Chapter 12 — The Sorcerer And Hotenshi-no-Kami (3)

The man had ability enough, as expected, to be sent out alone on the Seo matriarch’s order.

Even so, he fell short of anything that could be called First-Rank.
And on the other side stood Leon, who alone rated as a true Second-Rank; Flame-tail, who could briefly summon force on par with the upper tier of Second-Rank; Yun Juna, a Second-Rank awakened; and Shin Myeongin, who had cravenly borrowed her parents’ shikigami.
Pitted against that company, he had no choice but to be driven back.

When Old Aengseol had said dangerous, but possible, her tally had surely counted this man in.

If only I had kept Mochizuki’s sorcery in reserve, this would have gone more smoothly. …No, thanks to him we cleared a troublesome number of sorcerers in one stroke; I’ve no business complaining. There must have been a Second-Rank among them too.

A Second-Rank sorcerer has firmly entered the ranks of the strong, and is, at the same time, a particularly hard subject by which to gauge strength.

For a sorcerer to rise to First-Rank, he must meet one precondition: he must be able, alone, to “dispatch” a Rank-Four yokai.
On that account the leap from Second-Rank to First-Rank is brutally hard.

And so two sorcerers of the same Second-Rank can be worlds apart.
One barely manages a single Rank-Five yokai; another, also Second-Rank, sweeps aside several Rank-Five yokai by himself, and can even hold his own, after a fashion, against a lone Rank-Four.

The man before them was plainly the latter sort.
And yet, even so, this sat easier on the mind than facing several Second-Rank sorcerers at once.

“I’m warning you—.”

The sorcerer shoved aside the tiger-yokai that had fallen on him, with no great difficulty, and rose to his feet, speaking in a low, settled voice.

He drew the spiritual power of his whole body into a combat stance, ready to loose an offensive spell at any instant, and Yun Juna let out a long, deep breath, huu.

“Fight me in earnest and of course I’ll be at risk too, but one or two of you will die for certain. You’re of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, aren’t you? I never meant to touch you to begin with. I only need to kill that man called Shin Hae. So—.”

“You know we’re of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses? Then you’ll know this, too.”

Shin Myeongin cut the man off in a chilling voice.

“The Eight Pure-Blood Houses don’t abandon their comrades and run.”
“That’s the first agreeable thing you’ve said.”
“The first?!”

Yun Juna smiled, baring her teeth, and tightened her grip on the greatsword.

“We already know perfectly well you’re getting ready to attack us. You came out here having thrown away even your name. Would the Eight Pure-Blood Houses really make you hesitate? Did we look stupid enough to fall for some cheap divide-and-conquer? Ah, of course, the rabble of the Seo House might.”
“Fine, then I’ll start with the lady!”

Even as he said it, the man flung out an arm, and the spell he loosed was aimed at Shin Hweein.

The man’s very existence was woven from lies; that was no longer enough to surprise anyone.

To Shin Hweein’s spirit-eye, it had been plain from the very start.

“Fire-blood. The art of Dharmavachya.”

— Krrhk!

At the spell Shin Hweein chanted with quiet composure, a flame fiercer than any he had yet kindled rose up and devoured the man’s sorcery.

Dharmavachya is one of the thirty-six Hungry Ghosts catalogued in the Saddharma-smṛty-upasthāna Sūtra.
It is said to be the form taken in death by one who, lacking any faith of his own yet hungry for the gain of his own mouth, kept himself alive by spouting falsified sermons to others, and it can be sustained only by the Dharma.

By “Dharma” is meant, of course, the preaching of the monks.
But the range of Dharma that a Dharmavachya summoned through the Hungry-Ghost Dominion can consume runs somewhat broader, and it can prey even upon the spell-arts of sorcerers.

Even among the arts of the Hungry-Ghost Dominion, of course, this is exceptionally advanced sorcery, so the mere forging of a Dharmavachya demands a vast store of spiritual power, and the Dharmavachya thus completed is prone to going berserk soon after.

“What—?!”
“An opening!”

But under Shin Hweein’s perfect command, the Dharmavachya that Arong had become devoured even the spell-art the upper-Second-Rank sorcerer had loosed with all his strength, cleanly, and used it as fuel to swell his own force further.

Bewildered by a feat unheard-of and unseen, the sorcerer had his defensive barriers stripped away by several layers under Yun Juna’s surprise assault.

“Miss Myeongin, attack!”
“Dharmavachya? That’s… hm? No, but the shape of the sorcery is different. Strictly speaking ours is only a modification too, not a sorcery of our own, so… hm? Even so.”
“Miss Myeongin!”
“Ah, right!”

She had clearly heard of it somewhere before, the way Shin Myeongin’s ear pricked up.
But the Shin House too had only taken sorcery developed from Buddhist transmissions and reworked it freely for its own ends.

Shin Hweein had taken that and fused it, fittingly, with his own fire-realm sorcery; no one had grounds to call him to account.

“Attack! I’ll heal you if you’re hurt, so push him!”

— Kurr-huh-uung!

Watching the tiger-yokai, charged with Shin Myeongin’s spiritual power, charge the sorcerer once more, Shin Hweein was inwardly impressed.

