Chapter 23 — The Sorcerer And The Cursed Mask (2)

The gunslinger and the sorceress poured their attacks down from either side, breaking and burning the tree-branches Shin Hweein had called forth.
Beneath that storm, Shin Hweein held a brief council of war with his shikigami.

He had fought yokai of comparable power one-against-many before, but this was his first time facing two ability-users of differing disciplines at once, and even he was at a loss.
The one thing that was certain was that he and Leon would each have to take a different opponent.

“I will take the gunslinger. He’s a style I’ve matched up against many times back across the water.”
“Then I’ll leave him to you.”
“Hah! A rather impudent thing to say…!”

Just then the man had blasted away every tree-branch in front of him with a single shell-like, hugely enlarged bullet.
He snorted at Leon’s words and leveled his revolver, and in the same instant a blade Leon hurled at terrific speed lodged in the muzzle and detonated.

“Some time ago a worm like you could not have raised its head before me. Laughable.”
“So what you’re really confessing is that you’ve sunk lower than a worm?!”

The man had sheathed the revolver in black aura to shield it.
He shook off the impact in no time, drew another revolver in his free hand, and fired wildly.

Seeing Leon call out his thralls and charge the gunslinger, Shin Hweein nodded once and whispered to his other shikigami.

“Arong, help Leon.”

— Kyu?!

Arong, whom Shin Hweein had never once let leave his arms, let out a startled cry at the order.
But however he turned it over, splitting his forces this way was the right call now.
Arong could swallow up most projectile attacks with no great effort, which made him an excellent matchup against that white gunslinger, and on top of that, the synergy of fighting alongside Leon, who handled blood, was splendid.

If only Neuldam had finished its trial of strength and made it back, that would have been better. But if it isn’t here, then it isn’t here, and that’s that. I’ll have to trust the talismans and try my hand.

He briefly considered calling Eulha in from outside the Other Realm, but the boy was, just now, the one shikigami who could relay his will directly to the companions on the outside.
What was more, he knew well that the boy was a creature of many talents; but he had not yet had any chance to confirm his actual combat ability, and bringing him onto a battlefield blindly was something he balked at.

For now, he checked the will of Geum Moa as well, who had kept herself concealed throughout.

— Are you truly not stepping out?
— Tsk, young master, you’ve plenty in reserve this time, haven’t you?
— If we don’t hurry, a Rank-One ability-user is coming.
— It’s fine, it’s fine. You can handle that with it, too!

It seemed, after all, that Geum Moa was hoping desperately for Shin Hweein to put on the Ushi-gozen mask.
No doubt because, once he did, he would naturally come to use the blade she had made for him as well.
Her affection had always weighed on him in just this way.

“A Korean sorcerer who handles a fairly decent shikigami after all. But all it knows how to do is body-slam and breathe fire? You’ll have to grind it up a few more levels and come back with a new skill!”

— What audacity this woman has… I’ll burn every last one of your worthless shikigami to cinders! Hey, you too, stop dithering and get over here already!

At Flame-tail’s urging, Shin Hweein gave a sigh and turned around.
By elimination, since Leon and Arong had been drawn off into combat with the gunslinger, his and Flame-tail’s opponent was the onmyoji.
Unlike the onmyoji of the Onmyo Bureau in their white kariginu robes, this one wore red and black, her dress giving the striking impression that she had just come from a hunt with the blood of every kind of beast soaked into the cloth.
She seemed to be of mixed blood, her features carrying both Eastern and Western lines, and to Shin Hweein, who lived day-in-day-out with Geum Moa, she felt, if anything, more familiar than most.

“You’re not even startled to see me?”
“Am I supposed to be startled? You must be rather confident in your looks.”

— Flame-tail, fall back behind me. That Inugami is a bad matchup for you.

Shin Hweein answered the woman coolly, and at the same time sent a thought to Flame-tail by mind-flame.

The Inugami was a sorcery whose ill repute, even in Hwa, ran neck-and-neck with the great Eastern curse-arts of old, the yeommae (the curse-by-image) and the godok (the curse-by-poison-vessel), and especially the myogwi (the cat-ghost-curse) famous in Jin, since it was produced by methods of much the same kind.
It was easy to be deceived by the sight of the thing rampaging now in the form of a great dog, but the essence of it lay in a power of cursing born of the most desolate of grudges.
To complete the sorcery, a dog was reduced to a wretched state by horrific suffering and starvation, and then, right on the verge of dying naturally and being released from its torment, was beheaded by the sorcerer.
Could the grudge of a dog killed in such a way even be put into words?
What was more, the sorcerer did not bear the Inugami’s harrowing grudge himself but turned it onto another to curse them with.
There was good reason that, long ago, Jin had forbidden methods of this sort.

The woman’s right. It wouldn’t be easy for Flame-tail, who fights with pure elemental and physical force, to overpower an Inugami.

