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[Due to excessive immersion, the influence of Fourth Wall has temporarily weakened.]
Kim Dokja hissed through his teeth at the fresh, acid pain that ripped through him.
He was crouched and contorted in a terrible way, dabbing inexpertly at the brand-new gouge in his right wing. It was barely visible over the crest of his shoulder blade, but when he’d looked at it the first time, it had made him so dizzy he’d had to press his forehead to his knees until the sunspots had burned from his vision.
The Fourth Wall always had the worst fucking timing.
He and Yoo Joonghyuk had, naturally, been after a hidden piece, stealing off after dinner to avoid having to explain themselves. Of course, it was different nowadays—interspersed with soundless kisses on abandoned avenues, and when their swords were sheathed, the deliberate weave of Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers through his own. Kim Dokja was still always unprepared for these. Otherwise, an ordinary night.
But they hadn’t anticipated the chimera in Yongsan.
His companion—the phrase triggered a breathless, peristaltic clench in his chest, another pain to add to the pile—was gone. Last he’d seen of him, the chimera’s tail had lashed Yoo Joonghyuk straight through the wall of a building.
Kim Dokja had never been solid on what governed the arbitrary activation and deactivation of the Fourth Wall. But as the dust cleared in the space where Yoo Joonghyuk should have stood, indestructible, Kim Dokja found the sensation that then hollowed him out was immersive. Excessively.
Then the chimera (to add insult to injury) had taken a venomous bite of Kim Dokja even as he ran it through with his sword, and he’d pitifully, Fourth-Wall-lessly dragged himself into an alley to lick his wounds.
Kim Dokja hadn’t had to deal with raw, unfiltered pain in… a while. And yeah, it’d made him sloppy—he hadn’t packed any healing elixir. He’d probably have to cobble something together himself. Without equipment, he’d have to chew on compatible potion ingredients to mix them together in his mouth and hope it didn’t poison him. The taste alone would be enough to kill him.
A hoarse, wild laugh shook its way out of him in time with the throb of his wing. There was raw, unfiltered pain, and then there was raw, unfiltered fear. The second one was worse—how could everyone stand being so scared, all the time? The moment played over in his mind, the sick impact of the creature’s serpent tail against Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest. Was he already on that train car in the next regression? The uncrossable distance of a timeline away?
Was Kim Dokja now supposed to live in a world without Yoo Joonghyuk?
He couldn’t think about it. Maybe Yoo Joonghyuk got thrown really far and got lost. Or he was picking himself out of the rubble, one particle of gravel at a time. He was probably, hopefully alive. Dread nevertheless iced Kim Dokja through—or was it the blood loss? It made his fingers stiff, cold, and unwieldy as he tried to dress his wounds with the shredded remains of his shirt.
He’d stay here until he could stand up again without passing out from agony. Hopefully this would happen before he started passing out from blood loss, since the chimera venom seemed to contain an anticoagulant. Then, he told himself, he could go find Yoo Joonghyuk.
And that’s when they came for him.
It took a second for his vision to resolve them at the end of the alley, misshapen backlit shadows through the smeary lens of agony. They were two men, made into lumpy hulking figures by the chimera pelts thrown over each shoulder. Scales were tied in bloody bundles at their waists, and the chime of glass suggested they probably drained the chimera’s blood.
They were scavengers, the vultures that circled after the predators made their kill. They usually didn’t carve into the remains until long after he and Yoo Joonghyuk left, and they certainly never approached the two of them. However, nothing was going according to plan tonight.
“What do you want?” Kim Dokja scratched out.
Recognition glinted in their eyes, but they didn’t respond. They crept closer.
They should have been cowed by his Status, cringing away from the severe demonic aura that typically rolled off of him. They should have registered his size, that even crouched, he stared back at them with eyes at the same height. And above all, they should have remembered who he was.
However.
The creature they must have seen would not have looked like the Demon King of Salvation. Shirtless; bowed over in a painful, bony, white arch; painted in gore. His black wings—gingerly spread, caked with drying blood, and smelling strongly like iron—made the lightless place even darker. Kim Dokja knew, despite the height he gained from the Demon King transformation, despite his Status, despite his reputation, he looked like a hungry, wounded animal.
“How much do you think we’ll get for the wings?”
Kim Dokja felt a rough grip on his wing, the wounded one, and writhed in pain. His head suddenly hit the ground with jarring, percussive force as a retaliatory hobnailed boot slammed down on his spine. Blood filled his mouth—his jaw had flung shut on his tongue.
“That one’s fucked. The other one’s whole, though. Could sell it for a pretty penny.” Demon King feathers were rare—whole wings impossible to come by.
“And the horns?”
The other scavenger, the older one, knelt to yank Kim Dokja’s head up by the horns to inspect. This had the effect of bringing him face-to-face with his attacker. His face was windburnt and lined with the wear of survival, like old leather. Under the gaze of his drooping eyes, Kim Dokja was no longer the predator to trail for easy spoils. He was another dead beast to cut out into component parts.
He spat a mouthful of blood at him.
The scavenger roared in anger, hands coming instantly to his face. Kim Dokja, using the collective shock, pushed himself up and sprang at him with the last of his strength. He channeled Electrification and thrust a palm crackling with blue energy into his enemy’s chest. He felt the man convulse sickly under him with a sense of unhinged, animal satisfaction.
