Dancing Upon Scarlet Veins
Chapter 16 – Dancing Upon Scarlet Veins
I could feel my heartbeat in the wound.
Every step back toward the bunker made it throb, a slow, heavy ache under the half-frozen blood.
“Don’t move your arm,” Cha Eun‑ha said.
She said it while forcing my left arm over her shoulder and wrapping an arm around my waist.
On my other side, Yeonhwa’s fingers were hooked into my right hand, shadows quietly coiling around
my wrist like a bandage and a shackle both.
“If he doesn’t move it, it’ll stiffen,” Yeonhwa said. “Do you want it to freeze crooked?”
“I want it not to tear more,” Eun‑ha snapped.
“And I want it attached,” Yeonhwa replied. “You already tried to burn that side once.”
The snow crunched under our boots. Behind us, the field of corpses steamed in the wind. Ahead, the broken bunker squatted low in the white, half‑buried and ugly.
My shoulder pulsed with every breath.
My head would’ve been severed if Yeonhwa hadn’t pulled back at the last second. That didn’t make the hole any smaller.
Fire had kissed my back right after.
And If Eun‑ha hadn’t yanked the flames, I’d have matching wounds.
“I can walk,” I said.
“Shut up,” Eun‑ha said.
“Don’t talk,” Yeonhwa said. “It moves your ribs.”
So I let them half-drag me.
I wasn’t as weak as I looked. I knew exactly how much to lean, how much to sag, to make them focus
on me instead of each other.
I made sure I looked like I was suffering a lot.
The more guilty they felt, the more likely they were to think twice before doing something like that again.
The wind howled around the bunker. The doorway loomed closer.
Eun‑ha’s heat pressed against my side, keeping the cold from numbing the injury.
Yeonhwa’s shadows slipped under the worst of the snow in front of my feet, making a semi-solid path so I wouldn’t trip.
If I were an outside observer, it might have looked like care.
From inside the sandwich, it felt more like being handled by two people who had just remembered their favourite toy could break.
Inside, the air was colder but at least it wasn’t trying to tear my skin off.
They settled me down on the layered pile of coats and scavenged fabric they were using as a bed.
Eun‑ha immediately crouched in front of me, peeling back the torn fabric near my shoulder.
Yeonhwa caught her wrist.
“Watch it,” she said. “You’ll rip the clot.”
“That was your spike,” Eun‑ha replied. “You don’t get to lecture me.”
“He stepped in the way.”
“You aimed at his throat.”
They glared over my chest.
My shoulder throbbed in time with their words.
“Argue later,” I said, keeping my tone level. “Or do you two really want me to get hurt more?”
That, at least, they stopped.
Yeon‑hwa’s shadows unwound from my wrist and rose up, thinning into delicate strands. They pressed gently around the wound, steadying it while Eun‑ha poured the contents of another potion over the torn flesh.
Cold sting. Then hot.
The edges of the injury knitted slowly. Not fully. Not clean. Enough that I wouldn’t bleed out if we ran again.
“Good enough,” she muttered. “For now.”
“Don’t use full fire on it,” Yeon‑hwa said. “You’ll cauterise wrong.”
“Do you want to do it?” Eun‑ha asked. “Go ahead. Stitch your own mess.”
“I will,” Yeon‑hwa said.
They crowded closer, one on each side, passing my arm between them like a very fragile, very
dangerous object.
My vision swam a little.
Not from blood loss.
From the realisation that if I hadn’t thrown myself into that attack, one of them would be dead now and the survivor would be building a cell for me.
Two cages was better than one. For now.
“You’re frowning,” Eun‑ha said. “Are you in more pain?”
“Yes,” I thought. “But not where you can heal it.”
Aloud, I said, “It’s tolerable.”
Eun‑ha’s eyes flicked to mine. Searching. As if she could tell when I was understating.
She couldn’t.
That was one advantage of being someone else in a borrowed body. Their tells didn’t fit on my face quite the same way.
