Chapter 21 — The Deceiver And The Deceived (2)

Balbal had no particular fatal weakness.

The very thought of fighting and defeating a yokai that might pronounce a death sentence on you was, to begin with, impossible for ordinary people.
So it was said they would instead bury the corpse in haste, before the creature could come, to keep Balbal from feeding on it.

When that could not be done, two methods were used to keep him from approaching.

The first was Blumea balsamifera, an herb known in the Philippines as Sambong.
Set a sprig of it near the corpse and Balbal could not draw near.
There was, of course, no way to come by it here and now.

The second was simpler.
It was said the creature could be frightened off with light and noise.

But however carefully the tradition recorded that he “took fright,” would a Rank Four yokai so much as flinch at any light or noise within human means?

The tradition did not say it outright. Still, if light and noise frightened him, then Balbal’s true weakness must lie somewhere else.

An opening will come. Flame-tail has not been this strong since the moment I first met him. We can press him.

Shin Hweein kept loosing flame-shot after flame-shot, scorching Balbal’s thick hide, waiting for a more decisive opening to show itself in the creature.

The thing thrashed, its jaws bristling with vicious teeth, struggling to clamp down on Flame-tail and grind him to pulp.
At the same time, with constant beats of its wings, it vented the energy of death and weakened Flame-tail in real time.

— Stop getting in my way—!
— Is that the puny best your overflowing yokai aura can do for a curse? The reason you’ve survived this long is nothing but blind luck!

But Flame-tail was life itself, blazing dazzlingly.

By rank, his proper standing put Balbal nowhere near him.
He was not so easily weakened by the creature’s curses, and what was more, the sanctity carried within his flame negated no small part of Balbal’s own energies.

Watching this, Shin Hweein came naturally to understand one thing: the very curse Balbal must have laid on him.

A curse, I’d call it, that weakens my overall condition and drags me ever closer to death. Unlike the other curses, it shows little on the surface… but harmonizing with the rest, it would drive me into a state more extreme still…

Had he been able to use the Indulgence, he could of course have bolstered his own energies, gravely weakened Balbal, and struck the opening at once.
For now, though, there was no need even for that.

— You irritating mongrel dog—!
— Coming from a crocodile with stumpy little legs and no neck, listen to yourself.

— Kuwaaaaagh!

At last Balbal vomited out a dense breath laden with his own yokai aura.

Flame-tail, as if he had been waiting for it, exhaled a breath of fire and vaporized it.
Kicking off the floor, he charged forward, and, astonishingly, caught Balbal’s upper and lower jaws between his two forepaws as they hung open!

— What… I’ll sever every one of your limbs as you stand!

— Hoo, haaaaap—!

Before Balbal could so much as close his mouth, into the throat laid wide bare by his flung-open jaws, Flame-tail loosed his fire directly.

Flame-tail had recovered his power up to the Rank Four threshold, and the flame he poured out at full strength was such that even Shin Hweein, far off, felt the heat against his body.

— Krwaaaaaagh!

Unable to withstand it in any way, Balbal pumped his wings full of yokai aura and called up a wind, by which he flung Flame-tail off and fled.
But his throat and beyond was already scorched coal-black.

The bodies of yokai, unlike those of humans, were highly amenable to transformation, and so long as a yokai had yokai aura enough, recovery was in many cases possible.
At least in this battle, though, the wound would play no further part.

— I’ll kill you… every last bit of you…!
— That’ll spare us the bad breath, at least.

Giving up on biting Flame-tail, Balbal pulled an expression heavy with hatred, beat his wings, and lifted into the sky.

Since Flame-tail could not rise into the air in any case, it was an effective choice.

— I’ll shoot you down.
— But before that, I’ll kill that master of yours you so dearly love!

The creature, astonishingly, abandoned head-on combat with Flame-tail, accelerated through the air, and came charging straight at Shin Hweein.

Flame-tail, furious, fired flames after him, but the creature took them with its body and even used the impact itself to close the distance to Shin Hweein in an instant.

