Chapter 7 — An Audience With The Vampires (3)

It was fortunate that he had prepared in advance.

“Fire-blood.”

At Shin Hweein’s murmured word a dome of flame sprang up around him, a hemisphere shielding his body, and the spray of blood-droplets hurtling toward him was blocked clean.

He was hardly the only examinee quick enough to read the moment.
Many of the others threw up implements or spells of their own against the blast.
But some couldn’t, and took the blood-rain across their unprotected bodies.
A scarce few had stood too close, and when the bone-shards burst out with greater force, there was no stopping them; they were pierced through.

Blood smears one and pollutes another.
Blood flows, and resonates with another aura.
And when that happens, naturally…

“Fire-blood, the art of Rahulta (the blood-devouring hungry ghost).”

At his murmur the barrier of flame that had been guarding his whole body answered, swelling outward.
The next instant, the chain explosion he had foreseen broke loose.

KRA-KA-KOOOM!

Everyone so much as touched by a drop of blood, everyone wounded by a fragment of the burst corpse, erupted again, and a blast nothing like the one a moment before tore through the place.

Had their resistance-to-curse (the capacity to withstand a hex) been higher they might have warded it off, but the examinees sitting the Fourth-Rank Sorcerer trial had not yet come that far.

…Just as I thought.

The flame swelled to the bulk of some enormous beast and devoured every last drop of the blood-fountain rushing at him.
Shin Hweein nodded, satisfied, slid a glance sidelong at the examiner, Lt. General Yun, and clicked his tongue inwardly.

A chain explosion was tearing through the heart of the sorcerer-examinees the man had personally dragged out for the “supplementary trial,” and not only did he show no thought of stopping it, he watched it on with eyes of pure cold.

If anything, it was from among the group that had come along to “cooperate” with the operation that the Father started forward in horror, only for Sister Barbara to check him before he could so much as break into a run.

All the Father could do was recite a prayer and raise a ward, and that much should surely be within the means of the sorcerer-examinees here.
Even had Sister Barbara not stopped him, Lt. General Yun would have.

The trial has already begun. And by a thoroughly savage, survival-of-the-fittest method at that.

Even Shin Hweein did not think Lt. General Yun’s policy was wholly wrong.
He only thought it was not the sort of trial one ought to run on Third- and Fourth-Rank examinees.

If his reading was right, the man even seemed to be using the examinees as bait to draw the vampires out into action.

…To him this trial may have been no more than a chance to carry out a military operation with a resource he could spend freely.

Perhaps the candidates who had read the signs early and pulled their feet back had been the wise ones.

“Be ready, at the very least, for an enemy raid. You who would be sorcerers… Trust no ally either; doubt everything. Remember that the yokai you face will use a child to drive a blade calmly into the heart of its parent.”

That was what Lt. General Yun said, opening his mouth at last only when nearly half the examinees were dead in the space of a breath, the explosions barely subsided, the field gone quiet.

Father Lucas gaped at the words and was aghast, but mercifully kept his mouth shut for the moment.
Watching the Father’s state, it began to seem rather likely that Zer would be putting in an appearance fairly early today.

“If you’ve been struck, you strike back. Begin.”

The examinees, who could not have known where to begin protesting, only glared at him in stillness; Lt. General Yun’s command came down over them all the same, and he ignored them and turned his head away.

Strike back?
Shin Hweein felt an ominous resonance in the word and knit his brow, and sure enough, the bespectacled man who had been stealing glances at Shin Myeongin all this while snapped a salute and answered.

“Understood. All hands, to positions.”
“Yes, sir!”

The Spell Army’s special-detachment sorcerers moved as one.
Shouldering the examinees aside, they stepped into the heart of the carnage, each taking up a fixed cardinal point and beginning to chant; and the victims’ blood, bone fragments, and gobbets of flesh, slathered across every surface, lifted unpleasantly into the air and began to rearrange themselves in the void.

Watching it, Shin Hweein understood the words “strike back” perfectly.

So he did mean to use the examinees’ lives. The man has neither blood nor tears in him.

Among sorceries, many of the most powerful counterstrike arts take sacrifice as their premise.
The basic logic of sorcery is “give back what you were given,” and with a few rites of preparation that “give back” becomes not equal-for-equal but two-fold, ten-fold, even a hundred-fold returned.
And no doubt Lt. General Yun had completed the preparations to fire that sorcery off through the examinees themselves, without their knowing.

