The Bet (2)
The sparring hall was packed shoulder to shoulder.
The classes still in the middle of orientation, the ones busy ingratiating themselves with their supervising professors—every last one of them dropped what they were doing and came running.
"The top student's fighting a cadet from Class Gap?"
"We could file this away as teaching material, couldn't we?"
"Move! Get in there and burn into your eyes exactly what Class Gap amounts to!"
The cadets might have dragged their feet, but their professors had all but set their eyes alight, ordering them to go and learn something. That hardly meant the cadets themselves were short on anticipation. Far from it.
"Who do you think wins?"
"The top student, obviously. He'll flatten him!"
"Still, it's Class Gap. Shouldn't they be pretty evenly matched?"
"Yeah. Geum Taehyung. I heard a rumor he's got a Bloodline."
Standing at the center of the hall, Bihyung took in the chatter and nodded to himself.
Bloodline users are special.
A Bloodline was a power passed down through the blood. Players of Dokja Jeon-gi usually called the things bloodline carry, or traits, but their proper name was Bloodline.
The further a Bloodline travels down the blood, the stronger it gets.
A handful of geniuses refined it, then handed what they had built to the next generation. The old prestigious houses were not favored for nothing.
When I looked earlier, Geum Taehyung had a Bloodline too.
Bihyung had already triggered the Dokkaebi Bet back in class and confirmed as much.
Geumtaeyang. Capturing the Sun.
A Bloodline with a rather arrogant name—seizing the sun itself. To Bihyung, of course, the only impression it left was a flat why is the Bloodline called Geumtaeyang too?
And the secondary effect packed inside it.
There was something called Uncontrollable Yang Energy.
That's the one.
The moment he saw that power, Bihyung was certain. Take it, and he could postpone the countdown on Perfect Neutrality before the whole thing came apart.
Yokai are yin by nature. Which is to say they have no yang energy.
A single ability would never be enough to suppress that nature for good, but it ought to hold until he found a way into the library.
More than anything, Bloodlines that amplify yin and yang are rare.
The veterans had been unanimous about it. Anyone carrying a Bloodline that amplified yin and yang was to be recruited as an ally, no exceptions. Geum Taehyung was not someone Bihyung wanted for a comrade. So he would simply take the ability.
"All right. Everyone's watching, so the loser admits it cleanly. You know the rules—basic arts only. And since you haven't been enrolled long, some of you may not have any energy stored up yet..."
The supervising professor glanced at Bihyung for a moment, then looked away.
"For the sake of fairness, the circulation of any energy you already possess has been sealed. Only the use of Primal Qi is permitted."
Primal Qi, put simply, was stamina. Dig into the particulars and it was more complicated than that, but the players had usually just called it stamina anyway.
"You won't die in a spar, so give it everything you've got."
With that, Class Gap's supervising professor stepped down from the floor. Left alone in that space, Geum Taehyung crooked one corner of his mouth into a lopsided smirk.
"Finally we get to fight. Been wondering what the top student's actually made of."
"You watched the test and still couldn't tell?"
Bihyung's indifferent tone did not set Geum Taehyung off the way it had before. Instead he dragged the other corner of his mouth up as well and pulled a phone from his waistband.
"Culling anomalies and fighting other exorcists are... totally different fields, yeah!"
An app booted. Inside it, a single talisman reloaded—something like the duels in a certain anime. The difference, if there was one, was that this place had no such thing as a turn.
"Come on!"
Flame gathered in Geum Taehyung's grip. Energy born in his dantian raced along his blood channels, and the instant it pooled again in his hand, his blood amplified it.
Bloodline: Geumtaeyang, Capturing the Sun. Uncontrollable Yang Energy.
It was the most basic of flame arts, and yet the fire Geumtaeyang had gathered looked a good half again larger than it had any right to be.
Even that's only because his proficiency is low.
A technique tied to fire among the Five Elements—and not mere flame, but fire with yang energy laid over it. Yin and yang carried a rather special function. Among them, the virtue of yang energy was activation: it quickened life and amplified energy. Power, naturally, swelled by geometric degrees to match.
"Drop dead!"
