A Butcher's Naming Sense
The root of Park Woochan, as Jung Pilyeon understood the man, was that of a strongman armed with absolute confidence.
He was unquestionably good-natured, the sort who could laugh off anything with easy grace, but what held up that foundation was, above all else, his trust in his own skill. Put another way: a composure born of pride in himself.
His brazen attitude — reckless enough to read as outright arrogance at a glance — was much the same. It wasn't the naive optimism that he could never possibly make a mistake; it was the confidence that even if something did go wrong, it would scarcely register as a problem for him. And beneath it all lay the boldness of a man who could, in practice, resolve most problems in the blink of an eye.
That was why Pilyeon hadn't been fazed by the tabloid article that had set the school abuzz a while back. No — if anything, he had understood it. If Park Woochan truly was a hunter who had once hunted S-rank monsters, as the article claimed, then an attitude like his was only to be expected.
The signature he had demonstrated before Pilyeon's eyes mere moments ago was no different.
Thanks to the warning Park Woochan had given him beforehand, Pilyeon had been granted the time to calmly observe what was actually happening. Even with that generous head start, the flow of mana had been nearly impossible to follow with the naked eye — which spoke, more plainly than anything, to how complete the signature was.
First, Park Woochan scattered his own mana in a thin veil. The mana suspended in the surrounding air then made contact with it and began to mingle. And then, at a certain instant, that drifting mana locked precisely onto the mana held within the cans and cutting boards.
That was the exact moment Park Woochan swung his sword.
He launched no blade of pressure, nor swung any invisible edge. His wooden sword had, quite literally, done nothing more than split the air before him in two.
And yet.
Suddenly, Pilyeon recalled a story he had once heard in passing — an eerie tale claiming that, given sufficiently cruel conditions, a single drop of water could drown a man.
What had happened before his eyes was much the same. All Park Woochan had done, in the end, was cleave the air at exactly the right moment. As a result, his blade never once came into contact with the cans or the boards — because in the following instant, the mana inside those objects, resonating with the current of air, had sliced itself apart of its own accord.
In time with the arc his sword had traced through empty space, the mana of the props tore in two, top from bottom. Following the currents of mana stored within them, the items prepared for the demonstration split clean in half without being touched at all.
Which meant the essence of this signature was not, in truth, swordsmanship at all. His enemies simply killed themselves in time with Park Woochan's movements.
Defense was impossible. Strictly speaking, this wasn't even an attack — the armor and protective gear the defender had prepared simply split in two on its own.
Evasion was impossible. Strictly speaking, Park Woochan had never attacked in the first place. Much the way one's emotions flood with sympathy at the sight of someone writhing in agony, the mana within the target's body simply chose to die along with him.
Regeneration wouldn't be impossible, but it would be quite the ordeal — the mana spent on healing would tear itself apart as well.
Literally, a magic sword — that and nothing else.
No defense. No evasion. Regeneration suppressed. A master art that reproduced, through sheer technique, the kind of effect one might expect from a magic sword out of legend.
Truly, a technique worthy of the name signature.
And at the same time, he understood why Park Woochan had so readily stepped forward to show it off.
That technique was, for all intents and purposes, a magic sword. How hard or how fast an opponent might be — irrelevant. No special craft or strength was needed to land a hit. So long as one possessed the ability to stir the air before them, it was a technique that could kill anyone at all.
Would a person who could wield such a thing actually bother practicing swordsmanship? Of course not. When a single light graze would cleave anyone in half no matter who they were, who on earth would drill the fundamentals of handling a blade?
Anyone who obtained such a technique was bound to grow complacent. And at the end of that road, they would fail to put down a single E-rank monster ambushing them from behind and, nine times out of ten, die right there.
The strength Jung Pilyeon had been demanding of himself was no different. It had been barely two months since he entered the Academy — not even half a year. How vast was the gap between himself, craving visible growth already, and the greenhorn hunter from his imagination just now, drunk on power and dying without so much as noticing one E-rank monster?
Pilyeon could see it clearly now: how shallow his heart had been, chasing power he could use this instant instead of strength earned through steady practice.
Well — not that it was a particularly convenient technique.
In fact, Park Woochan had said as much himself. Watching the man demonstrate his own signature, hands-on, purely for Pilyeon's sake, he felt as though he had fallen into a scene from an old martial arts novel.
Still — how on earth was the technique named "Cut Prettily"...?
If there was a problem, that was the only one. Faced with a name that would send any enlightenment or grand awakening fleeing with its hands raised, Pilyeon found himself tilting his head before he knew it.
Ugh, shit. I'm dizzy.
Using my signature for the first time in ages had me swallowing an ill-timed headache. My body had been half-retired since the end of the Second Great Cataclysm, but I'd kept up training all the same — because the day monsters ever appeared again, I intended to be the first to throw myself into a gate. In other words, this wasn't a lack of training.
If I had to name the cause, it was the principle behind the technique itself. I had to forcibly soothe a nervous system that convulsed at the mere sight of a monster and focus on each individual mana particle drifting through the air. Deliberately turning my mind toward mana that had spilled out of a gate alongside those monsters demanded considerable patience from me.
And that focus was no light undertaking — it was on par with trying to make out the individual molecules or atoms composing an object with the naked eye. So my head ached in its own right, all while I forcibly maintained a state in which my senses raged like they were tearing apart a me attempting a cockroach dissection lab.
Wait like that for the optimal timing, swing the sword once, and? Oh my — miraculously, a clean cut, complete. Capable of killing any monster in an instant: a literal finishing move, done and dusted.
