The Building Becomes the Blade
Just as he had before, Park Woochan crushed a cold-essence crystal in his grip. At the same time, he clicked his tongue. He had suspected from the very beginning that Kim Minchul would have a defensive function like this. After all, when it came to experience, Park Woochan was second to no one. It was the standard defensive capability that practitioners of that kind of power invariably developed. He would have loved to prepare the cold crystal from the start, but there was no way he could. If he had, the ambush would have been dead on arrival. In the end, a mana crystal was nothing more than a trinket. Since it wasn't his own ability, he couldn't manipulate it freely, and if he forcibly suppressed it, most of the cold would simply disperse into the air. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of mana detection would have noticed immediately. Which meant it was useless for an ambush. Thanks to that, the only real damage he'd managed to inflict was from a single oversized nail, sharpened to exploit its frosty nature. The greatsword's slash, in practical terms, had done nothing more than knock Kim Minchul away from Ha-yeon. Indeed, Kim Minchul, revealing himself from beyond the factory's wall, seemed to have no injuries to speak of — aside from the hole punched clean through his shoulder.
Well, well. Talk about hasty—
Kim Minchul opened his mouth to flaunt that very fact, but the next moment he was forced to shut it and wrench his head back. Because the iron sphere Park Woochan had thrown was already upon him. Wha—?! Along with that strangled cry, more iron spheres came surging in one after another. They were Park Woochan's throwing weapons of choice. Shot-put-sized iron orbs, forged from rare metals of assorted myths. His shoulder was the catapult, his elbow the trigger. And his fingers, the rifling. The iron sphere, hurled like a baseball, detonated with a thunderous crack.
If Park Woochan's arm was the main cannon, then a hunter's inhuman strength was the propellant. The iron spheres blazing toward Kim Minchul, erupting in howls of displaced air, were as good as a wall of fire. Even Kim Minchul couldn't summon flames in this situation. The flashing light had come screaming in to tear at his skull faster than he could kindle fire. And these weren't loose enough objects to be casually melted away, either. The iron spheres wreathed in cold would shatter any half-baked defense and pulverize his body outright. For now he was dodging them by a hair's breadth, but that too had its limits. Calmly, Park Woochan reviewed the facts. Whatever Kim Minchul was trying to bluster didn't matter in the slightest. He thought of Ha-yeon's tattered state from moments ago. As expected. No matter how many times he turned it over, there was nothing he wanted to say to that bastard now. That conclusion only hardened further. Tsk.
In the end, Kim Minchul had no choice but to hold his tongue. At the same time, he summoned his trademark staff to one hand. A quarterstaff of extravagant design. He'd heard it was practically a matched set with the robe Kim Minchul wore now. Equipment supposedly tailored for him by Tiamat, when he ascended to A+ rank. Of course, as a goddess she surely hadn't wanted its performance tested like this. What a strange world it was. Well, either way. He already had a rough grasp of its capabilities from intel. Which meant he could be certain. At this moment, Park Woochan's advantages over Kim Minchul came down to roughly two things. One was the intelligence war, spearheaded by Tiamat; the other was the quality of equipment. Naturally. After turning his back on the Association, Kim Minchul had thrown himself wholly into the cult. From then on, instead of hunting monsters, he devoted himself to training. His skill had no doubt risen noticeably — but by the same token, the quality of his gear had inevitably suffered. He'd surely found ways to patch the gap in his own fashion. Leveraging connections, tapping the cult's pipelines. But that was the extent of it. Judging by the state of that robe, he was, at best, barely scraping together enough to maintain that staff. And his opponent was Park Woochan. A madman who haunted illegal auction houses hunting down mineral materials of the same grade as his prey — purely because he found monster materials distasteful. There was no way Kim Minchul could win on equipment quality. Let alone dream of assembling sidearms and auxiliary weapons the way Park Woochan did. It was the same reason hunters balked at taking up mixed martial arts. Everything in life carries risk and return in equal measure. For Kim Minchul, who had devoted himself to a cult that worshipped monsters, sourcing monster materials had to be a distant prospect indeed. Just as there are hunters who fear that learning martial arts would see them pushed off the industry's cutting edge in the meantime. It was the same.
Therefore. The next move each man would make was easy to predict — for Park Woochan and Kim Minchul alike. Gripping his staff afresh, Kim Minchul batted away one of the incoming iron spheres. And then. The sphere, deflected at a exquisite angle, intercepted the very next sphere hurtling in behind it...!
Of course it would be.
