Blood cult au part eighteen (first, most recent, masterpost)
Currently: Minji and Miyeong made out, Rumi freaked out, and everyone has run out of time to deal with the aftershocks—they’ve got wraiths to kill!
Rumi, Zoey, and Celine end up in Celine's car, with Celine's gear, and Mira climbs into the backseat of Miyeong's for the drive up to the apartment.
Celine has distributed protective bujeok, to all of them, meant to make it harder for wraiths to read or influence them, and give them something to amplify an exorcism through if needed. It won't keep them out, not by itself, she'd said, once again visibly annoyed that she isn't able to singlehandedly no-sell the most powerful shards of Gwi-Ma himself that Mira has ever seen, but it will give you an edge.
Mira rolls the little talisman around in her hand, and wonders.
"Minji, you want to do a little science?"
Minji turns to look at her from the passenger seat. "That's a very Zoey question."
"Zoey asks smart questions."
That earns a small smile. "True enough. What kind of science?"
"Wraiths can't read minds, exactly. But they can tell if you're afraid, or jealous, or angry or whatever. I'm wondering how different the listening ear is."
"You want to see if Celine's bujeok will block it? I'm game."
"Yeah, cool. Might be nice for you guys to not have to worry if I'm digging around in your heads, too, right."
"That would be nice," agrees Miyeong, but it's friendly, lighthearted. Probably more than it should be, about a Kang using sketchy occult magic, but… if Celine trusts Mira with this shit, and Miyeong trusts her, and Minji trusts her, and Rumi—
Fuck Rumi, anyway, but they can't all be wrong, right?
"Passive defense, then active defense?" suggests Minji.
Mira nods, and focuses, starting the slow, arcane murmur of it, wrapping the words of the spell around herself until it sinks into her, something almost like an audible click and the strangest feeling of weight settling just inside her right ear.
She looks up at Minji and it feels like the weight looks with her, as little sense as it makes, and she doesn't exactly hear but it's like hearing, a mild pervading sense of curiosity and—
"Are you listing medication interactions in your head right now?" asks Mira, baffled.
Minji shrugs. "It's an easy thing to think about on demand. Wanna try active defense now?"
"Sure?"
Miyeong laughs and Minji pulls the bujeok out from under her various layers of borrowed outerwear to wrap a hand around it, spinning up a quick, quiet defensive melody.
Mira points her attention back at her, again bringing the ear with her, and she almost thinks she can pick up something, a vague impression of numbers, maybe, but it's like there's a wall of white noise in the way.
"That worked. Or the ear didn't? Like, maybe if I were stronger, it wouldn't, I can tell there's something to hear, but I can't get to it."
"Nice," says Miyeong, and Mira's attention drifts over to her, unthinking, the ear comes with it, and she catches—
A starving deer may think a rhubarb patch a feast, but the leaves are no less deadly for her hunger.
Mira releases the spell, "Shit, sorry, I clipped you, Miyeong. Need to work on my aim, I guess."
Miyeong doesn't respond for a moment, but apparently it's long enough for her to decide to be gracious, because she just says, "Thank you for telling me," easy and kind.
"… you think that's your line in the prophecy, then?"
"Yeonggi used to call me that, sometimes," says Miyeong, and her voice is still kind but it's definitely not easy, anymore. "His little deer. I don't know what the rhubarb would be, though." Her voice twists, goes bright, laughing, "I'm a little spoiled for choice, really," and Mira doesn't need the listening ear to know the casual cheer is a lie.
Minji reaches a hand over the center console to give Miyeong's thigh a reassuring squeeze, but if she had any insight to offer, she doesn't get a chance; Celine's car is pulling to a halt in front of them.
Mira peers out the window, through the rain, at the four-story apartment complex, a dark shape in the storm. The lights of occupied apartments slipping out through curtained windows should feel warm, but somehow, looking at them, Mira can only see them as trapped, crushed things, fading signs of life being slowly swallowed up by the shadow around them.
