LV.? Swordmaster Ban Ji-sung [2]
Among the operators of 4 Fantasy Online, the existence of a Swordmaster playing their own game was classified at the highest level.
That this Swordmaster was the Prince of Ash was a secret held more tightly still.
It was a secret that rivaled any matter of national security. Only three people shared that astonishing truth: two employees who had stumbled onto it by chance, and the chairman himself.
From that day forward, watching the Swordmaster's every move became those two employees' primary assignment. It was not the kind of work that padded a résumé, but neither was it thankless. They had been promoted on the back of it, and more than anything else, watching this particular Swordmaster was genuinely entertaining.
"Lord Gaon is a lot more fun than I expected. He's actually hilarious... Feels like a waste, keeping this to myself..."
The senior employee answered his junior without looking up.
"Don't go spreading that around. You do realize that if word gets out that Lord Gaon is actually a complete goofball, your head comes off — physically?"
"Lord Gaon seems like a nice guy, though? He's even decent to those Earth trash. I don't think he'd kill someone just for running their mouth."
"Even if Lord Gaon doesn't kill you himself, his followers will."
"Lord Gaon has followers? After being holed up for that long?"
"A ton of them. Just the Wood Elves alone..."
The phone rang in the middle of their gossip. Both employees went rigid the instant they saw the caller.
The junior answered in a posture of extreme deference, then turned to his senior.
"The chairman has given an order... He wants Ban Ji-sung's AI pattern changed."
"Changed how?"
"From 'hostile to Japanese-nationality players' to 'hostile to Korean-nationality players.'"
It was not a legitimate order. The chairman had already directed NPC armies to sweep through the Korean players' forces. Now he was telling them to put a thumb on the scale a second time and inflict still greater damage on a specific faction.
It was an instruction that tore the fairness of game operations to shreds, but the two employees had not the faintest intention of complaining. Whose orders would they dare hesitate to follow? They were simply overwhelmed that a dragon of historic stature had deigned to command them personally.
They carried out the order at once.
Inside the game, an NPC's behavior changed.
It was unfortunate for the Koreans who now had to face him, but Ban Ji-sung belonged to a category of Swordmaster that soldiers found exceptionally difficult to handle.
He was a demigod. That made him a superhuman who, even among Swordmasters, boasted the second-most formidable specs in existence — a transcendent body that had shed the limits of flesh, and a mana reserve that had no bottom.
Because of that, Ban Ji-sung had no need to do what Hyungtun did: forge a blade that was long but thin. A demigod's monstrous strength meant he had no reason to shave off weight. His vast mana meant he had no reason to reduce the surface area his Sword Qi had to cover.
There was nothing to compromise. And so Ban Ji-sung's sword was grandiose to the point of childishness. He had sheathed that building-sized blade in an unbroken coat of Sword Qi. It went past the unreal. It was the kind of weapon a giant robot from a Japanese anime ought to be swinging.
Until now, he had used that sword to tear Japanese players to shreds. The irony had given the members of the Baekdu Guild no end of amusement.
They were not laughing anymore.
Not now, with that impossible blade coming down on them. Ban Ji-sung was attacking the Korean players. He was leveling a sixteen-meter mass of light at Koreans. The Swordmaster who had hunted Japanese players exclusively had changed his target.
"Why the hell?"
A Baekdu Guild member answered Gaon's question.
"No idea. The Japanese kids just got wiped by the zombies, so maybe he switched targets while he was at it. We were Earth faction to begin with, so we were never going to look pretty to an As loyalist like Ban Ji-sung... Anyway. Can you do it? Ban Ji-sung. Can you take him..."
"I'll give it a shot."
"Thank you. Thank you so much!"
The guild member thanked him over and over, looking ready to cry, and then he was gone.
They needed a moment's rest before the next fight. Gaon went back to the Rankers.
The Rankers already knew the situation had changed. Every one of them looked bewildered.
"Things are breaking our way a little too conveniently..."
"Our employer isn't actually one of the admins, is he? I mean, that ridiculous army he mobilized, for one thing."
"That's not a bad theory. Taking down Swordmasters fits the whole point of this game as a military simulation, doesn't it?"
While the others turned it over in confusion, Gaon cut in.
"Anyway. We're fighting. That's locked in, right?"
"Yes. Of course."
