The Density of Desperation
The man standing before Park Woochan found that his deductions were partly right and partly wrong.
Which was only natural. He knew it himself — the man had essentially been guessing blind, without a shred of evidence to go on. Call it the realm of conspiracy theories and you wouldn't be far off.
If anything, one might have to praise Park Woochan's instinct for hitting that close to the mark on gut feeling alone.
But even the raw animal instinct that Park Woochan called a body had its limits. Thinking this, the man who had abducted Hwang Yoonha wrapped his hand around the axe hanging at his hip.
He had no name. He'd used a pseudonym for his missions, but even that he had discarded some time ago. He had never made a family, nor had he ever wanted to. Every component that made up who he was could be discarded or replaced at a moment's notice — and in truth, he had swapped out even his own face for this job.
His line of work was black ops.
Quite literally, a profession for dying silently, without a word, whenever it was required of you.
That was the workplace he and his comrades belonged to.
For what purpose? Well, if you asked, he'd have nothing to say. Some did it for money, pure and simple; others might invoke a long-retired faith called patriotism and preach the virtue of nameless devotion.
But his case was a little different.
The reason he stood here was for a certain someone — the person who had given him this particular order.
What intentions lay behind it, he had no idea. No — he had never been curious in the first place. It was an old-fashioned attitude, perhaps, but picking apart every little detail like that had never been his style.
For the blind loyalty he offered, that person had once expressed regret in a bitter tone. Something along the lines of: what a waste, that a man who could have lived large as an A-rank hunter in the Association was suffering like this instead.
He hadn't cared one way or the other.
He had never wanted glory. No — he considered a life spent at that person's side to be glory itself. He couldn't presume to call himself their confidant or right hand, but he had hoped that even if he was nothing more than a tool to be used and discarded, this body might serve as a foundation for that person's will.
Perhaps there were circumstances behind it. Maybe some reason had driven a man of such talent to pledge himself to an individual rather than an ideology or a cause. Maybe there was some private debt between them that only the two of them in all the world knew.
It was none of Park Woochan's business.
And so there was no hesitation in his stride. Honestly speaking, it bordered on excessive.
In truth, the moment he had successfully lured Park Woochan out here, there was nothing left for him to do. Even if his head left his shoulders on this spot, he could say his work was complete.
But he had no intention of meekly offering up his neck and dying. And in his eyes, Park Woochan's charge could only look like sheer recklessness.
The terrain was jungle. A sweltering flood of heat wrapped around them, an unseasonable tropical night in full effect. In a place like this, there was no way anyone could properly handle such a clumsy, oversized weapon.
Of course, with a hunter's superhuman strength, cleaving through the trees along with the swing wasn't impossible. It wouldn't even slow him down much. But the tiny opening that created — a civilian wouldn't notice it, but against a fellow hunter, it came on like a fatal blunder.
Especially against a hunter who killed people, like himself.
And so the man had finished his preparations. Slip past the first attack, then drive straight in for a strike to the nape. That would be the end of it. Whatever political fallout came after was not his concern.
Park Woochan, by contrast, had chosen a full swing at full power from the very start.
Monsters slayers, all of them cut from the same cloth, the man thought, a sneer forming inside. Even within the same underworld, the ground he stood on and Park Woochan's were different places. To him, Park Woochan's current form looked utterly foolish. No — honestly, most hunters were the same. Hunters who swung absurdly oversized weapons around like it was something to brag about had a habit of meeting their end at the three inches of steel he had quietly slipped between their ribs.
The man had no doubt it would go the same way this time.
What did strike him as odd was that Park Woochan's attack came in strangely slow.
Just as the thought crossed his mind — isn't this too slow for an opening strike? —
KWAAAAAANG!!
The steel screamed.
You were planning to slip past my opening move and counter, weren't you?
A searing, crawling pain gnawed at his wrist. Moments ago, the axe he'd been gripping so tightly had been torn from his hand in a single blow.
And into his ear tickled the sound of Park Woochan's scoffing voice.
"About all that chatter you were running just now — honestly, I was thinking the same thing."
……?!
"Even by my standards, the Association's guidelines are way too damn soft."
At the same moment, the man's back slammed into the ground.
Pain shot up his spine and his eyes flew open. Only then could the man grasp what had happened.
Park Woochan's opening move had not been a simple full swing.
Quite literally, it was a single strike that had wrung out every last drop of strength he'd had since infancy.
A blow delivered with everything he had — so complete that it could not possibly flow into a second.
And that was exactly what happened. Park Woochan's own greatsword, carried by a force he himself could not control, was seen slipping free from his hand. But as if he had anticipated it, Park Woochan reached out with that empty hand, seized the man by the collar, and rode the momentum to hurl him through the air.
Is he insane?!
He had no choice but to think it.
Perhaps because the situation was too disadvantageous for weapon work, Park Woochan's choice to abandon his weapon had paid off in the end. But that gamble had only worked because the man had planned to absorb the first strike. If the man had come out swinging from the start—
No. Before he could finish the thought, the man suddenly realized it.
He hadn't been the one deciding to absorb the first strike.
Park Woochan had baited him into it—!
There was no other way to see it. A full swing with no thought for what came after. An attack no better than a schoolyard haymaker — and precisely because of that, it took enormous courage to throw your body inside its range.
Worse, the environment favored Park Woochan not at all — a rainforest. So of course, anyone would naturally arrive at the same conclusion: slip the first attack, counter. That would be the orthodox answer, the killer technique, for dealing with an opponent who breathed so deep and heavy from the opening bell.
