The Hidden Heavenly Demon
What began as a meal for Yuun's empty stomach was nowhere near enough for friends meeting again after ten years.
Aside from Yuun, every one of them could have feasted on the rarest delicacies of land and sea. Travel rations meant only to quiet a simple hunger, and the meat of hunted beasts, fell woefully short.
"I never knew watching someone else eat could be this fascinating."
"If they ever held an eating contest, Yuun would win it, wouldn't he?"
His friends could only stare, spellbound, as Yuun inhaled every dish in reach—meat included—like a man possessed. As martial artists who worked their bodies hard, they counted as hearty eaters themselves. Next to Yuun, it hardly mattered. He finished off a staggering heap of meat, so much that it seemed Gyobin must have hunted the surrounding wilds bare.
Palates refined on every fine flavor under heaven had already surrendered, unable to bear the grease and the heaviness. Yuun simply called it delicious and kept eating.
"That isn't someone eating because it tastes good. Only a person who can't count on the next meal eats like that."
Ma Gyobin said it as she watched his appetite, the hunger driving it. She knew what it was to starve. At her words, every eye turned to her.
"Before I met my master, I lived by begging too."
Under those stares she laid her past out plainly. It was a story she would never have told anyone else. These friends, though, would take her as she was, without prejudice, and so she spoke honestly. Guilt had a hand in it as well—guilt that she still could not tell them what she did now.
"Hmm? You went around begging, like me? Not beating up people in the street, or picking pockets to get by?"
Yuun doubted the begging. Worse, it was a truth she had no way to deny, and Gyobin was left with nothing to say.
When the meal was done, a short discussion ended in a decision to move on. Had their hometown still stood, they might have stayed and lingered over childhood memories. As it was, nothing remained but ruins, and sleeping in a ruin like this would have been hard going. They would make for the nearest city.
"If I carry Yuun and use my lightness art, we'd reach the city in a flash."
"It's not as if there's a patient in crisis. I don't feel like rushing it with lightness arts."
They were walking at an easy pace now, but the argument had been real enough: one side for covering the ground fast, the other for strolling like travelers now that they were all together. The vote had gone to the slow walk. Even so, Jeonghyeon—the one who had pushed for lightness arts—could not quite let the idea go.
It was not that he disliked walking with them. Ten years of success, though, had left every one of them with work that would not wait. Leisure was pleasant enough. What pulled at him harder was the wish to spend what time they had more comfortably, and more happily. They had only just found one another again, and he wanted to pile up as many memories as he could, yet in a matter of days they would all have to go back.
"I'm not the only one. Jain, you can't leave your patients sitting forever, and Soryeong, you said you're with the Embroidered Uniform Guard. You'll have to return too, won't you?"
"Hm? My master told me to handle things on my own from now on, so I'm free."
"I've still got plenty of time. I took a generous leave. Unless something urgent comes up, I've got a good half month to spare."
Jeonghyeon's careful regard for everyone else's circumstances was dismissed on the spot. From the start, he had been the only one arguing for a swift trip by lightness art. He tried every way he knew to turn his friends' minds, and none of it took. The fiercest opposition came from Yuun, who had never properly learned martial arts. Ignorance of the arts or not, he was eighteen years old. He had no desire to be carried on a friend's back.
"Y-Yuun's a patient who's only just started to recover! He shouldn't be stuck out on the roadside. He ought to be staying at a proper inn!"
When persuasion failed, Jeonghyeon dragged Yuun into the argument. Yuun was objecting out of pride, and the others were trying to be kind to a friend who looked to have lived hard—so he made the attempt.
"If that's all it is, don't worry. Go a little farther and you'll find the carriage I came in. It's far nicer than any ordinary room."
Even that attempt collapsed under the words of Cheonghwi, princess of Mugang Fortress.
And the looks turned on her, striding at the very front, changed. Because she led the way, they had all thought the old troublemaking tomboy had come back to life alongside Gyobin, chief of the alleys. Now they realized she had something in mind.
"Cheonghwi. Don't tell me you left that carriage in the empty lot at the crossroads."
Seonghwa asked it as if something had just occurred to her, and Cheonghwi nodded without a moment's hesitation.
"This is bad..."
"What's bad?"
"My people kept trying to follow me all the way to the village, so I dumped them halfway and slipped off. I told them to wait there."
As Seonghwa muttered, calling to mind the fourteen Demonic Cult elites who had been trailing her, the rest of them decided that yes, this was bad. They had yet to hear what authority she held within the cult, but the heap of precious elixirs she had carried out made one thing certain. She stood high. Elites assigned as escorts to someone of that rank would be skilled, certainly—but they would also carry the peculiar cruelty of cultists.
And the warriors of Mugang Fortress guarding its princess would be no ordinary fighters either. What was Mugang Fortress? The greatest sect of the Unorthodox Faction. Once a quarrel started, they did not pause to consider who stood opposite them. They were madmen who drew steel without hesitation even against officials of the authorities, the very people a martial artist least wanted to entangle. For the record, Mugang Fortress was the sort of group that counted it as picking a fight if you held their eyes for more than three seconds—or if a sidelong glance crossed theirs three times.
And now the warriors of the Demonic Cult and of Mugang Fortress were in the same place? Blades were bound to come out. If nobody died, that itself would be a miracle. Worse, both sides were factions that never let a grudge go. Once they clashed, there was no guessing how far the trouble would spread.
