The Crossfire of Old and New
NJ Fire Cup, Unified Qualifiers.
“Heh heh, you live long enough in this world, and you see all manner of strange things.”
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, smiled with modest warmth as he looked at the girl sitting across from him — a girl who could have been his own granddaughter.
This was nothing more than a preliminary round, not even the main tournament, and yet the crowd packed into the hall as if it were a championship quarterfinal. Several professional players with familiar faces had come to engrave the game upon their own eyes, while broadcast cameras stood installed here and there, the production staff bustling about in the final minutes before the live feed went on air.
And yet, despite the unfamiliar environment, the girl showed not the slightest trace of nervousness.
“Out of respect for an old man's dignity, please go easy on me, Teacher Ryu. Haha.”
Anyone who had already beaten three active professionals was, for all intents and purposes, a pro herself. Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, tossed out the light jest while addressing her with deliberate deference.
“Yes, sir! To be able to learn even a single move from a teacher I respect — truly, truly, it is the honor of a lifetime!”
The girl, having thrown off an easy laugh, turned her gaze to the upper right corner, her eyes sparkling as though she'd just been handed a treasure.
“Heh heh. To think a young one like you, Teacher Ryu, knows who I am — I suppose I haven't lived all these years for nothing. Then let us both play the finest Go of our lives, without a single thing to be ashamed of.”
“Yes, sir! Of course!”
The standby signal sounded. The cameras began sweeping the game hall, and the referee announced the start of the match.
By the results of the nigiri performed beforehand, Ryu Seoa took black. Her clock, preset to two hours, began ticking down, second by second.
As he waited for the girl's first move, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, stole a glance at her.
No fear, no intimidation — nothing of the kind. Her eyes, if anything, brimmed with exhilaration.
Some professionals and writers like to dress Go up as the game of courtesy, a game of ritual propriety.
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, had never cared for such refined interpretations.
In a game of winning and losing, manners and virtue are secondary concerns. The essence of Go, in the end, is a fierce struggle and competition in which one devours the opponent or is devoured.
And by that measure, the girl before him was ready. She was mentally armed to sink her teeth into her opponent's throat at any moment.
After her game against Lyu Zhenyan, 6-dan, the day before, he had briefly had the chance to look over her game records. The opponents who had underestimated her, who had approached her lightly, had their necks seized and torn out before they could even mount a response.
One who failed to take sufficient care would suffer a fatal, irreversible wound.
For the past several decades, standing his ground in the Go world, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, had faced countless new challengers. The reason he had never crumbled under their endless assaults was that he had always acknowledged and respected every one of his opponents.
Regardless of the girl's age, appearance, or strength, the sheer fact that she sat across the board from him demanded his full respect.
Move one: the girl placed a stone on the 4-4 point of the upper right corner.
Answering it, move two from Park Pilgyu, 9-dan: the 4-4 point of the upper left.
The girl claimed the lower right corner with a 3-4 stone, slightly skewed toward the right side, and Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, filled the last remaining corner with a 4-4 point.
Move five. From her 3-4 stone in the lower right, the girl extended in a knight's move, securing one corner firmly.
Move six. Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, drove deep into the third line at the center of the right side.
Move seven. As if to declare she would not yield an inch, the girl claimed the left side.
Moves eight and nine. Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, and Ryu Seoa each extended two spaces in mirrored symmetry, claiming the right and left sides respectively.
Up through White's sixteenth move, an invasion of the upper right corner coordinated with the stones on the right side, the game unfolded without anything out of the ordinary.
“Hmm…”
Then came Black's seventeenth — a move so peculiar it drew a murmur from Park Pilgyu, 9-dan.
Ryu Seoa ignored the white stones that had invaded her upper right corner entirely, instead slamming a stone down against the lower left corner with audacious crudeness, aiming to seize the bottom side at speed.
Move after move, fast and relentless enough to wrench a gasp from the observers.
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, deliberated, then settled for solidly closing off the lower left corner before turning to encircle and press down upon the upper right.
Before long, the encirclement was complete.
Yet even a proper fortress would have been barely adequate — and Ryu Seoa, as if she had all the time in the world, threw up only a rough barricade of sandbags, abandoned the upper right corner, and turned her hand toward the left side.