It was a scenario Park Woochan had engineered — and one Kim Minchul, knowing it, could hardly afford to lose to. And so the actions both men took were crystal clear. Having punched a hole through the wall of fire, Kim Minchul took one enormous stride forward. At the same time, flames erupted. Fire far too violent for mere iron-sphere harassment to suppress came churning to life. By contrast, Park Woochan chose to retreat. A position exactly inverted from before, when Park Woochan pressed and Kim Minchul held him off. Of course, neither was serious. Not Park Woochan, greatsword drawn — nor Kim Minchul, flames kindled, either. Kim Minchul's handling of the staff was far superior to Park Woochan's self-taught blade work. But. It still fell short of a hunter who had professionally honed weapon arts. That, too, went without saying. Mastery of a martial art could never be achieved in a mere handful of years. So. There was only one thing the bastard was after. Buying time. Plain and simple. That was Park Woochan's conclusion. Unless Kim Minchul was an idiot, he wouldn't stake his trump card on a means already exposed. The quarterstaff swung so savagely was pure misdirection. Its purpose was, from start to finish, a delay to read the situation. And the biggest bait of all was, of course, the signature. The trump card that could flip this entire situation in one stroke. Given how he was charging in, was the signature a close-combat technique? Or was it nothing but an elaborate feint? He would offer those two choices and, while his opponent deliberated, scheme out his counterplay. However. There was one colossal problem with that. From beginning to end, the man who had designed this entire flow was Park Woochan himself. Naturally, even Park Woochan couldn't predict Kim Minchul's actions one hundred percent. Even so, he had already finished a rough estimate of how to steer the board. He couldn't prepare for every contingency, but at least he'd had time to think in abundance.
Thwack. Park Woochan's heel kicked the tip of his blade upward. By the time Kim Minchul registered that the motion resembled the Western longsword forms he'd once seen — Park Woochan was already standing before him. Shukuchi. It was a tactic he'd shown in their previous fight, but this time was different. Unlike then, when he'd needed to rig the stage with traps beforehand, he was now deploying Shukuchi in combat, full-scale. But. Its form was too different from Kim Minchul's expectations by far. Park Woochan's foot, riding the flow of mana in the air, kicked the blade-tip upward instead of stepping forward. The power of the earth. By the so-called principle of the earth-riding step — channeling the rotation of the planet itself to bolt thrust onto the greatsword — the moment it took hold, Park Woochan's body was flung forward as if seized by an invisible hand, crashing down on Kim Minchul in an instant. It was such overwhelming force that even Park Woochan himself could barely control it, and it had instead hurled his own body away. It looked less like a man charging with a sword, and more like a man clinging to a sword that had been fired ahead of him. And yet. The effect was undeniable.
In summary, from Kim Minchul's point of view, Park Woochan's movements looked like this: The spacesuited man he'd assumed was retreating closed the distance in a single bound. At the same time— A raised blade. Like a guillotine, it fell in a sweeping arc. A single strike that converted the tremendous energy of Shukuchi wholly into offense. This overhead chop, surpassing even a full swing, was — by all accounts — the opening of the most glaring gap in longsword doctrine: the recovery after the cut. Who in their right mind would believe it?
Oh, hell.
Blocking was impossible. He knew it in a single breath. Even reactive armor from an explosion couldn't answer that strike. Considering it was wreathed in cold as well, he'd probably be severed clean through along with his defense. The moment that judgment was made, the rest came fast. Flames burst from every inch of Kim Minchul's charging body. The target: forward. The explosion erupting toward the onrushing Park Woochan wedged itself between the two men in an instant. At the same time, the recoil sent Kim Minchul's body rocketing backward. Quite the flashy backstep, that. But. Even as his own attack went wide, Park Woochan brought the greatsword down without a flicker of hesitation. There was no sound. No roaring blaze. A single stroke. The descending blade cleaved in a straight line through the flames an S-rank pyrokinetic had released in that instant. He'd barely registered the chill that ran down his spine at the fact. The next moment, Kim Minchul beheld an impossible sight. The greatsword, its force undimmed even after parting the flames, drove into the floor.
It was such a monstrously heavy blade that drawing it back out should have taken an eternity. And yet Park Woochan did not let go of the hilt. Clack. On the contrary — he seized the auxiliary grip mounted on the blade itself. At the same time. Riding the recoil of the downward strike, he hurled his body into the air. A leap. Or flight, rather. With a violent rotation that could only be called one or the other, the greatsword planted in the floor came free. No — to be precise, it was quite the opposite. Krrrrrroooom...!! A roar like the heavens splitting shook the air. Because the factory floor that Park Woochan had 'planted' his sword into and swung had just torn away from the building in its entirety. In this moment. The abandoned factory's second and third floors became one. The floor had literally evaporated. And that evaporated slab — the second floor's ceiling and the third floor's floor — became Park Woochan's weapon and came screaming down at Kim Minchul.
