I Believe You'll Do It
Rage had spun Wangrang's head clean around, and he struck first.
His foot shattered the earth. The ground crumbled like a cracker, and that three-meter bulk came firing out of it — a charge that broke the air as it came. His eyes were bloodshot, spit flew from his mouth, and he looked for all the world like a fighting dog mad with rabies.
"Hoo."
I let the breath go. Carbon dioxide mingled with the air and thinned away, and from that point the world began to slow.
A chest filled everything in front of me. I rolled my eyes up, and there was Wangrang, looking down. I was caught in those round, slit pupils. The eyes were vicious, steeped in a grudge, as if he would not be allowed to see tomorrow unless he tore my limbs to pieces.
The me reflected in those pupils moved. I answered the nails driven in like a spear — to his right, to my left.
White nails, or perhaps gray. Curved the way a hook bends, they were made for catching an enemy, dragging him in, and tearing him open. They came on slowly. The only thing between them and the skin was cloth, a shirt from some brand with a name, and that shirt split of its own accord and laid the flesh bare. The outer skin had begun, faintly, to tear. One second remained before the vessels would break and the blood come jetting out.
I guarded the skin under the blow and gathered the energy of the Five Phases where the nails would land. Fire, water, wood, metal, earth — five ways a human eye divides the world. I set the five energies into mutual generation, and the skin turned harder than diamond.
The second passed. No blood poured. Only a pressed mark remained.
A monster.
The nails were harder than diamond, a hardness that had left the body far behind. Nature sent up a warning: a follow-up was coming. Afterimages sheeted over my field of view, every one of them raised by Na Wangrang's hands and arms — elbow, palm, fist, thrust, claw, grab. A banquet of techniques no beast should have been able to perform. While the right hand grazed my arm, the left that remained was drawing art.
Wildness and instinct, braided together with human skill. The flurry crashed over me.
My mind had recognized the attacks. My body could not keep up. So I drove it, hard, until it had no choice.
I heated the flesh, and my temperature climbed. I shocked the nerves with electricity and hauled nerve and cognition into the same line. Faster. Fast enough that he could not follow. The speed would be mine. Sound would stand beside me like a neighbor.
The speed of lightning I still could not make my own. Sound, I could — and more than sound. Sound dropped away behind me.
The afterimages hunting me burst apart, and I fed a blow straight into the face that was glaring me down.
—
A ringing, where the sound had been cut. In the slowed world his head snapped back, and teeth leapt up on a gout of blood. I seized a shoulder, threw my body up with it, and drove my knee into his jaw.
—
The shock must have been just as heavy this time. He could not get his mind back under him. The hit felt right in the hand. I had put a proper crack in him, and he could not follow me into my world.
But as if to laugh at the thought, moonlight blazed.
Wangrang's wounds healed as though they had never been there. And for good measure, his fur caught and burned like a fire. Before I knew it the moonlight was gone, and the full moon had set. Only the half-moon that ought to have been in the sky remained.
A chill. My throat prickled. I shoved at Wangrang's chest and opened the distance, and a hand shaved through the space I had just left. The moment my feet touched ground, the world that had slowed returned to itself.
KRA-KOOM!!!
The laws of physics that had been sealed inside that speed went back to their work. The earth heaved, the clouds were shoved aside, and the ridge that had only been background was sheared away in a single mass. Rock and trees tumbled down like rain, then stopped in midair. Master, it seemed, had moved a hand of his own.
"Grrrrrr."
Wangrang howled — low, heavy, a cry that seemed to press the air flat.
"Full power, then..."
His presence had changed. The three-meter body had shot up to nearly four, and the fur on his hide burned with moonlight. A wolf of flame, the kind that belonged to myth. This was the Wolf King at full strength.
"...Grr."
The king cried out, low, and vanished where he stood.
The world slowed again. Nature hurried the information across, and from it I concentrated the Five Phases behind my back.
No — all around!
Picturing armor, I wrapped the Five Phases over my whole body. I may have been a little late. The attack sank into a gap where the energy had not spread evenly.
"...!"
A sharp blade drove dead into my stomach and stopped a hair short of the organs. I swallowed the groan and stamped. The earth within ten meters turned itself inside out.
Already gone.
Fast was one thing. This was too fast. There wasn't even an afterimage, let alone a shadow. Nature reported his position in real time, but knowing was not the same as being able to answer. His physical power had climbed past all sense. It was like looking at Dad.
