Chapter 2 — The Fire-Wielding Yokai (2)

Tales of tree-yokai had come down through every country in countless forms.
In Aeshin, back in the long-ago days when the land did not yet bear that name, there had famously been a wood-god called Duduri, worshipped in certain regions.
There was even a story that the famous Young Master Bihyeong, son of that king of ghosts, had set Duduri to work and so raised a bridge in a single morning.

But Duduri’s true form, when all was said, was a wooden-image shape rather than a whole tree, and what was now charging toward them was trees.
The likelier possibility, then, was that these were the human-faced trees said to grow in the neighboring land of Jin¹, or else some other tree-yokai of the sort the Westerners spoke of.

So he had been thinking.

“My lord, this is no ordinary branch. The yokai force it holds within it is quite formidable! If you were to use it as a staff, would your sorcery not also see some progress?”
“That is Duduri itself!”

What Hoa thrust out at him now, having come running back with a pack of tree-yokai at her heels and a face full of pride, was a long, well-shaped wooden mace.
No matter how one looked at it, the thing was a yokai’s very body, possessed of no small spiritual nature and yokai force.
Its breath had been cut, however, likely already seen to by Hoa, so what remained was in fact simply timber of a quality far too fine to be spent as a mere staff.

“Hoo hoo, surely it could not be the famous Duduri. It must only be a tree-dokkaebi of a similar origin to him.”

So Hoa said, with a bashful laugh, as if to suggest would a creature of mine come by so easily, were it truly Duduri?

Yet that modesty of hers only made her look the more suspect.

— There’s a human too!
— Let us kill them, and so avenge our elder!
— I shall strangle them dead, and then tear them to pieces!

And the way the tree-monsters flung themselves forward with the desperation of children avenging slain parents fanned his suspicion further still.
But hungry and wanting an enemy, he had no help for it; he could only set the wooden mace against the ground and lean on it for a staff.

— Th-that wretched human, using our elder for a cane!
— I should pull out his spine and ram it through his eyes!

“My heart is heavy.”
“My lord need not trouble himself. This yokai had sought to dishonor this maiden, and so I cut him down. And as for those tree-yokai, they are demons who, when a man enters the forest, suck his blood until he dies.”
“…Let us say it is so, then.”

It was, in all likelihood, the truth of what she said.
And yet, considering the manner in which he had come to meet Hoa in the first place, there was no telling whether the dokkaebi had first sought to dishonor her, or whether she had been the one to lure him into the crime.

What was more, those things were tree-yokai.
Yes, that creatures so neatly suited to be dealt with by Shin Hweein’s flames should appear at just this moment was too convenient by far.

“My lord, the timing is perfect. I shall teach you the incantation at once, so try it out on them!”
“Yet my mother used to say that, even when one learned but a single incantation, one was to turn its meaning over in one’s heart and write it out a full thousand times to fix it within oneself before ever putting it to the test.”
“There is no leisure for that now. Quickly, repeat after me. So speaks the master of the flame that destroys evil—”
“Hoo… So speaks the master of the flame that destroys evil—”

He had had some inkling of this from the moment she came dragging the tree-monsters in her wake, so to Hoa’s bullheaded brand of field instruction Shin Hweein only let out one sigh, then meekly followed the incantation after her.
He had never had occasion to wield sorcery, yet in fundamental theory and in the disposition required for handling the arts his mother had schooled him with the utmost severity in his early years, and so his bearing as he intoned the incantation was nothing if not reverent and earnest.

At the time, since he was bound to die without ever practicing sorcery or commanding shikigami at all, he had inwardly resented his mother for refusing to play along with him a little more freely and for caring only to uphold the dignity of the Shin House.
But now that things had come to this pass, he truly could not lift his face before her.

“Become a bullet and pierce — Flame-shot!”
“Become a bullet and pierce — Flame-shot.”

— Kyaaaack!

With a slight space of time between them, the two flame-shots crossed the air and each brought down one of the tree-yokai at the head of the pack.

Whether through his mother’s teaching or not, the sorcery he had invoked for the first time by uttering an incantation proved effective.
Until now he had merely been converting his spiritual power into flame and flinging it; now, by giving the flame distinct shape and meaning through an incantation, he added weight and speed to it, and it brought forth a power not to be compared with what had gone before.

