Chapter 18 — The Sorcerer And The Ill-Omened Prophecy (2)

The battle grew fiercer by the moment.

Ham Seoyeon and Yun Juna each stood out like a crane among the chickens of the Rank-Two awakened, but holding out for any length of time against Oxhead and Horsehead, Fourth-Rank yokai both, was beyond them.
Had they been capable of it, the two of them would already have climbed to First-Rank.
Were it not for Geum Moa’s support flying in at exactly the right moments in between, it would have been no surprise if a limb had already been torn clean off one or the other of them.

“Huh?”
“Wha— …”

Iron spits erupted from the ground, and the heat of Hell already blanketed the area, bursting in waves wherever it caught the chance.
Each of those attacks carried impact enough that, had they detonated in the heart of the Capital, blowing away an entire block would have been no surprise.
Yet Ham Seoyeon and Yun Juna evaded them with bodies that suddenly felt a great deal lighter than they had a moment before, and exchanged glances.

“You feel that too?”
“Yeah, what is this?”

— Those things are worn out. Their movements have stopped!
— It might be a trap. They’re weak things in any case, slow and sure. Seize them and throw them into Hell!

No matter how she turned it over, her body felt light.
It was less as if she had suddenly leveled up and grown stronger, and more as if shackles she’d been wearing without knowing it had abruptly come loose.

“Sham-Shaman, did you cast a buff?”
“I’m busy keeping my own hide intact. What buff.”
“Then what on earth is this.”

A faint vigor returned to bodies that had been wearying without their knowing it, and what felt sharpest of all was the clearing of her mind.
Body and spirit had improved so much that she had to wonder whether some curse she’d never known about had just been lifted.

— KRRRRA-BOOM!

Right after, an absurd roar tore through the air, and not only the two women but Oxhead and Horsehead too had their eyes dragged toward it.
Yun Jinseong, locked in a grinding stalemate with a yokai whose exact form could not even be made out, had loosed a tremendous sorcery and landed a great blow on the enemy.

— Bad, bad.
— That foul sinner’s state has suddenly improved.
— If that monster falls, we’re next. We have to drag the sinners down to Hell!
— Kill the women now! Their crimes aren’t so light that we should let them off!

Every second, every minute of this had been a blood-draining struggle against foes a class above them.
And up to now they’d been letting them off because their crimes were light?
Watching yokai who could provoke them more thoroughly than even Geum Moa, the two women ground their teeth.

“What do we do?”
“What do you mean what. We haven’t even landed a proper hit on them this whole time.”
“It’s a miracle we haven’t taken a mortal wound.”
“Long live Goddess Athena!”
“It’s General Athena.”

The wall of a Fourth-Rank yokai was tall indeed.
To begin with, the two of them had set out not to bring the brutes down but to buy as much time as they could, even as they’d thrown themselves in meaning to take the things’ heads if ever the chance came.
But the beasts’ bodies were rugged past belief, and between dodging the wild eruptions of blades and spears and the heat that strangled the breath out of them, there was no way even to reach a blow that could cut.
If she had to make a feeble excuse for it, it was that the two of them could not bring their specialties to bear.
Yun Juna was strongest when she gathered her power and brought it down in a single heavy stroke, and Ham Seoyeon was strongest with her feet planted on the ground.

“Just hold on a little longer, until the older man finishes that thing off.”

Or, if Shin Hweein were to stand up again…

Ham Seoyeon swallowed the words back down just as they were about to leave her.
This was no moment to be airing a girl’s daydreams, and more than that, the General would never forgive her for leaning on someone else instead of settling the matter with her own hands.

‘You were born a god, weren’t you. Humans, you know, we live by leaning on each other…!’

— If only you could bear the weight of my divinity, you’d have no need to lean on any other human! Besides, did I not tell you not to give that man so much of your heart? It is I who would like to sigh, my mudang.

It was an engagement where a single instant’s lapse would send her head flying, and so her connection to the goddess was at its peak.
Perhaps that was the worth of riding the spirit-blades the enemy had so kindly provided her. The goddess’s voice came through with unusual clarity, though that was not exactly welcome.

— I had believed you would be the one to make the Parthenon great again.

‘Go in there and I’d have to grow old and die a virgin. No thank you.’

— Ah, how dreadfully has the world changed. Is there truly no other girl in all this world both gifted and chaste besides you alone!

‘But I’ll keep my vow, so don’t worry. I’m still better than those other shameless mudangs, aren’t I?’

— That vow of ten years ago, you mean. Are you trying to remind me again, in case I forget?

‘General, I’m honestly about to die soon, so if you’re going to keep talking to me, could you at least lend me a little more strength…’

— My mudang. The man of your vow has woken.

