The First Tail
Of course, the matriarch of the yoho coiled at the heart of Guisusan had known of Park Woochan's assault from the very start.
A colossal mass of mana came tearing through the Fox Rain, charging straight for her.
With the illusion laid across Guisusan being dismantled wholesale, there was no way she could have missed it.
And so the mistress of the yoho den gathered her brood.
They were the ones who had been flailing about in panic anyway, scrambling to decide what to do next. There was no telling them to go home now, and even if they did, it was already too late.
So instead, the matriarch swept the scrambling yoho up and organized them under her own command.
The mana bearing down on Guisusan numbered seven in total.
Factoring in the advantage of terrain, the odds favored them.
It was a judgment born of circumstance, but it wasn't wrong.
After all, Park Woochan possessed precious few techniques capable of suppressing a great many enemies at once.
Park Woochan was, above all else, a hunter.
Flamboyant rampaging was not his role.
The problem was that Park Woochan himself understood this better than anyone.
And therefore—
Pleased to kill you, Cut Prettily!!
The next instant, a blazing arc of the blade carved the entire area in two.
Thk-thk! The yoho's heads went flying.
Even so, the situation was undeniably unfavorable.
Park Woochan might manage against a single powerful foe, but he was comparatively clumsy when it came to many. The advantage of the terrain lay with them as well.
And yet.
There was no particular need to humor them.
At baseline, his raw perception was superior. That the yoho were massing for an ambush went without saying—he had known it all along.
There was risk in it, but extermination came first. The conclusion he reached stood before his eyes right now.
Thud-thud-thud-thud.
Blood spattered.
A fox rain woven from yoho blood came pattering down. At the same moment, trees cleaved in two flung their arms skyward in a triumphant salute before beginning their long fall—upper halves of trunks, severed branches, splintered cores, yoho heads and all.
The den the foxes had labored to build atop Guisusan reverted to bare mountain in the space of a heartbeat.
The work was clean enough that his students, who by now would be beginning their own assault on Guisusan, would never even notice.
With a single strike, over a thousand yoho had been reduced to headless corpses.
And yet Park Woochan only furrowed his brow, as if profoundly unsatisfied.
This is why I hate striking first.
They say the early bird wins, but that depends entirely on the time and the situation.
As he had said time and again, a signature is a technique that pushes an individual hunter's abilities to their absolute limit.
And because signatures embody the very nature of those who eat by the sword and live by killing monsters, the vast majority of them are specialized for raw lethality.
Invincible in theory.
A decree of death that settles an entire battlefield with a single swing—that is what it means, literally, to be a completed signature.
The same logic explains why the signatures of hunters below the so-called A+ Rank are dismissed as "unfinished."
Because they have gaps.
Unless a technique can kill a monster beyond all doubt, it has no right to usurp the name of signature.
It is, in a sense, an old guard's grumbling—but it isn't wrong either.
In practice, even signatures lauded as invincible in theory had been broken more than a few times.
Take Lee Joongoo's signature, for instance.
The same went for the straight punch that hammered through as living lightning.
There are monsters that withstand a strike exploding at the speed of a thunderbolt, head-on.
There are creatures that react even to the roar resounding across the heavens.
Even a completed signature is, in the end, nothing more than the distilled essence of an S-rank hunter.
Just as a Full Release can be met with an equal Full Release, a peer among S-ranks can shatter a supposedly invincible signature head-on.
The scene unfolding before his eyes was no different.
Thk.
A headless body caught its own falling head.
Then it pressed the head against the flat cross-section of its own severed neck, and with a crisp snick, the neck visibly reattached.
It was, in every sense, a scene from a horror film.
Considering the appearance, even more so.
Clack—the girl gripped her misaligned head and set it straight.
On this girl, who couldn't have been a day over twenty no matter how generously one guessed, there were two things her peers among young women could never claim.
One was a seductiveness wholly unbecoming of her age. The other was the pair of fox ears bulging from the crown of her skull.
Under ordinary circumstances he might have wondered why a creature with fox ears also had human ones, and what purpose those could possibly serve—but instead, Park Woochan simply drew back his blade.
