The Bandit and the Roadside Life-and-Death Duel
“KRAAAAAAH!!! WHY WON’T YOU USE IT?! I’M TELLING YOU TO USE THE TANG CLAN’S POISON ARTS!!!!!!”
“Ah. I already told you I can’t use poison arts.”
“Don’t give me that crap!!! Heaven and earth both know you’re from the Sichuan Tang Clan!!!”
“What the hell kind of heaven and earth know that, huh?! Are we even talking about this planet’s sky and dirt?!”
“Just use the San-gong-dok already!!!!!”
“That damned San-gong-dok!!! Why the hell are you so obsessed with it?!”
“Because of my body, obviously!!! Look at me and still say that!!!”
“What’s wrong with your body?! Your skin’s red because your liver’s shot, right?!”
“Don’t tell me you genuinely don’t know!!! Use your Eye Force and you’ll see it, won’t you?! Look already!!!”
Eye Force was a technique that poured internal energy into the eyes to sharpen one’s vision, allowing a rough observation of the flow of qi. Like footwork or light-body arts, it was something nearly everyone learned to some degree. But…
“I can’t use that either!!!”
He couldn’t use footwork. Eye techniques were no different.
“Stop bullshitting me, you San-gong-dok Freak!!! A righteous sect disciple who can’t even use that?! Even a middle-school graduate can manage it!!!”
“Sorry I never got to finish school, you asshole!!!”
“You’re mocking me again!!!!!!”
He wasn’t.
Gong Ryun felt a little wronged.
Behind him, Loro—who had been regulating his breath and piecing himself back together—suddenly shouted.
“Aaaah!!! That highwayman bastard!!! His internal energy flow is all kinds of wrong!!!”
Gong Ryun glanced back. Yellow light of internal energy shone from Loro’s eyes as he scrutinized the bandit.
“Th-this flow… what even is it!!! It’s like it’s going against the natural order!!! Like it’s gnawing away at his own life!!! What the hell is this! W-wait… no way!!!!!!!”
Loro’s face went white.
“No way… this is!!!”
The bandit kindly answered for him.
“That’s right! It’s Yeokcheon Magong!!!!!”
Yeokcheon Magong.
A forbidden art that defied the natural order.
A vicious, detestable mental method that burned the user’s own life force.
Loro’s face drained of all color.
Then he started screaming.
“KYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!! IT’S YEOKCHEON MAGONG!!!!!!!!!!”
“What? Loro! What’s wrong with you!”
“YEOK!!!!! CHEON!!!!! MAGONG!!!!!!!!!! HELP MEEEE!!!!!!! SOMEBODY HELP MEEEEEEE!!!!!! I HATE THE COMMUNIST PARTY!!!!!! I HATE THE COMMUNIST PARTY!!!!!!!!!”
He was practically having a seizure.
“What the hell even is Yeokcheon Magong?!”
“San-gong-dok hyuuuung!!!!! This is no time for jokes!!!!!! We gotta get out of here right nowwwww!!!!!”
Loro had completely lost it to panic.
Only then did the bandit’s presence swell with arrogance.
“KHAHAHAHA!! Too late!!!!! You two aren’t getting away!!! I’ll chase you to the ends of the earth!!!”
I wasn’t planning to run either. A man doesn’t show his back. …It’s definitely not because I can’t use light-body arts.
Gong Ryun thought.
“Now!!! San-gong-dok Freak!!! You understand the situation, don’t you!!! You’ve got no choice but to use your poison arts!!! San-gong-dok is one of the few things that can suppress Yeokcheon Magong!!!!!”
The bandit took a step forward.
“And I have no choice if I want to live!!! There’s no way to stop Yeokcheon Magong’s runaway myself!!! The only method is to erase my internal energy completely with San-gong-dok and stabilize it!!! My Yeokcheon Magong’s been out of control since last week!!! Today’s the last day!!! If I don’t stabilize it today, my body will explode and I’ll die!!!”
In short:
The bandit was a practitioner of the infamous Yeokcheon Magong, and he had been suffering its side effects.
The flow of his internal energy was running wild. The only solution was to wipe the energy itself out with San-gong-dok and calm it down—like rebooting a malfunctioning computer by turning it off and on again.
But on this rural planet, obtaining San-gong-dok was no easy task. After going around and around, he had finally reached the San-gong-dok Freak himself.
