Chapter 15 — The Sorcerer And The Great-Mouth Ruins (4)

While Father Lucas and Zer dominated the gathering, Shin Hweein quietly drew close to a lone serviceman who lay collapsed just outside the barrier.

Aeshin’s entire military ran on a volunteer system, so every soldier was well-managed, systematically trained, of high quality.
But unless they belonged to one of the sorcery-handling special units, they were, in the end, only civilians.
And the ordinary servicemen who had been dragged into this cavity were every one of them being driven to the very edge of terror.

“There is no need to be afraid. The priest has spread a barrier. You will not be enchanted by the ruins any further.”
“I-is that so?”

Shin Hweein put a few questions to him, and the man, after one quick glance at his own officer, who stood overwhelmed and witless beside Zer, told him cautiously what he wished to know.
Having heard all there was to hear, Shin Hweein nodded and made his way over to Zer, who was driving several lengths of iron chain into the ground around the cavity.

“A second barrier?”
“No. I’ve no knack for that sort of thing. This is just a trap, to indiscriminately kill anything that tries to violate this territory.”

Zer said it that way, then winked one eye at Shin Hweein.
He had spoken so loudly only so that everyone could hear, Hweein supposed; the actual implication was, won’t quite kill them.
Stood to reason. The priest who owned the body would be dead-set against it from the start.

“Is it all right for you to be out already? There must be some limit on how long you can hold that state.”
“I didn’t come barging out on my own. The Cardinal wrote that warrant, didn’t he? It means my leash has been let out a little.”

His words finished, Zer stared down at the warrant still held in his own hand as though the sight of it disgusted him, clicked his tongue with a sharp tch, and thrust the warrant at Hweein.

“Looking at it makes my stomach turn. I’ll end up tearing the thing up if I keep holding it. You keep it.”

Shin Hweein silently received the warrant, marveling.
So that was it. The Cardinal’s handwritten warrant did not only display his authority; it was also a permit, granting Zer leave to wield his power.
That what Zer had shown before was not his full strength, Hweein had grasped well enough already. But to learn that even this was the result of his leash being merely let out a little…

“Zer, those who were going in seem to have all gone in already. The ones left here are the chaff, the sort the priests and the army alike could not pierce through. In the chaos that arose after Baek House forced their entry, a great many other sorcerers seem to have slipped in as well.”
“Tch. Truly, nothing but useless vermin around here. Fine. The traps are set. Let’s go in too.”
“You. Mind your words.”

At some point Sister Barbara had ended up with an electronic vape between her lips.
With a sullen expression she spoke, and blew a stream of smoke straight at Zer.

“Huff.”
“Yagh…!”

Even as the disgust spread plainly across his face, Zer found himself unable to snap back at her.
The sight reminded Shin Hweein of the time Sister Barbara had blown her smoke at him in turn, and he shook his head.

The smoke, laced with consecrated water, was a supplementary measure to keep Zer from running rampant.
When the Cardinal and the Pope, figures of that order, were personally holding his leash, and Sister Barbara was being used on top of that to stifle his breath one notch further, one could not even begin to gauge what Zer’s true capacity must originally have been.

“Let us go.”
“Let’s go. …But before that.”

Looking back at the people still frozen in place, Zer murmured.

“Behold, the Lord has come with ten thousand of His angels. They are come to execute judgment, to destroy the ungodly, and to judge all the unrighteousness which sinners have committed against Him.”

What exact power the prayer wielded could not be known, but when his voice reverberated through the area, every person there flinched and bowed their heads.
A wavelength that surely belonged to the realm of holy power, and yet somehow chill, somehow ghastly to the senses.

Shin Hweein felt that the power, like Father Lucas’s prayer-verses, was stoking his own energies, and turned to ask Zer.

“Are you reciting that of your own will?”
“Hmph. His light reaches even down to the underworld.”

Leaving those words behind, Zer leapt first into the cavity.

Sister Barbara stared at Shin Hweein with a look that said she did not quite trust him, then hurried after Zer; and just as Hweein, Flame-tail gathered in his arms, was about to follow into the ruins, Geum Moa caught firm hold of his arm.

“What are you doing?”
“The instant after those two jumped in, I felt a twist in the space. We may end up moving separately.”
“…Why did you not tell me sooner?”
“Oh, please. I only just realized it myself this moment.”

So she said, smiling with that slippery innocence, and he felt the urge to give her nose a hard pinch.
But this peerless great yokai received every touch of his hand as an expression of affection, and so he could not even do that.

“Wait! When our lord arrives, you will be punished without fa—”
“Just a moment, please. Let us join the investigation as we—”

Zer’s disappearance had loosened their throats, it seemed; cleanly ignoring the people clamoring at him, he too cast his body into the hole.
But strangely, at the very instant he fell into the ruins, the hole that had stayed open all this while closed, severing the connection with the outside.

