Chapter 12 — The Sorcerer And Hotenshi-no-Kami (2)

“Wh, what…!”

The reinforcements had come to relieve him, and in a single stroke they were swept clean away. First by Old Aengseol’s counter, then by Mochizuki’s little finger.
The onmyoji could not keep the dismay off his face.

“How can the sorcerers of a great house be so feeble!”
“Hardly. They were never anything more than sacrifices to you. Sacrifices to pay the price of your contract in your stead.”

The voice that answered the onmyoji’s lament rang out from far closer than he could have imagined.
How could it not. Shin Hweein had already taken up position at his back.

“—Hah!”

Sensing it, the onmyoji proved he had the craft of a 2nd-Rank after all. On the instant he left a substitute in his place and translocated himself far away.
What he left behind was a sorcerous bomb, packed thick with spiritual power.

It was plastered all over with talismans and looked ready to detonate at any second. Shin Hweein stretched a hand toward the cursed thing and murmured.

“Go and chase after him, you as well.”

— KA-BOOM!

In the very next moment, a thunderous roar erupted at the spot to which the onmyoji had translocated.

Shin Hweein leaned on his staff, advanced, and intoned.

“They who go about leaving their doors open shall not be able to blame the thief when he enters.

The front gate is bolted; he comes through the back. Let the guest, then, do as he has done.

The god who keeps the great gate is watching. How then would he steal the key and pose as the master?

When the time of judgement comes, the front gate and the back gate alike shall be shut, and only the gate of hell shall open to receive him.“

“Kuh-keoh, cough! How—!”

Truly, this one had certain skill, unlike the foes Shin Hweein had faced until now.
For when the smoke parted to disclose him, the onmyoji stood all but unscathed, though Shin Hweein had been sure the ambush was very nearly perfect.

He had not managed to shield the whole of himself, though. The tip of one hand was wounded and bleeding, and he must have burned through several of the warding charms he carried besides, so Shin Hweein decided to be content with that.

“That bomb was the thing standing in your place, was it not. Then it should be easy enough for it to find its way to where the master ought to be.”
“You, you… you are a sorcerer of a noted house!”
“Insolent. To learn who I am, you ought first to surrender your own name. That is the courtesy.”

There was no telling how much of his self-defense the man had left, but he must already have spent a fair portion of it.
He had thrown out every shikigami on hand to keep the party from rushing him all at once, and he would no longer be able to call up any with real force.

“They say onmyoji wield mysterious spells passed down in secret across the generations in Hwa-guk. Come, then. Show one to me. The more time you draw out, the more your shikigami fall and the worse your position grows. While you have only one opponent, should you not put forth all you truly have?”
“You think to look down on me. You, whose spiritual power is hardly worth speaking of…!”

The onmyoji bit down on his teeth as Shin Hweein had bid him and wove a mudra.
And astonishingly, what he attempted was a sorcery worked upon Shin Hweein’s mind.

He must have watched how easily Shin Hweein had earlier shrugged off the other sorcerers’ attacks, and judged that physical means would not avail.

But unfortunately, that was only because I warded it off through the talismans of Purple Cloud, and it will not be so simply warded off this time.

And as for arts that work upon the mind… I now have my own measures in place.

Unlike when he had used the power of Purple Cloud, this time a beguiling, pinkish aura wreathed Shin Hweein’s head in a faint mist.

For how long the two sorcerers stood glaring at each other like that, there was no telling. And then, with no warning, Shin Hweein abruptly vomited blood.

“Khh!”
“Pwhe-hyeeeek!”

The onmyoji, by contrast, retched up four times as much, his whole body stained crimson.

“How, how could…! That ability worked even on direct-line members of the Seo House!”
“So. You wove sorcery in among your persuasion, did you. You did well to escape punishment from the Seo House. Unless it was that—.”

Just as the onmyoji had drawn a direct-line Seo into his scheme, the Seo House too, perhaps, had had something it meant to accomplish by making use of the onmyoji.
There was no knowing what the matriarch, who doted dreadfully on her youngest son, would have thought. At the very least, the head of the Seo House was not the kind of man to sit idle while a member of his clan was made a plaything by some 2nd-Rank onmyoji.

Still, the onmyoji had managed to bring into being a dream-demon capable of operating with the whole Capital as its territory, and that achievement was reason enough for them to watch and see how things went. That was all.
Perhaps the reinforcements that had shown up earlier had been meant to dispose of the onmyoji too, once they had finished off Shin Hweein.

No. In that case, perhaps even now…

Shin Hweein opened his spirit-eye wide and stepped toward the onmyoji.

“There is a way for you to live.”
“You dare speak of my life! Keh-keh!”
“Look at the truth. You too were no more than a thing to be played with. By the radicals inside the Onmyo Bureau, and by the Seo House. What have you gained from this affair? Is there anything you have come to know that will truly be of any use to you?”

