The Ant and the Grasshopper (4)
If someone asked me to name the best tonfa wielder I'd ever seen… honestly, I wouldn't know where to begin.
But the worst? That one I could pick without a moment's hesitation.
Pablo.
Despite the tonfa being her weapon of choice, she never once took advantage of what it could actually do.
No — it wasn't that she couldn't. She simply didn't bother.
To her, weapons were little more than tools with no real meaning, and the tonfa was just something to grip and swing.
'And even so, the woman hit like a freight truck.'
Of course, that was because Pablo's unique ability was so absurdly broken that she hardly needed a weapon at all.
Which meant Lee Jun had never managed to learn proper weapon technique from watching her fight.
At this point in his life, he could at least imitate how she leveraged her ability — but back then, even that would have been pointless.
No, there was exactly one thing Lee Jun took away from her.
Her utterly overwhelming combat instinct.
The raw, innate talent Pablo Cervantes possessed was something no words could accurately describe.
She never had a strategy. Not once, not ever.
She charged in without a plan, beat the hell out of everything in her path, and won. Every time.
Everything in between was covered purely by personal instinct.
That was not a skill you could train or study.
It was a talent she'd been born with.
Her instincts were simply on that level.
Always the first to charge the enemy at the head of the line.
And always the last one standing, crushing what remained.
That was the kind of combat Pablo Cervantes — Arcana's Judgment — displayed.
And Lee Jun, who paired with her fairly often, had watched that overwhelming talent unfold from closer than anyone.
They say mediocrity can stare at genius all day and never understand it… but she had apparently surpassed even the category of genius itself.
Even Lee Jun — who served as a decent benchmark for ordinary talent — had found things to learn from watching Pablo fight.
How to adapt to a battlefield shifting in real time.
How to break down an enemy he'd never seen before.
How to fight in unfamiliar terrain.
How to wield weapons beyond his main one, all at once.
How to face many alone.
How to face one as many.
And everything else besides.
She did all of it with absurd ease.
As if she'd known it all from the very beginning.
Come to think of it, she'd probably grasped it all long before she was even aware she had.
The kind of people called prodigies.
And among them… a talent truly heaven-blessed, beyond heaven itself.
Her brilliance stood out even within Arcana, a team made up entirely of geniuses.
Which was exactly why she so often ended up paired with Lee Jun, the team's weakest combatant.
Lee Jun excelled at all sorts of odd jobs rather than direct combat, so he and Pablo — lacking in everything except fighting — made a naturally good match.
And back when he analyzed everything under the sun, she had been his single finest subject of analysis.
Watching Pablo fight, Lee Jun would point out the inefficiencies and refine them.
He knew the theory inside and out, after all.
He just couldn't execute any of it with his own body…
And that's how it always goes — those who fall short in practice tend to excel in theory.
Put kindly, it meant he could still help in his own way. Put unkindly, it meant he was all mouth.
"Whew…"
Lee Jun studied the tonfa's usage, then studied it some more.
And beyond that, he developed even more outrageous methods.
Awakeners weren't ordinary humans to begin with.
Techniques far more complex and demanding than anything that existed before the Gates appeared — they pulled those off without breaking a sweat.
And since the one actually using whatever he came up with would be Pablo anyway, why sweat the details?
With that carefree mindset, he threw every ounce of imagination he had into dreaming up one application after another.
For instance. Just to give an example.
KWAAANG—
"Kieeeek!"
Lee Jun dragged his tonfa along the ground and kicked up a spray of dirt at the soldier ant.
The floor was packed hard enough that his raw strength alone came up a little short, but with spatial distortion, he threw more than enough soil into the air.
{"Wasting your ability on something this petty…"}
It's plenty for right now.
Ants had notoriously poor eyesight, yes — but theirs was good enough to pass a mirror test.
And no matter how primitive the ant, at this distance it relied on its ordinary eyes to make out objects.
Their dependence on sight was low, but it wasn't nothing.
And right now, just that much was enough.
