Is This All?
Softer than silk, and gentler than a fur coat finished under a master's hand. The figure stood straight as a set blade, pride offered up in the line of its body, and a loftiness shone in it that suffered no presence above its own.
A wolf's muzzle and fangs, a human frame blended in at just the right measure, forging the optimal shape of a warrior. Fight, and win. Run, and seize. That was the sight of it roaring with the full moon at its back—grand, noble, sublime. A beautiful being, the kind that set a heart racing.
A race in which the ferocity of the wild and the reason of humankind had fused into one finished whole. A child born of nature, and of the full moon. Werewolf. Lycanthrope. In the garden of an old and storied house, a noble pureblood announced its birth.
Awooooooo!!!
Peril howled beneath the full moon, and for a heartbeat Dan Chuyeon's mind went blank.
"They weren't human?"
He had taken them for ability users of Hwang Seokgu's sort. They were nothing of the kind. The whispers and the scents nature laid in his hands told him the race before his eyes was not human at all, and the moment that new fact settled, he understood the other two were not human either.
Grrrr…….
The wolf growled. For an instant the sheer mass of that body wrung a cold sweat out of Dan Chuyeon.
"I'm going to have a lot of questions for Wangrang."
He smiled bitterly. He had known his friend was hiding something. He had not known it was something on this scale. A secret child, at the outside? He had thought it ended somewhere around there.
Hruff!
Peril lunged. The spring of thighs thicker than a bull's hind leg came slamming in on Dan Chuyeon, and ten claws—crude things, and razor-sharp—raked for him.
Dan Chuyeon drove his foot down. His body dropped clean out of sight.
Peril's nose twitched. The tail that had torn out through their waist struck the earth, and the ground split in the shape of that tail as if a tree had come down. A wolf's tail was carved into the lovely garden.
Peril's mouth twisted. They had meant it for their finest blow, and there was no feel to it at all.
Awooooo!!!
Hraaaagh!!!
The cries of the other wolves poured into ears pricked high.
"Damn it!"
Dan Chuyeon was already standing in front of Yamaga and Sharl. The two had been on the point of fleeing; the instant they understood they could not break through him in human flesh, they threw themselves into wolf shape.
Two wolves, each far larger than he was, and Dan Chuyeon did not so much as blink.
"Come on."
He crooked a finger and provoked them instead.
Yamaga and Sharl did not charge blind. They trusted the instinct and the intuition the wolf had sharpened in them. Rush in now, and they would only be toyed with in the ugliest way. Winning was not under consideration. The plan had failed. All that remained was to break through and run. Matching their breath, they lunged together.
Dan Chuyeon rolled his neck once.
Yamaga, lean as a whip, shot out a leg and came in hard. Sharl, driven on the push of four legs, knifed in from below. A joint attack, high and low at once. They had trained the combination so long that there was nowhere decent to slip free, and a hollow laugh rose in Dan Chuyeon at the shape of it.
Because the two of them were strong? That was part of it, yes. He did not have much experience of a real fight. The opponents he had actually faced could be counted on one hand, and from where he stood these two were strong. The pressure of them, the pitch of the violence, told him this was the real thing.
But he had laughed for another reason. They were strong. They were. And that was the whole of it.
"Still not stronger than a god, though."
A mythic dragon was not worth the comparison, and they were far weaker than the man sitting on the wooden floor at this very moment, watching.
"So I really was strong?"
Monsters crowded so thick around him that Dan Chuyeon had never thought of himself that way. Weakest of the group. Someone who needed protecting. A baby, meant to study and to play. All of it was only a dissonance of perception, born because the average around him sat absurdly high. Dan Chuyeon was strong—strong enough to have room for stray thoughts even with an attack about to touch the nape of his neck. One second passed between the start of the strike and the impact, and inside that second he finished taking his own measure.
An under-tackle rocked his waist. A band of muscle hammered his neck. The two wolves' eyes flew wide. There was no soft give of human flesh under them, only a sturdiness like rebar, like steel, ringing a shiver through their bodies from end to end.
He had wrapped the energies of Metal and Wood around himself and hardened the guard of his flesh: the hardness of diamond laid over a great tree a thousand years old. Dan Chuyeon licked his lips and spoke.
"……!"
Sharl's fur and Yamaga's stood up stiff. A chill colder than the ice of the Arctic ran the length of their spines as Dan Chuyeon's eyes passed over them, and they read the feeling held there. Joy, so bright he hardly knew what to do with it. The rapture of a fight, tasted and relished. Any werewolf knew that feeling. The trouble was that the two of them felt nothing of the kind.