It was a shikigami borrowed from the family, true. Or rather, because it was borrowed, handling it could be no easy thing.

Yet she was wielding every shikigami-augmentation art she had been taught so far with deft skill, amplifying the shikigami to its fullest and commanding it.

“To wield a shikigami so far beyond your station…!”
“This bastard’s insulting you! Stomp him! Trample him flat!”

— Kuh-hoo-oo-oong!

That shikigami was indeed the human-form porter shikigami from earlier.

From its heelless feet Shin Hweein had inferred the shikigami’s true nature.
It was none other than a chuin, a tiger-shapeshifter yokai that could pass between the forms of man and tiger.

Aeshin has fewer indigenous yokai than one might think, and even in the scattered transmissions that survive, the tales run more often to ghosts arisen from people who died in injustice, or to dokkaebi born of familiar household objects, than to yokai proper.

This was because, in truth, the tigers that lived in the mountains frightened the common people more than any yokai.

To match it, there were a great many tigers in Aeshin.

Just that many.

Any middling low spirit that met a tiger of true spirit-power would be torn apart on the spot, and the people along with it, into the bargain.

And so, rather than sightings of yokai, what had to abound were tales of fleeing from tigers, of surviving an encounter with one, even of falling in love with one, every variety of tiger story there was.

With even the stories trampled by tigers, the indigenous yokai could scarcely hold their own, and the only ones who fared at all well were a few cunning, fiercely individuated breeds of fox-yokai.

In such circumstances, among the tiger-yokai handed down in Jin and in Aeshin there is one well suited for use as a shikigami: the chuin, which can take human form.

Clever and strong both, it is hard to deal with, but once subdued and made into a shikigami, no shikigami is finer than this one.

As the sorcerer struggling against it had said, it was not a yokai a Shin Myeongin, who had not even passed her coming-of-age rite, should have dared so much as consider.

— Are you faring well in body, young master?
— I thank you for holding back. I am unharmed in body; do not be anxious.
— If I… that is, if I lent even the strength of a handmaid attending the young master, I’m sure I could finish him off.
— No. You must keep your true self hidden from those two, no? Yield that role to me, then. However angry with him you may be, I am no less angry myself.
— Tch, I’ve been caught out.

As Shin Hweein wondered, again and again, from whom on earth she could have borrowed a chuin, Geum Moa’s voice slipped into his ear.

The voice was calm and gentle, but Shin Hweein, who had spent long years at her side, could tell she was at this moment furious to the very crown of her head.

Geum Moa, most likely, had been writhing with the urge to tear the sorcerer’s body to ribbons from the instant Shin Hweein’s body was run through.

But that was Shin Hweein’s portion.

“Khaaack…! What manner of shikigami are you handling?! It plainly defies all reason, damn you!”
“Hardly more than the Seo House, which all but plunged the whole Capital into chaos.”

The Dharmavachya’s work was not yet finished.

Pressed by no fewer than four Second-Rank-class adversaries, the chuin turned into a vast tiger, Yun Juna swinging her keen greatsword, and Flame-tail and Leon besides, the sorcerer was forced to burn through, one by one, the dozens of layered shields, barriers, and cursed objects he had no doubt prepared beforehand.

“Formation, ujung. Khaaht!”

And yet, befitting the Seo House’s secret weapon, every time the sorcerer somehow seized an opening and wrung out a spell-art in counter-attack, the Dharmavachya pounced, and more than half of those spells ended up devoured by the beast.

The Dharmavachya’s duration… is, after all, not going to be long.

To begin with, it had been forcibly half-manifested by swallowing the blood of a Second-Rank onmyoji whole.

This experience alone would raise Arong’s rank considerably, but for him to take the field as Dharmavachya again would take many long years yet.

Kill the man before then.

It would have been good to pry even a little information from him before killing him, but no matter how Hweein looked at it, the man did not seem about to give up anything willingly; there was no help for it.

For a creature merely moving under the Seo matriarch’s command, the depth of preparation felt a touch excessive.

And the entanglement with the Hwa-guk Onmyo Bureau’s radicals seemed sordid beyond imagining.

But all of that was only suspicion, and the maddening thing was that he could present no physical proof.

Still, that the Seo House must be watched far more closely from here on is plain. It is at least fortunate that the Shin and the Yun share this knowledge.

As for the Shin among them, it was a pity that the crucial collaborator there had to be Shin Myeongin.

And just as he was rounding off his thoughts and stepping his staff forward to finish the man, it happened.

“Hotenshi-no-Kami!”

On a spirited voice from behind, a black ray-like surge of force shot out in a straight line and pierced the sorcerer through the brow.

“Phew. With this, at least, I’ve saved my face as an archer-priest!”
“…”

He turned to look, and there was Mochizuki, index finger thrust out at the sorcerer in a posing stance, wearing a smug expression.

The help had been decisive, true enough.
But it was also undeniable that everyone else had ground down the sorcerer’s defenses through hard, exhausting struggle while he merely slipped in the finishing blow at the convenient moment, and so the looks turned on him were not entirely sweet.