A curse, then.
A rather textbook curse, one that transferred whatever damage the caster sustained onto a sacrifice.
Its distinguishing feature was, as ever, its polish.
In a one-on-one fight it might have been different, but a signature swung for wide-area slaughter lacked the capacity to cut through that curse as well.
More precisely—whatever capacity remained had been devoted, deliberately, to a certain extermination.
But even granting that.
A curse so refined that his own signature could not sever it in one stroke. And on top of that, this crawling chill along his skin.
S-rank.
That was the conclusion he reached.
The worst of the scenarios he had anticipated.
According to legend, the one who set Guisusan moving in the days of King Sinmun of Silla was King Munmu—the king who declared he would become the Great Dragon of National Protection even in death.
As a monster, that would make him at minimum B-rank.
Considering that a figure of King Munmu's caliber was entangled in this, at least A-rank power would be required.
In other words, moving and controlling Guisusan demanded strength of A-rank or higher.
That was why the first suspect for the yoho's matriarch had been, naturally, a nine-tailed fox.
As the legend of Geotaji attests, an adult nine-tails possessed strength rivaling even a fully matured dragon.
Indeed, the Association currently classified the nine-tailed fox as an A-rank monster at minimum.
But even so—S-rank?
That was a little beyond his expectations.
That said, Park Woochan's guess hadn't been entirely off the mark.
Beneath the ill-fitting hanbok, nine surging tails were plainly visible.
Yuseongsin?
The first name that came to mind passed his lips.
And at that, the yoho who had been scowling furiously only a moment ago brightened in an instant.
Yuseongsin.
A Celestial Fox recorded in the Taiping Guangji, the encyclopedia compiled in the Song dynasty.
The fox whose tricks were undone time and again by the Tang dynasty Taoist Nakongyuan.
And yet even Nakongyuan could not kill Yuseongsin, who had ascended to the realm of the Celestial Fox.
In the end, the Taoist released his captive at the easternmost edge of the land—Silla—where she was henceforth enshrined and worshipped as a god.
The legend itself is exceedingly plain, little more than one among the many Celestial Fox tales recorded in the Taiping Guangji.
However.
What set Yuseongsin apart from those other foxes lay in her very essence.
Unlike the other Celestial Fox tales, her story was born from the fox worship actually practiced in the southern Korean peninsula of that era.
The ancient fox faith that the toraijin carried with them when they left the peninsula and spread across the Japanese archipelago.
The venerable fox deity who became the wellspring of Japan's fox gods and of countless fox legends besides.
That was Yuseongsin.
It was the same reason her mood—soured with irritation mere moments ago—had recovered in a heartbeat.
Broadly speaking, how many beings in this day and age even knew the name Yuseongsin?
True, the discourteous surprise attack had shattered the charm she had prepared in advance—but if he were to become her devotee, such a transgression could well be forgiven.
Of course, none of this mattered in the slightest to Park Woochan.
She could take it or leave it.
Judging by her reaction, he hadn't been wrong. He'd saved himself the time it would have taken to deduce her identity—if anything, it was a gain.
And so.
The next instant, Park Woochan surged forward.
Simultaneously, a hurled sphere of iron screamed toward Yuseongsin's face.
Kuuuung!!
But.
Rotten mackerel is still mackerel, as they say—no, more accurately, he failed to deal any real damage at all.
Because a tail, moving as though it were a creature entirely separate from the girl before him, had batted the incoming iron sphere aside.
Kwazazazak!!
Even though Park Woochan's signature had failed to flash, a road was blasted clean through the forest far in the distance.
That was the carnage wrought by the iron ball deflected by a yoho's tail.
Needless to say, Yuseongsin's face had been utterly contorted by the effort.
Her jeogori, soaked in her own blood, made the sight all the more chilling.
It was not a consideration Park Woochan extended her.
He had not come to sightsee. He had not come to play games.
He hadn't even come to talk.
Park Woochan had come to win—and, more than that, to kill.
Splitting the very air, the blade came flying in.
The yoho, who had been parting her lips to speak, had no choice but to shriek and meet it in kind.