The other examinees, recognizing the great-art now being readied at the hands of the Spell Army’s sorcerers, wore expressions of utmost rage; but among them were also some who nodded as if only now understanding.
They were the ones who had thought from the start that the opportunity had been too generous, that a man no less than a Lt. General would surely have some such scheme tucked away.

“Lt. General, sir, preparations are complete. Sufficient to activate the rite!”
“Mm. The fools who would only have dragged us down on the battlefield even if we kept them alive have, by their sacrifice, dealt a mortal blow to the enemy. Those who died ought to be satisfied with that much.”
“…”

Meanwhile the Father, watching the spectacle from behind, wore an ever more thunderous expression; it was beginning to look hard indeed for the bonds between the Catholic Church of Aeshin Korea and the Yun House to deepen any further.

“Then activate it.”
“Yessir!”

The bespectacled man answered crisply and turned to his unit, stamping the ground.
A translucent hemispheric membrane rose, visible only to those who could sense spiritual power, and wrapped them all entire; then the sorcerers opened their mouths in unison and began to chant, but no sound leaked out.
No doubt because the army’s internal incantations could not be allowed to escape.

That’s…

The victims’ flesh-pieces, scattered across the air like a constellation, at last gave off a baleful light and vanished.
Right after, explosions began to sound from every quarter once again.
From nearby buildings, from shadows in back-alleys, from beneath the eaves.

The lower-rank vampires who had been observing them and laying their surveillance net all this while had been laid bare to the retaliatory sorcery without a moment to defend themselves.

— Kyaaaaak!

— Run for it!

“There they are!”

Pitch-black bats screamed in agony and rose into the air, but by then the sorcerers had already finished readying for battle.

“The enemy is vampires. Press them with the resolve to wipe them out before nightfall! If you can capture them, capture them!”
“Yes, sir!”

At the Lt. General’s order the Spell Army’s sorcerers drew their capture-implements and rushed each at the vampires.

“Anyone whose blood is sucked becomes the enemy’s nourishment — be prepared to fall into hell even after dying!”
“There are no such fools in our unit, sir!”
“Ohhh! They’re all great even at close quarters!”

The woman’s voice, alone still breaking the mood, was particularly grating.
But honestly, even Shin Hweein had to admit, with some chagrin, that what he felt watching the sorcerers’ performance was much the same as Shin Myeongin.

Sorcerers, of all things, throwing themselves into close-quarters fighting of their own accord…

Even as he thought how absurd it was, Shin Hweein worked his fingers and loosed flame-shots.
The flame he handled, Geum Moa said, had reached the realm of the sacred (the holy), and indeed the vampires writhed in torment, their whole bodies burning away at even a graze of it.
The efficacy was beyond question.

“That man…”
“I thought he only handled flame-hounds.”
“Idiot. He can contract a flame-hound because he handles a formidable flame-sorcery to begin with.”

The examinees who had grown dispirited, seeing the active forwardness of Shin Hweein and a few other Third-Rank candidates, began at last to manifest their own sorceries and fight.

But however much they had grown their numbers in Zone 3 in the meantime, the vampires showing themselves from every corner of the empty warehouse district, where not a single household lived, came on without end.
Stray dogs and cats with eyes dyed red, manipulated by the vampires; even birds in flight!

“Those who do not fight in earnest should consider themselves close to disqualified! When you have the chance to show your ability — show it!”

Lt. General Yun himself did not lift a finger, only raising his voice from within the sorcerer-unit’s protective ring.
Shin Hweein, who could feel the vast spiritual power that lay sleeping in the man’s body, grasped that he was conserving it not for these miscellaneous lower vampires but for a great one, a chieftain-class foe he meant to bring his power against.

The spiritual power he’d burn dealing with lower vampires like these would be fully recovered by the time he met a chieftain-class — could it be that he simply doesn’t want the vampires to know his sorcery beforehand?

The same went for the sorcerer-unit.
A close look showed they were merely splendid on the surface; in practice they moved only to shield Lt. General Yun and the “special cooperators,” and showed not the least sign of unsheathing whatever secret arts each must surely have.
What they were swinging looked to be unit-issue silver longswords and handguns loaded with silver-bullets, nothing more.

And the examinees, drawn along by them, gladly displayed their own sorceries without realizing the enemy was watching, observing every one.

