The First Line
Lee Bok-dong had learned the low crawl at the combat training camp only yesterday. He had not expected to put the lesson to use the very next day.
He crawled, then crawled again, dragging himself all the way to the front. His elbows and knees burned. It was so grueling he could hardly believe this was a game. Still, he drove his body forward with everything he had.
The pain in his flesh was blotting out the pain in his mind.
Countless people were paying the price for something he had done. Under that kind of pressure, he was not sitting there stunned — he was doing something, anything. That fact alone brought him a measure of relief.
And so, right now, Lee Bok-dong found a strange liberation in this hardship.
Ugh...
He crawled on, inch by agonizing inch, until he could poke his head into the trench Gaon had entered first.
Contrary to his fears, no bullets came flying. The trench that had been vomiting gunfire only moments ago now held nothing but corpses.
And one man, standing atop those corpses.
Lee Bok-dong stared at Gaon, his face gone slack with horror.
"You killed them all by yourself..."
"Is there anyone else here? Save the admiration for later. Where's Jijonmussang?"
"He's dead."
Lee Bok-dong tried to speak as loudly and clearly as he could. He was afraid his words would not carry. His pronunciation was already poor, and this was a battlefield — a place louder than anywhere else on earth.
As if on cue, a grenade went off somewhere to the side. Inside a trench, by the sound of it. A roar, and then screams echoing down the line.
This stretch of trench was under a proper assault.
"Whoa. It actually breaks. We might actually win this..."
Gaon shook his head.
"Don't get too happy. This is just the outpost line."
"Sorry?"
"This is the first defensive line. Meaning they only stationed a fraction of their troops here, knowing it'd take the heaviest beating. You saw the trench lines further back, right? That's where the main force is. Until we sweep those, the enemy hasn't really been hurt."
A beat late, Lee Bok-dong caught what Gaon was getting at.
"So... you want us to go all the way there?"
"Yeah."
Lee Bok-dong glanced around. Expensive guns lay scattered everywhere nearby. If they just survived, they could scoop the lot and walk away with a fortune.
He tried not to look. With a set face, he nodded.
"Okay. Let's go. But... how do we even get there? Just looking at it, isn't it way too far? And the meat shields are still a long way from reaching us to break through together. There's nobody left to take the bullets instead of—"
Gaon did not answer. Instead, his lips moved.
The next instant, Lee Bok-dong's eyes went wide.
Gaon was gone. What the hell?
He barely remembered that the man in front of him was not from Earth, and asked,
"Magic?"
"It turns you invisible..."
The unseen Gaon offered that brief explanation, then mouthed another spell.
Lee Bok-dong vanished as well. Gaon shouted.
"I put invisibility on you too. Now run! I didn't spend much mana, so it won't last!"
Gaon seized Lee Bok-dong's hand and ran. Lee Bok-dong stammered something shapeless and sprinted for his life beside him.
However Gaon was doing it, he was genuinely fast — impossibly fast, for someone who was supposed to have similar stats. For Lee Bok-dong, keeping up was murder.
Still, that all-out sprint closed the distance in a hurry. The enemy trench rushed toward them.
Gaon shouted from beside him.
"The spell's about to drop — get ready!"
The magic finally gave out and both men snapped back into view at the exact moment Gaon hurled himself into the trench.
Gunfire erupted inside.
Lee Bok-dong threw himself in after him.
Again?
He looked around. Once more, the trench was carpeted with corpses. Fresh awe rose in him, and with it a stray thought.
That pistol in Gaon's right hand. People said you needed both hands on a pistol just to hit anything — and this man was firing one-handed and still dropping enemies where they stood.
So why not put a second pistol in the other hand? Why was he holding a sword in his left? Was it a bit?
"Too much noise everywhere. I can't pick out positions by sound alone... I won't be able to just stick a muzzle over the wall and shoot them from here."
Gaon muttered that, then started walking along the inside of the trench wall — toward the far side, where the enemy was waiting.
Lee Bok-dong followed. A beat behind, he came upon the place where Gaon and the enemy were already facing off.
A firefight, unfolding that very instant. The moment Lee Bok-dong saw it with his own eyes, he understood why the man had brought a sword.
"The hell is that guy?"
"Shoot!"
The White Skull Unit had standardized their outfits into a uniform of their own. Thanks to that, there was no chance of mistaking someone who had suddenly appeared in the trench for an ally.
The instant the enemy reacted, Gaon fired first. Five cracks of gunfire.
Another perfect burst of rapid fire. In a blink, five men were down and sprawling.
