Chapter 12 — The Sorcerer And Hotenshi-no-Kami (1)

The truth was, before they could go chasing after the onmyoji, there was one matter that had to be settled first.

“So. How much longer do you mean to ride around on my back?”

“Wh, what? Are you serious, that’s hilarious. You’re the one who slung me up there in the first place! Haa, honestly.”

The instant the words left Shin Hweein, Shin Myeongin slid down off his back and rounded on him, her face a picture of pure exasperation.

“You were so obviously hung up on me that I figured I’d throw you a little service, and now the man himself goes all stone-faced on me? Like, I’m the one who can’t deal with this.”

“What a richly enjoyable life you must lead. Though I never did expect so much as a word of thanks for protecting you.”

If she can really keep her thoughts to only whatever pleases her, she’ll never come down with a stress-illness, at least.

Shin Hweein shook his head and recalled the staff, drawing his talismans back to him with it.

“Let us go, then. Best not to be late.”

— Ah, but we’re already late. The chance is gone.

“What was that?”

— The chance for an easy hunt is gone. Their number has grown.

Every one of them flinched at the words.

The original criminals had numbered three, and two of the Rank-Three ability-users had already been put down on the spot, so by rights only the lone onmyoji should have remained.

Wherever these reinforcements had sprung from, it was a serious turn.

“Guji.”

“I really don’t know! Big bro, you know it too. I’m a subcontractor of a subcontractor, I keep telling you!”

Surely he wasn’t trying to make a clean escape, but to link up with the reinforcements?

If that was the case, then it would have made far more sense to arrive together with the reinforcements from the start, and the reason he hadn’t…

‘He tried to hog the credit, took a counter-strike from me, judged the situation lost, and pulled back for the moment. In that case.’

The odds were good that these so-called reinforcements and the onmyoji shared no tight working relationship.

Which meant the odds were equally good that word of Shin Hweein had not leaked through to them. A small mercy amid the misfortune.

“Let us hurry, then. With our strength as it stands, we can take them?”

— Risky, but possible. Whether that hindrance there can hold up, I cannot say.

“Who are you calling a hindrance!”

— Follow!

Old Aengseol set off in little springing bounds, hopping like a rabbit working its way forward.

Shin Myeongin glared at the back of her head even as she planted her own feet exactly where Old Aengseol had stepped, hopping along in the same small bounds, and pressed the point to the rest of them.

“It’s a space-shifting kind of sorcery, so don’t break the rhythm. Keep up properly!”

“R-right, understood!”

Guji Mochizuki, still gripping his shaku and muttering through whatever incantation he was reciting, followed after with a thoroughly tense face, bounding in his turn.

Watching all this, Yun Juna wore a less-than-impressed look as she asked Shin Hweein, quietly.

“Does the rhythm matter as well?”

“No. Stepping precisely where she has stepped is the only thing that does.”

The two of them fell in silently behind the three who hopped along in lockstep little bounds, almost as though reciting some incantation.

Then, of all things, Yun Juna spoke up.

“In fact, I have been given a secret order by my uncle. To deepen my ties with you, Sir Shin Hae.”

“If you say it aloud, surely it ceases to be a secret order.”

“You may have noticed already, but I am unskilled at growing close to people.”

It did rather seem, at any rate, that growing close to Shin Myeongin would prove difficult.

“And yet you appear to be on quite intimate terms with Shin Myeongin, Sir Shin Hae.”

“That is a deeply mortifying assessment.”

“And so I should like to ask how one becomes close to a difficult sort of person.”

Was it really the right move, when one wished to grow close to Shin Hweein, to go and ask the very man himself for the trick of it?

And more to the point, did her words just now not also carry the implication that Shin Hweein was himself a difficult sort of person?

“That was a joke.”

“…”

“Mm, this is hard. I was told that if one simply blurts out whatever one usually thinks toward one’s parents and tacks ‘that was a joke’ onto the end, it tends to land.”

