"What do I do. What am I supposed to do…?"
Yoon Seul-hye sat slumped on the floor, trembling, muttering to no one.
The question, with no one to answer it, just dissolved into the empty room.
She fumbled at the phone with shaking fingers.
The recording started playing again.
Someone's scream, a tangle of crashes, the sound of something being torn open and crushed — and only after all of it had passed did an unfamiliar man's voice come through.
The voice of the man who had killed them all.
Yoon Seul-hye sucked in a breath, as if a hand had closed around her heart.
Choi Jun-hyeong's voice.
Right. There was one more, wasn't there?
You mean Yoon Seul-hye? That one's still useful.
After that, Choi Jun-hyeong walked the man through what kind of ability she had, and how, used properly, it could smooth over a fair amount of inconvenient business.
Only after she'd listened that far did Yoon Seul-hye let the phone slip from her hand.
She'd played the conversation back over and over, and the conclusion was the same every time: only one future was waiting for her.
"I'm… going to die…"
She wrapped her arms around her own body to try to stop the wild trembling, and the words came out anyway.
The man who'd cut down four Six Stars in a single breath had her marked.
Choi Jun-hyeong was in on it with him.
She wasn't a fighter to begin with, and they knew her ability inside and out. There was no slipping the grip of people like that.
She had to ask for help.
She thought it — and not a single face came to mind.
She knew better than anyone that the Association couldn't be trusted.
The media wouldn't save her either.
What good were headlines or public opinion when a man like that had decided to kill her?
If she held a press conference and begged on her knees, screaming for someone to save her, she'd just get her neck torn off on live television.
She ran frantically through the dozens of names and numbers stored away in her head.
Not one of them was a person who could help her now.
'The Ten…?'
Almost immediately, she shook her head.
She had a rough idea of where the Ten Powerhouses stood at the moment.
Most of them, after going head-to-head with a Seven Calamity, were still convalescing, and even the ones still active hadn't been moving as boldly as before, dragging the aftereffects with them.
And honestly, she had her doubts about whether they'd protect her at all even if she asked.
So who else, then? Who…
"Ah."
Without warning, a face flashed across her mind.
The one in command of a power so vast that even the Association couldn't touch him lightly.
The one who'd made his presence felt in the full-on war against a Seven Calamity and earned the acknowledgment of every member of the Ten.
And the one Choi Jun-hyeong was after more than anyone else — the one clearly hiding some enormous power.
"……"
Yu Ji-hyeok.
She had to meet him, she whispered, her voice raw with urgency.
"Hmm."
"What is it, Landschi?"
Choi Jun-hyeong asked as Landschi suddenly began scanning the room.
"One of the corpses is gone."
"What?"
Startled, Choi Jun-hyeong looked around as well.
He was right.
There were supposed to be four bodies.
There were only three.
"Whose body is it?"
"Hold on. Give me a second…"
Choi Jun-hyeong scowled and let his eyes sweep the room.
The only female corpse — that was Xiao Jie.
The one missing both arms and its head — that was Hailey.
The one wearing that gaudy jewelry — that was the substitute whose name he couldn't even remember…
"Maxim. Maxim Goldenberg. His body isn't here."
"Tell me about him."
"Plenty of money, very good at gathering information. He could hold his own in a fight, too. That's why I put him in the Six Stars."
"That's not what I'm asking."
Choi Jun-hyeong thought for a beat, then nodded.
"…He was active in a lot of the Association's incidents. But he was so obviously about the money and his own profit that everyone just shrugged it off. A lot of the cases really were tied to his own business, after all. Because of that, he actually had decent pull inside the Association. He was hooked into the upper ranks, too. Hardly anyone reined him in."
"That means he had a strong voice. He could nose around anywhere and people would chalk it up to him sniffing out money."
"That's right. …Oh, no, you can't be—"
Landschi nodded at Choi Jun-hyeong's stunned face.
"He was your spy. From what that woman confessed earlier, I thought there was only the one planted, but apparently not."
Muttering the words, Landschi crouched down where Maxim Goldenberg's body should have been and started examining the area.
He brushed a hand across the floor, tasted the blood on his fingers, muttered something to himself, then gave a small nod, as if it all clicked.
"Body-doubling, with a shape-shifting branch of ability. The trace of vanished mana and the feel of the blood — no question. Not a homunculus, not a drug, not some magic-tool construct — this was a body double made with a pure innate power. And… it's a woman. Race, I can't say. Middle Eastern? European? No, mixed. I don't know human races well enough to narrow it down further, but the mana is quite distinctive."