A truly merciless operation, and yet one could not help admiring it.
They understood the nature of the enemy, vampires, perfectly well, and although it required spending their own forces, up to this point they had been matching them flawlessly.
But that was only “matching,” tit for tat.

They lack ingenuity. They have the most perfect fragment of possibility in their own hands.

Shin Hweein looked about him, and once he had confirmed that the battle had grown fierce enough that no one was paying any mind to the likes of him, he stepped his staff forward.
He pushed forward of his own will toward the front, where the fighting was at its most violent, and waved his hands this way and that.

The barrier of flame that still guarded his body answered the gestures, sometimes scattering prettily, sometimes massing together, splitting in two the bellies of dogs that came lunging while bleeding from their gashes, of bats winging in from every side, of the claws of lower vampires.

“Fire-blood, the art of Rahulta.”

He murmured it low.

The barrier of flame, no, Arong, moving as freely as a living thing, mustered a further strength at his whisper and the spiritual power pouring out with it, and devoured the blood and gobbets of flesh of the vampires overflowing on every side.

The compatibility is better than I imagined. More than that, I can actually see the creature growing, in real time.

The reason Arong had come to be capable of taking the form of a barrier of flame was no complex matter.
This morning, before they set out, the Hungry-Ghost Dominion technique had been inscribed across the creature’s whole body, and as a result Arong had taken the Shin House shikigami arts’ secret method fully into himself, becoming capable of swallowing anything down and making it his own strength.

What was unexpected was this: the incantation had been inscribed on the creature’s body using a mingling of cinnabar-ink and Shin Hweein’s own blood, and as a result the creature had become capable of acting in accord with Shin Hweein’s own blood-curse ability as well.

That being so, the experiment of whether the creature could also be subjected to Fire-blood, which kindled flame from his own blood, passed with perfect naturalness.
There was no erasure of the incantation; only a slight expense of Arong’s own spiritual power.
And even the spiritual power so spent was, at this very moment, being more than doubly replenished by the devouring of the enemy.

The Aeshin military has, more truly than I imagined, made something extraordinary. To think that, joined to the Shin House’s arts, it could yield such a miracle… I trust we shall not be caught out.

Indeed, at this moment it did not even hold the shape of “Baby Bear.”

As Arong, under Shin Hweein’s control, nibbled away at the vampires of the battlefield and swelled in bulk, a change came over the field.
The contours of the path leading outward warped, and a forking road sprang up.

“A Specter Realm!?”
“E-, Examiner, sir!”
“Not a Specter Realm. A mere Other-Realm shift — quit your fuss!”

Lt. General Yun shouted it out as if he had foreseen even this turn of events well in advance.

The Other-Realm shift occurs readily within the Specter Realm, but it is also a fairly common event when one faces a powerful yokai or a yokai band even in the present world; insofar as one can find and remove its source, or strip away the yokai aura making up the Other Realm, returning to reality is far easier than from the Specter Realm itself.
Yet of course Other Realms came in kinds, and an Other Realm ruled by some mighty yokai was, for all that it was smaller in scale than a Specter Realm Gate, by far the more dangerous.

A space provisionally formed, into which men could not easily set foot, ruled by the will of the yokai that made it; in this respect the West called such Other Realms dungeons.

Perhaps it was even his intention to set the time at early evening. The vampires’ chieftain is almost certainly hiding inside the Other Realm woven into Zone 3.

Had it been full morning or full night, more elaborate means would have been needed to enter the Other Realm, but at this hour, the early evening, the boundary between worlds thins.
Through the act of killing a great number of vampires, with the blood and yokai aura that bled out of them alone, the door to the Other Realm where they were hiding had been forced open with perfect naturalness.
The same principle by which Shin Hweein, on his first entry into the Specter Realm, had adjusted the hour.

“Have you taken a vampire alive?”
“We have managed to subdue one with abundant aura, sir!”
“Good. Then we use it to scout the path.”

Lt. General Yun dragged the bound vampire over and ordered sorcery worked on it again.

Shin Hweein watched the spectacle in stillness, then quietly summoned Arong, who had by now reshaped himself once more into a faint mist, back to his side, and confirmed.

“You understand?”

— Kyu.

So it seemed.

The creature, having gorged itself in volume on the lower-rank vampires, had come into the ability to track the higher-rank vampire within the Other Realm.