LV.23 Ranker Lee Hyun-woo [1]
Two conditions are always named when people speak of what it takes to become a Swordmaster.
The first is mana enough for Sword Qi to manifest.
The people of old Earth never met that condition. For all the brilliant swordsmen who crowded Earth's history, that is why none of them ever became what As calls a Swordmaster.
But decades after the gate to As opened, a Korean Swordmaster was born. That Korean proved that an Earthling, too, could become a Swordmaster — once they had acquired a certain measure of mana.
The second condition is the manifestation of perfect technique.
There is a concept known as the Perfect Move. The finest stroke a human being can produce — a godlike blow that even the greatest masters might land only once in a lifetime.
A Swordmaster is a master among masters, one who can unfold such techniques as a matter of ordinary habit.
And so any swordsman who means to become a Swordmaster must be capable of the same. An ordinary strike must become the finest stroke there is.
When that becomes possible, the swordsman's blade drinks in a brilliant energy and begins to shine.
Legend has it the process goes like this. A swordsman, confronted with a moment, executes the finest possible move — and if they then understand how they were able to do it, they can release Sword Qi at once.
Lee Mi-ri had already satisfied the first requirement.
Back in the days when her family still had money, she had knocked back expensive mandrake extract like yogurt, on the theory that becoming a mage would make her better at her studies.
She never did get better at studying. Mana, however, accumulated in her body. Thanks to that, she could at least manage the most elementary magic. They said that much mana was plenty to become a Swordmaster.
Which meant that now, all Lee Mi-ri had to do was satisfy that business about the finest move, and she could become a Swordmaster.
Sadly, that was the hardest condition of all to meet.
Lee Mi-ri panted as she looked out across the battlefield.
An army of High Elves — the Korean People's Army — was holding the defense, while the NPC forces of the Karse Empire came on in attack.
The two armies were slamming into each other. The noise they made was not the bang-bang of gunfire, but the ringing clash of steel on steel.
Colder sounds than that. Sharper.
A radio operator of the Korean People's Army shouted it — and in front of him, utterly at odds with the handset in his grip, swords and spears, polearms and shields were still very much in active service.
Not modern firearms. The cold weapons of another age.
Lee Mi-ri was wandering the battlefield with a sword in her hand as well.
Under ordinary circumstances, permission for her to be here at all would have been nearly impossible to obtain. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the Korean People's Army. She had been allowed onto this field for one reason only: her sword work was good.
Which meant, in other words, that the Korean People's Army's situation was hideously bad.
More precisely, they were so hard-pressed that they had to take in outsiders for no better reason than that those outsiders could fight.
Dust boiled up, and the thunder of hooves rolled across the ground.
From the far side, knights in full plate came pounding in on horseback. Cavalry — made utterly obsolete by the machine gun — carried themselves on this field with something close to the dignity of tanks.
"Pikes up! Pikes!"
A Korean People's Army officer barked the order.
Seasoned soldiers leveled their long pikes. The Korean People's Army had more or less adapted to this kind of battlefield, and in a game there was no terror of death. Standing fast against a cavalry charge would not be so difficult.
A pike wall snapped into place in an instant and caught the oncoming charge, while the shooters behind it raised their AK-47s and drew a bead on the enemy horsemen.
"Volley fire!"
The officer shouted it. The order was not carried out.
It was not insubordination.
"Agh!"
"Ghk!"
Screams tore across the line. Every firearm that had been about to fire exploded at once.
More precisely, the ammunition inside the guns cooked off.
The officer did not take it for a hideous coincidence. He had grown used to this battlefield, and he knew exactly what the phenomenon meant.
The authority of a god.
Of course, being used to it was not the same as being able to stay calm about it.
The officer's eyes went wide. The radio operator shouted again.
The Swordmaster Gaon, who only tens of seconds earlier had been more than four kilometers away, was now somewhere close. He had arrived by that wild piece of sorcery the officer could barely credit — teleportation, or whatever they called it.
And within 2.4 kilometers of Swordmaster Gaon, gunpowder weapons either refused to fire or burst in pointless little pops.
The authority of the Goddess of Fire and Hearth. The power of that great divinity was working upon this earth almost in full, through the body of a demigod.
They could not simply abandon firearms altogether, so the Korean People's Army had stretched the battlefield as wide as they could and issued guns to only a portion of their troops — so that someone, somewhere Gaon was not, might still be able to shoot.
Unfortunately, he had chosen to appear in the middle of a pitched fight.
