The Colosseum of the Fighting Demon
In an instant, the scenery around us shifted, revealing a fighting arena floored with crimson sand.
I stamped my foot lightly, testing the texture of the ground.
Not a bad imitation of the real thing.
It wasn't an illusion-type skill. The sensation underfoot and the flow of energy riding the air were far too natural for that.
If anything, the space resembled one of Moorim's forbidden grounds more than a gate — even a gate, for all its strangeness, carried a faintly artificial aftertaste that this place lacked entirely.
"Ha. Fucking acting all high and mighty. But you. You really are strong as hell, aren't you? If we'd fought out there, I'd have been seriously screwed. Heheheh."
It was right then that the bastard began to chuckle, low and strange.
I narrowed my eyes at his reaction and asked, "What's so funny?"
"I told you. This place is perfectly fair. Which means, in this space, everything gets tuned to match the stronger fighter. In other words — anything you can do, I can do too."
"Oh."
I let out a short sound of genuine interest as I watched Jin Dohyuk say it, his face lit up with gleeful excitement. It was an unusual space, to be sure, but my attention was fixed on him, not the arena.
"And on top of that, if I win here, all of this power becomes mine. Heheheh. How could I not laugh?"
"Sure. I suppose a man can think that way."
I studied him with a curious gaze. The trick woven into the arena itself was clever, but skill had never been decided by raw strength alone.
So — just how good is he, really?
"In that case, I'll be accepting this power of yours with thanks."
It was at that moment Jin Dohyuk let out a roar and charged.
The two-handed battleaxe he heaved overhead came crashing down toward my skull, heavy with killing force. I could see his eyes widen — as if even he were startled by his own speed — but a satisfied grin soon spread across his lips.
Still too early to celebrate.
The moment I confirmed the axe's arc, I twisted my upper body — just slightly.
BOOM!
Deprived of its target, the axe bit deep into the crimson sand with a thunderous crash. It packed decent destructive power — but an attack that never touches its opponent is worthless.
Not much of a thinker, this one.
As the man launched into a purely straightforward assault, I studied him with the detached eye of a judge at a competition. Honestly, in Moorim, this sort of tedious work would have been unnecessary. I had a rough grasp of the martial artists circulating there, and a glance at someone's internal energy and stance was usually enough to gauge their level.
The problem was that this opponent fought in a bizarre style I had neither seen nor heard of in Moorim.
"You dodging, you little shit?"
The man called Jin Dohyuk ground his teeth and swung the axe sideways. The movement was utterly inefficient — yet perhaps because he'd been granted power similar to mine, the flow of his follow-up attacks wasn't entirely terrible.
I rolled lightly on my feet, widening the distance between us.
So he can manipulate true qi after all — just barely.
I could see the qi inside his body circulating in a peculiar manner. It was nothing like the Moorim way; it felt closer to what I'd sensed when I had studied Yeonseo's body. The axe continued its frenzied dance, unleashing a relentless barrage, but I simply evaded — calm, unhurried.
All his eggs in one basket — pure brute force. His speed isn't bad, thanks to that, but his trajectories are a mess.
After slipping past several dozen of his strikes, I was able to finish my assessment.
He claimed my internal energy had been copied onto him exactly — yet the way he uses it wouldn't pass for a mere senior disciple of the Demonic Sect.
Which meant: he possessed tremendous internal energy, but his grasp of the martial arts fell short of even the first-rate tier.
The reason I refrained from using words like Peak or first-rate casually was entirely my master's doing. My master had rejected, root and branch, the entire hierarchy that the martial world had built. His doctrine was that the depths of martial learning could never be sliced cleanly like a log — no lines marking where the Peak realm began, where the Supreme Peak began. Such categories, he argued, only built walls in a man's mind.
And in truth, since it was a flimsy framework the murim folk had cobbled together themselves — padded out with endless sub-stages like Early and Refined Mastery — my master's words weren't entirely wrong.
