Chapter 22 — Four Men And Gyeongdo (5)

Citing the need for secrecy, Bishop John had sketched the information-map straight onto a tourist pamphlet there on the spot.
He’d crammed it with such detailed notes on the eateries along the route that one might almost have wondered whether he’d mistaken the whole point of the thing.

The only meal any of them had eaten was the airline tray they’d picked at in flight, so someone suggested dropping into a shop along the way and at least getting some snacks.

“These rice-balls are really good.”
“Tssst — makes me want a drink.”
“Mm. The taste of the East. They’d go nicely with green tea brewed by Moa. Shopkeeper, wrap up everything you have, if you would.”
“Brother?!”

The upshot was that four dark-clad men commandeered the little bench out in front of a small rice-ball shop and sat there noisily working through skewers of rice-balls basted with soy sauce and grilled.

Shin Hweein had kept Geum Moa on his lap the whole flight and so hadn’t managed to eat the airline meal at all, and he ate now with all the more appetite.

“This mitarashi dango is the real deal. Though the ones my little sister makes are still better.”
“Guji, you need to bring that dependence on your younger sister down a notch.”

Having delivered his rebuke to Makoto, Shin Hweein opened his subspace storage and swept the carefully wrapped skewers into it whole, then held out a card to settle the bill.
He was told they took cash only, which left him at a loss for a moment.

“Hmm…”
“Right, these old shops will sometimes do that. I forgot to exchange any cash. We’d better look for an ATM on the way too.”
“It’s all right, Grand-Master. For now I’ll cover it…!”

But just as the still-impoverished Makoto, near tears, was on the point of paying, a little handkerchief-wallet embroidered with a cute fox pattern dropped down onto Shin Hweein’s hand.

When Shin Hweein, perfectly naturally, drew cash out of it and paid, Father Lucas’s gaze on him turned stern.

“Brother, you were just speaking on the subject of dependence, were you not.”
“…Of course, I too am making efforts toward independence.”
“Whoa, was that just now a shikigami? What kind of shikigami moves without a First-Rank sorcerer even noticing? You’re actually First-Rank already, aren’t you?”
“She is an aide beyond my deserving.”

Shin Hweein answered the genuinely astonished Yun Jubaek with a wry smile, then held out a skewer of several rice-balls into the air.
The rice-balls vanished, one by one, in turn.

Geum Moa’s pretense of being elsewhere had failed, so this was, at the least, to fill the belly of the woman who all this while had not been able to eat a thing and had simply trailed at his heels.

“Now that we’ve staved off our hunger, shall we move.”
“It would be well if there were a little intelligence left for us to gather.”
“Well, to be honest, I’m sceptical.”

Just as everyone was about to set off, Yun Jubaek threw a wet blanket on the matter, and every eye fell on him.
He merely shrugged and said:

“You all saw those Onmyo Bureau lads back there, didn’t you. We provoked them, they provoked us, and at this point they’ll be desperate to find something before we do. Anything His Excellency the Bishop is in a position to know, that side will already have. And this place is where the Onmyo Bureau’s headquarters sit. Once they throw manpower at it, they’ll have already finished combing through everything…”

Yun Jubaek pulled out a single strand of spiritual power on the tip of one finger, and with his other hand fired a thread of spiritual power against it.

Watching the straight-drawn strand twist itself into a tangled knot, Shin Hweein caught his meaning too.

“You mean to say, then, that whatever spiritual traces remained at the scenes will already have been scrambled.”
“That’s right. Whether on purpose or not, at any scene they’ve finished checking, the odds are high the evidence won’t be properly preserved any longer.”
“Then by what means do you intend to find them, Big Bro?”
“People.”

Yun Jubaek answered Shin Hweein’s question as he called over the limousine that had been waiting nearby and ushered the party into it.

“Whether it’s the police or the Onmyo Bureau, didn’t they say they were rounding up every last person identified as a Honwondorae believer? There’s no way every last one of them was caught. With people being hauled in en masse the way they are now, no one’s going to be foolish enough to show his face out in the open either.”
“Then?”
“So they’ll still be hiding in this city. Watching the onmyoji’s collective movements, and maybe trying to relay any intelligence they gather up to Honwondorae’s upper echelons. If the string running up that high happens to still be intact, we hit the jackpot.”

Yun Jubaek set the limousine moving.

Gyeongdo drew a very great number of tourists, owing both to its well-preserved old buildings and to the fact that one could see the gaudy-robed onmyoji and their shikigami at work out in the field.
But even in such a Gyeongdo, the sleek black limousine was a thing that pulled every eye toward it.

It was then that Shin Hweein abruptly realized it.

