Guardian Star and the Last Sin (1)
A week had passed since Ellie told Yeon that we would be going to retrieve the artifact.
A week was by no means a short span of time for us.
For one thing, Khan, who had fought so hard on our behalf, returned to Plot Territory — and with him went the compensation payment we had prepared.
The money itself didn't matter to us. A family that served all four of the Divine Beasts would rarely find itself struggling over coin in the first place.
Crystal Territory had been a rather special case, of course — the barrier and walls that protected and shielded their land had been all but reduced to rubble.
Even as he accepted the payment, Khan declared that the money belonged not to himself, the Successor of the Divine Beasts, nor to the Plot family, but to those who had lost children and spouses. All he was doing, he said, was delivering what those men and women had bought with their lives to the very end.
After Khan's return, we moved quickly. The artifact slumbered in the Helios Mountain Range.
With 'mountain range' right there in the name, the place boasted staggering heights — and because the scorching sun hung so close, it sweltered with an intensity few other places could match.
Fortunately, I could simply invoke Brionic's authority and ignore the heat altogether, so it was no concern of mine.
Ellie, for her part, cleared our duties in record time so that we could carve out the hours needed for the artifact expedition. Beyond that, she was studying and refining Baekyeomgeom — a sword form woven entirely from her own white Sword Flame — sparring with me again and again as she worked to forge a style that was truly her own.
And then there was Yeon.
She had devoted herself to properly mastering Jeophwa Swordsmanship, her family's unique sword form — accelerating her movements to deceive the eye, and then, the moment her opponent thought they'd caught up with her, cutting down the illusion she had already planted. It was a blade built on a kind of illusion art.
She had created a sword form unlike anything I had ever seen, and it showed power startling enough to catch even me off guard.
It was only for an instant, but I genuinely struggled to tell the real strikes from the phantoms. For a heartbeat there, I nearly conceded a clean hit — before my instincts kicked in and I managed to turn the blow aside.
When the attack failed, she made no attempt to hide her disappointment.
"Hey... still, that expression's a bit much, don't you think?"
"I let that strike out because I trusted you could block my sword even if it strained you. If I hadn't, I would have pulled it back halfway through... It's you. Of course I trust you."
Blushing at my words, she got a pat on the head and a word of thanks for her hard work.
"Next time, I will break through your guard. No matter what."
"If it breaks, I'm the one who gets hurt, you know?"
"Ah... right... that's a problem...?"
I watched her wrestle with the dilemma in silence, and when no solution seemed forthcoming, she finally declared that even if it meant shattering her own sword form, she would always withdraw the blade when it came down to it.
Among the things Ryu Shin had taught her — beyond treasuring one's sword as dearly as one's own life — was the precept that a strike, once launched, must be carried through to the end no matter what.
Yet here she was, willing to cast aside even that teaching to put me first. Something in my chest felt quietly, warmly full.
Next was my little sister, Seul.
The bow, for all its virtues, left her badly exposed in single combat.
She was no match for me, Yeon, or Ellie, and sparring with us was pointless besides, so she trained with the knights and veteran soldiers instead. That meant plenty of matches lost to letting a hit slip through while she drew an arrow with one hand and held the bow in the other, or countered because she failed to pick her timing properly.
The reason Ellie insisted she drill melee practice with a bow in hand was her advice that even in a one-on-one standoff, an archer must hold out until reinforcements arrive.
An archer fighting a duel was the mark of an army already half-shattered — but you couldn't exactly fold your hands and politely ask to be killed, either.
At any rate, Yeon's win rate in those bouts climbed steadily day by day. She had found the answer herself.
Shooting the bow with both hands.
Unlike me, my sister wasn't right-handed — she was ambidextrous. She could use both hands with equal ease, and she exploited it: sometimes she'd nock and loose with her left hand, and the instant things turned dangerous, she'd transfer the bow to her right and fire, slipping most of the incoming attacks entirely.