“…”

“Ah, that too was a joke.”

Shin Hweein’s heart longed desperately to flee this stifling atmosphere, but regrettably, the moment he stepped off the path Old Aengseol had trodden he would be cut off from the party in short order, and so he could not.

“There is no need to deliberately try to grow close to a person.”

“But you are close with Shin Myeongin, Sir Shin Hae. Is that not the fruit of effort?”

“Not in the least. We are not close to begin with. We have crossed paths a few times by chance and so we acknowledge each other, that is all.”

“Crossed paths. In other words, what one must do is contrive more chances to see the face.”

A sense of foreboding washed over Shin Hweein, that at this rate he might find himself forever entangled with a woman he couldn’t so much as hold a comfortable conversation with, and he hurried to ask.

“Must you really follow Lt. General Yun’s directive without fail?”

“Yes. He is an elder of the family, and I am of the branch line. …It may be a little hard to grasp from outside the family.”

“This is the twenty-first century. The age has passed when the direct line enjoys all the family has and the branch line is worked like slaves. Repay the family only in proportion to what you have received from it. And do not try to grow close to a person for work’s sake.”

“That is… ah.”

The scenery around them was steadily changing.

The shortcut Old Aengseol had carved out by prying open the seams of space was guiding the party along the swiftest route, skirting every danger of the Specter Realm.

The yokai that had lain in wait to ambush them, and perhaps every other trap besides, had all lost their meaning.

“Hey, Old Aengseol! How much further? I’m starting to run out of breath!”

— You. If you don’t take up some exercise on a regular basis, your belly will steadily start to protrude as you age. Mark that down as prophecy.

“Be quiet! How much further, I’m asking!”

— Just a little more.

Shin Myeongin could probably claim to have filled her whole quota for the day simply by summoning Old Aengseol.

…Of course, the truth was that Old Aengseol’s guiding them in person had nothing to do with Shin Myeongin.

“Exercise. Now that you mention it.”

“Mm?”

Hearing Old Aengseol’s voice, Yun Juna looked toward Shin Hweein and murmured it half to herself.

When he offered a sound without turning around, she asked.

“Do you do any exercise on a regular basis?”

“I do not. Or rather, I do not have the constitution for it.”

“That is an excuse. Your constitution does not build because you do not exercise.”

A second crisis came creeping toward Shin Hweein, and he felt himself give a slight shudder.

In Yun Juna’s voice there was the unmistakable confidence of one who had seized the high ground.

“No. I truly have a chronic illness that makes vigorous movement difficult.”

“And yet you have been moving for quite some time now. If you can move this much, then basic exercise is certainly within reach. And by repeating basic exercise, constitution accumulates and muscle is built.”

“At present I move only by drawing on spiritual power, and—”

“Then when you exercise, simply endure it with spiritual power. Have you tried?”

He had not.

In the old days, exercise had been the furthest thing from him. Merely getting through ordinary daily life had been more than his body could bear.

That Shin Hweein could now manage even a clumsy imitation of a normal person was entirely owed to the Indulgence lifting at least a portion of the curse. Even now, his internal organs were a wreck.

Because of it, his body, never once trained from the day he was born, was so frail that a sturdy elementary-schooler could have overpowered him.

“I shall assist you.”

“With what? Exercise?”

“I have confidence in exercise. I will train you at a level suited to you, Sir Shin Hae, so let us hold regular workout sessions. By doing so we will see each other often, and I shall splendidly carry out my uncle’s directive.”

“Did you hear a single word I just said.”

Meet on a regular basis and train the body, was it.

Setting aside affection or aversion, he could not begin to gauge whether such a thing was even possible.

He was at a loss how to answer this Yun Juna, who made no effort to hide her motives, and just then.

— We have arrived.

Old Aengseol came to a halt where she stood.

The party noticed in the same instant that the surrounding scenery had shifted, and that on the far side of that shift, five or six sorcerers stood waiting, already closing the distance toward them. Every face hardened.

