26. Ground Zero (1)

Ground Zero.

Before the Great Cataclysm it had gone by the name Paju Outlets, but wave after wave of monsters had since turned it into a lawless free-for-all.

— So this place wasn’t restored at all. The same as it was thirty-five years ago.

“You glad to see Ground Zero?”

— As if. I’ve no taste so foul as that.

Fafnir gave a wry smile.

Fierce stares pressed in from between the half-collapsed buildings. In Ground Zero, looking like easy prey cost a man more than the contents of his pockets.

— So why have we come here?

“There’s someone I need to see.”

— Doesn’t seem to be on the legal side of things.

“That part isn’t going to count as a breach of the contract, is it?”

— As if. I’m not such a saintly fellow as that.

“I’m going to see the Madam of the Galaxy Pub.”

Wearing the Shadow Mask, Yujin strode out into the concrete ruins.

Madam Oh Hyeonjeong. In his past life he’d dealt with her often. Her main trade was supposedly a cocktail bar, but in reality her tentacles reached into brokering, information-dealing, and any number of other underworld trades besides. There was no telling how far she’d expanded by this point in time, yet she would be doing the very thing Yujin needed.

Information. And a ticket into the black market.

The deeper in he went, the more openly the wary stares multiplied.

— You may have need of my strength.

“Forget it. As long as I don’t provoke them first, there won’t be a problem.”

Unless someone picked a fight, that is. There was no need to flex his strength before anyone had bared their teeth.

“In Ground Zero, don’t go showing off your fists.”

There was a saying to that effect, after all.

At last, a shop with the word Galaxy strung up in cheap neon came into view.

— Master. Is this the right place?

“Yeah. For now.”

— Your taste is awfully peculiar. Who’d have thought you liked vintage bars.

A door blown off its hinges by some explosion. What he could glimpse of the interior didn’t look any more intact.

“At this point isn’t it less vintage and more flat broke?”

— Agreed.

Fafnir promptly seconded Yujin’s words.

The bar was wrecked badly enough that a single intact piece of furniture was hard to find. Damaged goods would have been one thing. But a table cleanly split in two was stained red, soaked with the blood of a thug who bore a spider mark.

Not very convincing, saying that while you’re laughing, you know?

I’ve no intention of catering to an incompetent Constellation’s tastes.

Yujin and Fafnir looked the pub’s interior over.

— A fight broke out. Doesn’t seem to have been long ago.

“Let’s ask this guy.”

Yujin walked up to a thug collapsed on the floor.

“Hey.”
“Kk, kgh.”
“Where’s the owner?”
“Th-the Madam’s already been caught by my buddies. Cough.”
“Friend. That wasn’t what I just asked, was it.”
“You lunatic. I’ve never had a friend like y—”
“We can get close starting now.”

The Masked Demon-Beast had used this very curse, a dark-mage-only skill engraved into the Shadow Mask, so as long as he fed it mana he could wield it freely.

— Hsssss.

“Gyaaaack!!”

“Well? Don’t you feel like getting close with me now?”

Fafnir’s lips twitched.

— That’s a pretty peculiar way to make friends.

“I’m a bit of a people person.”

When he fed in more mana, the curse spread its reach. Part of the man’s arm rotted away, and a scream ripped out of the thug. Gyaack!

“I’ll talk. Just let me, all right?!”
“Good. Friend. Can you tell me when the Galaxy’s Madam was attacked?”
“Half an hour ago. She won’t have gotten far.”
“And you don’t know where she fled?”
“The Red Spider’s guys chased after her to catch her. I was here, so I don’t know.”

Yujin clicked his tongue, a soft tsk.

So the friction with the Red Spider was around this time, was it.

In his past life she would come to be called Moon Shadow. Madam Oh Hyeonjeong led a great organization that split Ground Zero down the middle. He didn’t recall the details of how she’d built the Galaxy to that size, but he’d heard a single incident had been the catalyst: the war with the Red Spider.

Hmm. Never figured this was around when it happened.

Yujin fingered his chin.

— After twenty minutes, the trail will be hard to find.

“It’s fine. I’ve got a way.”

“Hmph. I don’t know where the Madam ran off to. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you!”

The thug raised his voice.

“Don’t worry. The one I’m asking isn’t you — it’s someone else.”

When Yujin raised his hand, Fafnir’s hand rose and fell. A single impact rang out.

“Kgh.”

Struck on the crown of his head, the thug fainted.

“That guy. He’s not dead, right?”

— Even a villain, I don’t kill carelessly.

Fafnir answered with a sour look.

— More to the point, how do you intend to find this Madam?

“I told you there’s someone I can ask.”

— There’s no one in this pub except the guy you just knocked out.

