Thrown In as Bait, the E-Rank Lantern Wakes Up Every Time He Dies novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Lamps Off
The lanterns obey his voice instead of the guild master's, the thing in the pool chases a thrown lamp, he kills the scalder in front of the inspector and walks every lantern out, and the Lamp of Mangwon steps out of a black car.
Cold poured out of the gap, and the first line of lanterns stepped through into the white tile.
Twelve lamps lit up the black plunge pool.
The pink phone pouch lay on the floor by the door, right where it had been when he died.
The lanterns knelt and started sweeping things into their sacks.
Woo-seok kept his eyes on the water.
At the far end of the pool, the surface moved.
"Lamps off!" he shouted.
It was the voice he'd used on fire grounds, and every lantern in that room had followed it through the steam for years.
Eleven lamps went dark at once.
Gyeol was still fumbling with his clip.
Woo-seok tore the lamp off his own chest, turned it up to full and threw it across the room.
It skidded along the tile and stopped on the far lip of the pool.
The thing came up out of the water, pale and as big as a bus, and frost ran across the tile around it.
It turned toward the only light in the room.
Woo-seok slapped the lamp off Gyeol's hoodie and pushed him toward the gray square of the doorway.
"Out. All of you, out."
The lanterns dropped their sacks on the tile and ran.
He shoved lanterns through the door by their collars, counting.
In the hall, Byun's vice-captain put his hand on the bar.
Ha-yeon touched the edge of the door with her spear.
The door stopped.
The vice-captain threw his weight on it, and it didn't move an inch.
Chil-seong squeezed through the gap, then two more lanterns, then Woo-seok.
"That's everyone," Woo-seok said.
Ha-yeon took her spear away, and the two of them slammed the door and drove the bar home.
Something heavy hit the steel from the inside.
Frost spread across the outside of the door in a white sheet.
Then the hall was quiet.
Barring a door on a waking master was Association protocol.
The lanterns left on the wrong side were written up as an operational loss.
Ha-yeon turned to the vice-captain.
"You reached for that bar with five people still in the room."
"Protocol," Byun said.
"Protocol says a master that's awake. It was still in the water when he touched the bar."
She wrote something in a small notebook and didn't look up.
Byun's hunters led the way back with their weapon lights on full.
Hunters were allowed to carry light behind the lanterns.
In the hot pool hall, the water split open under the first hunter's light.
The scalder took him by the leg and dragged him toward the pool.
Two hunters swung their swords into the boiling water and pulled them out steaming.
Woo-seok was already at the wall.
Ten years ago he had shut the city water main to this hall with his own hands.
The valve wheel was still there, rusted under the tile at waist height.
He put his shoulder into it and spun it open.
Cold water roared out of the fill pipe into the hot pool.
The steam over the water thinned, and the pool went gray, then clear.
The scalder came up thrashing, slow and soft, a thing made of hot water caught in cold.
It let go of the hunter's leg.
Woo-seok pulled the red-handled fire axe off his back and brought it down through its head.
The thing came apart into warm water.
A red stone the size of a walnut sank to the bottom of the pool.
Ha-yeon was standing at the edge of the tile with her notebook open.
"Kill recorded," she said. "D-grade. Jeon Woo-seok. Witnessed."
Byun laughed.
"He's a trespasser. Any kill in this gate belongs to the contract holder."
"The rank rule says whoever kills it while an inspector watches," Ha-yeon said. "I watched."
She didn't say it like a favor.
She said it like a woman reading a sign.
At 2:10 they came out the front doors of the Blue Crane into the March sun.
Woo-seok stood at the top of the steps and counted every lantern who came out.
There were twelve.
Chil-seong pressed another strawberry candy into his hand.
"Fireman," he said. "Next time you warn us, I'll listen in the yard."
Gyeol came out last and stood next to his uncle without saying anything.
Then he said it.
"You knew what Byun was going to say. Down to the second."
"I'll tell you at home."
"You'll tell me now."
"At home," Woo-seok said, and Gyeol let it go for once.
A reporter with a blue umbrella was coming up the sidewalk with a cameraman.
Behind her, a long black car pulled up to the curb.
The two guards at the doors dropped their cigarettes and stood up straight.
A tall young man got out of the back in a white suit and black gloves.
Every lantern on those steps knew his face from the photo on the guild fence.
Kwak Do-han looked at the barred building, and at Byun's empty hands, and then at Woo-seok.
"Byun," he said pleasantly. "You opened my door, and you came out with nothing?"
Then he smiled at the cameras.
"And who let the firefighter back into my bathhouse?"
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