Chapter 7 — An Audience With The Vampires (6)

An offering, in truth, can be made by anyone to any being.
That what one prays for in offering it will be granted, however, can never be guaranteed.

The conditions matter, and the hour of the day, but if there is one thing that matters above all others, it is the quality of the offering.
Yes. That was the very domain over which Do Yuna’s unique sorcery presided.

‘The sacrifice-rite turns something into an offering, and then, when that offering is made, makes the granting of the wish wonderfully efficient. That is its unique sorcery. Do Yuna used it merely to feed her own crude cravings, but the true reach of this art opens without limit only when it is joined to a formal offering.’

The trait of this sorcery was simple and matchlessly powerful: it drove the efficiency of an offering to its furthest extreme.
Turn that not upon oneself but upon the object of the offering, and under the same conditions one drew out far better results.
To wield so preposterous an ability for nothing more than killing people and patching up one’s own life was foolishness of the highest order.

“This lowly mortal, Shin Hae, calls upon Lord Pungbaek with all his heart, upon the lord who governs the winds¹. The winds rage so that I can scarcely hold my own body upright. Deign to receive this paltry offering, and grant me, if only for a moment, a single thread of the wind.”

Pungbaek was the wind-god venerated throughout the Northeast Asian sphere.
When Sangje’s son descended to earth and took his place beneath the divine tree, Pungbaek was the eldest of the three gods brought down at his side, and his divine standing was accordingly very high.
And as the god who governed the weather, even now, though the shape of the nation had changed many times over, he still received offerings without fail.

To make an offering to such a being, inside an Other Realm where neither the proper place nor the proper time had been prepared, alone, and with no more than a few grains of cereal to give, would have been excessive even as a joke.

— Hwoooooong!

The instant the fierce wind came down lashing both himself and the altar, Shin Hweein leaned his weight against his staff to keep his feet, certain now of his success, and let a smile cross his lips.
Already the wooden altar had risen into the air, and the grain heaped atop it was being snatched up by the howling wind and vanishing.

And in the very moment it disappeared without a trace, a violent draining sensation tore through him, and he staggered.
He could feel it already: a single thread of wind winding itself about his body.
The wind-god Pungbaek had found his offering acceptable, in truth, and bestowed his grace upon him, if only for a moment.

‘I had thought that buying myself one opening against the creature would be enough, but this is more powerful than I imagined…!’

Until now the technique had lived only in his head. This was the first time he had truly cast it, and there were several things he learned only by the doing.

First, as he had roughly guessed, this was not a sorcery he could use very often.
His spiritual power aside, the unique strength the art demanded felt as though it had been wrung completely dry.

On the other hand, even at this raw stage its efficiency was absurd, and the more he honed the ability, the better it would grow.
It might run close, but at this level he could manage, somehow…

“Get down here.”

“Whuh—?!”

To the vampire weaving about to slip the pursuit of Flame-tail and Arong, Shin Hweein delivered his short command.
The creature must have sensed something. For an instant a chill flickered across its features, and it hastily melted its body into mist to flee the spot.
But it was a heartbeat too late.
The wind came pressing down from above as though to crush it, and drove it to the ground in a half-misted state.

— Now!

— Kyuaaaaaa!

The shikigami did not let the chance slip.
The flames they had flung themselves into the fight with whirled up, and in an instant the creature’s whole body, now turned to mist, was wrapped in fire.
The flames blazed up grandly, as though fire had been set to combustible gas, and surged as if possessed of will, bent on snuffing out the creature’s very existence.

“Th-, this flame…?!”

The vampire’s face showed it knew its mistake. It tried to release the mist-form, but the unceasing wind hemmed it in and would not let it.
This was no ordinary wind. It was a wind that wove spiritual power together with the divine power of an Eastern god, and it scattered the mist in every direction so the creature could never knit itself back into shape.
While the vampire could not bring its true ability to bear, the flames of the flame-hound and Arong gnawed away at its body, and at last severed even the breath of life within it.

“You, this—!”

It could not get out one more word.
Its whole body was carved into the finest fragments and evaporated away.

Arong devoured every last scrap of it, and his spiritual power and his bulk swelled before Shin Hweein’s eyes.
The momentum was not slight. By Shin Hweein’s rough reckoning the creature had likely reached a solid Rank Six.