The flame clenched in Geum Taehyung's hand shot forward. A fireball the size of a grown man's torso came screaming in, as if it meant to swallow Bihyung whole on the spot. Bihyung kicked off the floor of the hall and jumped.
Slow.
It wasn't that the fireball was slow. It was only that, just as on the day of the briefing, the moment a fight began the world around him seemed to drag. Stirring the fighting spirit of a yokai, Bihyung looked down at the floor below.
Geum Taehyung's sneering face came into view.
"You jumped up? You stupid or what?!"
Flame gathered in his grip again. Unlike before, these were fireflies of fire, and there were a great many of them.
Geum Taehyung's Blazing Scattershot flew out in every direction at once. Every one of them, though, had Bihyung for a target. Their trajectories kinked in midair, and the flames that claimed up and down, left and right, were nothing so much as a tiny prison.
"...That isn't dangerous, is it?"
A cadet's mutter rang through the suddenly cold stands, and still Bihyung's expression did not change.
I can see them.
In that sluggish world, every trajectory of every fireball lay open to him. No—he felt them. Refusing to ignore the sensation against his skin, Bihyung twisted his body in the air. The first fireball grazed his shoulder and slid past. The second kissed the back of his hand as he spun like a top and went shrieking away behind him. After the third and the fourth had missed as well, his feet touched down, and he kicked off again at once.
Boom! Boom! Ba-ba-boom!
Fireballs tore after him in a furious chase. They were not fast enough to catch his speed.
Even without energy stored in my dantian, I can move as if my body were reinforced.
Was this the flesh of a yokai? No. Of a half-yokai?
A yokai's skin used to shrug off ordinary arts... I wonder if I can do that too.
Worth testing. Bihyung stopped dead, tipped his head, and let several fireballs slip past him. The last one remained. In the instant it meant to take his head—
Hup!
His waist turned, and his leg came up.
Bang!
The sole of his foot met the fireball. Like a baseball off a bat, the fireball could not overcome the strength of his kick; it flew forward and burst.
My sole's tingling.
Strange, how it wasn't the foot that had caught the fireball that stung worse, but the leg planted on the ground. He was shaking his sole out when Geum Taehyung's scornful snort reached him.
"Heh. Running away the specialty of our precious top student? They said you culled an anomaly, but looking at you now, seems like all you did was run."
"......"
"Got an excuse, or—"
He was just about to keep going.
"Hmm. I felt it burst partway through. Didn't quite deflect it clean, did I?"
Bihyung was muttering to himself. He wasn't paying Geum Taehyung's words the slightest mind, and that scraped the other boy's nerves raw.
"You rotten little bastard...!!"
Geum Taehyung's face went red, then blue. On either side of his twisted brow, near the temples, heat was visibly surging.
His yang energy's rising. Is that what they meant by uncontrollable?
Yang energy that had overrun the sun points and invaded the crown of his head burned every stray thought away. All that remained in Geum Taehyung was a single fixation: kill the man in front of him. The yang energy only swelled for it, and though he cast the same basic art as before, the fireball it produced was vastly larger.
"Die!!"
A fireball grown too huge to still be called 1st Rank came roaring in.
A direct hit and I wouldn't walk away clean.
That, of course, assumed he took the direct hit.
I've got a decent feel for the body now. About time I tried the arts.
Did Geum Taehyung have any idea? That Bihyung had yet to fight in earnest. The flesh granted to a half-yokai, and the boon of a branching story—he had been carrying the fight this far only to check those things over.
The path to the summit.
If both of them were limited to basic arts, then even if he had taken the top seat on nothing but racial privilege, Bihyung did not foresee his own defeat.
Time to wrap this up.
His foot tapped the floor of the hall, light as anything.
KRAAANG!
A wall of earth a good two meters high surged up and stopped Geum Taehyung's fireball cold.
"Cheap tricks!"
Seeing his fireball blocked by a wall of soil, Geum Taehyung flew into an even wilder rage. The basic art of the fire attribute did nothing more than make flame and shape it. Once it held yang energy, though, it began to answer his hands like a living thing. Fire strung out like a serpent and lunged for Bihyung as if it were alive.
Bihyung was a little faster.