“Fire-blood.”

Shin Hweein, of course, had been prepared for this very turn, and at once threw up a thick barrier of fire before his eyes.

By now even the plain Fire-blood had grown well past what it had been when he first learned the art.
Its height was more than twice his own, its breadth wider than his outstretched arms.

— First I’ll crush you flat, then I’ll snap your spine and kill you. If I kill you, from the countless yokai who resented you I will gather awe and reverence. With that alone I shall ascend to a great yokai!

“—The art of Avichara (the swift-running hungry ghost).”

In the very moment the barrier and the enormous crocodile collided, Shin Hweein completed the sorcery.

The barrier of fire, instead of breaking apart against the creature, wrapped itself smoothly around its face.
The next instant, Arong shifted his shape into the form of a hungry ghost.

A hungry ghost that torments the impure and devours corpses, said to rejoice at the outbreak of a plague more than anyone and to race fastest of all to feast, for which reason it bears the name the swift-running hungry ghost.

A hungry ghost in fine accord, indeed, with a corpse-eating Balbal.

And in another sense, of course, that accord meant something more.

— Y-you, you puny little thing—!

— Khaaaaagh—.

Arong drew in a fierce breath, as if to suck every drop of air from the surrounding sky.

What he was actually drawing in was Balbal’s yokai aura, the energy of death.

Avichara, no less than Balbal himself, loved death and was a hungry ghost akin to it, and could readily absorb Balbal’s energies as his own.
So it might be said that the nature of a hungry ghost, who devours whatever comes before him, had met the Shin House’s shikigami arts and put out new shoots.

— Are you all right?!

“Of course.”

A step too late, Flame-tail came running back and planted himself in front of Shin Hweein.

— That’s why I told you to ride my back!

“I have to remain in contact with the sorcerous array on the floor. Otherwise I cannot control it.”

Besides, he still had several other means of guarding his body left in reserve. Would he flee so easily, merely because Balbal was fearsome?

“Flame-tail. Arong won’t be able to hold him long. Can you land him one solid blow before then?”

— Leave it to me. That thing is plainly weak to either light or heat, one of the two. Or else to life-force itself!

“My thinking exactly. Then strike whenever you’re ready. I’ll match you.”

— Good… Now!

Flame-tail gathered every scrap of strength left in his body and loosed it all at a single point.

Compared to the flame he had spewed earlier it did not look so terribly grand, but it rushed in fast as a bullet, and at the instant it struck Balbal’s wings it ignited grandly and cleanly vaporized both of them!

— Kuhak!

It must have been because Arong had been concentrating his torment on the creature’s face, leaving Balbal unable even to react properly.

Struck by a shock beyond any comparison with the burning of his throat, Balbal plummeted, and his crash into the ground threw up a hideous roar.

The opening. Now.

At last the sorcerous array, now in direct contact with the creature’s skin, began to give off a strange light, binding his body fast.

It exhausted every last drop of yokai-force remaining within the array, but that was enough.

— You ungrateful—!

“Neuldam.”

— Kurururung!

In a clear sky, lightning struck.

And a lightning bolt vast enough to swallow Balbal’s enormous body whole and have room to spare.

A hideous flash and concussion shook the whole place, and just as the trailing noise was making ears go numb, Shin Hweein spoke softly.

“How was that? Quite grown, hasn’t it?”

— A little stronger, sure. But it’s still nowhere near enough. It can still only fire one bolt, can’t it?

— Kururung….

True to Flame-tail’s words, Neuldam, having poured every ounce of its strength into a single bolt of lightning, let out a feeble cry and climbed up onto Shin Hweein’s shoulder.

Meanwhile Arong, without the slightest discrimination, set to devouring the dazed Balbal, who had taken the lightning head-on.

Unable even to scream, eaten alive head-first by a hungry ghost, the figure Balbal cut was the very image of the corpse-devouring he had perpetrated his whole life, and might truly be called karmic debt.

— He’s dead, right?

“Not yet… Now, he’s dead.”

