The Galaxy Martial World Is No Pushover

"KAHAHAHAHA!!! Die, you piles of trash!!!"

"Let's settle this today, you bastards!!! Hkehehehehe!!!"

"Come on, you cowards!! My eight-foot crescent blade is starving!!!"

"You're all dying today!!! Kihhihihihi!!!"

It was pure chaos.

The unorthodox mercenaries were screaming at each other, hands already on their weapons, ready to strike. Killing intent swept back and forth across the room. So did the curses. Spit flew.

A truly, unmistakably unorthodox free-for-all.

"…"

And right in the middle of it all stood Gong Ryun, wearing a thoroughly sour expression.

His head was starting to ache.

Rewind the clock a little — about an hour earlier.

Gong Ryun had been eating a late lunch.

That morning he had just finished an ostrich-hunting commission.

Galaxy ostriches. Human-sized. Wild beasts that roamed in flocks of dozens, even hundreds. They lived on the gray wastelands beyond the city. The planet's surface didn't have much oxygen, so mammals larger than a person had a hard time surviving — yet the galaxy ostriches had adapted to that extreme environment and multiplied like crazy.

They weren't native to this world; they were an invasive species. The kind that thrived on pretty much any planet, so people had brought them here for food and terraforming.

The terraforming project had been abandoned halfway through, which should have left the ostriches stranded and doomed… except they grew so well anywhere that they thrived just fine without any management at all.

Omnivores. They happily ate moss under rocks, root plants, small animals and insects, and the garbage humans threw away — and they prospered ridiculously. Their numbers swelled and swelled until they became the undisputed kings of the ecosystem, roaming the planet's gray surface in Mad Max–style hordes.

Of course, to humans they were delicious protein.

Leave them alone and they basically photocopy themselves. What's not to love?

So people tended to leave them be, so long as the population stayed at a manageable level. Sometimes, though, the birds caused problems.

The moment mating season hit, any living thing roughly their size or larger became a target for a straight-line charge — some kind of proof of courage, maybe. They thrust their sharp, hard beaks forward, accelerated hard, and speared whatever was in front of them.

In that moment their bodies locked into a fluid-dynamically perfect posture that cut air resistance, while their short-spread wings generated just enough lift to skim them off the ground. In the end they flew like giant bullets. Beak, neck bones, and spine formed one perfect straight line — like a single long spear.

It looked exactly like a knight's lance charge.

Dozens. Hundreds. All of them charging like that.

And for the record, their mating season came every two months.

This periodic charge event was probably a racial instinct for hunting big game to nourish the egg-laying females. Or so people guessed.

The usual targets were mining workers — attacked right while they were loading ore into trucks on the surface.

So the mining companies hired mercenaries to fend off the ostriches.

And, as a bonus, to harvest some meat.

Gong Ryun really liked these ostrich-defense jobs.

They played perfectly to his strengths. All he had to do was plant himself in front of the charging birds like a roadblock, and they came straight to him. Then he just tanked the hits and killed them one by one with Geumnasu. Done.

He liked the work so much he had set an alarm on the mercenary app so it would go off whenever a related listing appeared.

He had worked from before dawn until lunch, and now he was luxuriating in a well-earned rest.

Today's ostrich kill count had set a personal record, which made him feel even better. Thanks to his lightness skill, his arms whipped around faster than ever, making the whole job even easier. In between he had even tried finishing a few with Parangjang.

He had collected hazard pay on top of the base fee, and his wallet was comfortably fat.

Truly satisfying work.

At this rate… maybe he would take the entire afternoon off?

The thought ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that he might skip the afternoon just because he had been working since dawn filled Gong Ryun with a quiet pride. He was improving. He could feel it.

After finishing his meal, he sipped a drink — ice added, which made it five times more expensive than the bulk price at a big-box store, the absolute peak of luxury — and scrolled through his personal device.

He was currently looking up spiritual elixirs on the interplanetary net.

The listings were endless. In the distant ancient past, a spiritual elixir had been a legendary treasure worth more than ten times its weight in gold. But during Terra's industrial revolution, artificial spiritual materials and elixir manufacturing techniques had been invented, and the whole field had hit a turning point.

In the modern age, they had become something closer to health supplements that anyone could buy through interplanetary online shopping.

Of course the truly excellent elixirs were still expensive — the same way a thousand-year wild ginseng still costs a fortune. But just as farm-raised cultivated ginseng was only somewhat pricey and available to anyone, spiritual elixirs were no longer the exclusive property of a tiny elite.

All kinds of products caught his eye in the online shops.

Those were the light, everyday health-food type products. Then there were the serious high-grade internal elixirs:

Gong Ryun scrolled through the lists one by one.

His recent training with Medilla had made something clear: what he needed right now was to increase his total internal energy.

No matter how advanced a martial art he could learn, if he didn't have the internal energy to fuel it, he couldn't use it.

With his current reserves, even a single high-level technique left him gasping.

Gong Ryun's total internal energy: roughly two hundred and fifty years.

Elementary-school level.

The unit "years" was a measure of internal energy that had existed since the ancient Terra era — the amount an average martial artist could accumulate by practicing breathing cultivation for one year. A twenty-year total meant the amount of internal energy built up through twenty years of training.

That amount could be accumulated faster with more efficient breathing methods or heart techniques, and it could also be boosted by consuming spiritual elixirs. That was how someone could build a twenty-year total in only ten years of real time. In the ancient era, a hundred years of internal energy was enough to be considered a peerless master.