"Then let's run the plan. You know it. I draw Ban Ji-sung in and hang onto him. While I've got him pinned, you put him down."
Luring a Swordmaster while fighting him was an absurdly difficult job, but he had already proven it could be done against Hyungtun. He wasn't a Swordmaster himself, or so he claimed — but still.
They nodded, and Gaon went on.
"So, Ji-sung. How close do I bring him?"
"As close as you can."
"Last time you took the shot from 1.1 kilometers. And that was in a city."
"That was because the login point was fixed, so we'd already zeroed the sights. There are going to be other targets in between, and he'll be moving fast on top of that. Taking the shot from too far out is..."
"I still can't draw him in too deep. From what I've seen, he bails the second he smells real danger. He won't come far into enemy ground. I'll try to bring him to seven hundred meters. Take the shot."
"Yes, sir. Then..."
They had already scouted a position with a clean line of fire, free of terrain and cover. The sniper team — assault rifles and a dedicated sniper rifle — moved onto the field with the squad assigned to cover them.
Lee Bok-dong asked the Rankers a question as they prepared to go.
"What about me?"
Entering the field required stealth. The Rankers had no interest in dragging along someone whose skill they couldn't even gauge.
"You sit this one out and watch."
"Ah... Right."
Lee Bok-dong glanced over at Jijonmussang. Unlike himself, slumping with nothing to do, Jijonmussang looked to be in an excellent mood. Gaon was once again doing exactly what the employer wanted.
"Nice. Real nice..."
Lee Bok-dong started to sneer inwardly about whether money was all that mattered, then stopped. In the end, neither Jijonmussang nor he was actually doing anything. He figured he might as well just cheer them on, and raised his binoculars to the battlefield.
He found Ban Ji-sung.
The Swordmaster was using the zombies as a wall of meat, charging in among them and swinging that absurdly enormous sword. Machine-gun nests, barricades — he was ripping them apart without ceremony. At a glance it looked like mindless wrecking, but the destruction was planned. Ban Ji-sung was targeting the obstacles the zombies would struggle to cross: buildings, coils of barbed wire, anything that would slow them down.
It was every bit as effective as swinging the blade at living enemies. The undead advance, which had begun to stall, was picking up speed again.
He's really tearing everything down...
Even watching from a distance, Lee Bok-dong let out a groan. Destroying walls and fences on a real battlefield was a job for APCs and bulldozers. That Swordmaster was a far superior instrument of demolition. One sweep of that colossal light through the air, and everything simply came down.
Charging a Swordmaster like that was no different from ramming a ridiculously enormous machine head-on.
And one man was doing exactly that.
Gaon. Even knowing what that man of As could do, it was a sight that stopped the breath in Lee Bok-dong's throat.
He can turn invisible. Why isn't he?
But Gaon was charging in cold and clean. He knew Ban Ji-sung better than anyone alive. He knew that turning invisible against Ban Ji-sung was useless, and he had Ban Ji-sung's swordsmanship and habits mapped down to the last tic. He had built a tactic out of that knowledge, and he was acting on it.
"Ji-sung! Your brother's here!"
Ban Ji-sung gave the charging Gaon no answer. Without a word, he swung his sword.
White radiance swallowed the world. The largest horizontal cut in history. Everything within thirty meters — people and earth alike — was scoured away.
It was a massive attack, so it should have been slow. It was not. It was sickeningly fast. Even Gaon, under a Haste spell, could see that.
He assessed the situation with accelerated thought. He had taken an Ogre Potion, and it still would not be enough. He could not stop that cut head-on. Absolutely not.
Gaon took the risk, sprang aside to let it pass, and tried to drive in closer. Ban Ji-sung swept the giant blade down on a diagonal to cut him off.
The dense exchange of reads that unfolded between the two Swordmasters in that instant was something no ordinary person would have understood. Gaon won it. He closed the distance.
One more step, and they were nose to nose. Point-blank. That put the advantage on his side. You couldn't even half-sword with a blade wrapped in Sword Qi.
The only thing Gaon was worried about now was winning too easily and being suspected of being a Swordmaster himself.
He fired the pistol in his right hand in a rapid string. A gun discharged at that range, at that accelerated speed, was hard for even a Swordmaster to dodge.
Ban Ji-sung dodged it anyway. He slipped sideways through the bullets and made it clear. Exactly as Gaon had expected. It was the setup.