It was that instant.
The iron spits that had been filling the ground, already warped by the qi of Hell, abruptly twisted and snapped and broke into ruin all at once, as if drawn by a magnet.

“It’s a special treat, eat it all up. That’s right.”

— —!!

What had appeared so suddenly there was a headless, muscular man, his whole body dyed silver and giving off the gleam of metal.
By any measure he did not look human, and he was hauling in the iron spits and absorbing them whole, with no regard at all for whether they still bore the qi of Hell within them.

“That, could it be…”

Even with no head, there was something about the man’s figure that Yun Juna felt she’d seen before, and she was just trying to place it.

“Thank you for your trouble, both of you. Allow me to express my gratitude for guarding my master.”

Behind the headless man, a handsome figure in Western-style formal wear appeared, Leon, who lifted his hat and bowed handsomely to the two women.

— That?
— A filthy stench. A sinner who has reaped the lives of others at random and fattened his own flesh on the blood of his victims!

The hell-wardens, as they had all along, branded Leon a sinner in an instant and breathed out their heat in high spirits.
Their manner said one more body was nothing to fear. But the heat they breathed out, just like the iron spits before it, began to be sucked away in a single direction.

— Hah, forgetting your duty and wandering the surface, dragging people into Hell at random. Better him than the likes of you!

It was not only Leon.
Flame-tail, who had revealed himself fully enlarged, was hauling in all the heat that blanketed the area.
Before the flame-hound, possessed of a nature that took in every fire in the world, even hellfire was no exception.

“Iron and fire, both at once…”
“With just those two we can win, can’t we?”
“That’s not so.”

The sorcerer who commanded both thralls, Shin Hweein, appeared on Flame-tail’s back.
Unlike when he’d collapsed with blood running from his nose, his color was healthy now, and the faintest of smiles played at his lips.

“Shin Hae!”
“Thank goodness…!”

He gave a nod of acknowledgment to the two women, whose faces had brightened at the sight of him, and said:

“Hell’s wardens come up out of Hell already weakened. The only conduit they have for handling Hell’s power is themselves, and the moment iron or flame parts from their bodies, it weakens further. Put it the other way around, and the heat and the qi of iron they shut up inside their own bodies is still ferocious.”

— Sinner!
— A, aaaaaaah!

With Shin Hweein at last stepped forward to face them, Oxhead and Horsehead screamed in unison.

— Greatest of sinners! A sinner who has sold the world away!
— W, we can’t handle this one in our Hell. This is for Yama himself to look upon and judge!

“I’d anticipated this kind of reaction, but how is it you never miss the mark.”

Still, at least they had opened a gap in the enemy. Should one count that as a relief?
Shin Hweein let out a sigh and extended the hand that held the staff.
A droplet of blood fell from his fingertip and rose into the air, and at once all the heat still scorching the area rushed into it. The droplet vanished as if evaporated in an instant, and a colossal fireball rose suspended in the air.

“My blood has become fire, and so fire is as my blood.”

And then it changed back into a colossal blood-droplet.

“My blood carries the dragon’s authority, and so my blood is as water.”

And at last it cleared into purity, becoming a colossal water-droplet bearing the dragon’s power.
As it spun rapidly and pulled the heat from the area, even the qi of Hell that made every living thing fragile slowly began to die down.

— I, impossible.
— With barely any spiritual power to speak of, how! Whose strength are you borrowing!

“It’s the dragon.”

What had been the reason Oxhead and Horsehead, the moment they appeared, scattered flames in every direction and made iron erupt across the ground?
It was all to make the environment as close to the Hell of Repetition as they could, to build conditions like Hell, to weaken the living and at the same time swell their own strength.
Now that Leon and the thrall he commanded had sucked away every last bit of the iron, and Flame-tail and Shin Hweein had absorbed every last bit of the flame, all of it was gone. This was no longer Hell.

— Y, you may try to flee Hell as you will, but you shall never escape it forever!
— Yama himself will punish you with his own hand!

“Hah. Wardens of Hell, instead of laying down a cowardly field-buff, why don’t we have a fair contest?”

“Young master used a gaming term and an English word directly…!”

Oxhead and Horsehead would not keep their eyes on him forever, either.
Shin Hweein had, for the moment, taken the high ground by stripping away their advantages, but in the end, going head to head with them, he would not win easily.
While they still showed a gap, he had to change the situation dramatically.

“And so… like this!”

He fired the water-droplet hanging in the air.
At the cannon-shell laden with no small measure of spiritual power and authority, Oxhead and Horsehead leapt for the moment from where they stood, and the droplet that fell between them split the ground deep and raised a colossal wall of water.
For the time being, the two wardens had been parted from one another.

“You two take one of them!”
“Got it!”
“You go support, support!”

