You Can't Exactly Demand Manners from a Beast
KRAKOOOOOOOM—!!!
Walls and ceilings shattered into fragments. Support beams crumpled and gave way.
"Heh heh heh."
In Leon's wake, the grand manor collapsed. Stone, timber, and glass burst into flying shards—only to catch fire and melt the instant they touched the crimson flames.
Everything along the Hwasinjo's path burned and was crushed flat. Every beat of its wings erased someone's fortune by the platinum-coin load.
A mass the size of a three-story mansion, charging with monstrous force and speed, and on top of that raw physical power came heat that could melt alloy on contact. The resulting destruction was more than enough to tear human architecture apart like so much paper.
From the beak of the Hwasinjo pursuing Leon, a blast of fire erupted.
KRAAAAAASH—!
A scarlet heat-line carved itself through the air, sweeping sideways in a fan-shaped arc.
Paht—!
Leon sidestepped it with casual ease, as if dodging a child's punch. He had room to spare.
———!!
In more than five hundred years of life, the Hwasinjo had never been this furious.
Leon kept tossing out precious elixirs in tiny, teasing amounts while dancing just out of reach, flaunting his footwork at point-blank range. Whatever reason the beast still possessed had been annihilated; only extreme hunger and rage remained inside that skull.
Golden eyes blazing, the Hwasinjo accelerated.
Hwaaaaaaak—!
Scorching wind, vibration, thunderous noise, killing intent—the catastrophic pressure crashing in from behind was enough to make Leon's hair stand on end all by itself.
And yet.
"Not happening."
His body might react, but his heart didn't so much as flinch.
No matter how hard that birdbrain tried, it was never going to catch him.
Leon's foot met the ground.
Tu-woong!
A single light step sent a deep, resonant shockwave rolling outward. Mana particles in the air shivered; a crisp current of force unfurled ahead of him.
In the next instant—
Chwaak!
Leon's form blurred and melted away, then tore back into existence far in the distance, splitting space as he burst free.
······Thwick.
The Hwasinjo's golden eyes, still locked on empty air, rolled belatedly after him and found his new position.
"Kh."
The sheer speed sent an indescribable rush of pleasure surging through Leon.
In less than ten minutes of this chase, he had completely fused the Heavenly Spirit Steps and the Heavenly Escape Steps into a brand-new martial art.
Heavenly Spirit Steps—a footwork technique and light-body art. Heavenly Escape Steps—a footwork technique that was also stealth, concealment, and shadow arts. Both were advanced martial disciplines obtained from the Crusif family.
Those two superior footwork arts had merged and intertwined, giving birth to something a full dimension higher. The martial principles settled into place; the underlying logic of the technique took form.
It was, in short, astonishing. Creating a new martial art by fusing two high-dimensional superior techniques?
How did I even do that?
Sometimes in life things just worked out without you quite knowing why, and this was one of those times for Leon. He'd simply kept running, and it had happened.
Regardless, one thing was certain: this new movement art—still unnamed—was extraordinary.
Tu-woong!
It almost felt as if he arrived the moment his gaze landed on a place. One step erased his presence and vaulted him through space.
To anyone watching, it was indistinguishable from a blink—from teleportation.
The agility and speed of the Heavenly Spirit Steps had been sharpened further still; the secrecy and keenness of the Heavenly Escape Steps had grown denser. The two locked together like puzzle pieces and produced pure synergy.
Leon could feel boundless potential in this movement art. It was a peerless technique. He called it a movement art for convenience, but of course it could be applied to footwork, stealth, and more.
He felt a deep gratitude toward the Hwasinjo for helping him create it.
"Thanks, Firebird."
But gratitude was gratitude, and the thing still needed to die.
Eight minutes.
Eight minutes since the Hwasinjo had burst out onto the surface. It was about time to end the game.
The alarms had started a little later than that, but he needed at least this much of a buffer.
Kwachang—!
Leon smashed straight through a window and leapt outside. Behind him, the Borsha family manor blazed sky-high.
"Hahahaha······."
The sight made it impossible for Leon to stop laughing. What a glorious bit of arson this had been.
Time constraints had left a few outbuildings untouched, but he'd annihilated more than eighty percent of the estate's structures. Close enough. He was satisfied.
Leon set his course for the Rumel Canal and ran.
He hadn't agonized over the battlefield. The Hwasinjo was a living fireball, and in the capital, the Rumel Canal held more water than anywhere else.
Somewhere heavy with yin energy, water energy—that sort of thing. Roughly speaking.
Aria hadn't raised any objections when she'd heard the plan, so the judgment was probably sound.
Paaaaaang—!
Folding distance with every stride, he had the waterway right in front of him in under a minute. Thanks to the alarms, not a single boat was moving on the surface.
"Okay. This is far enough. Good work."
Leon hurled the red fruit in his hand—and the entire bundle of elixirs—straight into the river.
Hwirik—
And in the brief instant the Hwasinjo's gaze was snared by the falling prizes, he vanished from the spot.
