Thud!
The sound that had been ringing against the living room window was now coming from the window of Da-woon's room.
Thud! Thuuud!
The culprit behind the noise was, of course, the crow.
Spotting the black mass flapping its wings outside the window, he clicked his tongue. He quickly covered Da-woon's body with the blanket, then climbed off the bed, swaying on his feet.
Caw!
“Quiet.”
He used telekinesis to open the window and shut the crow's beak at the same time. Letting out a strangled gnngh, the crow scrambled into the room.
“Su-ho, you, mmph!”
“Keep your voice down.”
Having transformed into a human, Heuk Gu-hyeok had his mouth clamped shut by Su-ho, who then plopped down onto the floor. Bracing his dizzy head with one hand, he stretched out his other hand toward Heuk Gu-hyeok.
“Hand over a feather.”
With his mouth held shut, Heuk Gu-hyeok exhaled through his nose with a snort like a rhinoceros. Then, with practiced ease, he plucked a single feather from the wing on his back, and tapped his lips to signal that he wanted the telekinesis released first.
“Speak quietly. He's sleeping.”
Su-ho snatched the large feather with his small hand and crunched it down.
Like him, Heuk Gu-hyeok was a “chosen” Beastman, and through his veins flowed blood imbued with spiritual power. Chosen Beastmen could share their blood with one another to replenish that power.
Without enough spiritual power, they couldn't transform into humans.
Beastmen who weren't born with spiritual power in the first place lived their whole lives in their true forms. Born as animals, dying as animals. Aside from being able to converse with Beastmen of the same species, theirs was a life little different from that of an ordinary animal.
“You're not even well, so why are you straining yourself using your powers...! What if something terrible happens to you?”
Having finally managed to lower his voice, Heuk Gu-hyeok knelt down on the floor. Bowing before Su-ho with the plea that he please just sit still, he patted his startled chest to calm it.
The Su-ho of now was still in an incomplete state. Sickly from birth, he fell ill especially often, and even now, close to being fully grown, he frequently suffered fevers or collapsed.
When they were young, they'd assumed it was simply because he was congenitally weak. But that wasn't it.
He wasn't weak. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It was the enormous power he held that his immature body couldn't withstand, and that was what made him fall ill so often.
“I've told you thousands of times to use your powers to your heart's content later. You only have to hold out fifty more years, that's all.”
Su-ho dug a finger in his ear and rolled his eyes. That blasted fifty years. He'd heard it so often his ears were worn raw, and it was suffocating.
“You're supposed to wait to transform until your body can take the power.”
For a Beastman to change from animal to human looked easy on the surface, but it required quite a lot of power. Even shifting into an animal similar to one's true form used up no small amount of energy.
Even the form of a cat he was maintaining only barely, with some strain. Just altering his shape a little tired him out easily and left him quickly famished.
“Shut up. I know.”
Having swallowed Heuk Gu-hyeok's feather, Su-ho flopped down flat on the floor. As expected, the aftermath of overexerting himself left his complexion looking far from good.
“If you know, then why do you keep doing reckless things?”
His was a willful temperament by nature, but Su-ho had never forced a transformation into a human before, so Heuk Gu-hyeok was thoroughly thrown.
It wasn't even a time when he was in good condition. He wasn't the sort of fool to act recklessly during a spell when his body was weak, so why...
Watching Su-ho sprawled out limply with no energy, Heuk Gu-hyeok's mouth slowly fell open. Drawing in a deep breath, he scanned his surroundings with bewildered eyes.
Su-ho's pheromones were vibrating through the room. The scent had such a strong presence there was no way to miss it.
And on top of that, this was clearly...
Catching the suggestive undercurrent laced through Su-ho's pheromones, Heuk Gu-hyeok abruptly raised his voice and shouted.
“What did you just do?! You haven't even held your wedding rites yet!”
“I told you to be quiet.”
Turning his head toward Heuk Gu-hyeok, Su-ho gave a chilly-eyed warning.
“The kid's sleeping.”
Watching Su-ho jerk his chin toward the bed, Heuk Gu-hyeok found himself at a loss for words. He had no idea what on earth this situation was.
“Why are you acting out now, rebelling like you never even did in your teens? I really do have a weak heart. Please stop giving me these shocks.”
Getting to his feet, Heuk Gu-hyeok rattled on in a deliberately light tone as he opened the window. He meant to air the room out first, to clear away the suggestive mood and smell lingering inside.
Well, he was at an age brimming with vigor, so if one tried to understand it, it wasn't impossible to understand. He himself had a record of the odd bit of rebellion, large and small, in his own youth.
“Still... you didn't go all the way, did you?”
“Do I look that debauched to you?”
The crow, who'd asked cautiously, let out a deep sigh of relief.
He'd known it. He'd trusted that Su-ho, surprisingly, was the most conservative of all the brothers in that regard.
He'd sooner trigger a landslide than ever be the kind of person to create a situation where a child got conceived before the wedding rites.