Naturally, as the ages passed, the techniques for increasing internal energy — breathing methods, heart techniques, and the like — along with elixir technology had advanced by leaps and bounds, and the average total internal energy had soared to absurd heights. (People called it internal-energy inflation.)

In the modern day, two hundred and fifty years of internal energy was what elementary-school kids had.

People Gong Ryun's age usually started with around seven hundred years as a baseline. That was for ordinary civilians. Professionals who made their living by fighting had even more.

Loro, who had barely graduated high school, already had several times Gong Ryun's internal energy.

Un-rang, being from an orthodox background and having trained in Shaolin heart techniques, sat at around a thousand years. (Age played a part in that, but Gong Ryun refused to acknowledge the excuse, so never mind.)

This was the galaxy's martial world.

Even a housewife who had spent her whole life doing chores could, if she poured every scrap of her internal energy into one desperate strike, kill most monsters outright.

In the old days, climbing the back mountain with a kitchen knife to bring home a wild animal for a spiritual-elixir bone broth for her growing kids had been a basic housewife skill.

It was "the old days" because wild animals had been hunted nearly to extinction and were eventually protected by law.

The reason every wild animal left in this galaxy was some vicious, nightmare species was simple: any weakling that couldn't survive a housewife's child-love, full-internal-energy, kitchen-knife one-hit had already died out long ago.

There was a saying for a reason: In the martial world, beware the old, the women, and the children. What it really meant was: beware ordinary people. Every last one of them had a last-resort one-hit kill technique they could pull out when cornered.

They simply lacked the specialization, combat sense, and killing intent to go around beating people up — not the raw power. Put their own lives on the line and they would thrash anyone.

It was a world where everyone carried a revolver in their back pocket. How did a society like that even function? Think of the old Terra-era empire called America. America had flourished as a democracy, grown wealthy, and been powerful enough to rival the Eastern martial world, hadn't it?

Still, owning a revolver and firing it were two different things. Just because everyone had a gun didn't mean everyone was busy shooting each other.

That was why people hired mercenaries. Because the job wasn't their specialty. Ordinary mining workers might have browsed a few secret manuals as cultural enrichment, but hunting monsters was another matter entirely.

Take a lifelong office worker and tell him to go deal with a pack of wild dogs — he couldn't do it. Even if that office worker hit the gym every day and had a body of pure muscle. He would half-ass the attempt, get hurt, get bitten, and fail. He was scared. He wasn't a professional, and he had no real desire to kill. In the end a specialist mercenary had to step in.

There were exceptions, though. If those wild dogs lunged at his little daughter standing right beside him, that office-worker father would smash a dog's skull without a second's hesitation.

He had the power to kill one dog. All he needed was the killing intent.

So you did not casually mess with ordinary people.

Thanks to the breathing method contained in the Honwongong, even civilians accumulated internal energy in their dantians automatically as they aged. A hunched-over old fogey, cornered by thugs and facing death, might unleash as a last resort the "Old Man's Sure-Kill — Lifetime of Internal Energy Dumped Into One Shot — Punch."

Remember this well: every single person living in this galaxy was a martial artist.

To be recognized as a real expert in the galaxy's martial world, you at least had to be able to survive an ordinary person's desperate one-hit strike.

The martial world was strong. Strong enough that the Cosmic Locusts — which had wiped out entire galaxies — had been reduced to a meal ingredient here.

Anyway.

Back to the point.

Gong Ryun needed to increase his total internal energy.

He had somehow managed to get by with this pitiful amount so far, but he couldn't stay an elementary-school dantian forever.

His technical fundamentals were already solid. His talent was overflowing. The fact that he ranked in the mid-to-upper tier of this city's mercenaries with a mere two hundred and fifty years of internal energy — a handful, really — proved just how skilled he was.

He had come this far on Geumnasu, which used almost no internal energy, and on maxed-out protective hard qi alone. If he just had more internal energy on top of that, it would be icing on the cake.

But why… do spiritual elixirs have basically zero ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠effect on me?

Right. If only he didn't have this special constitution. Whenever Gong Ryun took a spiritual elixir, he got maybe a tenth of the normal effect — if that.

Everyone knew that spiritual elixirs worked better or worse depending on a person's constitution… but this was extreme.

At first he had ordered all kinds of things, trying to find something that matched his body. Every single one just filled his stomach and did nothing else.

The only thing that improved was the color of his shit.

In the end Gong Ryun stopped browsing the online shops, propped his chin heavily in his hand, and slumped over the dining table. Should he ask the Haomen? No. He couldn't trust those people. Last time they had given weird information even to a robber.

Slurp. Slurp.

As he sat there sucking his drink through a straw, fragments of conversation from a nearby table began to filter in.

"Did you hear? Three-Sword Style finally remarried! Apparently they threw a huge ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wedding!"

"Hmm? But Three-Sword Style killed the son of the woman he proposed to. And she still accepted?"

"When she heard that All-In-Arms Jason had broken the rules of a life-or-death duel, she declared she had never raised such a shameful son and struck him from the family register on the spot."

"Hoh! What a heroine of the age! Truly a charming woman! The kind of spirit that could reel in Three-Sword Style himself!"

"A vessel worthy of a lifelong wanderer finally building a nest. With a heart that good, her face must be beautiful as well."

"Indeed it must."

…

He was filling his ears with that ambient chatter when his personal device rang.

A call from Un-rang.

Something urgent — get there now.

So Gong Ryun went to the nearby inn Un-rang had indicated.

And this was the scene that greeted him.

"KIHAHA! You pieces of garbage!!! Let's settle this!!"

"Come on, you bastards!!! You're all dying today!!!"

A brawl had broken out.

A full-scale group brawl between mercenaries.