Chapter 45 - The First Survivors

As the gunfire died down and the gun smoke dissolved into the fog, the Supreme Mages gathered one by one around the Seoul mage’s corpse.

Hamza was the first to approach. He babbled something in a foreign language, and I vaguely caught something about Allah. Well, anyone who’d actually seen and fought the Seoul mage would react that way.

But Hamza had made a very big mistake.

He should have explained himself to us before Allah.

I peeled the little kitty bandage off my left hand, soaked through with the Seoul mage’s blood, and tossed it away. Then I flicked my hand to shake the blood off the blade.

I only did it because her blood gave me the creeps. I wasn’t trying to threaten anyone, but Hamza’s expression looked strange.

“Hamza, you bastard. I thought you’d fucked off for good, but you came back.”

“If she targets me, I die immediately. I have to intervene at the important moment.”

Hamza made what was, in its own way, an objective argument.

His actual combat ability was utterly pathetic, so he’d either be killed in an instant or targeted later. In that case, wouldn’t it be better to stay out of sight until the decisive moment, then show up when he could help his allies most and give them what they needed?

If I’d heard that while furious, I would have snapped at him to quit the bullshit. But now that we’d successfully killed the Seoul mage, I was in too good a mood to do anything but nod.

While I was accepting Hamza’s reasonable argument, Lee Se-jun, who’d landed the finishing blow on the Seoul mage, checked the cylinder of the fucking huge revolver and clicked his tongue.

“These rounds are precious, and I’ve already used two. But they definitely work.”

“Let me see.”

If I’d known it was such an awesome weapon, I would’ve used the fucking huge revolver too.

I reached out, thinking that someone like me, who could do all sorts of things with his eyes, ought to wield an awesome weapon. The moment I snatched it from Se-jun, though, its weight surprised me. It was far heavier than I’d imagined.

“This thing’s almost as heavy as a K2!”

“Oh, come on, Je-min. Stop overreacting. It’s lighter than that. A K2 weighs about three to four kilograms, as far as I know. This is only half that. They said the barrel’s about eight inches long, so... around two kilograms?”

“And you fired this one-handed and actually hit her.”

Humbled, I turned the gun around and offered Se-jun the grip.

This wasn’t something anyone but Se-jun, who’d reached Stage Two of heart-branch magic, could use. Besides, it was on an entirely different level from the .38-caliber revolver I’d tried on a visit to a shooting range. It looked like it required dedicated training.

Apparently, the bastard really had trained to shoot this thing while we were at Suwon City Hall.

I could clearly see a future where a delicate, cultured man like me fired it and wrecked his shoulder. A man ought to know himself better than anyone.

I wasn’t one to pine after something I couldn’t use, so the fucking huge revolver and I parted beautifully.

That was when Pastor Park Yo-han approached, clicking his tongue.

“Strong, my ass. You ganged up on her five to one. Of course you should win.”

“Aw, damn it. Pastor, if numbers were all that mattered in a fight, we should’ve gotten our asses kicked.”

“What nonsense are you talking about?”

“Don’t you know that these days, when five people gang up on a mysterious woman, they’re the ones who get sliced to pieces? Look at us Supreme Mages. Every one of us has his face covered by a gas mask and a poncho, while our opponent’s a woman walking around smiling with her face fully exposed. That’s a total-party-wipe cliché.”

For the benefit of our behind-the-times pastor, I explained the modern versions of clichés from horror movies and various action stories.

The dream of a five-man hero team winning by ganging up on the enemy had ended with Power Rangers. This was the brutal age of twenty-first-century media, where the moment five fully armed people covered their faces, one person with an uncovered face hunted them down.

Apparently, a few words like that weren’t enough to bridge the generation gap. The pastor clicked his tongue and approached the Seoul mage’s corpse.

“Baek Je-min, there’s a limit to your bullshit. Get over here and see what we can salvage.”

“I think we should destroy the walkie-talkie.”

Shin Na-in, who’d been looking around without joining the conversation, let out a short sigh.

I was just wondering why this shit-stained fanatic bastard was acting so uncharacteristically serious when he tapped his headset with his index finger.