Looking up at the hole closing above his head, thinking it looked rather like a gaping mouth shutting tight, Shin Hweein, an instant later, lost consciousness.

“It is true, then.”

Waking from his brief swoon, Shin Hweein sighed quietly as he saw that Zer and Sister Barbara, who had gone in ahead of him, were nowhere in sight.
Geum Moa, still gripping his arm fast, had remained with him. Perhaps if one came in with bodies in contact, it would be all right.
…Of course, it might equally be that Geum Moa had simply ignored the ruins’ power and clung to him through it.

“I know you are awake. Open your eyes, now.”
“Mmmh….”

— Get lost!

Geum Moa made as if waking naturally from sleep and tried to drape herself across him, only to be swatted away by Flame-tail’s forepaw, which had taken up occupation of his chest, and went bouncing off.
By now Shin Hweein had grown accustomed to the slapstick the two of them put on; he ignored it, rose from the ground, and looked around.

“In any case, it is dark. I cannot find so much as a sliver of light.”
“At least there’s no gold to be seen anywhere nearby.”

Leon, who had been hiding from the moment they stepped into the cathedral, lifted himself out of Shin Hweein’s shadow.
A protective rune had surely been drawn for him so that he would take no harm even inside the cathedral, but the inborn revulsion of a vampire was, it seemed, a thing no remedy could fully overcome.

“No, my lord, what a thing to say. It was only because of that rune that I was able to endure in your shadow at all. Before, I should not have dared even to try.”
“Even that was an improvement.”

Rising to his feet, Shin Hweein tapped the floor with his staff and examined the ceiling, trying by every means to grasp what the ruins were made of.

“I cannot get a feel for it. I can only tell that it is constructed of an extraordinarily dense spiritual power…”
“I can tell, you know.”

In the meantime Geum Moa, having put Flame-tail in his place, had come to Shin Hweein’s side, grinning as she spoke.

At her words something occurred to him.
Turning his spirit-eye on the surroundings, Shin Hweein soon discovered strands of spiritual-power thread leading from this space toward a single point.

“This is…not a ruin.”
“Correc—”
“Pardon?”

At the answer Shin Hweein gave without difficulty, Geum Moa cackled while Leon’s face went blank with disbelief.

“If it is not a ruin, then what would you say it is, my lord? It cannot be the Specter Realm. Surely you don’t mean it’s an Other Realm…?”
“That is it. This space was made by a single yokai.”
“Hawn—”

At his immediate reply Leon heaved a long sigh and extended his magic to examine the surroundings in finer detail.
But evidently he gleaned little of use either; with an exaggerated shrug of both shoulders he turned to Hweein.

“I’ll have you know, I may not look it, but I rather pride myself on my craft when it comes to constructing Other Realms. Is there no possibility, then, that you are mistaken, my lord? Truly?”
“That vampires possess the knack of constructing their own territories I know very well. But this one is an expert beyond even that. Even the legends say as much.”
“You already know the creature’s identity?”
“Yes.”

Recalling the way the ruins had closed the moment he entered, like a giant shutting its mouth, Shin Hweein nodded.

“Although it does seem that with the changing of the age, the creature’s powers have altered too.”
“What on earth do you…mm?”

Just as Leon was about to ask him about the yokai’s identity, a roar like an explosion came from far off.
Shin Hweein frowned and thrust his staff forward.

“We must hurry…this is no good.”

He had meant to borrow the powers of the Pagoda-Tree God and the dokkaebi housed in his staff to travel quickly.
But because this space was already under the dominion of a powerful yokai, the trees would not grow up through the floor at all.

— Hey, hop on!

While he was wondering what was to be done, Flame-tail swelled to the size of a great tiger and bore him onto his back.
It moved him deeply, for since the contract with Shin Hweein the creature had been recovering his strength step by step, and could now hold this much bulk all the time.

‘He could just as well keep that size as his default. Why is he always shrinking himself down… Then again, the smaller form is more convenient for travel, so it is fine.’

— Let’s go!

“Ah!”

Geum Moa scrambled to clamber up behind, but before she could, Flame-tail had already kicked off the floor.
The prediction that the corridor would be crowded with deadly traps proved gratifyingly wrong. It was merely dark, and as Flame-tail, grown to his greater size, poured forth a holy flame from his whole body, even the darkness could not give chase.

— I see it.

Flame-tail, who had been running without check, came to a sharp halt.
Without need of the flame’s light, the scene before him stood revealed in vivid clarity, and Shin Hweein clicked his tongue, low.