"So this is it," says Miyeong, and from the way she says it, Mira thinks she must be seeing the same thing.
"Yeah." Mira thumbs along the one shin-kal she's been given, still there, tucked against her waist in easy reach. "Feels just like home."
Celine shifts into park, and considers the ugly tang of ash and blood that hangs in the air. It’s not nearly as bad as when they’d been drawing Rumi back from Gwi-Ma’s realm, or even—
…Now is not the time to think of such a thing. Clearly, the summoner hadn’t yet begun their work.
She can feel it charging the air, though. The cords are being drawn, readied to rip open the fabric of the world.
“Shall I carry the chest, mudang-nim?” Rumi asks. She has not said anything of Celine’s shift into a perfectly neutral register for her—appropriate for someone she does not know, not yet—but Celine wonders if she is truly imagining the extra hint of melancholy.
“That would be very kind of you, Rumi-ssi,” Celine replies, and offers the umbrella back between the seats to Zoey. “I’m sure you saw how slippery it can get when wet.”
“Oh—right!” Zoey startles from her own head, breaking off the nervous tapping of her bujeok against her thigh. It’d be easier to keep her from getting too anxious about the upcoming conflict if she had a way to keep her hands busy, she’d said, and Celine hopes giving her this little task will help.
As Zoey circles the car with the umbrella, and Rumi starts getting the chest with most of the gear into place, Celine considers what’s left in the front seat with her, and then the pouring rain outside.
Oh, well. Her hair was already ruined.
She turns the car off, tucks the mess of amulets under her jacket, and makes for the front door as fast as dignity will allow.
Funny, but it’s almost easier, once they’re all dripping in the lobby.
She’s been in a million lobbies before, readying herself to go pull the thorn from a tiger spirit’s paw or convince a ghost to move on before it drove its living family mad from a doubled grief. She knows her role here, now. She’s more prepared than she has been… ever.
Rumi-nim is fighting beside her.
Celine slips off her jacket, and gestures for Rumi to open the chest, that she can retrieve at least part of her proper garb. Usually, she doesn’t bother to wear anything other than her own suits, but tonight, she wants all the weight of its symbols and ceremonies.
“Pretty colors,” Zoey says. Mira snorts. Rumi makes a face, like she isn’t certain if they’re being disrespectful or ignorant or just silly, and isn’t certain if she ought to correct them besides.
Celine…
Celine smiles, and shrugs it on. “I suppose so.”
They disperse through the hotel pretty quickly, Miyeong heading over to the desk to charm and/or interrogate the half-awake receptionist, Minji and Mira wandering over to secure the elevators, Rumi taking an umbrella and her supernatural night vision back outside to do a loop around the building to check for any exits that weren't on the blueprints or other last-minute plan-disrupting details.
Zoey follows Celine up the stairs, stopping at every floor to set wards and warnings and mystical tripwires. It's strange, how strange Celine doesn't look, decked out in her traditional garb with its vibrant reds and stark whites and shimmering golds, a million miles from the monochrome Western business casual she always wears but somehow still perfectly in-character. It's so… normal to her, like there's no line, no contradiction between the modern world of cell phones and car insurance and this ancient mythology of spirits and demons.
And prophecy. Can't forget prophecy.
"So, when you get told about the future," Zoey asks, as they finish locking a spell down around a fire door. "Is that, uh. Generally reliable?"
"Do you mean what I told you when we met?" Celine's expression is keen and knowing. "Or Kkachi-ssi's prophecies?"
"Um. Either? Both? Like, it sure seems like what you told me came true, keeping a bunch of demon shards from summoning an uber-demon into the world feels, you know, kind of important. Is it… is the future, like, set? Determinism was real all along?"
Celine makes a thoughtful hum. "Things act according to their nature. A tree will grow to a given height. If a rocky overhang bars its way, it will grow to the side instead. You can look at it now and know the path it will follow for twenty years to come. You can't guess the number of leaves it will have, or which bird will land on which branch."
"So… what Suspicion-ssi told us...."