When they were done fussing, they arranged themselves automatically: Eun‑ha on my left, shoulder
pressed to mine, hand resting just above the bandage; Yeon‑hwa on my right, shadows still curled
under my palm like a second skin.
Their attention never fully left each other.
Every time one of them adjusted my coat, the other’s eyes flickered there too, checking for ulterior motives.
The ground rumbled under us again.
Dust dropped from the ceiling in a thin curtain.
Something out there roared. Close. Answered by another. And another.
“…They’re getting bolder,” Yeonhwa said.
“They smelled mana and blood and cleared snow,” Eun‑ha said. “We fed them.”
“We?” I thought.
I kept my mouth closed.
The bunker walls creaked.
There was no real “safe” here. Just degrees of how fast you died.
If they started again—really started, with full power—this place would collapse in minutes.
If they didn’t fight, everything outside would come in anyway.
Yeonhwa — The Black Sun (POV)
Yeon‑hwa did not believe in God.
She believed in hunger.
In cold.
In the sound of a gate screaming open above your head and monsters pouring out faster than the Association could read their names.
She believed in debt.
In knives.
And certainly not in some Saintess’s toy.
It didn’t matter if it proved he wasn’t Si-woo, or that every word he spoke was a lie.
The only thing that mattered was what her chest had believed: It’s him.
She didn’t need a floating rock to tell her.
But when the same floating rock said, in front of Cha Eun‑ha’s ruined face, that he loved her?
That…
She had to admit.
Felt good.
He’d said “yes” because he was cornered.
She wasn’t stupid.
But the artifact
It only tasted the part under all that.
The part that still ran toward danger whenever she closed her eyes.
The part that had thrown itself into the path of her shadow spike a few minutes ago like a lunatic.
“Yes,” he’d said.
Blue.
Her heart had kicked so hard it hurt.
It had been tight for so long she’d almost forgotten how it felt to relax.
When she’d asked, voice carefully low, “Did you ever hate me?”
and he’d looked at her and said, “No,”
and the orb had stayed blue—
It was like someone had reached in and pulled a knife out of the heart she had carried her whole life.
He might not remember the years she’d spent rotting under the city.
He might not remember the times she’d failed him so badly she’d had to leave just to stop dragging him further down.
But some part of him had never hated her.
Not even when he’d left.
Not even when he’d walked into Eun-ha’s trashy building and put on a clean coat and tried to scrub
the sewer smell off his bones.
The artifact wasn’t God.
It was worse.
It stripped away all the excuses and left bare, ugly things.
He loved her.
He loved Eun‑ha too.
The orb had said so. Again and again.
It had refused to let him lie even when his mouth tried.
That meant they were both right.
Which made everything worse.
If he’d only loved one, the other could break and let go or snap and die.
If he’d loved neither, he still would die.
Instead, the stupid rock had confirmed that his soul was still tangled between the two worst people in
his life.
Her.
And the red bitch.
Then he’d jumped into her attack like an idiot.
The memory of it still made her fingers go numb.
Seeing her spike go straight through his shoulder: feeling it, even, through the mana. It was like watching that gate in the slum open again, right above his head.
For a second, everything in her had gone silent.
The next second, she’d been screaming.
“Why! Why would you do that?!”
Not “are you okay”.
Not “I’m sorry”.
Just—
Why would you throw your life away again to protect her?
She couldn’t take it back.
She knew the answers she didn’t want to hear.
Because he didn’t want her to become a murderer in front of him.
Because he didn’t want to watch someone else die for his sake.
Because this version of him, even broken, still moved toward the person bleeding the most in the
room.
If that was it—
If he’d bled himself in front of her to keep her hands clean—
Then she was even more of a monster than she thought.
She’d been so careful.
So patient.
She’d told herself, when she pulled him out of that guild, when she threaded her shadow through his,
that this time she’d be different.
She wouldn’t show him what she had done to survive.
She wouldn’t let him see the kids she’d sold, the throats she’d cut, the deals she’d signed with people even worse than her.