Shin Hweein felt the bond between himself and the creature wholly severed, felt the curse laid upon him wholly vanish and his strength swelling, and he smiled.

He had not absolved the curse through the Indulgence, so he could not strip the creature of its power for himself.
But the curse that had been tormenting his body was lifted, his body’s condition improved overall, and naturally a portion of his spiritual power, which had been bound up, was released as well.
That alone amounted to a great strengthening.

— So now you’re Rank One?

“That is still a long way off, so be patient a little longer. Now, the situation… has nearly been tidied up, hasn’t it.”

Having struck down Balbal and regained his composure, Shin Hweein looked about the battlefield and took stock.

He had been wondering why it had grown so quiet around them not long since.

There were the weakened yokai, and there were the Seo House sorcerers whose condition had stayed relatively intact.
That imbalance had been compounded when Leon joined the fray with his own thralls in support, and so by now most of them had already wiped one another out on the field.

That he need not give every little order in detail, that Leon read his intent and dealt with things cleanly, was simply something to be grateful for.

Just then Leon, having noticed Shin Hweein’s gaze, sliced off the throat of the last surviving Rank Four yokai and came toward him.

“Master, in fact I was just about to deliver my report. Subjugation of the sorcerers and disposal of the yokai are both now complete. There aren’t many survivors, but should you wish that these be kept alive…”

“Keep them alive? Surely you jest. Handle it as you see fit, Leon.”

“As ever, my master is a man one can speak with!”

As though he had been waiting solely for Shin Hweein’s permission to drop, Leon snapped his fingers and drew every drop of blood from the bodies of the surviving sorcerers.
A portion he consumed himself, and another portion he fed to his thralls, the vampire bats.
His face was extraordinarily bright at having secured, for the first time in a long while, a large quantity of the superior blood of Rank Two and Rank Three sorcerers.

A laugh escaped Shin Hweein at the sight.
Looking, by contrast, at the carcasses of the yokai laid out upon the floor, he closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

“To think this is still only a part of it. Truly astonishing.”

— …What do you mean by that?

Flame-tail, who had spent every last drop of his strength and returned to his smaller form, asked the question, and Shin Hweein answered with narrowed eyes.

“Just what I said. The Seo House’s mastery of spatial sorcery is, simply, second to none. Even inside the Seo House’s main residence, which we visited last time, the space shifted itself again and again. This Other Realm, in much the same way, holds within itself several smaller Other Realms in turn. Perhaps somewhere, yokai of a rank still higher than those we saw this time lie locked away.”

— You’re joking. Surely there’s no yokai worse than Rank Four—

“I only said it as a possibility. The probability is low. Besides, in any case, all the yokai aura produced like that is…”

“Hae, here!”

Just then, with a black crystal sphere in one hand, Ham Seoyeon returned.

“It was farther than I expected! Thanks to you reshaping the array and opening a path, it wasn’t hard, though.”

“Well done. The deeper into the Other Realm one goes, the heavier the pressure must have been.”

— The depths of the Other Realm… so what’s in your hand is the concentrated ‘whole’ of this Other Realm’s energy?

“That’s right.”

Taking the yokai-orb from Ham Seoyeon, Shin Hweein shuddered at the overwhelming mass of yokai aura that came from within it, and yet declared with confidence:

“Whatever the Seo House meant to do here, hidden from every eye, at the very least we have succeeded in undoing everything they have done up to now.”

“But considering how many passages there were that I had to skip past while retrieving this… there are still plenty of hidden zones, aren’t there?”

“Yes. I’d have liked to clean those up by our own hand as well… but it seems time is up.”

Eulha, who had been monitoring the situation from outside, had been sending him warnings for a little while now.

And rightly so.

However little the Seo House might have anticipated outsiders entering the Other Realm, those outsiders had freely reshaped the sorcerous array, swept one entire zone clean of yokai along with the sorcerers, and on top of that taken the yokai-orb that was the very reason the Other Realm was being maintained.

“Out, now.”

