Sparring (2)
Jin-soo had no interest in seeing Cheon Museong grow strong as a martial artist alone. He wanted the man strong as a martial artist and as a Player both.
But he isn't the sort who'll listen just because I tell him.
In truth, it had been little short of a miracle that Cheon Museong gained an enlightenment at all—mid-clash, after charging in to teach Jin-soo a lesson and mixing swords with him.
And thanks to that, everything fell into place.
He had met Cheon Museong far earlier than in the life before his regression, and succeeded in wearing away the man's aversion to the System. That very Cheon Museong had even advanced his class and learned a class skill.
Even so, it isn't finished.
Deep in Cheon Museong's heart there still lived the conviction that any skill outside the martial arts was sorcery, and beneath him.
Well. I can hardly blame him.
By an age like his, character, thought, taste, and temperament had all finished forming and set hard as stone. People often knew they were wrong and still clung to useless stubbornness, just to prop up their pride.
In that respect, the old man's far more open-minded than most.
The moment he realized he was mistaken, he set about correcting it. That was never an easy thing. It wasn't only elders of Cheon Museong's years. Plenty of adults whose minds had already stiffened would rather swallow a loss than admit a mistake, throwing a fit of misplaced pride rather than confess they had been wrong.
The problem is that the old man is still human.
Breaking an old belief with a few words happened only when one's luck was extraordinary.
There's a saying—seeing once beats hearing a hundred times.
Just as he had grasped the Undying Knight's usefulness only after advancing into it, and been shaken only after he experienced Sanctuary, a man changed for certain only when he saw a thing with his own eyes and lived through it himself. On that count, Jin-soo meant to show Cheon Museong today, thoroughly, just how frightening the class skills he dismissed as sorcery truly were.
With the old man's martial skill, he could chew up most skills and spit them out.
That was only because they were still on the lower floors.
Climb high enough, and the skills he sneered at as sorcery will teach him fear in full.
Jin-soo intended to let him taste that fear a little early, so that when he someday met a truly strong opponent he wouldn't pay for the lesson in blood.
Conveniently, he has Immortality, so he won't drop dead on the spot.
So long as the blow wasn't instantly fatal, Jin-soo's healing and Shin Sua's could keep his life tethered as long as they pleased.
First, he needs to learn how terrifying curses are. Touch of Black Gloom. Shackles of Binding. Crown of Thorns. Weaken Body. Twisted Steps.
The curse skills Jin-soo had mastered blanketed Cheon Museong all at once.
"Krgh—?"
Cheon Museong's face twisted horribly. His vision smeared, and his skull felt ready to split. His body grew heavy as a thousand pounds, and his steps dragged.
Mere curses.
He drove Muhwansimbeop at full power. Clear internal energy surged through him, straining to shake off the curses wrapped around his body.
"What?"
Bewilderment flooded his face. Until now, ordinary curses had barely taken hold, and even when they did, running Muhwansimbeop at full strength shook them loose with ease. This time was different. The curses refused to fade. They clung, stubborn as burrs, veiling his eyes and ears and crushing down on his body.
The reason he had been able to ignore curses until now was the harmony of a high Spirit stat and Muhwansimbeop. Thanks to that Spirit, low-level curses never landed in the first place. Even if one did, pouring everything into Muhwansimbeop—whose internal energy was pure enough to stand among the highest of the orthodox arts—drove it out in moments. When that pure art had been converted into a skill, it had gained a faint resistance to curses, magic, and shamanic techniques. But that was all. A high Spirit stat and that faint resistance could shake off nothing but crude, low-level curses.
Of course, the curse skills Jin-soo himself had learned were not especially high in level either. He could not raise the level of skills born of Skill Synthesis. His Magic stat and Spirit stat, however, each stood at a staggering 1,622, and a blessing lay over them that increased both by a further 92.2 percent. That was more than enough to paper over the curses' modest level.
If the old man had a curse-breaking item, or a healer at his side, this would be another story.
As he stood now, Cheon Museong did not possess a single item for dispelling curses.
He wrapped his whole body in a protective sword-aura and charged, white streams of sword-energy pouring from the blade in his hand. Even cursed, he traced the optimal line and came in attacking, and Jin-soo could not help a measure of admiration.
But the curses are only the beginning.
Jin-soo hurled mage-line attack skills straight at him. Bitter cold punched through the protective aura and froze Cheon Museong's curse-wrapped body, and ice arrows and ice spikes screamed in after it. Even with his vision restricted, Cheon Museong swung in a fluid stance, smashing the magical attacks apart and closing the distance.
Jin-soo changed his weapon to a bow and drew. Arrows laced with cold and binding skills hissed toward Cheon Museong. With a single sword the old master showed the art of batting aside dozens of shafts—yet the accumulated damage of curse and spell kept the defense from being perfect. One frost-laden arrow pierced his protective sword-aura and buried itself in his left shoulder.
Cheon Museong only hardened his expression a fraction and kept coming, stubborn to the last. His eyes blazed with the will to land even a single blow. The distance, though, refused to close. Jin-soo gave ground, loosing arrow after arrow to hobble every step.
"Grrk—!"
Frost crusting beard and hair, Cheon Museong ground his teeth and advanced with cold precision, narrowing the gap little by little. Then his feet moved in a bizarre step, and for an instant the distance vanished. Jin-soo still had not traded the bow for a sword. He kept firing.
Cheon Museong's eyes flashed. At last—a real chance to land a clean hit. He stepped in to swing at the man still drawing the string.