She wouldn’t kill in front of him unless she had to.
He’d lost his memories.
He looked at her now like she wasn’t covered in filth.
That was a gift.
Heaven, hell, God, whatever—she didn’t care who had given it. She only knew she didn’t want to break it.
So she’d been good.
She’d held back.
When Eun‑ha burst into Black Sun’s headquarters, she hadn’t strangled her in the first corridor.
When the dragonfire came in Seoul, she’d pulled Si‑woo out instead of pulling Eun‑ha in.
In Spain, when she’d wanted to slit every throat on that boat watching them walk out of the harbour, she hadn’t.
She’d told herself:
Don’t let him see. Don’t let him see what you are. Let him think you’re just… dark. Not rotten.
And then, in Russia, with his blood all over the snow again, all she could do was shout at him for trying to die for someone else.
“Idiot,” she muttered now, watching him breathe in the half‑light of the bunker.
He was asleep.
Or faking it very convincingly.
His face looked too relaxed for this place. For this situation. For these two women.
His left shoulder was wrapped crudely with cloth and potion residue. Her shadows had already traced over the bandage subconsciously, reinforcing it, trying to hold it together.
She hadn’t asked her mana to do that.
It had moved on its own, the way his used to when gates opened.
Her chest still hurt from watching her spell hit him.
She flexed her fingers in her lap.
Little flecks of dark mana rose and sank again, restless.
She wasn’t used to not using it freely when she was upset.
Normally, she’d go down to the lowest levels with a knife and a chair and some poor idiot who’d sold
the wrong drugs to the wrong kid and work it out until she could breathe.
Here, she had nowhere to put it.
Except into the snow.
And into the monsters.
So she had.
Every time Eun‑ha wasn’t looking directly at her, she’d let just a little too much mana drip into the
ground. Just enough to send a shiver down into whatever was hibernating under these ruins.
Shadows seeped into cracks.
Followed old tunnels.
Tickled old nests.
Woke things up.
She’d done it from the moment they’d crossed the border.
If she couldn’t kill the Sun herself without looking like the villain in his eyes, then the country could do it for her.
Russia was a graveyard full of teeth.
All she’d done was whistle.
“It’s not my fault if the monsters like her fire more than my shadows,” she thought.
Every new wave that came snarling out of the blizzard, every new pack that zeroed in on them, made Eun‑ha burn hotter. Made her leak more signal.
The wolves weren’t multiplying on their own.
They were being fed.
On purpose.
Yeon‑hwa watched Si‑woo’s chest rise and fall.
His hand twitched once against the blankets, fingers closing on nothing.
She was sorry for what she was, and for what she was about to do.
She wasn’t kind.
She was selfish.
She wanted all of him.
His love. His fear. His stupid, suicidal attempts to protect the wrong people.
So she’d made a plan.
There was a Dungeon entrance not far from this bunker.
Half‑collapsed. Still active enough that things crawled out of it every night.
She’d found it the first day, sent shadows inside, tested the walls, the structure. Laid threads. Hooks.
If she could coax them into that hole “to deal with the source,” if she could get Eun‑ha down there
with that much hatable mana and close the door on her with a few thousand kilos of monster and rock—
She wouldn’t have to swing the blade herself.
She could knock Si‑woo out before the worst of the sound reached them.
She could come back up from the dark, cloak torn, face bloody, and say with shaking lips:
“She held them off so we could run. She burned everything. She died for you.”
He’d cry.
He might hate her for a while.
Then time would work.
Isolation.
Warmth.
Soft hands.
Eventually, his heart would stop flinching every time she moved.
Eventually, he’d stop asking about the dragon.
Eventually, he’d be hers.
That was the fantasy, anyway.
It looked very pretty in her head.
Up until he’d thrown himself into her spike.
Up until he’d put his body between Eun‑ha and her, like he thought that kind of gesture could balance the scales.
“Why,” she whispered now, staring at the crude bandage. “Why are you still like that.”
Because he won’t survive any other way, a quieter part of her answered. Because that’s the only way
he knows how to live.
