Chapter 41: Five-Tailed Crimson Fox

Jinhae

We kept moving.

The left fork stayed low and wide. Two Demonic Rats died on Seolhwa's blades before they finished coming around a corner. A third broke past her hip. Yellow paper slapped its horn. I put the scholar's blade through the eye and ripped free.

Ahyun's fingers stayed hooked in my robe.

Far off, someone shouted.

Then another voice answered it, bright with relief. A party had found an exit.

Seorin's head turned toward the sound.

“Someone cleared,” she said.

“Let them.”

We went the other way.

The torch-oil turned thick. Seal-script on the brackets crawled a little brighter.

I had been waiting for that.

The Catacomb's first floor was a tutorial dressed as a simple tomb. Most parties hugged the right wall and eventually reached the exit. The thing I wanted did not live on a speedrunner strategy.

It lived on a special event.

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[SPECIAL BOSS INITIATED]

Objective ............... Survive

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*— Containment breach.

*— Floor mismatch.

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The roar reached before I finished reading.

It went through the stone and the soles of my boots. Dust shook out of the ceiling in a fine gray rain.

Ahyun made a sound against my spine.

Seolhwa did not look back.

“That's not a rat,” she said.

“No.”

Each floor of the Catacomb was a different prison. Each one came in close to ten times harder than the last.

In the original timeline an array failed and a third-floor beast climbed. It killed its way across the preliminary until the Sword Saint put it down and the Alliance wrote his name in gold. Instructors arrived late. Museong started his legend at that event.

With SSS-Rank heroines it was a steal.

“On me,” I said. “Left. Fast.”

We reached a circular hall. I had walked the geometry in loading screens until the walls were more familiar than the Kang estate.

Screams reached us as we hit the threshold.

The hall was a vault. Support beams met the stone high up in the dark. The floor was a wide disc of old containment script. The air smelled of copper and wet fur and opened bodies.

Candidates littered the middle of the floor.

Orthodox white, Unorthodox black. A seal-tag still tied to a wrist that no longer had an owner. Some of them had been cut. Most of them had been broken.

Ahyun's face had gone white. Her medicine bag was pressed to her chest.

Seorin stopped so hard her satchel swung into her hip.

“Kang Jinhae.” Her voice stayed soft. “Are we going in there?”

“Yes.”

“There are already bodies.” She swallowed. “The instructors.”

“Won't arrive in time.” I tipped the scholar's blade toward the cracked script. “This is our chance at first.”

Seolhwa's shoulders set.

Seorin's mouth closed. Color touched her cheeks.

Ahyun looked at me like I was going crazy.

“Young Master—”

Bootsteps cut her off.

White-and-gold filled a side arch to our right. Baek crest. Four shadows with him, spreading on instinct as they cleared the stone.

Museong saw the hall, the bodies, then us.

His mouth flattened. The same face from the loading screen, the same shoulder that had put me on pavilion stone. He did not waste a cripple-line this time.

They lasted seconds.

A red mass occupied the middle of the disc. It had been sitting. One tail came off the floor like a whip made of meat and Qi and hit Soyeon's spear. The shaft cracked. Ice exploded. She went spinning into the wall. Another tail swept low. Harin met it with both dao and still went backward, boots sliding. Jinmu vanished. Shadow Lotus training swallowed her into the dark between one heartbeat and the next.

Museong's sword came up in a line that would have split a first-floor beast in half.

The fox dodged and attacked.

Crude Qi detonated off its shoulders in a ring. Dust lifted. Museong's boots slid. The tip of his sword dipped. A tail the width of a man's waist smashed the space where his chest had been and he was sent flying to the other side.

Then it sat again, first-years a snack it had not finished chewing.

Soyeon had her back flat against the stone. Her spear was raised. The point trembled. Blood ran from a gash above her left eye and sheeted across her cheek. White hair stuck to it.

Her breathing was ragged. Ice-shine died along the shaft in little useless flakes.

Harin stood beside her.

The Iron Serpent heiress held a dao in each hand. Her stance was low. Weight forward. Her eyes kept flicking toward the vault's center and back to the wall, counting exits and tails, then how many of her people were still standing.

Low light hid her from anyone using their eyes. Mind Evolution painted the vault in cold blue. I found her in two seconds.

She was pressed flat against the ceiling, fifteen feet up, wedged into a crevice where two support beams met the stone.

Baek Museong stood apart.

Ten paces from his team. Closer to the corridor we had just come through than to his own people. His sword was drawn. The tip pointed at the floor.

Weight shifted toward the dark behind him. One foot already angled for retreat. Those gray eyes measured the distance to the fox, then to the dark behind him.

The honorable Sword Saint, on the first important choice in the game.

“Brother!” Soyeon's voice carried across the vault. “We have to—”

“We're done.” Museong did not turn. “If we stay, we are done.”

Harin spat blood onto the stone.

“The Baek heir is thinking of running?”

“I am not running.” His jaw tightened. “I am assessing.”

“Assess faster,” Harin said. “If we scatter now, it picks us off in the corridors.”

Soyeon pushed off the wall. Her spear arm shook.

“Brother. Please.”

Museong's foot stayed angled toward the corridor.

The fox sat in the center of the vault.

It was enormous. Hunched shoulders nearly brushed the vault. Fur the deep wet crimson of blood. Heat came off it in a slow pulse.

The head was wrong.

Too large for the body. The skull broad and flat, dominated by a mouth that hung open in a permanent snarl. Fangs jutted from both jaws. Upper and lower canines curved past the lips and ran beyond the chin. Six inches of yellowed bone.

Five tails fanned behind its haunches like a peacock's display. Each one as long as the body, thick at the base, tapering to a point that moved with its own mind. They swayed and coiled. Testing snaps left hairline cuts in the stone.

The fox's head swiveled toward us.

It growled, a vibration that climbed through the floor and into the bones. Ahyun stumbled back a step. Seorin's hand clamped onto her satchel strap so hard the leather creaked.

“Jinhae.” Seolhwa's voice came low. Her eyes were wide. A tremor ran through her arms. “You better tell me you have a plan.”

“I do.”

“What do we do?”

“Each tail is a reservoir. The fox channels its Qi through the tails. More tails, more power.”

She processed it in half a second.

“Cut the tails.”

“Correct.”

The fox rose from its haunches.

One tail dragged a groove through a dead candidate's sash.

“Seorin.” I kept my voice level. “I need a barrier. Something that slows it down. Can you do that?”

Paper rustled behind me. A brush scratched talisman stock. The smell of fresh ink cut through the copper.

“How long do you need?” she asked.

“As long as you can give me.”

“I have three barrier talismans prepared. Each one holds for maybe four seconds against something this size.”

“Twelve seconds. That's enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“For Seol to take the first tail.” I turned my head. “I'll draw its attention. You circle. When it commits to me, you take the tail.”

Seolhwa's jaw set.

“Are you crazy? You don't have Qi.”

“I'll have the blade.”

“You'll have eighteen inches of steel against a creature that shrugs off Expert-level blades.”

“I'm trying to make it look at me instead of you.”

Her eyes searched mine.

“Don't die,” she said.

“I'll do my best.”

I turned to Ahyun.

“Stay behind Seorin,” I said. “Don't move unless I tell you.”

“Jinhae.”

“Ahyun.”

She swallowed.

“Don't die,” she said.

“I already said that.”