Chapter 107
A week passed after Park Seok-hyeon was dealt with. In the meantime, Ian had cleaned out his one-room apartment and signed for a detached house.
Of course, he bought it outright.
If it had been an ordinary house, he never would have been able to buy it with just a few hundred million won, but the area had been ravaged by a major fire once, and ghosts appeared there often too, so the price was incredibly cheap. Thanks to that, Ian could afford to buy it without much trouble.
What was there to hide?
It was the same neighborhood he’d visited while handling the library request. There were almost no people and plenty of empty houses, so Ian had no reason not to move here. The price was low to boot, making it practically impossible to find a better listing than this.
A fire? Who cared. Ghosts? Even better. He was short on materials anyway, so please, come out already.
He knew that a sosa-gwi (燒死鬼) was considered a rather dangerous ghost in Buddhism. But humans were scarier than ghosts to begin with, and mages were scarier than humans. So ghosts should show mages a little more respect.
And as for what becomes of ghosts that fail to do that, Ms. Lee Seo-ah, the ghost-type Pokémon master living over in Busan, was proving it firsthand.
‘Come to think of it, didn’t Seo-ah say she was coming up to Seoul too? When is she planning to get here?’
As that thought crossed his mind, Ian neatly stacked the things he’d brought into the house.
A cabinet full of alchemy supplies, boxes of bullets, money bags, and so on.
The things he could—and had to—move himself were strewn across the spacious living room. He hadn’t brought the bigger items like the refrigerator or wardrobe yet.
By now, they were probably being hauled along in the moving company’s truck. There wasn’t anything especially important inside, so even if other people handled them, it wouldn’t be a big problem. Ian carelessly nudged the drawer unit he’d brought with his foot, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and stepped out of the house.
Just then, he ran straight into Cecilia, who was carrying the computer over. She looked up at Ian while holding a desktop tower as big as her own body.
“Where should I put this?”
“The room at the end of the first floor. There’s a white desk in there, so put it on top of that.”
“Okay.”
Cecilia nodded and strode into the house. Ian watched her bright blond hair for a moment, then stepped out into the parking area and put a cigarette between his lips.
There was nothing special about why Cecilia was hauling things around. Ian had just asked her to help him move.
Apparently she didn’t have anything urgent going on, because Cecilia accepted right away and came running all the way to Seoul.
He had considered calling someone else at first, but no matter how he thought about it, among the people Ian knew, there was no one he could trust with physical labor besides Cecilia.
Han Yuna? Out. She had the image of someone who couldn’t even move an ordinary kettle or rice cooker. Even if she used magic, the iron rice cooker would just turn into a tofu rice cooker, so it wouldn’t help much.
Lee Seo-ah? The distance was too great. It wasn’t even worth considering.
Kim Yul? If he called her, the house would probably wind up smelling of water. Her stamina wasn’t all that great either, so calling her for no reason would just waste time. Eunha was similar. How good could the stamina of a shut-in mage who never left the house really be?
Kim Iseo was the best fit, if only by a little, but even so, calling a Bureau agent to his house felt a bit too sketchy, so he gave up on that. That was how he ended up choosing Cecilia.
Well, Cecilia was affiliated with the Vatican too, but she seemed a little more trustworthy than the Bureau. At the very least, he didn’t get the feeling she’d betray him.
Of course, he didn’t trust her completely. They still hadn’t interacted nearly enough for that. He figured they’d need to meet and talk at least five more times.
Maybe she knew that too, which was why she’d immediately volunteered to help.
Either way, it wasn’t a bad thing for Ian. He tossed his finished cigarette into a portable ashtray, grabbed the boxes that had been loaded into Cecilia’s car, and went into the house.
“So that’s it……”
He set the boxes in the corner and sat down on the sofa that had been included as an option, catching his breath. While he did, Cecilia, after placing the computer on the table, hurried over and sat down beside him.
“All done now?”
“Yeah, you worked hard. Thanks for helping.”
“It was nothing.”
Cecilia leaned back against the backrest and looked up at the pure white ceiling. The sparkling light fixture scattered light downward.
“I’m hungry.”
“……Really? Want me to order something?”
“The nun said you eat jajangmyeon when you move. I want that too.”
“……One bowl?”
“No. I want seven bowls, plus tangsuyuk, gunmandu, palbochae, gan-shao shrimp, and dongpo pork.”
The menu far exceeded even his wildest expectations, and Ian let out a wry laugh. Cecilia seemed embarrassed too, and muttered while hugging her knees.
“……I’ll pay for mine myself. So don’t laugh like you’re teasing me.”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way…… Fine. I’ll pay too, so just eat. Let’s call it my way of repaying you for helping out.”
Ian said that and placed an order with the Chinese restaurant.
It was a fairly large place, so he was able to order everything Cecilia had mentioned. He set his phone aside and looked back at her.
“More importantly, your Korean is pretty good now, huh? Your pronunciation and speed are better than when we met at the hospital.”
“……I kept learning from the nun. It wasn’t easy.”
Cecilia rested her cheek on her knee and met Ian’s gaze. His black eyes were reflected in her amethyst-purple irises.
“I heard mages use magic that makes it easier to learn foreign languages. Do you use that too?”
“There is one, but I haven’t tried it yet.”
It was a spell recorded in the Touch of Re-Creation.
It wasn’t a spell found only in the foreign god’s grimoire. It was a deeply traditional spell devised long ago in Europe, where every language was different, to make communication between mages easier.