“The more martial arts I use, the faster the runaway accelerates!!! So, San-gong-dok Freak!!! Use your poison arts!! Use the San-gong-dok poison arts!!!!! Before it’s too late!!! That’s the only way you get to live!!! If you refuse, we both die!!!”
In other words: a cliff-edge gambit. If you don’t give me what I want, we both go down.
One of two outcomes. Either Gong Ryun used the San-gong-dok poison arts to soothe the bandit’s Yeokcheon Magong… or he refused to use the poison arts that were supposedly his mainstay, lost the fight, and died. Or perhaps the bandit could still harvest a hidden spare dose of San-gong-dok from the Freak’s corpse.
Either way, the bandit held a structure that favored him getting what he wanted. He praised his own flawless plan to himself.
“So drop those pathetic Hainan Sect arts and that Geumna-su crap!!! If you’re a true Sichuan Tang Clan bourgeois!!!! Use your real main technique—the poison arts!!! The San-gong-dok poison arts!!! On me!! On this runaway body of mine!!!!!!”
Ah.
See? Being a Named is completely useless.
This whole catastrophe had been caused by a stupid nickname.
Gong Ryun’s head was starting to hurt.
“Hyung!!! Even now, you should escape with light-body arts!!!”
Loro fretted over him.
“Loro! Right now we have to fight and win!”
“Winning or losing isn’t the issue here! The bastards who use Yeokcheon Magong are lower than even the unorthodox sects!!! They’re the absolute bottom of the barrel!!! Only crazy-eyed psychos with nothing left to lose ever touch that art!!! And because they’ve got nothing left to lose, you never know what the hell they’ll do!!! That’s what’s terrifying about them!!!”
“That’s how it is, huh?”
Then it was fine.
At least it meant he wasn’t terrifying because he was too strong. The situation was better than that.
And that guy… from the look of him, he was a hand-based martial artist just like Gong Ryun.
Not the cheap hit-and-run type who swung long weapons. The kind who closed in and traded flesh for flesh.
That alone raised his odds. Because he could grab him.
Good. No fear. No retreat. Face him head-on. That was all.
Gong Ryun stepped forward.
“Hyuuuung!!! Be careful!!!!!”
Loro’s cheer rang out from behind.
The distance between the bandit and Gong Ryun. About five long strides. They walked toward each other.
Three strides. Soon they would enter each other’s range.
And then—
Huanghe Flood
The bandit’s palm unleashed a colossal surge of internal force.
A palm technique that simply dumped massive amounts of internal energy. Rough. Crude. Unrestrained. And that was exactly why it was terrifying. The flooding Yellow River was like that—a hell of muddy water that swallowed the land whole.
The more energy poured in, the greater the flood. And the bandit’s internal energy reserves were immense. Yeokcheon Magong was a method that burned lifespan for power, like some wicked black magic. He sacrificed his own life as an offering to gain strength.
A vast torrent of internal energy crashed over Gong Ryun.
This wasn’t a single finishing shock like the one used on Loro. It was a continuous deluge of force—like a river in flood. As long as the bandit fed energy into it, the shockwaves never stopped.
What Gong Ryun chose was a single-point breakthrough.
He concentrated force into his left hand and thrust it forward as far as it would go. His palm met the torrent at the very front and endured the impact—like a rock splitting a river current in two.
Treating the palm as a single point, like the tip of a thrusting spear, he relied on it and advanced. As if he had become a fish swimming upstream against the Huanghe itself.
One step.
But the Yellow River was rough and irregular. A palm alone could not stop every current. The farther Gong Ryun pushed forward, the more streams of force stabbed into his body from every angle. Still he did not stop. He endured everything.
Protective aura at maximum across his entire body. Unshaking internal energy control.
The protective aura he had wrapped himself in so he wouldn’t die of heatstroke. The protective aura he had used so factory machines wouldn’t shear his limbs off. The protective aura that let him keep working through overtime that felt like his body would burst. Martial arts learned purely to survive… and the desperate, earnest arts he had mastered so he could take on his frail mother’s labor quotas in her place.
Gong Ryun’s rock-solid fundamentals carried him forward.
One more step.
The final step.
He reached him.
Gong Ryun whipped out the right hand he had been hiding and struck.
No clever reversal. Geumna-su. Right now he needed the technique he was most thoroughly trained in.
