The Uppercut
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This time, it was the man who took the arm.
With a motion like snapping his own wrist, a stiletto blade shot up from his sleeve and flew at Park Woochan. At the same moment, his opposite hand drew a military-grade combat knife and thrust it forward. It was a move to keep his distance — and, at the same time, an implicit admission that close-quarters fighting was not his game.
By comparison, Park Woochan's response was simple on the surface and yet maddeningly intricate underneath.
A headlong, stubborn charge. One seasoned with a trick, of course.
He found himself idly wondering if the man suffered from some condition that forced him to be clever or die. Park Woochan's left foot, already driving him into range, slammed down hard against the ground. In sync with that stomp, his leaping body took flight.
It was a move far too ostentatious for a single dodge of one knife. Head to the earth, legs to the sky — at the sight of him inverting his entire body, the man couldn't suppress his confusion, though he never forgot to tense the arm gripping the dagger, ready to swing at a moment's notice.
But Park Woochan hadn't offered his back out of carelessness.
And then.
Thud.
Park Woochan's leg stepped on empty air.
Shukuchi. No — it was more accurate to call it a hovering step. As though an invisible platform existed there, Park Woochan planted his foot on open space and flipped his body over in one motion.
And naturally, a heel came plummeting down toward the man's skull.
Crack—!!
It was a force far too violent to call a footwork technique. The shockwave rippled out from the man's inner wrist. Against a strike better described as lightning itself, the man judged his arm lost. Yet even amid pain that would almost certainly leave him permanently crippled, he could not help but feel a deep, private relief.
If he hadn't sacrificed his wrist, what would have shattered was his head.
He couldn't believe anything else. Park Woochan's descending blow carried that much power.
Since his opponent wasn't a monster, anyway, he could use Shukuchi at most twice in one fight. Which meant that now — with room to breathe and space between them — was the time to hit with everything he had. That was Park Woochan's thinking.
Shukuchi was, admittedly, a unique technique. A skill that let a human body step on the sky, it offered tremendous gains in mobility — and, unexpectedly, in deception as well.
But at its heart, it was still nothing more than a footwork art. A lightness technique.
As long as it could close a gap, that was enough.
Scrape. Landing as he kicked off the man's forearm, Park Woochan swung a fist at point-blank range. It was an interval the man would never have conceded willingly, but by the time Park Woochan had forced his way inside, there was nothing to be done about it. All he managed was a flailing swipe of his nearly pulverized arm to keep Park Woochan at bay, while his good hand drew a second knife.
After that, it was a breathless, no-holds-barred slugfest at grappling distance.
True, he'd lost an arm — but the man was still a hunter. Even a wrist so wrecked it could no longer move on its own was more than enough to serve as a distraction.
Abandoning any hope of that arm's recovery entirely, the man swung his dagger.
Park Woochan, meanwhile, was fighting completely bare-handed.
Yet he didn't consider himself at a disadvantage for a second. The only thing worth watching was the other hand. A knife swung by a mangled arm was, quite literally, nothing but a diversion.
So the solution Park Woochan produced — with that in mind — was as brutishly simple as solutions came.
He extended one arm straight toward the dagger that had been needlessly flickering through his vision for the past several exchanges.
It looked like he'd thrown away the entire advantage he'd just won by taking the arm — and it was the man, in fact, who let out a strangled gasp of disbelief.
Kaang!
That was not a sound flesh and steel should ever have made together.
No matter how wide the skill gap between the man and Park Woochan, it wasn't vast enough to knock aside a mana-laced dagger with bare skin. If anything, judged purely on raw physical capability, the man — a body-reinforcement type — and Park Woochan, who stood a rung above him, were nearly identical.
Which meant there was exactly one reason the man's attack had failed. The difference in equipment.
The knife snagged against Park Woochan's suit sleeve and produced absolutely no effect. Of course it didn't. What Park Woochan wore was his combat suit — quite literally, modern-day armor. Woven from countless exotic minerals thanks to his obsessive hatred of monster materials, that suit might as well have been a castle wall to a man who'd made a career of slitting hunters' throats with nothing but a military knife.
'What the hell is this thing?!'
Needless to say, the man had no way of knowing any of this. To Park Woochan, it was simply an overpriced custom weapon commissioned because he refused to touch monster materials — nothing more. But to the man staring it down in the middle of a fight, it could only feel like an ambush from out of nowhere. It's just a suit, I thought. Turns out it's armor?!
He might have been better off sticking to the blunt strikes and joint locks of the opening exchange.
Not that Park Woochan would have done anything but snort at the suggestion.
Why do you think I used Shukuchi to dodge, when I had gear like this on hand?