"Moments, or choices, that our natures will inevitably lead us to, but how we respond is ours to decide. If we can understand and heed her message it will lead us to the better choice, with the better outcome. Which I recognize may sound unlikely, given the consequences of her intervention last night," and oh wow she's trying to lock it down but she's real annoyed, "but spirits have their own rules, and advice she offers in her capacity as Wisdom is reliable, regardless of what she does in her personal time."
Zoey smushes her (honestly not really sustainable) impulse to defend Suspicion-ssi, and focuses on the task at hand instead. "How do we take advice if we don't know what any of them mean? Except Mira's, I guess, but we don't even know which ones everyone else's are! Even if you and Rumi are right about yours, that still leaves me with healer, deer, or mugwort—"
"Mugwort," says Celine, as she tucks scribed paper up under a doorjamb.
"… you know what it means?"
"No. But it feels right that it's you." She opens a little satchel, holds it out to Zoey. There's a powdery herb inside, one she's been spending little pinches of as they go. The very plant in question, Zoey realizes, remembers from Celine's first few exorcism lessons at Miyeong's place.
Mugwort is as sacred as it chooses to be, Suspicion-ssi had said.
"Isn't mugwort always sacred?"
"Arguably yes, but one could distinguish between the way mudang use it, for purification— such as right now, weakening the negative influence the wraiths have left by wandering in and out of this place for weeks— and its mundane medicinal use, which requires no particular invocation of spiritual strength."
"Oh, right, uh, menstrual relief, sleep aid, and anxiolytic effects, right? Clinically ambiguous but popularly attested when used in tea or otherwise consumed orally."
Celine shoots her a glance, eyebrow lifting. "Impressive."
Zoey shrugs uncomfortably. "Random useless fact repository, at your service."
The corner of Celine's mouth tilts up. "Would the repository be so kind as to cleanse this stretch of stairwell?"
Zoey dips into the pouch and takes a little mugwort between her fingers, breathes in, focuses, and copies the short little couplet Celine's been singing as she does this. That little tingle of power tickles through her skin, there's a tiny spark of heat against the pad of her thumb as the powder burns itself up, like snuffing a candle wick, and the air smells cleaner, lighter in its wake.
"Much better," Celine says, tucking the little bag back in with the rest of her gear. And then, just like that, they're at the fourth floor, where their target is supposed to be. When they push the stairwell door open, Zoey smells ash and copper and rot, sudden and unnatural.
Neither of us would accept a plan of attack that we did not believe you would all walk away from.
Zoey checks her bujeok, her makeshift bandolier of shinkal, her own little satchel of exorcism powder (plum blossom and mugwort, hopefully intending to be sacred, today), and says a little prayer to anything listening that Celine and Rumi's belief in them is sound.
The first wraith comes to attack from behind—Minji honestly doesn’t realize it’s there until she hears Rumi grunt and spin, her sword snicking as it’s drawn and the umbrella clattering to the floor as it’s dropped.
She freezes, looking back down the steps.
The wraith is wearing a set of plain blue-gray coveralls, the kind that would get anyone in anywhere, combined with a clipboard and a confident manner. Minji doesn’t know its face.
She’s glad.
It says something in Jejuan, and Minji would swear that Rumi’s eyes glow before she snarls and swings, clipping the wraith as it leaps over the rail and takes the quick way down.
She doesn’t give chase, surprisingly, but looks up at them from the landing, panting slightly from the sudden exertion. “You both are well?”
“We’re fine,” Mira says.
“What did it say?” Minji asks.
Rumi shrugs as she sheathes her sword, shoulders tight despite her blank expression. “A taunt. Meant to make me give chase. It is likely they were planning an ambush.”
“…Didn’t the spirit say the summoner was on the fourth floor?” Mira asks, frowning as she looks up to the fourth floor landing.
The spirit did. Which makes it very odd, from what Minji knows, for the attempted ambush to come from fully below them rather than having met them as they passed.
