Five Minutes for a Mountain God
* * *
And then.
Atop the mountain ridge.
Gazing down over the far side of the saddle, Duduri was feeling a strange unease.
……Just as one hunter had predicted, it was this ancient wood spirit that presided over the current stampede.
Measured by the Association's standards, its strength fell somewhere between C and A.
A monster whose rank shifted depending on its stage of growth.
Which meant that, in its current state—literally all over the place—Duduri ranked as an A.
Add the environmental advantage unique to dungeons and the mana pouring out of the gate, and the practical difficulty of clearing it crept close to S-rank.
And it was precisely because it was Duduri that it could tell.
Something about this situation was wrong.
Beyond the territory Duduri had claimed, the presence of its kin vanished in an instant.
Parents. Siblings. Children.
Countless lives blooming and withering—those it should have called its own—and Duduri, their progenitor, remained utterly cold.
The attacks raining down without pause, irritating as they were, kept shearing away its extremities.
Duduri knew what this was.
Bombardment.
That was what humans called this form of attack.
In truth, it was something else entirely.
But it could hardly be blamed for the misunderstanding.
The arrow-baptism delivered under the A+ rank hunter Shin Seoa's lead was less marksmanship than aerial bombing.
And yet.
That was exactly what made this so incomprehensible.
If this offensive was support fire delivered from a distance, then what in the world was this killing intent boring into it like a blade……!!
The moment that thought crossed the dokkaebi's mind—
Park Woochan's assault had already begun.
Thud!
Through the drumming rain came the heavy sound of a fall.
Slowly, the dokkaebi turned its gaze toward where the sound had rung out.
Only then did Duduri understand.
A moment ago.
What had plummeted down below the peak was its own right arm.
───────!!
Pain swept through it as a howl.
A distant, dulled agony.
What on earth had just happened—its understanding couldn't catch up.
Park Woochan's thinking, by contrast, was remarkably simple.
Kill it.
A different dimension entirely from the rambling, ill-suited deliberation of moments before.
Naturally.
The Great Stampede.
A catastrophe that could swallow a village—and, for all anyone knew, several cities besides.
In fact, just climbing up to this point had cost him dearly.
Ten minutes spent shoving down his killing intent while his mind wandered in circles.
Even that had evaporated cleanly the instant a monster of that caliber entered his line of sight.
His brain ran white-hot.
Would Seoa, watching this scene, know the truth?
That Park Woochan had requested supporting fire not to pin down the monsters swarming their leader.
Quite the opposite.
Before carrying out the operation, he'd simply worried the surrounding monsters might crash into him, and asked her to clear them away in advance.
And now, thanks to Shin Seoa's heroic covering fire, he stood face to face with the leader without a single interruption.
As far as he was concerned, the matter was all but settled.
Whoosh—he swept the greatsword in a horizontal arc.
Even through the falling rain, the venom soaking the blade quietly asserted its presence.
Not a drop of blood.
Because in the end, it was nothing more than wood.
Not that it mattered.
Twisting the groaning blade, Park Woochan lunged again.
Trees surged up to block his path.
He regripped his weapon and met them head-on.
And at the same moment—
Duduri, too, understood.
Just what, exactly, the strike that had swept its arm away had been.
The underside of the greatsword, gripped in a reverse hold.
Saw teeth, jutting like rows of fangs, bit into the trunk with a dull thunk.
It was a monstrous amount of force.
And then.
With a wet crunch, the sole of Park Woochan's shoe slammed down.
The forcibly embedded sawblade—
wrenched free with a violent twist of the wrist, and the tree shrieked a splintering crack.
A savage sawing motion.
Ripped out as if tearing a wound open, the blade rent the tree in two.
At a glance, it looked inefficient.
Three whole operations just to fell a single section of wood.
One might reasonably think a sword's edge would be faster.
Setting aside, of course, the question of whether a blade meant for cutting could even fell mana-coated wood in the first place.
But there were proper reasons for it.
First: plant-type monsters are weak to saw-tooth structures.
Perhaps because, since time immemorial, trees have been broken by saws and knives.
Even Duduri, resistant to fire and steel alike, was no exception.
Second: the alternating-tooth structure unique to saws.
Across all ages and cultures, the defining trait of plant-type monsters has always been their regenerative power.
Nature's chosen blossoms.
Beings that are nature given form.
The vitality these creatures carry—the vitality of nature itself—means that sharp attacks are healed over in an instant.
Which is to say, a sawblade that gnaws the cross-section itself to ribbons is the single most efficient tool for sabotaging that regeneration.
And finally, third.
Into the ragged cross-sections left behind, poison can seep into every crevice.
A poison that kills plants.
Call it a medieval defoliant, if you like.