His two shikigami were powerful, of course, but this was by no means an opponent that ought to have gone down so easily.
It should not have.
Yet the creature, trusting in its command of the air and lounging there at ease, had been caught off-guard by Pungbaek’s wind, and so met its death without ever bringing its full power to bear.

“Take it that your carelessness killed you.”

“That goes for you too!”

The moment Shin Hweein murmured this, having confirmed that Arong had drunk down all of the vampire’s blood and with it all of its information, a presence sprang up behind him and pounced.
The lone woman vampire, the one who had come at the head of the higher-rank vampires.
She had clearly been locked in combat with another sorcerer, and yet somehow she had risen up at his back, the whole of her forearm shaped into a black blade, and stabbed in at him.

“Carelessness?”

“Kgh, kyak?!”

The vampire’s arm, by every appearance an instant from running Shin Hweein clean through, met a purple cloud the moment it touched his back, a cloud that rose of its own accord, and so came to nothing.
And not only that.
That cloud, freighted with an auspicious aura, clamped down on the vampire’s forearm, gave a crack, crack as it discharged, and went on stripping her strength away before her eyes.

“Was that meant for yourself, perhaps? Fire-blood!”

“What in the—, you sorcerer types, every last one of you—!”

Having turned the attack aside with the Purple Cloud talisman he had prepared in advance, Shin Hweein wheeled and hurled fireball after fireball in answer.
But the vampire flung her body clear just as fast and slipped them.
That she would neither unfurl her wings nor melt to mist again, remembering, perhaps, how her comrade had died, was in its way a little funny.

But.

“Even a fire that’s gone out is one you ought to look at twice.”

“Tsk!”

Shin Hweein lifted his index and middle fingers together and crooked them.
The fireballs swiftly wheeled back, and in the end even the vampire had to conjure a black barrier to fend them off.

Meanwhile Flame-tail and Arong had returned and fallen upon the enemy, and seeing it, Shin Hweein at last let out a breath and checked the talisman that had just shielded him.
And sure enough, the figure of the dragon that had originally stood out proud upon the warding charm had faded badly.

Pour spiritual power back into it and in a few hours it would recover its potency, but for the fight in front of him it was useless.
One of the three talismans he had prepared had been spent and rendered inert with appalling speed.

‘The effect is beyond question, but the capacity is wretched. Shin Uin… had it even been Shin Myeongin who made it, I could surely have got another two uses out of it. As I thought, my spiritual power is still woefully short.’

Sighing, Shin Hweein tucked the talisman back into his robes, fixed a keen glare on the vampire trading blows with his two shikigami, and was readying a fresh sorcery when Geum Moa’s voice reached him.

— I held off, thinking young master could block it. But just now, were you perhaps holding still on purpose, trusting me to step in?

— No, I meant to verify the talisman’s effect. There is no checking it while fighting the master of the Other Realm. …But it was a mistake. The effect surpasses my expectations, yet the capacity falls far too short.

Shin Hweein answered, and as he loosed another fireball, watched the vampire’s form.
She conjured a spear of blood and flung dozens of arrows from it, she warped her body to shear through a whole stretch of ground, she loosed swarms of vampire-bats from inside her chest to beat back the two shikigami’s onslaught.
In all of it, just as one would expect, the flair of a higher specimen showed plain.
And yet the one arm she had attacked him with stayed stripped of its strength, still wrapped in the purple cloud that crackled and discharged, so the talisman’s potency, at least, could be called certain.

‘Even allowing for what the talisman has taken from her, she is plainly stronger than the last one. Stronger than an ordinary Rank Six, though she does not quite reach Rank Five. Call her about Rank Five-and-a-half. This is near the limit of what I can take on without staking my life.’

After a moment’s thought, Shin Hweein concluded that with Arong now added to his strength, even short of spiritual power as he was, he could operate as something close to a Third-Rank sorcerer without the least trouble.
Against yokai weak to holy flame in particular, like the vampire before him, the advantage only ran further his way.

— There’s no time to be taking your ease. Once even this one is dead, that fellow will start to suspect.