"Uh..."
But one was still standing. That one pulled the trigger. A single crack.
A muzzle blooming fire. A bullet coming straight on.
Lee Bok-dong froze in horror. Was this it? Were they about to die?
They were not.
Gaon gave the longsword in his left hand the slightest twitch, and sparks leapt from the blade.
What had just happened?
Watching from behind, Lee Bok-dong could not tell exactly. Reconstructed after the fact, it went something like this.
The other side had fired. It was not a range anyone should have missed at — and Gaon was unharmed. Because he was unharmed, he could reload the pistol in his right hand and fire immediately.
The last enemy died. All of it happened so fast that Lee Bok-dong never even found a gap to step into.
Once again, every enemy in the vicinity was gone.
Gaon kept advancing, the sword in his left hand masking half his face, the pistol in his right covering the way ahead.
What followed was the same. The moment he met the enemy, Gaon snap-fired, and if that dropped all of them, he simply moved on.
And if someone survived long enough to get a shot off? Gaon moved the sword against the incoming round. After that flick of the blade, the bullet never touched him. A heartbeat later he returned fire and finished whoever was left.
It happened again. And again. Even Lee Bok-dong was beginning to understand what he was looking at.
The sword in that left hand was a kind of shield. The blade was knocking the bullets aside.
Holy shit...
He should have pieced it together from context long before he actually saw it. He had been so late not because he lacked the wits, but because the whole thing sat so far outside common sense.
A stunned thought crossed his mind. He was recording every second of this. Would anyone even believe it wasn't edited? Or maybe...
Gaon stopped. He spoke quietly.
"From here on, the trench runs in a straight line."
"What?"
"There's going to be a huge number of them standing in a row. No matter how fast I shoot, no matter how many I drop, there'll be more left standing... This is where you matter, Bok-dong. You know why I brought you."
Lee Bok-dong stood there blankly and tried to think. What was his job again? Stand around going wow at everything?
"Cover..."
"Right. I run out and draw their eyes. You shoot. Shoot as much as you can and drop as many as you can, as fast as you can. That's how you take the weight off me. You can do that, right?"
"I don't know if I can..."
"You'll be fine. You're a good shot. You were last time, too."
Lee Bok-dong nodded before he quite realized he had.
Gaon sensed the enemies beyond the wall. The noise had half-deafened him, but he could still tell how many there were.
A lot. A great many.
Gaon broke into a run, straight at them.
The instant he met them he fired the gun in his right hand. Five shots put five men on the ground.
But there were still far too many left standing.
"What the—?"
The gunshots rolled down the trench. Wide-eyed enemies swung their muzzles toward him in a single wave.
And Gaon chanted a spell. Magic wrapped around his heart.
Haste
His blood surged. His body moved twice as fast, and his already inhuman dynamic vision sharpened until he could make out the shape of incoming bullets.
Under Haste, Gaon kicked off the ground.
It was less a man sprinting than a human-sized bullet being fired. In the next instant he had already left the naked eye behind, flashing past the positions of the men who had pulled their triggers.
Huh?
Lee Bok-dong did not actually see what Gaon had done. He only saw the result, with the process cut out.
In the space Gaon had passed through, five enemies who had been aiming their guns were collapsing, bleeding.
No — half a second later, it was sixteen.
Lee Bok-dong could not quite grasp the situation, but he managed to remember his job.
He lined up on the enemy and fired.
They had no attention to spare for his side of the trench. That gave him the luxury of actually aiming.
A crack, and one of them dropped. By then Gaon, already far down the line, had put another ten on the ground.
Even after that instantaneous slaughter, plenty of enemies remained. To cut that number down as fast as possible, Lee Bok-dong kept shooting.
The recoil was vicious. His braced shoulder burned as he advanced, firing as he went.
He moved and shot, and shot again.
Some thirty seconds of that, and he was pouring off as much sweat as there were spent casings scattered around him. It was worth it.
The gunfire stopped. No one was left standing nearby.
Gaon walked back and spoke.
"You did great!"
Lee Bok-dong answered in a daze. What had the two of them just done? The whole thing had been so unreal he could not feel it yet.
"Uh... how many did we even kill?"
"Definitely over a hundred. I don't think we hit two hundred, though. Oh — and fair warning, I can't pull that stunt again. I'm out of mana."
"Ah. Then..."
"I was going to sit and wait for it to come back. Want to park it and shoot the breeze?"
He said it while starting to sink to the ground — then stopped. His grip tightened on his weapons.