No one heard the words he murmured. They took effect all the same. Cracks split the earthen wall without warning, and from within them a host of pillars of ore shot toward the serpent of flame.
Crash! Crash! Crash!
Like a rain of rebar driven home, the serpent had its head pinned in a single instant. It could advance no farther, and went slack.
"Wh-what?!"
Geum Taehyung kicked off the ground to escape the rebar that kept coming without end. He gathered flame beneath his soles and, on that thrust, sketched a figure that seemed to fly through the air. One bar of ore sheared past his head.
...Huh?
All at once, the droplets of water beaded along the surface of the ore passing him entered his vision. And then—
Ba-ba-boom!
The water on the ore crashed over Geum Taehyung like a violent downpour.
"Gyaaah!"
His flames died, and he dropped toward the ground. Fire is weak to water. He had simply been caught by the obvious overcoming cycle of the Five Elements. Even as he fell he tried to raise the fire again, but whether it was the damp soaking his body, the flame would not come properly.
Yang energy. More of it!
He was on the verge of drying the water from his body and kindling the fire once more when a grinding creak rose from beneath the earth. He looked down. Between the streams wetting the floor of the hall, a single enormous vine was rising. It stood rigid toward the empty air like a trap, and draped the space in a sharpness honed to a point.
Fwoosh!
He raised a fierce flame, burned the vine away, and landed. Geum Taehyung's eyes flew wide—because Bihyung's expressionless gaze was on him. Finished showing off? Nothing left to show? That was what the look seemed to say.
"Don't... don't look at me with those eyes!!"
Yang energy invaded him as if it meant to burn his brain out. Geum Taehyung took every bit of that energy in and lifted both hands high toward the sky.
Fwoooosh!
He dragged out every scrap of energy he had, and when even that fell short he poured in stamina until his face went bloodless. The flame, now large enough to dwarf a grown man three times over, was nothing like the first. Condensed to an extreme, it blazed with the light of a sun. He hadn't even drawn near, and already the heat left his throat parched. Bihyung watched him, and cast his final art.
"So this works."
Mutual Generation. The attributes of the Five Elements were bound to one another. In Dokja Jeon-gi, if you triggered attributes that harmonized according to that principle on the right timing, the power of the next attack rose. It was a technique any veteran could manage as a matter of course, but he hadn't expected the timing to be identical now that the game was real. Bihyung had already passed through Mutual Generation three times.
This is the fourth.
The energy around him was sucked into his grip. The earth energy that had held the wall at the start, the metal of the rebar, the water of the downpour, the wood of the vine—each cycled into the next and multiplied the force of the flame he was about to cast several times over.
"Die!!"
Geum Taehyung's enormous fireball came flying. Matching the timing, Bihyung caught the flame in his hand like a bow and drew it back, long and taut.
Fuga...
Ah. That wasn't it. Anyway. He released the string of the Fire Bow he had drawn to its limit.
Thwip!
Set against the huge flame roaring in, the arrow was endlessly small. But—
BOOOOM!
The instant they collided, it pierced a single point and began to burn Geum Taehyung's sun away.
Flash!
Heat slammed in. At the same time Geum Taehyung understood. The fireball he had thrown had been run through.
FLAAAARE!
The light that had been blinding him whipped suddenly back upon himself. The colors around him erased themselves one by one, until at last it seemed even he was bleaching white. And then—
Fwoooosh!
A savage conflagration swallowed Geum Taehyung whole.
"...Khk!"
Burned black, he coughed out black smoke. His lungs had probably cooked as well. Even so, he wouldn't be dead. The art laid over the entire hall prevented death in the course of a spar. That was why Bihyung had stacked the energy of Mutual Generation with everything he had, and loosed it without holding back. If things had gone wrong, the professors would have stepped in and stopped it.
I won.
Looking down at the fallen Geum Taehyung, Bihyung smiled. At the same time, a notification claimed one side of his vision. The moment he read it, he went blank.
No, why...
He had only meant to take the Uncontrollable Yang Energy. Why hand over useless junk like that along with it?
Inheriting Geumtaeyang doesn't exactly feel great.
The effect, though, was considerable.
Uncontrollable Yang Energy activates Human Nature.