Just as the onmyoji had spent two 3rd-Rank ability-users as discards in his hand, so too, beyond any doubt, had the radicals spent him as a discard in theirs.
He himself must feel as much.

“Nonsense! All of it is part of a grand plan to restore the Greater Empire of Japan as the hegemon of East Asia once again! What would a low cur like you understand of such patriotism!”
“And yet, as things stand, you will accomplish nothing, and Hwa-guk too will lose its talented men in vain on foreign soil, and that will be the end of it all. The Seo House may even seek redress from Hwa-guk for the loss of its own sorcerers.”
“…”

The power radiating from Shin Hweein’s spirit-eye expanded by another step and laid itself over the whole of the area.
His eye was fixed only upon the onmyoji, yet his sight read every current of energy moving through the man’s body, and beyond that, every flow of energy through the surrounding terrain as well.

It could not compare with his prior awakening, but he had the sense of having recovered nearly half of that state.
A little more strain and damage would come to his body, yet such a price was cheap against his own life and the lives of his companions.

“Will the Shin House sit still after the precious daughter of its hearth was made a target? Will the Yun House, whose pride has been spat upon? Did the Three Capital Houses, then, look so easy to you? Now that you have actually tasted them, how does it stand. Rather different, was it not, from what others told you. Even the useless youngest of the Seo House is at this very moment recovering in the shelter of his family, as though nothing had happened. And meanwhile, you have lost every one of your comrades and are fleeing in a miserable rout.”
“Enough…”
“Ah, yes. If you die here, will Hwa-guk so much as acknowledge your patriotism? Surely not. You are an incompetent, a wretched creature, a traitor who leaked precious intelligence to an enemy nation and died for it. They will curse your soul, and if they ever find your corpse they will curse it a million times and a million times again. You may think it well enough to die for your fatherland, but to them you are nothing but a piece of trash that, even in death, drags the name of that fatherland through the mud.”
“Stop it—!”
“A man has meaning only if he lives.”

Shin Hweein, with the faintest of smiles, narrowed the distance between them.

“Only the living can wash away an ill name. Only the living can deny a lie. And history, too, is written by those who survive. If you would not have your name set down in the histories as a fool, you must at the very least come within reach of those histories. Will you live and die as a foot-soldier toyed with to the very end by your superiors? Is your life so trifling a thing to you? Already your shikigami are dying. Do you think those shikigami will hold no grudge against you? Did they not at least wish to stand upon a stage that could shed honor on the name of their country?”
“What… what is it you want from me…!”
“What. Only that we live, both of us, and pursue our gains.”

By now the gap between the onmyoji and Shin Hweein had narrowed to a single step.

If someone, far off, were waiting to take aim at both men at once, it would be close enough now that they might steady their breath and wait for the moment the two shadows wholly overlapped.

“You know well enough that the Seo House is hunting you. That is why you struck at us alone, without joining hands with their sorcerers in the first place. Even just now, you had the chance to save them and did not. Am I wrong?”
“…You are not.”
“What I ask of you is simple. I want the head of a man bigger than you. Cooperate in that, and there will be no great difficulty in your surviving. It makes a fine proposal for you as well, for it is your chance to dispose of the man at the top who treated you as a worthless expendable and threw you away. If it is the fatherland you are for, would it not be the better thing to sweep such trash out at the earliest opportunity?”
“But how.”

The dream sorcery that had been wreathing only Shin Hweein’s head had, by some quiet contagion, spread to the onmyoji as well.

Dream sorcery worked chiefly upon the mind, but because its principal authority was concentrated upon dream-space, it ought not to have been able to bring such force to bear in waking reality at all.
Yet now it had all but seized the man’s mind in its grip and was squeezing it at will.

The principle was simple.
A reflection of sorcery.

The man was at this moment paying the price for having recklessly cast sorcery upon Shin Hweein.
In return for attempting to attack another’s mind, he was now exposing his own, with not so much as a single screen of protection between them.

“You take me as your hostage and request a private audience with him. Or have you never had a private audience with him before, even once? Surely you were not so little valued as that?”
“How could that be. I am a 2nd-Rank onmyoji whose future was already assured! I was set to become a high officer of the Onmyo Bureau in time!”
“Then it should be easy. Could a man who returns with so important a hostage be denied a private audience? With his disposal I shall have payment enough, and at that point our deal is concluded. I have full confidence in my own getaway, so you need not even trouble to return me safely to Aeshin. You gain your life, I gain my prize. What a finely balanced contract, is it not, that serves us both?”
“How am I to, to trust you…!”
“Simple. We contract it.”

Shin Hweein drew blood at the tip of his finger and extended that hand toward the sorcerer.

“We swear a blood-contract that we will not attack one another. Since the blood we shed bears equal value, we must each pour our whole strength into upholding the contract. Is there a contract one can trust so surely as that?”
“Blood-contract… Hah.”

Only then did the sorcerer notice that blood was flowing from his own hand as well.
He hesitated a long while, then offered the hand to Shin Hweein.

