Into the Heart of the Underworld
Slap!
"Harder. Hit him harder, Biryu."
So Yeomgyo spoke between ragged breaths.
"If my body were fine I wouldn't be making someone else do it. Beating a man only tastes right when you do it yourself."
"You look pale. You all right?"
I still had Chu Yeo-ryong by the collar. He was a short man; with my fist knotted in his clothes both his feet kicked uselessly in the air.
"Ugh… ghk. Let go of me!"
Slap!
My palm cracked across his cheek and split the skin. Chu Yeo-ryong went limp. Whatever fight had been left in him was gone. I flung him aside and turned to So Yeomgyo, who sat slumped on a heap of broken stone, arms wrapped tight around her midsection, sucking air through her teeth.
"Better now that I've sat a while."
Cold sweat beaded on her face as she looked at me.
"What about you, Biryu? You took a few hits earlier. You okay?"
"Nothing serious. I've already patched the wounds."
She gave a small, relieved nod, her face still paper-white.
"How do I look right now?"
I hesitated a moment before answering.
"Like someone who ate spoiled food in the middle of summer and got the worst stomach cramps of his life. Or…"
"Don't you dare say it looks like bad period pain."
"I never said anything of the sort."
So Yeomgyo sighed, still hugging her stomach, and tucked herself smaller on the rubble.
"Do you know what it feels like when every drop of inner energy is sucked out of your dantian the way someone drains a cup of wine in one pull? Empty stomach, week-long hangover, and the burn that goes with it—except worse. And don't stop hitting that bastard while I'm talking. Watching helps me work off the temper."
Right then Chu Yeo-ryong, still being worked over, let out a scream.
"S-stop… stop it!"
Through swollen lips he managed to spit the words.
"You monster bastards! Are you even human?!"
He twisted his head to look behind him and his voice trailed off.
"…How can power like that come from a single person…"
Behind us the bright golden noon sun poured straight down through the hole that had been torn open from the first underground floor all the way to the surface.
"I have to agree with him on that," I murmured, soft enough that So Yeomgyo would not hear.
A perfect vertical shaft now ran from the basement to open sky.
So this is the Blood Death Sect Leader's ultimate technique.
I had copied her Blood Demon Serpent Chain Sword long ago and used it often enough to know her art was already high-level. But the Heaven-Annihilating Blood Burst Calamity she had just unleashed belonged to an entirely different plane. Among every martial art I had ever witnessed, it easily ranked among the very highest.
Piecing together the scattered rumors I had heard, I could estimate that at full power she stood at least equal to a Guardian of the Nine Great Sects.
Is this what they mean by Guardian-level strength?
I did not know how much of her true power she had actually used. What I did know was that she had not gone all-out for this final technique. Back during the Emei battle she had told me: if she ever drew the two swords strapped to her thighs and combined them with her soft sword, that meant she was fighting at full strength and I should run. In the end, while holding off the Blood Cult's assault, she had been forced to do exactly that. When she saved me from Jeokmaryeong's killing blow she had been the literal Flame Eye—nothing like her usual self. She had opened the Nine-Tailed Death Flame Gate, fused the soft sword with the other two blades into the massive greatsword she called the Red Demon Command Sword, and driven Jeokmaryeong back. That had been every card she held laid on the table.
If she used this technique in that full state… just how far would it go?
People often called a Guardian "the only single force that can overcome numbers" or simply "a natural disaster." I now understood those phrases were not exaggeration at all.
"What's with the admiring stare? I don't need your pity. For the great So Yeomgyo this much is nothing—ah, ah, ahh!"
She tried to straighten her back with her usual bravado, then went deathly pale and doubled over again, clutching her stomach. Still bent, she waved a hand at me.
"Go lecture those two. Lucky for us the branch heads crawled out toward the entrance, so we won't have to dig all the way down to the fourth basement looking for them."
"You heard her?"
I turned to the two men sprawled on the floor—Chu Yeo-ryong and Muk Se-hwi. Behind them the rest of the black-path fighters lay in blackened heaps under the golden shaft of sunlight, every last one of them wiped out by So Yeomgyo's ultimate technique. Only Chu Yeo-ryong, whom I had dragged down by the chain on his axe, and Muk Se-hwi, whom I had dropped with a front kick to the solar plexus, had survived.
I never even got a clear look at it.
All I remembered was a colossal white flame-dragon sweeping through. The power had been too vast to watch properly. The corpses on the ground had not merely been cut or exploded; their upper bodies were simply gone—as though an actual fire-dragon had bitten them in half.
[Hmm. So this is the level. Interesting.]
I felt Mumyeong's gaze flicker from the shadows behind me, calmly inspecting the dead.
"How… how could my men… This is impossible."
Chu Yeo-ryong had already watched his entire third branch annihilated earlier, so the shock was slightly dulled for him. Muk Se-hwi, who had just watched the elite force he trusted erased in a single instant, looked far more shattered.
"After we learned that formation we were supposed to be invincible… so many masters strutted in and fell flat…"
"Well, of course. It was the Great Blood Net Array," So Yeomgyo muttered, still holding her stomach.
"The Great Blood Net Array uses twenty-eight opening moves that look tough but are still just barely blockable. Those are the bait. While the opponent trades one move, then two, he starts thinking he's handling a flashy-looking formation just fine. By the time the twenty-eight moves end, every escape route is already sealed and the only future left is suffocation. It's an ant-lion pit of a formation."
