Want Me to Show You?
Siwoo had been walking the empty corridor when his feet stopped.
The room ought to have been cleared by now. The nameplate was still there.
Slowly, he uncurled the fist he had been holding shut. A badly crumpled tube of ointment lay alone in his palm. From somewhere a cold thread of night air drifted in, and the wind, carrying moonlight, came to rest against his cheek.
I am truly glad Young Master can say he dislikes what he dislikes.
...Grandfather. Was that really true? Was it truly something to be glad of?
He could no longer tell. Perhaps saying aloud what he disliked had been nothing but a child's stubbornness — and perhaps that stubbornness was what had driven Grandfather, and Jehwi, and Eunha, all the way to the cliff's edge. Should he not have lived by giving in, with no pride left to him at all? In the end, had it not all been his fault? Questions he turned on himself, and a doubt that would not end.
Protection? You think you're the one protecting her?
A sneer brushed his ear. Siwoo closed his eyes and folded his hand around the ointment in his palm.
Where had I meant to hide? Whom had I meant to protect? Had I only been crouched behind someone else's back, doing nothing, trying to keep no one in the world but myself?
Foolishly.
From now on.
He curled his fist tight once more and slowly opened his eyes.
The blue of them no longer wavered.
"Is it over already?"
Commander, the A+ hunter from Singapore, world rank 72, let the words fall without much flavor from the center of the training ground. His ability was summoning and control. He called forth armored soldiers in the shape of men and fought through them, and the most he could hold at once was a thousand — more than any other hunter with a summoning ability. An S-rank promotion sat just in front of him because of it.
He hadn't expected a place like this to drag his full number out of him. Even so, the result was his victory. So this was the prospect the Wolf Guild, the finest in Korea, was raising in secret? If the boy amounted only to this, it was hard not to feel a little let down.
"Won't be needing this anymore."
He reached for the badge fixed at his left chest. The Wolf Guild had issued it, a convenient thing with a translation function built in, but once an opponent was down it served no further purpose. His fingers stopped short of taking it off. Something was wrong.
A sharp crack split the air, and then another, and another, before he could so much as turn his head toward the source.
They were freezing. All thousand of the armored soldiers he had summoned, one after another. A frozen soldier toppled, struck the ground, and burst apart like porcelain. He was staring at the wreckage, the sense gone out of his face, when someone rose slowly from among the falling ranks.
A curtain of pure white radiance hung across the sky, and beneath it a white shadow lengthened, unhurried.
Baekrang.
A wolf's howl, cold caught in it, brushed his ear. A hallucination. Or perhaps a chant. When Siwoo lifted the palm he had set against the ground, white ice-dust pattered off the surface.
Impossible. He froze that many of them at once — through the ground?
He could not believe it, and still he was backing away. Too late, he understood something else. The very path under his retreat had turned to slick ice without his ever noticing. Cold closed around him from head to heel.
Siwoo came on at a walk. For every step he took, Commander gave one back.
Damn it.
There was nowhere left to go. The moment Commander set his jaw, the ground shuddered — he had wrung out whatever strength remained and summoned one armored soldier more. It rose through black smoke with a grinding creak, vast as ten of the others fused together. Commander hid his hand behind his back, where Siwoo could not see, and closed his fist. The giant mirrored him. One hand snatched Siwoo up the way a man might catch a fly.
An instant later, ice thorns erupted in a thicket across the back of that hand. Three seconds had not passed. In the moment the fist closed around him, Siwoo had sheathed his whole body in ice. He had the judgment for it, and the speed to match.
"...Ha."
The laugh came out hollow. Only then did Commander seem to catch the Wolf Guild's clever little lie. An A-rank in training at Wolf? He had lingered at A-rank long enough to know better than anyone. The young man in front of him was no A-rank at all. A human weapon, raised in secret — yes, that was easier to believe. They could call it a mock battle if they liked. Being thrown in against something like this made him feel like a lab rat.
Siwoo took one more step toward him. Commander did not retreat again. The match had ended the moment that giant fist was pierced. Siwoo caught his right wrist, and from the palm against his skin pure white ice bloomed, climbing as if it meant to seal the whole of him — then stopped, clean, around the shoulder. Had this not been a mock battle, Commander would have frozen solid all the way through to the brain.
"Who's next?"
Siwoo let go and turned his gaze elsewhere.
The victory belonged, unmistakably, to Baekrang.
"Better entertainment than I expected."
The voice came with applause, and with a new figure. Another hunter from Singapore, this one S-rank, world rank 56 — Weather.