He was abruptly kicked away, breaking the circuit. The younger scavenger had recovered, and crushed his ribs under his boot. A scream tore from Kim Dokja’s throat as the wound in his wing ground against the asphalt. He didn’t know he was capable of making a sound like that.
The scavenger panted triumphantly. He leaned over Kim Dokja and traced the point of his knife down Kim Dokja’s sternum, like the ghost of an autopsy. “What about the rest of him?”
Mostly worthless. Of no economic importance, when it came to the Dokkaebi Shop. Or maybe he was worth something, butchered—the alien biology of his new form might stretch into the parts he still mistook for human.
The electricity hadn’t stopped the older one’s heart. His face stretched in a malicious, vengeful grin. It was still streaked with Kim Dokja’s rusty spit. “Wouldn’t the story ‘Demon King of Salvation Killer’ be pretty sweet?”
Kim Dokja wanted to tell them that that title sounded terrible, but his vision had begun to fade in and out alarmingly. A tinnitic whine droned in his ears. He was out of energy, out of mana, and—at this point—probably out of blood.
The Demon King of Salvation was likely to die here.
He ultimately didn’t blame them. It’s what he would have done, in their situation. You had to survive somehow, in this world—and if you happened to kill a constellation in the process, wasn’t that even better? One less spectator to your misfortune, one less manipulator of your fate.
He remembered Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression in the split second that had elapsed before the chimera had killed him. His face had been so open, locking eyes with Kim Dokja as if Yoo Joonghyuk knew he’d had a plan, and he’d follow it if only he asked. It was a trust Kim Dokja hadn’t earned. But what other choice had the Demon King of Salvation left Yoo Joonghyuk, at this point? Kim Dokja had been the ultimate manipulator, had already irreversibly changed everything he knew with a calculating lack of mercy. All Yoo Joonghyuk could do is submit himself for use as Kim Dokja’s instrument of scenario progression.
[Excessive immersion has severely worn out your mental strength.]
Kim Dokja had doomed this round. Through the numbing, cold static of his senses, he hardly felt the knife as it sliced him open.
But he did hear the scream. He thought it was himself again, at first, but when it was suddenly silenced, he became aware that it had erupted from above him. The weight of the scavenger abruptly disappeared.
He looked blearily upwards.
There he was. Kim Dokja felt a wave of shivering relief wash over him so strongly that for a moment he felt like he was about to cry.
Yoo Joonghyuk, coated in plaster dust and bloody at the left temple, but blessedly alive. His face was frozen in an expression of cold, silent fury as he held the scavenger in a blood choke.
The younger scavenger’s hands scrabbled frantically, fruitlessly at the unyielding muscle of Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms. The scavenger was thin with hunger, thinner than Kim Dokja initially thought, with the bulk of the pelts having slid off of him. His face dawned young and afraid with the realization that he was dying. Then, it faded entirely.
Yoo Joonghyuk let the body crumple to the floor and instantly pivoted to intercept the other, who leapt at him with a short sword and bitter desperation. In the close-quarters skirmish, Yoo Joonghyuk lashed out with the hunting knife he’d pulled from the dead scavenger. He was a black, relentless hurricane. A blade-on-blade block, then a vicious slash to the man’s gut. Parry, then a cut at the tendons of the man’s wrist that made the sword fall from his grip. When Yoo Joonghyuk finally thrust the blade through the man’s ribs into his heart, Kim Dokja let out a breath of sympathy for the scavenger. Yoo Joonghyuk had dragged it out for long enough.
Yoo Joonghyuk dropped to his knees in front of him. Kim Dokja was peripherally aware of gentle, large hands on the insensate skin of his face.
“How did you survive?” he asked sluggishly.
Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t even seem to comprehend the words. He just searched him with a wild gaze—his face, his body, and back to his face. Yoo Joonghyuk, who trusted him too freely and with too much of himself. Who had just killed two men to make them suffer, with the same hands he now held Kim Dokja’s face in.
Who wanted Kim Dokja despite all that he was, and all that he’d made himself into, because maybe he was just as inhumanly ruthless.
He was looking with more concern than really necessary at Kim Dokja’s injuries. An overwhelming, unnameable, tender feeling clogged his throat. Kim Dokja wanted him to stop looking—he couldn’t even feel the pain anymore—there were more important things to worry about. But he couldn’t speak.
After a while, Yoo Joonghyuk opened his mouth. “Why didn’t you call me?”
On Midday Tryst. Fuck, he was stupid.
“I… forgot.”
Yoo Joonghyuk eyed him disbelievingly.
His own blood was tacky on his fingers, Kim Dokja realized as he reached out for Yoo Joonghyuk. He froze, though his hands burned and shook to feel the tangible proof that Yoo Joonghyuk lived. Yoo Joonghyuk met his touch anyway. He folded Kim Dokja into a careful embrace, in which Kim Dokja could self-indulgently lay his palms over Yoo Joonghyuk’s beating heart.
Yoo Joonghyuk tilted his chin up. They kissed, and it made him feel unbearably human.
[The excessive immersion has caused the 'Fourth Wall' to shake.]
Yeah, he was in too deep.