No. On flesh alone, he stood above Dad — and that was Dad with the Stone of Resurrection in use. He had left mere monster behind and gone past transcendence.
...I need firepower.
Overwhelming firepower, enough to punch through that transcendence. But firepower on that scale came with danger. If I stopped caring what became of everything around us, I could raise a mushroom cloud over this place without much effort — and then both my life and Wangrang's would be at risk.
Then.
What I needed was single-point concentration. One powerful blow. No more and no less. An impact just heavy enough to drop him.
I thought of the time with Dan Miryong, of that fight in the hospital. I had gathered the Five Phases into one place and set them off in a blast, and only after I reached the brink of death did I touch the realm where Dad stood. Nature reproduced the old scene for me. The difference was this: unlike Dan Miryong, Na Wangrang had stepped into the realm of transcendence, and I had a foot across that line myself. A control of power that had reached the level of a divine art would have to come with it. Get it wrong, and I could die.
The problem was that no one here was going to stand and blankly watch while I took the time to concentrate.
Shafts of moonlight wiped the landscape away. His speed climbed — not several times the speed of sound, but dozens. Following him with the eyes was meaningless. I hurled my body to the side. Something passed through the place I had been, and before I could set myself, something else kicked me out of the air.
The barrier of the Five Phases broke. Pain stung through my chest, and there was no room even to groan at it. Hundreds of shafts of light, thousands of them, beat me down.
"Ghk—!!!"
Clawed, torn, broken, ruined. Not a part of me was whole. With a clumsy Life, I seized the lifeline that was about to snap. Heal, then wound again — a vicious cycle without a break. Inside the pain, my mind felt ready to cut.
...If I can't keep up, and I can't even catch him.
I gave up range. Until now Nature had been feeding me everything within dozens of meters; I restricted that information to the reach of my own arm. An extremely compressed domain. Inside this domain alone, I was omniscient.
And then, all at once, the realization. If omniscience stood at the front, could some other word not follow on behind it?
Reckless. Nature warned me that it was too far. But the poison called curiosity could not be stopped. I had experienced it once, back when I staked the erasure of my own existence. Limited, yes — but I had been complete. That rapture was something I would not forget for all eternity.
Then. Could I reproduce it?
It didn't have to last. A few hundred-millionths of a second. No. A nanosecond would do. Inside that, putting my friend down — and more than putting him down — was possible. A surer method than single-point concentration.
Spirit blazed up in me, and bravado with it. At a means so attractive and so perfectly clear, a smile came to my face. Had he seen it? For an instant the Wolf King's pupils showed, dyed through with fear.
Right. So long as I'm the only one who gets hurt.
After everything you've suffered, what did you do wrong?
I chose. And I carried it out.
I narrowed the already narrow range still further and erased even the five senses. Exactly there. I pressed omniscience down into a circle one centimeter across, dead center on the skin above the heart. If he ran me through at the throat or the belly, I would die without a chance to move. I was sure of myself. And I trusted Wangrang. My best friend would not kill me. We had too many years between us for that.
Inside senses that were going out, Wangrang reached. The target was my throat. Before the nails could sink, the eyes that had been blazing found their light again, and the arm wrenched its direction in a hurry. From the shoulder it tore a long line through the lung, and the nails touched omniscience.
Its other half awoke.
I muttered the word I had prepared.
"Snap out of it."
Omniscience and omnipotence restored Na Wangrang's consciousness.
"Huh...?"
Wangrang was lost. Like a man just risen out of a deep sleep, he looked around, trying to understand where he was.
"Hey. You with me?"
I eased out the nails that had split my chest halfway open. My sense of touch was wrecked, so there was no pain, and that was a mercy. I hurriedly wrung out what power I had left and set Life to work — emergency treatment, just enough to keep me alive. If I failed to recover within a few hours I would die anyway, but I wiped the blood away as well. On the outside I looked fine. Wangrang would have no cause to feel guilty.
"Chuyeon? What happened here?"
"Long story. I'm about to pass out, all right? We're in midair, so take me and stick the landing yourself."
"Hey, hey! Explain, and then pass out!"
"Ah, nope."
I threw myself into Na Wangrang's arms. He was, unexpectedly, soft, and he smelled good. I was able to lose consciousness in a hurry.