The problem was that, structurally speaking, a monstrous headache came bundled with it. It wasn't a side effect of the technique itself; my body was simply reacting on its own to what I was doing — which amounted to ignoring a peanut allergy and snacking on peanuts anyway. Fever, chills — mishandle it, and there was a real chance of dropping out of the front line entirely.
It was a fine technique for taking down a single target or handling many at once, but it also meant that if it went sideways, the cleanup was a pain. A finishing move that had to be used properly, in the proper situation. Truly a signature.
Shiiit, if it just didn't come with the side effects, I'd straight up—
If not for the risk, I'd probably have opened every hunt with it. The effect was rock solid, but honestly, I had no desire to use it proactively.
"Someday the time will come for you to build a signature of your own, too. When it does, treat this as your reference."
The only question was whether Jung Pilyeon would actually be satisfied with just that... Fortunately, the kid was nodding along, eyes shining with enthusiasm at my words.
Well, look at him. Hard to say anything when he's that delighted. A short laugh escaped me at the sight. Paying my hollow chuckle no mind, Pilyeon was slowly replaying the signature I'd just shown him. The clumsy way he waved his hand about was fairly funny to watch, but at least it was better than at the start.
Not that I expected him to copy it in one go. Using my signature required mana sensitivity above all — you had to catch, precisely, the instant the surrounding mana locked onto the mana inside the target. Even if a deficit of sensitivity could somehow be patched over, at best an S-rank hunter could use it on one or two targets at a time.
Even that much — I'd heard it dismissed as a flawed technique because, without me, the preparation time was far too long. Then again, signatures were always like that for anyone but their owner.
Honestly, flawed or not, wasn't it still better than whatever the hell Joongoo had? As I shuddered, recalling the insane technique he'd supposedly completed only after frying his own nerves with lightning a hundred-odd times, Pilyeon slowly opened his mouth and began to mutter.
"A signature, huh... a signature."
"You don't need to settle on anything right away, but if you have some rough concept sketched out in advance, it'll be convenient later, no?"
"That's true."
In Pilyeon, nodding along obediently, there was no trace of the confusion that had clouded his eyes until only recently. Ah, would you look at that. Have I finally awakened my 'talent' as a teacher?
As I marveled at my own growth and progress, Pilyeon suddenly blurted out, in a throwaway tone:
"Still... how is the technique named Cut Prettily..."
This little punk?
"Hey, Pilyeon. Sure, it might look strange to you. You might be thinking, wow, my teacher's that old and still hasn't outgrown the second grade. I understand completely."
"Uh... I wasn't thinking quite that much..."
"But think about it. Obviously, a signature — like it or not — inevitably becomes a master art that pushes its owner's ability to the very limit. In other words, cases like the one I just used, where fine adjustment is possible, are actually the rare ones."
"And among those, the signatures used by dump-everything-out types like Choi Seungjun are, as a rule, absurd in both range and power. So much so that they can't even tell friend from foe."
"In a firefight, if someone shouts, I'm about to use that insanely awesome rumble-boom from last time, so back up — do you think people would get it, or not?"
"They wouldn't."
"Right, kid. Especially in a melee — all the more so, see? So you slap on a name that sounds the part at a glance. Nobody has a clue what you mean if you say you're firing something awesome, but if Joongoo says he's using Thunder God, people get it."
"At its core, it's no different from image-making for hunters. To put it crudely — if you go around saying, I'm so-and-so, I've cleared a few C-rank monsters and a few B-ranks, how many people in this whole wide world would even know who you mean?"
That was why, during the Cataclysm long ago, the Korean government — needing to heroize its hunters and rally the people — had thought nothing of pinning embarrassing nicknames on them. Telling people that a mid-tier hunter who'd killed three A-rank monsters had arrived reassured them far less than telling them the hunter with the flashy nickname they'd seen on TV had shown up.
Even now, the caption running beneath Lee Joongoo's face — plastered huge across the front page of every video site — was exactly one such example.
[ THUNDER GOD DESCENDS ]
...Naming sense staggering enough to shock even me — and I'm a man who thinks Thunder God beats the Butcher. Who knows — from here on out, Joongoo might not manage a single loud word in the National Assembly.
Setting aside that strong-arming civilians would be a bit rich coming from a hunter — if I were Joongoo's political rival, I was confident I'd topple over backward every single time the man clapped his palms together and boomed, Thunder God Descends.
"Still... couldn't there have been at least a somewhat better name?"
"Why? Afraid that since your teacher's is Cut Prettily, yours would end up being Rough Chop?"
...
...
"Ehey, what are you even saying, teacher. You wound me."
Did you see this punk just now?
Well, there wasn't some grand other reason I'd given the technique that name. As I said, naming a signature move was closer to a signal to your comrades — I'm about to use something big, so clear out on your own. Back when I finished this technique, I'd set Cut Prettily as a working title, fully intending to give it a proper name someday...
Never got the chance.
I didn't have a party.
Fuck.
Wandering the edges of gates alone, occasionally cooperating with a handful of hunters and that was the whole of it — there had never been anyone for me to warn before using my signature, nor anyone who'd have understood the warning if I had. And so my signature's name stayed the working title it had been given: Cut Prettily.
Don't get me wrong — I'd have loved to slap on some badass name too, you know~ Sky Cleaver!! Heaven-and-Earth Splitter!! How cool would that have been, I'm telling you.
But I'd been thinking that for roughly ten years now. Renaming it at this point would only confuse people, wouldn't it?
"Anyway — was that helpful?"
"Yes. Thank you, teacher."
"Good. If you ever need help down the road, say the word anytime. If it's something I can help with, I'll help however much you need."
"Thank you, truly. But I'll be naming my technique myself."
"Hahaha, you rascal. Hahaha!"
And with that, the matter concerning Jung Pilyeon was, one way or another, settled for now.