"Kiek! Kieeeek!"
The scattered dirt clouded the Giant Ant's vision, if only for a moment. Instantly, the creature began twitching its antennae.
Ants perceived their surroundings through pheromones, vibrations, sound — so this was almost certainly part of that process.
'First… left.'
TAK—
Lee Jun seized the split instant the soldier ant wavered and darted for the left wall.
Simultaneously, he re-gripped his tonfa.
The beauty of the tonfa was that all three of its prongs could serve as a handle.
The side Lee Jun took was… the longest one.
And with that grip unchanged, he jammed a protruding section of it straight into the wall.
{"What's next?"}
A tonfa.
Same length.
Swhoosh—
At his words, a shadow-forged tonfa formed in his other hand.
He really was wielding two at once now, just like Pablo.
Lee Jun pivoted half a turn and drove Silhouette's tonfa into the wall.
The same movement as before — like a climber slamming in a piton on a sheer rock face.
And now hovering directly above the ant, Lee Jun simply let go and dropped.
{"So, what's the plan this time?"}
A voice that carried a note of anticipation somewhere in it.
Instead of answering her, he activated the Styx's Shard lodged in his heart.
At maximum output — the most he could muster right now.
KWAAANG!
Turning himself into a single weighty pendulum, Lee Jun slammed down onto the soldier ant's head.
It wasn't a great height, but he'd already multiplied his weight several times over, so the impact was considerable.
"Kieaaaagh!"
A very different cry from its earlier threats — this one carried unmistakable pain.
'An impact like that should keep it down for about four seconds. Its head is bigger than a normal ant's abdomen, so it takes that much more punishment when it's rattled.'
Letting the shriek wash over him, Lee Jun pulled the tonfa still embedded in the wall toward himself.
TAK—
The one of the two that had been Pablo's.
It came sailing smoothly into his hand.
And then—
{"Whoa, hold on! You're not actually about to—?!"}
"Of course I am."
Gripping Pablo's tonfa firmly, Lee Jun pulled a mana ampule from his Pocket.
"I've wanted to try this at least once, ever since I watched you do it."
Pablo's signature technique.
Detonating mana and shaping the blast with gravity — the so-called Graviton… Explo… sion.
{"What?"}
Graviton Explosion.
{"Say that again? I didn't quite catch it."}
…….
{"Hehehe, this is great. Is this what they call a downgrade?"}
Shut up.
Granted, this wasn't a system-granted skill, so there was no reason it should have a formal technique name at all.
Pablo had named it herself.
And why such a ridiculous name, you ask?
Because Pablo Cervantes never outgrew her chuunibyou phase until well into her mid-twenties.
'…I am absolutely never saying that name out loud.'
Making that solemn vow, Lee Jun inserted the mana ampule into the hole in the tonfa's handle.
The method was simple.
Similar to loading gas into a gas gun.
Just line the ampule up with the hole, press down, and hold — the mana would charge on its own.
'And then… roughly three seconds until detonation.'
The explosion was a brute-force mechanism: once the tonfa's interior filled with mana, the pressure overwhelmed the casing and it blew.
Pablo had possessed a monstrous baseline mana pool, so efficiency had never entered the equation — she just crammed the thing full, mindlessly and maximally.
{"Hold on, though. You can't even sense mana. How do you know whether it's full or not?"}
No idea.
{"…What?"}
I said I don't know.
Gut feeling is all I've got.
{"Hey, wait a sec—"
Done.
KWAAAAAAAAAANG!
A violent explosion erupted from the small aperture at the tip.
And at the perfect instant, he caught it and wrapped it in spatial distortion.
Compressing a blast that would have spread in a wide radius into a thin, slicing wave.
Which meant… a Giant Ant's head, give or take.
CRACK-BOOM—
"It just punches right through."
And so, without even the chance to scream, one soldier ant's head was blown clean apart.
Lee Jun's instinct had been exact.
No — instinct wasn't quite the word. It was something engraved into his mind.