“I never said it was a person.”

Yujin pulled off the Shadow Mask and, with a thread of mana, erased one of the curse formulae.

The Chaotic Frenzy curse maximized regeneration at the cost of the user’s own lifespan. Regeneration meant nothing to the undead, and turned on himself the curse would only age him in a hurry.

That was a curse to drop first by priority.

— Sssssht!

Gathering spirit-power into his fingertip, he inscribed a new curse formula onto the Shadow Mask with slow, deliberate strokes.

“Inscribing each curse I need one by one is a pain.”

Grumbling, Yujin put the Shadow Mask back on.

This pub was as good as Oh Hyeonjeong’s own bedchamber. Finding the trace of a soul’s energy in it was child’s play.

Alien colors flickered across his retinas, as though he were seeing the world through an infrared camera.

“Let’s go.”

— My master sure has a lot of strange tricks up his sleeve.

Murmuring as if genuinely impressed, Fafnir followed Yujin out of the building.

The alleys of Ground Zero tangled together as intricately as a maze, a slum that had swelled without end through illegal rebuilds and expansions, swallowing new migrants all the while. Even longtime residents lost their bearings the moment they set foot somewhere unfamiliar.

“Hah, haah.”

A woman ran without hesitation down a narrow path that bore not a single signpost. Her bob, barely brushing the nape of her neck, tossed in the wind.

“Get her!”
“We can’t let her get away!”

Her pursuers’ breaths felt close enough to graze her earlobes. Her heart pounded fit to burst, yet she did not stop running.

Why on earth is the Red Spider after me?

Oh Hyeonjeong. On the surface she was the owner of a pub called the Galaxy, but in truth she was a broker who arranged every kind of back-alley deal. In the ten years since she’d thrown herself into Ground Zero she’d grown her business by walking the very edge of the line, yet she’d never once done anything to make an enemy of an outfit as large as the Red Spider.

I’ve no idea why, but if I’m caught, it won’t end simply.

Grrrit.

Oh Hyeonjeong ground her teeth. She couldn’t die so pointlessly in a place like this. She still had work left undone, piled up like a mountain.

I can’t end it here—

— Skreeeee!

A whistle blast tore through the dark. Men in clothes embroidered with the Red Spider sealed off both ends of the alley.

“Well now. To think we’d go to this much trouble over just one woman.”

A man with a striking long scar on his forearm came striding toward Oh Hyeonjeong, eyes glaring wide.

— Tng.

A dagger sprang from her sleeve into her hand, the blade stained a dark crimson. The blood she’d drawn cutting down the Red Spider men who’d chased her clung to it in thick smears.

“I won’t go down easy.”
“Heh. You’re all out of mana already, and still putting on a bluff.”
“Whether it’s a bluff or not, why don’t you check with your own body.”

Oh Hyeonjeong reversed her grip on the dagger. The Red Spider pack ringed her, closing in little by little.

Of all times, when Mister Jinyeong’s away…!

She masked her fear behind a venomous expression, but she couldn’t keep the tip of the dagger from trembling. Her stamina and her mana had both bottomed out, and the wounds large and small across her body, arms and legs and abdomen alike, kept steadily pumping blood.

Ahead and behind, the Red Spider, infamous throughout Ground Zero, spread its demon’s claws.

If only it were night.

Oh Hyeonjeong’s innate trait fell dormant while the sun rode high. Escaping this on her own power looked unlikely.

It was then.

“Misters. What’s the fun thing going on that’s got you all swarming here?”

An unfamiliar man’s voice cut through the alley’s settled silence. Every eye, the Red Spider pack’s and Oh Hyeonjeong’s alike, turned at once toward the outsider who’d broken the mood: Yujin.

That’s right. A little later and it might have been a disaster.

The man with the spider tattoo wore a sinister smile at the sight of the unexpected intruder.

“Out-of-towner, clear off right now. If you don’t want to die.”
“How kind of you. Giving me a warning and all.”
“You bastard. The nerve, making a fool of the Red Spider.”

He’d meant it sincerely, though. Yujin gave a faintly troubled shrug.

— Hmm. Doesn’t look like a situation that talking will solve.

Fafnir entered the alley next.

“If you’re acting big on the strength of that one summoned beast, you’ll regret it.”
“Fafnir. He says so.”

— The ones who’ll do the regretting are you lot, not my master.

— Tahat!

Fafnir sprang in among the chattering Red Spider pack. One of them instinctively threw a punch, but Fafnir was far faster, driving a fist into his solar plexus.

“Gugh!”

The man at the front of the pack went rolling across the ground. His eyes went wide; only now grasping that Fafnir was no ordinary summoned beast, he raised his voice to a shout.

“Kill him!”

