Deep in the Underground

In the very heart of the deep, dark underground waterways.

"Huff…! Huff…! Huff…!"

A man ran, tearing out ragged breaths. It was Gong Ryun. Yet something about him felt wrong.

Scratches and gashes marked his body in places. Given the level of his protective internal energy, that should not have been an ordinary sight. His footsteps kept stumbling. He could barely keep himself upright.

And something was chasing after him.

Soon its cry reached him.

Kishishishishishishishishishi!!!!!!

As the voice rolled and echoed, a vivid killing intent poured out of the darkness. Whatever it was prowled these tangled sewers like its own home, at a speed that defied the senses.

Through shortcuts. Through emergency exits. Through ventilation shafts. It used every nearby path, staying close to its prey, waiting for the moment—tracking him with only a single wall or a single floor between them. It waited for him to weaken, slowly gnawing away at his stamina.

Kishishishishishi!!!! Madoka♩ Shining Moonlight♩♪ Magical Girl of Justice♬

That voice rang out again. He was thoroughly sick of it. This was not the first or second time.

Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!! Kishishishishishi!!!

He had already lost count of how many times he had heard it. He felt ready to die of mental exhaustion. His willpower was being scraped raw.

Gong Ryun staggered and braced a hand against the wall.

And that was the moment the presence in the dark had been waiting for—the instant he was weakest.

Swaaaaaaaaa!!!!

A razor-sharp slash tore toward Gong Ryun.

A few days earlier.

Finished with work, Gong Ryun headed straight to the secret manual shop and bought a new martial art.

The technique he purchased was the Huanghejang—the very palm art that robber had used.

He had bought it because, in that clash with the robber, he had felt a certain special conviction.

Gong Ryun hurried to a reading room, skimmed the theoretical manual for only the key points, then went straight to a hologram chamber to watch the form demonstration. He swung through the motions a few dozen times, copying the posture. All of that took about two hours.

Without wasting another second, he rushed off to a training hall.

The training halls were spaces where you could actually practice martial arts hands-on—vast, reinforced rooms where you could pour out internal energy and run through forms. They stood in a separate annex from the library main building, divided into zones like an indoor grand hall.

There, Gong Ryun attempted the Huanghejang forms. Holding the image in his mind, he thrust his palm into empty air.

He locked the muscles of his hand until the fine veins stood out, then drove every scrap of internal energy from his dantian up into his palm.

The result:

It worked. On the first try.

His internal energy was thinner than the robber's, so the power was weaker—but the form itself was perfect.

"So… it works…"

With those words Gong Ryun toppled backward and sprawled out like a starfish.

He had learned an entire form in a matter of hours. Faster even than when he had learned Parangjang before. That time it had taken him a full day.

Gong Ryun understood the reason by instinct.

He had watched the robber's Huanghejang form up close. And he had taken it head-on. Sight, touch, hearing—every sense had been seared by the experience.

It was a strict upgrade over watching a hologram martial demonstration. Yes. An upgrade. Live combat was the superior version of a hologram.

He had observed every detail from the front.

Extreme focus born of a situation where his life hung in the balance. Endorphins. Adrenaline. Blood still raced and the heart still pounded, yet the instant the opponent thrust out a palm, the frontal lobe went ice-cold at terrifying speed. A strange calm nested inside the fever of battle. In that calm the enemy's palm seemed to move in slow motion. Why was that? It was as if he could see something. Something he still could not put into words. It had been the first time, and too brief—perhaps that was why it defied description. If he experienced it more often, maybe he would get a grip on it.

Anyway.

Just as watching a hologram had been easier than reading theory, learning by taking the hits yourself was easier than watching a hologram.

…

Did everyone work like this?

Probably not. Un-rang had said last time that most people studied primarily from theoretical manuals.

The sheer efficiency of holograms and live combat had to be Gong Ryun's own peculiar trait.

Absolutely not because the theoretical knowledge was hard. He was not saying that because the theory was difficult.

Oh… wait. Am I a genius?

Gong Ryun felt a swell of pride.

At this rate he might end up able to use every palm art in the galaxy. What did they call that again…

Ilgyeon-jeukhae…?

One-Glance Instant Comprehension. The talent to understand a principle at a single look. It felt like something out of legend.

Oh… that was cool.

…But the gods, when they give a person something, always take something of equal weight away.

Genius is deficiency. The more extraordinary one thing is, the more something else is lacking.

"Huff! Huff! Huff! Huff! Huff! Cough!! Huff…! Huff…!"

Collapsed on the floor, Gong Ryun gasped for air.

Internal energy exhaustion.

Huanghejang was a martial art built on the premise of massive internal energy expenditure. He had used only the bare minimum required for the form—and that bare minimum was nearly everything he possessed. The moment he completed a single form, he hit total depletion.

Gong Ryun closed his eyes in an undignified sprawl and began circulating his energy to recover.

His total internal energy was far too small.

Until he increased it, he absolutely could not use this.

Wait—he had finally learned it and now he couldn't use it? He felt ready to cry.

He needed to buy some internal energy–boosting elixirs, too. Why was it that whenever he took them, they only worked at a tenth of their normal effect?

In the end, thanks to this special constitution of his, he had only burned money without seeing any results.

"Haa…! Haa…! Haa…!"

