There Is No End Here — 9
Hyungkesuni gave in to the Outer God's words.
The Outer God called it persuasion. In truth it was a threat — do as I wish, or I will kill you — and so, strictly speaking, the proper word is surrender.
The moment Hyungkesuni sold out countless worlds so that she alone might be spared a hideous fate, the Outer God did not rejoice. She fretted instead, turning over and over how the mess now before her might best be undone.
The Outer God thought. If all that mattered was keeping Hyungkesuni alive, it would be enough to make a hero of her. The sphere-headed humans were, just then, in a state where they would move at the Outer God's own will. If it came to the worst, she herself could become the villain — a corpse-giant fused out of royalty, an Outer Godmon — and simply proclaim that Hyungkesuni had come to stop her and failed. The thought flickered through her mind, and was gone.
The Outer God's mind ran rather well when it came to cowardly little schemes. But even she could see a grave flaw in this one, and she threw it out at once. If only Hyungkesuni survived, then even with the book still there, the Outer God would be unable to read it.
There are two ways the Outer God remembers a book. One of the Blessed reads it once, or she licks the light of someone who has read it all the way through. That she has no method of reading a book herself says a great deal about her nature.
In any case, it would be enough for someone who had received the blessing to read it. The problem was that not a single Blessed remained in this world. Hyungkesuni had hunted them down and killed them. While Tisha healed the kingdom and raised it up again, she too had been very busy.
Let me tell Hyungkesuni's story.
First, back when the cult that called itself the Future Hope Church still existed. When Yasle would not listen to what she had to say, Hyungkesuni warned him five times, and then she parted from him.
A very long time ago, when Hyungkesuni and Yasle first made their contract, she agreed to help him in his work on the condition that if he ignored her words, she would leave. Her sudden departure from the Future Hope Church was therefore not a betrayal of him. The contract had always been written that way. If anything, five warnings was patience enough. Once she had endured that far, leaving was simply leaving.
To tell the truth, the reason she began helping Yasle in the first place was a rather sordid one, which made it strange that she had gone on helping him for more than a few decades. For the record, the sordid reason was nothing grand. From Hyungkesuni's point of view, Yasle had not originally been the leader of a cult so much as a young man raised upright in the religious state called the Theocracy of Yeongrang — a priest, in the most literal sense. Full of ideals, merciful, and unforgiving of heresy. That stiff sort of holy man.
Hyungkesuni, by contrast, was a wicked witch out of a fairy tale. A textbook case of cringing before the strong and tyrannizing the weak. When she needed something, she went down to a village, laid a curse, and took it. When someone strong came to kill her, she scattered curses behind her and ran. Because she laughed every time she fled, people hung a nickname on her: the Witch of Joy. To those who faced her, she was nothing but a witch who mocked them as she ran.
To that wicked witch came a priest, brimming with the vengeance of a man who had lost his country, seeking her out. The witch found him amusing, and decided to cooperate. She was curious how a devout and upright young man would fall. The higher one climbs, the farther one drops — and just how far, she wondered, did that obvious truth actually hold?
It held exactly as far as she had thought. Yasle became something for which wicked was the precise word, well past mere garbage. For the sake of his revenge alone he brainwashed people and used them, and in the end he falsely accused the innocent and burned them alive. Watching him, Hyungkesuni delighted in it: even a person that splendid, that good, ends up like this once they fall. It would be a lie to say that a cowardly comfort — that she was not the only one like this — was not mixed in among that pleasure. And so she gave a gift to Yasle, who had fallen to the same place as she had.
If a wicked monster comes, tame it, and use it. With no thought deeper than that, she taught him how to summon a god.
But what emerged was not the wicked, powerful devil they had imagined. Instead there came a vacant girl who seemed to possess some special power, and yet knew how to do nothing at all. Of course Hyungkesuni, a coward from birth, had suspected the girl might not be harmless from the moment a crossbow wielded by a warrior of the faith destroyed her face and the face grew back. The curse housed in that crossbow was one meant to drag a god down and kill it — a genuine curse, with a proven record of having slain, in the Theocracy of Yeongrang, a monster that could be called a god of the wild, or a primordial god.
But even that wariness soon thinned. The monster in the shape of a girl needed warmth in order to regenerate, and more than that, she was fool enough to go about still wearing her wounds. It seemed less a matter of her own power than of her simply not understanding flesh very well. Without care she looked as if she might keel over at any moment and die, and so suspicion gradually faded. A monster without a body had gone into a girl's body, and if the body broke, she would die. That was the mistake Hyungkesuni made.
Not long after, she heard the truth of that nature directly from the Outer God. That day she understood that what she had believed to be a law of the world was in fact the Outer God devouring people, and that the monster had been dragged out from the place where the law had stood and descended into this world. A wicked god had been set loose.
Thinking so, Hyungkesuni rushed to consult Yasle, but he would not listen. On the contrary, he pressed her: she was moving properly according to the contract, so what was the problem? She went to persuade him three more times after that, and failed. In the meantime she heard the name Outer God spreading around them. Things were growing worse and worse.