So for me, the only standard available was the one I knew best: the bastards of the Demonic Sect.
"Haah. You were supposed to be a Returnee — did that other world of yours only teach you how to run away?"
Winded after the string of misses, Jin Dohyuk glared at me as he spat the words out. I snorted at the sight of him.
"You… yes, it seems you never managed to truly learn anything. You've been handed a power that shouldn't even belong to you, and you think swinging it around wildly like that is going to accomplish anything? Is that really how you survived over there?"
I said it plainly to his face — and it was, word for word, my honest assessment. I couldn't tell what kind of world he'd experienced, but his hand-to-mouth style of fighting, while it might have been serviceably practical, reeked of crude improvisation.
The amusing part was watching Jin Dohyuk's face begin to warp at those words.
"You mouthy little bastard!"
It was then that explosive energy erupted from Jin Dohyuk's body. His entire frame flushed crimson, and in the next breath his speed and strength leapt upward, beyond all comparison to moments before. That, presumably, was his true power — though the crudeness still clung to every inch of it.
"DIIIIIE!"
I saw the axe blade hurtle toward my neck at blinding speed. But this time, I had no intention of dodging.
Instead, I pressed my index and middle fingers together into a sword-finger, and simply extended my hand toward the descending blade.
CLANG!
The axe he'd swung rebounded away with an unearthly shriek. Jin Dohyuk's pupils shook as though an earthquake had struck them. Because the full-force downward strike he'd poured his whole being into had failed to pierce a single wisp of blood-red sword qi coiled at my fingertip.
"Wh-what! How the hell is this—?"
He plainly could not comprehend what had happened. I kicked him square in the chest.
"Gahk!"
Even though I'd held back considerably, Jin Dohyuk's body went flying a good ten meters before tumbling across the ground. I walked slowly toward him where he lay caked in dust.
"Don't tell me that's all? Really — is there nothing more?"
Frankly, if this was everything he had, I was going to be bitterly disappointed. I had carved time out of my day for a fellow Returnee, and his skill had fallen hopelessly short of expectations.
"GRAAAAAH! I'll kill you!"
Jin Dohyuk scrambled to his feet, swinging his axe in desperation, but nothing changed. He still couldn't use even a tenth of the ability he possessed, let alone its full half.
What followed was a one-sided beating. He threw dirt in my eyes, spat at me, resorted to every gutter trick in the book — but the gap in skill was far too vast for any of it to shift the situation.
With nothing left to learn from him, I decided it was time to end the tiresome affair.
Crack.
The shin I kicked without warning bent at an unnatural angle.
"Ghk… why… why?"
The words spilled from Jin Dohyuk's mouth as he sprawled on the ground. By that point, even he seemed to have realized that things were not unfolding the way he'd intended.
Admittedly, only grasping it at this stage was more than a little late.
"Why? Because a trained swordsman and a monkey holding the same sword will never stand on equal footing. Shouldn't that be obvious?"
"What… what the hell kind of world spat out a monster like you?"
The look in Jin Dohyuk's eyes bled from fury into disbelief — and then into something far darker: naked terror. And the words that left his lips were, amusingly enough, soaked through with grievance and envy.
"Moorim."
There was no reason to hide it, so I said exactly that. His face began to twist in a most peculiar way.
"Moorim? How would someone from Moorim… Hah. I suppose you stumbled onto some great fortune, then?"
I didn't deny it. Meeting my master was, if anything deserved the name, exactly that.
"It's a goddamn injustice. I clawed and fought every single day just to survive in that shit-hole arena. And some bastard gets one stroke of luck and turns into this? Isn't that just unfair? You have no idea what I did to climb to the very top of that Colosseum—"
I shrugged as I listened to Jin Dohyuk's genuinely aggrieved ranting. Yes, I had encountered a fortune — but thirty years in Moorim were hardly so light a thing that a whelp like him could dismiss them.
