A Leader's Qualifications
Yong-Ha swung his greatsword.
BOOM!
The force bound into the blade itself split the ground, and Paseong crashed toward Butler Ju and Hwa-Rim.
They slipped past it with almost lazy ease—only for separate spells to streak in right after.
Bang!
Both of them canceled the magic with aura, and the same realization settled over them: Yong-Ha could throw around all sorts of powers at will, yet something about him still felt clumsy.
They had sensed it from the first exchange. Now that the fight had stretched on, they finally understood why. Both shook their heads.
"I see. SSS-class or not, things you only stole have their limits, don't they?"
Yong-Ha knew combat methods at S-class and above, and he had enough real battlefield experience to put them into practice. He could even chain the family's secret techniques together with a natural flow. But everything he had learned was only the foundation of each vassal's true arts. He could not push any of them into their higher forms.
"Looks like my traitor of a father never taught you past this point."
"...Ha! You sure you'll be fine if I go all out?"
Yong-Ha answered Hwa-Rim's taunt with a threat. Butler Ju only snorted.
"If you can, by all means. There's no one else on this deserted island. No need to hold back."
"Threats don't even work, huh. Should've run somewhere crowded after all."
Yong-Ha had hoped for at least a flicker of alarm. He cursed himself for choosing the wrong escape route. If he had fled into a populated area, Butler Ju and Hwa-Rim would have been forced to hold back for fear of collateral damage. Here, they were only probing his level; they could unleash everything whenever they chose.
"This is exactly why a full-scale war with the family is suicide. Chang-won's probably dead by now too."
Yong-Ha clicked his tongue as he swung the greatsword again, forcing his way between Butler Ju and Hwa-Rim. The family's greatest weakness was that they could never unleash their truly destructive power while people still needed protecting. Remove the people who needed protecting, and nothing held them back. No force on earth could weather that kind of power. Butler Ju's casual remark to Jeong-Hoon—that if things went south they could simply topple a nation—had never been a joke.
CRACK!
"What—?!"
"...I've seen enough of your little toys."
Butler Ju caught the edge of the swinging greatsword bare-handed. Mana flooded his grip; the blade shattered into fragments. It was no ancient relic—only a titanium-alloy greatsword forged with the family's knowledge. Watching an artifact crumple under a single strike, Yong-Ha scrambled backward. Hwa-Rim was already behind him, dagger thrusting for his back.
Yong-Ha snapped a mana barrier into place.
"...Ack!"
The barrier simply unraveled into raw mana and was sucked into Hwa-Rim's dagger, fueling an even sharper thrust. Yong-Ha threw himself into a desperate roll and came up scowling.
"Great-uncle never taught me anything like that."
"This is the core of the Hwanhyeon Arts, you idiot nephew."
Grasp the essence of an opponent's technique, pierce that essence to nullify it, then absorb the power and return it as a stronger strike. Yong-Ha had only ever been taught the outer shell—how to read essence. The true heart of the art was forever beyond him.
"That so? Thanks for the lesson, Auntie. I'll do better next time!"
"There is no next time for you."
Yong-Ha answered her provocation with a sneer—then saw Butler Ju's fist already driving toward him. He raised his own fist to meet it. Butler Ju's attacks were still Paseong at their root. Even an evolved form could be canceled out by raw output, or so he believed.
"Wh-what the hell is this?!"
The fist came slowly. The moment Yong-Ha saw it, every scrap of composure vanished and pure terror took its place. It was not slow. His instincts had already decided the blow could not be stopped; his perception had simply been pushed to the absolute limit in a frantic search for any way to live.
Every scrap of mana in the surroundings was being dragged into Butler Ju's fist—and as an Awakened, Yong-Ha himself was being pulled with it. There was no way to resist the binding. If that condensed aura struck him now, even an SSS-class would take a lethal wound. An irresistible killing blow. This was the next stage of Paseong.
"HRAAAAH!!!"
Yong-Ha detonated every last drop of mana in his body, tearing free of the binding by brute force, and threw his own fist at Butler Ju's with everything he had left.
BOOOOM!!!
The explosion carved a massive crater into the island; the surrounding sea heaved under the shockwave.
WHOOSH—!
A tidal wave rushed in to fill the crater. Yong-Ha barely clawed his way free before it swallowed him.
"Hah... hah... damn it!"
The right hand that had met Butler Ju's fist was ruined—twisted, bones jutting through flesh, so grotesque that just looking at it raised gooseflesh. Blood poured freely enough to half-hide the horror.
"My, my. Eating's going to be difficult like that. Shall your auntie kindly cut it off for you?"
"...You bitch!!!"
Hwa-Rim closed in the moment he caught his breath, mocking him as she slashed with her dagger. Yong-Ha whipped his shattered right arm and forced a spell into being.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
Magic circles bloomed around Hwa-Rim and detonated, yet she strode out of the smoke unscathed, dagger already cutting. The blade aimed straight for his throat. Yong-Ha jerked his body back, but the injury threw his balance; the edge carved a long diagonal line across his face.
"GAAAH!!!"