Arrogance? Or confidence that she could repel any assault without meaningful loss?
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, began reading.
Even granting that Black held the strategic point of defense, she was in absolute numerical inferiority. And she was thoroughly surrounded, besides.
Moreover, her defensive formation was a sloppy thing that only looked the part — there were many routes of invasion.
Without hesitation, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, plunged a detachment into the most vital, most fatal point.
The roles of attacker and defender reversed; Ryu Seoa set upon the invasion force. As the intruders scrambled in search of life, a gap opened in the defending army through which it could escape.
As though she had finished her calculations long beforehand, the girl executed her breakout with a cleanliness and precision that made the impossible look inevitable. The price was her complete forfeiture of the right side — but the right side had been territory largely occupied by White to begin with. Compared to the gains she harvested from the left side and the lower left corner, where she had withdrawn her hand and placed her stones, the loss was a small one.
She had landed a counterpunch.
The girl had never intended to defend that shabby little fortress from the start.
It had been nothing more than a diversionary unit, buying time while her main force pressed elsewhere.
The moment the enemy invaded, she stalled for time, then slipped away without spilling a single drop of blood.
The reason she had raised a sturdy citadel along the bottom, in contrast to the flimsy top, was to guarantee her diversionary unit a safe line of retreat from the outset.
What supple, resilient reading of the board.
Even though his attack had succeeded, the aftertaste was bitter.
“…”
Truly, an opponent worth breaking. Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, felt a smile spreading across his lips before he realized it.
He was a player whose aggressive Go was, in the history of Korean Baduk, second to none.
He had conceded ground, yes — but he had seized the initiative.
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, shifted the battlefield downward and opened fire.
A devastating crossfire worthy of his prime. The battle that began along the bottom side flared wider and wider, and before long it swept the whole front up into the center.
The center remains an uncharted territory even to professionals.
Corners and sides are narrow. Through study and drilling, one can to some degree anticipate their variations and follow along.
But the center is vast and three-dimensional, shifting endlessly with every stone placed around it — an unexplored expanse, like the boundless cosmos, that no human understanding or thought can fully track.
Perhaps that is why the players who prized thickness in the center above corners and sides came to be called the Cosmos Style.
In the vastness of the center, no fixed, formulaic optimal path exists. Wherever you walk becomes the road; wherever you stand becomes possibility.
Black stones and white stones clashed in that boundless open ground.
Like a serpent coiling upon itself, the stones entangled, tight and clinging.
A sticky, clammy, shameless intertwining.
As though lovers caressing one another, black and white soaked each other's bodies into every crevice with thick, viscous saliva.
Not the pursuit of love, but of lust. Without tenderness or consideration, like beasts ruled by instinct alone, they roughly explored and coveted one another's flesh.
They pressed down, they bound, they clawed, and they bit again.
The afterimages of their movements multiplied, their breathing grew heavier and more ragged — and still black and white drew closer instead of parting, pressing their bodies tighter together.
As if determined to settle which of them stood above, they rolled over and under one another, mounting for a moment only to be pinned down in turn.
Having explored each other's bodies until both were utterly ravaged, neither white nor black pushed the other away. They merely twisted and shook against each other with growing violence, as if to say the first one to collapse from exhaustion would be the loser.
And the more feverishly the caressing rose, the more ferocious black and white became.
Had obsession and impulse curdled at last into a twisted possessiveness? Black, governed by a madness that vowed to make white its own through murder alone, soon tightened its grip around white's throat.
“…”
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, felt his breath actually catch and choke with pain. It seemed to him that sharp nails were tearing into his flesh, that the blood streaming from his neck was pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.
He had no intention of suffocating to death like this.
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, seized the black-clad woman clinging to him, crushing her throat, and beat her down with savage blows.
But for all his stubborn resistance and his ferocious counterattack, the fingers around his neck only tightened further.
His focus wavered; the strength drained from his entire body.
Even in this extremity, however, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, still refused to surrender.
Through the haze of his fading consciousness, he raised his elbow.
And squeezing out the last of his strength, he drove it down toward the face of the woman in black.