The Path to Damnation

Eugene put on his spiritual glasses and surveyed the area looking for traces of the spirit's energy. He led them through a winding path that crossed through the clearings and arrived at a wide tree whose trunk twisted and spiraled around itself and unwinded into branches above the foliage.

A chill snaked down Jun's body, and she drew her sword, its engraved sigils glowing. "It's coming."

A mass of bluish-white energy circled around from behind the tree, and as it approached, the outline within became clear. A bear.

Eugene set down his backpack and aimed his magitech musket and charged it with his aura, causing the crystal on top to shine in response. Shimol drew his sword, and Desun's fists flowed with aura.

A voice rang in their heads, "Arrogant humans, your greed knows no bound. It seems you all can see me and have come to slay me. For over four millennia, we have provided our bounty to human and animal alike, but the time of our parting has come. If you wish take anything more, you must slay me. My name is Beksup, Guardian of the Central Forest."

Beksup lunged at them. Eugene fired. The magitech bullet grazed the spirit. It pounced on Eugene. Jun and Shimol jumped in front and guarded against the swing of its paw with their swords. Beksup bellowed and knocked them back. Eugene retreated back further, while Jun and Shimol regained their footing after sliding back.

"Eugene, cover us!" Jun ordered.

He aimed and fired. Beksup darted around the tree dodging. Jun circled around the left, while Shimol circled right.

They executed a pincher maneuver and slashed down on Beksup from both sides. It batted away Shimol, but Jun's slash connected, and blood and white aura sprayed from the wound as she sliced open its torso, but it wasn't enough to stop the spirit. Beksup turned and swiped at her. Its claws gashed through her stomach and pummeled her into the tree. Beksup charged at her while she was down. Eugene's shots blew open several holes in the spirit, and blood and aura continued to spill out and evaporate, but Beksup powered through it and jumped on Jun.

She only partially managed to roll out of the way, and it sank its teeth into her arm. A searing pain surged through her body as its teeth ripped through her muscles and crushed her bones. Jun shrieked and tossed her sword into her other hand. Tears streaming down her face, she stabbed its neck. Shimol caught up and stabbed its neck too. Beksup roared with an intensity that sent waves through the forest, and the trees shook energetically as if cheering on the spirit.

"I've been waiting for this moment!" Desun jumped above Beksup with his glowing fists and punched down.

His blow exploded with bluish aura, carving a crater in the ground and driving Beksup into it. The explosion grew and filled the whole area. When the light cleared, Beksup lay mangled along with the broken roots of the tree in the crater. The aura around it evaporated.

"Radiaurora will bring damnation upon itself. I have heard the laments of the many. The land will never forget…" Beksup grew silent. The body of the bear within faded away to nothingness. It was over.

Jun groaned.

"Are you alright?" Eugene asked.

"Does it look like I'm alright?"

"Aria's going to get mad again," Shimol said with an awkward smile.

"That's par for the course though," Desun quipped.

"Eugene, Desun. Retrieve Mr. Park's body. Shimol, you help me get to the automobile. You'll have to drive, license or no license."

"Yes, sir," they said.

"I wonder what's going to happen to this tree though," Shimol mused. "Judging from the size, it must be at least a thousand years old."

Eugene shook his head. "The roots were carved out by Desun's punch. It's as good as dead anyway, so the mill will probably cut it down."

"Don't make it sound like my fault. I did what I had to."

"We did what we had to, huh?" Jun recalled hearing this from many people in the past, including the leader of the peasant rebellion who had paid a visit to her parents in six years ago.

Shimol gave Jun a shoulder to lean on, and they trudged forward out of the forest. "Seeing all this though, it makes me think. Are we the villains here? We just slayed a nature spirit who had been guarding this forest since the founding of the nation. All so a lumber mill could cut everything down."

"You think too much. You'll never make it in this unit if you let things weigh on you," Jun said. She was the captain. Only she should have to take on such a burden. She had made the call to slay it, and thus, she had to take responsibility.

"I don't understand why it even came to this in the first place," Desun said. "I don't mind slaying an old spirit or whatever, but for the lumber mill folks, why didn't they just harvest at a normal pace? What's the big rush? Won't they run out of trees in a few years?"

"That's what the big wigs wanted, so that's what they got," Eugene said.

Jun answered with labored breaths, "If I had to guess, it's foreign currency. Emperor Kojo desperately needs foreign currency to fund his modernization programs. Foreign countries are hungry for more lumber than their own land can provide."

"So, we're destroying our own forests for the sake of other nations that have destroyed their own, so that we can one day be the nation getting other nations to destroy their forests for our sake." Eugne scoffed. "I've heard Westerners say life's a stage, but the playwright's obviously writing a farce."

"You might be right about that, but the playwright is also paying us actors, so we'll dance to their tune like those court jesters in Western stories. Let's get a move on," Jun said.

On their way back, Eugene pulled out a rumpled body bag from his backpack, and he and Desun zipped Mr. Park's body up in it, and the two each took a side and carried the bag the rest of the way to the automobile. They tossed it in the trunk and slammed it shut. Jun took the shotgun seat.