Blood poured from the deep gash. He was lucky his eyes had been spared—yet the outcome was already decided. The moment he lost any means of stopping Butler Ju's attack, the fight was over. Another strike like the last would force him to sacrifice his left arm. After that, only death remained.
"Hahaha. I knew I couldn't win... but I thought I could at least take one of you with me."
The organization he had spent years building, the strength he had accumulated—everything had crumbled like a sandcastle the instant the family learned of him. A hollow emptiness settled over Yong-Ha.
"Starting lines this different make this big a gap, huh... Ha!"
"...Even if the starting lines had been the same, you never had a chance of beating the family."
Butler Ju walked toward him slowly, speaking to a man who was finally tasting the weight of four thousand years of accumulated power.
"No—even if you and the Gaju had switched places, you still would have lost."
"Ha! You're saying I can't beat that orphan bastard—that manufactured king?!"
Yong-Ha howled at the open contempt in Butler Ju's comparison.
"Say it. You're claiming I'm worse than some street mutt who used to beg for scraps? I didn't sit on a throne someone else built like he did. I made everything myself, from the ground up. I'm nothing like the fake king you people prop up!"
"You lack the qualities of a leader. You have no right to lead people. That is what created this defeat."
The moment Jeong-Hoon discovered his identity, Yong-Ha had tried to cut his losses. The organization he built, the Nova he absorbed, every Awakened he recruited—he threw them all away as bait so he alone could survive. Jeong-Hoon, by contrast, had given orders to his vassals and still thrown himself into danger. He had accepted the suffering. During Apollon's trial, still a Non-Awakened, he had outmaneuvered Apollon's vassals with pure strategy and matched Jeon Mun-Jae even while wearing restraints. He claimed to have enjoyed himself, yet in Flamma's trial he endured a sealed room for an entire day and toyed with Baek Si-Hwan the whole time.
"I suffered more than that building my organization! He just used the family's power—of course it was easier for him!"
"The moment the Gaju learned who you were, you should have committed to total war. Do you not even understand that?"
Yong-Ha had pretended he would fight a full-scale war—then fled, abandoning the most important piece: himself as leader. Because of that, his scattered subordinates were being crushed by the family with ruthless speed. Had Yong-Ha held the center as a true commander, the family would still have won, but they would have struggled. That struggle might have exposed openings he could have exploited. Jeong-Hoon would have seized those openings. At Shine Mall he deduced the correct answer the moment the trial began; at Diana he found the solution in a single day. With insight like that, if Jeong-Hoon had led the organization, he might at least have forced the family to the negotiating table.
"And last of all—you valued your own life far too highly, and treated everyone else's as worthless."
Jeong-Hoon's life was measured in the time remaining to humanity itself. Yet when the Ogre Lord appeared at Diana, he still risked everything to save his vassals. During Myeong-il's trial he never treated So-Hyeon as a mere exam subject; he gave her everything he had. He treated her like true family and grieved her death. A man who cherished only his own life and discarded everyone else's would have lost to the family sooner or later, even if not today. No one ever follows a man who values only himself with true loyalty.
"Ha... you're completely gone. A few months and you've already been brainwashed by that Gaju. Fanatics, the lot of you!"
"It isn't blind faith. The Gaju trusts us, so we answer with trust of our own."
Yong-Ha shook his head at Butler Ju's words, still denying Jeong-Hoon's worth—until Hwa-Rim cut in with a rebuttal. No matter how highly the two praised Jeong-Hoon, to Yong-Ha the man remained nothing more than a lucky descendant of the first Gaju who happened to sit atop an organization of staggering power. Everything he achieved was possible only because of the family's strength. Yong-Ha, by contrast, had built everything from nothing while hiding from that same colossal organization. Traitors like Kang Hyeon-jung had helped, but making contact in secret and claiming their power for himself had still been Yong-Ha's own effort.
"How I hid an entire organization from the family... how much harder I worked than that Gaju of yours... see it for yourselves."
Fed up with the two fanatics who refused to listen, Yong-Ha drew the dagger he had kept hidden against his chest with his uninjured left hand and poured mana into it.
THUNK!
"...!"
"...!"
He reversed the dagger and drove it straight into his own heart. Butler Ju and Hwa-Rim froze solid. Neither had imagined that the same man who treated every subordinate as disposable bait for his own survival would ever choose suicide.
"You won't get a single scrap of information from my corpse. And my death doesn't mean the organization is finished. Don't relax just yet."
The moment the dagger touched the mana he had gathered, flames of pure mana erupted from every inch of Yong-Ha's body. Magic that extracted information from a corpse existed—but only if a corpse remained. Knowing that, Yong-Ha burned himself to ash to protect the network of collaborators the traitors had left behind.
"Tell the Gaju for me. Quake in fear at the threat I leave behind and guard that precious life of his well. He'll miss me."
With a final curse aimed at Jeong-Hoon still on his lips, Yong-Ha's body was consumed by fire. The two of them tried desperately to salvage something from the sudden suicide—but they had no choice except to fall back. An SSS-class mana detonation. Even in death, Yong-Ha had tried to take them both with him.