His left hand continued to hold back the Huanghe Palm while his right hand flew for the enemy. Anywhere—so long as he made contact.
And in that instant—
The bandit used the hand opposite the one launching Huanghe Palm and seized Gong Ryun’s hand.
Grip locked against grip.
Uh…
It almost looked like they were interlocking fingers?
Gong Ryun was badly shaken.
What kind of trick was this?
Was there a martial art that killed people by holding hands?
While he was still flustered, the bandit withdrew Huanghe Palm and used that free hand to clamp down on Gong Ryun’s left as well.
Both hands. Interlocked fingers.
In that moment of confusion, the bandit crowed triumphantly.
“KHAHAHAHAHA!! GOT YOU!!!!!”
Got me?
Got what?
Watching from the rear, Loro also cried out.
“Wait, that stance is!!!!!”
What stance could possibly matter that much?
“The golden rule stance of bare-handed martial artists!!!!! The Internal Force Contest!!!!!!”
An Internal Force Contest.
A method of competing by pressing bodies together and pouring internal energy into the contact point, deciding victory with qi alone.
In short: internal energy arm-wrestling.
Whoever had more internal energy, and whoever controlled it better, won.
The loser of this pure qi contest would have the opponent’s force flood in through the contact point like a bursting dam, suffering internal injuries—or, in severe cases, falling into qi deviation.
“If you lose, your dantian gets completely wrecked!!! It’s the ultimate manly way to settle things!!!”
“KHAHAHA!! San-gong-dok Freak!!! You’re not getting free!!! Now you’ve got no choice but to use your poison qi!!!!!”
Indeed, escape looked impossible.
The bandit bastard had locked Gong Ryun’s hands down tight with Geumna-su of his own.
But Gong Ryun had never planned to escape in the first place.
“KHAHAHA!! From this moment I’ll start pouring force into you!!! If you don’t want to die, hurry up and push San-gong-dok-laced internal energy out through your palms!!!”
“…Got you.”
“There’s no way out now! Quickly, the San-gong-dok arts!!!”
“I reached you, didn’t I?”
“?”
He had reached him.
He had grabbed him.
The bandit never should have let himself be grabbed.
It was over.
…Geumna-su.
—CRACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Huh……?”
A hollow voice slipped from the bandit’s mouth.
He still didn’t seem to understand what had just happened.
The bandit lowered his gaze and looked at his hands. Hands weren’t supposed to look like this. The palm faced downward, yet the fingers were bent skyward. The entire hand had been crushed like soft clay—exactly as if a wicked child had squeezed a lump of undried pottery clay with all their strength.
Gong Ryun’s grip had completely pulverized the bandit’s hands.
What was this? Some kind of poison art?
“Wh-what…”
The bandit had definitely used Geumna-su as well.
Yet one grip had simply devoured the other.
No—where was the poison art, then? What kind of martial art even was this?
“It’s not over yet.”
He rotated his grip.
Originally a technique for tearing through the entrails of giant beasts. But what he was shredding now was not entrails. It was the pair of arms locked in his hands.
—CRUNCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The bandit’s tightly clasped arms twisted outward in an instant, wrung out like a wet rag. Muscle burst free of the arms. Torn clothing, skin, and muscle fibers tangled together into a grotesque mass. Shoulders dislocated. Bones slipped free of cartilage.
“GWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Only then did the pain seem to register. The bandit’s scream shook heaven and earth.
He dropped to both knees as if collapsing, his entire body crumbling.
“AAAAAAAGH!!! UAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!”
Both arms dangled uselessly. Enormous pain raced along every nerve.
Continuing the contest was impossible.
Defeat.
He would lose consciousness any second.
In the bandit’s mind, just before total blackout, a flurry of thoughts flashed past.
The poison arts… where…?
No… so that’s it…
He didn’t even need to use them… He hid his true skill to the very end…
My training was lacking…
Ahh. The suffering of the people…
“Com…rades… please… the great cause…”
He swayed—
The massive frame, now a completely dark-crimson, grotesquely swollen lump of muscle, toppled backward.
—THUD…!!!!!
At last the bandit fell.
“Haaah…! Haaah…!!! Cough! Cough! Haaah…!!! Haaah…!!!!!”
The one left standing alone at the end was Gong Ryun.
Half-exhausted, he gasped for breath in ragged heaves.