“Three soldiers. All fatally wounded. They’ll die soon. Let’s burn the devil’s corpse or take everything we need, then hurry over and baptize them.”

“Baptize them?”

“They might want to repent before they die and go to heaven.”

This fucking lunatic.

But the pastor nodded at Na-in’s words with utmost seriousness and pointed at the Seoul mage’s corpse.

“Everyone, come here and look.”

“Is there anything left to look at?”

I’d emptied at least two magazines into the Seoul mage to kill her.

Torn and crushed by bullets and grenade fragments, she barely resembled a human anymore except for her legs.

But I could understand why the pastor was beckoning us over to inspect the body.

Beneath the predatory spine’s ribs, one organ remained perfectly intact.

The heart.

On it was the heart-branch magic script Se-jun had described before: a vertical line running through a circle. It was easy to spot, engraved into the surface like an indented scar.

Se-jun handed the fucking huge revolver to Hamza and frowned.

“It does look like the heart’s magic script... but it’s a little different from mine.”

“How?”

“The magic script I saw had a horizontal line, not a vertical one. This one’s vertical.”

That sparked an intriguing thought, and I turned to look for the piece of the Seoul mage’s tongue I’d cut off.

I didn’t want to pick it up with my bare hand, so I pricked it with the tip of my bayonet and carefully lifted it. When I brought it over to the Supreme Mages huddled around the corpse, Pastor Park Yo-han’s eyes widened and Hamza made a gagging noise.

“Holy shit. Baek Je-min, you fucker, don’t tell me you’re thinking of using that!”

“Urrrgh...”

“Using it for what? Fuck’s sake.”

What the hell did this Christard pastor and this Islamofuck migrant worker think I was?

I hadn’t brought over the chunk of tongue because I had some weird fetish. I wanted to turn suspicion into certainty. I gave my bayonet a little shake to dislodge it, and it landed with a wet splat, revealing the magic script drawn on it.

But its shape was different from the one I knew.

The tongue-branch magic script I’d seen had a semicircle at the bottom like a bowl, with a vertical line rising from its center. Short horizontal lines crossed and extended from that vertical stem like branches.

But on the Seoul mage’s severed tongue, the semicircle was at the top.

It was at the root of her tongue, so when she stuck her tongue out, the design appeared upside down.

Despite my reasonable explanation, Pastor Park Yo-han’s first response was a frown, clearly visible even through his gas mask’s lenses.

“Baek Je-min, you’re reaching. Maybe she simply thought of the root of the tongue as the bottom. There’s nothing wrong with it being flipped like that.”

“But the vertical line on the heart definitely suggests an inversion.”

“There’s something more important than that!”

Just as the pastor and I were about to begin a brief, one-minute debate, Hamza frowned at us—specifically, the three alteration-type users—with a slightly sickened expression.

“This woman learned magic too. Then magic script was carved into her. So... what about you?”

“I don’t remember hearing anything like that when I had my checkup in Pyeongtaek.”

Se-jun, who’d undergone a health checkup and every conceivable test to determine the precise effects of heart-branch magic, immediately countered him.

I stuck my tongue way out too, wagging it around for them to see.

“Anythin’ there?”

“Je-min, that’s disgusting. Put it away.”

“Ish there any?”

“There isn’t. Put it away.”

Shin Na-in was as prickly a bastard as ever.

Anyway, contrary to Hamza’s reasonable suspicions, the three of us alteration-type users didn’t seem to have any immediately visible markings. Yet the Seoul mage had magic script carved into her. What accounted for the difference?

CLICK.

Then Na-in detached his magazine to check the remaining rounds and spoke in an indifferent voice.

“Perhaps they’re carved in when an unbeliever dies. The veneration of saints and their remains is deeply heretical, but there’s nothing unusual about a devil’s remains being heretical. Naturally, we practitioners of alteration-type holy-war arts are different from those devilspawn.”

Once I filtered out enough of the shitter’s words, a plausible theory emerged.

Whatever the case while a mage was alive, upon death, magic script appeared on the body parts corresponding to the branches they’d learned. But was that all? It needed checking, so I took a deep breath and made a decision.

“Se-jun, lift your foot.”

“Huh? Okay...”

CHOP. CHOP.