'What kind of pig-ignorant bastard even does this.' That was all Kim Minchul could think. Terrorist he might be now, but as a former hunter, this was a tactic beyond his imagining. The physical capability that made it possible was impressive enough — but the real problem was the idea of using a building as a weapon in the first place. Hunters in the Association, whether they liked it or not, had always been forced to act to minimize property damage. Park Woochan was different. He was, in a sense, Kim Minchul's exact opposite. Even though the Association now counted him among its enemies, at his core he remained, as ever, an unlicensed hunter. For Park Woochan, the only thing that had ever truly mattered was exterminating monsters. Of course, even he had his lines. Boundaries he'd drawn himself, from years of running alongside Lee Joongoo. Never use people as bait. Never stand by and let greater harm happen for the sake of his own gratification. He had standards, that much. But. 'Property damage can be paid back in money, can't it?' Use everything you can use. That had been Park Woochan's iron rule since his active days. Monsters weren't opponents you could fight while minding your manners, to begin with. It was a tactic possible only for an unlicensed hunter with no honor to defend and no face to save — but it was unmistakably effective. Besides, this was an ownerless abandoned factory. Where else would he find conditions this good? And there was one more splendid thing about it, above all.
No, what the hell is th—
Kim Minchul, kindling fire against the incoming slab of building, spat a curse before he could stop himself. Because the explosion he'd thrown up in a hurry to stall the assault was scattered in the blink of an eye. It wasn't that Park Woochan had laid some particular countermeasure. Simply this: On his way here, Park Woochan had obtained the blueprints and specifications of this factory. And so, Park Woochan knew. He knew that this building had originally been planned as a grand department store worthy of its "new city" name. After the gates appeared, architects had been placed under an obligation to raise buildings from special materials, prepared against monster attacks and unlicensed hunter terrorism. All the more so for structures with high population density, like department stores. The steel used in this factory was no exception. On top of that, given its department-store designation, it had received additional fireproofing treatment. Park Woochan, for his part, was delighted. Thank God these bastards were a conscientious construction firm. If the reports had been all show and they'd skimmed the steel in practice, he'd have gained one more place to visit after this fight was over. Well, even if he did demolish the factory, it should be fine. The construction firms would be satisfied enough seeing the steel used for its original purpose. And they had the money for it.
KUUUUNG!! The slab that had been the second floor's ceiling and the third floor's floor slammed into the building's outer wall, and it burst apart. And so. The piece of the building Park Woochan had torn free and swung met the floor head-on. Dust billowed up in choking clouds. Fortunately, Kim Minchul was unharmed. He'd vented flames mid-air to control his momentum and managed to hover. But. 'Damn it.'They built this place properly, didn't they — Kim Minchul found himself grumbling despite everything. Dust far denser than their last fight. A field of vision obscured like this belonged, entirely, to stealth specialists and mana-sensors. And then. A frost-blue blade surged up from beyond the dust.
In a sense, it was an easy ambush to anticipate. But. An utterly unorthodox method of attack — literally ripping the building's corridor out to swing it. Through it, even a single instant of vision-blocking dust cloud was achieved. And into that double blind spot — of sight and of attention alike — the blade dove. In this one moment, the superiority in one-on-one combat that had stood between Kim Minchul and Park Woochan was overturned completely. Unlike the earlier ambush, he held nothing back — mana poured in without reserve as the greatsword tore through Kim Minchul's body. Shk. The sound of flesh being skewered was far more chilling than he'd expected. Park Woochan caught himself thinking that, and so squeezed his grip on the sword all the tighter, deliberately. A grievous wound. But his opponent was a hunter. It wasn't enough to say he was certainly down. Honestly now.
And then. The next instant, a chill swept through every inch of Park Woochan's body. There. Kim Minchul's hand, resting on the man's shoulder. The source of the wrongness was right there. A sunnily cheerful smile revealed itself from beneath the hood. A wan complexion. A palm slick with blood. And yet, in this very moment, Park Woochan could not say for certain who held the advantage. For a heartbeat, Kim Minchul opened his mouth. At first he wondered what to say — then thought better of it. Reproach. Admiration. Praise. Rage. None of it mattered; he couldn't imagine the man before him hanging on his words at this stage. And so. The only words Kim Minchul let pass his lips were these: Photosphere. The sun. His signature technique — that was its name.