Shit.
Even if this was only a game, the appearance of that Swordmaster was never going to be a welcome thing.
Being slaughtered one-sidedly was an ugly experience, whether it happened in reality or in play.
The officer clenched his teeth. The knights, at last, came crashing in to point-blank range.
"Gah!"
With the guns silent, there was no way to stop the charge. The knights reached the wall of pikes and swung down from the saddle.
They had trusted the thickness of their armor and simply ridden straight in, and there was nothing left that could stop them.
The pike wall broke in an instant. Screams went up on every side.
Through it all, even the radio operator's reports kept coming in like screams themselves.
The casualty reports kept coming. They were not, of course, reporting the death of every common soldier.
Everyone dying now was a commander.
Officer after officer, posted hundreds of meters apart, was being erased in rapid succession.
"All shooters, drop your guns and take up crossbows—"
That was the last order the officer on this stretch of the line ever gave.
Swordmaster Gaon appeared in front of him. That was all the officer managed to register.
As far as the officer could tell, Gaon had not moved at all.
Gaon had teleported with his blade already extended. The instant he arrived, that blade was already buried in the officer's heart.
Then a slight sweep of the sword, and another teleport. The target of that sweep was hundreds of meters away.
The edge found its mark.
A heartbeat later, the head of an officer hundreds of meters off went spinning into the sky.
Lee Mi-ri saw it.
What the hell is that...
She tried, somehow, to take it into herself. It was a difficult thing. She could not imitate what she had just seen.
The Gaon who had flickered into view was wearing armor of black, trimmed in red. Hugin's national treasure: the Adamantium Armor.
On this battlefield, Gaon's image suited that cold, heavy-looking plate. His movements looked still and weighty, and were at the same time hideously fast.
From days of watching him, Lee Mi-ri had worked it out: Gaon's feet did not move at all. Teleportation did the traveling in their place.
The right hand that held his sword was just as still. That hand never traveled so much as ten centimeters. And yet those tiny motions were invariably accompanied by the death of some vital commander or artilleryman.
To prevent exactly this kind of selective slaughter, the Korean People's Army had tried dressing their officers in the same uniforms as the common soldiers.
It had been a useless attempt.
They had already learned the hard way. Swordmaster Gaon, with that peculiar hearing of his, could pick out who was giving orders from hundreds of meters away, and he never failed to erase them.
As he was doing now.
"Ghk—"
This time it was the radio operator. Gaon appeared in front of him like a trembling afterimage and moved his sword a fraction.
With that small motion — so small it almost looked like he was standing still — Gaon existed in that spot for perhaps four-tenths of a second.
It was enough. The radio set and the operator's throat were pierced through together.
Having accomplished that, Gaon twitched the blade again and vanished from the spot.
Fuck...
To Lee Mi-ri, it looked like something out of a horror film.
The ghost in a horror movie seems to come on slowly — and then, without warning, it is standing in front of its victim. The ghost never runs. It never looks hurried. And yet it is always faster than the one it hunts.
And so every motion the ghost makes is still, while the situation itself drowns in speed. From that contradiction is born a surreal kind of tension. A presence.
That terrible presence...
Gaon was barely even visible on this battlefield. And yet, even so, he projected a presence so vivid it was almost unbearable.
It was a presence too surreal, too purely fantastical, for Lee Mi-ri to dare imagine reproducing it.
She clenched her teeth and looked for easier prey.
"Glory to Caresse! Freedom to Arin!"
Shouting their scripted lines, the NPC knights came charging in.
In As, because of the Swordmasters, the sword is worshipped to a degree that borders on the excessive. Sure enough, the As knights were armed with almost nothing but blades.
And their skill? In a game this meticulously researched, it would be hideously good. A medieval knight was a human weapon, after all. Monsters who had poured countless hours into nothing but training.
A knight of Caresse brought his sword down.
Shit—
At the moment of impact, Lee Mi-ri thought the knight's blow might knock her senseless.
It was not merely strong. The technique was precise as well. A blade coming for her throat out of a broken rhythm.
The knights of As were, nearly all of them, seekers who hoped to become Swordmasters themselves.
Lee Mi-ri could not match even this one knight in technique.
It would not be that this knight alone was especially strong. The others would be just as strong as he was.
And yet they were all extras.
History had already proven it. Even fighters of such astonishing skill had never become Swordmasters. Relentless training and a lifetime of combat had not made them superhuman.