At that, Choi Jun-hyeong drove his foot into one of the corpses with everything he had.
He muttered, low,
"Oh, fuck."
Hailey's body went tumbling away with a dull thud, and Landschi watched him with an expression that said, what now?
"Fuck — what the hell, then? These pieces of shit have been playing me this whole time? Xiao Jie was crawling into bed with some bastard I don't even know, feeding him information, and Maxim came in as a plant from day one? And wasn't even the right sex? And I don't have a goddamn clue who he really was?"
Eyes glittering, he muttered the words and then drove his foot into Xiao Jie's corpse with the same force.
Then he pointed at the old man standing by the door like a sentry and said,
"Hey, you — you fucking… ah, my apologies. Sir. That wasn't directed at you. Anyway — your name was?"
"…Arthur. Arthur Walclay."
"Right, Arthur. Arthur, sir. If it's not too much trouble, could you… clear these bodies away for me? Chop them up small, if you would. Heard you're handy with a blade. Cut up your own comrades and dumped them too, didn't you?"
Choi Jun-hyeong muttered it, eyes still glassy.
The old man, who had given his name without a word, only watched him.
"I want them carved up and fed to our Happy. Oh — Happy's our dog. Three-year-old male Maltese. Just the right amount of dumb and cute, you wouldn't believe how lovable."
At the sight of him muttering to himself like a man unhinged, the old man gave a slight, contemptuous shake of his head.
After looking the floor over a few more times, Landschi spoke, exhaling.
For all that it was for the sake of his master's seal, he found his own circumstances — having to keep company with something this crude — too pitiful for words.
"Their corpses have uses. Leave them be."
"…More uses than feeding them to our Happy?"
"Yes."
Landschi rose slowly to his feet as he spoke.
"They're on lockdown, fine — but if they aren't seen for too long, it'll draw suspicion. Fortunately, we have the originals. Build halfway convincing puppets out of these bodies and there'll be no fuss."
"…Ahh."
"In the meantime, Choi Jun-hyeong, keep working the list — keep calling, keep checking. …As you know, the two who would've been our biggest assets just now — Ender Freeman and Ichinose Kohei — both went silent at almost the same time. The information was almost certainly leaked in advance and they were taken out. Move on the rest immediately and start chipping away at the people around them."
The former captain of Red Case's escort team.
And a former executive of the Thorn Cross Congregation, now leading what was left of their ranks.
"It's barely more than a distraction. Is that going to be enough?"
"What, did you think they'd cheerfully hand over what we want?"
Landschi snorted, as though he'd never expected anything else.
"Distraction is plenty. What we need now is time, nothing more—"
In the same breath, he sent a lance of flame at a corner of the room.
Choi Jun-hyeong recoiled and stumbled back a few steps. The skin around one of Landschi's eyes twitched as he strode toward where he'd loosed the flame.
In that spot, a small plant sprout was burning.
A World Tree sprout.
"Ugh."
A sharp sting shot through my eyes and ears.
I'd been spotted. No doubt about it.
"Mm…"
The last of Milited's surviving children — and a dragon, too, wasn't it.
Part of me had hoped otherwise, but you really couldn't slip a dragon's senses.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing — let's keep going."
Minerva, walking ahead of me, glanced back with a puzzled tilt of her head.
I waved it off as nothing, shifted my grip on the tail I was carrying in both arms, and followed after her.
It hadn't mattered when I was an adult, but in this body, her tail dragged on the ground and got in the way of walking — so she'd said.
"It's right here. Almost there."
We were following Lee Ye-eun toward her room.
Originally, Minerva had planned to go out with me to wander around the two of us, but since she'd shrunk along with me, going outside became impractical.
That was when Lee Ye-eun had offered her room — most necessities were already there, and no one could approach without her permission. Minerva had brightened at that, calling it a splendid idea.
…I'd promised to keep Minerva company until the potion wore off, so I just trailed after the two of them in silence.
"Are you sure it's okay for us to come inside?"
At my question, Lee Ye-eun, walking ahead, answered like it was nothing.
At some point we'd slipped back into the way we usually talked.
"Mm… honestly, my actual room is pretty far from here. The place we're going is more like a lounge attached to my office. It's on the small side, but… anything you'd want is in there. And it's somewhere you can relax without other people fussing around."
When we arrived at this so-called lounge, I was momentarily speechless.
Lounge — sure. It was on a different planet from the house I'd lived in or the dorms I'd stayed in, and richer than most decent hotels.
"Are either of you hungry or thirsty? If so, help yourselves to anything in the fridge or the cabinets. As for the others… I'll go get them, so why don't you watch some TV in the meantime?"
