The Real Madman
Today, I'll have the old man and Sua spar as a team.
After yesterday's spar, and again in the hours before and after the fight with the PK players, Cheon Museong had reaped the full benefit of Shin Sua's healing and purification. Even so, if the two of them were truly going to breathe as one, they needed to train as a single team.
Honestly, yesterday's scrap with those PK players wouldn't have given him any real sense of what a healer can do.
The killers they had met were below standard even by the measure of the 200th Floor Starting City. They had simply trusted in numbers and charged in, convinced that numbers alone would win it for them.
In yesterday's second spar, Cheon Museong had faced Jin-soo alone. Today it was time he faced him with a healer keeping pace at his side.
He'll be in for a shock.
The day's second spar would brand into Cheon Museong, once and for all, just how vital a healer was. And Jin-soo's prediction struck true.
Steel rang, and the impact boomed. This is different. No question about it.
Fighting in concert with Shin Sua, Cheon Museong weathered the second spar far more comfortably than the day before. The curses Jin-soo laid on him unraveled almost at once, and he fought in a condition leagues better than yesterday's. Jin-soo's magic and his archer skills were likewise far easier to turn aside once Cheon Museong brought Shin Sua's protections to bear alongside the guardian skills he had gained on advancing to Undying Knight.
Easier than yesterday, however, was not the same as being able to beat Jin-soo.
A heavy blast drove Cheon Museong's body helplessly backward. Jin-soo's strike—an assassin skill woven together with a tank skill—had caught him cleanly off guard.
A straight assault still won't do it.
Cheon Museong ground his teeth. Yesterday, in that second spar, he had failed even to graze a single hair on Jin-soo's head. Today was different. Thanks to Shin Sua the curses never took, and his overall physique and the power of his skills had risen instead.
Even if it kills me once, I will land a single blow.
He swore he would succeed today at what he had failed to do yesterday. He did not, however, charge in as recklessly as before. Accepting wounds both great and small, he waited with a cool head for an opening he could drive into. That patience was possible only because of Shin Sua's recovery skills. Minor injuries vanished in an instant, and even the serious ones, slow as the mending was, healed completely in the end. From where Cheon Museong stood, there was no longer any need to fear his strength bleeding away through injury.
Jin-soo read that line of thought easily enough.
If I were a real enemy, I'd have gone for Sua first.
But this was only a spar. For Jin-soo, it was a chance to drill the combination and application of every class's skills. For Cheon Museong, it was a chance to learn how to defend against the attacks of many classes, and to grow familiar with a tank's own. For Shin Sua, it was a chance to grasp the proper moment—and the inventive moment—for every skill she held. The bout served all three of them.
Later I'll give the old man, as our tank, the duty of protecting Sua as well. It's still too soon for that. First he has to master the Undying Knight's class skills.
Cheon Museong no longer dismissed class, skill, achievement, and item as heretical tricks, nor did he belittle them. In his own way, he had come to admit how useful and how powerful a skill could be.
Admitting it and actually using it, though, are two different things.
He still was not carrying a shield, and he still wore no armor. Even after advancing into a tank class, he met Jin-soo with nothing but a single sword in hand.
Then I'll just have to force him to use them.
Jin-soo meant to drive him hard—past merely putting the Undying Knight skills to work, all the way until Cheon Museong donned a tank's equipment and took up the exclusive skills and the shared ones without resistance, wielding them in battle until they sat in his hands like old tools.
Only if I corner that stubborn old man completely can I change how he thinks, and how he acts.
He pressed all the harder. Baekcheonsingeom poured out stream after stream of pure-white sword-aura and crashed against Cheon Museong's blade again and again. As the sword's Skill Nullification took hold, the aura gathered along Cheon Museong's edge guttered like a candle in the wind, growing ever fainter.
We'll end today's spar here.
He had lasted longer than yesterday. That, however, was only because he had matched his breathing to Shin Sua's. Cheon Museong's own ability had hardly changed.
