The Boundary Between Life and Death
The squad leader, who had been watching the scene in silence, finally spoke.
"I'd heard the rumors, but this is truly remarkable work. Where did you learn the blade?"
Ga-ryeong answered nothing, only offered the faintest of smiles.
"From the world…"
At Han Ga-ryeong's reply, the squad leader fell silent for a moment. Then he let out a short laugh.
"The world, is it… Well, the world is certainly wide, and it teaches a man a great many things. I learned plenty myself, once upon a time!"
The squad leader raised his hwando to shoulder height and leveled it horizontally. The vice-captain lifted his own blade in both hands, holding it upright before him. The three henchmen still breathing each took their stances and gripped their weapons. Slowly, the assassins began to split apart to either side.
"I don't say this to boast, but on the path of the sword, I flatter myself that I know a thing or two. And yet—"
Blade lowered, Ga-ryeong silently tracked their every movement with his eyes.
"—there remains one thing. Just one thing I have never truly understood," the squad leader said quietly, his sword held level.
In lieu of an answer, Ga-ryeong studied the distance between himself and the men.
Five now. The attack would surely come from both flanks, and the pivot of it would be the squad leader talking to him right now. Even at a glance, none of them were men to take lightly, so the underlings arrayed in front were meant to confuse him, to press him.
The squad leader, glaring fixedly at Han Ga-ryeong, twisted his lips into a sneer.
"Do you know what that one thing is?"
He slowly swung his blade from horizontal to vertical. Moonlight shattered brilliantly across it and scattered.
"It is the razor's edge that cleaves life from death!"
The vice-captain, who had been chewing on a stem of plantain, spat it out with a tut. In the same instant, he came charging in from the right. The three henchmen kicked off the earth and rushed in from the center as well.
The squad leader drove in from the left, separated from his men by no more than a single breath.
In that instant, Ga-ryeong read their intent. The vice-captain's movement was meant to split his attention toward the right; the assassins at the center sought to hem in his range of motion; and the squad leader meant to slip through the gap and land a killing blow.
"Hah—!"
Ga-ryeong surged forward to meet them head-on even as he swung his blade upward in a low diagonal arc, his body half-turning with the motion. He had already judged roughly what his enemies were capable of.
The squad leader and his vice-captain are the strongest of the lot… which means—
Han Ga-ryeong flung himself toward the three men charging from the center. By doing so he would shatter the momentum of their coordinated assault—and force the enemies into each other's way.
"Hk!"
The man at the very middle folded, cut from waist to chest in a single stroke. And Ga-ryeong was not finished.
"Gahk!"
Flowing without a break, he slipped past to the left side of the man on his right, driving his blade into the man's shoulder and pulling it free. Before the body had even finished collapsing, Ga-ryeong drove his elbow into the third man, whose panic was plain on his face. All of it took no more than a few seconds.
"Ngh!"
Whirling around, Ga-ryeong bore down on the vice-captain this time. The man hastily raised his blade and caught the attack. Ringing steel tore through the night air. His stance broken, the vice-captain staggered backward, step by stumbling step.
"Hyaaah!"
The squad leader raised his sword high overhead, aiming for the left shoulder of Ga-ryeong, and brought it slashing down. Ga-ryeong tilted his own blade up over his shoulder to catch the blow. The grating screech of iron grinding against iron set the teeth on edge.
"Tch—…"
As the squad leader wheezed and strained to force strength into his blade, Ga-ryeong subtly deflected him and let the force slide off to the side. The squad leader lost his balance in an instant, nearly pitching forward before he caught himself with a step of his right foot.
"You bastard!"
Seeing what he took for an opening, the vice-captain raised his blade into position to swing. But he was one step too slow. Before his stance had even settled, Ga-ryeong's sword had already swept across his belly.
"Uh… ah…"
The vice-captain stood frozen, mouth hanging open, sword still raised. For a heartbeat he could not grasp that he had been struck; then his face twisted into open disbelief. The sword tumbled from his hand, and one leg buckled beneath him.
Ga-ryeong had already slipped out to the vice-captain's right and turned again, but no second blow was needed. The man's legs folded, and he crumpled sideways to the ground.
The squad leader pulled himself upright. Beside him, the third henchman—the only one left from before—gripped his sword in both hands and hesitated, visibly rattled. With all his comrades cut down, fear had clearly taken hold of him.
The squad leader glared at the man as if to devour him whole. Under that gaze, the assassin let out a low groan.
"Uhh… uaaagh!"
After a moment's hesitation, he loosed a shriek that was part scream, part battle cry, and hurled himself at Ga-ryeong's right side.