I slipped my bayonet between the ribs of the predatory spine that had lived and died with the Seoul mage, scraping away as I cut out the heart. Then I stacked it with the severed tongue and reverently placed them beneath Se-jun’s foot.

“Now stomp.”

“Je-min. I really don’t want to swear, but I think I’m going to. You want me to step on this?”

“Tsk. Do I really have to give you a tedious, pedantic explanation?”

“Baek Je-min, at least tell us why.”

I explained briefly.

If a mage’s remains had some mystical effect after death, then mages would be both the most dangerous and the most valuable beings. It was still only speculation, but magic script appearing on a corpse’s body parts was itself a mystical occurrence. We couldn’t dismiss the possibility.

So if there were people after mages’ remains, they wouldn’t leave us alone, whether we took the remains of the Seoul mage we’d killed or left them behind. They might pursue us to exploit us.

That was why I’d decided against carrying the remains, despite the very high likelihood that they were useful.

“We don’t know how to use them anyway. But we can’t just hand them over to other unknown Seoul mages, and we can’t carry something around when we aren’t even certain what it does. We have no idea how strong the average Seoul mage is. Rather than take on unnecessary risk, I think we should decide our policy after finding relevant records or contacting friendly locals. Therefore, let’s destroy them.”

At my rational, intellectual explanation, the pastor narrowed his eyes and asked,

“And your real reason?”

“Fuck me, I don’t want to carry around the tongue and heart of someone who sucked people’s heads off with a big sloppy kiss and kept a predatory spine inside her. Can we just smash them?”

“Okay. That passes!”

CRUNCH!

Se-jun’s foot, powered by Heart Branch, Stage Two, crushed the heart and tongue like an industrial press. Fog hissed out of them.

Startled by the unexpected reaction, he jerked his foot back, but it was already over. All that remained where he’d stepped was a footprint and crushed, mangled pieces whose magic script was no longer recognizable.

Meanwhile, the pastor retrieved a phone and a suitable notebook from the Seoul mage’s corpse and handed them to Hamza.

He tossed the walkie-talkie under Se-jun’s foot as well.

“Let’s keep these for now. Se-jun, stomp on that one too. Sorcery or whatever it is, using an enemy’s belongings without thinking could turn them against us. We’re dealing with mystical heretics. There’s no harm in being extra careful.”

“Ugh.”

CRUNCH!

Only after Se-jun crushed the walkie-talkie with a groan could we leave.

And while we’d been examining and dealing with the Seoul mage’s corpse, Na-in delivered some bitter news.

“One soldier has died. All we can do is hope he attended church.”

“Oh, dear.”

The pastor’s sorrowful sigh drew a bitter sigh from me too, and I put my gas mask back on.

It was unfortunate, but they were already fatally wounded. We weren’t a rescue team, and even if we went to them, we had no way to save them. What could we do?

At least we’d avenged them.

* * *

We Supreme Mages followed Na-in to the soldiers who’d survived to the very end.

The first soldier he led us to was crouched near the bathroom entrance.

But he was already as good as dead.

He seemed to have chosen to shoot himself, with the muzzle in his mouth. But perhaps because he’d forced himself to fire while his hands were shaking badly, the bullet had gone astray and failed to kill him instantly.

Only choking gasps escaped his blood-smeared face.

Na-in knelt in front of him, checked his name tag, and spoke.

“Corporal Hong Gi-sim. You can’t go to heaven if you kill yourself. Did you attend church?”

He gasped and choked...

We couldn’t hear a thing. Na-in was conducting the whole conversation on his own.

He nodded, then chambered another round with a click.

Standing again, he aimed the muzzle squarely at Corporal Hong Gi-sim’s head.

“Brother Hong Gi-sim. May you knock upon the gates of heaven. Amen!”

BANG!

The choking breaths stopped. The hand that had trembled until the very end fell limp and peaceful.

Without a word, Pastor Park Yo-han approached the soldier’s body, placed his hands together, and offered a short prayer. Na-in switched his rifle back to safe as acrid gun smoke drifted from it.

Se-jun, Hamza, and I straightened out the soldier’s rifle and took his magazines, grenades, and even his gas mask filter. Se-jun went one step further and pulled off the dog tags around his neck.