A single flame-shot of his struck the lead creature of the pack through the trunk and bored a hole clean through it, and the fire then spread to its whole body and set it aflame in an instant, so that the force of it was made plain enough.
This was, of course, partly because the Indulgence had once more caused his flame to grow, on top of his having learned flame-shot.

“My lord, however did you come by a flame so much stronger in the meantime…!”
“There was a tie. So speaks the master of the flame that destroys evil — become a bullet and pierce, Flame-shot!”
“Oh, you do it so very well! Flame-shot!”

There she was, the one who herself abbreviated the whole long incantation to the single word “flame-shot,” now openly fawning over Shin Hweein, who had only just stepped into the practice of real sorcery.
He was so put out by it that he wanted to fling a flame-shot at her, but at present he was too busy contending with the tree-yokai to do so.

— Kill that woman! She’s treating us like toys!
— The man’s no easy mark either — he’s wielding some strange flame!
— All at once! Attack together!

The tree-yokai, having finally brought Shin Hweein into their range, each extended a thick branch and came at him.

In the midst of forming a flame-shot Shin Hweein paused, and asked Hoa, who was about to step out in front of him.

“There must be a defensive art for flame as well. Teach it to me.”
“There — there is, my lord, but it is an art that requires your lordship’s blood to be shed, so it would be better simply to leave the matter to this maiden—”
“At once.”
“Ngh… So speaks the master of the flame that destroys evil — let my blood become the moat and my flesh become the rampart — Fire-blood!”

Knowing now that Shin Hweein would not stand down, Hoa intoned the incantation clearly all the same, with a face that said she very much disliked it, then bit down on her index finger with her teeth, drew blood, and scattered it through the air.
For the Shin Hweein of the past, who had suffered a grave skin inflammation, this would have been a thing he could never have done… but after loosening the bandage at his fingertip and checking the state of it, he gave a light laugh and followed her lead.

“So speaks the master of the flame that destroys evil — let my blood become the moat and my flesh become the rampart. Fire-blood!”

As Hoa had said, Fire-blood was an art that shielded the body from an enemy’s threat at the cost of a slight sacrifice.
Earlier she had used this very art to confuse the enemy and to translocate her allies through space as well, but what Shin Hweein, having only just learned the foundational sorcery, could manage was little more than scattering blood from his fingertip into the air and turning it into a barrier of flame.

And yet, was it because the grade of the flame he wielded was so very high?
Hoa’s incantation had become only a barrier on the level of a makeshift ward, setting alight the branches that came flying at it and beating them back.
But the barrier he had brought forth not only burnt up every branch it touched; it spread at once onto the creatures’ very bodies and blazed up there.

— Khaaaaagh! It purifies — I am being purified by force…!
— Forgive me, please, forgive me!

The spiritual power he had spent was about the same as for flinging a single flame-shot, yet with one stroke he had finished off several at once, so that rather than the sorcery itself being great, one should say the authority residing in his flame was simply too overwhelming.
The pack of tree-monsters, which even while wary of his flame-shots had been creeping in to close the gap, now sensed at last that something was very ill amiss, halted the branches they had been thrusting out, and, eyeing one another, began little by little to draw their bodies back.

“What will you do now, my lord?”
“Become a bullet and pierce — Flame-shot!”

Perhaps because of the talk they had just exchanged about there being no good in killing, Hoa, half-expecting that he might let the yokai go, had thought it worth confirming.
And to her question Shin Hweein answered with deed in place of word.

To extend mercy to one who had once borne him malice was the prerogative of the strong.
For the weak, if he did not stamp out even the last spark, there was no telling when or where a flying ember might land and burn him.

“My lord, already abridging the first half of the incantation! Truly you are my lord — the time required for the art has been cut by half!”
“…Become a bullet and pierce — Flame-shot!”

When the same incantation is repeated and one grows fluent in it, one may begin to omit parts of it, or all of it, and yet produce the same result.
This is not, however, something one comes to by sheer rote repetition of an art; rather, when one has truly understood the art and become able to manage the movement of force that arises in its working without need of an incantation at all, the change occurs of its own accord.
That Shin Hweein had come to understand his own flame and could now lend his will to it without recourse to an incantation: for this alone, the trouble of learning sorcery from a yokai could be said to have been worth it.

— Kuwaak…

Letting fly flame-shot after flame-shot until at last he had finished off the whole pack, Shin Hweein let out a long “hoo” of breath and looked the field over.
Earlier, no sooner had he finished one fight than he had been ambushed; so this time he did not let his guard down, and held himself on watch.