At her words, Minerva went pattering across the room and flopped down on the sofa.
Lee Ye-eun watched her for a moment, blinking, then turned to leave with a "make yourselves comfortable."
"Oh — one sec."
"Hm? What is it?"
I went over to her and motioned for her to lean down.
She tilted obligingly, and I murmured, voice low, the things I'd just picked up.
Her eyes narrowed for a moment, and—
"I might be a bit longer coming back."
She left it at that and slipped out the door.
I was thinking it would be best to move quickly as soon as our bodies returned to normal, when—
"You — over here. Here. Come, sit yourself down."
Minerva had clearly run out of patience. She was scrunching her face up at me and patting the sofa cushion — pat, pat.
I sat down beside her without a fuss.
She picked up the remote that had been lying nearby, fiddled with it for a moment, and handed it to me.
"Oh."
The TV switched on and a drama started playing, and Minerva's tail swished excitedly.
She casually hooked my body with that tail, reeled me in to her side, and asked,
"You, what is that called?"
"Which? The thing showing it, or the thing playing on it?"
"Both."
"That's called a television… and as for what's on it, I don't know the details either, but I think it's a drama?"
"A drahhma. Mmm, I see."
She nodded, drawing the syllables out deliberately, and immediately fixed her attention on the screen.
I tried to slip free of her hold, only to realize the tail was wrapped snugly around my waist, and gave up on it almost at once.
In the end, I sat there next to her, watching the drama too.
"You."
"Yeah?"
"Why is that woman so angry?"
On the screen, a man was being splashed in the face with ice water and yanked by the collar — caught by the protagonist while on a blind date with another woman.
"It's because he cheated."
"Cheated?"
I thought for a moment, then tried to explain.
"Hmm… so, basically, humans take it for granted that one man and one woman pair off and become a couple. When someone in a relationship sees someone else like that, people generally treat it as a kind of betrayal. A lot of people get upset even when it's just someone of the opposite sex they know — no romantic feelings, just an acquaintance."
"Ah, that part I know. The so-called… yes, jealousy?"
"Right."
"And when one has a lover and meets someone else of the opposite sex — that's betrayal? Cheating?"
"Right."
Minerva stared at me dead-on.
"Then are you cheating?"
"…What?"
"Aren't you."
She held up her hand and folded her fingers down one by one.
"Setting aside this Minerva — Han Su-yeong, the World Tree girl from earlier, the shadow girl, the tiny one with whatever she's got going on… even counting only the ones I know about, that's five."
"……"
"So that's what it was — that prickly feeling I'd catch every so often was jealousy. I kept noticing this eerie chill whenever you were out of sight…"
"Wait, what?"
I shot back, startled, and Minerva tipped her head as if it was nothing.
"So — exactly who is your lover? It is this Minerva, of course, isn't it?"
At her question I looked away, and trotted out an excuse I knew was about as cowardly as they came.
"…I don't have anyone I'm dating. And I'm not planning to."
Right on cue, the actress on the TV let loose a furious scream.
Minerva blinked thoughtfully.
"So I have been a joke to you the whole time? Are you trash that crawls out of the gutter?"
"…Minerva."
The pleading note in my voice — please, stop — set her off into a small puff of laughter.
She must have been genuinely amused, because her tail was swaying back and forth in a soft, contented rhythm.
"Mm, you. May I ask one more thing?"
"What?"
"If this Minerva were to cheat — with some other human man, not you — would you be jealous?"
I let out a small laugh at that.
"Hard to say. Probably, yeah."
"Hmm."
Minerva let out a satisfied little snort.
She leaned her head against me, which meant my cheek got squashed against her horn.
"In any case, humans other than you mean nothing to this Minerva. Human man or human woman, they all look the same to me. Hmm — even if I were to cheat, I imagine I'd just dissolve the partner away in my shadow afterward and use them as nutrients."
I answered her at once.
"…Maybe don't go meeting any other humans, then."
"Mm? I just learned about this. Right now, you are being jealous of this Minerva."
At her playful tone, I just gave a limp nod.
She laughed — a bright, ringing laugh almost like song.
"You."
"Yeah? Hungry? Want me to grab you something?"
"…Do you take me for some glutton?"
Minerva muttered it with a look of mild exasperation.
She slipped off me and straightened up.
"I have something to tell you."
"Something to tell me?"
She nodded.
"It concerns the Seven Calamities."
I immediately hit the mute button.
"This is about the ones still out there, then."
"Yes. Milited. Venus. Juno…"
Minerva drew a quiet breath.
"And Ahriman as well. There is something you must hear."