The Target Makes the Technique

The house we visited that day—Jung Pilyeon's home—turned out to be quite the stately affair. And in this day and age, a stately house meant, roughly speaking, that a family could have a room apiece.

Even setting aside the realities of the era, though, Pilyeon's place was remarkably spacious. There were roughly two reasons for that: first, Pilyeon's family history—he was one of the rare children of this age who wasn't an orphan—and second, the house doubled as the kendo dojo his father ran.

Thanks to that, contrary to my expectations, we got to finish our preparations in the dojo off the back yard instead of rolling around in the dirt near some playground.

"Man, nice place ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you've got here. Perfect for practice."

"Ah, yes."

Pilyeon himself, however, looked less than thrilled. No—to put it more precisely, he looked awkward.

If I had come alone, he wouldn't have said a word, but apparently this situation was more than a little bewildering for a boy his age.

"Um, Teacher?"

"What?"

"Why is she here?"

"Hey, I told you, didn't I? She was next in line for counseling after you."

"I heard you, but I figured she'd be off wandering around somewhere else..."

As if he couldn't believe she'd followed them all the way in, Pilyeon shot a disgruntled look at Ha-yeon, who had tagged along with us right up to the dojo floor. It must have felt rather unfair from where Ha-yeon was standing.

In any case, it wasn't as if Ha-yeon had suddenly developed an interest in blade work and followed us here on a whim. That was on me for scheduling things so suddenly.

The counseling appointment was obviously an excuse, too. I could hardly tell my own student, "Actually, she lives at my place," now could I?

Fortunately, Pilyeon didn't show Ha-yeon the door. He did make a somewhat complicated face, but that was the extent of it. For all I knew, he'd already guessed at the family circumstances that had her following us here for an evening counseling session.

Well, for my part, it was nothing but convenient. Honestly, he wasn't wrong—our Ha-yeon had it rougher than most orphans.

"What, were you nervous?"

"Please don't tease me..."

"Why, what's wrong with it? Everyone's like that at that age. And she is pretty cute, you know."

"You're not wrong, but it'd be the same no matter who it was. I went to an all-boys middle school."

"Oh. Sorry..."

At my answer, Pilyeon let out a groan before he could help himself. This might be a bit much to say, but to a boy from an all-boys school, a girl his own age was practically an undiscovered species. No wonder he reacted like that.

In the end, he answered by simply tuning Ha-yeon out. Even so, his stance was far more rigid than usual, and a hollow laugh escaped me before I knew it.

"Right, right. So, what was it again?"

"Swordsmanship."

"Hmm. Swordsmanship, huh."

I found myself stroking my chin. First, though, there was one thing that needed correcting before we got into the meat of it.

"To be precise, what you learned from me isn't swordsmanship."

"Plainly put, what I use is, first and foremost, a method of disassembly."

Exactly what it sounds like: a technique built on the knowledge I'd picked up working part-time at a disassembly yard after first coming to the city, scraping together money to live on.

Loath to write off the years I'd burned on part-time work just to secure funds, I had racked my brain endlessly over how to put that knowledge to use—and this craft was what I finally hammered out.

The whole of it was butchery, retooled so it could be turned on the monster standing in front of you.

In later years I did graft swordsmanship onto it through exchanges with other experts, but that was only because, of all the tools I'd handled back then, the sword happened to be the closest kin.

In short: my technique is the knowledge from that part-time job, with swordsmanship layered on top. Pilyeon, on the other hand, would have swordsmanship as his core. Which meant we had to come at it from the opposite direction.

"You know this already, but it's hard to pull off anything dramatic in a mere two months. That goes for plain training, and it goes double for technique."

From the sound ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of him, Pilyeon had hit a wall against the technique I'd used during our spar. So he'd chewed on the question of how anyone could wield a blade like that, and somewhere in the chewing, lost the path instead. Well—catch only a fragment of a technique you couldn't hope to copy and start digging away blindly, and getting lost was only natural.

In that case, my job was to calmly guide him back onto the path.

"Let's start by fixing your stance."

Nodding along, I set before him the scenario he was originally supposed to face in the exam.

"You're clearing a gate when a thick-shelled monster appears right in front of you. What do you do?"

"Wha—!" Pilyeon yelped, scrambling to switch his stance. It was the posture I'd seen in that video a while back—the one for bringing down a heavy blow.

