Traces
"Tch. Everyone, halt."
Barely a minute after entering the gate, Sato Kenji, leader of the Japanese awakened, barked the order at the team trailing behind him.
It was hardly unusual for the landscape beyond a gate to differ from what lay outside it. But this time, a single massive tower loomed into the sky, and Sato Kenji could instinctively feel that this was where they were meant to go.
The problem was that as they advanced toward the tower, strange energies brushed against his senses at the mouth of a narrow gorge.
No one was visibly present. And yet he could feel eyes on him, watching with an uncanny, unsettling patience.
"Hoh. Sharp instincts, aren't you. Must come from a nation of professional plunderers—you people have always been quick on the uptake."
The instant the words left his lips, Wi Cheonghan stepped out of empty air, his folding fan spread wide.
"Sneaky Changko bastards. You moved first with this exact scheme in mind, didn't you?"
Dressed in his black uniform, Sato Kenji drew the sword at his hip with a cold snarl.
Wi Cheonghan answered with a thin, mirthless smile.
Conversation between the two was impossible from the start, but words weren't strictly necessary. The situation spoke volumes on its own.
"Naturally. Eliminating variables is the foundation of everything."
Just as Sato Kenji suspected, Wi Cheonghan had rushed into the gate ahead of the others for one purpose—to claim the ground first and dispose of his rivals before they could settle in.
A formation array was never something that could be deployed quickly and cleanly, but with sufficient preparation in advance, a serviceable bit of misdirection was entirely within reach.
True, the trap had been sniffed out far sooner than he'd hoped. But Wi Cheonghan had little to regret. He still had more prepared, and the numerical advantage lay with the Chinese side regardless.
"Attack."
Raising his fan to point at the Japanese awakened, Wi Cheonghan shouted the order.
The Japanese hunters, for their part, had already braced themselves the moment the Chinese awakened turned killing intent on them.
The uninvited guests arrived at the very moment both sides' hunters shrieked battle cries and hurled themselves at each other.
"Uwaaaaah. Where the hell are we now?"
That was when yet another unfamiliar language rang out from the direction of the gate entrance.
"Tch. Already?"
"...The Koreans?"
The Chinese and Japanese awakened, who had been a heartbeat away from going for each other's throats, warily broke apart and put urgent distance between themselves.
With a third faction entering the fray, fighting on now would most likely only cost both sides.
And there, where every eye had turned, a giant with a boy strapped to his back and a young man were sprinting toward them at breakneck speed.
"Uhahahaha! Cult Leader! Are those things over there monsters?"
"...No."
"Uuugh. I—I think I'm actually gonna throw up. H-hold on a sec."
It was a bizarre pairing you'd never expect to encounter in an S-rank gate, yet the Japanese and Chinese awakened didn't lower their guard one bit.
Every last one of them had seen the video of the giant in the skin-tight shirt massacring a horde of orcs.
"Well, look at that? You trash who aren't even monsters, daring to bare your fangs in front of the Cult Leader? You wanna die?!"
At the giant's roar, the morale of the hunters of both nations began to churn with alarm.
Strangely enough, the man's words had punched straight through the language barrier, delivering their meaning perfectly to every ear present.
In that instant, the gazes of Wi Cheonghan and Sato Kenji crossed in midair.
The South Korean awakened who had just charged into their midst numbered all of three.
An unspoken agreement was reached in the same breath: take out the weakest side first. It only made sense.
"We kill those three first."
And so two nations that had been enemies mere moments ago joined hands with remarkable speed.
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"Kill them!"
Dozens of razor-sharp blades of killing intent tore through the air.
Kang Samsik watched the awakened rushing at him and let out a short, hollow laugh.
Laughable. That was his honest impression of the lot of them.
What on earth were they thinking? He simply could not fathom how trash with skills this pathetic could dare to draw blades in front of the Cult Leader.
"Ha. You rotten bastards have lost your minds."
Kang Samsik drove his fist into the skull of an awakened charging straight at him.
Pop.
Like an overripe watermelon splitting open, the head of the man who'd lunged in frontmost simply detonated.
"Uuurp."
From behind him came the sound of the little brat dry-heaving at the sight, but that was none of his concern.
He didn't know what reason the Cult Leader had for bringing the kid along, but if the boy meant to become one of Hyeolcheon under the Cult Leader's banner, he would need to grow accustomed to blood sooner or later.
"Th-that monster of a—"
"Don't charge in like idiots. Hold formation. Take him down slow."
Even though he'd only felled one man, the enemies' movements visibly shifted.
'Hoh. So there's some orthodox-sect leftovers here too.'
Kang Samsik smirked as he watched the swordsmen weave together in coordinated defense around him.
He couldn't tell which sect's sword formation it was, but that distinctly orthodox-school qi flowed through it.
Then the space before Kang Samsik's eyes began to warp.
The flow of air changed, real and false blurred together, and he felt the signature disturbance of a formation array scrambling his senses.
"All your clever tricks come apart the moment I break—"
Clap.
That was when a single enormous clap of hands echoed through the gorge.
And in the same instant, several Chinese awakened who had been lying in ambush along the cliff wall vomited blood and collapsed to the ground.
"N-no way. How could the Eight Directions Bewildering Formation break that easily—"
The owner of that clap, of course, was the Cult Leader.
Kang Samsik snorted at the bone-white face of the Chinese man.
For gutter rabble of the orthodox sects to challenge the Cult Leader of the Blood Sect with a mere formation—a hundred years too soon.
"Samsik. Clean up here however you like. Ah, and look after Jinwoo over there for me."
"At your command!"
Kang Samsik grinned at the order.
