Chapter 14 — The Sorcerer And The Two Faces Of The Shadow (2)

The change soon showed itself to the naked eye.

From the sky, from underground, from the surface, the yokai came swarming, all of them hungry to cross over into the present world and gorge on the fresh fear of living humans.

“Could this be that sorcery from before…?”

— I’m being worked half to death over here. Don’t go getting distracted, you idiot!

The first to catch on was Leon, who had lived through that same ordeal at Shin Hweein’s side.
It had been a single day, no more, and already his lord had learned their sorcery and turned it to use.
Leon could scarcely credit it, and even glanced back mid-clash with the dragon-princess just to be sure.

It was not a thing easily believed, even by an elder noble of the night, and the answer Shin Hweein gave only deepened the marvel.

“To use it raw would have been dangerous, so I refined it. By now it is quite stable. Leon, Flame-tail, begin preparing to fall back.”
“Refined it, in that short a span?”

In that, too, the dreamscape Lyl had built proved useful.
In the waking world a sorcerer who failed mid-research stood a real chance of catching a curse on himself or taking some injury, but inside the dream, no matter how many times he failed or how gravely he was hurt, Lyl had only to flick her finger and everything was restored to how it had been.
High-ranking sorcerers, in all likelihood, each kept their own means of dispersing the hazards of their craft.

“That a sorcery the Onmyo Bureau’s sorcerers pooled their wits to devise could be undone so simply…”
“Do not make light of Hwa-guk’s Onmyo Bureau. This is merely the slapdash sorcery the radicals patched together. Though the insight folded into it was of considerable help to me.”

Shin Hweein met Geum Moa’s flabbergasted look with a perfectly straight face.
Like the compass, this sorcery too was outrageously unstable, far too dangerous for anyone without a Gatekeeper’s Brand to handle.
Even if the Onmyo Bureau had developed it to begin with, the odds were good they had grasped its perils partway through and thrown it out.

It was that very thing the radicals had fished back up and put to use, and, comically enough, only once it passed into Shin Hweein’s hands did it become a properly working sorcery at last.

— The scent of humans!
— A door has opened. At last we can return to the world…!
— Strike down whatever stands before the gate!

Onto the red long-needle spinning round and round above his hand, Shin Hweein took aim at the very heart of the North Sea Dragon King’s spectral soldiers risen from the sea, and shot.
The needle reached its mark unobstructed, and though it wounded no one in particular, in that instant the eyes of every swarming yokai locked onto the soldiers.

“How is it, then. Stable, is it not?”
“I’ll have to concede the point.”

A sorcery that conjured a false Specter Realm Gate to lure yokai, and could even pick out its target.
Refined by grafting dream sorcery onto the power of the Gatekeeper’s Brand rather than the Brand alone, it asked little spiritual power and triggered instantly, though it carried the flaw of being unable to draw in higher-rank yokai.

— Over there!
— Kekeke, let’s go!

But for now, that much alone was enough.
Better than enough, in fact.

— Kyo-eh-eh-eh-eh-ehk!
— Kill them, kill the lot of them!
— Kuhaaaah!

At last the two yokai bands crashed together.
In quality the water-ghosts were far the better, and in number nothing to scorn either, yet the low spirits poured in without end, ignoring every difference of quality and flinging themselves on them all the same.

“We are withdrawing. We withdraw, and…”

— No, don’t go! Don’t!

“…we engage the North Sea Dragon Princess.”

Shin Hweein struck the ground with his staff, wrapped himself and his companions in tree-trunks, then borrowed the dokkaebi’s power to open distance from the battlefield in a rush.
It was no match for the land-shrinking spell, but the thick branches cradling his party reached out toward their destination at speed, a movement that doubled as defense.

— Stop right there! Are you going to leave me behind this time too?!

The shoreline did not move. The North Sea Dragon Princess did.
Her body had swollen in proportion to her fury and her spectral aura, her lower half changed into the form of a great black serpent, and she pursued the party with astonishing nimbleness.
Even with the soldiers she had summoned locked in struggle against the mob of low spirits, there was no hesitation in her.

— My husband, I beg you. Don’t leave me behind!

“He’s my husband, you snake-soup-slurping bitch!”

— He’s not your husband either, you fox-of-flame bitch!