Without a trace of reluctance, Shin Hweein tossed the yokai-orb into the subspace storage, then gestured to Arong, who in the meantime had finished devouring Balbal’s carcass and was hurriedly making his way through the rest of the yokai corpses.

“Arong, we have to hurry now. Whatever you can’t finish, I’ll keep in the storage so it doesn’t go to waste. You can eat it later…”

Neuldam, abruptly, leapt straight into the still-open subspace storage where the yokai carcasses were being put away.

The trouble was that it had set foot in the very area where the yokai-orb was kept.

“Ah.”

— …Is it going to go berserk now?

“Eek, is it going to die?!”

Shin Hweein, too, was handling something like a yokai-orb for the first time, so he had nothing to say on the matter.

The one fortunate thing was that, since the incident had occurred after the orb had already been moved into the subspace storage, there was no danger of the yokai aura spilling out.

Another was that a Thunder-Beast was the representative late-bloomer among yokai, and would not, at the very least, go berserk from failing to digest yokai aura.

And the last was…

“Samshin Halmi will protect it.”

“That just means it’s going to die!”

Shin Hweein had meant it quite earnestly, thinking of the incantation of Samshin Halmi he had inscribed on Neuldam’s body, but Ham Seoyeon, perhaps believing that his shikigami was about to die on account of the yokai-orb she herself had brought, pulled a tearful face.

In the meantime Arong had, in the end, cleanly finished off the carcasses of the other yokai as well and returned, and the sorcerers’ bodies, too, Leon had finished tidying up.

“Splendidly turned to ruin. The other zones, of course, will be intact.”

That someone had wreaked havoc in here might come to be known, but no evidence worth recognizing would be found.

Even if they tried to trace the marks of sorcery or spiritual power, there was, to begin with, no subject left whose marks could be traced.

The Seo House’s sorcerous array itself was knocked out, so by the time it was restored the matter would no longer be one of weighing intruders.

“Right, then. Let us go.”

“Marten…”

His final check complete, Shin Hweein took Ham Seoyeon, who was still fretting after Neuldam, firmly by the hand, gathered up all his shikigami, and slipped out of the Other Realm for the time being.

“Welcome back! That was close, truly.”

The place where they emerged was not, however, the spot where the party had first entered the Other Realm.
It was outside the amusement park.

Nearby a flock of sparrows was chirping, and among them two birds were peculiarly familiar.

Shin Hweein looked at the Blue-Robed Boy, who welcomed them with a smile, and asked:

“Eulha, was this you?”

“Mm-hmm. I figured staying inside the amusement park would be dangerous.”

“You are right. Very well done.”

Granted it was only within a space he had wholly grasped, and only over no very great distance, but even so, Eulha’s spatial-displacement ability was extremely useful.

“But, master, you may have noticed it already. Getting cleanly away looks unlikely. From a little while back there have been some keeping a mark on us.”

“Roughly as I’d expected. Whoever comes out from the Seo House, in order to establish our own alibi we’ll have to meet them at least once.”

“Hae, even you use words like alibi…!”

“…Since Moa isn’t here, you’ve taken to doing impressions of Moa?”

Shin Hweein sighed, sat down on a nearby bench, and drew a small box from inside his robe.
It was a box of his favored sweets.

“Since they’re so openly signalling that they’ll be along to find us shortly, shall we sit here until then and chat?”

At Shin Hweein’s gesture, Ham Seoyeon meekly took the seat beside him, and now that the tension finally seemed to have left her she let her shoulders drop and asked:

“What sort of cookie?”

“Yakgwa. Just yakgwa.”

At that Ham Seoyeon giggled and answered:

“Is yakgwa just yakgwa? Is there some other kind?”

“No. Yakgwa is just yakgwa¹.”

For a little while the two of them, without discussing what had taken place inside the Other Realm, frittered the time away on idle small talk.

“Forgive me for interrupting your date. In the name of the Seo House, the price of disturbing you I shall pay in full.”

A heavyweight beyond imagining had appeared, and stood blocking their way.

His name was Seo Jingang, the current head of the Seo House.