Monster Raids Are Orthodox Martial Arts
—KRAAAAAAAAAASH!!!!!!
The brood mother’s foreclaw Internal Power Strike detonated.
A mantis-like claw the size of a grown man slammed into the cavern floor where Gong Ryun and his companions had stood an instant before. The sheer force of it made the whole cave feel as if it might come down around them.
Fortunately, Gong Ryun and the others had already scattered as one, footwork and rolls carrying them clear of the impact zone.
The brood mother shifted her claws again.
—Whoooooooooosh!!!!!!!
This time the other claw swept sideways in a vast arc. The sound it made as it tore the air was less like a blade and more like a timber beam being swung with murderous intent.
The party ducked low, timing their evasion to perfection.
The brood mother’s assault did not let up.
—Whoooooooooosh!!!!!!
—KRAAAAAAAAAASH!!!!!!
—Whoooooooooooosh!!!!!!
Claws rained down. She lashed both massive foreclaws in horizontal and vertical cuts, hunting the intruders. Her bulk, heavy as a century-old imoogi, twisted and coiled as she scoured the cavern.
And that was not all.
—Kireeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!
A bite attack this time.
Powerful jaw muscles unhinged, baring rows of densely packed teeth. Then, like a viper’s strike, she drove her head forward in a straight line.
Unlike the claws, this was not a line attack but a point attack. Her target was Brigit—but Brigit slipped out of range with veteran footwork, light and sure.
—THUNK!!!!!
The brood mother’s jaws snapped on empty air. The clash of teeth rang out like a spear thrust hitting home.
Claw slashes and overhead chops. Bite-thrusts. This was the Three Calamities Sword Technique, pure and simple.
The Three Calamities Sword Technique had always been built on the most fundamental movements of the body. Swing, smash, thrust—every animal under heaven did those three things.
Still, a martial artist’s pride could only take so much.
Brigit jabbed a finger and roared,
“You animal bastard, aping martial arts?!”
Un-rang was not to be outdone.
“Even instinct has its limits—to dare imitate martial arts!! How dare a creature that knows nothing of righteousness mimic the Way of the Martial!! This is an insult to the Martial God himself!!!”
Gong Ryun, of course, could not share the sentiment.
“No matter how hard I squint, that doesn’t look like a sword form to me. And so what if a beast uses it…”
He had bigger concerns.
“It still hasn’t used its breath. We need to figure out what type it is…”
“Most hydras open with breath attacks under the usual patterns, but it still hasn’t. There must be some reason.”
“So it can’t use breath right now?”
“That is possible. In that case, we truly can win. Let us take it!”
“Good! Let’s go!”
It was a big specimen, yes—but without breath, the danger dropped sharply. Time for close combat.
At once the party moved.
Brigit closed on the hydra with footwork.
“Gong Ryun! We each take a claw!!!”
“Understood!”
Gong Ryun sprinted after her.
The two of them would hold the aggro. Behind them, Un-rang prepared an attack form—a high-output art that needed a long cast time.
—Drrrrrrrrr…
Internal energy slowly gathered into Un-rang’s iron staff. He shaped the current of power within his body, refining and stacking force bit by bit.
It took time. Gong Ryun and Brigit would buy it.
—Whooooooooooooosh!!!
The beast’s foreclaw carved a huge arc again, hunting the Brigit who seemed always just out of reach.
This time Brigit did not dodge. She took the claw head-on.
A defensive membrane woven of internal power—commonly called a qi barrier. An energy shield, more or less.
Brigit thrust both arms forward and formed a barrier large enough to cover a whole person. The more internal energy poured in, the thicker it grew. Brigit poured it in hard. Her total reserves were enormous; she cultivated a civil-engineering heart method, after all.
The giant foreclaw struck.
—KUUUUUNG!!!!!!
Barrier and claw collided with a thunderous report. The impact shoved Brigit backward—but her solid core strength and explosive leg muscles held. She did not fall.
She had blocked it. The barrier cracked a little, still within tolerance. Foreclaw and Brigit locked in a razor-thin contest of force against force.
To finish her, the brood mother raised its other claw and swept it sideways like a pair of shears.
—Whooooooooooooosh!!!!!
Blades closing from both sides—and just then Gong Ryun arrived.
—Crack!!!!!!
Gong Ryun seized the foreclaw in both hands, palms pressed to the cutting edge. By now everyone knew: Gong Ryun’s palms carried invincible judgment. They did not cut.
His perfected protective hard qi and muscle reinforcement kept him from being thrown back. Instead he clenched with the crushing grip of the Geumnasu. The claw locked in place.
That foreclaw was sealed. Even if the brood mother tried to pull free, it would not.
So Gong Ryun and Brigit each held one claw in a stalemate.
Then the two secondary heads flanking the hydra’s main head yawned wide and began a familiar motion. Their throats started to glow—one yellow, one blue.
—Kiiiiiiii
—Kiiiiiiii
Breath. The smaller heads were firing breath attacks, each locking onto Brigit and Gong Ryun in turn.