The first exchange had shattered the handicap of fighting on unfavorable terrain and dragged the situation into the bare-knuckle brawl Park Woochan wanted.
The advantage won there had been spent freely to close the distance a second time.
The preconceptions he'd planted in the man's mind had turned his attack into nothing.
Three times.
In this brief little fight, Park Woochan had already seized the initiative three times over.
And.
Giving up three moves to a hunter of equal or greater rank meant, in other words, that an unbridgeable gap had opened.
He shook off the arm that had caught the dagger and seized its wrist. In the same motion, he wrenched the elbow in the opposite direction and crushed it. Crack! With a viciously satisfying sound, the elbow splintered apart. When the man instinctively tried to stagger backward, Park Woochan's leg crossed into his path and cut him off. So the man abandoned one arm entirely and swung the dagger gripped in his remaining hand.
Naturally, a suit couldn't be expected to absorb an attack carrying full strength and mana behind it.
But right now, it was the only thing the man could do.
Which meant it was easy to read.
Park Woochan pulled the broken-armed man toward him, sliding the dagger's strike — lunging for his flank — off its line and past his body. A thrust to the front was dangerous, yes — which conversely meant it could be redirected.
Kghaaaargh!!
A scream of agony, or a war cry stuffed to the brim with fighting spirit — even the man himself couldn't have said. He howled something incoherent as he swung the dagger wildly. And yet the technique burned into his body still aimed with terrible precision at Park Woochan's vital points.
By conventional wisdom, a knife thrust has the shortest time-to-impact of virtually any weapon attack. Even Park Woochan couldn't parry each and every one of them.
So he chose to give back the distance the man so desperately wanted.
Yanking the arm he held, he drove a shoulder check into the man's torso.
Cheolsango — infused with everything his mana could give — detonated against the man's body with a hideous sound.
It wasn't a shove. It was a shoulder aimed at shattering ribs. Perhaps because the man had released his arm at the last possible instant, he still managed to hurl himself backward, vomiting blood. But the shoulder caught between Park Woochan's pull and Cheolsango's impact was obliterated completely.
A relentless offense. Had he simply hated the sight of that mangled arm still flopping around after destroying the wrist? Now the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder were all twisted in the opposite direction — the man's forearm hung on out of pure spite, as far as anyone could tell.
He'll be fine after one decent potion, probably.
Of course, Park Woochan wasn't exactly unscathed either. The dagger the man had jammed into his side at the moment of impact was stuck there like some grotesque ornament. No matter what, slamming a shoulder home would never be faster than a single stab.
The suit's defense and Cheolsango had kept it from sinking too deep, but it was a desperate, dying-swing kind of attack — not something to be brushed off lightly.
And then.
The next instant, the world spun.
'So that's it.'
How had a greenhorn hunter managed to abduct Yoonha — a girl whose awakened defensive ability made a ruckus practically impossible — without raising a single alarm? The answer stood right in front of him.
Come to think of it, he'd never taught Yoonha any kind of countermeasure, either. A note to revise the curriculum later drifted through his mind.
'Got him? ...He's got him. It stopped. It stopped, right.'
The man, too, studied Park Woochan's condition with taut nerves. Sacrificing the arm had been agonizing, but it was a price he could afford many times over. After all, an injury like this was nothing the finest elixirs brewed by the West's alchemists couldn't patch up.
What he'd coated the blade with was a premium-grade witch's poison, purchased from those same Western pharmaceutical houses. An extreme toxin with roots in ancient Rome, it was potent enough to kill a man from a passing graze alone.
In other words, the sacrificed arm had been insurance all along.
He hadn't expected quite this level of injury, granted — but if he could simply walk away from here, the victory was his.
Park Woochan, of course, had anticipated this too.
Whatever else could be said, the man holding onto his dagger even after confirming the suit's capabilities meant he had expectations riding on it. And yet, even so, the weapon's quality itself seemed to be nothing more than standard-issue military stock.
The first thing anyone would predict was poison.
Park Woochan, who'd assumed the man would discard the knife immediately, had been left with no choice but to expose his flank this time.
But the only reason he'd made that call so decisively was that he'd concluded — after due consideration — that it wouldn't be a problem.
Mana sensitivity.
Called a near-universally useful ability, it was nothing but a pie in the sky for Park Woochan, who couldn't hurl flashy mana attacks like the mages did.
Instead, his ability specialized in one thing: sensing monster mana.
As mentioned before, under normal circumstances its strength was less than half that of a same-rank mana-sensitivity hunter.
However.
Flip that around, and it also meant that even in a situation like this, he could keep pace with roughly half of an S-rank sensor.