“He didn’t bring a phone, being a soldier and all.”

“Se-jun, he’ll cry if you take his phone too.”

After the short funeral, Na-in set off again.

We followed him toward the last survivor.

From the first through fourth floors, the department store was packed with mannequins and clothing or accessory displays. That seemed to be why the surviving Korean soldiers had managed to hold out against the Seoul mage’s poor detection abilities. In the fog, it was hard to distinguish mannequins from people.

It was a small mercy that she hadn’t absorbed every surviving soldier.

If she’d gained more ammunition and greater skill with firearms, we Supreme Mages probably would have been wiped out instead. Considering their inadvertent contribution, this dark, fog-covered department store was dangerous, yes, but they deserved our time.

The last soldier lay slumped beyond the mannequins, near the door to the emergency stairs.

The entrance was blocked by a barricade of piled-up displays and mannequins, apparently preventing him from getting inside. He was breathing hard, and through his gas mask, each breath could be heard clearly from around twenty meters away.

He huffed. And huffed. And huffed.

Hamza was the first to approach him.

He knelt, opened his bag, and took out a first-aid kit, a needle, and thread.

“Hamza, do you know first aid?”

“I... was a medical student in Pakistan.”

“Not dentistry or something, right?”

“Surgery.”

Quite apart from this shocking revelation about Hamza, the migrant worker who’d hauled bricks, I didn’t think he could save the soldier before us.

Blood poured between the fingers clutching his side. He seemed to have been bleeding for a long time already, judging by the blood soaking the area around him.

It wasn’t just his side. His thigh was bleeding too, but the soldier didn’t seem to feel that injury.

Maybe he simply couldn’t reach it.

Given how the Seoul mage had swung and hurled chunks of concrete, he’d probably been hit by a similar projectile or a stray bullet. Still, Hamza opened the first-aid kit, took out a tourniquet, and examined the wounds.

Despite his despairing expression, he kept it out of his voice and spoke calmly.

“Stay calm. I studied medicine. You can live.”

“G-gas mask... please...”

Hamza calmly and steadily removed the last soldier’s gas mask.

Fate could be cruel.

The face beneath it was one I’d passed by several times.

“Why is First Lieutenant Shin Han-gi’s driver here?”

“Lieutenant Shin? He’s that man’s driver?”

Pastor Park Yo-han looked bewildered. Se-jun and Na-in wore strange expressions too, perhaps because this was someone they’d known at a remove.

Already deathly pale, the driver didn’t recognize my voice.

We’d only passed one another in coming and going, so naturally he wouldn’t recognize me. But meeting someone who seemed to know him must have been enough. His chest heaved, and he began to sob.

“I-I volunteered...”

That was when our shitter fanatic’s translation skills came into play.

In a calm, subdued voice, Na-in relayed what the soldier wanted to say.

“The first advance reconnaissance mission. Special forces alone couldn’t secure a foothold, so they called for Korean troops to volunteer to enter Seoul. Priority went to people with family in Seoul or another reason they had to go in.”

The soldier gasped, then broke into coughing sobs, thick saliva trailing from the corners of his mouth.

“M-Mom... in a place like this...”

“...”

“How can she be alone in a place like this...”

Hamza silently continued trying to stop the soldier’s bleeding.

But there wasn’t enough equipment, supplies, or time to rekindle a life already growing cold.

Na-in gently closed his eyes, then raised his right hand and gestured.

He was dead.

I patted Hamza’s shoulder and helped him stand.

“Just pray they turn down the heat in hell for him.”

“...”

“He’d lost too much blood anyway, and with where we are, we couldn’t evacuate him even if we stopped the bleeding. He would’ve died on the way back.”

“... Yes.”

Even so, Hamza could only let go after completing the measures to stop the soldier’s bleeding.

He wiped his blood-soaked hands on his trousers, repacked the first-aid kit, and put it in his bag. Meanwhile, the pastor approached and asked me,

“Did you know him?”

“He was the driver who told me his mother, Han Suk-ja, was in Seoul.”

“Amen. A righteous man who cherishes his family must surely have attended church in life.”

I realized that was the pastor’s own way of offering comfort and nodded.

