Chapter 60 - It's All Mine

As a child, I used to close my eyes on Christmas Eve with my heart pounding in anticipation of presents. I remember being less concerned with whether Santa Claus really existed than with what gifts might be waiting for me. If anything had changed now that I was an adult, it was that I had to acquire the gift boxes myself.

Some people might find that disappointing. But a real man like Baek Je-min doesn't let such trifles dictate his moods. I drew my bayonet, gave it a few loose swings, and began the joyous process of unwrapping my present.

"Look at all this wrapping. Off with the goggles, off with the mask~."

Being a sensitive soul, I pierced the mask with the tip of my bayonet and gently peeled it away, lest I accidentally touch Ski Goggles' lips. Holding the bayonet in my right hand, I eased off the mask while lifting his goggles with my left to get a look at his face. But his face was far more hideous than I'd imagined.

"Aah!"

"Je-min, what are you making such a fuss about this... Aah!"

CLANG!

I dropped my bayonet and stumbled backward. Lee Se-jun, who'd seized the opportunity to give me shit, recoiled in horror the instant he saw Ski Goggles. Hamza shuddered as though he'd seen something no human should see. Only Shin Na-in and the pastor stared fiercely at the exposed face, their eyes wide.

"Is this that price you pay for ritual-type magic? What the hell did he make a contract with?"

"A fitting appearance for a servant of the devil."

V-shaped cuneiform characters were engraved all over Ski Goggles' bare face, irregular and asymmetrical, pointing every which way without a break. From a distance, they might have looked like tattoos layered with ink or paint, but having seen them up close, I could say with certainty that they weren't tattoos or body paint. His flesh was gouged out in the shape of cuneiform characters. His cheeks, forehead, lips, the bridge of his nose, his philtrum... His entire face was densely pitted with V-shaped characters of every size and orientation, each hollow filled with a bloody scab.

Even worse, a few cuneiform characters had found their way into his eyes. The whites of his eyes, I suppose you'd call them? I shuddered as I watched dark-red characters drift across them and past his pupils like things floating on water. Visceral revulsion raised goosebumps all over me.

Seeing Ski Goggles' bare face, stained and defiled by those V-shaped characters, even stirred a destructive impulse in me. I was overwhelmed by the urge to scrape them all away with a knife until his entire face was reduced to pulp. The problem was that I needed to extract or burst those magic-script-covered eyeballs to steal the power of the fetish objects.

Lee Se-jun discreetly backed away a few more steps, then shrugged as though making a grand concession.

"Wow~. I'm so jealous, Je-min~. Too bad I'm not an eye mage."

"You can do it, Je-min. You might make a mistake with your eyes closed, so you have to keep them open."

Se-jun and Hamza had somehow ended up pressed against each other, trembling from head to toe. Honestly, if you asked me which was more disgusting, a cockroach or Ski Goggles with his cuneiform stains, Ski Goggles was so much more revolting that I'd have accepted the cockroach as a pet instead. If destroying a mage's body parts once they became fetish objects didn't grant me their power, I'd have simply burned him.

Everyone seemed to feel much the same. Na-in fiddled needlessly with his gun and looked at me.

"Should I just smash them for you?"

"No, no... I'll handle it. Besides, if you destroy him, how will you get information out of him with Ear, Stage Three?"

Disgusting or not, the job had to be done. We needed to squeeze out every scrap of information we could, even if it took leading questions through Na-in's Ear, Stage Three. What would we gain by smashing everything just because he looked revolting? I wasn't some primitive from the old days who condemned people solely for their hideous appearance.

I breathed in, then let out a long sigh through my gas mask and took my bayonet in a reverse grip. For harvesting, stabbing downward that way was easier than holding it normally.

Perhaps because I'd given them a little time, magic script had now surfaced in Ski Goggles' eyes, much as a snow crab turns a lovely vermilion when steamed. A distorted square crammed forcibly inside a triangle. The magic symbol representing the eye had driven out the cuneiform and settled in his pupils. Now I only had to extract them.

I wondered if the bounty hunters of old had felt this way when cutting off a wanted man's head. Crouching down, I began harvesting the fetish objects with the tip of my reverse-gripped bayonet.

SCRITCH, SCRITCH.

The sensation of scraping bone traveled through the hilt, and the distinctive feeling of piercing something soft crept up my fingers. When I finally finished harvesting the fetish objects, I held Ski Goggles' gouged-out eyes in my hand. Without hesitation, I set them on the ground and raised my foot.