"A monstrous bird, watching you do all that, dives at you from overhead. Now what?"

At my words, the boy gripped his sword with a face gone even more lost and lifted his eyes toward the monstrous bird circling above, hunting for an opening.

A diligent response—much appreciated. But it was plain to see he was simply scrambling to answer whatever stood right in front of his nose.

The bird that had been timing its moment struck. Its target was the eyes. Whether it meant to peck with its beak or gouge with its talons, I couldn't read just yet. So?

"I'd hold my high guard to keep the bird at bay."

"Great. Then you just got crushed to death by the crustacean in front of you."

"Wait, what?"

Pilyeon yelped in bewilderment at my words, as if wondering whether he'd overlooked something.

Of course, there's no right answer to a question like that. But it could serve as an example of the point I wanted to make.

"It's like this."

"Like what?"

"Do you see the difference between what you just did and swordsmanship?"

"Uh, no..."

"Hey, you dummy. The target's different. The target."

Ah. A short groan burst out of him.

It was hardly some tremendous secret, yet even among hunters, plenty of people overlooked it.

Martial arts are, at their root, made for fighting people. That's why the optimal sequence of attack and defense tends to be more or less fixed: when both you and your opponent are human, the movements available to you are, in the end, limited.

A hunter's craft—hunting technique—was different.

Look no further than the techniques of the Chakho Gabusa, the armored tiger-hunters said to have faced tigers on this land in the distant past. Just as combat sports were built for fighting people, those arts contained nothing but techniques for relentlessly exploiting a tiger's habits—nothing else existed in them.

Hunters were the same. What mattered to a hunter, above all else, was the craft of hunting monsters. Reading a monster's nature and devising the right way to bring it down—that was a hunter's job, plain and simple.

It was exactly what I taught at the Academy, too. The clumsy stances he'd shown a moment ago were presumably the fruit of interpreting my lessons in his own way and putting them into practice. His drive to improve wasn't the problem—but that was precisely why I couldn't shake the feeling that all that effort was spinning its wheels.

To put it bluntly, this was an industry where monsters that shrugged off gunfire yet could be subdued with a scattering of salt strutted about in broad daylight. What mattered to hunters was the knowledge required to grasp such creatures' ecologies—and the analytical chops to devise a strategy even against a monster they were seeing for the first time in their lives.

It was not the sort of technique a boy purely bent on getting stronger ought to be touching. Presumably because he'd set his sights on the technique I'd used in our spar, he seemed to have tried to weld together every last thing I'd ever said...

"Let's put a stop to that first, for starters."

An approach like that demanded, before anything else, knowledge of monsters and the ability to read them. Until he reached the level where he could call up the right technique at the moment ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he needed it, it would do nothing but get in his way for now. That was the very thing I was training into him in the first place.

The boy nodded with a disgruntled look—half convinced, half not. He must have sensed it himself, but more than that, no better method had come to mind, so he'd tried it out of sheer desperation.

Well, that's technique for you. There's no tidy shortcut waiting to be found. Of course, saying so wouldn't solve his problem.

What to do?

It wasn't that I was short on ideas. Bluntly put, even showing him a single impressive sword art up close would help.

A spectacular technique he couldn't make heads or tails of, versus one demonstrated before his eyes, explained step by careful step. Ask which of the two would actually help him improve, and the answer was plain as day. He wouldn't walk away with any flashy achievement on the spot, but it beat slamming his head against bare earth.

The problem was—

Ugh. This is a headache.

I didn't possess a single technique suited to demonstration in a setting like this. No, seriously.

What I'd acquired by folding swordwork into my techniques was footing, weight distribution—skills for governing my own body, and nothing grander. What I used to carve monsters dead was the experience banked over years as a hunter. It wasn't that swordsmanship had been no reference at all, but with a monster on the other end of your blade, knowledge you could turn against it was always going to help more than form.

Shukuchi?

Not a bad candidate. Closing or opening the distance in a blink, certainly—but being able to plant your feet square and fight even on ground with no footing to speak of was, even by my own estimation, a colossal advantage. It even scrambled the enemy's sense of interval—you could call it a footwork art and lightness technique worthy of the name Shukuchi.

But what he wants is swordsmanship, through and through.

