Chapter 168
A tiny hotel room. Irene slowly painted while looking at the cityscape spread out beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Black paint moved freely across the canvas.
“Mmph! Nngh!”
To her, painting was like a window for communicating with the world. A passage that broke down the boundary between the world she had created as an artist and the real world. Her one lifelong companion, one that could be either made real or dismissed as fantasy.
Unable to recognize other people's faces, Irene could only judge others by inspiration. A normal person would find that terribly unfortunate, but Irene was proud of her face blindness.
Because in creative work, personal judgments about other people's looks are nothing but poison.
A painter must always move according to her own inspiration and philosophy. She must not be bewitched by public standards of beauty. Only by pursuing her own beauty could she become the finest artist. Irene had achieved that through her disability.
So how could she hate a disability? She should love it instead.
“Mmmph!!”
Love was an indispensable emotion for an artist.
Irene loved her own worldview. She loved the idea that all things in this world were made of paintings, and that if lines were drawn with paint, they became reality. She loved the erosion of reality born from her fingertips, and cherished it as the most beautiful and pure creation of all.
She also loved reality. The Earth overflowing with inspiration, humans, paint, animals, buildings, soil, the sea, the mountains. She loved them all. So she wanted to paint over them with her own world.
That was how her magic was born.
The pinnacle of art, created after killing her parents, making artwork out of their corpses, getting caught displaying it to a passing mage, and then becoming his disciple after he was moved by it.
How could she not love it? How could she hate it? How could she call it filthy?
She did not accept criticism. She ignored condemnation. She bowed to praise and answered applause with kisses.
From the moment she first picked up a brush and stuck her parents' blood and organs onto the canvas, she had lived that way.
And even now, she was no exception.
“Mmmmmmph!”
“Ah, that’s noisy.”
Splat.
Irene reacted to the voice from behind her. She hung the brush on the palette she was holding, then slit open the abdomen of the corpse lying beside her with a knife. The skin of her abdomen split open with hot blood.
The organs of the already dead corpse held not even a trace of warmth. Even so, Irene pulled them out from inside, sliced through the exposed flesh, and poured the overflowing blood into a bucket.
She wasn't storing it for some special ritual.
It was simply paint. Art material. Nothing more, nothing less.
Irene dropped the powder she'd brought beforehand into the blood in the bucket. The blood thickened as if it were paint. She squeezed the paint out with a dropper to refill her palette, then stood and walked over to the other woman tied up nearby.
Her underarm tendons, Achilles tendons, and knee cartilage had been cut, so she couldn't move properly, but she was writhing anyway, trying somehow to get away.
Like watching a caterpillar. Irene slowly walked after the woman crawling on the floor, then grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back.
“Mmmph!!”
“Shh. Quiet. If you keep that up, someone outside might hear. I can't use barrier magic or anything.”
“Mmph! Nnngh! Gghk!”
“Ah, you don't understand me. You still haven't learned Korean... sorry?”
“Nghhh!”
“Shh. You understand a gesture like this, right?”
Irene brought her index finger to her lips. It was a gesture used everywhere to mean shut up, but the woman only thrashed even more instead of closing her mouth. In the end, Irene let out a long sigh and felt around her face with her bare hand.
“The eyes... ah, here.”
“Mmph?!”
“It'll hurt. Bear with it?”
She did not wait for an answer. Irene gently pressed her finger into the round, jelly-like eyeball she could feel.
“MmmMM?!”
The woman convulsed. But all she could do was twitch her pelvis and elbows, so it didn't even count as resistance. Irene hummed a lullaby while pressing down on the eyeball as if to crush it.
Nanourisma.
One of the songs known as a traditional Greek lullaby. Irene wasn't talented at singing, but it was a song her mother used to sing often when she was little, so she still had it memorized to some extent. She closed her eyes and pressed down, gently rocking the slightly protruding cornea up and down.
“Mmmph!”
She could feel the woman spasming below, but she paid it no mind. Irene hummed the lullaby to the end from memory, then stopped when she felt the woman's eyeball crack with a crisp snap.
“……squelch.”
Sticky, transparent liquid and blood both smeared onto the tip of the thumb that had crushed the eyeball. Leaving the convulsing woman alone, Irene looked down at her finger and tilted her head.
“Hmm... a transparent liquid that isn't white won't turn pink just because it mixes with blood, will it.”
“Mmph...! Mmmph...!”
“Isn't that strange? The whites of the human eye are white, but when they're crushed, white doesn't come out. Only blood flows.”
“Guh...! I-it's disappearing...!”
“It’s so strangely designed, isn’t it? The human body.”
With that, Irene shoved the heated rod deeper into the woman's mouth and fixed it firmly in place. Now that breathing would be difficult too, she wouldn't even be able to make groaning sounds. She looked kindly down at the woman writhing in agony from her shattered eyes and smiled softly.
“Wait. I'll make you pretty soon.”
Swish.
She rose from her seat and walked over to the easel with the canvas hung on it. Gripping the palette she'd set down, she loaded the brush with blood paint and completed the picture.
