LV.? Swordmaster Ban Ji-sung [3]
You've gotta be kidding me...
Gaon rolled across the ground, screaming the words inside his head. A complete disaster. He had barely kept his life, but the situation was grim. The sniper shot he had been counting on had all but failed, and he had even dropped his sword.
That was a serious problem. The blade lying in the dirt was adamantium. He had a spare longsword at his hip, but it was ordinary steel. Without an adamantium weapon, there was no facing a Swordmaster. Ban Ji-sung seemed to have figured that out as well.
"Hey! Get out of my way!"
Gaon got up to grab the fallen sword, but Ban Ji-sung stepped in front of it and came straight at him. Gaon had no choice but to turn and run. He dumped the last of his MP into a Haste spell and sprinted for all he was worth.
Ban Ji-sung caught that accelerated pace with nothing but his own body. A demigod's strength was not limited to his arms — his legs were transcendent too. After about four hundred meters of chase, Gaon's MP was nearly gone. Sensing death, he screamed.
"Get lost!"
And astonishingly, Ban Ji-sung answered that cry. He peeled off and started running somewhere else. He was heading in a completely different direction.
"That bastard?"
In that moment, Gaon did not rejoice at being alive. Ban Ji-sung had not shown him mercy. He was simply going after a different enemy — running toward the direction the snipers had fired from. Now that Gaon had lost his sword, Ban Ji-sung's threat ranking had shifted.
Gaon kept running. As he fled for his life, he barked a warning into the radio, and a complaint along with it.
"Sniper team, Ji-sung's heading your way — get out of there! And why didn't you go for the head? Headshots are Sniping 101, aren't they?"
The snipers' reply came back over the radio.
"That's only in FPS games. In real life, you usually go for the torso."
"You shot me in the head, though?"
"That was because from where I was positioned, the only angle I had was on your head... If I'd actually hit your torso, it would have been harder for you to dodge. You wouldn't have gotten off with just a little head-tilt."
Fair enough. A bigger target meant fewer misses, and there was no reason to aim exclusively at a hard-to-hit head. In front of a lump of lead faster than sound, a frail human body was a vital point wherever you struck it. But Ban Ji-sung was not a frail human. He was a demigod.
"From now on, shoot for the head. What kind of demigod dies from one hole in the torso?"
"Shooting the torso won't kill him?"
"If you dump enough rounds into him, sure he'll die. A hit to a vital like the heart will do it too. But one or two shots in the gut, he'll just regenerate—"
A scream rang out over the radio, and the voice cut off. The demigod had found the two snipers and finished them off.
In the silence that followed, Gaon looked weakly across the battlefield. The undead kept surging in waves, and the Baekdu Guild members resisted with everything they had. But resisting a tidal wave only meant getting swept away whole. No matter how he looked at it, there was no chance of winning.
Their best sniper team was dead. And now that even their half-powered Swordmaster had been neutralized, it was all over. This was not just a matter of him being locked out for twenty-four hours. The undead were on the verge of occupying this land. At this rate, that unlucky guild and everyone in it would lose every last bit of property they had.
There was nothing he could do. Gaon trudged back to the main camp.
Lee Bok-dong, Jijonmussang, and Baekdu Guild Master Kang Joo-seok were waiting there together. Jijonmussang's eyes went wide. He had noticed that the sword Gaon was carrying now was not the one he had left with.
"You lost the adamantium sword?"
"Yeah."
"You've gotta be kidding me..."
Jijonmussang spat the curse like a scream. Had he grasped the tactical gravity of losing that blade?
He had not.
"Wasn't that a three-million-won piece? What a waste, seriously..."
At Jijonmussang's words, even Kang Joo-seok beside him went wide-eyed.
"You lost a three-million-won item?"
"It just kind of happened..."
"Where did you lose it?"
Gaon shot the question back.
"Why do you ask?"
"I'll go retrieve that three-million-won sword."
Gaon let out a hollow laugh.
"You see all those zombies swarming out there? Start wrestling the horde over a sword and you're dead, no question. I had no choice but to give up on recovering it and come back, man."
"I'll put together a suicide squad to recover the sword. We can't let you lose a fortune trying to help us."
"No, you're up to your necks already... Aren't you guys about to go under right now?"
"We are. But if we're going down, we'll go down clean."