“Stop fighting your own allies and strike together with me. Together! That woman’s one we have to handle ourselves anyway!”

— Kyu…

Astonishingly, the only two with their wits about them here were Leon and Arong.

Striking together. Yes. The time has come for me to join in as well.

Swinging his staff to release his party, Shin Hweein wove the leftover tree-stems into a vast barricade and tried to halt the charging dragon-princess, and it was breached with the most futile of ease.

That will do.

For all that he had failed to slow her charge by a hair, Shin Hweein’s eyes shone as he drew his staff back to him.

“Break!”

The barricade shattered readily enough, but it transmuted as it broke into tens upon hundreds of thousands of razor splinters that lodged themselves in the dragon-princess’s body.
Hard scales armored her whole frame, so the mere fact that they had taken hold was proof enough that a sorcery was already at work.

— Thanks for the kindling!

The countless thorns seemed, moreover, to be sketching some fixed pattern across the dragon-princess’s body, as though she were a sheet of drawing-paper, and Flame-tail caught the gist at once.
Bravely he hurled himself in and swelled his frame to its utmost.
Only for a moment, but he had grown to a body vast enough to trade blows with the dragon-princess head-on.

— Burn to ash, you!
— You dare, you mangy mongrel!

If the flame-hound commanded fire, then the dragon-princess, heir to the blood of the North Sea Dragon King, commanded great quantities of water.
Even with some distance now between them and the shore, in an instant dozens of water-jets surged up around her and loosed themselves at Flame-tail; he answered with a contemptuous snort and barreled straight into them.
With Shin Hweein’s spiritual power concentrated through him as it was, Flame-tail’s strength had now risen past the level of a Rank Five yokai.

— What insolence! That some foul, lingering wraith would dare bar the way of the flame of purification!

Flame-tail vaporized everything before him with the fire he loosed from his mouth, and still he was not done; he kicked off the ground with all he had and rammed the dragon-princess square in the trunk.
The shards of wood embedded thick in her body kindled to the flame as if they had been steeped in oil and flared up in a blaze; flame met flame and fused without a single gap, and in a heartbeat a sorcerous array marked with a particular character took shape upon her.
It was an on-the-fly flame array, devised by drawing fully upon the array-craft talent he had wrested from the youngest son of the Seo House.

— Aaaah?!

It was just after this that the dragon-princess’s runaway charge stopped dead.
His thralls were not the sort to leave her be once she had laid bare a fatal opening.
Knowing the manner in which Shin Hweein’s sorcery worked, they kept clear of the formation-marked portion, but Arong, Leon, and even Geum Moa poured their attacks onto her upper half, where no formation had been drawn, the portion that still held a human shape instead of a serpent’s body.

— Kyaaaagh! It hurts, it hurts so much…!

“…”

Just as she had the first time, when the sight of Shin Hweein wrung that first cry from her, the North Sea Dragon Princess flung the same dreadful, curse-laden shriek out in every direction, but this time he had foreseen it as well, and the hasty barrier he threw up himself was enough to nullify it.

Never grow careless. You haven’t yet seen the bottom of this opponent. Flame-tail’s power is steadily draining away, and Moa has agreed to lend her aid only as a Rank Two sorceress. Neuldam is out of the question. With Arong and Leon alone, even this thrashing dragon-princess cannot be held for long.

Shin Hweein poured the whole of his spiritual power into reinforcing the sorcery and held his gaze steady on the North Sea Dragon Princess.

The sorcerous array had two effects.
The first was simply to amplify the flame’s force and let it seep inward.
If that were all, then naturally the flame Shin Hweein and Flame-tail were producing now could never break down the dragon-princess, who commanded an overwhelming mastery of water.

The second was to convert that flame into blood.
This was a remarkably delicate, thoroughly sorcerous procedure.
First, because Flame-tail’s flame was qualitatively identical to Shin Hweein’s own, the line between the two was dissolved and the whole was treated as Shin Hweein’s flame.
Shin Hweein possessed the Fire-blood ability, which produced flame out of his own blood; so by inverting that within the array, the flame that had seeped into the dragon-princess’s body could in turn be transmuted back into Shin Hweein’s blood.