“Don’t let a single one of them get away—”

“First, we open fire— eh?”

In the next instant attacks came flying in from several directions and slammed into Old Aengseol. Talismans wreathed in spiritual power, fireballs conjured by sorcery, that kind of thing.

— Ouch.

And not just one or two. Several at once.

It seemed they’d meant to fire all together the moment the party arrived, but to Shin Hweein’s eye it looked rather as though the whole volley had been sucked into Old Aengseol.

— I had only ever meant to escort you in this far.

Reeling under the simultaneous barrage, Old Aengseol lifted her head and smiled, her crimson eyes glinting.

A smile that said everything is going to plan.

— Since I’ve been struck first, there’s no help for it. I shall repay every blow they landed.

“Eh? Hey, I’ve got no more trinkets to give you!”

— Cheapskate, hush. I am only venting the anger of being hit.

Old Aengseol answered Shin Myeongin’s startled cry calmly, and then she vanished from sight.

A heartbeat later a hideous shriek tore through the air, and two human heads went sailing up into empty space.

It had happened with no chance whatsoever of resistance.

— Then I’m truly off. Survive!

“Confound it. In an instant—!”

“Do not be shaken! Re-cast the barrier!”

The man glaring at Shin Hweein from furthest back flicked open a fan to ward off the spattering droplets of blood, and shouted in a rather less-than-fluent Aeshin tongue.

“Do not lose the momentum, attack at once! That man and that woman, those two we must secure at all costs.”

“Do not order us about as you please!”

The voice that answered, meanwhile, belonged to a complete native of Aeshin.

Good. At least the reinforcements are not Hwa-guk men.

Sizing up the situation quickly, Shin Hweein waved a hand to scatter a few suppressive flame-shots and fixed his gaze straight ahead.

“The two of them must be brought back to the home country. Disobey me in this and I will not forgive you!”

The onmyoji’s kariginu, for a man of criminal standing, was a good deal more ornate than the one their Mochizuki wore.

Pointing at Shin Hweein and Shin Myeongin and declaring that the two absolutely must be secured: that meant he knew Shin Hweein had exerted some influence over the gate of the Specter Realm.

The traces of blood at the corner of his mouth confirmed that he had taken internal injury from the rebounded sorcery.

That man, above all others, had to die.

“Big bro! That bastard’s mine. He’s a disgrace to the peace-loving nation of Japan, I have to handle him with my own hands!”

So Mochizuki had been muttering an incantation all this time to take the onmyoji down, then, and now he called out as if to bar Shin Hweein’s path forward.

“Spare me the nonsense.”

Shin Hweein answered in a voice colder than he himself had intended.

“By what authority do you treat a criminal who has harmed the people of Aeshin as a disgrace to your own country? He committed his crime in Aeshin. He shall die in Aeshin, and he shall be judged by an Aeshin man. Ghost-Sword Maiden, am I wrong?”

“You are utterly correct.”

“You’re stating the obvious!”

Almost before any of them realized it, three of the sorcerers had stepped forward in a formation that put Mochizuki behind their backs.

Shin Myeongin in particular, who had quickly summoned her shikigami, ground her teeth fiercely.

“Whatever else I don’t know, the fact that I passed out when I crossed into the Specter Realm earlier, that was that bastard’s doing too, wasn’t it? Until I take my revenge with my own hands, my temper isn’t going to settle!”

“Mochizuki. Guji. If it is your power you wish to use, use it against the others. As it happens, those people are a bit too unwholesome for us to dirty our own hands with.”

Unlike Shin Myeongin, who was glaring at the onmyoji without a single thought in her head, Yun Juna seemed to have a hunch as to who these reinforcements were.

In truth, the same was so for Shin Hweein.

Of all things, an enemy reinforcement appearing at this moment, and an Aeshin man at that.

And among those, the ones who could collaborate this closely with an onmyoji: surely the highest probability was that they were sorcerers of the Seo House.

