Chapter Text
Baby paced the short span of the room, listening impatiently to the muffled screaming of the fans, the high, clear ringing of the hunters’ singing. How much fucking longer could one concert go on? Didn’t they have important hunter shit to do? Literally anything else? They’d already had a fucking encore; was it normal to have an encore for the encore? Fucking wrap it up already.
This was a bad idea. He should just do this some other day. Or...not at all, maybe. This was stupid. He was going to get killed and he was going to deserve it for being an idiot. He turned on his heel and paced back the other way.
No. No, this was the best idea he’d been able to come up with. And it was fucking stupid, yeah, but it wasn’t like there were any better options either. He wasn’t going to interrogate a fucking sword—Jinu had a lot to answer for and this was the only way to make that happen. This was Jinu’s fucking fault; he needed to get out here and explain himself. “No fears, no lies”, right? Just like their insipid little song said. No more lies, Jinu. Just a fucking explanation would be nice. And then he could kill Jinu personally.
A clatter in the hall outside drew his attention and halted his pacing—the bustle of a crowd moving together, the overlapping of excited voices clamoring over one another. The fawning mass of Huntrix’s servants rushing about after the show, and their all-too-familiar voices in the midst of it all.
Time to decide. He could still back out…or he could commit and see this stupid, stupid plan through.
Fuck it. He wasn’t a coward, and at this point he really was all out of ideas. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, or some shit like that.
With a quick leap he scaled the wall and sank his claws into the soft plaster above the door, bracing himself to crouch close to the ceiling in the shadows over the doorway. The door opened on a burst of sound—laughter, the call-and-response of questions and answers, exclamations and praise. The soundtrack of general ass-kissing. He rolled his eyes. The hunters bustled through the doorway and the lanky one, Mira, paused in the doorway to talk to their pudgy little manager. So commanding with his army of staff, but he was a limp, simpering, rag doll of a man when he talked to his “girls”.
He imagined dropping down on them from his perch. None of them had even noticed him yet. And they called themselves hunters? Fucking pathetic. He probably couldn’t kill all of them on his own, but he could take them off guard like this. Long enough to at least kill the manager and probably Mira, maybe Zoey. Maybe even Rumi, if she didn’t cut him in half first.
But, no. He needed access to Jinu first. Just to talk, as friends. That’s what Jinu said when he first approached him with the original stupid fucking plan. “Wait, hold on, I just want to talk. As a friend.”
It had been such a bafflingly absurd thing to hear that he’d actually stopped trying to tear the idiot’s head off long enough to listen, at least for a few minutes. There was no such thing as friends in the demon realm. In the end he’d lost his patience and told him to fuck off, but Jinu kept coming back. “Can’t we talk? We’ve known each other a long time—I’m just here to talk, not to attack. Just a friendly chat.”
He should have killed the idiot then and there; it would have saved them all a lot of time and trouble. It was never just a friendly chat among demons; everyone had hidden motives. Always. He knew that and he’d still let himself get drawn in, amused and curious about the claim to friendship, intrigued despite himself when Jinu dropped his voice into a conspiratorial tone and said, “What if there was a way to break the Honmoon and escape the demon realm forever?”
He waited until they closed the door on their manager and the teeming mass of their servants, until it was just the three hunters alone. Somehow they still hadn’t noticed him. How the fuck had these three managed to kill Mystery and Abby when they couldn’t notice a demon waiting for them in their own dressing room? Well, alright, Abby had probably tripped over Romance’s ego and landed on a blade, but Mystery had seemed like he’d be able to pull his weight in a fight. Up until a hunter slit his fucking throat right in front of him, her starry eyes wide and bright with excitement. So much for the plan, Jinu. “Stay together, try to fight in pairs if you have to fight the hunters directly. Split them up, keep them busy. We can win this.”
Except they hadn’t won, had they, Jinu? And whose fucking fault was that?
He needed to get their attention focused on the information he could offer, instead of the threat he represented. He needed them to not immediately see him as a danger and try to kill him. That last fight didn’t go so well, and he’d only been fighting one of them with backup. Against all three at once and on his own? He didn’t like his chances. They needed to believe he’d come in peace. Just a friendly demon here for a friendly chat, no need for weapons.
He dropped down from his perch soundlessly. As a courtesy, he even waited for the lanky hunter to move away from the door first so he didn’t land directly on her. Would sure be a shame if someone slit her throat right in front of the little hunter’s big, starry eyes, wouldn’t it? It’d be very unfriendly of him.
“Hey. You know your boyfriend is trapped in your sword, right?”
So, yeah, that didn’t work.
Zoey gasped as they all whirled to face him, which would have been a gratifying expression of terror…if it hadn’t been so obviously a sound of tremendous offense. She flung a handful of those weird little knives at him while he resorted to an undignified scramble to avoid them. “A Saja Boy! Kill it!”
“What do you mean, ‘it’?” he demanded, now with some tremendous offense of his own. But fuck, pick a struggle: be offended or run for safety, there was only enough time for one. He leapt up onto the counter of the long vanity to avoid Mira’s woldo, scattering brushes, makeup, and skincare products in all directions, and then had to keep going down the length of the counter as Rumi swiped at him. “Hey, watch it—fucking seriously? I’m not even attacking you this time—”
“Get down from there!” Zoey shrieked, flinging more knives at him. “You’re stepping in my eyeshadow!”
That explained all the glitter he was tracking around now. He ducked the knives and then had to leap straight up to jump over Rumi’s sword. She overshot and shattered the mirror behind him while he threw himself forward to avoid the backswing. He hit the ground on his shoulder, rolled to take the impact, and came back upright just in time to have to bend backwards to avoid getting cut in half by Mira.
“Fucking—stop—moving!” she grunted, swiping at him while he wove past the blade. Fucking goddamn, no wonder Abby and Ro got their shit wrecked; she was faster with that thing than he would have guessed. He stumbled back into one of the metal-framed chairs in front of the vanity counter, snatched it up and used it to block the next round of knives from Zoey, then threw it at Mira. She cut it in half, which in hindsight was what he should have expected to happen, but at least she couldn’t cut him in half while she was busy with that. He followed it up with a headbutt to keep from getting backed into a corner and to give her something else to think about. It kind of worked, in the sense that she reeled back and it gave him the space he needed to dart past her, but it also fucking backfired because she straightened up with blood smeared across her mouth and murder in her eyes.