I suppose I should count it a small mercy that he used the Undying Knight skills at least a few times.
Expecting another of yesterday's mutual-destruction charges—the sort of attack that said if I die, you die with me—Jin-soo kept the pressure steady. This ends it. The energy on Cheon Museong's sword was on the verge of dying out completely. Jin-soo swung Baekcheonsingeom and delivered the final blow.
In that instant a great shield burst into being and, with tremendous force, knocked Baekcheonsingeom aside.
What?
A shield had suddenly appeared in Cheon Museong's left hand, and genuine shock flashed through Jin-soo. Shield raised, the old man closed on him at a terrifying speed.
The old man is using a tank skill? With a shield?
Jin-soo was truly astonished. He had meant to change Cheon Museong, yes. Never in his dreams, though, had he imagined that Cheon Museong—more conservative and more rigid than even the other martial artists of Moosung—would take up a shield after a single day of sparring.
I didn't see a change this dramatic coming.
And yet it was nothing more than a butterfly effect Jin-soo himself had set loose.
Before the regression, Cheon Museong had spent a very long time calling advancement, skills, achievements, and items heretical arts, and keeping his distance from them. He could afford to. He was that strong, and with no crisis to corner him, there had been no reason for his thinking to shift. He did revise his views in later years, but even then he treated class, skill, achievement, and item as little more than supplements for raising the level of his martial arts.
This time, the situation was different. After his first meeting with Jin-soo, and the battle that followed, enlightenment had come to him. He acknowledged Jin-soo as a martial artist who had reached a higher realm than his own, and he respected him. Through their arguments afterward, he shattered his fixed ideas far earlier than he otherwise would have.
The next great shock was the spar itself. In the first bout, where only martial arts were used, he lost—and yet he felt neither helplessness nor emptiness. He could even take pride in how much he had learned. The second bout, against a Jin-soo who wielded the skills of other classes with complete freedom, had been utterly one-sided. Cheon Museong had felt a crushing helplessness, and a hollowness to match.
That unexpected, lopsided defeat struck him harder than almost anything had. At the same time, he understood to the bone just how threatening, and how powerful, the strength the System granted could be. He did not sink into despair and waste the hours in a daze. Rigid as he was, Cheon Museong was a man who could admit his mistakes and learn from them. He was also the sort who, chasing enlightenment, committed eccentricities often enough to earn the epithet Weird God—and who, once he had a goal, would charge through fire and water without a second thought.
Having grasped how powerful and how useful the System was, he had no reason not to use it. He was not entirely free of the worry that his martial arts might decline. But as Jin-soo had said, if a man sank into the System's power and regressed, that was only because the man himself was incompetent. Of that, Cheon Museong was certain. Overflowing with pride, he trusted himself. He did not believe he was that sort of incompetent fool. And so he threw himself at once into the Undying Knight's class skills.
Along the way his interest turned to the tank's exclusive skills and the shared skills as well. He invested points in items without hesitation. Without a moment's wavering, he took up a shield—one of a tank's principal weapons—and learned the skills that went with it. He had never in his life so much as held one. For a man who had already resolved to accept everything the Tower offered, however, it was instead a chance to found a new martial art.
My Lord is shaken.
The moment he drew the shield from his inventory and triggered a tank skill, Cheon Museong felt a fierce joy at the bewilderment coloring Jin-soo's face.
That confident, infuriating face, twisting at last.
He poured more strength into his grip, until sword and shield threatened to crack in his hands. The enlightenment he had gained because of Jin-soo, and the fixed ideas he had broken, were a tremendous grace. Even so, his towering pride could not easily swallow yesterday's one-sided defeat. In truth, the greatest reason he had taken up a shield without reservation and learned the tank skills was a single desire: to land even one clean hit, and to watch that face—confident to the point of arrogance—go dark with bewilderment.