“Guji Mochizuki, you had a sorcery you were preparing?”

“Ah, yeah. Still, I… no. Understood. I respect your wishes.”

Guji Mochizuki no doubt had convictions of his own.

It might well have been a proposal sprung from a wholly innocent guilt and earnestness, born of the national temperament that loathes inconveniencing others.

But to an Aeshin man, it sounded like nothing other than a self-centered remark.

Parties unable to understand one another because of differences in culture: this was precisely what such situations meant.

— Guji. When I raise my voice loud, an opening will appear in those reinforcements without fail, whatever the onmyoji may do. Strike at that moment.

“Okay!”

“How dare you, before our very eyes, work some petty little trick!”

The onmyoji and the enemy sorcerers all began chanting incantations at once, calling out their shikigami.

Meanwhile Shin Myeongin’s shikigami suddenly transformed into a massive tiger and tore forward, while Yun Juna charged in with red sorcery-power coiling about her greatsword.

— At last, opponents worth the trouble!

— Hoho, and as it happens, I was just in want of the blood of the strong! What splendid timing!

Flame-tail and Leon, Shin Hweein’s shikigami both, likewise leapt forward once again.

Flame-tail had not yet shown his full power, and Leon, that absurd specimen who grew stronger the more blood he saw, would not be pressed back even against a shikigami handled by a Rank-Two onmyoji.

And then there was Shin Hweein.

“Seo House thrall! Do you dare violate a contract sworn on the family’s name?! For every measure of Shin Hae’s blood that flows in me, you shall be made to pay the price!”

He cried it out, lifting his voice with every ounce of force he could muster.

“Hah. What nonsense is this.”

“We are not sorcerers belonging to the Seo House.”

“He’s a madman, that’s all. Attack…!”

The sorcerers denied his words in unison, as though they had foreseen his reaction, and turned their sorcery upon him.

Yet Shin Hweein, almost as if he had been waiting for it, flung himself willingly into the very middle of them.

“Yah—!”

Since Shin Hweein, the one handling the shikigami, had withdrawn to the rear, Shin Myeongin saw the scene of him being caught in the crossfire with perfect clarity and came charging out with a yelp. But the thing she feared did not come to pass.

First, an auspicious purple cloud spread out from his body and devoured every one of the sorceries whole.

“Khh—!”

And though they were not the parties to the contract, the sorcerers all spat blood at once.

Shin Hweein’s surmise, that the lady of the Seo House would have made her subordinates bear the price of any breach of contract, had hit the mark precisely.

— Now!

That fatal opening gave Guji Mochizuki more than enough time to unleash a grand sorcery.

“—Hotenshi-no-Kami!”

A shadow fell across them all.

In the instant Shin Hweein began to raise his head to see what it was.

— KRAA-OOOOM!

A colossal pillar of light came plunging down from the sky and crushed the enemy sorcerers flat.

They had presumably set some sorcerous defenses of their own, and yet those too, along with everything else, were ground to pieces.

“…Don’t tell me that just now—”

“Yeah. Little finger.”

Guji Mochizuki answered in a voice of utter seriousness.

It seemed casting that single sorcery had drained the strength from his whole body, for he had dropped to one knee on the ground. But having just witnessed sorcery of such magnitude, the figure he cut did not look a light one.

“Big bro, doesn’t a bit of faith in Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami start to grow in you too?”

“Faith, I cannot say.”

He likely did not have the spiritual reserves to maintain that for long. The black pillar broke apart into innumerable particles and scattered, revealing beyond it the sorcerers sprawled across the ground.

“A measure of trust, however, does begin to take root.”

And, alongside it, a certain conviction concerning the connection between himself and Hotenshi-no-Kami.

For it stood to reason. In the instant that black pillar of light had manifested, Shin Hweein had, for some reason he could not name, felt an extraordinary familiarity with it.

…As though it were a part of his own body.