“Fucking stop trying to kill me!” he snapped at her anyway. It was the principle of the thing. He wasn’t trying to kill them (currently) so surely he should be granted the same courtesy, right? That was just basic manners. What did they even teach kids these days, if this was how they behaved?
In the broken fragments of the mirror, he saw Zoey and Rumi both lunge while his back was turned to them. Rumi had a longer reach with that big-ass sword, but Zoey’s throwing knives could strike him from anywhere. He prioritized, spun and grabbed Zoey’s wrist as her momentum carried her past him, and slung her around to throw her face-first into the wall. She slammed into it so hard she left a dent in the plaster and crumpled to the floor, too dazed to move but still holding her knives. Shit, he hadn’t meant to throw her that hard. That was going to piss off the other two for sure.
“Zoey!” they both cried, and yeah, that was a battle cry. Mira guarded Zoey while she tried to shake off the hit, which wouldn’t have been a problem except that Rumi went full-on fucking hunting dog and chased him in circles around a room much too small for this kind of thing—that was why he’d picked now to approach them; he’d assumed a smaller space would make it too difficult for them to use their weapons to their full effect and he’d have more time to talk them down. The reality of it was that every couple of twists and turns to avoid one of them would drive him straight toward one or more of the others. Mira was bristling and on guard as she stood over Zoey, too furious to realize he wasn’t even trying to attack—he was trying to get out of Rumi’s way and they just happened to be on the other side of the room, so every few seconds he was forced to loop past them again.
Rumi was getting frustrated and it made her more aggressive. He’d tried to avoid getting chased back down to Mira and Zoey by standing his ground and clawing at her arm to make her drop her sword. But he was also trying to be careful not to cause too much damage—if he really hurt one of them, the other two were going to make him pay for it, he was sure—which meant she’d barely batted an eyelash at the scratches, just dropped her sword into her other hand and tried to take his head off again. He abandoned that plan and just let himself get chased back around to the other end of the room again, and this time tried to climb back up the wall to give himself some space while Zoey was still too cross-eyed to aim at him.
“Look, I’m not here to pick a fucking fight, so just—” oh, okay, so all of them could throw their weapons, not just Zoey. Good to know. Mira’s woldo buried into the wall where his head had been, seconds before he let himself drop back down to the ground in a rain of plaster dust. It vanished and reappeared back in her hands, and he darted to the side when she launched it at him again. “Fucking shit. Alright, well fuck you—”
But that had been a deliberate move, or maybe they were just used to the way the others fought and knew how to plan around it, because her attack drove him straight toward Rumi’s blade as he tried to dodge it. He twisted and darted up the wall in an arc, but Zoey was back up and had the same idea. She was running up the wall from the opposite direction, knives at the ready. He didn’t have enough momentum to go over her (and didn’t think he could manage to get enough height to avoid getting stabbed in the stomach anyway) so he let himself drop straight down instead. She sailed past where she’d clearly expected him to still be located and slammed straight into Mira, taking them both down in a heap. He snorted—that hadn’t been intentional on his part, but it was fucking delightful that it’d worked out that way—and then got clocked in the jaw when Rumi just straight up punched him, like this was a bar fight. Maybe he should have expected that after what happened to Mystery, but seriously. Have some fucking class.
But damn if she didn’t have a solid right hook, especially with the hilt of her sword in hand, and that rattled him hard enough that he stumbled, tripped over a broken piece of the chair Mira had cut in half, and fell back into a corner hard enough to knock the wind out of himself against the wall.
That ended the chase right then and there—Rumi snapped her sword up, pressing the blade into his throat just beneath his jaw. Mira and Zoey got themselves straightened out in nearly the same instant, Mira’s blade leveled against his ribs as he held his hands up in a show of surrender. Zoey wasn’t throwing any knives yet, but she was holding three in each hand and she looked furious, a slow trickle of blood oozing down the center of her forehead and the bridge of her nose.
“Explain,” Rumi snarled, pulling out her demonic voice. Like that would scare him or something?
“What do you mean, explain,” he demanded indignantly, hitting his own demonic tone in a mockery of hers and ignoring the way they all flinched at the sound. Yeah, he could put on a demon snarl too, she wasn’t special. Even the weakest little spirit could manage a decent snarl if it tried; that shit wasn’t intimidating. “I was trying to explain and then you all tried to fucking kill me! What kind of fucking—”
“Explain what you meant about my sword, or I’ll kill you here and now,” Rumi snapped, pressing the edge of said sword a little harder into his neck to make a point. Touchy, touchy. The blade burned where it touched his bare skin, just a little. Enough to feel it, thrumming with the souls of the Honmoon behind it. Enough to pick apart a faintly familiar resonance buried within it—there was Jinu, tucked away somewhere in that mess. Hiding, like the spineless bastard he was.
“Jinu gave up his soul to you and then your sword changed. You got stronger, too. You think that was a coincidence?” he said pointedly, and watched Rumi’s expression change: fury to grief, and the raw, desperate beginnings of hope. So she’d already thought the same thing. He’d wondered if she’d even thought about it, if she’d given Jinu any passing consideration after she took what he offered.
It actually could have been coincidence, though he knew better than to tell them so. How the fuck could he know for sure? It wasn’t like hunters had demons lining up to trade in their souls; there wasn’t a precedent for this shit. He was pretty sure they were all stronger because of their newly found fortitude after they’d shaken off Gwi-ma’s influence. He’d spotted Zoey and Mira in the crowd in Namsan, but that was the only reason he’d known they were there before Rumi showed up for their finale—with the Honmoon in tatters and their spirits all but broken, he hadn’t been able to sense them as hunters. They’d been just as human as all the rest, shambling dumbly into Gwi-ma’s flames. But after, fucking hell—he thought he would have been able to sense them from across the fucking city. Impossible to miss it. Before, he’d had a sense of their power only if they were already close enough to touch, but now they were beacons of spiritual energy, lit up like lightning was trapped under their skin. It had settled a little more in the month or so after the fight at Namsan Tower, evened out a little maybe, but they were noticeably still stronger than they had been before, and up close like this he could almost feel it—like sparks striking his skin. So, yeah; entirely possible it was a coincidence. But only Rumi’s weapon had changed as far as he could tell, not the other two, despite all three of them being more powerful than they had been before. So maybe that really was Jinu’s influence at work in some way, like he thought.