A vicious curse erupted from beneath his feet and swallowed him whole.
"Urgh!"
The headache already scrambling his mind worsened, and his body grew heavy as stone. Both ankles dragged as if thousand-pound shackles had been locked around them. He had stepped into a curse trap Jin-soo had laid in advance.
"Nngh—!"
Cheon Museong clenched his teeth and swung anyway. In that same breath, Jin-soo's weapon had already shifted from bow back to sword. The old master's blade cut empty air. Presence and form alike had vanished on the spot.
Behind me.
His superb sense of qi found Jin-soo, and he spun—but a beat too late to slip the attack cleanly.
I have to hold this distance.
Cheon Museong stuck to him doggedly, sword flashing. But this was a Jin-soo he could not beat even in peak condition. With every kind of curse gnawing at flesh and mind, and an arrow through his left shoulder, there was no world in which he won.
One hit. Just one.
He knew it perfectly well. So his only goal now was to strike Jin-soo a single time. The cold pouring endlessly from Jin-soo's body, however, kept slowing him, and worse, that body flickered out of sight for an instant, presence hidden with it. Facing him grew more troublesome still.
A straight assault won't work.
The moment he understood that, madness flooded his eyes, and his movement flipped entirely to offense. He abandoned defense and moved only to land a telling blow. In a blink his body was a mess of wounds—inevitable, once he gave up guarding. Even as blood soaked him from head to toe, he pressed the furious assault, waiting for a single opening.
And then, at last, the chance he had been waiting for arrived. Ignoring the sword driving for his abdomen, Cheon Museong aimed for the gap and thrust. Jin-soo's blade punched through his stomach. Cold steel through an abdomen full of organs was a pain past imagining, and that was not the end. The Blood-Sucking Sword, buried in his gut, drank his blood at a terrifying speed, and for an instant his head spun. Cheon Museong endured pain and haze on will alone and poured still more internal energy into the sword he had driven toward Jin-soo's shoulder.
His blade pierced Jin-soo's protective sword-aura.
I did it.
The instant the triumph roared up inside him, the sword he had thrust was knocked aside a hair before it touched Jin-soo's shoulder.
"How can this be..."
Too much blood drunk by the Blood-Sucking Sword, his face gone pale, the words spilled out hollow.
Jin-soo drew the blade from Cheon Museong's abdomen and cast a recovery skill—simple first aid, nothing more.
"That's enough for today. Sua!"
At his call, Shin Sua hurried over and cast recovery, curse removal, and purification in succession. The wounds across Cheon Museong's body closed fast, and the curses and cold smothering him vanished.
"Now that you've felt the skills of other classes for yourself, what do you think?"
At the question, Cheon Museong's face went hollow, and he spoke.
"To speak plainly, I was astonished. I believed the skills of mages, shamans, and healers posed no great threat... I was wrong. It was only that they were weak, and so I never felt the danger."
Correct. Cheon Museong stood so far outside the standard that the skills of every Player he had met until now had looked laughable.
"My Lord, why did my sword bounce away at the end?"
Curiosity filled his face.
"I used a healer's Protection and a tank's Guard. Both are skills you can make use of, Elder Cheon. Take Protection from Sua, and cast Guard yourself. That is all."
"I see."
A bitter look crossed Cheon Museong's face, and he bowed his head. He had thought a healer's Protection and a tank's Guard were nothing but paper, torn apart by a casual swing of the sword. That had been nothing but his own delusion.
And yet my sword could not so much as graze a single hair of my Lord's.
The spar had struck him hard. He was more than a little shocked that the skills of other classes could be this threatening. The curses he had scorned were far too strong, and the attack skills of mage and archer were dangerous in their own right. An assassin's stealth and ambush, and a tank's defense, were sharp and troublesome enough to decide a fight in a single instant.
It is not simply that my Lord is strong. When the skills of each class weave together, the opponent becomes frighteningly difficult to face.
Even if the foe had not been Jin-soo, but a skilled party that fought in true harmony, the result likely would not have changed much.
Let my guard down, and I would have been the tiger hunted by the hunters.
Without the spar just now, he would still have looked down on the skills of other classes, and someday it would have cost him dearly. For the moment, the only person he had met who could threaten him was Jin-soo. But what had been true so far was no promise of what would come, and so once again he owed his Lord a great debt.
"This dull old man has learned a great deal from you, my Lord."
"Starting tomorrow, through our spars, I'll teach you the weaknesses of each class's skills, and how to answer them, one step at a time."
At those words, cold sweat beaded on Cheon Museong's face. The first spar, fought with martial arts alone, had taught him much and been maddeningly fun. The second, with every class skill brought to bear, had been a one-sided beating. He had not even managed to properly cross swords with Jin-soo. Put simply, he could do the first a hundred times, a thousand times, and still want more. The second, he never wanted to do again.
"Shall we head back, then?"
Cheon Museong forced a nod. In his heart he wanted to ask whether they might do only the first spar, and not the second... but Jin-soo, wearing a bright, easy smile as if every bit of long-pent irritation had finally cleared, did not look likely to grant the request. And more decisively, Cheon Museong himself understood why the second spar was necessary. He had been far too ignorant of the skills of other classes. In the lawless Tower, once a man recognized his own weakness, he could not simply leave it unfixed.
Then why do I want so badly not to do it?
From the moment he saw that bright smile, the second spar appealed to him less and less. Unfortunately, the option of not doing it did not exist for Cheon Museong at all.