"H-how do you even know that? Who the hell are you… I mean, who might you be, miss?"
Muk Se-hwi shrank under the flash of So Yeomgyo's eyes and hastily corrected his address. She ground her teeth.
"Black-path trash or not, this is still Shaanxi—right in the middle of orthodox territory, even if we're underground in an extraterritorial pleasure district. And you still dared use a Blood Cult formation out in the open? Your guts really must be hanging outside your bellies."
"That is absolutely not true!"
Muk Se-hwi clutched his aching gut and jerked upright.
"We may suck the blood of ordinary folk for a living, but we haven't thrown away every last scrap of humanity. I swear on heaven itself—if we had known it was a Blood Cult formation we never would have used it, no matter how strong it was."
So Yeomgyo frowned.
"You know the grand name 'Great Blood Net Array' well enough, yet claim you didn't know it belonged to the Blood Cult?"
Muk Se-hwi's face flushed.
"Th-that's… well, we're black-path, so knowledge that every proper martial artist treats as common sense is… a little hard for people who can barely read…"
He kept talking, but So Yeomgyo's brows only drew tighter; she clearly believed none of it.
"P-please believe us! There were odd things, yes, but that bastard Paeng Ha-jin always brushed them off as just the nature of the formation! If this really is connected to the Blood Cult, we will cooperate fully!"
Sensing the rising temperature, Chu Yeo-ryong also shouted in panic.
"I'd sooner trust a drug-addled beggar walking down the street than the two of you, you sons of bitches."
So Yeomgyo bit her lip and slowly raised the hand around which the soft sword was coiled.
Shhhk.
The paper-thin blade uncoiled from her wrist like a living silver snake and stood straight. Pain from her abdomen had left her edge far sharper than usual.
"I'm not taking their side for no reason, but at least right this second I think they're telling the truth, So Yeomgyo."
She whirled on me in a flash of fury.
"What? How can you abandon me and take their side?! Is that the kind of man you are?!"
"…Don't phrase it in a way that invites misunderstanding."
She clicked her tongue, clearly disappointed, and rose while lightly punching her own hip to ease the lingering ache. Then she looked straight at me.
"I'll give you the time it takes to breathe five times. Convince me."
"There's no special reason."
"What?"
"But I know this much."
I adjusted the black dog-skin cloak on my shoulders.
"When a man has to confess his own powerlessness to someone else, it is extremely hard. Even harder when that man is already scraping by on nothing but pride at the very bottom."
"…You."
So Yeomgyo stared at me with an unreadable expression. I said nothing more. Arms crossed, I looked away from her toward the light pouring down the shaft.
"…Annoying."
She flicked her wrist; the soft sword went slack and wound itself back around her arm. Crossing her legs, she settled onto the rubble again and fixed her gaze on Muk Se-hwi and Chu Yeo-ryong.
"You said Paeng Ha-jin?"
Both men's faces brightened and they nodded hard.
"Spit out every single thing you know. I'll listen. But if even one word doesn't line up front to back, I swear I won't lay a finger on a single hair of your heads."
"What?"
Everyone blinked at the contradictory threat. So Yeomgyo continued coolly.
"I won't touch a hair. Instead I'll force-feed you every tonic and intelligence pill on the market until your minds are razor-sharp, then dump you at the front gate of the Martial Alliance with a tip that you reek of Blood Cult."
"…"
The two black-path men slowly sat up straighter. So Yeomgyo blinked once with cat-like eyes and spoke in a voice like winter steel.
"Now then—shall we see just how sincere your cooperation really is?"
"Ow."
So Yeomgyo set down the cup of sorghum wine after barely half a swallow, rubbing her lower abdomen as the alcohol burned.
"Still hurts?"
She filled a water cup to the brim and gulped it down.
"I had to force the energy so hard this time that the aftereffects are lasting longer. One night's sleep and I'll be fine, though."
I chewed on a piece of meat and said, "Thanks for believing me."
"Pffft!"
Water sprayed from her mouth and soaked my entire face.
"S-sorry! You know I didn't mean to!"
Startled, she snatched the tablecloth and began wiping my face.
"That was the leftover mala broth, by the way."
Her hands froze.
"Huh? Oh—you're right. Biryu, your face is bright red with chili oil."
"And it's starting to sting like hell."
"Aaaah! Waiter!"
A moment later I had my face buried in a cold wet towel the waiter had brought.
"So what was that earlier? Honestly I expected you not to believe me even while I was talking."
There was a small barb in my voice.
"…Forget it. No point dredging up the past now."
She refused to answer. I lifted the towel a fraction and looked at her. Arms folded, she sipped her water and said,
"And it's not like I just swallowed whatever information they fed me. I only decided to trust them after their story matched, detail for detail, the intelligence I'd already gotten through the Lower Gate."
"Of course."
She was always thorough in her judgments. I finished wiping the red oil from my face.
"So in the end we have to go in there. The place we deliberately left for last because the security was tightest and the difficulty highest—"
I paused a beat.
"Jeolhae, the Fifth Branch. Right into the very heart of Zhongyuan's underworld, just as they're about to host a massive dark fighting tournament."