Ten Minutes of Resolve
Ryu Jihee had never once in her life thought of herself as a fighter.
It was the same back in elementary school, when she first realized the nature of her power. It was the same in middle school, when she traded blows with Lee Yeeun. To her, her power had always been something unclean — a power inherited from the whore who had seduced her own father and most of the men around him, and toppled a refugee camp on a whim, as if it were nothing more than a game.
And so, if there was a single thing driving Ryu Jihee forward now, it was one conviction alone.
She could not lose the people of the Honinhoe. She could not lose her family.
She understood Uncle Nam Sangwon's heart. She would never dare claim she truly comprehended it. Who could possibly imagine what vow he made that day — the day he lost his wife and the child in her belly in the same breath, standing before the carnage that spread out in front of him? Jihee, at least, could not even begin to guess.
But ever since that day, Nam Sangwon had repeated the same words like a mantra.
I can't wait any longer. I've endured far too long already. No one has the right to demand more patience from me than I've already given.
That was why he'd accepted such unfair terms, she supposed.
And yet.
Jihee still couldn't bring herself to accept it.
Nam Sangwon, on the other hand, was a superb fighter.
The years had made him so. Twenty of them — more than enough time for a bookworm who knew nothing but study to become one of the most feared fists in South Korea.
Which meant that Jihee's attack had landed only because it had never once occurred to Nam Sangwon that she might strike him.
Even then, it had left nothing more than a faint afterimage on his cheek.
Nam Sangwon turned his head slowly, eyes round with disbelief. Seeing that expression made Jihee's resolve waver in turn, but she forced her grip back down and opened her mouth to shout —
No. She tried to shout.
The fact that she could react at all was close to a miracle. Before her compressed mana could fire the release, before she could even pull the trigger of her outstretched finger, a chill came racing up the back of her neck. Instinctively, she slammed every scrap of the nightmare's mana she had gathered straight into it — the swelling mass of mana, dense as a shadow given weight, reared up before her like a bulwark.
And the next instant, that wall of mana evaporated entirely.
The matchup had favored her. What Nam Sangwon wielded was the giant's strength, weighted toward raw physical power. Jihee, by contrast, was half nightmare — and nightmares, incapable of easy physical interference, were inevitably strong against giants and their ilk.
Besides, in most legends, giants were famously vulnerable to temptation. Considering a nightmare's abilities, there was hardly a better matchup to be found.
Which left only one thing standing between them: a far simpler gap.
Pure, unadorned difference in power.
It was nothing but a simple front kick. Nam Sangwon closed the distance in a single stride — the step of a giant — and lashed his leg out. That alone was enough to shatter the nightmare's mana, which should have granted her near-absolute advantage against his kind.
Khk...!
His foot drove into Jihee's abdomen, punching clean through the mana barrier. Even borrowing both the mana's protection and the nightmare's peculiar constitution, the air slammed out of her lungs. It felt as though her whole stomach were heaving in a single convulsion, and she bit down hard on the rising retch.
At the same time, she spread her wings and hurled herself backward. Unrestrained for once, Jihee's power ran at nearly B-rank hunter levels — the storm of her half-blood life had seen to that.
Even so, she had never believed she could go toe-to-toe with Nam Sangwon in a head-on exchange.
But after the blow he had just allowed to land, her mind had changed.
He wasn't beyond her. Not quite.
If he catches me, I'm dead—!
Nam Sangwon, by contrast, was astonishingly calm.
Of course, it hadn't crossed his mind that Jihee would attack him. He still could hardly believe it even now — how could he have imagined it beforehand? Left to his own heart, he would have wanted nothing more than to talk her down, once and for all.
But there was no time to spare.
Panic, grief — all of it could wait. What mattered now was discharging his duty, as swiftly as possible.
That was the difference between Nam Sangwon and Ryu Jihee. Where she had floundered even after the fight began, he had looked at the girl now standing against him and made a clean decision: subdue her first, sort out the rest after.