If the Cult Leader decided to move himself, cutting down the men ahead of him would take a single heartbeat. But the master he knew was not one to savor slaughter.
"Then, I'll be going on ahead."
With those words, the Cult Leader stepped off empty air and advanced forward.
It amounted to abandoning the battle entirely on his own, but Kang Samsik considered that only natural.
The throne of the Blood Sect was a seat from which to reign—not a place to mingle with grubs like these.
The startled enemies scrambled to block the Cult Leader's path, but with skills as pathetic as theirs, it was never going to happen.
"You worms don't even know your own place—how DARE you!"
Kang Samsik charged at the man pulling some sleight of hand toward the Cult Leader.
The swordsmen who had already been watching him swung their blades, but the attacks simply bounced off his crude, brutish Body Protective Astral Qi.
"M-monster, let go of—!"
Kang Samsik bared his teeth down at the black-uniformed man squirming in his grip.
"You're not fit to face that man."
"Kraaaaaagh!"
Crack.
The man's waist folded in half like a matchstick in Samsik's grip.
When a human body bent in two that easily, the Chinese and Japanese awakened instinctively began backing away from Kang Samsik.
They were, after all, awakened dispatched to represent their nations. They had all accepted that death was always a possibility. But not this.
Even dying to a monster, having your head crushed or your spine snapped in half was a rare way to go.
At that very moment, the Japanese awakened the man had hurled aside hadn't even fully stopped breathing—he was still twitching, folded in half.
"Madu... demon..."
Face drained white, Wi Cheonghan leveled the words at Kang Samsik, folding fan trembling in his hand.
Naturally, no one of the Blood Sect took the insult kindly.
The word madu had originally been the slur for the demonic-cult scum the Blood Sect despised above all others.
The funny thing was, once the Great Murim War broke out, the demonic cult bastards had started hurling the word madu right back at the Blood Sect.
But Kang Samsik was different.
His master—Lee Jaeseong, the sum of everything in his world—had redefined the word for him.
'That? That just means "you're so damn strong, boss. I couldn't beat you if I died and came back to life," doesn't it? Synonyms include: "that's sorcery," "that's cheating," "did you hack?" Conclusion: it's just jealousy, plain and simple.'
Which meant, by his heaven-on-earth Cult Leader's own definition, they had just admitted defeat.
'Huh? Why is he standing there like that?'
That was when Kang Samsik noticed Seo Jinwoo, frozen in place with a face gone deathly pale.
Samsik caved in the chest of one of the men rushing at him, and suddenly remembered the Cult Leader's final order before departing.
'Ah, and look after Jinwoo over there for me.'
How merciful. How profound a purpose lay within those words.
There was only one possible meaning to "look after that fragile little thing."
Among those who served at the Cult Leader's side, the weak had no place to exist.
The great design was obvious: teach the pathetic brat who'd panicked over a few dead men what real combat was, and forge him into a useful guard.
And Samsik knew exactly how to accomplish it.
Nothing made a person stronger than the extremity of an experience at the very edge of death.
"Hey, little brat."
"Y-yes? Wha—m-me?"
"Give thanks for the Cult Leader's mercy."
Wearing a smile of pure benevolence, Kang Samsik seized the trembling Seo Jinwoo roughly by the nape of the neck.
Then, without ceremony, he hurled the boy bodily across the gorge.
"Are you insane, you crazy bas—AAAAAAAH!"
Kang Samsik smiled in satisfaction as he watched the little brat scream curses at him.
The boy who'd been paralyzed with fear mere moments ago was already seething with killing spirit.
"Little brat. Every single one that gets past you, that's one punch from me."
At those words, Seo Jinwoo, now landed at the far end of the gorge, gripped his shield tight and planted himself firmly at the mouth of the pass.
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BOOM!
I ignored the explosion erupting behind me and kept sprinting forward.
There was only one destination.
The colossal tower, rising absurd and out of place inside the gate.
'The pendant... they say it came out of the gate inside there. The one who found it claims he picked it up near the tower, but...'
Before entering the gate, I had asked a man who appeared to be a high-ranking official of the North about my sister's pendant, and that was the answer I got.
Sloppy information by any measure. But for me, it was enough.
The rest, I would find out myself.
Thoom. Thoom.
The closer I drew to the tower, the more frequent became the ponderous footsteps shaking the ground.
The golems—the gate's primary monsters—were patrolling the tower's perimeter like sentries.
Deeper in, I could see that among them were no ordinary piles of stone, but specialized variants mixed in.
Taking those golems down one by one would have made for a fine diversion, I supposed. But the current me had no such leisure to spare.
I needed to confirm, right now, whether the tower held any clue about my sister.
'Best to avoid the hassle.'
I had no desire to waste time provoking them.
I began regulating the flow of my internal energy, merging my body with the surrounding air.
Traceless Form Scripture, ver. 2.
A martial art I had ripped away from the Salmak assassins, refined and improved by my master.
My body existed, plainly, in that very place—yet no one in the world could perceive me. A state of perfect concealment unfolded around me.
The low-intelligence golems failed entirely to register my presence, even as I brushed right past them.
I slipped through the hulking watchmen and at last entered the tower's interior.
'...Is this the place?'
Inside, the tower was silent to the point of grotesquerie.
I walked slowly toward its center.
How long had I walked?
I found myself forced to a dead stop, staring at one face of the solid stone wall at the tower's heart.
There, carved into it—utterly alien, utterly out of place within this gate—was a trace that did not belong.
I miss you, honey.
Seoyeon, Seojun. Mommy is so sorry.
I will never give up. Jaeseong might still be alive, too.
Those words were, unmistakably, my sister's handwriting.