That was when Pastor Park Yo-han blinked and raised a hand.

"Wait, Baek Je-min, hold on. There are two, so if you and Na-in take one each..."

"No! They're mine!"

A Stage Three ear mage wanted to muscle in on Stage Two eye magic too? Not. A. Chance.

CRUNCH!

Ski Goggles' eyeballs squashed beneath my foot. It was exactly like before. Just like the Dubai Chewy Witch's tongue root and heart, his eyes released fog with a hiss. The instant that burst of fog enveloped everything around me, I once again faced an overflowing tide of knowledge.

Words and languages I'd never heard in my life rang ceaselessly through my head. It felt as though I'd been planted in the middle of a debating chamber where dozens of different people were raising their voices and babbling, each intent on saying only what they wanted to say. Even a fight between hard-line supporters of opposing political camps would have seemed infinitely more polite and sophisticated than these voices.

The ominous, unpleasant voices rummaging through my head had wildly erratic tones and indistinct pronunciation. They scratched at my eardrums like a recorder squeaking off-key, a harmony messier than construction noise. Even the strained groans of someone whose voice had been rasped raw, or vocal cords buried in phlegm, would have sounded clearer and cleaner.

Fishing useful knowledge out of voices filthier than industrial wastewater demanded a truly horrendous amount of concentration. In some ways, it was worse than the pain I felt whenever I used eye-branch magic, like rubbing my eyeballs against rough plastic. The harder I concentrated, the more my forehead throbbed and my skull ached. Listening made me dizzy; trying to discern the patterns made my stomach churn.

But just as a thirsty person can scoop up muddy water pooled beside a rice paddy and drink it, I, thirsty for knowledge, could scoop up meaningful information from this nauseating harmony. Here is a summary of the portions of Ski Goggles' knowledge that I could understand.

The detailed classification of magic that Seoul's mages had established was far more systematic than I'd expected, and far more extensive than what the South Korean military knew.

First: sorcery-type. This was scholarly magic encompassing everything from the malign influences cast by shamans to tarot divination and the esoteric mysteries of alchemy associated with Hermes Trismegistus.

Naturally, most Seoul mages lacked the knowledge to use sorcery-type magic properly. But after January 6, amid the chaos brought on by the critical-threshold breach, information about it spread through word of mouth. Some alteration-type mages supplemented their firepower with sorcery-type magic and managed to survive.

Second: ritual-type. Contract-based magic proposed as sorcery-type and alteration-type magic became widely known. Sorcery, at its root, was the vestige of attempts to control and reproduce natural phenomena according to human will. Science and sorcery resembled each other far more than one might think. The clear distinction was that science uncovered the principles behind natural phenomena through empirical experiments, while sorcery sought those principles in divine beings and attempted to control the phenomena through supernatural rituals.

Ritual-type magic focused on the rituals through which sorcerers had originally tried to command or handle divine beings. Through revelations in dreams or their own research, practitioners contracted with divine beings and borrowed their power in the form of spells. Very few such beings were known, and contract terms and spells were invariably kept secret, since disclosure created a serious risk of their being countered. Contracts with these beings were extremely dangerous. Once contract progress reached 100%, certain destruction was decreed.

Even Ski Goggles hadn't known everything about the being he'd contracted with. He had merely speculated based on the cuneiform spreading over his body and the grimoire he'd made himself. For what it was worth, he believed his destruction would mean his entire body degenerating into cuneiform characters. He thought that, upon his complete destruction, he would become a page in a grimoire like the Necronomicon of the Cthulhu Mythos, and he presented offerings to postpone that fate.

The offering accepted by Ski Goggles' divine patron was fresh raw meat. That was awfully hard to obtain in fog-covered Seoul. He would have needed to search occupied areas or looted grocery stores for refrigerators that might contain frozen meat. Instead, he changed his mind and began targeting ordinary people. He hadn't gone out of his way to target mages because doing so cost him too many familiars.

Ski Goggles estimated that tens of thousands of mages had survived in Seoul. Of those, he thought roughly ten thousand were genuinely significant mages who had reached Stage Two or higher. He believed all of them were hiding their individual powers, which was why he'd cautiously restricted himself to ordinary people.

And here I discovered a hidden effect of ear-branch magic. How exactly had Ski Goggles learned ritual-type magic? The moment that question occurred to me, the filthy voices that had been tormenting me nonstop faded, and a familiar voice took their place.