Blood.
Blood, shining so brilliantly it dazzled, was flowing.
It looked, indeed, like liquid gold.

“Mongrel. I’ll kill you one day, I swear it!”
“If you’d been a little kinder day-to-day, you might have been able to ride along too…mm?”

Belatedly arriving, Geum Moa and Leon also realized what was unfolding before them, and their faces changed.

Several human corpses, crumbling away into powder.
The blood that streamed out of them, as though drawn by gravity, was gathering toward a central altar.

“Hm? Who are you?”

What lay on the altar made of pure gold was a gem that glittered red as blood. A ruby.
A Western woman in an extravagantly bedecked dress had been watching over it; sensing their approach, she turned her head.

“You. You’re not Baek House people, are you? Baek House has taken this place over.”

Korean studied with considerable effort, and yet still unmistakably awkward.

Lifting his eyes from her and fixing them on the gem now nearing completion, Shin Hweein read off the process by which it was changing, then slowly closed his eyes and opened them again.

“This place is not under Baek House jurisdiction, but under that of the Aeshin Catholic Church. And, woman, to look at you, you seem not to be of Baek House origin either.”
“You’re saying you came out of the cathedral? Hah, what a joke. I’ll soon be a member of Baek House. The second young master and I have pledged our future together.”

Beneath his mask, Shin Hweein’s gaze sank a shade darker.
A direct-line member of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, taking a foreigner as a daughter-in-law?

Of course, such a thing could happen. Miraculously.
The flow of the times was terrifying indeed; things that only ten years ago could not be imagined did, now and then, actually come to pass.

‘Even so, no House would induct into its direct line a woman who…does this sort of thing. The second of Baek House, that would be Baek Yeongho. Even when he was small there were signs of this restlessness in him, and it seems the wind has well and truly gotten into him now.’

The judgment was complete, her outer appearance and her interior as well.
That she had the boldness to claim the name of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses was, perhaps, in keeping with the considerable spiritual power her body bore; but he had the confidence to fight and prevail with just himself and Flame-tail, without even Geum Moa’s support.

Shin Hweein directed Flame-tail to take a step forward and opened his mouth again.

“Tell me, does Baek House permit the making of gems from human beings?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

In the meantime the woman tucked the now-blood-gorged gem swiftly into her bosom and took a wary step back from him.

“You seem not to have properly experienced this ruin yet. If one does not give the ruin what it desires, no one will survive here. These people merely sacrificed themselves so I might live. To regard me as if I were some sort of murderer, that’s offensive!”
“Is that so? The ruin compelled you. Then I will ask one thing. Are you, by chance, a Gem-Mage?”

A Gem-Mage was a mage who employed gems, wherein the power of a single element had been condensed to its utmost, as expendable foci to cast powerful elemental magic.
The destructive force was formidable, but the consumption of money was so vast that they were forever chasing wealthy patrons… or contriving other, less savory methods.

Just as alchemists fashion gold from other substances, they fashion gems out of other things.
Through sacrifice-rites, “objects of high value,” for instance living lives, were offered up to fashion gems, and this was by far the most common method.

“Wha—”

At Shin Hweein’s seemingly out-of-the-blue question, the woman instinctively took a step backward.
So many vengeful spirits clung to the woman’s back that he had thought she must have ground up a good many people into gems by now to deserve so heavy a tail, and her bearing alone was answer enough.

“You. You’ve been on my tail from the start, haven’t you? Are you a stalker? You don’t seem to know how terrifying Baek House can be. Once my honey gets hold of you, you’re fini—”
“Baek Yeongho was always the sort of man whose mouth jutted forward while his backside stayed pulled back. He was likened often enough to a duck. If, hidden in his elder brother’s shadow, he had simply settled there in the shade, or had instead struggled to leave that shade, it would have been well; but he carried on only with his mouth jutting out, prattling beyond it.”
“—my honey says he has no friend like you. He never told me about any weirdo.”
“I have no desire to be friends with Baek Yeongho either. I simply know him better than you do.”

Shin Hweein swung his staff, and dozens of tree-stems lashed out from it, coiled around the gold altar that stood between them, and crushed it utterly.
Loosing a flame-shot, he set the whole thing ablaze, and Shin Hweein growled.

“He may be timid, but he is not stupid. Which is to say, he is not the sort of man who would take to wife a woman of your filthy stripe. You had best put a stop, while you can, to flaunting the name of Baek House.”
“What. What would you know, to be running your mouth!”

In that instant something exploded from the woman’s left ear.
In a heartbeat dense fog filled the chamber. Shin Hweein, who had been on guard against any movement of hers, immediately called up wind through the dragon’s authority and drove it away. But of course.
By that time, the woman had already vanished from where she had stood.