Steel pipes, daggers. The rest snatched up whatever weapons came easiest to hand and rushed in, eyes rolled back.

“Leave them breathing.”

— What do you take me for, a thrill-killer? I’ve no such hobby.

Ground Zero might be a lawless zone beyond any administration’s reach, but slaughtering people by the dozen couldn’t be quietly swept under the rug. The Red Spider, by contrast, charged in without restraint, spilling killing intent as though burying a body or two meant nothing to them. This was exactly the sort to raid a pub doing perfectly honest business.

“Guk!”
“Gyaaack!”

The Red Spider pack went down one after another. A good number of the outfit were unawakened, unable to handle mana, and swing their blades and bludgeons however they liked, they couldn’t lay so much as a scratch on the body of a Draconian etched with reinforcement circuits.

Here and there a ‘Hunter’ mixed in among the thugs took aim at Fafnir.

He reinforced his scales with spirit-power and held firm against them.

— What. Going to stab some more?

“Ngh!”

The Hunter strained with everything he had, face flushed bright red. The scales sheathed in Dark Fighting-Aura took not a single scratch.

— How dull.

Thwack. A single blow crushed muscle and cracked bone, and the man went rolling across the ground. The Red Spider pack was put down in short order.

“I don’t know what kind of bastard you are, but burn to death!”

— Fwoooosh!

The instant the man with the long scar on his forearm spread his clasped hands, streams of flame surged up from his palms and dyed the cramped alley orange.

The attack spared no thought for the safety of his own men.

“Ah. So that’s how it was.”

Watching the surging flames, Yujin let slip a short exclamation.

The Oh Hyeonjeong he remembered, the woman who would one day be called Moon Shadow, had carried a large burn across her face. So that was it. The one who’d branded the future Moon Shadow had been a Hunter of the Red Spider.

“Look out!”

Oh Hyeonjeong’s warning came a beat too late, grazing past Yujin’s ear.

— Master. I’ll borrow some spirit-power.

A black current sheathed Fafnir’s whole body: Dark Fighting-Aura, drawn to its maximum.

Yujin staggered at the sudden wave of dizziness and ground his teeth.

“You’re supposed to warn me beforehand.”

They were bound soul to soul. Because Yujin hadn’t kept a tight hold on the mana path, Fafnir had pulled part of it through to manifest the Dark Fighting-Aura.

The flames raging through the alley guttered out in an instant before the Dark Fighting-Aura.

“How — how did you, my flames…! By what means!”
“Come back to your senses now?”
“Don’t think this is over. We, the Red Spider, will—gurk!”

— You talk too much.

Fafnir’s fist slammed into the man’s face and brought the matter to a close.

“One side’s done.”

Yujin looked at the Red Spider pack on the other end of the alley.

“D-dammit. Then grab the Madam at least!”
“That would be a problem, young man.”

A voice rang out from behind. The Galaxy’s bartender, Jeong Jinyeong, dropped the Red Spider man with a quick chop of his hand-blade.

“Mister!”
“Sorry I’m late, my lady.”

Aha.

Only now did Yujin understand how she’d weathered the crisis. She’d hidden her mana, or so she believed. But she couldn’t hide the fierce soul-force shimmering at the old man’s back.

Sixth Rank, is it.

With an old man who looked to be in his seventies at her side, a few dozen of the Red Spider pack posed no real danger. In his past life the timing must not have lined up, and that was how Oh Hyeonjeong had come away with the burn on her face.

Not anymore, though.

History had been rewritten by Yujin’s intervention. At the very least, the scar that would have stayed a lifelong regret for her would never appear now.

Stillness settled over the alley.

“My lady. Who are these people?”
“I don’t know. But they don’t seem to have come with bad intentions.”

The Madam smoothed her windblown hair back into place.

“Thanks to you, I made it through the crisis. I’m truly grateful.”
“I just came for a drink, and the bartender and the owner were nowhere to be seen, so I followed along.”

The Madam looked Yujin over carefully as he played it cool, her gaze a subtle thing, curiosity laced with wariness.

Yujin walked toward her. Both the old man and the Madam tensed.

“Hold still.”

He drained the life force from a sprawled-out Red Spider member and poured it into the Madam. Her wounds began closing fast.

“Ah. You were a Priest?”
“Something like that.”

In less than a minute, every wound had healed. An ordinary low-grade healing spell wouldn’t have managed as much in a full hour. Perhaps because it was a Saint-only skill, the sheer effect was tremendous.

Pipe down a little, would you.

The monarch couldn’t read the room.

“This doesn’t seem like a good spot to exchange names.”
“Hohoh, true enough. Shall we move somewhere else?”
“A place where we can talk at length would be even better.”

Yujin smiled broadly.