But for Shin Hweein, the case was different.

Flame-tail had understood his words and moved at once, drawing the Inugami’s motions where he wished them; then, shrinking his frame in an instant, he hid behind Shin Hweein.
Having lost its target in a single beat, the dog-yokai grew frenzied, tongue lolling long from its jaws, and charged straight at Shin Hweein.
Beyond it, as though she had been waiting only for the moment Flame-tail tucked his tail, the onmyoji could be seen flinging out several talismans at a time, eyes gleaming, with the centipede-yokai coiled round and round about her, shielding its master.

“You really are fond of poisons, it seems.”

— Kheeeeeek!

Though the Inugami bore down on him slavering, Shin Hweein only stood there.
The onmyoji, finding his demeanor suspicious, cried out for the creature to halt for a moment, but by then the Inugami had already slammed into Shin Hweein.

“Khuck!”
“What…? It actually landed, didn’t it?”

Unable to bear the impact, Shin Hweein, who had been trying to rise after rolling on the ground, lost even his staff and crumpled to his knees.
A trickle of blood ran down beneath the mask of his swaying figure, and the onmyoji let out a sigh of relief at the sight.

The attack-talismans that followed in its wake were blocked by Shin Hweein’s warding charm flaring to life, but they had, in truth, been launched only to pin his movements down.

The Inugami’s charge was not a thing that crushed a man with physical force.
It was the dense yokai aura that made up its body that cursed a man to death.

“What in the world were you trying to pull just now? My Inugami has been passed down through three generations, from my grandmother on my mother’s side. Even a sorcerer of equal grade can’t block it without preparation.”

For the spiritual power he gave off, Shin Hweein had taken the Inugami’s yokai aura dead-on with a strangely low resistance, as though he had borne the blow on purpose; revival from this would surely be impossible.
So thinking, the onmyoji closed the gap with Shin Hweein, little by little.
She did not, of course, drop her guard, keeping several talismans charged with spiritual power floating about her and the centipede-yokai’s defensive barrier wrapped around her, just as before.

“It’s a bit of a pity. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a man who didn’t get startled, or get any funny ideas, on looking at me. But what can I do, you’re an enemy. Are Korean men all like this? Should I take a trip over to Korea if I want to meet a real man?”

“…The Inugami.”

To Shin Hweein’s low mutter, the onmyoji obligingly responded.

“Hmm? You were looking down on my Inugami?”
“Even if it takes the form of a shikigami, it ought, in truth, to be regarded as a sorcery the onmyoji wields with her own hand.”

Shin Hweein, wiping away the blood that flowed beneath his mask, had at some point summoned his staff back to his hand and was already rising to his feet.
What he had wiped the blood with was a single talisman.
Glowing brightly and activated, it was the Indulgence.

“Kuhuk?!”

The onmyoji vomited blood and dropped to her knees.
An internal wound that neither the centipede-yokai nor the talismans could ward off.
She had been hit by a curse turned back upon its sender.

“All who have forgotten this have paid a heavy price. Show me one who walks about with his own entrails on the outside.”
“You… you!”

Every time the Indulgence flared, the body of the Inugami that had passed through Shin Hweein burned, and the onmyoji vomited blood and writhed in torment, while Shin Hweein, by contrast, grew more vital by the moment.

He had thought returning the harm the Inugami had dealt him in equal measure to the onmyoji would be counter-blow enough. But.
Whether it was the magnitude of the evil karma the Inugami had piled up to this day, or whether the karma of the elder generations who had wielded the Inugami too was being borne entirely by the onmyoji before him, the karma piling up in real time was plainly greater than the karma being consumed by the curse-absolving, and the Indulgence looked as though it would not stop until the Inugami itself was annihilated.

“It really… really was you. The one who broke his curse…!”
“You will have guessed as much yourselves on the way here, surely. That is why you came prepared with a Rank-One ability-user.”

Even as he answered her obligingly, Shin Hweein gathered spiritual power into one hand.
By now the onmyoji was simply crawling along the ground, retching up gobbets of blood together with her screams.

“But… surely, with no equipment at all… how, with one cheap talisman like that, how…!”
“Indeed. Unlike your kind, I did not offer any costly sacrifice, and accomplished it by my own strength alone. Tell your master to mind himself with me as well. If, that is, you can send mind-flame from hell.”

There was one thing this fight had taught him clearly.
Shin Hweein was much, much too short on offensive sorceries that could end a battle in a single stroke.
Flame-shot was weak, and its applied sorceries, though powerful, took a great deal of time, and so he had need of a sorcery that was simple yet could swiftly subdue an enemy.

And quickly.

“Primordial chaos shall come, every rule shall fall, and the world shall return to the form it had at the beginning. Then, and only then…”
“Now die.”