“We should reunite with Miyeong-nim, Zoey, and the honored shaman before we attempt to investigate,” Rumi declares firmly, tucking the umbrella back under her arm. “It would not do for us to walk into their trap, even without taking the bait.”
“Fair enough,” Minji agrees, and they take the last flight together.
There’s one door open on the fourth floor, and an odd chill in the air seems to emanate from it—a contrast to the cheerful, floral-patterned welcome mat.
“They’re not here,” Rumi says, grimacing.
“I don’t think you can call it breaking and entering if you’ve got a key,” Miyeong argues from inside, and Minji feels muscles she hadn’t even realized were tight relax at the sound of her voice.
…And then clench all over again, because that means the fucking summoner is the missing one.
The familiar chill courses through Rumi as she steps over the threshold, she clamps down on her adrenaline as best she can. The whole place feels wrong. She can sense the rot hanging in the air. It is so thick that she can’t work out where it begins and ends.
“The summoner isn’t here, but that doesn’t mean we can be careless, they may have left something important,” Celine says as they join her in the little hall.
Rumi sweeps her eyes around the apartment, the place may have been homely once, before its owner gave themself over to Gwi-Ma. Trinkets and what looks to be a collection of rocks are piled high on a shelf against the wall. The windowsill is full of plants in cheerful, colored pots, but they are dried out and dying, if not dead already. Dirty dishes clutter the small sink and pieces of ceramic lay scattered across the kitchen counter. Rumi crosses to investigate, circling into the tiny, tiled area that must function as a kitchen. She can just make out part of an inscription on the largest piece. “World’s best—”
She feels more than sees Zoey flinch, over on the carpet by the table.
Rumi’s hand drops to her sword as she moves to Zoey’s side in an instant. She bites back the nausea that always accompanies sanctified Mugwort. It’s comforting, in a way. Easier to focus on that than the guilt that pours through her as Zoey takes a startled step away from where Rumi’s just appeared. “It’s wet? But I don’t think it's blood? I hope it’s not blood,” Zoey says, gesturing to the carpet. Rumi buries her emotions and looks at the odd carpet; it does not smell like blood but it is certainly soaked through. Celine joins them and bends down. Gravely, gaze locked on the dark stain, she says, “Melted hoarfrost.” A botched summoning, we have even less time than we thought. Rumi’s hand tightens on the hilt of her saingeom. I need to cut the rot out fast. “Zoey!” Rumi whips around at the sound of Mira’s voice. She’s holding a small framed portrait. The painting within appears to have been torn in half, but the part that is still there is unmistakable. The man who’d summoned the ambulance for them.
Bobby.
“Okay, it’s—they need another space. Where’s the closest open space they can get into?” Zoey asks, half to herself.
“Laundry or gym,” Miyeong says, immediately. Guess she didn’t spend all that time staring at floor plans for nothing. “Probably gym.”
It makes Mira exchange a glance with Minji—she tries to look at Rumi, too, but she’s too busy vibrating with rage.
So.
“I guess it wasn’t just a trap after all,” Mira drawls, hand settling on the skin-kal at her waist.
“Indeed,” Rumi growls, and then she’s charging the hallway.
“One second,” Celine says, which somehow actually works. “I need to move the barriers into better positions.”
Rumi spins in the doorway and, with surprising clarity given how pissed she looks, says, “We’ll have to split up. We are short on time, but—Zoey or Minji-nim?”
The person with the most shared knowledge or the person with next best combat skill.
“Minji, if you would—“
“Of course,” Minji agrees.
“Ten minutes, and we’ll be there,” Celine says. “It won’t be perfect, but we don’t have time to waste on that.”
Mira nods her acknowledgment.
“Come,” Rumi says to the rest of them, a plain command, and she doesn’t wait for anyone to agree before she’s jogging off. Though, given how fast she can move when she wants, maybe that is a kind of waiting.
Four floors worth of stairs aren’t that many, but Mira’s still winded by the time they’re at the bottom, readying themselves to step out of the stairwell and into whatever might be waiting. Though a bat is not truly blind, it is still smart enough to use its ears to see.