Shin Hweein, with a gentle smile, clasped his hand, and even took a step closer to embrace him and pat his back.

“Now that we have made our contract, your blood is the same as mine. As promised, I shall not harm you.”
“A, ah.”
“Not directly, at least.”

In the very next moment, a vast spiritual force ran through them both.

“—Khak!”

Shin Hweein had, of course, braced for the attack from the very start. And what was more, his spirit-eye had been gauging the exact direction and intensity of the strike, so he could keep his own damage to a minimum.
To throw up a defensive technique openly would have risked the attacker catching on, so he had had to take the hit as it came. That alone was a pity.

“Cough, kuh-keoh.”
“What a foolish, pitiable thing you are. In the end, you are nothing but a third-rate villain who died being toyed with to the last by another’s hand.”

The onmyoji, by contrast, had truly known nothing, and had been pierced clean through the heart.
That was, of course, thanks to Shin Hweein’s small adjustment of his position.

“You tricked me. I, cur, se…”
“Hoh. By what right do you bear a 2nd-Rank license, then. By our contract our blood was made equal. With what, then, will you curse what?”
“From the beginning, you—…”
“Hardly. Your curse was never anything I feared from the start.”

The thing to be feared was only an enemy of greater stature.
The reason he had gone so far as to make a contract with the onmyoji was so that, even from a foe who would die in any case, he might wring every last use from his blood.

The onmyoji was already dead and could not hear his words.

“The blood of a 2nd-Rank onmyoji, brimful of spiritual power, left behind together with his curse. With this much…”

The wound that had pierced him through was already healing.
Of the powers of blood that Shin Hweein had taken from Attila, most were of the rudimentary sort, but among them there was one of immediate use: the ability to spend blood to heal one’s wounds.

Spending blood in great quantity to heal himself could never be a viable matter for Shin Hweein, who suffered ordinarily from anaemia besides. But at this moment there was blood he could spend as freely as his own, and there was no need to refuse it.

“So you had one trick left after all.”

To collect the blood while he was about it, Shin Hweein set to severing the onmyoji’s head and stowing it away.
Just then the man who had pierced him and the onmyoji through both at once stepped forth into view.

He had concealed himself with sorcery, hooded his face, and worn a mask over that besides. But to Shin Hweein, who could examine his target by spiritual power alone, none of it was any resistance worth speaking of.

“A man of the Seo House, then.”
“Let me say in advance: resistance won’t get you much. It might work on greenhorns, but at my level I’m equipped to repel even legitimate enforcement of contracts.”
“Indeed. The Seo House has always made such tricks its specialty. You have a knack for losing a man his path and at last casting him into stupor. That the Seo House should have been behind this whole affair is rather amusing.”
“Trying to throw me off won’t work either. I’m not a Seo associate. I came merely to fulfill my object. However…”

With the onmyoji’s death, every shikigami he had been driving would have vanished, no doubt.
The party had at last finished off even the stubbornly clinging Seo sorcerers, and now they had spotted the suspicious caster standing with Shin Hweein and were running over.

By all appearances, it would be a hard thing to take on the whole of them and kill Shin Hweein besides.

“To think the only ones gathered here would be this incompetent a bunch… I’ll come again next time. Until then, do your best not to die, and hold out.”
“Indeed. Did you think that, by offering so handsome a farewell, you would be permitted to depart?”
“Mm?”

The sorcerer had been on the point of vanishing his body away as before, but now his voice came out as though things had not gone as he intended.

Meanwhile, within Shin Hweein’s bosom, a single talisman shone with a dazzling light.
The warding charm of the Gate-King God.

“It seems you did not hear the spell I murmured a moment ago. The Gate-King God saw plainly with His own eye the manner in which you, like a thief, were skulking about behind us. How, then, did you believe you could flee through the same gate?”
“You can’t be serious. How did you block my ability. Surely…”

A faint smile gathered at the corners of Shin Hweein’s mouth.
The spell that flowed from his lips once again was almost like a song.

“The god who keeps the great gate is watching. How then would he steal the key and pose as the master?

When the time of judgement comes, the front gate and the back gate alike shall be shut, and only the gate of hell shall open to receive him.“

Shin Hweein, reciting once again the latter portion of the spell he had spoken earlier, drew his spiritual power up into it.
In keeping with it, from the dead onmyoji’s body the last drop of blood was drawn forth and gathered together in the air, and the misty thing that had wreathed his body opened its mouth and swallowed it whole.

“If you will not name yourself, I shall give you a name. You are a thief. …All the gates within this region answer to me, and the only gate granted to a thief is the gate of hell.”
“This can’t be. Surely you cannot be one who surpasses the Eight Pure-Blood Hous—.”
“Kill that bastard—!”

Shin Myeongin’s shrill, high-pitched voice rang out, smothering the man’s shaken one.

The shikigami she was riding drank up the overflowing spiritual power, swelled by yet another measure, and at over four meters in bulk threw itself bodily upon the man!