Until the Heart Beats (4)
"...Why's that bastard transforming all of a sudden?"
Lee Han clicked his tongue, impressed in spite of himself, as Rak—wreathed in flame—hurled himself like a madman at the monstrous spellcaster. Powerful at a glance, and yet it had the feel of a mayfly's fight.
That body won't hold.
Lee Han's Gyeong had forcibly dragged Rak's flesh up to something near his own, but there was no enduring an energy that violent for long. The man could burn himself out at any moment, and it would surprise no one. Even so, Lee Han did not spare him a worry. He only threw his fists faster, and harder. Right now, winning was more desperate than living.
Thud-thud-thud-thud—crack!
"Gyaaaah!"
"S-stop...!"
Screams seemed to rise from every direction. They were not his concern.
Lee Han was not flinging this disordered, far-reaching barrage merely to hunt the other spellcasters. The more his strikes multiplied, the more they seized the space around him, sketching the paths of countless bullets. Blows that not even he himself could read hammered the monster from every side, tracing trajectories no one could predict. And among the strikes that drew those paths—
Thud!
—was mixed a blow that carried neither hostility nor killing intent. Only will. An arhat's fist.
A blow of pure will, hidden inside the rain of fists.
The martial art of insight he had awakened the day before, facing the marquis. Yes—this was a power that held the concept of Intent, just as that spellcaster's magic did. It was neither as natural nor as strong as the spellcaster's own, but for this one moment, there was no way the man could stop the blow.
And yet—
A stab of pain.
Lee Han judged that the Arhat Divine Fist was not something he could use for long. As if the power had not yet been permitted to him, each use split his head with agony. Blood was already streaming from his nose. He had no mind to wipe it. He kept throwing punches, resolved to give the monster not a breath in which to act.
Not the simple strike—one carrying the insight of the Arhat Divine Fist.
Lee Han drove it out and clenched his teeth, certain that this, at last, would blow the bastard's head clean off—!
KRA-KOOM—!
In the next instant, lightning poured from the sky. Not a single bolt, but a rain of them—hundreds of strikes every second, sweeping everything at random.
"T-Tower Lord...!!!"
One old spellcaster died in that lightning. The one whose chest Lee Han had already split. The wound had been grave enough on its own. He could not endure lightning that convulsed hundreds of times over. And where the shower passed, everything was erased.
...Not a single thing left.
Heaven's Punishment.
A mage's spell is a means of turning language into reality, and the reason a spell runs long is so that metaphor can strip away as much risk as possible. Tur had gone past the intuitive and put in his mouth a word that could only be called a god's authority. The aftermath was overwhelming, as anyone could see.
"Khack..."
It left a wound on Tur himself. For the first time, he vomited blood. Even he could not commit an act on that scale and walk away without a price. The result was only natural. Put another way, he had used the magic knowing the danger, and that meant Tur acknowledged them as enemies. None other than an Archmage who had lived four hundred years.
And so—
"...As expected. This much still isn't enough?"
The whistle of scorched air faded. Land that had been a low hill took the lightning head-on and became an empty plain, yet even a bolt that flattened a hill could not kill them.
"...You alive?"
"For now."
The two knights were smeared in pitch-black ash, their burns severe, and still intact.
"Damn persistent."
Tur nodded, as if he had known it would be so. These were the first to wage a true death-match against him. They were hardly going to die from something like this.
And so—
"I won't wait for you any longer."
He declared there would be none of the patience he had shown a moment ago. He had acknowledged the knights. He had judged them threat enough. That was the conclusion, and so Tur swept his hand.
⟨ Perspective Manipulation ⟩
The Archmage's unique magic, shaking the principles of the world.
The earth trembled. The wind split. A shockwave of immense mass crashed over the knights. Only moments ago it had been overwhelming—a power they could do nothing but block, utterly helpless before it.
Crunch!
"...I really shouldn't use this carelessly anymore."
Tur's fingers bent backward. He had been the one hurt while attacking, and he restored the broken fingers.
Magic imitating the Mystery said to dwell in the divine bird, the phoenix. Any wound, recovered without end.
No matter the injury, he could recover without limit. And so Tur had felt that being hurt did not matter.
A throb.
"...The pain remains?"
In the end the magic was incomplete, as if to prove it was no original—only a copy. No. To correct himself: he had believed it perfect, and today, for the first time, he learned its ceiling. And as if to prove it, crack after wet crack, the longer their onslaught went on and the further Perspective Manipulation was solved, the more wounds multiplied across Tur's body.
Just as they had first expected, the catalysts were his arms and his eyes. Even exposed, that should not have mattered. Knowing them had been useless. They could not be exploited. Who could stand against mass and mana on this scale? But now that common sense had broken, and Perspective Manipulation was being solved at last.
An ordinary mage would have reeled in shock and despair to see his magic broken through.
"Heh!"