Kang Joo-seok's eyes trembled with anxiety as he said it. Even in despair, he was trying to look cool. Gaon wondered whether he ought to thank the man or apologize. Unable to decide, he lamented to the Goddess.
That guy is making this really hard for me. When I think about it, this is my fault...
The Goddess asked,
My Great Warrior's fault, you say?
If I hadn't taken part in bringing Ban Ji-sung down, that young lady who hired them wouldn't have contracted an undead legion, would she? So this mess is on me, isn't it?
It is difficult to conclude that this is my Great Warrior's fault. My Great Warrior merely did what needed doing at the time. You were not the one who set these events in motion, were you?
Still, I can't just stand by and watch. Helping some other way is genuinely hard, though. A few days ago I could've taken money from those mosquitoes and made these guys whole. After the way I tore into the mosquitoes the other day, I haven't got the face to go holding my hand out. I really went too far with them...
Then what will you do, Gaon?
Even if I can't take the responsibility, I should at least give it everything I've got.
Gaon turned to Kang Joo-seok.
"You don't need to go after the sword. I'm heading back out to throw down with Ji-sung again — just give me some cover?"
Kang Joo-seok frowned.
"I already know how extraordinarily skilled you are. Even so, you can't defeat a Swordmaster, can you? Earlier you were buying time for a sniper shot, but we don't have anyone left with that kind of ability..."
"I don't need a sniper."
"Then how?"
"Even if I can't match him, I've still got to throw myself at him."
"Do you have a chance?"
"Not if I just fight him straight, no. But I've got a favor to ask that'll improve those odds..."
After hearing Gaon out, Kang Joo-seok nodded. Gaon flashed a grin and ran back onto the battlefield.
The rate of mana recovery is proportional to one's total mana. That law applied in this game as well. Thanks to it, Gaon's MP had come back, if only barely. He could cast Haste and run.
He ran and ran, and there stood a Swordmaster wearing the face of an old friend. Confirming there was no one else around, Gaon offered a cheerful greeting.
"Ji-sung, don't you recognize your hyung? It's me! I've got my reasons for looking like this right now, but I'm actually Gaon — your old comrade and sworn brother. You know how good I am with polymorph, right? You really gonna swing a sword at a hyung like that?"
Even as Ban Ji-sung leveled his blade at him, Gaon kept talking.
"I'm a year older than you, so how about you take seniority into account and just let me win?"
Ban Ji-sung refused the conversation. Barely dodging the sixteen-meter sword that came crashing in, Gaon shouted.
"Is this payback because I didn't help you when Hyungtun was wrecking you? I couldn't help you! And when Hago was wrecking me, you didn't help either, and I never said a word about it. We were both too messed up back then to be helping anyone, weren't we? Let's not fight when we're both hurting, okay?"
He tried to stall for as long as possible and avoid a clash, but it was no easy thing. You could not casually dodge a Swordmaster's attacks. He survived another brush with death. A violent rush of air passed over Gaon's neck — the vacuum carved by Sword Qi splitting empty space. A chunk of his hair was sheared away.
"You putting feelings into that sword? Hey — wait. Are you actually Ji-sung himself? You're logged in right now and beating me up while pretending to be an NPC, aren't you? Busted. You're dead. Wanna take this as a real-life PK? Hyung's stuck in a human body right now, but in real life I'm the goddamn king. I've already beaten down more than three guys who snuck into Korea looking for a real-life fight. You really wanna be number four?"
As he kept shouting, the Goddess spoke.
Gaon, should anyone be watching, they would laugh themselves to death. Could you not close your mouth, if only to prevent so tragic an outcome?
Who's even listening that you'd say that...
Fortunately for the Goddess, Gaon shut his mouth.
Cannon fire rolled out, and explosions followed. The Baekdu Guild was shelling this way. The bombardment did not score a direct hit on the two Swordmasters. That was not the point of the barrage.
Black smoke burst out on every side. In an instant the surroundings were thick with a smoke screen. The Baekdu Guild was firing smoke shells for him, just as Gaon had requested.
Earlier, Gaon had told them that as an elf his hearing was sharp enough that he was fine even if his eyes were covered, but Ban Ji-sung, being human, was not — and that therefore, in the smoke, the odds would tilt his way.