If I ever met another archer who fought the way she did, even I would be dragged into a psychological battle — never knowing, as her fingers flew across the string, whether the arrow would come from her left hand or transfer to her right and release without warning.
Unsurprisingly, the rookie knights and common soldiers lost that mind game almost every time.
The veterans — men who had swung spears across battlefields and turned blades with their own — still parried her arrows or split them the instant they were loosed.
Though even they had to raise both hands in surrender once she started firing arrows that curved mid-flight around their guard.
Before we left for the artifact, I half-expected my sister to ask to come along — and when I offered, her answer was no. To be precise, she wanted to, but she knew she lacked the strength for it.
While we could endure the heat under Brionic's authority with a pleasant coolness, Seul was still barely a step above an ordinary person. She refused, saying that with her frail stamina and willpower she would only be dead weight.
What she didn't know was that one of the reasons I was making this attempt at the artifact was to obtain her next weapon — as a gift.
And so, at last, the present. With everyone gathered to see us off, we set out for Helios Mountain.
There was a reason the artifact slept there. The peaks were so tall and treacherous that few people ever visited — and being the place on this continent nearest the sun, fire took to it wonderfully well.
There was no better place on the continent for forging weapons.
Blacksmiths, by and large, tended to be fiercely heat-resistant and stubbornly set in their ways, so most of them sealed themselves away on Helios Mountain alone, hammering out their work in solitude. The smith I sought was no different.
In the game, sometimes he was dead, sometimes alive. But the further the timeline advanced, the higher the odds that he was gone.
When he died, he destroyed every weapon he had ever made before taking his last breath — so players who arrived too late never saw the completed pieces at all, only scraping together weapon fragments to make do.
There was, however, one player who managed to obtain a finished weapon while the smith still lived. Even at max level, his six-person party burned through five resurrection counts — and the player who finally carried the weapon out quit the game on the spot, prize and all.
Every one of his party members who'd exhausted their revivals quit too, as I knew well from the way their last-login records stretched ever longer.
But this other world runs parallel to Earth — the game was nothing more than my guidebook.
What, I wondered, had the Azure Dragon been trying to warn me about through it?
Whatever it was — the urgent matter was us. And whatever waited up there, two Sword Masters and a top-tier Sword Expert could topple three thousand regular soldiers between the three of us.
What was there to fear?
With everyone's farewell and my sister's well-wishes behind us, we took our first steps.
We had seven days in total. Accounting for the return trip to Cumul Territory, that meant we had to finish everything within three.
Unlike in Haizi Territory, we wouldn't be concealing our movements on covert inspection — but if anyone uncovered our identities, every town and village would erupt into chaos, so forged identities were once again in order.
Ellie and I had prepared in advance: she smoothly assembled a party of adventurers for our cover — two gold-rank, one silver-rank — and distributed the papers among us, making entry into the villages laughably easy.
We passed through villages and small towns until we crossed the boundary of Cumul Territory.
Once beyond the outer wall of Cumul Territory, what greeted our eyes was a wasteland of staggering scale — an endless feast of yellow and orange stretching to the horizon.
To an ordinary person, it would look like just another desert. But this was a kind of border.
Though the distance was immense, one could reach the Demon Realm by walking roughly 15,000 kilometers from here. Perhaps because of that, the air itself carried a faint thread of demonic energy.
Unless you could wield aura, possessed one of those truly rare constitutions that could contain demonic energy, or had a body strong enough to endure it, crossing this line was all but suicide.
Which was why passing through the outer wall of Cumul Territory was so difficult — the scrutiny was merciless, identities were cross-checked, and only those who survived the screening were allowed beyond.
We, however, had our forged papers made by the very man at the top of the wall's administration. The inspection flew by in a blur, and we stepped over the boundary without a hitch.
From here, Helios Mountain was about fifty kilometers on foot — a little over twelve hours of walking.
The old me would have broken out in goosebumps at the thought of a march like that. But with my body now so vastly improved, such a distance was nothing — barely a stroll to Yongin by my old standards.