—Haah… it blows up over and over like this — how are you supposed to actually learn it?
—No, you can do it. I know you will.
—…And what exactly are you basing that on?
—Because we're partners, obviously.
"Whew…"
The last time he'd actually used it was over a year ago… or, counting his regression, eleven years — and yet the count had been perfect.
"…One ampule, 3.4 seconds. Two, 1.9. Large ampule, 2.8. Two large, 1.2. And… Pablo, 0.3."
Numbers he'd memorized like formulas.
When you couldn't sense mana to begin with, there was simply no other way.
The recoil felt like it might pop his shoulder out of its socket, but for a single soldier ant, it wasn't bad at all.
The only real problem was that the sheer force of the blast seemed to have put a heavy strain on the Styx's Shard.
Since the shard had only taken up residence recently, its output was probably still heavily restricted.
Or maybe it was simply because his body had no mana of its own.
Whatever the reason, it had clearly overloaded.
{"You won't be using the shard for a while."}
Silhouette, settled near his heart, delivered her diagnosis.
She resided there alongside the Styx's Shard, so she could apparently gauge its condition at a glance.
And sure enough, spatial distortion was now beyond him.
Even something as basic as telekinesis would probably be difficult for the time being.
{"Then what about that one?"}
Oh, that thing?
It'll run, probably.
{"Huh?"}
Barely had the words left him—
PABABABAT—
The last remaining soldier ant bolted at full speed.
No doubt it would come back dragging a whole swarm of reinforcements.
They called that an alarm.
{"Isn't that dangerous, then?"}
Doesn't matter.
The alarm takes time to spread through the soldier ants.
And we already know where the queen's chamber is — we'll get there faster.
{"You even accounted for that?"}
There are only two of us, so efficiency is everything.
{"Hm. Is that so?"}
Silhouette gave an intrigued little hum through her nose.
But to Lee Jun, it went without saying.
Calculations must always be perfect.
Back then, he'd always been surrounded by comrades who executed every plan without a single deviation.
Which meant Lee Jun had owed them the most flawless plans he could possibly give in return.
The Lee Jun of today was simply an extension of that.
Perfect calculations. Perfect plans.
The ones who would have carried them out, though — none of them remained.
"……."
…No. That's not true, is it. Someone does remain.
"Ms. Seo Yoon."
"Yes…, Boss."
Seo Yoon looked a little dazed.
The time Lee Jun had taken to blow apart that single soldier ant was roughly fifty seconds.
It was a completely different performance from the fights so far, where he'd deliberately held back while teaching her.
To her eyes, he seemed to operate on a level far above even the combat prowess the world credited him with.
"Just now, that was…"
"Definitely better than the old days. Artifacts really do earn their keep, huh?"
Lee Jun said it breezily.
Well… in truth, ever since wrapping up his Arcana days and returning to Korea, there had been no occasion to show what he could actually do.
And even calling it his full strength — without Silhouette or the Styx's Shard, he couldn't manage half of what he'd just displayed.
'But a Giant Ant Soldier is a monster that barely qualifies as B-Class in the first place….'
He'd taken down exactly one, and now he was getting looked at like he'd performed a miracle.
He was supposed to be S-Class, technically. How far had his reputation actually fallen?
'Well… to be fair, this is exactly the period when the washed-up rumors and the fraud theories are churning at full boil….'
Not that it mattered — Lee Jun genuinely did fall short of A-Class right now.
And if people wanted to be impressed by his skill, he'd take it.
So he decided to just move on to the briefing.
"Before long, the one that just ran off is going to come back dragging a whole mob of soldier ants with it."
"Then…"
"We need to move, and quickly, before that happens."
Lee Jun reclaimed the shadow tonfa still pitifully embedded in the wall.
Then, rolling the stiffness out of his shoulder, he took the lead toward the queen's chamber.
"…Understood, Boss."
Seo Yoon fell in behind him.
Her face betrayed nothing, outwardly calm… but her eyes were shining.