It was a lie. Both of them were accustomed to fighting in a world with almost no light. Thanks to that, Gaon's hearing was unmatched even among elves. Ban Ji-sung was the same — even an Invisibility spell would have been useless against him.
So asking them to lay down smoke had not been about blinding Ban Ji-sung. It had been about blinding everyone else who was watching.
Gaon switched the longsword from his left hand to his right. Against a Swordmaster, a steel longsword was meaningless — and in this moment, it became the finest weapon there was.
Ash-gray Sword Qi spilled down the length of the blade.
Given that Sword Qi nullified physical impact, the difference in raw strength between them barely mattered. Among Swordmasters, the one with the highest duel win rate was a wood elf woman with arms as thin as twigs. The moment Gaon revealed his Sword Qi, Ban Ji-sung's wariness sharpened further. He shifted his stance and lunged.
The instant their Qi-wreathed blades collided, Gaon shouted.
"You're a damn scrub!"
Gaon could defend against Ban Ji-sung's attacks far more easily than before. That gave him room to breathe. He was not just blocking — he could observe. He watched Ban Ji-sung unfold the Cheondun Sword Technique in a way that was different from before, and it was not hard to guess how it had changed.
Since Gaon had last seen that sword art, Ban Ji-sung would have spent long years of training acquiring other techniques and absorbing them, then folding what he had absorbed into the style he already knew. Gaon knew he could change the same way. He set about revising immediately.
Gaon had a sword style of his own — motions carved into his body through life-and-death struggles with monsters. He tried mixing in the longsword technique he had been learning lately. Starting that work from scratch would have been enormously difficult, but now it was easy. Right in front of him was the swordsmanship of a man who had already succeeded in making that change. Just seeing how another work had diverged from what it used to be was reference enough to revise his own.
In an instant, the revision was complete. He tried the revised work on the enemy before him.
Ash, coiled in smoke, cut across the haze — faint, yet fierce. The faintness he borrowed from a longsword art that prized softness; the ferocity, from the motions that were already his. As befit a Swordmaster's work, the harmony of two unlike methods was perfect. The ash flew true, aimed at the throat of the enemy beyond the smoke.
It was not allowed to keep cutting through. A white radiance stepped into its path.
The counter the ash had been waiting for. Dying embers scattered like a detonation, wrapping the white light, and then the ash was flying again — for the vital point. Ban Ji-sung twisted his body and evaded. Seeing that, Gaon smiled. An application of the longsword style's riposte — his first time trying it, but it worked well enough.
He had the luxury of testing a method he was unfolding for the first time. Fortunately, Ban Ji-sung's swordsmanship had not reached Hyungtun's level. From the start, the completeness of a longsword art accumulated over countless years and the completeness of a style one man had practically invented from scratch were never going to be comparable. And so, just as this side's work was unfinished, so was the other side's — though it was extremely close to completion.
Ash and white radiance continued to intermingle. All around was a darkness in which nothing could be seen, and yet the presence of ash and of white stood out with perfect clarity.
They swung and swung, and Gaon was glad — truly glad — to be keeping proper company with a friend after so long. Two swordsmen, advancing toward completion.
There had been days like these.
It felt as if he had come back to them. As though they were sparring for each other's sake, they mixed their blades with something like joy. All the while, Gaon smiled. He knew that at this rate, short on MP, the loss would be his — and he did not care. He kept swinging. He focused on that fact alone.
He closed the distance, closed it further — and then, unexpectedly, the duel did not end in Gaon's defeat.
Ban Ji-sung swung with all his might, knocking Gaon away, then stepped backward. And then he bolted. Short on MP, Gaon had no room to give chase.
"What, you see hyung's skills and suddenly you're scared of a real-life PK?"
Of course not. Gaon heard footsteps ringing out beyond the smoke. They were heading toward the shore the undead had stormed from. The undead were running for the sea. In other words, they were falling back the way they had come. Why, he did not know — but they were.
With the undead legion withdrawing, Ban Ji-sung had no choice but to flee with them. Even a demigod Swordmaster who could take a bullet or two with a smile had his limits. He did not want to stand alone in the middle of a battlefield where bullets were raining down, becoming everyone's target.
When the smoke finally cleared, Gaon was alive. That fact astonished everyone.
"Whoa, you actually held out? For real..."
A moment later, cheers erupted. Gaon smiled, happier than he had been in a very long time.