Han Ga-ryeong's eyes flashed, and before anyone could mark the movement he had lowered his stance, let the blade flow aside, and cut clean through the man's right flank. Deeply gashed, the man swayed for a moment. Then his eyes rolled back.
"Ghhh…"
With a heavy thud, Ga-ryeong straightened his stance once more.
A brief silence.
"Now it is only you."
The squad leader bit his lip and tightened his grip on his sword.
Ga-ryeong asked quietly, "That question you were harboring earlier… did you find your answer?"
Some eight paces apart, the two men locked eyes. The squad leader's gaze smoldered, savage enough to tear a man apart, while Ga-ryeong calmly absorbed the piercing glare without so much as a flicker.
"The board has already been laid out, but still… Han Ga-ryeong." In answer to his question, the squad leader spoke instead, his voice gone cold. "Let me at least know why. Isn't your master Han Myeong-hoe, the Minister?"
Without taking his eyes off Ga-ryeong, the squad leader groped at his waist with his left hand. Judging by how Ga-ryeong's night vision showed no sign of faltering even in this darkness, the man's movements were exceedingly careful. He drew the short dagger at his hip, cautiously reversed his grip on it where Ga-ryeong could not see, and began easing it up over his shoulder. The hwando in his right hand he raised before his face.
"Did I not tell you? I despise blades without righteousness."
At Han Ga-ryeong's answer, the squad leader loosed a scream that was closer to a howl.
"Cut the shit!"
With that roar, he flung his hwando high and hurled himself at Ga-ryeong. Perhaps it was fury, but the squad leader's chest lay wide open beneath his raised blade. Ga-ryeong swiftly aimed for that exposed belly, cutting down from above.
Clang!
The instant Han Ga-ryeong's brow twitched, his upper body bent backward like a willow branch in pure reflex. The squad leader's blade grazed past him by a hair's breadth. The man had deliberately exposed an opening to lure Ga-ryeong in.
Neither waited for the other—both sprang backward at once.
Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo…
Even as they steadied their ragged breathing, neither took his eyes off the other. Ga-ryeong drew a deep breath, and released it.
No-mind, one body. Empty the heart. Focus. Take the blade in your hand and know it as your own flesh. Feel everything with your whole body—every tremor of the air through which your enemy's movement travels.
The squad leader glared at Han Ga-ryeong, crossed blades in both hands. His nerves were so frayed his head swam. Never in his life had an opponent driven him this far.
His eyes never left Ga-ryeong, yet in some corner of his mind, another thought was stirring.
Life and death…
Strength gathered in his sword hand. The words he had thrown at Ga-ryeong earlier had been meant to scatter his attention, of course—but they had been no idle talk either. The realm of no-mind won in battles straddling life and death—wasn't that what they called it? He had eaten off a blade as a street thug for years and faced countless enemies, yet he had never once touched that state.
Only now did he begin to understand it.
This man is like nothing I have ever seen.
The squad leader emptied his mind. It stung his pride to admit it, but Ga-ryeong's swordsmanship stood on a higher road than his own. If the inferior was to face the superior, he had to strike first, and strike again, denying his opponent even a single breath in which to reclaim the initiative. Pressed far enough, the tables could still turn.
Hoo—
This time there was no battle cry. With swift, fluid motion, the squad leader kicked off the ground. A sliver of silvery moonlight gleamed with a shiver of menace.
Clang!
The squad leader's blade, driven straight down, slid up along Ga-ryeong's with a scream of steel. Wielding twin weapons, the force of his one-armed downward strike could not help but yield to the two-handed upward lift. The squad leader knew it, of course. Before his hwando could be flung upward and leave him exposed, he meant to swing the dagger in his left hand at Han Ga-ryeong's right flank.
But Ga-ryeong was just as fast.
"Hah!"
The squad leader, having regripped his hwando and barely steadied himself, pulled the dagger-hand back toward his center. Because Ga-ryeong had knocked the descending blade upward while simultaneously drawing his body back, the dagger slashing for his ribs only grazed his jacket.
In the next breath, Han Ga-ryeong swept his hwando in a great arc from right to left. Once more rang out that crystalline crash of steel, and the squad leader's dagger spun away in a long curve, clattering to the ground far off.
Before he could even curse, a hiss of parted air split the night. The squad leader flung his body backward on instinct.
"Ungh."
He stared at his right shoulder, hanging in shreds. Warm blood ran down in a steady line.
No shallow wound. I can still swing a sword, but… it will be sluggish.