["The Society of 66?"]

It was Ski Goggles. His voice was hoarse from cigarettes and alcohol, but his manner was far more courteous and composed than when he'd confronted us alive.

["Who are they, and why do they want to know how I learned it?"]

He was talking to someone. Before I knew it, I was seeing a hazy image of the hideout Ski Goggles had used while alive. The ears. Each time my ears heard a sound, all five senses grew clearer.

["Really?"]

As the scene sharpened a little more, his hideout came into view. The first thing I saw was a window sealed tightly with blackout curtains and wooden barricades. A pentagram drawn in blood on the curtains trailed bloody stains like tears. Even in his hideout, Ski Goggles was bundled up tight, raising a Chinese cleaver to chop something.

TOK-TOK-TOK-TOK-TOK...

The cleaver's brisk tapping on the cutting board reached my ears. Repeated shelling had shaken the wallpaper loose and covered the wall in hairline cracks. Apart from the hands dangling from nails driven into it, it was a remarkably warm, domestic scene.

As water bubbled in a dented aluminum pot, Ski Goggles chopped human hands, bones and all, then used a sharp pen nib to carve something into each piece. Some might have seen cruelty and grotesquerie in the scene, but I glimpsed the passion of someone engrossed in their work, a concentration almost reverent.

Ski Goggles switched his sorcery phone to speaker mode, set it on the table, and spun the bloodied cleaver once. His voice was now as clear as if I were standing beside him.

["Wow. Those guys are completely fucking insane."]

He let out a disbelieving laugh, but he didn't seem displeased. He merely chuckled as he painstakingly engraved cuneiform into a human wrist with the nib. He even began humming before setting down the nib and wrist and heading toward the blackout curtains.

Hooking the edge of the curtain with his index finger, he lifted it the tiniest fraction—barely enough to see a speck of anything—and checked outside before promptly lowering it again. His steps looked light as he returned to the cutting board.

["Still, it sounds doable. So, if I share what I know about ritual-type magic, what can you do for me?"]

I couldn't hear the voice on the other end of the sorcery phone. Instead, I saw Ski Goggles grow a little anxious and gather assorted writing implements. When he couldn't find a notebook, he rummaged through the heavy pile of black garbage bags in the corner. A few seconds later, he hurriedly placed a pale woman's forearm on the cutting board. The hand had been severed at the wrist, and no cuneiform had yet been engraved into it.

["Wait... Prepare the magic seals and the ritual at two thirty in the morning on July 7... And the incantation?"]

SCRITCH, SCRITCH.

The sight of him taking notes on a human forearm with a sharp pen nib as though it were a notebook was so utterly routine that I was the one experiencing cognitive dissonance. Even as he carved into the arm deeply enough to scrape bone, I could clearly hear him swallow.

["66 for 7. 55 to complete 66. A pair of eyes gazing to comprehend 55. Good. We Seoulites have to help each other survive."]

POP.

The nib came out of the dead person's forearm. Ski Goggles set down the nib, stained with lifeless blood, and rubbed the blood on his hands off against his long padded coat.

["Dream. Symbols representing each god are hidden in this goddamn fog. With luck, you might find one. Sleep with the symbol, dream through it, and you'll receive a revelation and an offer."]

But wiping away the blood didn't remove the cuneiform covering his body. Ski Goggles absentmindedly raised his left hand and caught sight of the irregular V-shaped characters pitting the back of it like pockmarks.

CRUNCH!

He drove the pen nib into the back of his own hand. Then he twisted it about, digging out the cuneiform characters one by one. But no matter how deeply he dug, no matter how much flesh he gouged away, he couldn't erase the V-shaped characters. Blood pooled in V shapes where the flesh had been excavated. When he stripped away all the blood and flesh down to the bone, the bones twisted to reveal joints distinctly shaped like V-shaped cuneiform.

Eventually, Ski Goggles stopped his frantic struggle. After a brief deep breath, in the time it took to blink, his left hand was restored to its original state. Without a single wound—merely covered in cuneiform.

["Let me ask one more favor."]

He rubbed his hands together, struggling to keep even a little of the cuneiform out of sight.

["Just tell me where those non-mage freeloading fucks are. Everyone's struggling to find food. Some people ought to be changing their minds by now, right? Time to face reality. Anyone who isn't a mage isn't human. Even if we save them, they'll just become monsters anyway."]

Then he left the cutting board and headed into a corner. Picking up an iron tent stake, he tapped it against the wall a few times and began gathering things into his backpack.