Magically treated toxins that suppress a plant's regeneration and growth.
The end result: the tree trunks Duduri had deployed to ensnare Park Woochan's ankles bought it, at most, three moves.
One move to drive in the sawblade.
One to kick it deeper and saw further through.
One to finish the cut.
And—naturally—throwing away its right arm in a blind, reckless flourish.
Even with three moves banked, the circumstances needed to make them count were woefully, hopelessly absent.
No—plant-type monsters were never suited to trading moves in the first place.
They so rarely move at all.
Even when they buy time, they have no idea how to spend it.
They possess countless means of stalling, but their own actions cost more time than they gain.
It is the hallmark of plant-type monsters, whose biological rhythms are wholly alien to ordinary animals.
Therefore.
Having surrendered an arm and left itself without a single worthwhile defense—
all that remained for Duduri was a one-way trip to hell.
Within striking distance.
Beyond the tree roots Duduri convulsively flung upward—
this was no spacing befitting its colossal frame.
Nor the distance plant-type monsters favored.
This was a hunter's domain.
Shrrrreek!!
A flash of light tore through the rain and soared.
An upward slash, as if driving the weapon itself into the target.
Not the sweeping momentum a greatsword's centrifugal weight would suggest.
A dry, almost careless stroke—as if merely touching were enough.
But the result it carved out was something else entirely.
A tree in the shape of a man. A plant wearing the form of a giant.
The flat of the greatsword met the toes of such a creature.
And in the same breath—the heel strike.
It was a motion so strange, one might doubt how else to describe it at all.
The greatsword's grip, by now clamped rock-hard in one hand.
His other hand locked around the blade's sub-grip.
Then—Shukuchi.
Kicking off the earth with the tips of his toes, Park Woochan launched skyward.
Grrrrrrrind!!
A sound far too violent for an ascent, far too brutish for flight.
He'd braced the hand plane mounted along the greatsword's flat against the base of the tree—and stepped into Shukuchi on the spot.
And so.
A fraction of the very force that turns this planet sheared Duduri's left leg away.
It was far too lavish a sight to call mere bark-stripping.
At first, the plane's scars peeled away only thin ribbons of bark—but the higher it climbed, the wider they grew.
Bark. Sap. Grain. Heartwood. Knots.
By the time it reached above the knee, the leg, unable to bear its own weight, snapped clean through.
BOOM!!
Once more, a heavy sound.
In the space of a heartbeat, Duduri had lost two of its limbs.
Of course, this would not be where it ended.
Unlike the right arm, the left leg could still regenerate.
It had snapped under its own crushing weight, after all—which made it all the more recoverable.
And Park Woochan knew this too.
Above Duduri's head.
That was where Park Woochan stood.
Looking down over a landscape like two mountains carelessly stacked by an indifferent hand.
Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter.
Rainwater streamed down.
His vision swam.
He worried the downpour might be washing away the venom he'd coated his blade with.
Only after laying down another film of mana over it could he relax, somewhat.
Even that wasn't perfect.
Every swing of the weapon shook the coating, and he had to hold the mana steady.
And his opponent was no pushover either.
A wood spirit? Duduri.
A frame and mass rivaling a giant—either alone was already a weapon.
Considering the stampede had begun with that thing's invasion, the odds were anything but favorable.
So.
Weighing every one of those conditions, Park Woochan allotted himself five minutes.
Which meant—how much time remained now?
He'd stolen its right arm with an opening strike, shrugged off Duduri's interference, and sheared off its left leg.
More than four minutes left.
'Well, shit.'
Standing on empty air, Park Woochan reached that conclusion.
The next instant, Duduri's head snapped sharply toward the open sky.
Because it had caught sight of him?
No.
More precisely—it was the mana Park Woochan had scattered so flamboyantly.
Even a dull-witted plant-type monster couldn't fail to register mana that vivid, rippling and radiating its pulse outward.
Of course, by the time Duduri turned its face, Park Woochan was already gone.
Once more—Shukuchi.
Kicking the overwhelming mana churning through the dragon vein, Park Woochan descended.
Perhaps falling would be the more accurate word.
A whipcrack of sound—the branches ahead of him lashed out.
An ill-fitting description for a plant-type monster like Duduri, but the strike was all but reflexive.
And naturally, for Park Woochan—no physical enhancer—a reflexive attack of that caliber was more than enough to be lethal.
So.
In the next instant, Park Woochan's senses flared open.
Nails. Piercing the branches, pinning them fast.
Plane. Stripping the bark, baring the tender flesh beneath.
Chisel. Peeling away that soft flesh, raising fissures.
Mallet. Driving down the groaning cracks, spreading them wide.