And I'd stake my life on this: if he had met my master instead of me, his head would have left his shoulders before a single hour passed. To me, my master had certainly been a good man. He was not one to everyone.
"An arena. How interesting."
"Interesting? Hah, you can't even imagine what that place was—"
"You're telling me you risked your life fighting for other people's amusement, in the end? If it were me, I think I'd have at least aimed for those spectators behind the walls — once, at least, before I died."
At my words, Jin Dohyuk's face flushed crimson with shame. I had clearly struck the mark. He'd been proud of surviving that hellish arena — but he had never, not once, bared his fangs at the ones who'd caged him inside it.
"That, then, was the extent of your limits."
"You bastard — what would you know!"
The moment his desperate struggle was denied, Jin Dohyuk squeezed out what strength he had left and hurled himself at me. But even that was, to my eyes, endlessly slow and hopelessly crude.
Thud.
I felt the tip of my casually extended foot catch his jaw. His body folded and crumpled onto the crimson sand.
"Ghhh…"
He no longer had the strength to move; he lay face-down, groaning. Turning his head with great effort, he spat a red mass of blood onto the sand. And then it was that the man who'd been trying to kill me moments ago abruptly changed his tune.
"…S-spare me."
"…"
"I—I lost. If you want my guild, take it — take everything. If you want me as a slave, I'll be your slave. So just… my life—"
I looked down coldly at the bastard who, at some point, had pressed his head to the ground and begun begging for his life. It was certainly a tempting offer. He had disappointed me compared to what I'd hoped for — but his ability was, after all, genuinely intriguing.
"Th-that's right. The moment I walk out of here, I'll publicly declare that Mapo now falls under Guro. No one will object, and if anyone does, I'll kill them all myself. No — if there's anywhere else nearby you want, I'll take it for you before you even ask."
Did he truly believe there was hope? I watched him babble in a desperate, urgent voice.
"I have one question."
So I said, and drew a photograph of my sister from my coat, holding it out before him. That was, after all, the entire reason I had sought this man out in person.
"Have you ever seen this woman — in the world you experienced?"
My reason for asking was simple. Every Returnee besides me appeared to have experienced death in that other world. And it occurred to me that perhaps my sister had not yet returned because she had not yet experienced that death.
Of course, for now, it was only one possibility among many.
"…Don't know her. Never seen that woman before. I answered your question — so you'll spare me, right?"
I curled my lips upward as I looked at Jin Dohyuk asking me that.
"You know, though."
I tilted my head at the man gazing up at me with that groveling expression, and spoke.
"Didn't you tell me something earlier? That nobody leaves, nobody enters, until one of the two of us is dead."
"Th-that doesn't matter — it's my skill, so obviously I can release it and get out. I'll release it right now!"
Jin Dohyuk cried out the word Release in a frantic rush. But, remarkably, nothing about the space around us changed. His eyes began to quake as though the earth itself had split beneath him.
"Huh? Huh? Wh-why won't this… Release!"
He shouted it again and again at the empty air, but nothing changed. His hands were trembling visibly now.
I looked at the panicking man, let out a soft laugh, and spoke.
"You've never once spared anyone in here, have you? Am I wrong?"
At my words, Jin Dohyuk's Adam's apple bobbed. Of course, there was the possibility he'd never used this skill at all before — but considering the brash confidence on his face when he'd dragged me in here, that seemed unlikely.
"A shame, but there's nothing to be done. I can hardly live out my days in here with you."
I moved quickly and touched his shoulder — a light tap.
Myriad Blood Congregation Art.
The blood within his body reversed its flow, and through seven apertures, blood came pouring out of him. Truthfully, keeping him alive wasn't entirely beyond me. It was certainly a wondrous space — but I suspected that if I truly wanted to tear my way out, I could manage it.
"…A wolf that has tasted blood is not a thing to be tamed, after all."
I said it quietly, gazing down at Jin Dohyuk, who lay motionless on the ground.
The caster has died. The Colosseum of the Fighting Demon is being released.