Officer Ou was waiting by the front of the lumber mill.

"You handle it," Jun said.

"Of course," Shimol replied. He went over to the officer. "The workers are free to relax. The culprit was ultimately a bear, so there's no need to arrest anyone. We took care of the bear."

"What about the strange state of Mr. Park's corpse?"

"That was due to a rare medical condition that worsened after being attacked. For the sake of his family's privacy, we can't disclose any more. Please understand."

Ou didn't seem fully convinced, but he said, "Alright. Thank you for your hard work. I'll let the mill workers know. They'll probably be happy to hear that they're clear of suspicion. And it's hard to say this as a man of the law, but they'll be happy that a new manager will take control of the mill given their… disagreements with the last one."

Shimol returned to the automobile and hopped in the driver's seat. The case was resolved, and the automobile rolled out and headed south back to the capital Shinra. Jun's consciousness faded in and out during the ride, but one question remained on her mind. Why had the Interior Ministry felt this case was so urgent? Ultimately it was the murder of a single person who wasn't a high level official or noble. Something didn't add up. Beksup's last words echoed in her mind. The lament of the many… What had it meant by that? And was there a connection to the Ministry's interest in this?

They passed through the gate of their unit's compound and pulled over with a soft crunch as the wheels stopped on the sandy ground next to the red wooden wall. Eugene and Desun unloaded the body from the trunk and headed to a building with a trapezoidal shingled roof in the corner of the compound. Jun dragged her feet to the quarters with Shimol and sat on the stone steps when they arrived.

Shimol took off his boots and crossed the veranda and followed it around to a room on the back side of the building. He emerged a bit later with a yawning thirty-year-old woman with disheveled hair. She was still in her white night robes.

Aria took a look at Jun. "Ugh. Let's go to the shrine and get this over with."

They walked over the white stone pathway to the wide, splendid shrine at the back, the mixture of red, green, and yellow interwoven patterns along the walls and columns illuminated by neon magitech lights. During the day, this building had an air of ancient sacredness to it despite only having been built in the last ten years. Now, however, it felt almost cheap, the kind of building that would feel right at home in Shinra's red light district.

Aria slid open the main doors on both sides and ushered Jun in. Shimol attempted to enter, but Aria slid the doors closed in front of him. "You stay outside. No peeking."

"Hey, nothing I haven't seen before."

"That was because a spirit ripped my bandages back then. You have no excuse this time," Jun fumed.

"Quiet down. You'll make your wounds worse," Aria admonished. She undressed Jun and took some paper talismans from the drawer.

Inside the shrine room was dark, illuminated only by a row of candles on a wooden lacquer altar at the foot of a bronze statue of the Lotus Sage. There was a mural behind it, but it was too dark to make out clearly. It wasn't as though any holy texts mentioned that a shrine had to be candle-lit, but Aria had some strange obsession with preserving the old ways.

Aria wrapped the talisman around the wound on Jun's arm, and pasted one on the gash in her stomach. She gathered her hands in prayer and chanted a mantra.

"De gyun ge gwang shin shim…"

The circles with criss-crossing lines on the talismans glowed, and Jun's wounds closed up. "Thank you, Aria."

"If you want to thank me, try not getting hurt in the middle of the night. Remember, I'm not a god. I can close up your wounds by accelerating your healing, but if you lose your arm entirely, I can't help you. Also, the spell will stop the immediate bleeding, but you'll need a cast and bandages for your arm and stomach. Don't make any rash movements or the wound will open up again."

"Yes, mom."

She pulled Jun's ear. "I'm not your mom. I'm not even old enough to be your mom."

"Touchy as ever about your age, I see. Are you still worried no one's going to marry you because you're thirty?"

Aria lit a cigar. She exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Don't remind me. I've been banished from the clan so it's not like they're going to arrange a marriage for me either."

Jun coughed and fanned with her hand. She hated the smell of smoke, for more reasons than one. "In your case, rather than your age, a woman smoking cigars practicing old-school shamanism is not likely to be popular these days. But we all love you just the way you are. Maybe Eugene will even fall for you one day."

She rolled her eyes. "Go back to your room and get some sleep. I'll head back after I finish this."

Jun rose and left behind the surreal scene of a round-faced traditional shaman smoking Western tobacco in a shrine lit up by neon magitech lights. Shimol was sitting on the steps waiting. He stood up, and they each headed back to their rooms.

Inside her own room, Jun opened her personal shrine cabinet in the corner of the room. At the miniature altar, she opened the string-bound notebook and turned to the last page she had written on. From right to left, names in Centrosian characters were written from top to bottom. Jun took up the ink brush and stroked in a new name. Beksup, Guardian of the Central Forest. Spirits had no graves, and no one would remember them. Perhaps it was all meaningless in the end, but she wanted to record their names, so that their memory had a final destination somewhere, even if that somewhere was naught but a hollow shrine.