
It was a classic grappling technique. My vision spun. For a split second, I caught sight of the floor below us. Beneath us stretched a stairwell that dropped like a sheer cliff. If my back hit the steps, my spine could be badly injured.
I considered activating Judgment of the Superhuman, but I’m not really trying to fight this guy seriously.
I shouted inwardly and twisted my body.
“Hup!”
I rotated half a turn in midair like a cat, and Simon’s face twisted in surprise.
So the special training wasn’t for nothing.
It was the cat-foot step, a technique I’d learned from Na Sang-min.
He used to harp on about one thing like it was gospel.
“You know what matters more than swordsmanship? Basic physical conditioning and….”
He grinned at me.
“Hand-to-hand combat.”
Na Sang-min was a swordsman, yes, but he was also a ferocious brawler. During training, he made me carry absurd amounts of weight, and whenever he could, he’d shove me down or throw me in a strength contest.
That bastard really was useful sometimes.
With one foot balanced precariously at the edge of the stairs, I yanked Simon by the collar and drew him toward me. Then I planted my other foot against his abdomen and flipped backward as if I were throwing an overhead kick. With a thunderous crash, Simon hit the floor hard.
“Ghk!”
He groaned and twitched on the steps. In the middle of our frantic scuffle, we’d already dropped half a flight down. Simon sprang back up and reset his stance.
He came at me again with a quick one-two, then followed with a high kick. I blocked it, but the area around my forearm went numb with pain.
Heavy.
Simon kept pressing forward, driving a knee strike toward me. Considering he was lighter than I was, I caught the thigh that came rushing in and slammed it downward.
“Ungh!”
Simon desperately clung to my collar and hung on. We tangled again and crashed down another flight with a deafening bang.
Damn it. He’s persistent.
Simon fought in a strange way. He dug in without hesitation, kept attacking until he landed a hit, and that alone set him apart from ordinary Ganro-ryu tactics. He pummeled my head and jaw at random, then hammered my body. It felt as if our boundaries were collapsing, like a landslide was swallowing the staircase and dragging us down with it.
The impact rolled through my whole body. The world spun.
Simon showed no mercy at all. Every time I went down, I got back up. We clashed again, and again, and again.
How long are we supposed to keep doing this?
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Enough!”
At last, I drew Heoksikdo.
Simon drew his own sword at the same time. My Heoksikdo was at his throat, and his blade had stopped at my heart. We were one breath away from inflicting fatal wounds on each other.
“Hah!”
“Haaah!”
Both of us were breathing hard, our shoulders heaving.
There was one good thing about moving around so violently.
Simon’s excitement had finally begun to settle. Still holding Heoksikdo to his throat, I tried to talk.
“Twelve Apostles, second disciple. Simon. What are you, really?”
“You tell me first. Did you behead Matthew?”
We couldn’t just keep drawing lines in the sand. If I wanted something from him, I had to give something first.
At a time when I’d killed half the Apostles and gotten right up to the cult leader’s nose, if it came out that I was an infiltrator, everything would fall apart.
It’s one or the other.
Either I killed Simon, or I made him my ally.
I slid Heoksikdo back into its scabbard. Simon still had his blade leveled at my heart.
I took off my mask.
The cold air touched my face. For the first time since entering Cheonyang-ji, I exposed my face.
“My name is Choi Yongki. I’m a D-class hunter with the Dio Guild.”
Simon watched me in silence.
The Twelve Apostles were never supposed to remove their masks, and they were never supposed to speak about their real identities. I’d broken that rule to earn his trust.
I was good at lying. But I also knew that sometimes truth was the most powerful weapon of all.
Go straight at it.
I met his eyes squarely.
“I’m the one who killed Matthew. I’m the one who trapped Peter.”
Heavy silence filled the emergency stairwell.
Then Simon moved.
He lowered his sword.
Not only that—Simon followed my lead and took off his mask too.
I sucked in a breath.
Long golden hair spilled down over his shoulders. A sweet shampoo scent drifted through the air as the mask came away, revealing a strikingly beautiful face with delicate, refined features.
A woman?
She removed the voice changer attached to her throat.
So that’s how she’d been making herself sound like a man.
Simon brushed a hand across the smooth line of her neck.
“Yeah. I made the blood letter on the spot. To save you.”
I’d been right.
She had been helping me.
“Why?”
Simon let out a small laugh.
“Wouldn’t it be for the same reason as you?”
She had infiltrated this place to bring down Cheonyang-ji. Her target may have changed along the way, but the direction she was heading in hadn’t changed much. Was she after the same thing I was?
In the dim stairwell, the emergency exit sign glowed faintly blue.
Simon’s deep, dark eyes turned to me.
“Judas. What are you planning to do with the cult leader?”
Only then did I feel a sliver of hope.