That was the lure.
He baited me into taking his first strike. Using momentum, using flow — even the hostile terrain—!
At this point, only one conclusion could be drawn.
This bastard learned martial arts?!
He couldn't help it.
Among hunters, martial arts were not exactly a common discipline. Combat sports were, at their core, arts for fighting humans. Naturally, since you couldn't exactly put a joint lock on a giant-class monster, hunters who studied them were rare.
But that didn't mean hunters looked down on them.
They simply had no time to learn, too busy scrambling to kill monsters — if anything, the tendency was to rate them highly.
It stood to reason. A hunter was, in the end, a profession of slaughtering monsters. The press dressed it up in fine language, but the essence of the job was nothing more than a fighter's. You couldn't attempt a takedown on a dragon, but the skill of moving your own body never went to waste.
Besides — they were hunters.
Superhumans, beyond the reach of ordinary people.
This was an age when men conjured fire from their fingertips. What possible reason would a sufficiently trained master have to fail at hip-tossing a dragon or a giant?
And so, among hunters, those who refined martial arts until they awakened to the movement of mana showed a considerable gap in ability even against others of the same rank.
The reason Park Woochan had studied martial arts was the same. His ability was, at its core, mana sensitivity — not something with enough raw explosive power to face monsters on its own.
So in his youth, Park Woochan had truly put his hands on a great many disciplines.
Martial arts among them. Granted, the revulsion that flooded him every time a monster's flesh touched his fists meant he'd never had occasion to use them in the hunt — but the arts he'd mastered for the sake of moving his own body had paid their dues in full every time a moment like this arrived.
Of course, the same was true of the man. No — as a hunter who had killed people, he had been far more serious about martial arts than most. As said: martial arts were, in the end, techniques for fighting humans.
And yet, despite all of that, it was Park Woochan who held the advantage.
Damn it all!!
The man roared a curse as he took the fall, then snapped his body back up in an instant. But Park Woochan had already closed the distance, and with an air of utter indifference, ripped off a low kick.
There was no other way to describe it. Park Woochan's leg, lashing out like a whip, caught the man's rising body mid-recovery and spun it a full revolution.
In the same breath, a hand closed around the airborne man's face — a choke slam.
CRACK!! A hideous sound rang out. Suppressing the lightning flashing before his eyes, the man whose whole body had been launched threw his arms around the limb gripping him. An armbar. But Park Woochan, without so much as a grunt, poured strength into his grip.
It was too violent to call an iron claw. Less a squeeze of the head than a compression of the skull — with grip strength like that, Park Woochan pinned the man in place and slowly spread his legs.
And then.
Park Woochan began to use the terrain.
That is to say — faced with a situation where he could no longer slam the man into the ground, he began swinging his arm, man and all, to fell the rainforest itself. If one could describe such a sight with the rather mild phrase 'made use of the terrain,' that is.
CRUNCH!!
The ancient trees filling his vision toppled with agonized groans. Rotted through and hollow though they were, trunks this massive snapping off like twigs was no ordinary feat of strength.
Worse still was the suffering of the man — clinging to Park Woochan's arm one moment, converted into a felling axe the next.
GRAAAAHH!!
In the end, the man had no choice but to release the armbar. No — more precisely, the force of Park Woochan swinging him to mow down the forest had shaken his grip loose.
But the man had no intention of simply taking it lying down, either.
Freeing himself from the armbar, he whipped his newly liberated body around and drove a knee into the arm that held him. He'd caught it just barely in time to dodge, but Park Woochan, too, was forced to let go.
As the distance opened between them, they found themselves standing at roughly the same gap as when they'd first faced off.
Only — the situation had changed.
Park Woochan, loosening his wrist with the same easy composure as before. And across from him, the man, breathing in ragged gasps, a blur of afterimages.
The density is different.
The man's thought was only natural. Even if he fell short of a true martial-artist-turned-hunter, Park Woochan's attitude toward technique was beyond comparison with other hunters.
Other hunters learned technique to survive. Some became hunters for money, maybe, or revenge. There were even those who learned technique in order to kill monsters.
Park Woochan was different.
Park Woochan had learned technique in order to breathe.
He'd had no choice. From the moment society accepted coexistence with the unfriendly neighbors who had come through the gates, Park Woochan — unlike everyone else — had been forced to accept one truth: he had no talent for living an ordinary life.
It wasn't anything so shallow as disliking study or being slow. In this world, the simple fact of having to breathe the same air as monsters was, to Park Woochan, a disgust he could not possibly endure.
And so, the density of Park Woochan's technique was different.
For money.
For revenge.
To survive.
To kill monsters.
Of course, money was necessary for living. The desire for revenge, he couldn't claim not to understand. This had become an age where strength was needed to survive, and Park Woochan wanted to kill monsters just as much as anyone.
But.
Before that sensation — the feeling of every nerve in his body twisting into knots at the mere appearance of a monster — any reason he attached felt like nothing more than an impurity.
In a word: the scale of his desperation was on another level entirely.
By now, you've probably figured it out.
But.
Instead of kindly explaining any of these circumstances one by one, Park Woochan slowly settled into his stance.
The reason people use oversized weapons isn't some grand weapon theory — it's that most of the time, anything smaller doesn't even leave a dent.
That's exactly why every last hunter out there swings around weapons the size of telephone poles.
Simply put, the weight class gap between a hunter and a large monster is so vast that nothing less will even register.
I'm a technician, you jackass.
And.
As it happened, the man was not soft enough a opponent to be beaten just because Park Woochan had been deprived of a single weapon, either.