In the end, seized by terror, Hyungkesuni confronted the Outer God, and the moment she understood what sort of influence it was exerting over the whole of the Future Hope Church, she ran straight to Yasle. This time, too, he did not listen. Deeply disappointed, she left him at once.
No one knew it, but this had been the last chance — the last chance to stop the Outer God before it reached a hand toward this world. Unaware that the chance had already vanished, Hyungkesuni returned to the place where she lived in seclusion.
Not long after she came back to her hideaway, she realized through her magic that Yasle was dead. Above all she felt the trace of the banishment magic that only the leader of the Theocracy of Yeongrang could use. Because she knew what that magic had banished, she set out for the place where his corpse lay with a somewhat lighter heart, whether to mock him or to mourn him.
On the way, she discovered one of the Blessed using Yasle's magic, and her heart froze solid. Had it been merely the magic of Yeongrang, she might have let it pass, telling herself such things could happen. But her own magic was mixed into it — a secret art she had spent hundreds of years reshaping to suit herself, and had taught to Yasle alone. Several of the Blessed were using it.
With her excellent mind, Hyungkesuni grasped in an instant what had happened. She also grasped, in that same instant, that a truly vital technique had passed into the hands of the worst possible opponent. She became completely certain of it when someone opened a passage to the outside and worked a magic meant to call a wicked being. She blocked it at once with the safeguard she had buried when she handed the art over to Yasle, then sought out the one who had attempted the summoning and killed them.
Even then, she had not yet resolved to kill the Blessed so thoroughly. She thought only that she had killed a fool who tried to call the Outer God. Her heart changed when she saw several of the Blessed in the order built by Miri — the one Andrew had made — putting their heads together and trying to summon the Outer God. A coward, she pictured the worst case, in which the Outer God might find this world again, and she slaughtered the Blessed on the spot. Then she returned at once to her hideaway and set about researching a way to make certain it would never come to that.
While she searched for a method, she realized that only the Blessed were using that magic of Yasle's. She guessed the rest. They were connected to the Outer God, and so, even though the god had left this world, they could still use Yasle's technique. Soon she concluded that unless she eliminated every one of them there would be no future, and she created a magic that could find the Blessed. Then she sought them out, one by one, and killed them.
Tisha had originally been among those targets. But after hearing that the god of the Church of the Sacred God had sent a miracle down from the sky, Hyungkesuni went to the place herself, just in case, and there, having confirmed an immense divine power, she struck Tisha from the list. It cannot quite be said that among the reasons for that exclusion there was no fear that even Hyungkesuni could not stand against an entire nation — nor any lack of appetite for facing a true hero under a god's protection.
Set Tisha aside, though, and the Blessed could not be left alone. Her cowardly nature whipped her into diligent action, and after a long time she killed everyone except Tisha. Even after the last of them was dead, she checked again and again, with a paranoid thoroughness, whether anyone remained. Only then, barely, did Hyungkesuni return to her life in seclusion, and rest easy.
Unfortunately, the Outer God descended through Tisha, the one she had saved for last. The result of rushing there in a panic was this. Captured, and threatened by the wicked Outer God. The words were shaped as if the choice belonged to Hyungkesuni, but anyone who was not a fool knew there was no choice in them. Refuse, and the Outer God would eat her anyway, and strip the knowledge from her all the same, and nothing would change. In the end she decided to obey, if only to save her own skin, comforting herself inwardly that she had merely been threatened.
And so decades of effort vanished into foam in an instant, and Hyungkesuni was reduced to the Outer God's tool.
She had brought it on herself. If she had not known how to summon a wicked god. If she had opposed the sacrifice of the innocent. No — from the moment she followed Yasle because she wanted to enjoy, right before her eyes, the sight of a man who by her own measure had been good, falling to the thirst for revenge, this outcome had been decided. She could not be called especially wicked. Her heart was simply mean.
Exactly like ordinary people of the modern day who want to watch someone famous do something bad and get driven into the gutter. Just that much. She drew a line, telling herself that whatever the Future Hope Church did had little to do with her, and closed her eyes no matter what horrors it committed. Just that much. An ordinary person who looks at someone else's misfortune through the internet and comforts herself that she is living a better life. Just that much.
The result of doing what such a person might do was that it rolled and rolled until something she herself had named the Outer God burst out into reality. She received an invitation no different from a threat, and she accepted it. She fell from the edge of the cliff.
And then—
Thud!
With a great noise the door burst open, and into a place packed with people whose heads were purple spheres, as if it were some museum of modern art, a soldier of the Kingdom of Anselus came in. A moment before, he had forced his way into Tisha's bedchamber — strangely empty of anyone coming out — in search of the witch who had suddenly flown in through the window. Even if he were punished for disturbing a royal's private hours, safety mattered more. He was an excellent man, possessed of a sense of duty.
"Aaaaaaaah!"
And as the price of that duty, he witnessed a sight exceedingly grotesque, the sort rarely met with inside an early-modern understanding of the world. The cost of his courage was too cruel. Before he knew it he had collapsed where he stood, and screamed.