In the middle of all this, as if to certify the sorcerer’s death, the sorcery hiding his true features came undone, and the man’s bare face lay openly exposed.

“—Watch out!”

Sensing something, Shin Hweein cried out urgently and slammed his staff to the ground, and tree-trunks shot up all at once beneath the party’s feet, yanking them down and toppling them.

At the same instant the man’s face leapt skyward with a wet, splitting noise and shot like an arrow toward Shin Hweein, the one person still looking his way.

— KWA-RR-RRUNG!

Struck midway by a lightning bolt that fell from somewhere, the face lost all of its foul force and crashed to the ground.

— Krrng, kuh-rrng.

“Heheh. I thank you.”

Stroking the head of his “last resort,” which had taken the field for the very first time, Shin Hweein sent it back into his own head, and watched his party pick themselves up off the ground one by one.

Then, at the sight of the sorcerer’s corpse, neck torn off, blood pouring out in rivulets, sprawled on the ground, they recoiled in horror.

“What was that just now… eek.”
“To use such cruel sorcery.”

— Oho. The man seemed to have a bit of spirit; I’d half a mind to take him as a thrall.
— And this sort calls itself one of Aeshin’s sorcerers, and wears the badge for it? A disgrace. A disgrace, I say.

Shin Hweein picked the man’s head up off the ground.

Most likely he had wielded so vicious a spell-art to exploit even the opening his own death created, killing an enemy while keeping his true face hidden.

But it is said from of old that the lightning bolt carries within it the power of pama, the breaking of evil.

The man’s head, with nothing below the neck left to it and unable to resist, exposed to Neuldam’s lightning, had lost all its force; it could not so much as finish the last sorcery meant to hide its face, and so it lay bare.

“Do you know who this man is?”
“He’s probably had cosmetic surgery. But if I take it to my uncle…”

Yun Juna reached a hand toward the face in Shin Hweein’s grasp, but he twisted his hand aside and dodged her.

To her, gazing at him with a puzzled expression, Shin Hweein put the question:

“This is a matter between the Seo House and myself; is it well for the Yun House to step in? You’ll take a loss for it.”
“No, my own operation here was interfered with just the same. I’ve no intention of leaving it as your problem alone. Though, of course, whether you’ll trust me on the word of a mere branch-line member—”
“No. I trust you.”

When Shin Hweein nodded readily and handed over the sorcerer’s head, Yun Juna received it with a look of surprise even as she took it.

“Of course, I do not ask you to handle it. Press the Seo House directly and they would shrug it off, and bear a grudge against the Yun House for it besides.”
“But we’ve gained the knowledge that much lies hidden in the Seo House. The head of this man will give us certainty.”
“Right! Those bastards have looked suspicious from the start, really… ugh.”

Shin Myeongin shoved herself abruptly between the two, screwed up her face, and said:

“Hey, Shin Hae! Just come over to the Shin House, why don’t you? At the very least we’d make it so the Seo House couldn’t target you!”
“…Now, your mother is of the Seo House, is she not. Surely you don’t mean, on the strength of this business, to go and confront your own mother over it.”
“Do I look like a fool? If Mom really were involved she’d deny it all the harder, and if she weren’t, she’d just scold me.”

To think Shin Myeongin was capable of sound judgment.

Shin Hweein had never been so grateful to be wearing a mask as he was in this moment.

Had he too worn a look of surprise like Yun Juna’s, Shin Myeongin would have flown into a proper rage.

“Hm. So, big sisters.”

Despite the feat of putting a hole through the sorcerer’s brow, Guji Mochizuki, half-ignored even afterward, gingerly opened his mouth.

“You’re both people of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, then? Why are such important persons out here at a scene like this…?”
“Ah.”

Yun Juna made a dumb-sounding noise.

Shin Myeongin was just now puffing out her chest, all set to swagger as if to say figured it out at last, did you, but Yun Juna traded a glance with Shin Hweein, and the two of them nodded at the same moment, then each seized hold of Shin Myeongin and Mochizuki and pulled them apart.

“The undertaking has been carried out successfully; let us disband here.”
“Uh, huh? What? But we did the job well; what about a wrap-up drink…”
“You’ve worked hard. I’ll be in touch when we set a date for training.”
“No, training… all right, understood.”

At their exchange, Shin Myeongin’s eyes went wide and she shouted:

“When did you two set up a private meet?! What is that, that’s totally low! No, wait, let go of me a second! How do you two even plan to get back—”
“Right, then. Let’s go gather up the sorcerers’ bodies.”

Yun Juna hauled Shin Myeongin off bodily, and the two of them drew away from the rest.

Having quickly finished his farewells with them, Shin Hweein turned to Mochizuki, who was watching their retreating backs with what looked oddly like regret, and said:

“Guji Mochizuki, you too. Gather up every body you have to deal with. We’ll be off the moment after.”
“Hm? Off, you say. To where?”
“Your shrine.”

The work had ended sooner than imagined, as it turned out.

It was a small pity not to be able to see Ham Seoyeon’s gut in person, but at present there was something more important than that.

“You were going to tell me about Hotenshi-no-Kami, were you not.”