Chapter 2 — The Fire-Wielding Yokai (4)

Half a day had not passed since their flight. Not a full day, hardly even half.

It was less that Hoa’s art had fallen short than that the flame-hound was simply that formidable.

Embarrassed and sorry, Hoa would not let Shin Hweein out of her arms, keeping him sheltered there.

“This maiden shall buy you time. Until my lord is ready to fight, I shall not let so much as your shadow be touched!”

— It makes no difference which of you goes first. Once you’ve been burned, there’ll be no telling you apart!

“…No.”

Even gasping for breath, Shin Hweein pushed her away and stepped out in front.

“Did I not tell you, just now, that this is beyond what your ability can match? If you do not wish another hole punched in your belly, fall back.”

“But, my lord, you cannot fight as your body is now.”

— If you’re going to dawdle like that, I’ll just burn you both at once—!

The hot-tempered flame-hound spat another gout of fire at the pair as they spoke.

Shin Hweein faced it head-on. He unwound the bandage from one hand completely, and as the blood came pouring out he flung it in every direction and cried out again.

“Fire-blood!”

“Eeeeeek!”

Hoa shrieked, surely because the amount he bled was extraordinary.
But after the myodusa’s treatment of him earlier, even she could not have thought this much was little.

Shin Hweein’s claim that he could move no further had been no exaggeration.
His whole body had reached the limit of activity and was screaming at him. Push himself even a little harder and it would have been no surprise to feel his muscles tear, his vessels burst, his bones crush to powder.

And yet by that means he had drawn out blood enough to form a barrier.

— What paltry sorcery is this, that thinks to fend off my flame!

The blood, sprayed in every direction, turned into a wall of flame, and the fire that struck it was driven back. The flame-hound bellowed in a great rage.
The beast seemed to judge that fire alone would not do. It scraped the ground once and came charging in.
If that hulking body so much as grazed him, Shin Hweein’s frail flesh could not possibly endure it.

“By your leave!”

Before Shin Hweein could decide on anything, Hoa rushed in, took firm hold of his body, and leapt clear of the spot.

“Flame-shot — the art of Flowers in Full Bloom!”

She scattered her sleeves, and in a single breath let fly several dozen flame-shots.
The flame-hound ignored them and tried to leap after the pair in pursuit, but the flame-shots that struck it burst open like flowers in bloom, each one scattering dozens of smaller flame-shots and hindering the beast.

— A creature of no real strength, forever making such a nuisance of itself!

“Flame-Made-Flesh — the art of the Glittering Flame-Whip!”

Even bare Flame-Made-Flesh was something Shin Hweein could only stake on his life to use, yet here was Hoa wielding so deep a flame-sorcery as though it were nothing, throwing her body forward once again.
Beyond his sight, something like a whip of red yokai force stretched out, then split into several strands, dyeing the air with splendor as it wound itself about the flame-hound’s body.

To work Flame-Made-Flesh was to take the fire into one’s own body, so Hoa’s whole form was, naturally, dyed the color of flame as well. Yet, strangely, it did him no harm at all.

If she held so sure a dominion over fire as this, then surely, even against the flame-hound, victory was not beyond reach…

Foolish!

For an instant Shin Hweein had entertained that thought, and then he shook the wicked notion loose.
This fight was his own, to begin with.
It was shameful enough that he had borrowed a yokai’s hand to come this far. How could he think only of thrusting the whole of it onto another to the very end?

Men called him a cripple, but he was a Gatekeeper who had undertaken the rite, and a sorcerer.
He might be meager, yet he would not be base.
If he was to die, he would die as a sorcerer.

That did not mean giving up on life.
It meant living rightly, even if only for an instant.

“Hoa.”

Carried this way and that, he gripped the staff he had somehow managed not to lose and opened his mouth.

“Set me down now.”

“But the ground is dangerous just now, my lord!”

“If your flame is near me it will catch and dye over mine. Did you not say I must strike with my own pure flame alone?”

“Mmmhhh…”

— Aaaaah—! Truly, what a bother! What an unspeakable bother! Had you offered up your neck obediently, I should at least have let your soul go on to face Yama’s judgment!

— Boom! KA-BOOM!

The earth heaved over in every direction, and fire leapt up from it like lava.
Aghast at the sight, Hoa crossed both her hands; the several strands of flame-whip that had been at her command bent to intercept the blasts and once again held the flame-hound’s movements in check.
But for that, Shin Hweein slipped from her hold and plummeted toward the ground.

“Ah!”

“Fire-blood!”

A whip-strand shot out as Hoa stretched frantically toward him, yet Shin Hweein gave a firm shake of his head. Just before he struck the ground, he sprayed blood beneath his feet and chanted the sorcery.
A hemispheric flame-barrier, woven of blood and spiritual power, gently received his body, and the flame-hound’s fire, surging up beneath him, did not dare touch his flesh either.

Having landed cleanly, Shin Hweein groped at his own chest by instinct, to feel whether his heart had not come loose. And even so, he did not hesitate to provoke the flame-hound.

“You are a dog, after all, are you not. Your wits do not turn so well. Did you not see, just now, that your flame does not reach me?”

— There is nothing the one’s flame cannot burn. And the likes of you cannot possibly wield the one’s flame as it ought to be wielded!

Explosion, and another explosion.
Where Shin Hweein had to weigh the remainder every time he cast a single sorcery, the flame-hound poured out fire as though its yokai force were boundless.
The creature’s claim was not entirely off the mark. Cracks were already beginning to spread across the barrier he had made.
And worse, fire-blood spent blood in the making and spiritual power in the keeping. To work it over and over while he waited for the beast’s strength to flag was nothing short of nonsense.