He steadied his breathing and kept thinking.

In truth there was another problem.

Not so much a problem as a shortcoming.

What he had just used was the third form of Huanghejang: Yellow River Flood.

A form that took as its mental image the violently overflowing channels of the Yellow River.

The One-Glance Instant Comprehension (or whatever it was) applied only to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this single form.

Because that was the only one he had seen in person.

The other forms of Huanghejang would still have to be learned from the ground up—just as he had learned Parangjang.

Still. That means I skipped the basic forms and jumped straight to the third one.

An abnormal structure, like a two-story building with no first floor. If that worked… could he also reach the third, fifth, or tenth floor without a first floor?

If things went well… would he eventually be firing off the Heavenly Demon Death Beam or something?

Gong Ryun entertained the idle thought.

A few days after that.

As usual, Gong Ryun went down into the underground waterways for work.

He was diligently carrying out Her Majesty's double-wage mole extermination orders.

PWOOOOONG!!!

Kieeeee!!

Kirrrrrr!!

Thud-crash-bang!!

Parangjang's shockwave hurled the moles backward. Half a dozen mole bodies slammed into the far wall or tumbled across the floor.

The ones that had been close ruptured internally and died on the spot; the ones a little farther out survived, but with serious wounds. He would finish them off later.

It was far more convenient than killing them one by one with Geumnasu. Internal energy consumption was actually lower with Geumnasu, but there was no denying that palm arts had a better shockwave feel in the hand. He could get addicted to this.

Palm arts, at their core, were the general name for martial techniques that radiated a shockwave from the palm.

Usually the shockwave began at the palm and spread in a cone; because of that expanding nature the range was wide, and the closer the enemy, the greater the damage. In short, a close-range area attack.

If you compared it to a gun, it was like a shotgun. A shotgun fired multiple pellets in a wide spread. The closer you fired, the more pellets overlapped in a smaller area and the power rose. Against distant targets it could not deal heavy damage.

Depending on the art, the width and reach of that shockwave varied wildly. In Parangjang's case the width spread extremely wide; Huanghejang's was narrower and longer.

"Hmm…"

Gong Ryun lifted a mole corpse and analyzed the force. It was an experiment in how much internal energy he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠poured in and what results followed—how far the range and power increased. Lately he had been doing this every day. Practice mattered.

After finishing off the moles, Gong Ryun prepared to move to another sector and opened the map on his personal device.

He received map updates directly from Medilla roughly every other day, and for some reason the restricted zones kept growing wider with each passing day. When he asked, she said new construction was underway.

Thud. Thud.

Following the map, Gong Ryun ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠descended deeper underground.

Into places that grew steadily deeper and darker.

"These sewers really are huge…"

It was a dome-type closed city where it never even rained, yet the sewers were abnormally vast. Curious, he had asked Medilla about it a few days earlier.

"Ah, that, you say? When the first settlers arrived on this planet centuries ago, the original plan was to slowly terraform the entire world so living things could dwell upon it. This city was only a temporary dwelling until the terraforming was complete. Midway through the process the whole planet would be lashed by torrential rains and turned into a sea of water, so they built the sewers large with that in mind."

Build a temporary city, begin habitation, terraform the planet. Live in the temporary city until then; once terraforming finished, use the temporary city as a base and expand civilization outward.

That terraforming could take more than a hundred years at the longest, she said.

"But for various reasons the terraforming project was abandoned. In the end the development plan changed: only the places where people would live would be made into dome cities, and the rest of the planet would be left as it was. And so this city, which had originally been the core hub of the terraforming, became merely one of many dome cities on this world."

Terraforming had collapsed, but the sewers already built remained, guarding the city's underbelly. That was the secret of this suspiciously vast underground complex—an underground waterway designed for planet-scale deluges, dreamed up as the infrastructure of a new world's great capital.

Now it was nothing more than an ordinary closed dome city.

Bearing the utterly unremarkable name of AE City.

"You could build a whole city down here."

Even if it was only the western sector, Medilla had once patrolled all of this alone. Just how…

He was walking with that thought when—

Rustle.

He heard a sound.

"?"

Hm? What was that?

A mole?

Shrrrrrrk.

A far more fluid sound than any mole. Moles did not move with that kind of delicacy.

"Your Majesty… or rather, Boss?"

Here to settle the day's pay?

Gong Ryun checked the clock on his personal device. Still an hour left until quitting time.

"Don't tell me it's early leave?"

Ah. He had wanted to milk the sweet side job a little longer.

"Your Majesty!!! Stop trying to scare me and come out already!!!"

They had grown familiar ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠enough that he half-teasingly called her Your Majesty now. She loved it. Kyaruk! A true retainer, are you not! she would say, grinning from ear to ear.

Shrrrrrrk!

"Your Majesty really does love her pranks. Fine, I'll play along this much."

Where would she pop out from today? The ventilation shaft above? A dark fork in the path? Or crawling along the ceiling?

It was almost a daily event by now. She seemed to enjoy his reactions.

Kishishishishishi!!

Queen Medilla's laughter rang out clearly.

It only echoed from every direction, making her position impossible to pin down.

Even so, Gong Ryun moved his feet roughly toward the place where the voice seemed to resonate.

Deeper. Farther down.

Into darker places still.