It was a much warmer sentiment than saying the guy was an unbeliever who’d never attended church and would fall into hellfire.

Once again, we took the magazines and grenades. Se-jun alone collected the dog tags.

There was a reason we were so meticulous about gathering magazines.

“We each used at least two magazines to kill one Seoul mage. How many rounds is that?”

“About three hundred.”

“Wow. Two hundred fighting monsters as soon as we arrived, then three hundred here. We’ve already nearly emptied an eight-hundred-round ammo can in two days?”

As long as I could disinfect things, buffing bullets with blood from my right hand was starting to seem practical.

For now, one thing I understood painfully well was that, with fog this thick, we needed to share our magic script and learn the branches one by one.

Still, since we’d already started the day in spectacular fashion, we decided to recover the dead while replenishing our dwindling ammunition.

Prepared to spend the entire day on it, we decided to gather the Korean soldiers’ bodies on the department store’s second floor.

We collected around twenty unused thirty-round magazines, along with two gas masks in good condition and six filters as replacements, just in case. The rifles left behind were too heavy to carry, so we dismantled them and took only two bolt assemblies as spare parts.

Fortunately, thanks to our porter Se-jun’s tremendous efforts, gathering the fallen soldiers took little time.

Eleven bodies.

Considering the capacity of the vehicles they’d arrived in, there were definitely more. The problem was that neither Na-in’s past sight nor my tongue-and-eye magic combination could find them.

“It means they split up more than an hour ago. These men apparently didn’t know where the others were either, and were hunted down after becoming isolated.”

“Any officers or career NCOs among the bodies?”

“One first lieutenant and one sergeant first class.”

As Na-in and I exchanged information, Se-jun interjected with a sigh.

“They’re still alive, right?”

“Who knows.”

We were in a dark department store with visibility below twenty meters, packed with fog that had thinned a little but remained dense.

Even a tactical light couldn’t properly illuminate what was right in front of us through the fog’s particles. Only I, who could use eye magic, could clear the fog and steal the tiniest glimpses of this desolate, silent ruin.

This place would be their tomb.

“So much for a sunny resting place.”

We returned to where the vehicles were.

Plenty of monsters would have been stirred up by all that gunfire, but so far, there were no red footprints nearby.

Another mage might attack us too.

Still, these were the first survivors we’d encountered inside Seoul.

They weren’t locals, but members of the advance reconnaissance unit that had gone in ahead of us. So we filled the fuel cans kept in the vehicles, carried them over, and poured fuel over the bodies.

I struck a match Hamza had given me.

SCRITCH. SCRITCH...

The match’s flame was frail and feeble, wavering constantly, but it looked rather splendid in this filthy, dense, heavy fog.

I smiled as I carefully lowered the burning match onto the fuel-soaked pile of bodies.

“Anyone want to retreat?”

“Retreat? Wouldn’t it be better to just nuke the place?”

“That’d wipe out the magic. No.”

“Hey. What would you even use that stuff for?”

Se-jun roared with laughter, and the pastor scolded me.

“There is no retreat in a holy war.”

“Running away won’t help.”

Na-in answered firmly, and Hamza sounded resigned.

No one suggested retreating.

We Supreme Mages stared into the burning bodies for a while, then turned away. We intended to head to the department store’s upper floors.

We got scared, frequently spouted ridiculous bullshit, and harbored all sorts of bizarre wishes, but none of us discussed retreat. Pastor Park Yo-han gripped his K2 and said,

“Burning them might have stirred up the monsters even more. Check the upper floors, and if they’re safe, try learning that magic or whatever again. You all have booklets, don’t you?”

“If not, we’ll write it out and share it.”

Far from retreating, we settled on a course and pressed on.

Naturally.

If we’d called ourselves something estrogen-coded like Aphorism, we might already have gone home sobbing...

But we were the Supreme Mages.

To stop hell from seeping in, we march into hell.

Then Se-jun hesitated and spoke.

“Uh, Je-min.”

“If this is more bullshit about turning into a cute girl, I’m punching you.”

My prejudice against Se-jun was considerable.

A man who wanted to cut off his dick so he could coast through life was more than worthy of the contempt of Baek Je-min, a man’s man.

But the moment I heard his next words, I could only gape in shock.