She ignored it.
She reached out and brushed his hair back from his forehead instead. Her fingers lingered there a second too long.
If she tilted her hand just a bit, if she let her shadow seep into his veins, she could make him sleep for a week.
Drag him out of here.
Leave the bitch to choke on what she’d called.
He shifted slightly under her touch.
His brows drew together.
Even in sleep, he looked like he’d smelled smoke.
Yeonhwa pulled her hand back.
Not yet.
If she moved too early, if she knocked him out before the stage was set, he might wake up in the
middle of the collapse.
Then he’d see.
He’d see the monster she hadn’t let him remember yet.
I won’t let you hate me.
Once had been enough.
Back in the slum, when he’d looked at her in that Black Sun hall for the first time in years and seen the coats, the corpses, the weight on her hands—
He’d never said the words.
He didn’t have to.
His mouth had smiled.
His eyes hadn’t.
She had kept that look like a favourite knife too. Sharp. Familiar. Always there when she needed to
remind herself what she was.
This time, his eyes were blank when he looked at her.
Blank but warm.
Stupidly grateful.
Amnesiac trust.
She was not going to lose that.
The ground shook again.
Harder.
Dust drifted down from the cracks overhead, finer than before.
“More of them,” she thought. “Good. Come closer.”
The more that gathered, the more convincing the “we must go to the source” argument would sound.
She already had the lines ready.
“If we keep fighting on the surface, we’ll run out of mana.”
“They’re coming from that old gate.”
“We have to close it.”
Truth, even.
Half of it.
She pictured it.
Taking the lead, shadows lighting the tunnel edges for them, her voice calm and reasonable.
Taking them down to that broken gate she’d already marked.
Getting them into position.
Then—
A small sound cut across her thoughts.
Fabric shifting.
Si‑woo rolled onto his side with a faint groan, eyes slitting open.
For a second, confusion painted his face. Then memory caught up.
Bunker. Cold. Two women.
Blood.
He focused on her.
“Does it hurt,” she asked, nodding at his shoulder.
“Yes,” he said.
Good.
Pain meant he was still tied to this body. Not drifting off somewhere else where she couldn’t reach.
Before she could say anything else, footsteps scraped near the entrance.
Eun‑ha.
Of course.
Red bitch walked back into the bunker smelling of smoke, eyes bloodshot and focused, mouth set in
a way Yeon‑hwa had come to recognise as “I made a decision that will hurt everyone and I’m calling it
strategy.”
“We can’t stay in this circle,” Eun‑ha said without preamble. “They’ll keep coming. The density’s wrong. Something is pulling them.”
Yes, me.
Eun‑ha’s gaze swept over Si‑woo, checking the bandage, the colour of his lips, his eyes. Then she looked at Yeon‑hwa.
There was no gratitude there for the half‑shadow cast that had kept his shoulder together.
Only calculation.
Her eyes flicked to the far wall. Past it. As if she could see the landscape beyond.
“There’s a Dungeon gate not far from here,” she said. “Half-collapsed. I saw the residue on the way in.
That’s where they’re spilling from.”
Yeon‑hwa’s fingers stilled.
That was her line.
“We go down,” Eun‑ha went on. “We destroy the core. We shut the mouth. Or we run out of mana
fighting top‑side and everything eats us when we sleep.”
Yeonhwa looked at her.
At her flat tone. At her too‑calm eyes.
At the little, almost invisible twitch at the corner of her mouth that said she’d thought of this before.
“Of course you want to go into the hole,” Yeon‑hwa said slowly. “Burn everything from the inside. Very
heroic. Very suicidal.”
“Do you have a better option?” Eun‑ha asked. “Or are you just going to keep poking the snow and hoping it stops roaring back?”
They stared at each other.
For a moment, there was something like recognition in Yeon‑hwa’s gaze reflected in Eun‑ha’s.
You’re planning something, both sets of eyes said.
So am I.
Dancing on edge until one of them slipped.