Yamaga snatched the extended leg back and whipped a spinning kick the other way. Sharl heaved Dan Chuyeon up from below and drove him into that leg. The shockwave boomed out again.
"Kh!"
At Yamaga's grunt, Sharl seized Dan Chuyeon and hurled him. In that direction waited Peril, fangs set.
A wolf's bite came to nearly two hundred kilograms. A werewolf's was dozens of times worse. Even a saltwater crocodile, which crunched a sea turtle's shell the way a person crunches a cracker, could not serve as a comparison. As Hwang Seokgu had done when he took a Heavenly Criminal, Peril reached for their strongest weapon.
Nature warned Dan Chuyeon of the danger. At the alarm clamoring through his skull he spun his body in midair, and the energy of Wind wrenched the line of his flight. Halted all at once in the middle of it, he kicked aside the head of Peril as they charged.
The impact that burst against Peril's skull belonged to another order entirely from the kick Yamaga had thrown. A light sonic boom scoured the garden. In an instant the grounds a married couple had tended with such care were a ruin—flowers sailing far and farther, flowerbeds overturned, lake water soaking the bare earth in one cool sheet, the stone path smashed to pieces.
"Ah, damn it."
Dan Chuyeon's face went black and dead. The heart that had been running hot wilted on the spot.
Alexei clicked his tongue. Looking away in the middle of a fight—the boy's sense of tension was a disgrace.
Yamaga and Sharl struck into the opening. Retreat had been their first aim, but they could not leave the unconscious Peril behind. They spent a chance worth its weight in gold, the chance to finish what they had come to do, on a counterstrike. Foolish. They were simply not cold enough to abandon family. One of them would have been enough to get away, in any case.
Grrrrrr!!!
Yamaga's rough presence came flying in. Dan Chuyeon snapped back to himself and braced, but he was slow. Something detonated against his side, and he ground his teeth on the biting pain.
"Sharl!"
"Kgh!"
Sharl jammed Peril under her arm with no care for how it looked. Her silhouette crossed the full moon.
Dan Chuyeon threw out an arm. Yamaga latched onto it.
"Not a chance!"
His view went dark. It didn't matter. If nature was there, Dan Chuyeon would not lose the mark. His pupils drew tight. The irises bleached, and a colorless light settled in their place.
Yamaga's fur died flat. His teeth chattered. His tail hid between his legs, and his ears folded in.
"Whine……."
Instinct wailed. A natural enemy. A natural enemy was here.
Sharl's eyes, lifted toward the full moon, brimmed with terror. She did not look back. She only prayed her feet would find the ground, and soon. Something was aiming at her.
Dan Chuyeon's palm curled shut. He moved, and nature answered.
Among the innumerable laws of nature, one law revealed to humankind took form.
The force that pulls from below.
Gravity
Of that force, attraction manifested—within limits.
With a lurch, Sharl stopped dead in empty air. Her legs thrashed. A little farther—only a very little—and she would have slipped free. That little was much too far.
"No!"
She tried to get at least Peril clear, swinging her arm to throw them—and a hand closed over her.
"Got you."
It was far too early to be running. The wall still filling her sight drove Sharl to despair.
"I've got plenty to ask you. Kindly pass out for a moment."
Crackle.
"Grrghhhh!!!"
"Gyaaaaah!!!"
Electricity seared Sharl and Yamaga from end to end. Black smoke poured from their mouths, and the two of them collapsed. Eyes heavy with fatigue, Dan Chuyeon dusted off his hands.
"Brought an ox-knife down on a chicken."
Gravity had been too much. He had dozens of ways to stop them, and the win had never been in doubt. He replayed the fight slowly and felt his own lacking down to the bone. The three had plainly been beneath him—enemies he ought to have beaten without shedding a drop of sweat, and he had beaten them at full strength.
"Tsk."
Bitter in the mouth, he looked around. A construction site offered its greetings.
"I'm fucked."
Not a trace of the garden's shape remained. Staring at yet another house he had ruined, Dan Chuyeon tore at his hair.
"How am I supposed to tell Mom and Dad……."
Alexei sighed.
"You've a long way to go."
In truth, he did.
And then—
"Chuyeon……?"
For some reason Na Wangrang, come back to Dan Chuyeon's house, was standing at the gate. The three fallen werewolves filled his eyes.