His stint as a five-hundred-year-old Hwasinjo's seasoned handler—and as the legendary arsonist who had torched five noble houses in eight minutes—was over.
It was time to return as the Crusif family's young master, righteously standing against the monster that had invaded the capital.
Better go change clothes first.
Rumel Canal. The place Leon had just vacated and left behind.
— ?!?!
The Hwasinjo panicked when the human it had been chasing suddenly disappeared. Straight ahead, the food was tracing neat parabolas down toward the river.
The deliberation was brief. Food first. Fill the stomach. It could not simply stand by and watch its meals get dunked in water.
It spread its wings, shot forward, and snatched the prizes just before they hit the surface.
Psssssssssh—!
As the Hwasinjo drew near, the canal water boiled in an instant and turned to steam. Thick white vapor billowed up, blanketing the area in fog.
Gulp—
The elixirs vanished greedily down its beak and arrived in the fire-core.
Inside the core, fire energy melted and dissolved. Hunger eased; its eyes snapped wide open.
The Hwasinjo trembled for a moment, savoring the afterglow.
······But.
It was nowhere near enough. This was the stockpile it had gathered on the assumption it would wake in its original nest.
And to get home, it would need even more fire energy still.
Yet this place offered not so much as a speck of proper fire energy. Naturally, the Hwasinjo's thoughts drifted back to the white flame it had glimpsed earlier.
Yes. With that, a full recovery of its power would be more than—
Pajijijing—!
Right then, a mana shockwave burst out at point-blank range. Truly point-blank—barely a few meters away in midair.
— ······?
The Hwasinjo was baffled. The fire energy pouring off its own body made even approaching this close nearly impossible. And yet something was moving mana here?
It tilted its head and looked around.
"Hmm. Now what in the world is this creature supposed to be······."
At the source of the shockwave floated an old man, suspended in serene stillness. The long hems of his pale azure robes fluttered about his feet.
The old man stroked his short goatee and scolded the Hwasinjo.
"You little brat. What do you think you're doing, racing around all over the place like that? I spent ages trying to lock onto your coordinates."
— ······???
Naturally, the Hwasinjo had no idea what noises this insignificant creature was making.
The old man paid that no mind and kept muttering to himself.
"Heavens. But you are a curious one. Nowhere near a mere spirit beast······. A divine beast that commands fire energy, then? I've never seen or heard of anything like you, so you must have crossed the sea to get here."
He clicked his tongue.
"Aigoo, tsk tsk. A pity I can't take you alive—such a pity. If you'd only caused a little less chaos, or at the very least if you hadn't come bursting out right in the capital, I might have been able to spare—"
Hwaaaaaaak—!
The Hwasinjo stopped listening. It beat its wings and unleashed a tremendous blast of scorching wind, intending to swat the old man aside in one stroke and go claim that white flame.
However.
Hwik!
The old man drew a casual line through the air with one hand, and several strands of mana sliced the heat-wind cleanly apart.
— ······!
The Hwasinjo's flames flickered with shock.
"Interrupting someone mid-sentence······. Well. You can't exactly demand manners from a beast."
Murmuring that, the old man unleashed his aura.
Gooooooooooo—!!
The formidable power of Jenion Serzef, an 8th Circle Mage of the Empire, surged outward in every direction.
Every scrap of mana in the vicinity flipped over into his own, crushing down on the Hwasinjo and binding it in place.
The damage to the surrounding structures—which had been melting under the heat—came to a halt.
Space itself had been seized by Jenion's overwhelming force; not a single grain of the Hwasinjo's fire energy could leak free.
— !!!
Seeing that much, the Hwasinjo felt the edge of death for the first time in its life. For a body destined to become a divine beast, it was a sensation it should never have known.
In a frantic rush, it detonated the energy of its fire-core.
KRAAAAAAAAAAASH—!
Fierce fire energy became a typhoon and slammed through heaven and earth. The desperate flames darkened past crimson into black, displaying terrifying power.
"Hmm."
Even before that fearsome divine might, Jenion only clicked his tongue. Savage fire poured down, yet not so much as a single scorch mark appeared on his robes.
"This one's going to take a bit."
He prioritized sealing off any fire energy trying to escape the space he had cut away. Even a trickle getting out would mean catastrophic damage.
The Hwasinjo raged like a mad thing, pouring out fire energy, throwing everything it had into breaking free of Jenion's net.
Which was why Jenion judged it would take a little time. Containing the fire energy meant he had to keep focusing on the spatial severance.
If he could simply hammer it with pure offense and beat it down, that would be one thing. But this was District Four of the capital. It was not a battlefield where collateral damage could be ignored.
That was when it happened.
"······?"
Jenion sensed something and turned his gaze.
"Oho? Is that fellow actually coming this way? Hold on—that face looks somehow familiar······?"
There, black hair streaming behind him, a young man was charging forward with a sword clenched in his fist.
— Uwaaaaaaaaah!! You bastaaaaaard!!!
······Screaming at the top of his lungs, no less, as if he had just locked eyes with his mortal enemy.