The attack had been foreseen, and there was only one entry point for the poison to begin its work. It wasn't as though the man had scattered a hailstorm of poisoned hidden weapons like some martial-arts villain. At this scale, handling it on the spot was more than feasible.
Besides, no matter how lethal the toxin, poison was, at the end of the day, a consumable. If a single consumable could silently stab and drop anyone dead, every hunter in the world would be coating their weapons by now.
In other words — since they didn't — the ways to counter it were practically endless.
So. Was that the end of it?
Take, for instance, what Park Woochan was doing right now: manipulating the mana inside his own body to draw the toxin out.
He pulled the venom that had seeped into his flesh out through the wound, using mana alone. Total time elapsed: under one second. And frankly, it was barely a single dagger's worth. Had his opponent possessed an actual poison-wielding ability, such a casual fix would have been impossible — but short of that, there was nothing tricky about it.
Hell, if he hadn't had mana sensitivity in the first place, he'd never have offered up his flank at all.
Shk. Park Woochan drew the dagger out of his side, thinking as much. The blood soaking through looked damned unsightly.
He diverted his mana manipulation to stanch the bleeding from his flank. Reinforced the torn vessels as a temporary measure, routing his blood along a channel of mana instead.
With his own injury handled, the state of the fight was brutally obvious.
A man stripped of every trick he'd been hoarding, forced to face Park Woochan having already lost one arm.
A man whose signature techniques and signature weapons had been taken off the table entirely, subdued by Park Woochan's bare hands.
The gap in skill was unmistakable.
And that fact pulled the trigger inside the man's heart.
You son of a bitch......
Like a wounded beast, the man bit back a whine. Maybe it was the pain blazing through his arm since moments ago. Or maybe it was fury at himself — at the sight he made, failing to live up to that person's expectations.
But whichever it was, only one move remained to him now.
Quietly, the man slipped his empty hand into his coat.
Given that he had exactly one usable hand, it was an opening so wide it bordered on absurd.
Which was precisely why Park Woochan didn't move.
He'd intuited that whatever the man was reaching for was, to him, a trump card — his last resort.
I'm not here to wrestle this guy for fun.
His first priority was rescuing Yoonha. His second was finding out what the hell this man actually was.
And so Park Woochan waited, calm and composed, for the man's next move.
And.
The man drew a mana-crystal from inside his coat.
Or more precisely — a crystal formed of solidified mana, one might call it.
The moment the man exerted pressure, a crack crawled across its surface. Matching his slow, deliberate squeeze, the mana inside began vaporizing rapidly as it touched the open air. And in the same breath, the power sealed within revealed its true form.
Mana surging into a form that was painfully, thoroughly familiar to Park Woochan.
It was excessively similar to the spatial-ability tools he himself used every day.
Hahahahaha, how very relaxed you are! But did you really think I hadn't considered that your carelessness would be the death of you?!
In reality, though — he was wrong.
Because the senses that had gone haywire the instant he finished analyzing the properties of the released mana were now painting a vivid picture, right before Park Woochan's eyes, of exactly what was about to happen.
His judgment was instant. And so, instead of answering the man's taunt, Park Woochan lightly tossed the dagger in his hand into the empty air.
He caught it on the top of his foot, flicked the handle upward — tunk — and in the same heartbeat.
The air roared. It shrieked.
It was the result of Park Woochan's leg kicking the dagger's handle skyward the moment it left his hand.
Chasing the blade that had detonated like a flashbulb, Park Woochan broke into a sprint.
And thanks to that, the outcome came fast.
Beyond a sudden rift torn open in space — a black beast, jaws agape, mid-roar.
The ravenous predator, maw stretched wide with sccccrrk as it flaunted its savage fangs while hunting for prey — took the dagger square in its open jaws the very next instant and died on the spot.
The dagger, launched with mana crammed to bursting, couldn't withstand its own impact and broke apart. The blade that had punched through the screaming beast's gullet exploded, shredding the monster from the inside out like a shotgun blast.
To any observer, it would have looked nearly simultaneous — Park Woochan brushing past the monster's flank and, at that exact moment—
Just after the man had played his final card.
As the monster dropped dead, Park Woochan appeared right in front of him.
And.
Park Woochan's sprinting leg (→) slammed down in a fierce step (↓), dragging that energy upward (↘).
Simultaneously, the uppercut loaded and waiting at his flank (P).
In short—
"Nothin' left to show me? Then lie down."
Shoryuken (→↓↘+P), detonation.
The rising blow Park Woochan unleashed shattered the man's jawbone — and his consciousness — utterly and completely.
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