One of her yoryeok-laden tails collided head-on with Park Woochan's swinging greatsword.
Thanks to the yoho's mana, every single hair covering Yuseongsin's tails boasted a hardness exceeding steel.
And beyond that one, eight more tails yet remained.
Eight tails exploding outward to shatter Park Woochan's limbs.
The fox's claws flashing to behead him where he stood.
Ten attacks in all descended upon Park Woochan.
Of course.
If the number of ways to attack determined a monster's strength, the Hekatonkheires would have been an S-rank monster rather than an A-rank one.
All things in this world carry risk and return in equal measure.
And this case was no different.
The sword in Park Woochan's grip moved with uncanny grace.
It was not the clean recovery of a longsword. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Shoving the fox's tail bodily aside, he poured his entire body into a rotation. At the same instant, he gathered in the blade's arc.
With the motion of retrieving the greatsword, he scattered the point in a sweeping fan.
The buffeted tail. The flung-back greatsword. And every part of the yoho's body that crashed into them tangled and tangled again, colliding in mutual confusion.
The result: of the fox's ten attacks, not a single one so much as grazed Park Woochan's body.
It was attack and defense fused into one.
True to the essence of the greatsword arts handed down in the West, the motion of recovering the blade became both offense and shield at once.
And in the void that created—
Within a pocket of untimely safety that had opened at Yuseongsin's very throat, Park Woochan's forearm bulged.
The greatsword, still humming with the momentum of his rotation, exhaled a strained metallic cry.
W-wait a moment!!
He did not, of course, stop.
An upward slash.
The surging flash grazed past Yuseongsin's eye by the narrowest of margins.
That is not to say it missed.
Thwap. A sound that turned the blood to ice.
As a mass of flesh plummeted to the ground, Yuseongsin realized that one-tenth of the yoryeok composing her being had simply evaporated.
The strike Park Woochan had just swung had taken one of her tails.
Kyaaaa—...urk?!
Park Woochan's right fist buried itself in the snout of the yoho mid-scream.
It wasn't a strictly necessary move—but hearing her yelp in a human shape had pissed him off.
With the crack of wrenched bone and sinew, blood spattered across his gauntlet.
Yuseongsin's teeth had shattered.
She scrambled to put distance between them.
Rather than chase her down, Park Woochan instead tipped out a generous measure of solution drawn from his pack.
A poison that corroded mana.
Brewed from the venom of the Hydra, the A+ rank monster that appeared in Greece.
The agony that had tormented even immortal gods was, in moments like this, eminently useful.
It would obstruct her regeneration—and seal off any attempt to work her curse through the severed tail.
Eight left.
He counted the tails, casually.
As it happened, Yuseongsin possessed no particular weakness.
Something like the talismans the Taoist Nakongyuan was said to have used would have been nice, but there had hardly been time these past few days to prepare anything of the sort.
However.
Doesn't look like she's escaped the weaknesses of her species.
A nine-tailed fox stores its yoryeok within its tails.
Put the other way—if he succeeded in severing them, he might burn away her very mana in the bargain.
That was the hypothesis he'd come to test, and by the looks of it, the test was going rather well.
It was plain to the skin how thoroughly Yuseongsin's momentum had drained before his eyes.
Perhaps thanks to the Rooster's Crow Talisman coated along his blade, lopping off tails posed little difficulty.
Not cheap, though.
In the end, a fight against a nine-tailed fox was a matter of peeling an onion.
How many layers could he strip away, swiftly and with certainty? Could he finish the job through all nine layers without impatience shoving him forward from behind?
And—
Fortunately, Park Woochan was a very seasoned hunter.
He could perform the same task ten times over, a hundred times over, without being devoured by haste.
The chills and the headache from having invoked his signature were an inconvenience, nothing more.
His opponent was, after all, a mere S-rank monster.
A perfectly proportionate penalty.
Was that bravado to steel himself, or did he mean it?
Rather than dissect his own heart line by line, Park Woochan simply took up his sword once more.
No, wait—
And then.
Slipping into the gap before the yoho could spit out whatever she meant to say, Park Woochan strode forward in a single long step.