“Why do you care?” Rumi demanded furiously, but she eased the edge of her sword away just a fraction. He could still teleport, they didn’t have him trapped here like they thought, but if the illusion of control would keep them all quiet long enough for him to get a word in edgewise then he could stay put a little longer. For the record? Pinned between hunter’s blades was not the most comfortable experience he’d ever had. Not the worst thing he’d ever experienced as a demon (any interaction he’d ever had with Gwi-ma took that honor) but it wasn’t great either. “Why are you here?”
“You want him back, right?” This was almost as much of a gamble as coming here in the first place had been. It had been obvious (if not also fucking baffling and blindsiding) to see that she and Jinu cared for each other there at the end, and while observing some of their recent hunts from a distance he’d overheard enough conversations between the three of them to guess that she still cared, but that was no guarantee that she wanted Jinu back. He’d been banking on the bet that she did, or at least would be endeared enough by his sacrifice to care what had happened to him in the aftermath. “I can help bring him back to you.”
(And by the way? What the entire, actual fuck? Why did they care about each other? When had that shithead even had time to sneak off and chase a skirt around? How long had that been going on? It couldn’t have been more than two weeks—had Jinu really left them to burn for some hunter bitch he’d known for a fucking fortnight? The night before the Idol Awards, Jinu had come back from wherever he’d been, and with no explanations of any kind said flatly, “Change of plans.” He restructured the plan at the last minute to include some elaborate fuckery involving the Huntrix manager, a song change, and weak lesser demons in disguises, but he hadn’t explained why or how this change had come about. None of them had questioned him on it because that wasn’t their job, but he’d wondered about it. Now he knew he really, really should have questioned it.)
Rumi glared at him, her eyes narrowed in suspicion, but there was that sliver of fearful hope at the edges of her expression. Yeah, he had her hooked. That as good as guaranteed the other two would back down, but—
“He’s probably lying,” Mira said bluntly. But, they were still mad; not quite ready to listen to reason yet. She adjusted her aim, moving the edge away from his ribs to rest the point of the blade lightly on the center of his chest instead. He breathed shallowly, trying not to push into the blade by accident. He didn’t think she’d let him crawl away like Ro had; if she stabbed him now she was going to make it count. “They wouldn’t help us, and they definitely wouldn’t help Jinu after what he did to them.”
Correct on all counts, except that he needed Jinu out of the stupid fucking sword if he was going to kill that asshole. Admittedly, he didn’t know exactly how to make that happen, but he could probably figure it out. How hard could it be, realistically? Jinu had gotten himself into the sword somehow, so it stood to reason that he could (probably) get out of it again too. Maybe. Hopefully, or else this was going to be a colossal waste of everyone’s time and then they’d probably stab him for it.
“Where are the others?” Zoey asked unexpectedly. “Is it just you now?”
That was a wild fucking question to ask him, considering that she knew damn well what had happened to at least three out of the five of them. “It’s just me. I’m not Gwi-ma; I don’t have an army waiting to jump you. It’s just me and I’m just here to talk.”
For now, anyway.
Remarkably, that worked. They settled down, and while they didn’t put their weapons away yet, at least Rumi and Mira shifted their blades away from him. Enough that he could breathe again without worrying that he might cut his own throat open with a single wrong move. He’d given this part some thought in advance, so he had a story ready to spin for them that sounded plausible enough. He hadn’t known for sure how much they actually knew about demons, practically speaking—they knew how to hunt and kill them, but that wasn’t the same as understanding them.
For example, their leader, Rumi? He was as sure as he could be without asking outright that she didn’t fully realize what she’d done to Jinu. He was pretty sure she’d be freaking the fuck out about it if she did. Collecting souls to power herself up—did that sound like anyone else they knew? Maybe a giant, flaming bag of dicks calling himself a king? It wasn’t exactly the same thing, but it was close enough that he could only imagine how the hunter would react if she knew. And while he didn’t know the details of her situation, it was readily apparent that she was at least part demon, which made it especially interesting that she’d been able to...collect Jinu’s soul? Or whatever she’d done, anyway.
Normal demons could eat souls, technically speaking, but they generally didn’t. They channeled that energy back to Gwi-ma, ferrying souls across the realms, and maybe they skimmed off a bit of energy in the process but they didn’t really keep most of it. That was a quick way to get eaten by Gwi-ma in punishment for taking what he’d already claimed as his. Those souls had gone straight to Gwi-ma and fed his insatiable appetite. Now? No telling. Or at least, no way to know without getting back into the demon realm, and despite his best efforts, he hadn’t found a way back down yet. He definitely wasn’t going to start eating souls to see what happened—the demons that did that started to lose themselves in bits and pieces, until eventually all that was left was a ravenous hunger set into motion instead of a thinking, reasoning being. No fucking thanks.
Rumi didn’t seem to be clamoring to eat human souls or devour demonic energy, so he didn’t necessarily think she’d consumed Jinu’s soul in the same way that Gwi-ma had eaten souls. He’d have to get closer to check for sure (and in the process, probably get diced into pieces, so that was a hard pass) but he thought it was more like...Jinu had offered up his soul to hers and the pair were intertwined now somehow. Whether or not they could be picked apart remained to be seen, but he was...dunno, like maybe sixty-percent sure he could help her do that? Probably? As long as she didn’t kill him first, which her expression currently suggested would be her preference.
“What’s in it for you?” Rumi demanded, once he’d spun up a web of half-truths and guesses into a fabrication that sounded more or less plausible, about how he could teach her to connect with Jinu’s spirit and draw him back out into a physical form. Even to him it sounded possible, and he’d delivered it with as much confidence as he could manage. “What do you get out of this?”
He weighed his options briefly. He’d considered trying a heartfelt he’s my friend and I miss him, but that would be too great a strain on his acting skills. He called me his friend and then left me to die, and I have some strong fucking opinions about it that I’d like to share with him personally would be more accurate, but he didn’t think she was as likely to keep him around if he told her that.
