A Knight's Valor Knows No Recklessness (7)
......How?
The great evil spirit Inanna felt a confusion that had no right to find her. A divine being who had lived for tens of thousands of years ought never to have known such a thing, and yet in this moment she was utterly lost. No. She was on the verge of shock.
What was so bewildering? So appalling?
Everything...!
That was what Inanna wanted to scream. The human gave off no Holy Power, no spiritual force—not even mana, not even the power of sorcery. And a human like that had dared to lay hands on a god's spirit body. It should have been impossible.
And yet—
"Ah, it hurts...! I said it hurts!!"
Pain. The sort of pain only a worthless human ought to feel—and Inanna felt it. She rolled across the ground like a child throwing a tantrum, wailing her hurt. She had no tolerance for suffering, so the ache struck all the sharper, and she shrieked without the least attempt to endure it.
Scream as she might—
"For a god, you sure whine a lot."
Thud!
"Aaaagh!!"
Whether she hurt or not, the man did not care. He simply kept landing blow after blow—mysterious strikes she had no way of understanding. He stood a good three meters off, and he wasn't even moving, yet the impacts hammered her face and the rest of her body again and again, dealing out pain. Inanna could not begin to grasp how a man standing still could attack her at all, and the hurt was too fierce to leave any room for thought. All she could do was fuss and cry about how much it hurt.
Even so—even through the pain, even through the confusion—
"That one! Kill it!!"
She had not forgotten her hatred and her contempt for the worthless human who had struck her spirit body.
Kigigigik!!
Inanna poured her rage into a command for the Heavenly Bull, and the bull moved, obedient, to carry out its master's order.
Gugugugung!
It had only begun to move, and already the earth was heaving. Everywhere the Heavenly Bull passed was ground away to nothing. Whatever touched its body was pulverized—pressure and destructive force enough to prove this was no skeleton bull that was merely huge.
Boom...
"It pulverized Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox?"
He seemed to have landed the same mysterious blow on the Heavenly Bull that he had used on Inanna, but unlike before, the bull shattered the strike with ease. Its enormous frame was already a monstrous mass, and on top of that it possessed this pulverizing power. Calling the Heavenly Bull a cheat would hardly have been an exaggeration.
Except—
Kwaaang!
"!!"
"Weighted Strike Method still goes through? Strange as hell."
As if to prove the pulverizing force was not absolute, another of his attacks burst across the bull's back. Not enough to wound the Heavenly Bull, of course. What mattered was something else.
"A—a scratch? On the Heavenly Bull...?!"
A slight graze. Barely worth calling a wound. The point was that a wound had been made at all. The Heavenly Bull had been breached, and that brutal truth drained the color from Inanna's face.
"Y-you—what are you?! How is something like that even possible!!"
"......"
"Answer m—aaaaagh!"
Crack!
She had asked a question. What came back was not an answer, but an attack—and a far stronger one than the last. The blow flung Inanna far off. She skipped across the ground like a stone on water, bouncing three times in a row, utterly without dignity. It was a strike whose power could not even be compared to what had come before, and Inanna—
"Nngh, it—it hurts! I said it hurts...!!"
—could only thrash in hideous pain and whimper.
As for the man himself, the one beating the god Inanna senseless—
"Tough, I'll give you that. That much, you really are a god."
He only narrowed his brow, sharp with displeasure.
Let it be said plainly. In all his life, Lee Han had never done anything so idiotic as taking lightly an enemy he had recognized, or letting his guard down against one. Small wonder. The difficulty of his life had been the sort that felt like standing on a knife's edge—a miserable, godforsaken difficulty. Far from growing careless, facing an enemy more cautiously than other men had hardened into habit, and so had the rest of it: the moment an opening came, full power from the very first exchange, fist or blade swung without hesitation, to kill.
That habit was still very much in force. Which was why Lee Han was a little shocked.
I packed Intent in that hard, and all she does is hurt a little?
Meaning to burst her head like a watermelon, he had thrown Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox, laden with Intent, more than thirty times at full strength. The great evil spirit had endured every one of them, and Lee Han's face hardened of its own accord.
A Land-god was a Land-god, even rotten. An endurance that was anything but ordinary...
No. Can you even call that endurance?
It was alien. He could hit her with Intent, but by any ordinary means, dealing real damage looked close to impossible. At the very least—
Sword River. I need a force with that much mass.
Kigigigik!!