But I cannot be satisfied with only this much.
He wanted to become a martial artist Jin-soo himself would acknowledge. Simply startling him was not the end. He wanted to contend with him as an equal.
This time I will not lose so helplessly. And I will land one blow, no matter what.
He wanted the wish he had failed to fulfill yesterday to come true today. His sword traced a beautiful arc and came for Jin-soo.
He really does know how to startle a man.
Jin-soo was astonished that Cheon Museong had taken up a shield and used a tank skill, but he was not flustered. He turned the attack aside and pressed in again. Shield and tank skills let Cheon Museong block with noticeably greater ease. Unlike the old man, who was properly wielding both for the first time today, Jin-soo was more familiar than anyone alive with fighting tanks who made the shield their mainstay.
He worked through the guarded Cheon Museong with cool precision—steel ringing, wood cracking, impacts thudding home. Cheon Museong handled shield and tank skills with a fluency hard to believe of a first use, and he did not lean on them blindly. Whenever he judged them unnecessary, he stowed the shield in his inventory and secured his mobility with footwork.
To think he'd already fight with the inventory this well.
The transformation startled Jin-soo deeply. I'll have to teach him more. If today was Cheon Museong's first time using inventory technique in battle, Jin-soo was a master of that very art.
He vanished with an assassin skill and moved. Cheon Museong sensed the shift a beat late and raised his shield. In that instant Jin-soo swapped the Blood-Sucking Sword for a shield and triggered a tank's charge.
"Ghk—!"
As Cheon Museong's left arm rose and the shield lifted with it, Jin-soo swung Baekcheonsingeom and swapped the shield back into the Blood-Sucking Sword. Both blades came for Cheon Museong at once. The old man, too, stored his shield a moment too late and twisted to block, but he was a step behind.
Wreathed in blood-red energy, the Blood-Sucking Sword drove his blade aside. Right after, Baekcheonsingeom—bearing Skill Nullification and the rest of its options—shattered his protective aura and his guardian skill, and punched through his heart.
"Ghk...!"
The sensation of cold steel driven into his heart reached Cheon Museong's mind. With the heart run through, the blood circulating through his body stopped. Oxygen to the brain was cut off, and his consciousness blurred with terrible speed.
So this is death.
In the very moment he felt death for the first time in his life, Immortality activated. At the same time Jin-soo drew the blade free and cast a recovery skill, and Shin Sua's Heal Shower poured down over him. He felt the heart and muscle where the cold steel had lodged knitting back together at speed, and the mind that had gone dim grew sharp again.
"Hah... hah..."
Cheon Museong heaved rough breaths. Together with the sensation of a pierced heart made whole, he understood with painful clarity that he had died once and come back.
"Are you all right?"
Jin-soo's voice reached his ear.
"I kept the sword-energy to a minimum and made the thrust as clean as I could, so you'll feel sore for about a day. There shouldn't be any real trouble."
Watching him speak with a perfectly calm face after having killed him once, Cheon Museong's body trembled. Before that cold blade sank into his heart, he had thought that with Immortality, dying in a spar was nothing—he would simply live again. After living through it, that thought had changed. Ten seconds had been his, and still he had managed no proper counter against Jin-soo. Lost in the confusion, he had only lain there in a daze and taken the healing.
"It is a sensation I never wish to know again. Next time, I shall not be taken so helplessly."
"Helpless? You gave me a genuine shock today. Unpleasant as the experience is, you'll have to grow used to it."
"Grow used to it?"
"Immortality is a skill like any other. The more often you use it, the faster its level climbs. A shame, but until the cooldown comes back, I'll have to lower the difficulty a little. Safety comes first."
Hearing Jin-soo say, with perfect ease, that the moment the cooldown turned he would cut his life short again if only to raise Immortality's level, Cheon Museong understood with perfect clarity. People had called him a madman often enough. The truly insane one, it turned out, had been someone else all along.