He picked a more straightforward response, which was also the first completely true thing he’d said to them so far: “I know you’ve been picking off the demons still left out on this side of the Honmoon, and I don’t want to spend all my time looking over my shoulder waiting to get stabbed. I help you and I don’t hurt any humans—in return, you let me live and don’t stab me once you get your boyfriend back. Deal?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why do you want to stay in the human realm? You belong in the demon realm.”
He raised his eyebrows at that. “Have you ever been in the demon realm? It’s boring as fuck down there, there’s literally nothing in it except demons and dust. The human realm is way more fun. C’mon, you won’t even know I’m here—no killing sprees, promise.”
“Don’t demons eat souls?” Mira asked skeptically. “You can’t just run around up here eating people and expect us to let you.”
So they really didn’t know. Interesting. Weird gap for a hunter’s knowledge, in his opinion, but then again he supposed they really only needed to know how to sing and stab demons to do their jobs properly. “We don’t eat people, and most of us don’t eat souls. We sent the souls back to Gwi-ma, but you already fucked him up so I don’t have to do that anymore.”
They traded speaking glances between each other, holding a silent conversation while he waited. He could probably teleport to safety before they could kill him if this turned against him, but...only probably. He kept a close watch on their body language, their expressions, waiting for the smallest hint that they were about to turn on him. If this failed, he’d have to give up on Jinu altogether, but he wasn’t quite willing to abandon his plan now that he’d finally come up with one.
“Trial run,” Rumi decided finally, turning back to pin him with a suspicious, narrow stare. “We’ll meet up with you and we’ll discuss this. If that goes alright, then...maybe. We’ll see. But if we even suspect you’ve hurt any humans, we’ll hunt you down. Understood?”
Honestly, that was more than he’d expected to hear. “Fair enough.”
“How do we get in touch with you?” Zoey wanted to know. “Do—do you have a cell phone?”
To be fair, he had had a phone for a little while—they’d needed one to run their marketing. Jinu barely grasped the concept, Abby and Ro hadn’t cared enough to even try, and if Mystery even understood what any of that meant, he hadn’t been in a hurry to volunteer that information, so by default he’d ended up being the one in charge of socials. He’d stolen a phone and fucked around with it until he figured out how to do what he needed to do. But he’d stopped bothering by the time the Idol Awards rolled around, and who even knew where that phone had ended up? He could just steal another one, but that might make them mad if they found out about it. “Nah. But I’ll be back.”
“No more showing up in dressing rooms,” Rumi told him pointedly. “This was not okay. In fact, no showing up at any venues or other work engagements. You can come to our penthouse tomorrow evening. Do you know where that is?”
He rolled his eyes but agreed anyway. “No dressing rooms; got it. And yeah, I think I can find the giant fucking tower with your logo on the side. I don’t need directions.”
With that, he teleported himself away before any of them could change their minds and stab him. Fuck, that had been a stupid idea, but...but it worked. Or at least, he wasn’t dead yet, anyway. Close enough.
Right, so. Finding their penthouse wasn’t difficult. Actually getting up there? Surprisingly difficult. There were a lot of shortcuts he could have taken, but most of his ideas would have ended with dead humans, which would lead to furious hunters and, consequently, one extremely dead demon. If he could get into their apartment once he could just teleport himself back up there in the future, but in the meantime he still needed a way in.
In hindsight, he should have just stolen a fucking phone somewhere and just let them text him when they wanted him to show up. It would have been humiliating to be at their beck and call, but it also would have been much less of a hassle. Instead, he had to lower himself to stealing a keycard off the lobby guard, sneaking in like the dumbest kind of low-stakes heist. It wasn’t hard, it was just embarrassing. The lobby had glass walls, so he could easily see inside and watch for a bit, observing the comings and goings of the humans there. He even saw their manager come and go for a two hour meeting in the afternoon. In the coffee shop across the street, he watched and waited for an opportunity to present itself.
(The baristas at the counter became more passive-aggressively courteous the longer he loitered around without buying anything, and he ignored it patiently because there was no chance the hunters wouldn’t find out about it if he killed someone across the street from their home. But, for the record? He’d definitely killed people for less.)
The foot traffic finally slowed for the evening. He slipped out into the quiet street beside the coffee shop, keeping to the shadows alongside the building. The guard in the lobby was distracted at the door with a delivery and no one noticed him when he teleported himself behind the guard's desk. A quick skim through the desk's contents netted him a helpfully labeled keycard, and in seconds he was headed up to the penthouse suite.The elevator opened straight into their front hall, which saved him the trouble of knocking. He wandered in, faintly amused by both the grandeur of it all and the absolute garbage security. He supposed it made sense; what demon would be stupid enough to just walk in unannounced?
On the heels of that thought he heard a gasping, “What the fuck—”; he ducked just in time to avoid catching Mira’s woldo straight between the eyes. He teleported himself further down the hall to get a little space and said irritably, “You told me to come here; why are you mad this time?”
“How the fuck did you get in here?” she demanded, as Zoey and Rumi came skidding around the corner.
“There’s an elevator; you might not have noticed it.” He pointed past her, helpfully indicating the door in question. She glowered and let her weapon fall away into the Honmoon. He’d given her a split lip with that headbutt yesterday, although it already looked like it was nearly healed. Healing faster than a normal human, maybe? He wasn’t familiar enough with humans anymore. Not enough to be completely sure.
“The elevator needs a key, which you don’t fucking have, so how—”
He held the keycard up between two fingers. He didn’t actually need it anymore anyway, and the faster they moved past this part the faster he could try to figure out what the fuck Jinu had done to himself. “Your security here is trash, by the way. And before you start throwing weapons around, no, I didn’t kill anybody.”
He flicked the card at Zoey, who was closest to him...and who had a bruise on the center of her forehead, mostly covered with makeup. Even if they did heal faster than regular humans, like he thought, he’d still thrown her into a wall hard enough to do real damage the day before. She caught the card and glared with obvious suspicion. Yeah, throwing her into the wall hadn’t earned him any favors, clearly. Fair enough.
“I’ll go take this back downstairs and make sure everything’s okay,” she said pointedly. “I’ll be right back.”