A mock battle against an A-rank with no real combat experience was, for an S-rank, a dreary prospect. Dreary enough that he would have refused, had the compensation not been worth his while. Watching Commander and Siwoo just now had woken his interest all the same. He and Commander had reached the same conclusion. He would have bet his entire fortune that the opponent was no mere A-rank — and if he was wrong, then the Korean Hunter Association's Measurement Device was broken beyond use.
"Didn't think Korea would hand me an experience like this."
Weather twirled a finger through the empty air as he spoke, and a wind freighted with sand came from nowhere, winding around the training ground in the direction he flicked. True to his name, he commanded the weather. Not over a whole country, nor even a region, but a field the size of this outdoor ground was well within what he could claim as his domain, and that claim had just finished settling into place. The ground was about to become a desert without a drop of moisture in it. Ten minutes. More than enough.
He studied the young man before him. The face was calm. After a fight like that, the body could not be. Freezing a thousand armored soldiers — and a plain this wide — in a matter of moments would have cost no small amount of strength. Arms folded, Weather lifted only his index finger and flicked it, light as a conductor, and a great sandstorm rose along its path. Fierce, and short of killing.
And yet Siwoo slipped every strike at a speed that actually startled him. Was there still that much stamina left? It was hard to believe the boy was moving through Weather's own domain on nothing but his body, without once calling on his Unique Ability. The training ground had gone to desert. Sand blew hard enough to seal the eyes shut, and the heat was such that the smallest effort ought to have choked the breath in a man's throat. Even so, he turned aside everything that came for him, and not a trace of strain showed.
He was only evading.
A stream of water lanced in from Siwoo's right and flashed to vapor before it ever reached Weather. Calling ice out of heat like this would be no easy thing either.
Still. Talent worth praising. No wonder the Wolf Guild wanted him buried out of sight. Every guild liked to keep a joker in the deck. Had they shared a country, he might have taken the boy under him on the spot.
A column of sand roared up as if it meant to punch a hole in the sky. Siwoo dodged it, barely, and the next attack was already there. A wave of sand broke over him before he could get clear.
"Kh—!"
He threw up a wall of ice on reflex and kept the worst of it off him, but the moment that ice met the burning sand it was gone. He had blunted the physical blow and nothing more. The sand buried him all the same. For a man who fought with ice and water, the field could not have been a crueler mismatch.
Siwoo struck the binding sand aside and staggered upright. Blue eyes, worn thin, swept the ground around him.
I could draw on the moisture in the air. But the moment I did, every breath inside this domain would dry out. There would be no second chance. Too much of a risk.
The thousand soldiers had already taken most of his stamina. Even if he brought Weather down, one hunter still remained, and he would need whatever he had left for that last fight.
"You're lasting longer than I thought. I could push this harder, if I wanted. I don't. I'm not interested in walking away with murderer hung on my name."
"This is a mock battle, isn't it?"
Weather shrugged from a distance. The moment their eyes met, the light in Siwoo's gaze sank.
There was a way.
A vast shadow was falling over him. Another wave of sand was coming at his back, and in the instant before it took him, he was gone. Not gone — he had launched himself, so fast that even Weather, watching, had no time to widen his eyes. It could not possibly be a threat. In an environment like this, a man who wielded water and ice had nothing left to do.
And yet Siwoo was suddenly there, close enough to touch, and his hand closed on Weather's right wrist. The same hold he had used on Commander.
"Planning to freeze my arm as well?"
Siwoo said nothing.
"Go on. Try it. If you can."
Weather's smile was easy. He knew it would not happen, and it did not. Siwoo only gripped the wrist. No ice came. His chest rose and fell, rough; his dark blue hair was filmed with grit, and through the tears in his clothes the wounds — none of them shallow — were past counting.
Holding a wrist. That's about all he has left.
Weather was certain of the win. Win here, and the relic-grade item Maestro had promised him — the Clock of Silence — would be his.
"All right. You've got the wrist. What now? What are you going to do? Look around. There isn't a drop of water here."
Siwoo, still holding him, did not move. He only murmured, so low the words barely carried.
"The human body is seventy percent water. You didn't know?"
"...What?"
"I can reverse every fluid in you. All at once. Or I could simply raise the temperature."
Weather went still, his wrist caught in that grip, and then he understood. Siwoo's breathing, ragged only a moment ago, had already settled into quiet. It made no sense at all — unless the boy had been pretending to be out of breath.
"One thing more. Water that heats that fast expands. At a tremendous speed."
What is he saying...
The stiffness in Weather's face began to twist. Siwoo's eyes, by contrast, curved, little by little. He stood with the moonlight at his back, leaned in, and brought his mouth to Weather's ear.