“Big Bro, could it be that you had the limousine prepared on purpose as well?”
“If we’d meant to move covertly, we’d have ridden in something other than a limousine. In any case, we’re at present a group catching as many eyes in downtown Gyeongdo as the Onmyo Bureau itself. And we’ve left behind a record of locking horns with the Onmyo Bureau in front of an audience. Famous though we may be back in Aeshin, here in Hwa we have almost nobody to back us up. Just four men wandering about.”
“It sounds to me as if you’re saying that, whatever happens to us, there’s no one to come to our aid.”
“Uh… can I go home?”

Having grasped his meaning, Makoto turned ashen, called out his younger sister’s name, and said in a half-joking tone that he wanted to go home.
No one obliged him with a response.

“So they may well think us easy prey and come at us…”
“The problem starts from there. Luring them out is one thing. But when ones strong enough to bury the whole lot of us actually show up.”

When Shin Hweein looked at him, Yun Jubaek blinked his eyes a couple of times.

It was perhaps too much to hope that his expression would carry across through the mask.

“…Have you not given thought to what comes after?”
“Every operation gets put together and rewritten on the fly, depending on the situation and the variables, isn’t that the way of it? Watching those Onmyo Bureau lads back there, they weren’t to be taken lightly either. And so it suddenly strikes me that ones who operated openly right under the noses of that lot, leader or no leader, the rank and file aren’t going to be anything to sneeze at either.”

Why was it that this man, having been doing so well, must always have one or two blind spots like this?

Perhaps his being in love with Shin Myeongin was, in its own way, one of the blind spots of this man’s life.

Shin Hweein let out a sigh and answered.

“Big Bro, you are a First-Rank sorcerer, are you not. The priest here, by my own assessment, can put out a force amounting to First-Rank as well. And Guji Makoto… guji, how about you.”
“Thanks to the Grand-Master, I’ve gotten a fair bit stronger since then myself, you know? Cutting to the chase, if you just give me time to gather ki, then frankly, I can kill up to a First-Rank. A yokai, up to Rank Four. A Rank-Three… I could hold one off for a bit?”
“As you see, he has his flaws here and there, but I can vouch for the destructive power.”
“Flaws?!”

It was a tiger-mounted gamble.
Short of going back to Aeshin, there was no easy way to call up reinforcements here in Hwa, so the only thing for it was to crash ahead and run if it came to that.

His resolve thus hardened, the party made the rounds of several of the spots Bishop John had marked, searching for traces of Honwondorae.
But, sure enough, no sharp lead surfaced.

Yet just as he was about to climb into the limousine with a sigh and head for the next location, mind-speech came to Shin Hweein’s ear.

“Big Bro’s words were correct. There’s a response that has been steadily tailing us.”
“What, how did you catch something even I haven’t picked up on yet?”
“My shikigami is observing them. Even so, please don’t look up. The Onmyo Bureau has set many shikigami aloft in the sky as well. We could easily be noticed for no reason.”

What was currently aloft in Gyeongdo’s sky was, of course, the blue bird Eulha had taken from Shin Jain and synthesis-evolved.

Lacking any yokai aura, it was more adept than other shikigami at hiding its presence.
The Shin House shikigami arts, on the other hand, allowed sorceries to be layered onto it, which made its movements still more covert and, on top of that, allowed it to be put to free sorcerous operation.
So even into the skies of Gyeongdo, dominated as they were by the Onmyo Bureau, it could be sent up unseen.

“Whew, so this is the Shin House’s shikigami arts. The shikigami arts we study aren’t even in the same league.”
“Grand-Master, is it a bishoujo too?”
“It is a bird.”

Cutting Guji’s nonsense off flat, Shin Hweein boarded the limousine with the party, spread out the map he’d received earlier from Bishop John, and, on the basis of the senses he shared with the blue bird, plotted several dots.

“There are people continually observing us as they follow. People from whom no spiritual power can be felt at all. There’s also movement on their side that suggests they’re coordinating in a group to surround us. Perhaps they’re waiting for us to head somewhere quiet.”

When he kept plotting the movements of the people in real time, shifting in step with the limousine, a circular surrounding-formation took shape in the end, ringing them round.

What was startling was that the Onmyo Bureau was no fool, and many of the believers must already have been taken in, and yet there was still a group out there working in secret.

“Hweein, are you sure those are ordinary people?”
“To be exact, what they don’t have is spiritual power. Mixed in among them are some who do have ability.”
“What is that even supposed to mean, they have no spiritual power but they have ability? Every ability-user’s source of power is spiritual power.”
“No. I’m feeling something from all of them, as though something they didn’t originally possess had been granted to them, all at once, by someone… is this what holy power feels like, perhaps?”
“That is not it. The Lord’s grace can be received only in the measure that I myself am able to bear. It also grows alongside my faith.”

Father Lucas, smiling brightly even as he said it, cut the notion down flat.

Shin Hweein shook his head from side to side and replied:

“It only felt similar, no more. I’m getting the sense that they’re drawing a portion of a power rooted not in themselves but in something else, something far greater. What makes me uneasy on top of that is that the one wielding it has no spiritual power of their own.”

If a priest’s holy power was like using a debit card, the power of these people felt, one might say, like the use of a credit card.