Aww, they didn’t trust him. You’d think he’d tried to kill them a few times or something. He waved her off and wandered farther into their apartment to look around, since none of them seemed interested in offering their hospitality. “Take your time; I don’t have anywhere to be.”
“Hey—go sit down somewhere, this isn’t a fucking museum.” Mira shooed him away from their ostentatious wall of awards and over to the couch. She’d put her weapon away and Rumi hadn’t drawn her sword on him yet, so he decided that was close enough to a polite invitation and flopped down in the middle of their couch. That was another point in the human realm’s favor over the demon realm: there was a real lack of comfortable furniture down in the ruins.
“You’re missing an award for this year,” he observed, nodding in the direction of the tacky award wall.
“Funny how that worked out,” Rumi agreed, folding her arms and leveling an unimpressed stare at him. “This new idol group calling themselves ‘the Saja Boys’ won. And then they all disappeared.”
“There’s been a lot of missing people in Seoul lately,” Mira added, leaning on Rumi’s shoulder so they could glare at him in tandem. “The popular theory is that the Saja Boys were caught up in it somehow. Weird, huh?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot we won an award for that,” he mused. They glared even harder, but seriously, he’d forgotten all about it—the award part of the Idol Awards show hadn’t been even remotely close to a priority. “Gotta give Jinu credit, he’s actually a decent writer once he stops trying to put in a bunch of shitty poetry references. I had to separate him and Ro, because Ro kept ‘helping’ but he has, like, the last eight hundred years of poetry crammed in his brain. Makes for an absolutely shit pop song.”
Whatever they’d expected hear (hopefully not an apology, because fuck that) it wasn’t that. They forgot to glare at him for a few seconds while they traded incredulous glances.
“You...you helped him write those songs?” Rumi asked hesitantly.
“It was a collaborative effort,” he admitted, because he had to be fair here—even Abby and Mystery had chipped in occasionally. Jinu did the bulk of the writing, but he’d helped, and Ro could always be counted on to come up with a timely innuendo that sometimes took Jinu a few hours to catch. There were only a few sections he’d written personally: anything he’d performed solo. “You talked to Jinu, right? Like, you’ve experienced a conversation with him first-hand? You think he could write a rap verse without embarrassing himself and all demon-kind in the process?”
Rumi muffled a laugh behind a hand and Mira rolled her eyes, but obviously they both knew he was right. Of course he was; he was always right.
And while they were on the subject of Jinu being a loser…He sat up and braced his knees on his elbows, giving Rumi his full attention. “Okay. Let’s get moving on this. Show me your sword. And no stabbing, remember? We made a deal.”
They traded glances again, then Rumi came to sit on the couch too. She was careful to keep some space between them. He could flatter himself that he made them nervous, but realistically it was probably so Mira would have plenty of room to stab him without any risk of hitting Rumi. He ignored her, still standing like a security guard over the couch, and ignored Zoey too when she returned from her trip downstairs. His attention stayed on Rumi as she drew her sword.
Her expression went focused when she drew her sword from the Honmoon, just for a flickering instant. She was watching him in turn, but just for a second there her gaze went distant, internal rather than external. And then the sword was in her hand, the flat of the blade resting on her knees and her fingers loose around the hilt. It didn’t feel any different to him, or at least not at this range—they were all still more powerful than they’d been before the Gwi-ma fuck up, but it wasn’t as intense as it had been in the immediate aftermath. Not in a way that suggested they were less powerful than they’d been then, but more like they’d integrated the changes, internalized it somehow. Leveling out rather than declining.
He needed a comparison point. He turned to Mira and Zoey and instructed, “One of you draw your weapon too. I don’t care which.”
They took a pause to throw him a startled look—he’d really thought hunters would have better reflexes about drawing a weapon—and then they both pulled their weapons. They had different hand gestures for it to suit the different types of weapons, but for each they had a similar little flexing motion that he thought they probably weren’t even consciously aware of. The overall effect was the same as with Rumi. They were focused on him as the only current threat in the room, but in the moment there was an instant of divided attention. Not to be confused with inattention; he was fairly sure they could still fuck him up even if they’d been distracted, but a moment of split focus. So it took effort, even if by now they were probably so used to it that they didn’t notice it anymore. He could work with that.
“Does it feel any different to you now compared to how it was before the Gwi-ma thing?” he asked the group as a whole.
He’d expected a breakdown of the comparisons—it was obvious that they were stronger now, and it seemed unlikely that they hadn’t noticed. What he got instead was a round of shrugging and at least one person made a stupid “I dunno” kind of sound, although he couldn’t pinpoint which of them did it.
He rolled his eyes again. Alright, so this might be harder than he thought.
“Like, do our weapons feel different? Or does drawing them feel different?” Zoey asked hesitantly.
“Either? Both?” He’d already known patience wasn’t his strong suit, but fuck, it was starting to dawn on him that he’d signed himself up for actual work here. A demon coaching the demon hunters; what a fucking joke. “You’re stronger than before. You can tell, right?”
“Are we?” Zoey considered it, tipping her head to the side. Very cute, but a straight answer would be more helpful right now. “I guess so. I think we’re working together even better than we ever have, in hunting and in our careers. It doesn’t feel much different. Maybe it’s a little easier with the new Honmoon than the old one? The Honmoon looks different, and it feels a little different than before.”
Was the Honmoon different? Well, aside from the obvious—this one was a hell of a lot more intact, and he couldn’t figure out how to claw through it like he’d been able to with the old one. It was also visibly a different color, but he wasn’t sure what that might mean, if anything. He’d only actually created a tear once, years ago, and that had been from the other side—and it hurt way more than he’d expected it to. It burned his hands and arms and it had stung even months later. He’d never tried again. Instead, he’d found that it was easier to find a weak point already in the weft of the Honmoon and tear his way through there. The difference between creating a puncture compared to widening a gap already there, like a rip in fabric. With the current Honmoon there were no gaps to be found, or at least he hadn’t found any yet. He hadn’t been brave enough (stupid enough) to try creating a new puncture. If the old one had burned him, who even knew what the super-powered one would do?
“Different how?” he pressed. “In what way?”