Nowadays, with English as the world’s common language, its significance had faded a great deal, but back then it was practically essential. If you couldn’t master it, people treated you like an idiot without a second thought.
In fact, they weren’t wrong. Failing to use a spell that only required drawing a triangle and a circle and writing down a few languages you wanted to learn was enough to make you unfit to be a mage.
So a lot of people died because of it. Beheading them while shouting, ‘You are the shame of mages!’ wasn’t even unusual.
Of course, that isn’t how things are now. Once translators were invented and English took hold, language-learning magic was downgraded from a necessity to an optional extra. Mages no longer cared much whether the other person could speak their language or not.
“I’m not planning to visit any other countries yet. If that happens, I’ll use it, but for now it’s unnecessary.”
“……I see. Then what about using it on me?”
“It’s a spell that can’t be used on other people.”
“Selfish spell-casters.”
Cecilia narrowed her eyes and grumbled. Ian snorted softly and leaned back against the backrest like she had. The soft sofa gently enveloped his body.
‘Not bad for an option.’
As Ian thought that and reached for his phone, a sudden thought made him whip around to Cecilia.
“Ah, right. I’m planning to go catch a high-ranking vampire soon. Want to join me?”
“A vampire……?”
“Vampire. Dracula.”
“Ah.”
Cecilia understood what Ian meant and stretched her legs out. Her short legs kicked idly.
“As it happens, the Korean Catholic Association already contacted me about a ghoul.”
“A Catholic Association? There’s something like that?”
“Yeah. Think of it as a branch office set up by the Vatican. Normally only exorcist priests are active there, but sometimes they also ask clergy who’ve been dispatched here.”
He understood.
Ian nodded and leaned forward slightly.
“Are you going to turn it down?”
“No. I was planning to accept, of course. We can’t let vampires run wild.”
Cecilia continued with a serious expression.
“I’ll go with you. I don’t need payment. The Vatican pays for it anyway.”
“That’s good news. Other vampire hunters, mages, and a few Bureau agents might join us too. Is that not a problem?”
“Hmm…… yeah. I think that’ll be fine. If they’re not civilians, there’s no real need to hide our identities.”
That was a relief. Ian smiled and nodded.
“I’ll contact you when we leave. Rest until then.”
“Then can we hang out while I’m resting? I want to go to a place called a PC bang.”
“Uh…… if I have time. Send me a text.”
“Okay.”
Cecilia smiled shyly and swung her legs.
The two of them kept chatting for a while after that, then ate the delivered food together and finished unpacking.
*
The Bureau had a facility called the Observation Room. It was built to observe unidentified flying objects intruding into national airspace or to confirm whatever might be coming in from space, and among Bureau agents it was practically a dream job.
Usually, five people were assigned to the Observation Room. Their job was nothing more than taking turns checking and managing the radar 24 hours a day. They were normally given no other duties. And for that, they got paid nearly as much as the Response Division and field agents.
Naturally, it was the sort of setup that had to be called a dream job.
There was some risk, of course, but it was far less than in the Response Division.
The work itself was also incredibly easy. All you had to do was sit there and look at the radar, so what was so hard about that? If this were difficult, office workers would have all dropped dead from overwork long ago.
Of course, it wasn’t entirely without drawbacks.
For one, if you didn’t take leave, you had to live in the radar room’s dormitory for almost the entire year. Another was that if whatever came in from space was something cosmic-horror-like, you’d be the first to lose your mind.
But the biggest drawback, no matter what anyone said, was the overwhelming sleepiness.
“……Nngh.”
The man sitting in the Observation Room rubbed his increasingly drooping eyelids with his palm, trying to shake off the sleep.
“Looking at this green radar for 24 hours straight is driving me crazy…….”
He knew it was a spoiled complaint.
The agents in the Response Division were out there fighting anomalies with their lives on the line. Meanwhile, he just sat here and watched a radar. Complaining that he was sleepy on top of that was the kind of thing that would leave him with nothing to say even if the Response Division agents all ganged up on him.
But what could he do? He was sleepy.
People always thought the work they did was the hardest.
“Yaaawn…… Should I get some coffee?”
Muttering to himself, the man took a coffee out of the refrigerator in the corner of the Observation Room.
Just then.
Beep. Beep.
The radar, which had made no sound until now, suddenly began to beep. It meant something had been detected.
“...!”
The man’s face sharpened at once. Coffee still in hand, he turned his head and checked the radar that filled the entire wall.
“...A blue dot.”
A blue dot was blinking clearly on the radar. It was the signal for an unidentified flying object.
Of course, the Bureau’s radar didn’t pick up things like fighter jets or airplanes. The man clicked his tongue and checked the expected path the object had taken.
A dotted line stretched on and on. At the end of it was Earth’s pale satellite—the moon.
“......”
Needless to say, no aliens live on the moon. There wasn’t anything of the sort there either.
Swallowing hard, the man switched the radar screen to the waveform camera. It was a camera that used sound waves emitted by the radar to identify the object’s shape.
Whirr.
The radar display that had filled the wall shifted to black and white. A white image began to form in its center.
A picture of a round, saucer-shaped object. It was clearly a UFO. He nodded at the classic alien mystery.
Just as he was about to report it, he spotted a familiar symbol etched on the UFO and frowned.
“……This is.”
A symbol everyone was guaranteed to see at least once in their life.
A motif that looked like the 卍 symbol flipped and rotated.
“……It’s Nazi, isn’t it?”
Hakenkreuz.
It was the unmistakable symbol of Nazi Germany.