Unlike priests, who possessed spiritual power themselves, these people had no foundation to support the power, and so a vague unease hung over whether they would in fact be able to bear the price that came back to them.

“And how did you know that?”
“Because they’re using that very power, in real time, to communicate. To avoid having their telecoms tapped, no doubt.”

That alone, of course, wasn’t enough to explain why these people had gone undetected by the Onmyo Bureau all this while.

The reason Shin Hweein had been able to make them out through the shikigami’s eye was that the energy lying so cleverly concealed within them was an energy he had already encountered once.

That, too, in the form of a curse, and directly.

“Aw, you’ve all watched too many movies. We’re not the FBI, eavesdropping on phones…”
“In the Capital of Aeshin they do.”

When Makoto broke into the middle of the serious conversation in a cold sweat to say as much, Yun Jubaek answered him on the spot.

“In the Capital, a sorcery is laid over the whole telecommunications network that reacts to particular words, collects and sorts call records, and picks out the suspicious.”
“The telecommunications network is a metaphorical phrase, what kind of sorcery could you possibly lay on…”
“Don’t try to make sense of a power that runs on a different principle. It just is what it is. So then… what shall we do.”

Shin Hweein lifted his head and asked after Yun Jubaek’s intent.

If they kept moving only through the city centre like this, there would certainly be no fighting these people on any large scale. But they could hardly limit themselves to sightseeing Gyeongdo, could they.

And yet, if they moved somewhere unfrequented, that would be precisely doing the enemy’s will for him.

Never having dreamed the enemy would take the bait this fast, and so aggressively at that, Yun Jubaek was left wagging his tongue in astonishment.

“How to do this. I’d like to seize one of them and pry out what we can, but the fact that we’re dealing with Hwa nationals weighs on me.”
“In that case, please keep the vehicle moving as it is for now and keep their attention. I will slip out unseen, confirm the matter without being noticed, and come back.”

At Shin Hweein’s bold words, Yun Jubaek’s expression darkened, and he said:

“Will you really be all right? You need to think this through carefully. If you handle the approach badly and one of them ends up bursting and dying… the wrong sort of charge for that, and you could be treated as a major criminal.”
“No such thing will occur.”

For he had already finished his assessment.

Reckoning that for now there was no sharper option than to comply with Shin Hweein’s word, Yun Jubaek nodded with an unhappy expression.

“If push comes to shove, open the gate to the Specter Realm and go hide inside it. You’ve worn the mask the whole time we’ve been out here, so I’ll make it so that that identity can be treated as though it never existed, without any trouble.”
“Let it be so.”
“Brother, please, I beg of you, take care that no innocent victims come of this. Those people are merely lost lambs, brainwashed by erroneous doctrine and wandering astray.”
“Of course.”
“Grand-Master, for a while now everyone’s just been stacking up ominous flags one after another, somehow…”

Ignoring Makoto’s words, Shin Hweein space-shifted.

Specifically, with Eulha’s help, he moved to a location he had grasped through the blue bird’s eyes.

Borrowing the power of the Gatekeeper’s Brand, he could of course have used a spatial-shift sorcery himself, but doing so would leave faint traces in the surroundings, and there was a chance of being noticed by the enemy.

Sure enough — seen up close, it really does look as though they’re using something like holy power.

He chose, since it came to that, the tail of the encirclement, a person whose brief disappearance would take those above and below him time to register.
Having completed the space-shift, Shin Hweein sensed the faint black aura curling up out of the young man before him, and his brow furrowed.

Astonishingly, its source was yokai aura.

For a human to be handling yokai aura, it would not have been strange for him to turn into a yokai on the spot then and there.
That the consequent transformation was confined to a small portion of personality and thought was, he suspected, very likely the work of a sorcery developed by Honwondorae.

— Shall I try a hand first?
— No, I shall. …Even so, this is an outrageous heavyweight.

The yokai aura Shin Hweein was sensing through Honwondorae’s believer could only be the merest fraction of what its master held, and yet it set him trembling.

Without question this had to be a monster on the order of, or surpassing, the second-rank great yokai Ushi-gozen.

It carried the possibility of being a first-rank great yokai, on the order of a national-class disaster.

— It’s all right, he won’t yet be able to step forward in person. What’s more, last time he took a blow from you, young master, did he not. But if you touch that yokai aura now, he’ll be able to recognize you properly…
— Fortunately, there is no need to worry about that.

Shin Hweein drew out the Indulgence and held it in one hand.
Then, boldly indeed, he laid his other hand on the shoulder of the young man whose mouth was working ceaselessly as if reciting some prayer, and said to Geum Moa:

— Did I not tear something out of him myself.
— Eh?! Wait, then, surely, the curse of percep-…!

The Indulgence flashed, and before the man could even react with so much as a word, it scattered the yokai aura from his body to nothing.

It felt, in that moment, like having successfully defused a bomb.