“Why does that matter?” Mira demanded sharply. “You don’t need to know about the Honmoon. You’re just supposed to be helping Rumi with Jinu. What’s with the questions?”
There was a lot he could have said in response to that, but more than half of it would have ended in a stab wound and he just wasn’t in the mood to fend off an attack. He tried for patience and said, “Your fucking weapons come from the Honmoon, and Jinu is stuck in a weapon. A weapon made of Honmoon, or whatever the fuck. You can connect those dots on your own, right?”
She glared, but whatever. This was already the full extent of his patience.
“It does feel different, a little,” Rumi said quietly, before Mira could interject again (or stab him in the face, which she appeared to be considering right now). “Our weapons have a kind of resonance to them, although it’s very faint. It’s different than it was before, but it’s hard to say what the difference is. Whether it’s me, or the Honmoon, or...or Jinu.”
“Is it any different for you two?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at the other hunters.
Zoey frowned in concentration and, in a blur of motion, spun a knife between her fingers on each hand, letting the other four blades fall back into the Honmoon silently. It was an impressive show of dexterity...and it was also kind of hot, incidentally, but that didn’t seem like information he should volunteer right now. She let the last pair of knives drop, then summoned them back into her hands with a little flex of her fingers. “...Not really? I don’t think it’s any different than it was before. They look different, a little—the color changed a little, and they’re brighter than they were, but they don’t really feel any different to me. Mira?”
“Same, I think,” Mira confirmed. She spun her weapon around herself in a tight circle, and while he would have preferred that she did that shit after taking a few big steps back, he could grudgingly admit that she’d been careful about it—the blade didn’t get close to him, Rumi, or Zoey. She did the same thing Zoey had done: held the woldo out and let it fall into the Honmoon, straight out to the side like a mic drop, then pulled it back into her grasp again with a flex of her fingers. It had the effortless look of a training exercise being repeated from muscle memory. “Hard to tell, I’ve never really thought about it much to be honest. But I think it’s the same as it used to be.”
He hummed thoughtfully and considered the problem. Okay. Put the pieces together: they could sense their weapons (after having it pointed out to them by a third party, fuck, that was embarrassing—he was embarrassed for them), Rumi could sense a change that the others couldn’t, and they had a split-second moment of internal focus when they drew their weapon. So...if she could focus on that instant before she drew her weapon, learn to pick apart the minute shift in energy right before she pulled her sword from the Honmoon, maybe she could isolate the difference and pull Jinu out instead. Separate the two somehow. He had some evidence to suggest they couldn’t sense demons in the same way that demons could sense each other, but Rumi was part demon, right? He didn’t know the whole story there—if Jinu had known, he hadn’t shared that information with the rest of them—but she was obviously demon enough to have patterns. She could sense the resonance of her own sword, and he could sense some lingering bit of Jinu’s energy, so it stood to reason that she could eventually learn to sense Jinu’s energy the same way.
Worth a try, anyway.
“Put your sword away, then draw it again,” he told Rumi, focusing back on her. “Slower this time, if you can.”
She hesitated for a brief moment, watching him with a narrow-eyed, thoughtful expression he didn’t quite know how to place: not fear or caution, and not anger at being bossed around. But she let her sword fade back into the Honmoon for a moment and then drew it again. The actual speed of drawing her sword wasn’t much different, maybe fractionally slower, but that hadn’t been the point anyway. He wanted her to pay attention to what she was doing, but telling her to focus would just frustrate her. Telling her to slow down made her concentrate on the details. It worked, and her expression turned inward again as she again dismissed and drew her sword, then a third time. She frowned in concentration and did it again. “I can tell there’s a difference, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from or why. Is that...is that Jinu?”
“I think so. Now that you can tell there’s a difference, you can start trying to focus on the differences.” And hopefully enough of Jinu was intact for him to be drawn out—just because they could sense him in there somewhere didn’t necessarily mean he could pull himself back into a physical form again. But demons could reform after having their physical form disrupted—he hoped that was what happened to Abby and Mystery, and dreaded that it might be happening to Gwi-ma, too—and it seemed to him that Jinu had a decent chance at being able to be drawn out if they could just figure out the right way to reach him.
She rested the flat of the blade across her knees again and studied him thoughtfully. “...You’re actually trying to help.”
It wasn’t a question, and it was also a weird fucking thing to point out when he’d already been helping. He wasn’t quite sure how to respond for a moment. “I mean. Yeah? That was the deal. What’d you think I came here to do?”
“Pick another fight, maybe,” Rumi said promptly. “Try to sabotage us again somehow.”
“That would be a very fucking stupid thing to do.” Look, he was perfectly secure in how much of a badass demon he was, but on his own against all three hunters? After they’d evaporated Gwi-ma? Yeah, no. He knew his limits and he liked having an intact physical form, thanks.
“Yes. It would.” She looked him in the eye. “So it’s a good thing you aren’t going to be that stupid.”
He was gaining an unpleasant new insight into Jinu’s inner workings right about now. If he actually had any money to bet, he’d have bet that at some point Rumi had pulled her sword on Jinu and glared at him, probably with the very real intention of cutting his head off, and Jinu had probably immediately fallen in love with her as soon as she made direct eye contact with him. What an absolutely horrifying thought. “For the record, Jinu was always the one with the stupid ideas, not me. I’m just one of the idiots who went along with him this time.”
She let her sword vanish into the Honmoon and regarded him with open curiosity, but none of the hostility he’d expected. “...Why did you join him, then? Why help him?”
Because even when he’d known it wouldn’t work, knew perfectly fucking well that something would go wrong and they’d fail somehow or another...Jinu made it sound convincing. Made him believe they could pull it off, if they could just stick together long enough to see it through. And then he’d met the others, worked with them a little, argued and joked and practiced their way through the absurd modern choreography together, and he’d thought...maybe. Maybe. Maybe they could make it work, maybe this would be his way out of the demon realm for good this time, maybe they could get enough distance between themselves and Gwi-ma and he’d just forget about them.
But, you know. Fuck them if they thought he’d tell them any of that. He didn’t owe them an explanation.
“You already know how convincing Jinu could be when he put in the effort,” he pointed out instead, and watched the flicker of hurt chase across her face as he pushed up to his feet. “Keep practicing to pick out the difference in the resonance. I’ll be back later this week and we’ll try again.”