— Because my flame is suspiciously powerful?

— No, because of Arong, and because of young master’s blood mixed into the flame you’re handling now. You stripped a measure of the Lord’s authority from him, didn’t you? Which is all but the same as having stolen a portion of his blood. The dim-witted ones you’re fighting now might not catch on, but anyone above them, the deputy, who took the Lord’s true blood straight from the source, will notice without fail.

Indeed, the thought had not so much as crossed Shin Hweein’s mind.
For everything was bound together through blood, as befit a vampire, so that even in cursing and in absolving curses, blood passed back and forth.
If what she said was true, then Shin Hweein, without standing in any master-servant bond at all, was now tied to the Vampire Lord by blood.

— In that case, if I poured a great quantity of my blood onto the Indulgence, it would be as good as pouring his, and a curse-absolving might occur, would it not?

— I imagine that was meant as a joke, but in sorcerous terms it is a rather reasonable notion. Though young master would bleed to death in the doing of it.

Shin Hweein winced at the not-especially-pleasant image, and one more line came from Geum Moa.

— That vampire, she was fighting a sorcerer of the Spell Army. He let her get past on purpose. You can well imagine his intent, young master.

— A foul story indeed. At the least, I hope it was a notion of his own.

— Perhaps this Lt. General Yun fellow wanted to put young master’s abilities through a rather more decisive test?

That she had spoken aloud the very possibility he had been weighing within himself, and weighing as one of the larger ones, made Shin Hweein’s expression crumple sharply.
As for what that Spell Army sorcerer was up to now, it seemed he was rather worried for Sister Barbara, for he was casting nearby as though to shield her where she fired her revolver with her brow knit, driving the other vampires back.
If even that was a put-on, the man was truly something.

“At least you, then!”

It was at that moment.
The vampire, driven steadily back by the shikigami’s onslaught, launched the suicidal charge no one had quite foreseen.

“With that body?”

“As if this—!”

She had boldly cut away the one arm the cloud still clung to and went on draining strength from, and now she detonated it on the spot.
The fountain of blood that gushed up split into several streams to fend off the shikigami’s approach, while the rest came pouring on toward Shin Hweein, became for an instant the enormous head of a dragon, and gaped its jaws wide.

“Flame-Made-Flesh!”

Without an instant’s delay, Shin Hweein turned his own body straight into flame, wrapped about it the blessing of the wind he now bore, and called up a fiercer fire still.
And more: he struck the ground with his staff, and in an instant great tree-trunks surged up to make a natural rampart of themselves. While he himself blocked the vampire’s strike, his two shikigami would finish her off completely. Of that he had no doubt.

— That you cannot!

The dragon-head fell upon the wooden barrier, broke it apart, and in the same motion lost its form, scattering into plain blood that poured down over Shin Hweein.
And yet what bore down on him, who had meant to burn it all away by the Flame-Made-Flesh, was the vampire herself, thrusting her own body out from within that blood.
It was a blood-borne teleportation ability.

“This time it’s carelessness, isn’t it?”

“Wai—!”

She grinned, threw her arms wide, and clasped Shin Hweein in a tight embrace.
Even as her own body burned utterly away against the holy flame, the vampire wore a satisfied smile, as though she had already done what she came to do.

The thought that the deputy might already have grasped his identity flickered through him, and Shin Hweein’s eyes flew wide.
And then.

“With my own life, I consecrate this offering unto you!”

Paradoxically, calling out words very like the ones Shin Hweein had used in making his own offering, the vampire wielded a sorcery very like the one he had cast a little while before.
A sorcery that offered up her own blood, and now her very life, to fling another to a distant place.
And its object was Shin Hweein, and Shin Hweein alone.

In the next instant, hurled into a different space, he found something risen before his eyes.

“Hello. The Lord asked me to convey his message: ‘I have won.’”

A handsome man in a formal suit, marked by a thin-eyed smile.
He removed his hat, bowed in elegant greeting, and spoke those words.
And then.

“Then, goodbye.”

The same word, only whispered in a lonelier tone.
And with a sorcery still more polished than that of the woman vampire he had faced earlier, he reshaped one of his arms into a long and beautiful katana, and drove it straight toward Shin Hweein’s chest.