A painting of a faceless girl pinned to a building rooftop, as if endlessly pouring out blood. Crowds were packed all around, and the sound of their applause became an orchestra, engraving notes into the air.
“Hmm... not a masterpiece, but it was good enough to be called a mediocre work.”
She wasn't particularly satisfied, but for something painted without any inspiration, it had come out fairly well. She stared quietly at the girl's face painted in red, then took the canvas and walked over to the woman convulsing in pain. Then she adjusted it so the canvas and the woman's face were parallel.
“……gurgle.”
A moment later, the paint in the picture began moving on its own, and the girl's face inside the painting slowly took shape on its own. It was a face eerily similar to the woman whose eyes had been removed.
“It's done.”
Irene smiled brightly, hung the canvas back on the easel, and drew a magic circle on the back of the painting with a pencil.
At the same time, the convulsing woman's figure vanished as if it had been a lie.
“…….”
There was no incantation. The sacrifice had already been offered. The subject was already prepared. The painting had long since been finished.
The exhibition hall was reality itself, and the audience was the public. The magic had finished activating the moment she drew the magic circle.
“Ahh....”
Irene set down the canvas and, beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, burst out in admiration at the 'work' that had appeared on the rooftop of the building opposite.
Like Jesus, nailed to a cross and left to die.
A naked girl hung on a blossoming tree like a fruit. Where the eyes should have been, there were only empty sockets, and where the mouth should have been, only a mouth-shaped hole remained; roughly half the features that make up a human face had vanished.
The ribs had pierced through her back skin and spread out like short wings. From the torso split vertically, blood poured out like a broken faucet. The heart, drawing a perfect heart shape, throbbed rapidly and pumped hard.
“Heh-heh.”
The people standing where the 'work' was displayed were overcome with ecstasy and fled, unable to steady themselves.
In their place, only applause echoed through the void where nothing existed, and notes drifted up into the air. Irene sat in a rocking chair, watching, and stepped on the head of the sacrifice lying there.
“See? That's what art is. Isn't it beautiful?”
There was no response. That was only natural, since it was already a dead corpse.
Even so, recognizing a person's face with her foot was also fairly enjoyable, so she hummed as she mangled the corpse's face.
Then, all of a sudden, the smartphone she had placed on the table came into view.
“…….”
Thinking of it that way, Walter had definitely told her to make contact with Mariang when he entered Korea. But every time she called, all she got was the voicemail saying it was turned off, and there had been no contact at all... there was simply no way to get in touch.
Well, she didn't worry about it too much. Even if they met, they wouldn't be able to talk to each other anyway, and it wouldn't help. If possible, she wanted her to keep living exactly like now, as if she were dead. That would actually be better.
'It might be possible to suddenly get in touch later, but for now... hmm. Let's focus on diverting the Administration's attention.'
Thinking that, Irene admired her work once again.
“Haa....”
No matter how many times she looked at it, it was a beautiful sight.
*
“Sorry, but there isn't any way to contact Irene. I lost my phone and everything else in the mirror world.”
“What?”
“It couldn't be helped. I was fighting some enormous dog? Fish? Anyway, something like that, so I didn't have time to worry about it. And besides, the phone would have already been smashed from the moment we first collided. The impact was enough to forcibly dispel every spell on my dress, so there's no way the phone could have been fine.”
“…….”
That was true too, so there was nothing to argue back with. The Circulator's hand had indeed been excessively brutal.
Of course, he didn't blame himself. If he'd held back, he wouldn't have been able to brainwash Mariang like this now. So there was no need to regret the past now. He only felt a little disappointed.
'If only I had a way to contact her, I could just ambush her and rip her head off. Tch, what a pain.'
There was nothing for it. Once it had come to this, she would have to live as inconspicuously as possible.
That didn't mean she wouldn't use magic. It meant keeping up her daily life as much as possible while keeping other variables from getting involved.
If luck was on her side, it might even be possible to trace the scent of her painting back from the museum. Quietly waiting for that time wouldn't be a bad idea.
“……All right, I understand for now. Get some rest. I'm going to rest a little too.”
Ian sorted out his thoughts, then left her behind and went into the room.
As soon as he lay down on the bed, a drowsy heaviness began to wash over him. It was only natural, since he'd been moving since before dawn.
It wasn't really the proper time for sleep, but for the sake of getting his brain working again, a short nap seemed like a good idea.
'For now, it would be best to meet with the Administration tomorrow, talk things over, and decide what to do next. If it's Laplace, they should help too. Or I could just quietly ask Kim Yul.'
There were more options involving Irene than he'd expected. But among them, there was no option to keep Irene alive and send her back.
Since they were after the foreign god's grimoire, if they missed her, she would obviously come back later. So brainwashing or whatever, they'd just kill her. There was no need to leave any future trouble behind.
No matter who the opponent was, he had no intention of letting anyone touch the grimoire and get away with it.
[Humm.]
[Humm! Hummm!]
[Hm, humm...!]
The grimoires, moved by Ian's resolve, vibrated violently. Ian quietly stared at them, then chuckled and spread his arms.
“Come here. Let’s sleep together.”
Whump!
The three grimoires threw themselves into his arms without looking back.