Gripping his hwando in both hands now, the squad leader glared at his opponent as he crushed down the pain. He had distinctly felt the bite of a cut just now. Even if he had wounded him with that thrown dagger strike, there was not the slightest tremor in Ga-ryeong's stance.
…What do I do?
In that brief instant, a storm of thoughts raced through the squad leader's mind. Turn his back here and run? He scattered the thought at once.
Hah—!
He clenched both hands around his hwando. It was the pride of a warrior. A man who had caught Hong Dal-son's eye had long since left the level of gutter thugs behind, and he had pride in his skill to match. Once a man climbed that far, he wanted nothing more than to grind down any rival who touched a blade into the dirt. Ga-ryeong might be a cut above—but the squad leader, who had never known defeat, felt stubborn defiance boiling up inside him.
Only, at this moment, he had forgotten the first rule of the sword. In a true duel to the death, the man who cannot master his own heart, who cannot measure his opponent's skill with a cold eye, is already beaten.
Ga-ryeong, for his part, had stopped moving. He simply waited. He was a mountain, immovable. But it was no passive waiting—he was reading the rhythm of the air as it brushed past on the wind, and through it, the sound of his opponent's breathing.
The squad leader was losing his composure, little by little.
Soon. It would come soon enough…
"Hyaaaaah!"
With a roar, he charged like a maddened beast. One strike. A single strike was all he needed.
Ga-ryeong coiled his body and let the beast's charge flow off toward his own right side.
"Hah!"
Whirling with startling speed, the squad leader glimpsed an opening in his opponent's guard. A cold smile flickered across his lips—and his blade moved like lightning.
"Yaaah!"
Did I cut him?! A thread of hope flared in the squad leader's chest. The next instant, he realized his hand was no longer moving as he willed it. For a moment he stood dumbfounded, unable to understand what had happened—then he felt a searing wave of pain spread from his flank up across his chest.
"Ah… ah…"
As the squad leader stared down at it with a look of blank disbelief, his legs began to give way. The hwando tumbled from his hand and struck the earth with a hollow ring.
In the very moment the man had turned, Ga-ryeong had seized the opening his spin exposed and cut him down. Straightening, Han Ga-ryeong kept his eyes fixed on the fallen squad leader as he slid his blade back into its sheath.
A cold wind swept over the corpse—the man frozen forever mid-collapse, mouth agape, curled forward on the ground.
Confirming that his enemy's breath had ceased, Ga-ryeong turned slowly and stood facing Hong-wi and his party.
Hong-wi said nothing, only stared at him. In the desolate mountain wilds, only the intermittent cry of a cuckoo broke the silence. Not one of those still standing spoke. Ga-ryeong quietly wiped the bloody blade; Hong-wi and Ho-in simply stood as if nailed to the earth. Gongsaeng, left alone among the fallen assassins, trembled like a leaf.
"You have saved my life."
Only after a long while did Hong-wi speak. "Why? You are Han Myeong-hoe's man, are you not?"
A thin smile crossed Ga-ryeong's face. "That is so."
"And yet…?"
"The order this humble one received was to watch you, my lord. Not to kill you."
"That is no answer at all."
Ga-ryeong did not reply.
Just then, the sound of rustling reached them. Both men's gazes swung toward it. Gongsaeng, who had only just tried to rise, collapsed back to the ground as if the strength had drained from his legs.
"H-hiiik…"
He shook like an aspen in the wind. A chill squeezed his throat shut, and his breath came in strangled gasps. Staring at Hong-wi in desperation, he begged for his life.
"S-s-spare me… please, spare me…"
Hong-wi looked down at him, his heart a tangle. This was the man who had conspired with the assassins to kill him—and yet, seeing him so utterly abject, Hong-wi could not help pitying him, in a way. After all, had Gongsaeng not treated him with a certain warmth since his arrival in Yeongwol?
He turned to Ga-ryeong.
"That man betrayed you once already, my lord. He would not stop at twice."
"M-my lord!"
Gongsaeng dropped flat against the earth and clawed forward on his knees toward Hong-wi, wailing.
"I-I did not do it of my own will! I-I only did as I was told!"
"I pity you."
Hong-wi's voice sank low. He shut his eyes tightly, then slowly opened them again.
"If it had been me alone, I could have forgiven you. What matter is it to reap one wretched life like mine?"
He turned his gaze to Ho-in. The man was still cradling his father's body in his arms. Hong-wi watched them with aching eyes, then looked away, past the mountain.
Beyond it lived the only woman he had ever loved—the frail yet steel-hearted woman who, even in her final moment, had placed Hong-wi's life above her own.