Gaon's sword crashed into the space Ban Ji-sung had just vacated. A thrust like a flash of light.
Ban Ji-sung answered. With the right hand that had been idle until that moment, he swept the longsword at his waist.
Drawing a blade from its scabbard and cutting in the same motion was a technique in its own right. Nothing unusual about that. In Western swordsmanship and Eastern alike, a fast draw from the scabbard was useful enough that people put real time into honing it.
But in that instant, Gaon felt something wrong.
Ban Ji-sung had hated the Japanese, and he had hated the art of drawing a sword quickly from the scabbard as too Japanese besides. He had deliberately refused to train it.
So why was this so fast...
Ban Ji-sung's cut finished before Gaon's thrust.
Gaon saw a white flare bloom in front of his eyes. And then he understood, with a jolt of horror.
Ban Ji-sung's longsword had not come out of the scabbard at all. The blade had never been obstructed by the sheath. With astonishing brute strength, he had simply smashed the scabbard apart and swung through it.
The edge filled Gaon's vision.
Gaon threw himself aside in a scramble and cut back. Both of them possessed monstrous strength, so the instant the two blades met, a boom rolled out across the field. Thunder, bursting on the ground.
An explosive clash began. It was not as spectacular as when Ban Ji-sung had been swinging the sixteen-meter sword. It was faster, though, and fiercer, and to the ear it was almost unbearable.
Gaon gave ground. Steel kept locking with steel. Between the blades, the thunder did not stop. Locked together just like that, the two swordsmen carved a path across the battlefield.
Everyone was watching them. The soldiers still in the fight were no exception.
"Holy shit, is that even possible? He's going at a Swordmaster head-on?"
"I'm telling you, that guy is a Swordmaster... Watch yourself around him from now on. If you can get on his good side, do it."
"He says he's not one, though?"
"Whether he is or he isn't. If he really is a Swordmaster, you want him to like you because he's a Swordmaster. If he isn't, you want him to like you because he looks damn close to becoming one."
Some people still had the leisure to mutter like that. Others had been silent for some time.
The two-man sniper team had reached their position. They were waiting now for the target to come into a range they could not miss.
Their hearts hammered the entire time they waited. It was a game, but it was still a Swordmaster. The feat of a pair of ordinary gunmen putting down a superhuman like that would become a legend in its own right.
They ran the odds of success one more time. The odds looked better than expected.
They had already read the local conditions off the thermometer and anemometer they had brought, and their range estimation had been flawless from the start. Even their helper's skill was superhuman. The single greatest problem in sniping a Swordmaster — that a Swordmaster relocated far too quickly — had vanished, thanks to the man locked in combat with him.
Amazingly, that Swordmaster was focused on that one man. He seemed to find him threatening enough to keep answering. Thanks to that, he stayed in the scope.
At last their helper reached the point he had promised.
The sniper squeezed the trigger, and a bullet faster than sound tore the air apart as it flew.
Fighting Ban Ji-sung, Gaon could feel himself being overmatched.
First, he was losing badly in raw strength. Ban Ji-sung was swinging the sword with his right hand, and because he was left-handed, no Sword Qi formed on a blade held in the right. Their collisions were a pure contest of power. And there was no winning a contest of power against a demigod.
More humiliating still, Gaon was not winning on technique either.
"Ji-sung, you put in a lot of practice while I was gone? That's cheap..."
Even his voice was shaking from the strain. Ban Ji-sung's sword came on.
It was the Cheondun Sword Technique Gaon remembered — a form in which every motion was so oversized it was hard to believe it had any practical use, a style that had been, at best, serviceable against monsters.
But the technique coming at him now carried a startling sharpness and refinement. Even giving himself entirely to defense, Gaon was barely hanging on.
He took two more steps back. Ban Ji-sung closed the gap. If this had been a fencing match, he would already have lost on points.
Gaon put the last of his strength into a cut. Ban Ji-sung cut to meet it.
At the moment of impact, the sword fell from Gaon's hand.
Gaon bit his lip, and smiled anyway.
He had lost the fight. But they had won the war.
From far away, a bullet came. Ban Ji-sung, locked in a violent collision, had no room to dodge. The round punched through his torso.
And Ban Ji-sung, paying it no mind at all, swung his sword at the disarmed and helpless Gaon.