His hand shot out, rough and grasping, toward the beating devil's wings. He forced his fingers closed around the dim, translucent membrane unique to nightmares as it tried to slip away between them — and with that grip, he threw her.
Yiing!
Jihee clawed her wings through the air, barely arresting her momentum before she struck the wall, the motion tearing a pained cry out of her.
And the giant swung his fist at her face.
Raising her arms to block was not the product of any careful calculation. The way a flinch precedes thought when something streaks past your eyes — that was Jihee in that moment, both arms snapping up on pure reflex toward the incoming fist.
It was less a defense of her face than a sacrifice of her arms.
Crack-crack!! A hideous sound reverberated through her bones — a load even a nightmare's body wasn't built to bear. There was no time to scream. The blow, its force nowhere near spent, hammered her straight into the wall through her own guard.
Ughk...!
Her back hit stone and the breath left her lungs without permission. Her whole body buzzed with numbness; even her hands and feet wouldn't answer her. Only two impacts — that was all it had taken — and already something in her wanted to fold. She lashed out at that crumpling feeling, forced it back down.
Obvious as it was, resolving herself didn't slow her opponent's hand by even a hair.
Nam Sangwon closed in again, fist surging forward — a strike that would have crushed anyone but a nightmare from head to toe — and as he swung it, he fixed his gaze on hers.
Sleep now, little one. When you wake, it will all be over.
Into those eyes, which seemed to say exactly that, Jihee glared back with everything she had.
And then.
The next instant, Nam Sangwon's fist stopped dead, short of its mark.
This is—!
Heh... hehh!
The eyes of Jihee, gasping through ragged breaths, glittered with an uncanny light.
A mystic eye.
The so-called Evil Eye — a species of ocular power that worked its special effect upon meeting another's gaze.
And the one Jihee had unleashed was the eye of charm. Arguably the most archetypal function shared by nightmares and monsters of every stripe.
To be sure, a half-blood's mystic eye was nowhere near that potent. But her opponent was a giant — and against that famous weakness to temptation, it was more than enough to freeze his movements, if only for a moment.
HAAAAH!
Seizing Nam Sangwon by the collar, Jihee loosed a battle cry. The man's height was wrong, the situation was wrong — but wings twisting as she wrenched his body down toward the floor, what she executed was the very same throw she had once used to slam Lee Yeeun in a practice match.
The hip throw she'd learned from the Butcher — Park Woochan.
In a pure contest of strength, who could say. But if the opening was there—
KWAAANG!!
Nam Sangwon's body slammed flat into the ground. It was force enough to tear a grunt of pain out of even a giant.
This was the trump card Jihee had prepared.
A dagger aimed at the blind spot of his awareness — the assumption that no one would ever attempt technique against a giant. As Park Woochan had advised her only recently, it was a fusion technique, marrying the nightmare's abilities to her own hand-to-hand craft.
A giant's structure was human all the same. More so for a man who wielded nothing but raw strength. The matchup favored her, and if she could only carve out an opening, she could pay him back a move in kind.
This moment, in other words, was the path to victory Ryu Jihee had been refining without pause, ever since the day she first laid her secret bare before Park Woochan.
"H-how about that?! Why don't you go cool your head too, Uncle? If you can't even beat me, how exactly were you planning to beat the Butcher?!"
"You clearly weren't taught for nothing."
And so.
When Nam Sangwon, flat on the floor, answered in that unshaken voice, Ryu Jihee knew she had lost.
Her read of the odds hadn't been mistaken. Her strike had landed clean — right up to the final instant, Nam Sangwon himself had been utterly unable to resist.
A heart-stoppingly perfect blow.
So what, in that moment, had been moving Nam Sangwon at all?
Willpower? Duty?
As it happened, it was nothing so light as a matter of spirit — nothing that could be overturned by morale alone.