["Wouldn't it be a hundred, a thousand times better for us to put them to good use and advance our powers than to add another monster?"]

TOK.

["I can put them to ten thousand times better use, so give me a call."]

The instant Ski Goggles shouldered his backpack and tapped the wall one last time with the iron stake, the vision ended. I had completely absorbed the fetish objects' power. At the same time, understanding of alteration-type magic's third stage surged into me like the incoming tide.

Stage One was recollection. Looking back on happiness in order to feel pain. The stage of realizing why it hurt.

Stage Two was grief. Falling from happiness and experiencing pain. The stage in which mind and body alike mourned unavoidable pain, undergoing emotional purification again and again.

Stage Three was overcoming. Denying pain or accepting it. The stage of preparing, whether out of a desire to escape suffering or to embrace it willingly. And I was already enjoying pain.

"Huuuurrrgh..."

By now, even vomiting had become familiar. The moment nausea rose, I pulled up my gas mask, averting the catastrophe of coating its inside with vomit. Of course, the vomit splattered onto the ground in a heap, but that was what asphalt roads were for. As I braced myself against the ground with one hand and threw up, I heard someone clicking their tongue above me.

"Ha. Baek Je-min, you're a complete fucking lunatic. You stomped on both because you couldn't bear to give one away."

"Je-min, we should find out what happens if you and Na-in each take an eye."

"Bleeergh... Ptoo!"

I spat and answered Se-jun's bullshit attempt at sounding composed.

"If we each stomp one and I don't level up, I'm the only one losing out. Why would I do that? Are you insane?"

I'd entered this fog-covered Seoul for mana, and they wanted me to give it up? I couldn't see how that was any different from telling someone not to breathe so they could live longer, because breathing would eventually lead to dying of old age.

After throwing up for quite a while, I caught my breath and gave them a brief summary of what I'd seen and experienced. The pastor looked down at Ski Goggles' corpse, fiddling with his trigger.

"When an ear-branch mage destroys a fetish object, they can directly see whichever memories from its owner's life they want?"

"Yes. I'm only at Ear, Stage One, so my ear magic is pretty lousy, but from now on I think Na-in should crush fetish objects from branches we don't need."

According to the knowledge I'd acquired when I destroyed the Dubai Chewy Witch's tongue, the Dubai Witch had known there were limits to how far destroying fetish objects could advance one's powers. Advancement only occurred when destroying a fetish object belonging to a higher-stage mage of the same branch.

Acquiring the knowledge a mage had possessed in life depended on how much mysticism the mage doing the destroying knew. If you fucked around instead of studying mysticism, like Shin Na-in or Lee Se-jun, that precious knowledge scattered into thin air. But ear-branch mages apparently could bypass that requirement.

I looked at Na-in, who would have overheard my thoughts, and found him gazing down at Ski Goggles with contempt. I wondered whether he'd learned everything I'd realized too, but that hope was in vain. Now that I looked, the fanatical bastard apparently had been prodding Ski Goggles with his muzzle ever since I'd fallen into the vision. While Hamza flailed his hands helplessly beside him, Na-in was busy poking the cuneiform covering Ski Goggles' face with the barrel of his gun.

"Na-in, that's dirty. That's yucky!"

"This man worshipped an idol other than the Lord and may have harmed our brothers and sisters in the church. Even a heathen like you must understand this desire to inflict a little more suffering on him!"

"I don't understand. I don't need to."

"O Lord! There is no reasoning with one who is not of the people of the Scripture!"

The only person who could resolve this mess was the pastor, a fellow Christian nutjob. Meeting my bright, pleading gaze, Pastor Park Yo-han shook his head, then approached Na-in and quietly placed a hand on his shoulder.

"Shin Na-in."

"Pastor, we must burn this man. He must suffer continuously, even before he reaches hellfire!"

"Judgment belongs to the Lord. Our role is not to judge, but to help unbelievers repent before they commit greater sins."

"But... Pastor..."

"We've sent him before the Lord. That's enough. Let's go. We've spent too long here."

"But this man contracted with a demon. I gathered as much from Baek Je-min's thoughts. He was seduced by a demon through dreams!"

"WHAT!!!"

BAM! BAM! BAM!

The pastor and Na-in immediately swung their rifle stocks and kicked away, completely pulverizing Ski Goggles' head. Even our ancestors enthusiastically pounding away with mortar and pestle on Chuseok couldn't have pounded with such gusto. Their movements were so swift and so destructive that Se-jun and Hamza could only watch, trembling.