Hoa, whether she sensed his thinking or not, kept up a stream of admiration and praise.

“You have grown skilful at the incantation in not so much as a quarter-hour’s time — only a few more rounds against low spirits, my lord, and you will have utterly mastered flame-shot!”
“Yet with flame-shot alone there is no way to bring the flame-hound down.”
“Urgh.”

To be sure, were he to learn the deeper sorceries of flame-shot of the kind Hoa had employed, the force of it could no doubt be raised; but even then it would be unequal to felling the flame-hound.
The same held for Fire-blood.
A barrier of flame that boasted invincible majesty against low spirits would not be of much use against the flame-hound, who wielded the same flame himself.

“You do not, I trust, mean to make me learn the remaining arts while in the thick of real battle? I had best learn the rest here and now before we move.”
“There is… one art remaining, that is so.”

When Hoa wore a troubled look, Shin Hweein narrowed his eyes and spoke.

“Flame-Made-Flesh, is it not?”
“It is, my lord. The art by which one receives flame into the body and so raises one’s own grade. As it happens, the grade of the flame my lord wields being high, this art could be said to be very well suited to you, my lord — only…”
“I have a rough notion of what you would say. Either the consumption of spiritual power is great, or it places a heavy burden upon the body, or, should one of so poor a constitution as mine attempt it, the after-effects would be grave.”
“It is all of it as you say, my lord. And so I feared that to teach this art to my lord might be, on the contrary, to plunge my lord into a still greater peril.”

A laughable thing.
For when she herself thought Flame-Made-Flesh must after all be taught, here she was heaping up nothing but words that shifted the responsibility, because she did not wish to be hated by him.

Or rather, if she truly meant to do me harm by this art, she would not bother with such a show at all, would she? Could I perhaps even take comfort in that?

“Enough idle talk; teach it. Whatever may come of it, there will be no blaming of you.”
“This maiden is only worried for my lord…”
“Better that than to die at the flame-hound’s hand. Is it not so?”
“It is truly as you say. Only, my lord — once you have learned this, you must commit it to memory and use it solely at the moment when it is truly required, against the flame-hound. Promise me that.”
“That had been my intention already.”

Only after wringing this earnest vow from him did Hoa teach him the incantation of Flame-Made-Flesh.
When he had committed the whole of it to memory, he asked her what the Flame-Jaw Brand art had been which she had brought to bear against Eul, and her answer came back that, since it was a sorcery of her own, even to learn it he would not be able to imitate it.

“Hoo hoo. And besides, it would not work overly well against the flame-hound. From the very look of him, is he not used to the kind of mongrel-snapping dogfight in which two beasts tear at one another? My lord ought to fight a fight worthy of a man.”
“You are not wrong.”

In that case, did it mean that Hoa, who did wield the Flame-Jaw Brand, was herself used to the kind of fighting in which two creatures tore at one another?
The question rose up in him on a sudden, but as Hoa turned back to him with a wide, sweet smile, Shin Hweein decided to fold that doubt away again, quietly.
In the whole of his life the women he had known were only two, his mother and Geum Moa, and from both he had already learned that when a woman wore that sort of expression, one was in for a great deal of trouble if one prodded at her wrong.

“Well then, shall we go and look for a yokai connected with iron next? However good the wood may be, it is a pity to be carrying a bare wooden staff and nothing more; we must trim it out with some iron, must we not?”
“So it was you who first provoked the dokkaebi.”
“Speaking of dokkaebi — there is a saying in Hwa² that goes, ‘an oni (a yokai of Japan) with a geumbong (an iron cudgel)’ — does it not mean, after all, that if one kills them one comes away with an iron cudgel?”
“As I understand it, that saying is not there to kindly inform one of what one might come away with whenever one slays an oni…”

For at the very least, killing a tiger does not earn one wings.

“Besides — this place that we call the Specter Realm is not somewhere one meets whatever one wishes to meet simply because one wishes it, is it not?”
“…”
“…Is it not?”

Made uneasy by Hoa’s silence, Shin Hweein pressed the question a second time, but Hoa only smiled brightly back at him and said nothing.

Fortunately, in the Specter Realm exploration that followed, they did not encounter any oni.
What they met instead were green-skinned, small-bodied humanoid monsters…
That is to say, the creatures the Westerners call goblins (Goblin).