"W-wait, what? What is it?!"
The moment the weight of it landed, Jeonghyeon seized Yuun and broke into a lightness-art sprint. Not one of them held back. They all took off at once, every face tight with the same urgency: their reunion must not become the spark of an Orthodox-Demonic War.
Yuun had wandered the world begging for his meals, but the truth was he knew little of the murim. The Murim Alliance, Mugang Fortress, the Demonic Cult, the Embroidered Uniform Guard—he had only ever heard the names. A beggar scraping by on alms almost never crossed paths with martial artists, and the ones Yuun had seen were no tremendous masters. They were the sort who threw their weight around a neighborhood and called that strength.
So, unlike his friends, who wanted no clash at all, he found himself hoping he might get to watch true masters fight.
Thud! Whack! Crunch!
"Kill them! Kill every last one of them! Abandon any hope of living after you pick a fight with Mugang Fortress!"
"There is no defeat in a fight of the Demonic Cult! Teach that to those unorthodox dogs!"
But the brilliant battle of masters Yuun had expected was not there. There were only thugs, swinging fists and screaming at one another to die.
"This is a fight between murim masters...?"
He had hoped for something, seeing how frantic his friends were. What he found was a neighborhood brawl, and the disappointment sank in. If it differed at all from the common scuffles he knew, it was only that the punches came a little faster. An ugly fight, and nothing more. A fist flew. Someone went down, seized the other's trousers, and hung on. Kicks followed, stomping the fallen man. Then the one clinging to the trousers bit into his opponent's leg.
"Gyaaah!!!"
"This is supposed to be a fight between the Demonic Cult and Mugang Fortress?"
Yuun was not the only one disappointed. Even Jeonghyeon—a knight-errant of the orthodox faction, spoken of as the next Leader of the Murim Alliance—looked sick.
"That's enough. Are you going to keep up this disgraceful brawl in front of my friends?"
At the sight of it, Woo Cheonghwi, princess of Mugang Fortress, let her face go cold and released her inner energy.
"A-Young Miss!!!"
Her intervention stopped the fight in an instant, and a lull fell over the ground. The cultists took Cheonghwi for the one in charge and glared at her.
"So you're responsible for these unorthodox wretches? Count yourselves lucky the Cult Leader strictly forbade the shedding of blood. Withdraw at once, and I'll pretend I saw nothing."
They laid down the threat and put on a show of strength. It was not a look anyone would connect to cultists who had just been brawling like dogs.
"And what have you done to be shouting? I told you I'd kill you if you caused trouble. Was I that funny to you?"
When Seonghwa stepped forward in deadly earnest, the cultists' faces went white.
"The Heavenly Demon is undefeated! Ten thousand demons reign supreme!"
They dropped to their knees as one and roared the salute toward Seonghwa. It was no ordinary cult cry. Those words were spoken only to the Heavenly Demon.
Seonghwa clicked her tongue, plainly displeased.
"Tch. Undefeated, my ass. The Blood Heavenly Demon couldn't even trade a single exchange before he died by my hand."
It was an insult to the previous Cult Leader, the Heavenly Demon himself. But she spoke only the truth, and the kneeling cultists had no answer.
"He certainly wasn't undefeated," Jeonghyeon said. "The Blood Heavenly Demon was supposed to be the strongest in history, and my master drove him back."
At the mention of the cult's humiliation from more than ten years past, the cultists seethed. But the one who had said it appeared to be a friend of the Heavenly Demon, and there was nothing they could do. No—more than that, they felt as if they had just heard something extraordinary.
The man responsible for the Blood Heavenly Demon's defeat ten years ago was the current Leader of the Murim Alliance, the Lightning Sword Saint. And this young man had called that Lightning Sword Saint his master.
Then this youth was—?
"The Heavenly Thunder Sword, Yang Jeonghyeon?"
"Oh! Even the Demonic Cult knows my name. I must be famous."
Delighted to be recognized, Jeonghyeon caught himself and shook his head.
"No, wait. Thinking about it, I think I just heard something I wasn't supposed to. The Blood Heavenly Demon died at Seonghwa's hand?"
"Yeah. Strongest in history, they said. Died in one hit."
"Huh? Then you're the Cult Leader right now. You were the Hidden Heavenly Demon?!"
He had known she joined the Demonic Cult. He had never imagined his childhood friend had become the Heavenly Demon. When he blurted it out in shock, Seonghwa looked at him as if to ask what on earth he was talking about.
"Hidden Heavenly Demon? I haven't been given an epithet as Heavenly Demon yet."
"No, it's a temporary one. The Murim Alliance had no idea a master strong enough to bring down the Blood Heavenly Demon even existed, so they called you the hidden Heavenly Demon."
"Oh? I like that. An epithet from the Murim Alliance, not the cult. Hey—you lot!"
"We hear you!"
Seonghwa had never particularly wanted to boast of being the Heavenly Demon, and the epithet suited her. So she declared it then and there.
A Heavenly Demon's epithet decided the cult's course for as long as that Heavenly Demon reigned as Cult Leader. And here Seonghwa had named herself the Heavenly Demon who stayed hidden. For as long as she was Cult Leader, the Demonic Cult would lie quiet and keep out of sight.
It was the moment the strife between the Demonic Cult and the Murim Alliance—dragged on for ten years even after the Blood Heavenly Demon's defeat at the Alliance Leader's hands—came to a hollow end.