“Wait—where are you going? You just got here,” she said, bewildered, but as far as commands went that one was pretty weak. Actually more of a baffled, genuine question than a real instruction, like even she didn’t think he’d obey. And she was right—he teleported himself away. He’d answered enough questions for one day.
He’d started off just trying to stay well the fuck away from them, naturally. Namsan had gone so well, right up until it hadn’t anymore. They’d gone from the cusp of victory to getting their asses handed to them and the turnaround on it only took about two minutes. He hadn’t needed to see anything else after watching Jinu immolate himself in his own stupidity and Mystery get himself deleted by the tiny hunter. He’d teleported himself away to the outer edge of the stadium, looking back just long enough to see Abby vanish in a burst of energy and light, and then Ro was getting thrown off the end of the lanky hunter’s blade. Fuck only knows what the plan was there; something dramatic and ill-considered, probably—like Ro had leapt straight into his own death just to follow behind Abby. And that was the end of them: the whole group taken out just seconds apart, easy as that. The hunter’s song resonated through the Honmoon, rebounding and building into a crescendo that shattered even Gwi-ma.
That left exactly two demons still in the vicinity of the tower: himself, and Romance, pulling his broken body away into the shadows at the edge of the stage. He watched him from the upper railing of the stadium from his own hiding place behind lighting rigs and hesitated over his options. Go help Ro drag his sorry ass away? He risked drawing more attention to them both if he tried, and anyway, then what? Ro probably wouldn’t survive a direct hit from a spiritual weapon like that—it was impressive that he hadn’t died yet, but there was just no way he could heal from it. But before he could decide what to do, Ro teleported himself away somewhere. The hunters didn’t notice, hadn’t noticed him yet either, but...yeah, no. Fuck that. If Gwi-ma couldn’t salvage his own fucking plans, he certainly wasn’t going to volunteer his help. Time to leave, before either Gwi-ma ate him or a hunter cut him in half.
For about a week, he’d just kept a low profile. Moved around the city; aimlessly at first, then in a gradually widening spiral. He’d thought for sure there would still be weak spots in the Honmoon—there always had been, little tears here and there. Seams between realities, fractures where they didn’t quite line up evenly. He’d been sneaking out of the demon realm periodically almost as long as he’d been a demon; no one knew how to find a path like he did. He poked around sketchy back alleys and nightclubs, then checked out empty little side streets, cemeteries and shrines. First the places teeming with the seething dregs of humanity, all the worst and most violent clashing impulses. Then the places of death and worship, the cold stillness and empty quiet. The forgotten places, the avoided places, the clamor of anonymous crowds under the buzz of the neon, and the graveyard hush of the empty between places. He lingered on the edges of funerals and the halls of hospitals and morgues. Transitional spaces, places where spirits would be shifting from one plane to another. And consistent throughout it all: the Honmoon, radiant and inviolable. A smooth, unassailable barrier everywhere he looked, the Honmoon glowing in rainbow fractals at the edges of his vision no matter where he went. He couldn’t find even a shred of evidence to suggest the Honmoon could still be split like it had always been before.
It was unexpected—all the moreso because he hadn’t ever expected to stay on this side of the Honmoon. Sure, Jinu made big promises in the planning stages—“Escape the demon realm, forever. Gwi-ma will reward us with our freedom. Just follow my lead.”—but that had never been a realistic goal and he knew it. He was pretty sure they all knew it. Jinu could make all the promises he liked, but when it came down to it, Gwi-ma didn’t relinquish control. Ever.
But. But. He’d been stupid enough to hope—Gwi-ma wouldn’t release them from his control, but maybe he’d give them more freedom if they could succeed. Once Gwi-ma had an outlet into the human world, he wouldn’t need them anymore. He might not even remember they existed—they could quietly slip away while he gorged himself on souls, and it might be decades or centuries before he called them back, if he ever bothered at all. Jinu thought he could let Gwi-ma erase his sins and live without burdens, but personally? He’d settle for just staying the fuck away from Gwi-ma for as long as possible. A simpler, more obtainable goal.
Well. Wish granted, he supposed. He just...hadn’t expected it would end like this. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself now. He’d never really expected to get this far. And...he hadn’t quite expected to be the only one left, either. He hadn’t planned to stick around with the others, of course, but he’d thought either they’d survive and go their separate ways, or all of them would get killed, one way or another, for failing. He’d always considered himself a survivor, but even still, he’d been realistic about his chances and he hadn’t ever thought he’d be the last one standing.
He could have gone anywhere, really. There was no reason to stay in Seoul. He didn’t have any pressing needs the way a human would have in his position—he couldn’t die from exposure to the elements, he wouldn’t starve or die of dehydration. But...he didn’t think he could just wander forever either. The hunters had blasted Gwi-ma to pieces—he’d been able to feel the shockwave of it, the tattered shreds of the Demon King’s energy scattered into the universe. But was even that enough to really destroy a thing like Gwi-ma? How long before that whisper started up in the back of his mind? How long until he was pulled back down, down into the dust and ruin and torment?
He had to go back. If Gwi-ma had managed to survive the hunters’ last assault, he would at least be weakened, surely? Maybe enough that he wouldn’t survive a targeted assault. And he probably could do it alone, but if he was already going into the demon realm, then he might as well see if he could round up some help while he was at it. It was entirely possible that Mystery, Abby (and, realistically, probably Romance by now) had been killed off for real by the hunters, but there was a tiny possibility that they’d survived. If they had, then he could probably talk them into going with him to hunt down Gwi-ma. Hell, it wasn’t any stupider than what Jinu had asked of them, and all of them had agreed to that, so surely he could get them to cooperate? How hard could it be to wrangle them all together, if even Jinu had managed to do it?
And that was the other piece of unfinished business: Jinu. The absolute audacity to gather them up into his lunacy, only to lose his fucking nerve right at the finish line. If that fucker thought that turning into a sword would be enough to escape, he had another thing coming. Although...granted, that was a pretty decent hiding spot. He’d hung around and watched the hunters a few times while they cleaned up strays left on the wrong side of the Honmoon, monitoring closely for any hint that Jinu was capable of regaining his physical form. Maybe he’d even planned it this way, tying himself to the leader of the hunters as a way to protect himself from Gwi-ma? But, no—it hadn’t taken long to conclude that whatever Jinu had done to himself, he didn’t seem capable of fixing it. And the lead hunter, Rumi...he wouldn’t be sure until he actually spoke to her to confirm it, but he was pretty sure she would have gotten Jinu out of the sword if she knew how.