What I prized when facing monsters wasn't any flashy flourish, but the breed of technique that calmly picked apart a monster's nature. In other words: it lacked spectacle. At its crudest, it amounted to debating whether to slice, shave, carve out, or dig out.

There were techniques for turning a monster's attack aside, too, but like the one I'd used in that spar, the odds were good he'd walk away with no idea what had even happened.

"Hmm. Now what do I do?"

The boy studied me as I mulled it over. Under that gaze—wondering whether something was wrong—I began to walk, slow and unhurried, as if I had every answer in hand.

Then, all at once, a can lying abandoned near the dojo entrance caught my eye.

"Ah."

Now I remembered. As it happened, I had exactly the right technique.

"Right. Hey, Pilyeon. You know what a signature is?"

"Huh? Well—yes, of course I do."

A signature. Of course, I wasn't quizzing him on the English word—to put it more precisely, I meant a signature move.

Exactly what it says on the tin: a technique that becomes a hunter's emblem. These days, with the government championing hunters as heroes, the term had picked up a certain surface polish—but the way hunters had always used it meant precisely what it said: a sure-kill technique.

In an industry where people dropped dead at the slightest misstep, a single technique of that caliber was reckoned more than enough to earn your bread—an absolute ace up the sleeve. And because that's what they were, the signatures the industry actually recognized were, almost without exception, genuinely outrageous things.

Take, for example, the most famous signature in all of South Korea—Lee Joongoo's. Commonly known as the Thunder God.

A straight punch thrown as he traded his own body for a bolt of lightning.

Quite literally: unless you had the instincts to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠react to a lightning bolt, or the durability to eat a fist that had already flown into your skull, knowing about it wouldn't help you answer it in any way whatsoever.

In practical terms, stepping onto the same mat as him presupposed that you'd already worked out some way to deal with that technique. Short of that, he could flip the tide of any fight with that one signature move. Signatures were, as a rule, usually exactly this unreasonable.

"I'll show you."

And on that count, I was no different.

At my sudden announcement, the boy's eyes went round with alarm—but honestly, it wasn't anything that needed hiding. After all, even abilities of the same lineage diverged in their finest details from user to user, by gaps as wide as heaven and earth. And a signature, by definition, was a bespoke technique that pushed those minute differences into even starker relief.

Watching it wouldn't let him copy it in one go. If anything, in all my life I'd never seen a soul who could. But if he was wandering around looking for something to reference, there was no harm in showing him.

"Uh, what?"

"I said I'd show you. My signature."

I stood the can I'd spotted a moment ago in a suitable spot, then lined up the pine board and the stone lying beside it—along with an iron plate fetched from the storage shed for good measure. It was impossible to call the arrangement uniform, but it would do. My signature, to begin with, wasn't the sort of thing an onlooker could clearly make out—so the more targets, the better.

"Eyes wide open, now~"

An impromptu demonstration, abrupt and unannounced. Leaving Pilyeon flustered and scrambling behind me, I slowly drew a breath. Truthfully, the others' reactions had already slipped clean out of my sight—it wasn't a technique you could pull off while cleverly minding your surroundings.

And then—my senses, stretched further than ever, touched the mana sleeping inside the objects standing far away.

Unlike when I faced a monster, I had to forcibly wake senses that had been lying quiet.

Mana.

Like monsters, these things were products the gates had scattered across the world, and I needed to reach what slept inside them. Where a monster would have let my senses arrive without a thought, I now forced my awareness onto a trace of mana so vanishingly small that on any ordinary day I'd never have needed to notice it at all.

At that, my senses—flustered by behavior so unlike my usual—began to run wild. Every sense honed itself to a razor's edge. In the world rendered through those forcibly opened senses, mana scattered in a milky haze wrapped around my surroundings like fog.

And then—the moment the milk-white surge of mana aligned with the flow held inside my targets—I drew my wooden sword in a horizontal arc through empty air.

—Crack!!

A strange sound—neither the bite of a blade nor the sound of anything being severed. And in the same breath, every object in that line snapped in half.

"Huh?"

I hadn't flung out a blade pressure, nor swung an invisible slash. Quite literally, the can and the pebble had split in two because I had cut the air before my eyes.

Each cloven precisely in half at its own different height, they looked less like they'd been cut down by a slash and more like the very concept of "being divided in two" had been forcibly imposed upon them.

It had been quite a while since I'd last used it, but this was my signature.

...