Which meant that this contest had been decided by exactly one thing.
A trait of giants that Jihee had never known.
Ask any hunter what defines a giant, and the answers would come: physical abilities that outstrip any body-reinforcement hunter, sheer mass, and above all, skin said to turn away any blade.
But press those same hunters to name the giants' single most formidable trait, and most would say this:
Regeneration.
Not merely raw strength or stride-born speed — durability and recovery alike. Within the physical domain, this was the reason giants were said to surpass even dragons.
And Jihee, as it happened, had never known this. Because in all her life, she had never once seen Nam Sangwon wounded.
What the hell is this.
Things having come to that, that was all Ryu Jihee could say.
In truth, there was nothing else left to say.
And then.
Nam Sangwon rose to his feet.
The same instant, a violent shock swallowed Jihee's entire body. As was the way of giants, his movement alone was already destruction — already an attack.
Flung to the ceiling in a heartbeat, Jihee blacked out for a breath before plummeting back toward the floor. She came to belatedly and beat her wings, but she could barely keep herself upright, let alone fly.
At her, without a flicker of hesitation, Nam Sangwon swung his fist.
For Jihee — who had been knocked helplessly tumbling by nothing more than his rising to his feet — there was no answering strike left in her.
Ugh...
With a short groan, her legs gave out and she crumpled where she knelt. Nausea rolled up through her; without meaning to, she clutched her stomach and let her ragged breathing escape her lips.
Nam Sangwon, for his part, drew back the fist that had just driven into her solar plexus and slowed his breathing, unhurried.
By the result, an overwhelming victory.
But the truth of it was otherwise.
One move.
If she had been only a single move short, it would have been Nam Sangwon lying sprawled on this floor — not Jihee.
Feeling a certain grim awe at the fact, Nam Sangwon nodded. Then he remembered that Jihee, head bowed as she was, would never see it — but instead of adding anything further, he simply turned to go.
You were magnificent. Truly. Even I was surprised...
He wanted to praise her. But now was not the time.
And so all Ryu Jihee could watch was Nam Sangwon's heels, retreating out of her narrowing field of vision.
No.
The breath had welled up to her chin, and no voice would come. She stretched out her hand, but he had already turned his back on her.
Three minutes.
For all her painstaking preparation, that was all the time she had managed to buy.
The world spun before her eyes. Chills swept her body, and a ringing began to build in her ears. She could feel her consciousness dimming, moment by moment.
Even so, she wanted to speak. She wanted to scream. If anyone, anywhere, was listening, she wanted to beg.
Please, someone — stop that man. Those people became a family for a girl who never had one. I'm begging you. I'll do anything. I'm really going to die.
There was no answer.
She knew there wouldn't be. There was no one anywhere who could help her. The politicians who thought only of squeezing the Honinhoe dry, every last one of them — not a single soul inclined to lend an ear to half-bloods' troubles.
Wasn't that why she had prepared so desperately? Because no one was coming to her rescue, because if it wasn't done by her own hands it wouldn't be done at all. Because that ending — for a half-blood, for the daughter of a filthy nightmare — was the one she deserved.
And indeed, up to this very moment, not a single person had answered her call.
Except.
It had not been meaningless.
Two minutes to deal with the freezing ice clinging to everything. Five minutes to slip in under the noses of the reporters swarming everywhere. And three minutes to hold off him.
Ten minutes in total.
Damn it.
Tap. Tap.
At the light, unhurried footfalls sounding from far down the hall, Nam Sangwon's face hardened.
And then.
Oh, for the love of—
In his grip, a brutal greatsword. On his frame, a plain suit.
Kicking off the ground with an air of utter insouciance, a familiar face made its entrance.
Well, well. Someone certainly dressed up for the occasion.
Park Woochan.
The Butcher.
Of all moments — the one she had prayed would never come — the killer who tore apart monsters and half-bloods alike had chosen this one to appear.