So Shin Hweein took a single step toward the beast.

— Spirit, at least, you do not lack. Then I shall bite you to death with my own jaws… Aaah, truly!

“By whose leave!”

The very instant the flame-hound opened its maw and made to kick off the ground, Hoa’s flame-whip came flying in as though from nowhere and bound its legs, bound its mouth.
She too seemed hard pressed to hold Flame-Made-Flesh, sweat running heavily down her, yet her movement was as quick as ever, and no matter how the flame-hound tried to catch her, it could not.

— Fine. As you wish, then. The man first!

In the end the flame-hound gave up on catching Hoa, snarled through its teeth, and closed the distance with Shin Hweein.
Hoa’s interference had blocked the charge, but even she could not halt the flame-hound’s movement altogether.
She had only ever been working to keep the beast’s charge from crushing Shin Hweein flat, so in that her purpose was accomplished.
The way she worried over him while obeying his decisions to the letter, anyone watching might have taken Hoa for his shikigami.

“Flame-hound. Loyal flame-hound. I shall ask you, this once, for the last time.”

Dodging the fire that surged up from the ground, sweeping aside with his staff the unceasing flame the beast loosed at him, Shin Hweein advanced and spoke.

“The one of whom you speak — I truly do not know him. And I, too, truly wonder how it is that this flame came to be held in my hand. Have you it in you, even once, to lend an ear to my words?”

— No. The sin-karma you wear upon your body says all there is to say. You are a traitor and a liar. It is enough that I destroy your flesh and bring your soul back to lay before the one.

“…Is that so. In the end, then, you are no different from men.”

— What?

At Shin Hweein’s words the flame-hound raised the eyes of a wild beast and stirred up a fiercer flame, but by now there was nothing in it to frighten him.
The men who looked upon his ugly, limping self and cast at him a gaze full of disappointment, as though they knew everything there was to know of him, and pronounced every evil in the world his karma.
The monster who, because he had carried since birth a sin-karma no one had ever once explained to him, pronounced him fit to die.
Their outward forms differed, but inside they were the same. How, then, was he to fear it?

He felt only a stifling vexation, and hatred.

— I, no different from men? You! A sinner, to mouth such words!

“Was it my sin you spoke of? If there is one, it is but a single one. That I was born.”

Shin Hweein released every part of the barrier he had raised with fire-blood.
The flame that until then had held its shape broke into droplets like the blood that had mothered it, and drifted about him.
Watching the flame-hound’s vast forepaw come down on him, he closed his eyes once, and opened them again.

“That I would be fire is only that I might burn myself. Flame-Made-Flesh.”

The moment the words were spoken.
Every flame in the air rushed in upon him and shone like a small sun.
It erased, every one of them, the five strands of flame-blade that had risen on the claws the flame-hound brought down, and the flame-hound shrieked.

— That cannot be—!

The enraged flame-hound gathered its yokai force into its forepaw and drove it down just as it was.
Once, twice. With every collision of the spear and shield of pure flame, one side was pared away against the other, one-sidedly, little by little.

Difficult, this…

With Flame-Made-Flesh used but the once, Shin Hweein could already feel his body beginning to give out.
Blood burst out from here and there across him, his bones twisted, and from behind his head and down along his spine an ill-boding run of cracking sounds reached him, one after another.
And even so it was not enough to reach the flame-hound.
The fury that boiled up in him, he could not, could not get it across to the beast.
So unbearable was his vexation that he struck the staff in his hand hard against the ground, and in that instant a small change took place.
From the earth, several tree-stems leapt up all at once and held off the flame-hound’s forepaw as it came down on him.

— What’s this? Dokkaebi trickery? Are you joking?

To think a staff that was no more than the corpse of a tree-dokkaebi still held a measure of the dokkaebi’s power.
Whether because the dokkaebi’s standing had not been high, or because the fault lay in Shin Hweein’s handling of it, the wood burned away and was gone in an instant.
But it had bought him time enough, even as his very thoughts warped, for Shin Hweein to return to himself.

Yes. So that is how it is.

Thanks to it, Shin Hweein had understood.
For one who would soon die now in any case, what was he doing still squandering spiritual power on the keeping of his body, even as the claws that sought his life came flying at him?
Had he not, only a little while ago, resolved to die as a Gatekeeper carrying out his charge to the very end?
Having understood, there was nothing left to hesitate over.

The spiritual power that had been driving itself hard at every corner of him, to keep his bones from breaking, to keep his back from bending further, to keep his skin from melting away, to keep his brain from boiling, to keep his stomach from giving way, to keep his heart beating, to keep his lungs breathing, to keep him standing on both feet, to keep his arms moving, to keep his liver clearing its poisons, to keep his teeth from falling out.

— You shall not—!

“That I would be fire is only —”

— What?!

All of it, he turned to flame, and gathered it at his fingertips.

“— that I might prove I lived. Flame-Made-Flesh!”

The thing, swollen now like a sun, he shook off in a single sweep toward the flame-hound’s forepaw.

— You—!

“Kuh-hak!”

His body’s spiritual power briefly fell to utter vacancy, and a shock ran through every part of him.
His body creaked and his brain blazed.
No longer able even to tell this from that, Shin Hweein could not hold a single thought; he stiffened where he stood and tumbled to the ground.

Into his blurring sight, as it dyed itself blood-red, came two things.

The flame-hound, unable to bear the flame he had loosed, crying out in its agony. And then…

a face he longed for, and resented…