I wasn’t fighting Cheonyang-ji alone.
There was an ally among the Twelve Apostles.
“What do you want to do?”
Still, I was curious about Simon’s motives. I had posed as a hero to get close to the cult leader, and she must have had her own reason for doing this too.
Simon put her mask back on.
“Let’s get out of here first.”
Simon and I left the Unique Cathedral, changed our clothes, and met again.
As we walked through the streets, men kept sneaking glances at her in her plain clothes. That alone was proof of how beautiful she was.
Simon stopped walking.
“Here.”
Grace Orphanage
It was a rusty, shabby sign that looked like something you’d only see in an industrial district in Ilsan. I knew at once where we were.
This is where Nike’s younger sister is.
After Nike died in the dungeon, his little sister had nowhere else to go and drifted here. As soon as we entered the orphanage, children running around the playground came into view.
“Hey! Pass!”
The place was pitifully run-down. None of the playground equipment was intact, and every child wore clothes that were dirty and worn thin. The only thing they had to play with was a soccer ball that was frayed and half-deflated.
One child kicked the ball, and it rolled under a tree in the shade. There, a little girl sat on the edge of a flower bed. The child wearing the hat picked up the ball and tossed it back toward the others.
The kids didn’t thank her.
Instead, they mocked the girl in the hat.
“Ugh! It’s a monster!”
“It’s filthy!”
“I’m not touching that ball!”
Children in fairy tales were kind like angels, but orphanages in a world overrun by monsters and filled with orphans were cruel to the core. Bullying the weak wasn’t just some childish habit.
It’s closer to human nature.
Simon pointed at the girl in the hat.
“That’s the child the cult leader wants.”
I’d already known Nike’s little sister was here. I’d just been deliberately dragging my feet. I wanted to deal with the Twelve Apostles first rather than satisfy the cult leader’s twisted preferences.
“Get lost, monster!”
“Pay up for the soccer ball!”
“Ugh… disgusting!”
The children hurled stones at the girl in the hat.
She didn’t even try to resist. As if she were used to all this, she kept her head bowed and stood there without moving.
Simon said, “You asked why I helped you, right? Seeing that kid will make you understand.”
I walked toward the girl in the hat.
“Die, monster!”
A pebble struck the girl squarely in the head. Her hat fell off, and her face snapped to the side.
“Something like you should just die…!”
I stepped in front of her and caught the stone that came flying at us. I crushed it in my hand, and rock dust scattered into the air.
Before long, I could do that much without even using Judgment of the Superhuman.
“Ah….”
The children who’d been throwing stones startled and ran off in a panic. I picked up the hat lying on the ground and handed it back to the girl.
“Here.”
The girl bowed her head.
“Th-thank you….”
The sunlight that had been hidden behind the clouds finally emerged. As the tree’s shadow shifted, her face was revealed.
…….
One side of her face was blackened.
A crawling, slimy bruise that writhed like something alive. The moment sunlight touched it, smoke curled up from her skin and the wound began to burn.
“Eep!”
The girl quickly ducked back into the shade.
That wasn’t some ordinary disease.
A curse.
The condition called Black Skin was black magic deliberately placed on her by someone else.
The girl pulled the hat down lower.
“S-sorry. I’m really ugly, aren’t I?”
From behind me, Simon’s voice came softly.
“What Nike wanted was for his sister not to die.”
If the curse of Black Skin wasn’t eased in time, the black patches would keep spreading until they covered the whole body. Once a month, the Twelve Apostles were allowed to ask the cult leader for something they wanted.
“As long as his sister’s symptoms were eased every month, Nike joined the Twelve Apostles under that condition.”
Nike hadn’t simply fallen for a cult. He’d been forced to do things he didn’t want to do because of his sister, and maybe he’d even convinced himself that he was a devout believer in Cheonyang-ji.
Simon went on, “But Nike didn’t know.”
She looked down at the girl in the hat.
“This curse. He probably thought it had been inflicted by a magic-type monster that came out of a gate.”
Not a chance.
“It was the cult leader.”
From the beginning, it had all been a trap.
Those who were deceived by the cult leader ended up flailing helplessly in the dark pit until the day they died.
Even though the weather was fairly chilly, the girl was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. I took off my outer coat and wrapped it around her.
“You’ve got black flowers blooming on your face. Kind of cool.”
The girl’s face lit up at my answer.
“Keep the coat. It’s yours.”
A teacher came out of the orphanage building and called the children inside. The girl in the hat bowed to me, then walked carefully back toward the shade.
I stood beside Simon and finally spoke.
“You asked me what I was going to do with the cult leader, right?”
Without meaning to, I clenched my teeth.
That bastard, sitting at the top of a filthy cult and committing every evil imaginable.
“I’ll never forgive him.”