He’d overheard them talking amongst themselves the last time he’d lurked around one of their hunts. He had to be careful not to get too close—he didn’t think they could sense demons, or they would have spotted him by now, but as long as he wasn’t in their line of sight he could hang around to keep watch on them. Most of their conversations weren’t about anything important, or at least not while they were out hunting—they bickered about what to eat after a hunt, or worked out new song lyrics and traded off joking parody lines of either their own current songs or other musicians’ work, they squabbled about who got to pick the next movie night, whose turn it was to do dishes, and gossiped about the people they worked with. It was, to be frank, boring as shit. And that was coming from someone who’d spent four centuries off and on trapped down in the demon realm with nothing but dirt and dumb as fuck lesser demons with an IQ that could be counted on one hand: their conversations were boring.
But two weeks after the Namsan Tower fight, he’d been skulking around the shadows of a narrow backstreet, keeping up on the rooftops to stay well out of their sight as he listened and watched while they cleared out a nest of some kind of dokkaebi. In the midst of the fight, Rumi had taken a claw to the shoulder. It wasn’t anything close to a lethal injury from what he could tell, but there was an instant outcry from the other two. It couldn’t have been too severe, because Rumi kept fighting and didn’t seem to be all that inconvenienced by the hit. What really got his attention was the sudden appearance of that spirit tiger that had always followed Jinu around—he’d wondered what happened to him after Namsan, but he hadn’t seen him since then. The tiger must have been nearby, or otherwise had some way to know that Rumi was injured, and he came bounding in from out of fucking nowhere to pounce on the last dokkaebi. Baby had never actually seen the tiger fight and hadn’t actually known he could; he had always seemed to have all the predatory instincts of a mattress. Maybe he just hadn’t ever seen him provoked. He had the dokkaebi pinned under massive paws and any of the hunters could have finished the demon off for him, but in a move that looked both premeditated and personal, he bit down on the head of the dokkaebi and crushed it.
Rumi and Zoey both immediately gagged, which seemed like an overreaction—the dokkaebi vanished into a puff of smoke when the tiger destroyed it, so it wasn’t like there was a gory body left to deal with—and Mira said approvingly, “Good boy! I didn’t even know he was following us. Rumi, is your shoulder okay?”
“I’m alright. It looks worse than it is,” Rumi told her, recovering from her squeamishness and going up to pet the tiger. “He’s been hanging around a lot more lately. You are a good boy, yes you are. But please don’t put demons in your mouth; we don’t know where that thing has been.”
“Aww, do you think he gets lonely when we’re busy? Maybe he needs to go for walks or something too. We should start taking him hunting with us more often, maybe.” Zoey let her weapons fall into the Honmoon so she could hug the tiger’s enormous head with both arms.
Unsettlingly, the tiger tilted his head up and suddenly he was struck by the certainty that he knew Baby was there and was staring straight at him through the circle of Zoey’s arms. But maybe that was paranoia? The other eye was staring aimlessly off in the other direction; maybe he actually couldn’t focus at all.
“I...I think he misses Jinu,” Rumi said quietly, and the other two went silent. Mira and Zoey traded glances with each other while Rumi leaned on the tiger’s massive shoulder, her hands stroking through the deep blue fur meditatively. “He followed Jinu everywhere. Now that Jinu’s gone, I think...I think he doesn’t know where else to go, and I’m familiar so he’s sticking with me.”
Or maybe the tiger could sense Jinu’s soul, inexplicably tied to hers. He was a spirit creature and followed his own whims—he didn’t know how Jinu had happened across the creature or why he had fixated on Jinu, but he had been with him nearly as long as Baby had known Jinu. So the tiger was certainly more familiar with him than he was with the hunters, yet for whatever reason he had picked Rumi as his new fixation instead of coming to find him while he was wandering around Seoul. Hard to believe that was coincidence, given that she seemed to be carrying around Jinu’s soul in her sword or whatever.
Equally possible: maybe he just liked letting the girls pet him. Who could blame him, really?
“...Do you think it’s possible he can still sort of...I don’t know. Sense Jinu with you, maybe?” Zoey asked hesitantly. The question caught his attention, given that it was more or less exactly what he’d just been wondering too.
He could see in the dark, all demons could, but even so it was hard to make out their expressions at this distance, and then Rumi turned her face away so she could rest her cheek on the tiger’s shoulder. He couldn’t make out much from her body language either; she looked tired, but then, she’d just been fighting a bunch of dokkaebi. “...Maybe. Maybe he can sense something I can’t.”
She sounded tired too, but there was a thread of guilt and grief underneath it. It was enough to jump-start the idea: maybe she wanted Jinu back after all. Maybe she wanted him back badly enough that she’d be willing to take advice from another demon if it meant getting him back again. Maybe he could talk to them, get them to stop trying to kill him long enough to at least hear him out.
He wasn’t unaware of the irony, of making stupid decisions twice in a row based on nothing more than a maybe. He’d dismissed the idea at first, just like he’d first dismissed Jinu’s proposal. He teleported himself away from them and the tiger’s unsettling stare. But…the idea wouldn’t leave him. He spent another two weeks considering the angles, making and dismissing plans. Talking himself out of the idea, then talking himself back around again. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe if he was careful enough, clever enough, if he tried hard enough. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
It wasn’t much to work with. There was no way to guarantee the hunters wouldn’t kill him outright. He still had to figure out what to do about Gwi-ma, and how to get back into the demon realm. He was still...not worried, that wasn’t the right word, but distracted with thinking about what might have happened to the other three, to Mystery, Abby, and Romance. Getting Jinu back into a physical form wouldn’t help him with the rest of his problems. But it was the most approachable one of his problems at the moment, the thing he thought he could get a handle on first: getting the hunters to settle down long enough to listen to him, and then getting Jinu back out of the sword.
One problem at a time.