The two awakened, who had been watching the situation in any case, made the transition instantly.
Yun Juna, who had been hanging in the air, dropped straight down toward Horsehead and brought her greatsword swinging, while Ham Seoyeon, spear in hand, began chanting a prayer.

— You look down on me, do you!

“This bastard’s bearing is way down from before!”
“Kill him!”

Both of them, who normally minded their decorum before Shin Hweein, had clearly run out of the luxury to do so in the heat of battle.
Faces twisted into scowls, lashing wildly at their foe, they really did resemble each other.
At that, an amused smile drifted onto Shin Hweein’s lips as he turned his head toward Oxhead.

“Your opponent is me. Did you think I’d let you flee to Hell?”

— A great sinner like you…!

“Who, after all, is free from the sin of taking life? You are no different.”

He’d have loved nothing better than to write out an Indulgence for these who tried to load him with such preposterous sin-karma, but as it happened he had just absolved another curse and burned through his karma, so that was impossible.
Then again, there was no real need to use it.

“Leon, I leave it to you.”
“Leave it to me. I’ve been wanting to test out a finished weapon, as it happens.”

A weapon. What a savage way to put it.
Shin Hweein watched Leon’s new thrall, reborn from the body of a Rank-Three metal-awakened, and shook his head from side to side.
For one who’d been a mere Rank-Three awakened to now be able to take on a Fourth-Rank yokai, the kind only First-Rank sorcerers could face, even dead, wouldn’t he be proud?

“Flame-tail, let’s go too.”

— As much as you like!

Leon, weapons drawn in both hands, and the headless man whose whole body was sheathed in metal, slammed head-on into Oxhead.
The beast’s body was hard, and seared so hot that handling it was no easy matter.
But the qi of metal, the instant it leaked outward, was absorbed by the headless man, and the heat was taken in by Shin Hweein and Flame-tail.
In the end, the thing was reduced to fighting with its bare body alone, no other tricks left to wield.
If he had to assign it a rank, you could say it had dropped to about Four-and-a-Half.

‘Compatibility’s good, what a relief. Is this the gain of being a Shin House sorcerer who can keep a wide range of shikigami?’

But the true reason the matchup was so favorable lay elsewhere.
Shin Hweein, feeling the spiritual power swelling in him in real time even now under the Indulgence’s influence, drew a deep breath.
Pouring all of it into a single shikigami, he chanted the incantation.

“Fire-blood — the art of Barabacha!”

Among the thirty-six kinds of hungry ghost set down in the Saddharma-smṛty-upasthāna Sūtra, the twenty-fourth.
Those who in life used wicked sorcery to deceive others fall, upon death, into the Hell of Repetition; after enduring a sentence of 1.66 trillion years they escape Hell, but having still not paid out all their sins, they become the hungry ghost Barabacha.
He was also a hungry ghost who ate small children, though that was not what mattered now.

“As it happens, you all have falsely invoked the name of Hell to treat every soul as a sinner and try to cast them down into Hell. Even should you die and fall into the Hell of Repetition yourselves, you’d have no excuse.”

— Daring to threaten and intimidate the gatekeepers of Hell—!

“Arong, go.”

— Krrrwoaaaaaaaah!

Perhaps for its affinity with the Hell of Repetition, Arong, transformed into the shape of a horrid monster covered head to foot in wounds, gave off an aura plainly greater than the spiritual power he had fed into him, and charged Oxhead.
Barabacha was a hungry ghost that arose from a sinner who, in the Hell of Repetition, had been tormented for 1.66 trillion years by the wardens of Hell, that is, by the very Oxhead before his eyes.
Just as before, in the seas of the Specter Realm, when he had wielded Bariram against the soldiers of the Dragon King, when facing those who had been left as adversaries in the tradition, the art could give off a special strength.

— Die, die again! Fall back into Hell!
— Kiaaaaaak!

“Hah!”

— Once, the likes of a Fourth-Rank yokai used to crawl beneath my feet, and now this petty ganging up… you die!

With Barabacha at the front, all of them charged Oxhead.
Shin Hweein, on Flame-tail’s back, called forth the dragon’s authority to craft yet another new water-art, and glanced up at the sky.
A Third-Rank great yokai blackened part of the sky as it thrashed; and against it, Yun Jinseong put out an ever stronger pressure.

‘One is a sun about to set, the other a storm growing fiercer by the moment. Yun Jinseong has won.’

Relieved, he was about to turn his eyes back to his own opponent when all at once an ill-omened premonition came over him, and he turned his gaze back into the sky.
It was not that he sensed any threat to Yun Jinseong’s life.
It was something far vaguer than that, a foreboding, the sense of a calamity beyond recall about to arrive.
And along with it, there was the feel of…

“Yokai aura… two…?”

He turned the meaning of that over in his mind for a moment.
And when he grasped what it meant, Shin Hweein’s eyes flew wide.