The left head nearer Brigit loosed a lightning bolt—a single-shot electric type that spat yellow electricity from its maw like a falling thunderbolt to shock its target.
The right head facing Gong Ryun used ice breath—a freezing-spray type that exhaled a wide cone of frigid vapor.
This was what made a hydra brood mother such a headache. Each head carried its own unique breath, and the types were assigned at random. Older specimens grew more heads—three, five, seven—culminating in the final nine-headed form. Imagine trying to subjugate a creature that could fire fire, water, electricity, poison, acid, wind, ice, rainbow, and total-assault breaths from nine heads at once.
Even so, proper breath use usually required a fully mature adult.
This time they were lucky. The secondary heads were still adolescent, only half the size of the central head, and their power was markedly weaker.
The lightning bolt smashed into the qi barrier Brigit already had up.
The ice breath Gong Ryun simply tanked with his body. A film of ice formed on his skin, but with his protective hard qi running at full power, the damage was nothing.
Then the central head yawned wide.
Not breath. A bite.
It lunged to clamp down on Brigit—but Gong Ryun, back-to-back with her, unleashed Parangjang and shoved the brood mother’s head hard to the side.
The beast reeled. The bite missed.
In the instant the foreclaws’ pressure slackened, Brigit slammed one foot into the brood mother’s belly and stamped a true-step, the same door-smashing art she used before. The monster rocked again. A pained groan rolled out of it.
Even so, the beast recovered fast and bared its teeth once more to tear the humans apart.
It need not have bothered.
Time was up.
Un-rang’s voice carried through the cavern.
Advanced Ultimate Form
Tiger-Subduing Demon-Cleaving Sweep
The technique was complete.
—Whooooooom…!!!
No dramatic roar. It almost sounded like an ordinary staff swing.
The iron staff traced a forty-five-degree half-circle from back to front—much like a tiger swiping with a foreleg. At the same moment Un-rang stamped ultra-high-speed footwork forward, stretching that half-circle into a long afterimage: a pure-white crescent of internal power, drawn taut from top to bottom.
In a literal instant Un-rang stood before the brood mother.
The form connected.
—THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!
A drumbeat. The sound of body meeting staff.
As expected of a monk’s art—even the sound effect was plain.
The power was anything but.
High-density, high-purity internal energy thickly coating the iron staff had been swung at full power, full charge. At the technique’s destination, bone and flesh around the brood mother’s torso shattered and pulverized.
—Kieeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!
A scream of pure agony rolled through the cavern.
That vast body began to topple backward.
This was the might of an advanced form—and of an ultimate technique at that.
Every martial art possessed one ultimate technique: its strongest form and its signature, usually a leap in power beyond every other move. They were correspondingly hard to learn. Only by grasping the true intent of the art could one use its ultimate.
Anti-Demon Tiger-Subduing meant a hidden tiger that resists demons.
True to the name, the preparation was quiet. It radiated little energy, so the hydra never noticed Un-rang and never guarded against him.
Endure in silence. Charge force for a single strike. Then, at the decisive instant, lash out like a tiger. That was the art’s essence.
Of course the internal-energy cost was heavy even for Un-rang; he did not use it often. Against an ordinary brood mother he would never have bothered. This one was large enough to warrant it.
He had already spent a good deal of power dealing damage on the way here. Layering on a technique that devoured internal energy by the double helping left his reserves nearly dry. Not full exhaustion—but he could not push further without risk.
It was fine. The enemy was finished.
They checked the brood mother.
—Grrk… grrrk…
The beast lay sprawled on the floor, panting hard.
It was on the brink of death. Leave it alone and it would die on its own.
“Whew! Mission complete!”
Un-rang wiped imaginary sweat from his brow.
“Kyahahahaha!!! Clear! It’s a clear!!!”
“Three people ransacking a nest. Truly impressive.”
Everyone was elated.
And of course no one uttered the careless forbidden phrase, Did we get it?
After a brief round of high-fives and praise for one another’s fine work, they approached to finish the brood mother off.
And they saw it.
—Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
On the edge of death, the brood mother was wringing out every last scrap of strength, quietly preparing a breath.
“Oh, shit.”
A breath, once started, could not be stopped. Not even the hydra itself could stop it.
“Wh—what type is it!! What type!!”
Hydra breaths were random per head. You never knew until it fired.
There was one rough way to guess: watch what color the throat glowed just before the breath. Imperfect, but enough for an educated guess.
And the brood mother’s throat was…
Sky blue. Crackling with electricity.
Gong Ryun and Brigit had no idea what that meant. Sky-blue lightning? Fair enough—no one memorized every color. You only bothered if the hue was truly dangerous. Purple meant either plasma-energy breath or extreme-acid breath, both of the most lethal sort; beyond that, who cared? You only needed to remember the worst ones.
Un-rang was the same—he only memorized the most dangerous colors. But Un-rang was an android, and for him there was one more color that ranked among the worst.
His face went ashen. His complexion blanched pure white.
Then he screamed like a little girl.
“KYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!! It’s EMP typeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!! Somebody save meeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!”