Yeon might find it a bit of a stretch, but since we'd be borrowing the strength of Jeongryeong and the wind wolves anyway, it didn't matter.
Thunder Lord — sub-skill: Heaven's Wind
Jeongryeong and two of the wind wolves answered my call. Jeongryeong, overjoyed to see me after so long, licked my palm and my face again and again.
Ellie and Yeon exchanged greetings with the wolves who would carry them up the mountain, and it seemed the girls won the beasts over quickly enough — the wolves nuzzled their napes right into the women's hands.
Ellie and Yeon, seeing the spirits behave this way for the first time, fussed over them with pets and affection, and the warmth flowed freely between them all.
Lunch had already been handled at the last village, and we'd packed plenty of provisions, so food was no issue. The heat was the problem.
Lest the two of them burn under that merciless sun, I wrapped their bodies in the Authority of Wind and the Authority of the Ice Dragon respectively — myself as well, of course.
And so, carried on Jeongryeong and the wind spirits, our journey to Helios Mountain began.
The sunlight was fierce enough to cook the skin right off our bones, but every time the heat surged in, wind and frost rose to meet it, and we pushed through the blazing glare without a single worry of burning.
The authorities couldn't last forever, though. Whenever it was time to renew them mid-march, I sent word to Ellie privately through telepathy and we handled it between the two of us.
With telepathy, the two of us could at least talk. Yeon couldn't communicate at all, so we settled on hand signals between the three of us and kept pushing forward.
As we ran on, the sun sank little by little, and darkness pooled into the emptying sky. The instant I felt the temperature plummet, I reclaimed the Authority of Wind and the Authority of the Ice Dragon from the girls before it could steal their body heat — and in its place, I invoked the Authority of the Crimson Dragon, wrapping them in warmth, shielding their bodies from the cold.
True to any desert, the night winds came howling — winds that should have sapped their warmth and driven us steadily toward freezing. But under the Crimson Dragon's authority we felt not the slightest chill; if anything, we felt pleasantly warm.
The sand-laden gales that lashed at us, Jeongryeong and the wind spirits warded off with powers of their own.
We pitched a makeshift tent from cloth and poles — just somewhere to rest our eyes.
If they were going to copy Earth, they could have at least copied proper tents with actual functionality...
There were none. Every supposedly similar product came with a fatal flaw — cloth so flimsy it tore at the first strong gust, or canopies that blocked out the sun so completely you couldn't read the outside world at all. The market was flooded with them.
Is this seriously it? the three of us had wondered, and after much deliberation we abandoned the store-bought options entirely. I decided a controlled environment shaped by my own mana and authorities would serve far better — which is how we came to be here now.
Under a night sky needled with bright, motionless stars, we ate our rations.
Cooking out here would be a luxury. We weren't tourists; this was a place where we ought to be grateful simply to have full stomachs.
The girls knew it too. They ate only until the hunger dulled, then lay down beneath the makeshift tent.
From the outside it looked ready to collapse, with no protective merit whatsoever — but I had layered the Authority of the Ice Dragon over the exterior, just shy of interfering with the Crimson Dragon's warmth, so there would be no waking to find ourselves scorched by the morning sun.
We had to keep watch regardless: first watch was Ellie, second was me, third was Yeon.
When I chose the second slot for myself, quite deliberately, Ellie and Yeon rounded on me at once.
"Hyun. If you picked second watch just to make things easy on us, give it up now."
Yeon nodded along. "She's right. We already owe you plenty — I don't want to be babied on top of it."
"Really? Tomorrow's going to be a hard march. It'll wear even you down, Ellie... You're sure about this?"
My ominous warning made them blanch — but neither looked ready to back down.
The truth was, it was nothing. With Ellie's stamina, climbing Helios Mountain was hardly a strain, and Yeon could manage it easily enough with breaks. I simply couldn't bear to watch them nodding off with exhaustion.