Boom!
...and he would need it, of course, to get rid of this gigantic skeleton bull as well.
"Aaaaaagh!!"
The skeleton bull answered the stray spirit's rage, and every time it rampaged without restraint, that absurd pulverizing force reduced everything in every direction to powder. A little more of that, and it would not have been strange for the whole region to turn to desert.
And little by little...
Kugugugung!
The wilder the pulverizing force grew, the less it confined itself to the ground nearby. It shook the whole of the Hidden Grotto. Worse, the power seemed to be reaching beyond the grotto itself, and the moment Lee Han saw it—
"You pile of nothing but bones, you animal bastard...!"
He ground his teeth and charged. The instant that force spilled outside, something horrific was certain to follow.
Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow
Unleashed at full power.
Lee Han's body slammed into the bull at a monstrous speed.
"You stupid human! A thing like you charging straight into the Mystery of Pulverization is obviously going to be ground to pieces—how can anyone be that foolish—"
Crack!
"...?"
Kigigik!?
The Heavenly Bull, which had been rampaging without pause, seemed for an instant bewildered. What had just happened was that hard to believe. And it was no small thing...
Crrrrack...!
"Hraaaaaah!!"
A human, roaring not merely loud but vast, seized the Heavenly Bull's body with brutal force. Seized it where? The bone was too huge to fit in his hands, so all ten fingers drove into it and carved out a grip by force. Because of that, the Heavenly Bull's movement stopped dead.
A Heavenly Bull with the size and mass of a fortress, pinned by a human's strength until it could not so much as twitch. An unbelievable sight. Was such a thing possible by human strength? Even the ancient heroes said to have lifted castle walls by main force might not have managed this.
But what was harder still to believe—
Kugugugung!
Kigigik!!?
The Heavenly Bull's body was rising. Slowly. No—surely.
Wooooong!
Power burst forth. Diamond Indestructible Body—the frontier of Intent that Lee Han alone had reached, not merely in the South, but if one searched the entire continent. So long as his Intent did not break, the endurance of the Unbreakable and the force of the Diamond would not break either, and they overcame even the Mystery of Pulverization.
Yet that feat was only a part of what he was showing now. What mattered most was none other than the sheer volume of Gyeong he was releasing.
Goooooooh...!
A monstrous strength of the flesh that could not even be compared with what he had possessed before, and a technique that turned the very power of the earth back upon itself—a supreme art no one else could imitate. Only he, who had founded Gyeong and understood his own body better than anyone, could do it. Because of that, he could emit a strength that common sense called impossible.
Yes. If one were to give it a name...
"Instructor, now that I think of it—when I looked at your Status, you'd gained a new Trait."
"It hasn't even been two days since I told you the world isn't a game, you little shit. Live in reality."
"I—I can't help what I can see..."
"That kid never listens. ...So. What showed up?"
"...You want to know too."
"What was that?"
"Just that something good showed up.... Ahem!"
"Strength to Overturn Mountains. Level 8, for the record."
Trait:Strength to Overturn Mountains
Level:8
The mighty strength to pull up a mountain.
The mighty strength to pull up a mountain. That was the name of the realm Lee Han had reached.
Whooong!
The bull—the bull bearing the grandiose name of Heavenly Bull—rose high into the empty air.
Crunch!
Kigigi!!
The Heavenly Bull thrashed, desperate to tear free of Lee Han's hands at once, but that was not easy. The monstrous Gyeong he emitted spread like a net and wrapped the Heavenly Bull's body. And then, in that state—
Hwung—whooong! Whoooooong—!!
The Heavenly Bull's body began, little by little, to spin. He turned himself with centrifugal force, and the Heavenly Bull turned with him, and a monstrous pressure slammed straight into its body.
A fortress-sized bull, spun like a man on the end of an arm.
The only problem was that the object of the giant swing was a bull the size of a fortress. And the aftermath—
Wheeeeeeeeng!!!
"Grrrrrr...!!"
"Keeeek!!?!!"
"G-g-g-gk?!"
The monsters gathering in from every side were caught in the tremendous pull born of that spin. They could not even flee. They were dragged in as they were, and each time, they were crushed flat or burst apart.
And then, the next instant—
"Aaaaaaah!!"
With another fierce shout, he hurled the Heavenly Bull away. In the next moment—
KWA-BOOOOOOM!!!
...the Heavenly Bull was driven into the ceiling.