Tur wore a laugh thick with madness. It had been far too long since a crisis like this. Far too long since a wound. An unplaceable sense of danger set his heart thudding, and as his breathing quickened, he even felt a thrill. Hundreds of years of a life that had been empty, always drowsy, nothing but repetition—and the stimulus that had found him there was no different from a drug kicking dopamine through the brain.
No. It doesn't even compare to some drug!
Tur, who had already steeped himself in narcotics for some fifty years, was certain this death-match was an excitement that must not be set beside any drug. How to put it. Blood spraying, the body breaking, the heart pounding in urgency—the situation itself—
I'm alive!
It let Tur feel vitality. A thrilling rush of dopamine.
"...Just a little more. Make it—more fun!"
In the next moment his mana, vast as an ocean, surged, and with a rolling thunder—a waterspout descended.
Rumble—!
"This again..."
The overturning of the earth. The disaster that had once left Lee Han helpless was crashing over him again. A mass of soil even vaster than before was flipping over, dizzying to look at—could anyone even punch through that? And that alone was enough to make the head spin.
GUOOOO!
As if to prove this was not the end, the monster summoned something insane. He seized the typhoon the old spellcasters had called and shaped it into a colossal waterspout. A spout erupting where there was no sea. A continent of earth turning over. A scene of mad disaster. Enough to make a man faint, and then some.
"......"
Strangely, Lee Han was calm. It was not resignation. Simply—
I think I can do this.
He measured the earth and the waterspout bearing down on him and arrived at a result: he could meet them. Anyone else would have cursed him for a broken head, but the judgment was coldly sober. And for good reason. A fierce heat-haze shimmered around his body. He was certain that the powerful tu-gi churning through him would let him attempt something bold—something he had never tried. Now that he could use Fighting Art, it ought to be possible.
This is a demonic art.
Absurdly, even now, Lee Han was analyzing what Fighting Art was, and defining it.
A demonic art. Yes. Fighting Art was terribly like the demonic arts of the martial novels—fierce, rough, eager to threaten its host. In exchange it granted mighty strength, a power whose give-and-take was perfectly clear. So yes. This was a demonic art.
And, just as absurdly, the Gyeong he had trained was an orthodox art. He had increased his strength by building it step by step, and it would not be too much to say he had devoted everything to stabilizing his vessel. A method that let a man without talent advance one step at a time through effort and grit, until at last he could stand beside those who had learned Fighting Art. It took far longer to learn, and still it was a stable power. One could call it the righteous way—the Buddhist Muscle-Changing Classic, or the immortal's martial path of the Taoists—and it would not be an exaggeration. Set beside Fighting Art, the thought only hardened. Fighting Art did not draw out a human being's natural strength and grow it. It burned this violent energy, this life force, as fuel.
And Lee Han—
So that's it. There was a life force this fierce inside me...
He could feel a breath of life vaster than anyone else's writhing within him. An energy that looked ready to devour even the great mass of Red Tu-gi Rak had shared. And this energy was itself the proof of the history he had built, and of the life. The fruit of days lived fiercely, poured out as if each one were the last.
Good thing I worked for it.
He was fiercely glad that all those years had not been meaningless. The energy rose from its crouch as if to demand why he had called it only now, and he detonated it—his tu-gi.
HOOOOO—!
The flow of Fighting Art was already inscribed through his vessels and nerves, his muscle and bone, like a tattoo, so drawing up his life force was not difficult. If anything, it was easy.
A flare of power. A promising disciple of the orthodox sect, learning a demonic art—truly a thing to lament! But what could he do? If it was to bring down the cult leader threatening his fellow wanderers of the martial world, he could not be choosy about the means.
"...Who the hell did I take after, to be this insane...?"
The energy latent inside him disliked Fighting Art, so like a demonic art, and pressed a bizarre logic upon him. He had only taken hints from martial novels to shape his techniques. He had never truly learned a martial art. So why was this lump of energy turning up its nose at Fighting Art like a picky eater? A troublesome thing. Whose master was it, to act like this...
Ah. Mine.
Was it showing a nature this strange because it took after him? Lee Han grinned. Maybe this was the karma of all those years. Still, he was not worried. The energy itself was strange, yes, but—
What are you waiting for? We've got a spellcaster to grind down.
A twitch. And what did it mean, that it took after him?
Fwoosh!
...Did it not mean it loathed spellcasters to the extreme?
A fierce wave of power burst from Lee Han's body, and the tidal surge of earth and sand crashing over him—
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
—burst apart and died at every point of contact. A great mass of tu-gi radiated outward and wrapped him, compressed as if into a sphere. It looked like the mages' Mana Barrier, but it had been made less to defend than to rebound and annihilate every attack. Its base was tu-gi, and the structure by which that force gathered followed the principle of the Sword Star.
A martial art of gang qi. Its name—
A sphere of compressed tu-gi, built on the principle of the Sword Star—to rebound and erase every blow.