They could fight two, three days without sleep on a battlefield, sure — but no one survives a changed environment untouched by fatigue.
And if I weighed my ability to use the Authority of Life against the reserve mana I needed to keep available, in case something happened at the forge — then standing second watch was simply the right call.
They respected my decision, but Ellie's face as she tended the campfire carried a trace of unease, and watching Yeon's expression as she crawled in beside me, I felt an odd pang of guilt.
Not that I had any intention of reversing my choice. I closed my eyes and waited for the next watch.
Nothing went wrong before Ellie's shift and mine; we woke Yeon, and I snatched two brief hours of sleep in turn. Thankfully she, too, kept the camp without incident, and when morning came she shook us awake, and a new day began.
So the first night passed without mishap, and on the second day we struck the makeshift tent and roused the wind wolves, who had been sleeping soundly in the sand.
The wind wolves rested by rotating back into the spirit realm, trading places in an endless relay of shifts. One wolf alone refused the recall to the very end — Jeongryeong, who insisted that I would ride on his back.
Unable to break his stubbornness, I had no choice but to stay mounted on Jeongryeong's back for the whole of the journey.
How many hours had we run by then? Though we'd set out at dawn, the sun was already climbing toward the zenith.
However thoroughly an authority armored us, gaps always remained. The heat finally breached the enchantments and began seeping into the girls' skin, drop by drop.
Only when I crushed it under still greater power did the heat recede entirely — and I was startled by just how much mana sustaining the authorities demanded.
But since falling into my coma, my body had improved enormously. The recoil that once followed every technique was gone, my mana pool had nearly doubled, and I shielded them without the slightest strain.
As we ran ever forward, a mountain range of colossal scale finally heaved into view. The moment it appeared, the flat sand beneath us gave way to a natural trap-field studded with jutting rock, and the wind wolves had no choice but to let us down.
We were close now — two hours' walk at most.
We were still thanking the spirits who had carried each of us when it happened.
"Thank you, Jeongryeong. All of you."
And then something astonishing occurred.
— I'm sorry... I couldn't carry you all the way to the end...
A voice ringing inside my head. The same sensation I'd known once, when Baram spoke to me.
I didn't falter. I gave Jeongryeong a word of thanks for all his hard work and recalled him to the spirit realm.
It had been so long since I thought of Baram. I haven't forgotten him yet. Not even now.
When I truly become the Seventh Azure Dragon and ascend — I will return him to what he once was. A spirit, whole again.
"Hyun! Let's go! We'll be late if we don't move now!"
At their urgent voices, I shook my head briskly from side to side, scattering the thought like dust — and followed the two of them through the gates of Helios Mountain.
The closer we drew, the more the range swallowed our vision, filling half the sky from edge to edge. And when we reached the first of the five peaks, we began the slow climb up stairs that someone, long ago, had carved by hand.
Blacksmiths are people too. They had to haul in materials and forge weapons day after day — climbing that mountain on their own backs every single time would have been punishing beyond endurance. Lugging heavy ore up a slope came with no end of hardship, so they must have decided that stairs would spare them — and us — the worst of it.
Players in the game had speculated wildly, of course — who would carve something like this by hand? Surely it was shaped by magic. But standing here now, I could see the truth plainly.
These stairs were chiseled by hand. Truly, genuinely by hand.
The uneven, inconsistent steps proved it, first of all. The grades shifted without rhythm, throwing the balance between left foot and right foot off with every stride.
Stairs built for one purpose and one purpose only: getting up. Nothing else.
Our destination was the fifth peak of the Helios range. Since we were climbing the first, we still had a very long way to go.
And only then did it dawn on me.
In the game, I had obtained this artifact only twice.
But by my own reckoning, the odds that the blacksmith was alive were overwhelming. Ninety percent, at least, that he still lived.
Even if he had died and shattered every weapon he ever made — did I not already have, waiting for me, a blacksmith so extraordinary he could enchant a blade with his own two hands?
And so, together with the two women, I began the endless climb.