Those swordsmen out there had practiced and fought and died without leaving their names in history.
And I probably will too.
The odds were far too high. The Swordmaster Lee Mi-ri wanted to become was a superhuman among superhumans, and a superhuman was a superhuman precisely because human beings could not reach that place.
She carried herself as if she overflowed with confidence in all things, but in moments like this she grew anxious in spite of herself. Afraid that all this effort would, in the end, come to nothing but wasted time.
To beat the anxiety back, she shouted, aggressive:
"Come on and kill me, you miserable As bastard!"
Within five seconds of shouting that, Lee Mi-ri was dead.
In the same stretch of fighting, three hundred and twenty-six soldiers of the Korean People's Army died on the Swordmaster's blade. Every officer worth picking off was already gone. Gaon was targeting clustered soldiers now, and the casualties were swelling exponentially.
That day, the Korean People's Army's front was driven back hundreds of meters.
A good Swordsman often learns, merely by taking up the blade, how to find composure.
A Swordmaster is, of course, the finest of swordsmen — and Gaon, being a Swordmaster, could find composure in any moment.
The question he heard the instant he logged in, however, managed to throw even him.
"Hyung, you're really not a Swordmaster?"
Lee Bok-dong had been waiting at Gaon's login point and asked it out of nowhere.
Gaon fumbled for an answer.
"What? Why would I be?"
"Come on, there was this analysis post online saying you have to be a Swordmaster. They said there's no other way to explain the reflexes that bounce bullets, or that whole stunt you pulled baiting Hyungtun..."
"That's bullshit."
"Then what? Your name's Gaon, for one thing..."
"I'm not that Gaon! Swordmaster Gaon swings with his right hand. I only ever use my left. You can tell us apart just by looking, can't you?"
That was precisely why Gaon made a point of holding his sword in his left hand in the game — so that anyone with a real eye for swordsmanship would not be able to read his style.
Lee Bok-dong, of course, had no such eye. He only pressed on, looking unconvinced.
"So you're saying you're not a Swordmaster."
"That's what I said."
"Then if you went up against a Swordmaster, you'd lose?"
"Lose? Of course I'd lose! Do you have any idea how great and powerful a Swordmaster is? How is some ordinary swordsman supposed to win?"
"You're not just complimenting yourself right now, are you?"
"No! I am paying the respect that is properly due to the vanguard of a great martial art! A Swordmaster is a being worthy of that kind of reverence! A mundane swordsman like me ought to bow his head and honor them!"
In the middle of that speech, Gaon felt a presence that had not been there a moment before.
He turned, startled, and there was Yoeu.
He must have just logged in, and he had clearly overheard a Swordmaster singing the praises of Swordmasters. The way he was biting his lip until it bled, trying not to laugh, made that much certain.
"The end of the world is upon us! Sound the horn this instant and scour the earth with fire and flood!"
While the Goddess, unable to bear the shame, shrieked in his head, Gaon did his best to look as if nothing had happened.
He picked the conversation with Lee Bok-dong back up.
"Anyway, so if you went up against a Swordmaster you'd get wrecked for sure? Couldn't even last a second?"
Gaon answered Lee Bok-dong's question.
"Well. I'd last a little while, I guess."
"You'd last? How long?"
"I don't know... with an adamantium blade, if I did well, maybe ten minutes?"
"You sure about that?"
"Probably. Why do you ask?"
Lee Bok-dong answered carefully.
"We signed that contract a little while back, remember? They sent people over. A team to take down a Swordmaster. We're supposed to be on it..."
"A team to take down a Swordmaster? What is that?"
"Rankers."
"Rankers?"
"Yeah. That's what they call a few hundred people with high levels and real skill in the game. They're putting a team together to run an operation, and they said they want to see what you can do..."
"See what I can do? How?"
The answer came the moment he muttered it.
From behind him.
And then the crack of gunfire.
As he ambushed the target — Gaon's back — Lee Hyun-woo found himself worrying that this skill test might be going too far. He'd had orders to do it this way, so he had, but it was absurd on the face of it. Ranker or not, how was anyone supposed to react to a shot from behind?
The next instant, Lee Hyun-woo realized his attack had failed.
"Not bad. You've got real skill."
The target was nowhere in front of him. The voice came from behind his back.
Gaon went on.
"You went straight for the thigh. Aim for the head like an amateur and all I have to do is turn my face. Going for the lower body is actually harder to dodge. Yeah — I can see why they call people like you Rankers."