Oh. Well that’s dumb.
“Hold up,” she says.
And that works too, somehow. Wild. They actually look concerned about her.
“You okay?” Zoey asks.
“Fine, just—“ She breathes. “Thinking I can do a little surveillance before we go out there.”
Rumi smiles, even as her fingers twitch on the hilt of her sword. “You have my thanks.”
Zoey taps a shin-kal against her finger, the little musical ting ringing hollow against the thumping of her own heart. She shuffles her feet and goes through her verses and couplets, which helps a little more. Beside her, Rumi has gone eerily still; Zoey’s mind helpfully conjures up the image of a tiger waiting to pounce. How can she just stand there?
Rumi catches her eye and her gaze softens for a moment, but there’s something underneath it that makes Zoey want to up the tempo of her impromptu shin-kal drumming.
There’s a tap on her shoulder. Zoey whirls around and Miyeong, impossibly calm, winks at her.
“Like a heist,” she whispers as she rests her hand on Zoey’s arm. She feels some of the tension in her gut evaporate.
Zoey flicks her gaze over to Mira; her eyes are closed in concentration and she has this adorable little wrinkle in her brow when sh—Focus! Couplets! Mira’s eyes snap open and the colour drains from her face. “The hallway is clear, but there’s something odd coming from the gym. It’s like someone cast a muffling spell and then got confused halfway through, the voices are fractured.” “How many? Did you hear Bobby-nim?” Rumi asks. Her tone is polite, but Zoey hears the strained undercurrent. “Hard to say, maybe four?” Mira pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m not sure about Bobby, but someone in there is not having a good time.” “Stay behind me, I will draw the wraiths’ attention. Our priority is getting the sacrifice out of harm's way. Focus on destabilization.” Rumi’s tone brooks no argument.
The trip down the hall passes in a blur of jumbled rhymes and ragged breathing. The wraiths start coming/and my mind starts buzzing/gotta keep on running!Rumi is a solid few steps ahead of them all and Zoey’s having to work double time to keep up with the others’ long strides.
Rumi pauses before the large double door, she turns to assess each of them. Zoey readies a shin-kal and tries to steady her breathing, she sees Mira do the same. Miyeong pulls an entire string of bells from her pocket, and somehow they don’t make a sound. Rumi nods, turns to the door and kicks. Her boot connects like the crack of thunder and the doors fly open.
Six to eight enemies, plus the summoner, plus the sacrifice. Even if Mira’s estimate is incorrect, it’s likely that the wraiths are not all inside the gym.
Rumi decides against informing her comrades of this fact at the moment. It will not do anything but demoralize them.
She takes them in, one last time—Zoey, shin-kal held loose and ready to throw; Mira with her grim determination; Miyeong, bells in hand. They will come out of this alive. Bobby will come out of this alive. Rumi will make sure of it.
She kicks open the double doors, the central pole between them giving with a crack, and rushes in, taking the room in with a brief, sweeping gaze. Madly, the walls are covered in mirrored glass, though most of the walls are covered by large, unfamiliar devices.
The wraiths have not chosen a defensible position amongst them.
Rumi moves towards the summoning circle, drawing her sword with a wordless snarl as she engages the first wraith—unfortunately, it manages to catch her swing, cackling.
“Huh—Rumi?”
Rumi retreats and attacks again, and this time the wraith is left to dodge.
Behind it, in the center of the summoning circle, stands Bobby, a small, wriggling creature in his hand.
Rumi stops.
Hot rage slams through her, such as she has never known before. What sort of fool am I, that my dearest friend and my poorest sustainer both are such monsters?
Something is thrown into her head and the force of it snaps her sideways, bloody pain radiating out from the side of her skull and down her neck. She hears someone scream.
But Rumi is not called The Unkillable for naught.
She straightens, feeling the bone of her skull push back into place and begin to knit together, and hurriedly makes certain that her comrades are not fallen—no, intelligently, they are using a stair-like machine as cover, Zoey throwing and Miyeong ringing her bells to keep the enemy at bay.