To send one’s own blood into another’s body was an outrageously dangerous act, for it made one sorcerously linked to that other.
All the more so when the North Sea Dragon Princess was one of the dead; at the worst, Shin Hweein himself might be drawn closer to death alongside her.
So before any harm could reach him, Shin Hweein transmuted that blood once more.
Into the boon he had won this time from the Nine-Headed Dragon. Into deadly venom.

— Bweh!

In the end, perhaps because the venom had spread through her whole body, the North Sea Dragon Princess spewed up pitch-black dead blood.
The blood was dead not because the venom had taken her, but because she herself was already dead.

“It’s really working! Magnificent, my lord!”
“Don’t relax yet. We chip her down as much as we can while she’s struggling…!”

— Quit blathering, you two, and keep that snake from snuffing out the flame!

The North Sea Dragon Princess was indeed throwing up enormous lashes of water on every side, trying to swathe herself in them and douse the fire, resisting with all she had, but Flame-tail lent his own strength to the flame and held it.

— My husband, save me! Help me, please, don’t abandon me…!

“What kind of bride in this world tries to kill her own husband?!”

— Well said. That much alone disqualifies you.

“And from the very start I never had the least intention of killing the young master, did I? You’re the one disqualified!”

His thralls did not slacken their attack even as they bickered.
They knew that unless they ground down the North Sea Dragon Princess’s life-force here and now, she would somehow recover and strike back.

“Die, die, die, just die!”

Geum Moa in particular was hurling flame so excessively, evaporating the streams of water the dragon-princess raised, that one began to wonder whether she hadn’t already overshot the level of a Rank Two flame-sorceress, yet Shin Hweein chose to say nothing of it.

— Why did you leave me behind and go alone?

“Khh.”

The trouble was the very thing he had feared from the start.
It came from his connection with the North Sea Dragon Princess.

— You told me. That you would build a world where all of us could live together.
— And I, trusting you, made that promise to everyone.
— And yet, why…

“Khhrgh…!”

Even though he had converted the blood injected into the dragon-princess’s body into venom at once, in the course of mingling with her own blood it must have managed to form a link.
And so the thread of fate binding the two of them, which until now he had never perceived, rose into view, distinct enough to be seen even by Shin Hweein’s spirit-eye.

This did not come into being just now. It is a connection that existed long before. Since a remote antiquity.

Had there been no fate at all between them, the mingling of the living’s blood and the dead’s might in the worst case have made him a being closer to death than to life.
But their fate ran beyond the boundary of life and death, carried forward out of the past.
The mixing of blood had only brought that fate up to the surface once more; nothing graver came of it, and one might as well call it a blessing.

“Young master, are you all right?!”
“Don’t tell me the magic, no, the sorcery has backfired? My lord!”
“I am… well enough.”

When his thralls, sensing his suffering, turned to look, he answered them in a resolute voice.

“Keep up the attack. We must weaken her…!”
“Y-yes, understood!”

— Kyuuuuuh!

If the dragon-princess regained her strength at this rate, the odds were that Shin Hweein, outmatched in will, would be made subordinate to her.
He decided to count it as good fortune instead.
If his thralls were attacking her body, then he would attack her mind.

Yes. Show me, then, what passed between you and me in the past. Even knowing all of it, I shall still refuse you as you deserve.

A wavering, faintly pink aura rose up from Shin Hweein’s body.
By casting dream sorcery on himself, he would draw the deeply-linked North Sea Dragon Princess down into his own consciousness along with him.
Even if he could seize her mind for only a short while, in that interval his thralls would be free to strike her true body and turn the tide.

— My… husband…?

For all that the dragon-princess was one of the dead, she was a being of an order vastly above his own, and the daughter of a Dragon King besides.
To wage a contest of will against her was little short of madness.
But from her bearing toward him, he was certain she would not refuse this.

— At last, you have come to me!

Just as he had foreseen.
Surrendering himself, for the second time that day, to the sensation of slipping into a noon-time sleep, Shin Hweein let his body go limp, and from beyond, at the sight of the dragon-princess’s vast body staggering and toppling to the ground, he allowed himself a small triumphant smile.

“My husband, at long last I’ve come back with the promise from the elders!”

In the next moment he found himself facing a woman with dazzling, beautiful black hair.
The form of the North Sea Dragon Princess as she had been in life, as she remembered herself.
And his own past-life self.