Gaon's face hardened. Lee Bok-dong asked,
"What's wrong?"
Gaon answered quietly.
"Can't you hear the footsteps? They sent in the reserves."
"Reserves?"
"They figured this line was breached, so they committed extra troops. You've got to be kidding me. They only fielded a thousand guys and they still held a force back..."
Sending reserves to a broken line was the obvious move. The problem was how fast that obvious move had come. Fast enough to make this side sweat.
Gaon could already see what was about to happen. Once the reserves poured in, the trench they had just emptied would fill with enemies again. They would be boxed in from both sides.
"This might actually kill us... If you die, you can't respawn for twenty-four hours, right? You won't be able to grab any loot, but don't worry about that. You helped a lot, so I'll make sure you're taken care of."
Helped a lot? He hadn't even done that much.
Lee Bok-dong shook his head.
"It's fine."
"Hm?"
"You don't need to do that. I'm a pro gamer."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I took a commission and I fought. I barely pulled my own weight, so you don't need to hook me up extra—"
"Oh."
Gaon grinned. Lee Bok-dong had no idea why.
"For now, want to hide? We'll throw some dirt and corpses over ourselves. No idea if they'll fall for it, but..."
Lee Bok-dong did as he was told. He was pretty sure Gaon had just dropped the formal speech, but he was in no position to argue. He grabbed a shovel and dug in a hurry.
One way or another, they got themselves concealed.
Gaon, lying prone beside him, whispered,
"Hey. How old are you?"
"What? Twenty-four..."
"We're not that far apart, then. I already started talking like we're friends — you should too."
"Huh? Uh..."
Lee Bok-dong shut his mouth, still bewildered. He could not begin to guess what had brought that on.
About two minutes passed. The trench stayed quiet.
Lee Bok-dong muttered,
"What the hell. You said they were coming. Why aren't they here?"
They should have arrived by now. The reserves supposedly charging this way had not shown themselves.
Gaon pressed an ear to the trench wall to check. From the sounds rolling across the ground above, he pieced the situation together.
"Huh... they were coming, and now they're falling back?"
"What?"
"The ones who were on their way. They're all turning around and going back the way they came."
It was not only the reserves that withdrew.
Some ten minutes later, the two of them realized the enemy had begun a full retreat.
They had won.
By now, Margrave Hyungtun had come to hate the very concept of rest. If there was no fighting near his own territory, he would throw himself without hesitation into battles raging far away.
Along the front lines of As, sentries would keep their eyes bloodshot through the night until they developed neuroses. The infamy of a Swordmaster who came crawling in under cover of dark had spread to every theater. Let your guard down even a little, they said, and everyone died. And in truth, they said, you died even if you didn't.
It went on like that. Margrave Hyungtun spent a considerable stretch of years at war.
Half a century, to be exact. He fought through all of it.
The only reason he did not spend the other half-century fighting as well was not that he had grown tired of it. The war had ended.
Margrave Hyungtun received the armistice the way a man receives a bowel movement cut short. At his son's grave, he prayed that he might finally find true relief — that the war would begin again.
When the prayer went unanswered, he apparently could not bear it.
Forty years after the war's end, Margrave Hyungtun appeared on Three Mile Island in the United States. The security forces at the nuclear power plant there could not hold a Swordmaster who had come prepared to die for so much as a single minute.
There was no time to issue an evacuation warning to the residents. In an instant, the plant's reactor was destroyed.
A magnificent collapse.
Slathered in radiation, slipping from consciousness, Margrave Hyungtun was probably smiling. He would have hoped the radioactive fallout blanketing the American mainland would usher as many demons as possible into hell. He would have hoped the demons who survived would be angry — angry enough to want a war.
But the war did not start again. To Margrave Hyungtun's regret.
After committing the worst terrorist attack in history, the man whose death had been a certainty next appeared in the 2006 presidential election of the Karse Federal Republic.
How had he survived? Ordinary people were stunned, and so were the other Swordmasters. America was horrified and enraged by the return of its most monstrous terrorist.
The people of Karse, however, received this impossible return as the return of a hero.
A slogan rang through the polling stations.
The people of Karse did not hesitate to cast their votes for a superhuman written into the history books.
On the back of overwhelming support, Margrave Hyungtun was elected president.
The Hyungtun who appeared in the twenty-first century was a man far too old for the age, and he took the office of president as little more than another name for emperor. And so, for himself as president, he fashioned a title fit for a throne.
The Karse Federal Republic records this as the birth of Charmmahwang, the Demon-Slaying Emperor.