She turns in the direction of the projectile.
The wraith took its projectile from a rack of similarly shaped objects, different only by size. It has another already in hand.
In a heartbeat, Rumi has closed the gap and snapped its wrist.
In another, she turns it to dust.
Then she turns on the summoner.
Zoey crouches behind an exercise machine, the warm sharp ringing of a shinkal tingling against her fingers, a fear that is not her own pounding against her mind.
Which is rude and unnecessary, it's not like she doesn't have plenty of authentic fear to worry about already.
Miyeong's bells clear some of the pressure, every time they ring, and there's a wraith, a tall, thin man with a swoop in his hair, maybe a couple years older than Zoey, circling around toward them, and it flinches a little with every shake as well. Zoey can hear Mira muttering something behind her, and can feel an odd… heat? from that direction, but she keeps her focus on the circling wraith, and inhales, the breath guides the blade, Rumi had said.
The wraith comes around a bench, the bells ring, it flinches, exposed, and Zoey exhales and lets fly, a shinkal soaring smooth through the open air and sinking deep into the wraith's shoulder. It screeches, and Zoey sees— hears? — none of her senses are quite right to describe how she becomes aware of something… unraveling, from where the knife is seated, a trail of noxious, twisting black and pink smoking away from the wound.
They don't feel fear, they don't slow down when they're injured, they don't care about pain, they only care about death in as much as it interferes with the objective, Mira had explained, and Minji had said, oh, so basically a Counterstrike match, which no one but Zoey had understood. It makes the strategy so clear, though: kill the weakest mob first, focus fire, an enemy isn't dealt with until it drops. Which means Zoey hasn't taken her eyes off the wraith, despite what would have been a crippling blow to a human, and the minute it starts charging forward in a rage, still screeching, trailing smoke and reaching out with lengthening, rot-stench claws, she's whipping another shinkal off her belt and straight into center mass, burying it in the wraith's chest.
The blow knocks the creature back, spiritual velocity apparently not much concerned with physical mass, and another plume of smoke bursts out, another unraveling twist. Zoey can feel the magic of the shinkal still, a little, like she's still touching them, two gleaming notes of purity lodged in a knot of seething hate, and she reaches for them—
"Send you back to Gwi-Ma cuz you're nothing but ill-bred Cut apart your magic you're just rotting knotted thread—"
Something flashes between the two shinkal, a searing white line of fire ripping across the wraith's chest and splitting it open, and then it implodes, collapsing in on itself in a snarling black and magenta burst, the shinkal tinking musically to the floor next to the pile of sticky ash.
"Holy shit," gasps Zoey, who genuinely did not expect any part of that sequence of events to work while it was happening.
"Nice," says Miyeong, a little breathless behind her, and Zoey remembers the rest of the room and whips her head around. Mira is chanting, hand fisted in front of her and every muscle in her body clenched up, and there's a wraith snarling at them, held perfectly still, not quite three meters away, and Zoey can see a rippling distortion in the pattern of it, smell it slowly burning. Miyeong's hand is on Mira's back, the other white-knuckled on the bells, and she's straining a little, too, and Zoey can just about feel the way Mira's spell pulls on her, borrowing power.
Across the room, Rumi swings her sword wide, dances around a Bowflex machine keeping two wraiths at bay, every sweep and parry accompanied by circling movement as they try constantly to lock her up engaging one of them so the other can get behind her. She snarls, jumps backward onto a deadlift bench, and leaps toward Bobby, who has stood, frozen, since the four of them slammed into the room.
Another wraith— where the hell did that even come from, Mira said there were four— surges up out of nowhere and slams into Rumi, dead hands scrabbling at her wrists, and Rumi throws it off but Bobby drops the rabbit and bolts for the door. Zoey takes one last look at the paralyzed wraith behind her, the three converging on Rumi again, and then Miyeong says, "Go," and Zoey swallows, sweeps her shinkal up out of the ash and runs after him.