The instant enough spiritual power to kill her had gathered, Shin Hweein converted it straight to flame and shot it forth.
The flame swallowed in a single sweep both the onmyoji, chanting what might have been a prayer or an incantation of the advent of the primordial chaos, and the centipede-yokai that flung itself in to shield her body, and it burned with the heat of hell, and yet.
It did not reduce them to ash all at once.

“…O Master of Order, the one who has ruined your great work, I shall surely bring before you!”

For a black yokai aura that had welled up from nowhere quenched the flame and overspread the onmyoji.

— Kieeee…!

— Where are you going?! I’ll kill you now!

While Flame-tail dashed in desperately to block the centipede-yokai, which had swollen its bulk all at once and was springing in, Shin Hweein’s gaze stayed fixed on the onmyoji, who was slowly raising her body out of yokai aura thick enough to contaminate the whole area.
She had absorbed every ripple of yokai aura around her, and now, as she lifted her head, her veins bulged out across her skin in lumpy ridges; one glance was enough to see she was not normal.
Her skin was unnaturally pale, and the blood flowing through those visibly protruding veins had stained jet-black, as though letters had been inked across her entire body.

“The same as the believers, no, worse. She’s taken in more power than her own spiritual power can master. Her soul won’t bear it.”
“Better than dying on the spot!”

The woman scattered talismans in every direction.
The grotesquely swollen oni, the giant crow leaking dark-red ocular fire, the dokkaebi-fire burning alone in black, every one of them was warped under the master’s influence, twisted into uncanny shapes, and Shin Hweein’s expression grew the more grim.

“You mean to drag your shikigami down to hell with you, and not yourself alone?”
“If only you’d died meekly when you should have…!”

Along with the woman’s cry, freighted with a grudge that made no sense, the shikigami surged at Shin Hweein.
The one small mercy was that, in the meantime, Flame-tail had succeeded in cleaving the centipede, which, like the other shikigami, had blackened and grown gigantic, in two, and burning it to nothing.

What made things worse was that the presence of the Rank-One ability-user was now drawing right up to his very nose.

Not only that. The worst part is that other believers are mingled in alongside him. To fight them off as it is would be hard enough; if I get my legs caught trying to protect them, defeat is certain.

The enemy before his eyes was plainly running herself ragged, breaking down her own body and soul; given time, surely he could overcome her, but with the reinforcements drawing near, even that was becoming impossible.
He really ought to have developed an instantaneous, powerful offensive sorcery.
Or, if nothing else, before coming to Hwa, he ought to have pressed his father quickly for the right to call forth Yuryong.

— Moa, you really mean not to step out, then?
— Is the Three-Year Pact such a light thing as that?

When stepping out merely as a Rank-Two sorcerer would, for now, be quite enough, the only one taking the Three-Year Pact lightly and interpreting it as she pleased was, was it not, Geum Moa herself.

No, working himself up against her was pointless.

In the end, when he considered his own forces, had he not made up his mind to leave Geum Moa out of the reckoning?
To put it the other way, it meant that even with the enemy reinforced and a Rank-One ability-user added on top, she was certain Shin Hweein could pull through.

“Very well, then…”
“Giving up, are you?”

When Shin Hweein drove his staff into the ground, countless tree-branches once again shot up around him, blocking and attacking the shikigami’s approach.
But of course, this was only a stopgap.
The shikigami, reinforced beyond their limits by the power of the master of the advent of the primordial chaos, soon shattered or pierced or burned through them, and beyond, they rushed onward, aiming for Shin Hweein’s heart.

Directly after, a chilling yokai aura erupted.

— Sshk.

A sharp trajectory that split the air clean in two.

The dokkaebi-fire, light of body and so the first to reach Shin Hweein, a shikigami called in Hwa-tongue Shiranui (“fire-of-no-knowing”)¹, was cut clean in half in midair before it could even properly breathe flame.
A thing without form ought to have been impossible to cleave, and yet, at the sight of it being magnificently halved and snuffed out before it could recover, the onmyoji groaned.

“That blade… you.”

At the end of the trajectory that had cleaved the Shiranui, there gleamed a black, transparent edge polished to an eerie sharpness.
It was a katana so keen and so finely wrought you could not believe it had been made from a horn.

“Then have it just as you wish.”

The mask Shin Hweein had been wearing fell away of itself.
While the onmyoji stood frozen at the sight of his bare face, a new mask settled over Shin Hweein’s features.

A mask hides the original personality of the one who wears it, and conjures in its place a new personality.
Wear a mask, and a god descends into you, so they say, even in Hwa.

“Whew… Just as I thought, this thing really is cursed. But, in exchange, it has taken away every last one of my own curses.”
“You… what in the world have you done…!”

If that was so, then what stood here now was no longer Shin Hae, the Rank-Two sorcerer, nor Shin Hweein, heir of a great house tormented by curses.
It was Ushi-gozen, the Rank-Two great yokai with an oni’s face and the horns of an ox.