I was just as scared, but the thought that this appalling vandalism might damage valuable loot sent me scrambling to intervene.

"Wait a moment!"

"What do you want!"

"Je-min, please stand aside. This is purification!"

I raised a hand to stop them both, then spoke with perfect calm and composure.

"Let me turn him over and get the backpack off first. Then you can continue."

* * *

April 19, 2028, 3:24 p.m.

Expedition, day five.

After defeating the attacker known as Ski Goggles and acquiring his backpack, we managed to get past Mongchontoseong Station. It was a beautiful outcome, apart from Se-jun's sulky grumbling through his gas mask.

"Dumping this on me again."

"You're at Heart, Stage Three—a superhuman who doesn't even shit. Carry some luggage. You used plenty of ammo, so your load should be lighter anyway."

"Easy for you to say when you aren't carrying it, Je-min."

"Hey. I'm carrying a knife too."

Of course, not every outcome was beautiful. Fighting Ski Goggles had sharply depleted our ammunition. We had eight hundred rounds left. Without the bullets we'd acquired at the Jangji Station department store, we'd already have run dry. As a result, we Supreme Mages had no choice but to divide up our roles as a last resort.

Lee Se-jun could kill monsters through sheer physical power, swinging his bloody fists with Heart, Stage Three and Hand, Stage One. And then there was me, Baek Je-min, the Supreme in Supreme Mages, equipped with Eye, Stage Three, Hand, Stage Two, Tongue, Stage Two, and even Ear, Stage One. The two of us took just one magazine each and assumed close-combat duty, with bloody fists and a bloodstained bayonet respectively. We were the only ones capable of fighting up close; the rest would become human tin cans the moment their ammunition ran out.

Our best option was for Se-jun to bring up the very rear and for me, Baek Je-min, to take the very front, both prepared for close combat. My performance in these circumstances was so fucking amazing that they could edit it into a video for my funeral, showcasing the archmage in life. It was thanks to me alone that we could advance while incapacitating small groups of monsters through hunger with Tongue, Stage Two. I wanted to boast about every last feat, but postponed that until my funeral.

We Supreme Mages safely crossed a sizable bridge, repeatedly looking up at the shadows of tall buildings rising beyond the thick fog. Then I gazed down at the river, still flowing despite this catastrophe, and was overcome by a strange feeling. Humans were worrying about living or dying, yet the river flowed indifferently on. Seeing the schools of fish down below doing just fine reminded me that these monsters targeted only humans.

"Everything in Seoul is just so big."

"Nope. The rooms are tiny."

While Hamza and Se-jun exchanged pointless remarks, the pastor and Na-in brought up a more serious topic: the strange name mentioned in Ski Goggles' memories that I'd seen.

"The Society of 66, huh."

"Could they be people who command devils?"

"Who knows... They do seem connected to that sham monk."

I gave the backs of the pastor and Na-in a few hearty pats as they grew needlessly grave.

"Don't dwell on something we can't find right away. Let's keep moving. We need to reach the Han River today."

"Good grief. I wonder what else will be waiting at the Han River."

As the pastor voiced his worries, Na-in exhaled briefly and spoke.

"Pastor, I think we may need to regroup once more when we reach the Han River."

"Yes. We should."

Resolve returned to the pastor's eyes. He turned to us Supreme Mages, raised his gun, and gestured.

"Hey, Best of Best. If you're done slacking, let's go."

"Yessir."

Se-jun answered playfully, then looked at me and jerked his chin. Chuckling, I ran my left index finger over the broad flat of the bayonet. On the blade, coated with blood from my right hand, the word [Sharp], written in blood from my left, had hardened while trailing dark-red blood. Of course, the price was that both my hands were now wrapped in Hamza's cat-pattern bandages and gauze.

As I tightened my grip on the bayonet and started walking, I heard the others chatting.

"If land prices in Seoul fall, I'd like to own a home too."

"Hey, Muslim, you want to live somewhere like this?"

Leaving behind the groaning screams of monsters devouring one another, we listened to the flowing river. With every step across bridge tiles encrusted with browned bloodstains, the faint fishy odor of river water beginning to rot beneath the dense fog drifted up to us. To a nose accustomed to the stench of rotting blood, it smelled wonderfully clear and pure.

In a place some would call hell, we were still alive. And we were willingly advancing into a deeper hell.