“So the Omega was in heat. That's why you were soothing them. No wonder. Our Su-ho isn't the sort to do that.”
Smelling the faint Omega scent mingled into Su-ho's pheromones, Heuk Gu-hyeok arrived at his own conclusion. Whether someone was in heat or not could be told from the pheromone scent alone.
“And of all places, you walked into the home of an Omega in heat. Your luck really is filthy rotten.”
With a click of his tongue, Heuk Gu-hyeok went to inspect the bed where the Omega lay. At that, Su-ho suddenly thrust out a hand and yanked hard on his wing.
“Ow! Use your words. Words.”
“Don't look. I'll gouge your eyes out.”
Made to sit back down on the floor, Heuk Gu-hyeok's dark face filled with bewilderment and worry.
Don't tell me he's taken a liking to that human? He mustn't get deeply entangled with humans...
“Why'd you come? I told you not to come until I called for you.”
With no regard for the worry burning in someone else's gut. Kicking out at him and demanding to know if he was ignoring what he'd said, he was every bit the immature little brat.
Heuk Gu-hyeok first conjured clothes onto Su-ho's bare body and dressed him, then got to the heart of why he'd come all this way.
“We were spotted in our forms. It's my failing.”
Bowing his head, Heuk Gu-hyeok reported the situation plainly.
So that was why he'd come alone instead of bringing the black flock. It seemed a problem had arisen.
Su-ho rolled over to face Heuk Gu-hyeok with a composed expression.
“Were you caught?”
“No, of course not. Everyone's in hiding.”
By Heuk Gu-hyeok's ability, they were all concealed. But because there existed among humans, too, beings called Espers who wielded supernatural abilities, some had returned to the mountains as a precaution against any trouble.
“We were discovered while trying to find food. We never packed any provisions at all, since we expected to head back right away.”
One of the flock, worn out by hunger, had let his crow's nature take over and ended up straying from the group. And of all the timing, the trouble had happened while Heuk Gu-hyeok was in human form packing up food at a restaurant.
“It's all my failing. Since you said, Su-ho, that you'd just take a quick little look around, I didn't prepare any food for the others. I never dreamed in a thousand years we'd stay this long.”
Heuk Gu-hyeok kept stressing to Su-ho, the very source of the problem, that it was his own fault. In truth, it was a fact that his preparations had been inadequate. They really had planned to stay just half a day and then return.
“They say a few passersby saw him rummaging through a trash can. Fortunately, they were all ordinary, unremarkable people.”
The crow Beastman, who'd transformed into a human and was digging methodically through the trash can, had panicked at the presence of passersby and turned back into a crow and fled. He should've just kept playing the lunatic and gone on rummaging through the trash.
“When I went and checked, there was a large turnout of what looked like Espers, too. Going by how thoroughly they were taking witness statements, they'll probably be reviewing every last CCTV camera in the surrounding area.”
Su-ho's sharp eyes crumpled into a scowl. The only word he'd understood out of everything he'd just heard was “Esper.”
“The... anyway, the situation's bad.”
Rather than explaining each word one by one, Heuk Gu-hyeok devoted himself to persuading him. Su-ho, who would live out his life guarding the hidden, concealed mountain with no chance of ever being involved with the outside world, didn't need to know such information.
“Bad how, exactly?”
“Bad enough that we have to head back right now.”
When he spoke at the level of the younger-bodied Su-ho's understanding, Su-ho got it at once and promptly shut his eyes.
“Ah, I'm sleepy. I'm tired. It's too hard. I hurt.”
He even faked a yawn as he melted onto the floor like slush. As though he'd anticipated this reaction of throwing a tantrum about not being able to move a single step, Heuk Gu-hyeok calmly dragged a hand down his face.
“The trackers are going to multiply for a while. We'll have to be careful for a few years.”
The bird species who roamed in and out of the mountain on a regular basis to gather information would have to go into seclusion for a while, too. They'd have to wait until the interest of the trackers, gone red-eyed in their hunt for Beastmen, died back down.
Ten years at the longest, three at the shortest.
Once that much time passed, the memories of the witnesses who'd seen the Beastmen would fade. These days there was this thing called photography technology, so now and then irrefutable, undeniable evidence got captured, but even this, time would resolve.
Human patience didn't run long.
They were beings like fire, blazing fiercely only to eventually go out. It was thanks to that human trait that the Beastman race had been able to live in hiding without trouble all this time.
But from now on, they'd have to be even more careful. Ever since beings called Espers had begun to emerge, supernatural ability was no longer a power unique to the Beastman race alone.
Unlike Beastmen, who possessed numinous power, the Espers used only a single ability each, but recently he'd heard there were some who wielded a variety of abilities.
As the Espers' powers grew stronger by the day, the risk of being discovered had grown right along with them.
“Our identities must never, ever be found out. You know that even without me saying it, right?”
They mustn't get deeply entangled with humans. If they did, it might be a stroke of heaven-sent fortune for the humans, but for Beastmen it was nothing but a calamity, with not the slightest good in it.