Saw. And felling the weakened branches in a single stroke.
A belated bloom—flowers of flood and ruin?—burst against the sky.
And at the very center of it stood Park Woochan.
A wingless human body, weaving between the flowers blooming in the heavens.
Rat-at-at-at-at!!
The branches he'd cut through fell belatedly behind him.
And in the same breath—
through the gap he'd carved, Park Woochan's blade drank in the light.
The strike.
Seizing the opening without hesitation, he drove in his gambit.
The strike of a mountain-like spirit of colossal trees crossed with Park Woochan's blade.
And then.
SHRAKK!!
With a ringing crack, the giant's left arm went flying into the sky.
A feat impossible through raw strength alone—for Park Woochan, yes, but even for a same-rank physical enhancer.
The spirit's body, coated in staggering mana, was dismissed head-on by a single stroke.
But not a fatal blow.
Park Woochan's instinct had told him so.
Duduri's essence was, at heart, a wood spirit.
In other words—less a giant than a slime made of trees.
The Royal Family Tree?.
Duduri's core. Duduri's faith.
The foundation of the wood spirit Duduri was that sacred forest so named.
But even so, he couldn't simply go hunting for the latter now.
And the reason lay in a peculiarity of Park Woochan's instincts.
Call it a weakness, or call it a strength.
As stated time and again, his intuition rings far louder the higher the rank of the monster before him.
In other words.
With a near-S-rank monster standing right in front of him, what fool would go traipsing off after some sacred forest?
Therefore.
Park Woochan resolved to blow away every last tree that composed the monster before his eyes.
In a blur, Park Woochan's body spun through the air.
Barely a second since the strike that stole the giant's left arm.
Before his feet so much as touched the ground, he hurled the iron chain wound around his grip.
And then.
Ching-g-g-g-ring!!
The chain coiled around the giant's falling left arm.
Naturally, Park Woochan lacked the strength to swing that arm himself.
So instead of swinging the arm, he swung his own body.
Thwuuumm!!
Using the still-airborne arm as an anchor, Park Woochan's body rocketed skyward once more.
And at the apex of that ascent—Shukuchi.
At an action precisely identical to the last, Duduri let out a low, rumbling growl.
Simultaneously.
An enormous tree erupted from the ground.
A shape as if countless trunks had been wrung and twisted to their limit.
The spearhead of a sacred tree, in full bloom.
Ejection. Launch.
Or—growth.
Toward Park Woochan, who had only just begun to fall, the tree fired up from the earth and blossomed.
A strike that could be neither blocked nor parried.
Neutralizing it was self-evidently absurd.
And so.
Park Woochan simply fell.
Back against the surging tree, downward.
Like a meteor plunging into a mountain, he struck—and even through the sheets of rain, a cloud of dust bloomed around him.
Duduri's gambit had been brilliant, no doubt about it.
An interception built on an overwhelming difference in mass.
A single strike that permitted neither attack nor defense—there wasn't a crack in it, even to Park Woochan's eye.
The problem lay with Park Woochan's intent.
He hadn't used Shukuchi this time to claim the high ground again.
But still.
Berating Duduri for this one misread would be cruelty beyond measure.
……A ripple—the dragon vein twisted.
After all, even a genuine dokkaebi would find Park Woochan's design near impossible to read.
The descent from on high.
A fall powered by Shukuchi.
The strike that stole the left arm.
Who would imagine it had all been the setup for a single, final blow?
Duduri's instincts screamed a warning.
But.
With its last interception so hollowly evaded, Duduri had nothing left to stop what was coming.
Truthfully, even had it held that final card in reserve, it would have changed nothing.
An overwhelming altitude spanning two mountain peaks.
Energy enough to sink a mountain in one stroke—spent on nothing more than a single step of Shukuchi.
And precisely because of that, the effect was absolute.
The energy of freefall.
The shock born of slamming into the earth.
And finally, the driving force of the dragon vein, hauled up through Shukuchi.
KRRAAKADUUUMM!!
Carrying power enough to bring the very mountain range to its knees, Park Woochan swung his greatsword.
A savage rising slash.
A strike that left even its own sound behind detonated across Duduri's trunk.
And then.
A giant the literal size of a mountain went soaring into the sky.
Legs that had stood rooted to the earth like colossal trees—despite their crushing mass—swam through empty air.
And yet, in that instant, not a single soul was looking at Duduri.
……Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter.
The rain that had fallen in fine threads only moments before began to thin, fading.
For behind the collapsing bulk of Duduri—
the result of Park Woochan's single stroke had appeared.
Beyond the ink-black clouds blanketing the Gangwon sky.
A stretch of brilliant blue, revealed along the exact arc of his swing, glittered down at the world.