The Twenty-Two (1)
Lee Jun rolled to the left, dodging the incoming robot.
KWANG!
A vertically sweeping blade shattered the floor where he'd been standing.
"Tch…!"
The pattern was completely different from the Stage 10 model. So that's why it built a Stage 11. It'll stop at nothing to force a test out of me, huh…!
He scanned the robot as it flowed into its next movement, hunting for any opening it could possibly offer. There would be one — somehow, somewhere. He just had to catch it.
That thing is a robot, not a real person. Which means an opening will appear.
Most people would assume the opposite — but not in this case. No programmed intelligence, however sophisticated, could ever hope to imitate Kyle. No, nothing and no one could imitate that man. It was honestly hard to believe he'd ever been human at all.
Even through a fellow hunter's eyes, the robot showed no weakness whatsoever. Then again… it was because of a weakness that the real Kyle had died.
"Whew…."
For now, Lee Jun fixed his gaze on the charging machine and studied it. He had to read that movement. He had to see it coming.
{Then stop dodging and do something!}
Silhouette's voice rang through his skull, but he didn't answer. He simply waited — until the moment came.
It's not Kyle anyway. It's an imitation. That speed is something no one could ever match.
But short of that? Short of that, he could see it.
There was exactly one thing where Lee Jun could match — maybe even surpass — other hunters: his dynamic vision. And not just that. Hearing, smell, even taste. Depending on his level of focus, he could push all five senses to superhuman sensitivity. A talent that had been exceptional even before his Awakening, and had only sharpened further under constant exposure to the free-floating mana in the air.
The problem is that seeing it and keeping up with it are two different things.
Even so. His opponent was, at the end of the day, just a robot.
Whung—
He folded at the waist to slip under the incoming slash. The blade whisked past right in front of his nose — and every millimeter of it, from tip to edge, registered with perfect clarity in his eyes. The training robots could have been blunted, but the Stage 10 and up were kept as close to live combat as possible. Not quite lethal steel, but more than capable of cracking bone.
If it were Kyle… then next he'd—
Convert the horizontal slash's momentum into a spin, and from there, adjust the point of impact. Whether the enemy ducked or leapt, it was an attack that couldn't be avoided once your balance was already broken.
This one….
The dagger wouldn't work. The instant he parried, the blade would carry straight through him along with it. So here, what he needed was—
―You want me to teach you the sword?
―Yeah.
―Don't you already use daggers? What do you need longsword technique for?
What had he answered back then? Right — something like, whatever I do, I'll never master any one thing properly, so I might as well try as many things as I can. At that, Kyle had laughed and taught him the blade anyway. The grip, and every technique he had ever devised and refined — all of it.
Of course… he'd never managed to copy a single one. But there was one thing he had done: he dug into them, down to the underlying principle of every technique, and then reshaped each one to fit his own body. One person's style at a time, bent and rebuilt into Lee Jun's own — and that, in the end, was how the hunter known as Lee Jun had been completed.
"Longsword, then."
He called Kyle's sword up from memory — and in that exact form, a blade woven from shadow materialized in his right hand.
Can I actually pull this off?
He didn't know. Honestly, Kyle's swordsmanship had no clean counter. Overwhelming force and blinding speed, layered with precision and psychological pressure — Lee Jun had never once found a way to stand against it.
But the robot had none of that. No blade that stabbed at blind angles, no mind games that forced impossible choices. The wall he'd always felt from Kyle wasn't there. This was nothing more than a programmed artificial intelligence.
"Ha…!"
Kagak—
Lee Jun drove his sword into the floor and launched his body into the air. At the same instant, the robot pirouetted and cut a full arc through the space where he'd been. As expected, the strike came in slightly low — the blade skimmed past his back and passed clean through his shadow-forged sword without the slightest resistance. He was exploiting the unique property of the weapons Silhouette created.
{See? Your improvisation really is excellent.}
She said it with what sounded like genuine admiration — but Lee Jun had no room to spare for her reactions.
Next, high or low?
He couldn't tell. It wouldn't spin three times. Then — watch the shoulder. Whether the blade would swing sideways or come down in an overhead cut. He read the minute shift of the shoulder and predicted the next movement.
Kaang—
High to low. It seemed they'd programmed Kyle's habit of breaking his blade-path at right angles — a sword style where attacks could snap off in any direction at speeds barely trackable by the naked eye. But the swordsmanship the robot had reproduced was, unmistakably… incomplete.
Which is exactly why I can do this. There's your opening.
Kagagagak—
He laid his blade against the robot's shoulder plane and let the attack flow off it — while closing the distance in the same breath. Now the robot's sword was carried even further out than its original swing. And naturally, that forced its movements to grow larger and more exposed.
―Sword-based jointwork. Think of it that way. The goal is to collapse the opponent's balance and structure.
Number Eleven — Shao Yongliu. Where Kyle had taught him a hard, fast sword, she had taught him a soft one, one that flowed like water.
And next….
Without pause — he charged.
Seoguk—
Tuk—
The robot's head dropped to the ground. By simply drawing back the blade resting at its shoulder, he'd redirected the line of attack straight into its neck. Fighting a sword this way normally meant your own throat got cut first — but that was exactly what—
Styx's Shard.
—was for. Using its power to push the blade outward, he'd carved the robot cleanly apart. He'd only ever imagined this move before, and trying it for the first time, it didn't seem half bad. Something to remember and put to use again later.
"Whew…."
The Kyle-data robot was handled. Next up, then… Pablo.
Ziiiing—
The machine rising from the floor was, sure enough, gripping a pair of tonfas. Pablo Cervantes. Thinking of her, Lee Jun drew his own tonfas from his Pocket. Whether the program judged him ready or not, the robot immediately lunged.
KWANG!
One step back to dodge the overhead smash. Half a step sideways next. Head tucked slightly down. And finally, a long roll to the side.
Kagagagagak—
The furiously swung tonfa grazed his back, plowed on, and pulverized the wall. The output seemed even higher than before. Can't reproduce her unique ability, so they cranked the raw power instead, huh.
Pushing himself up, Lee Jun watched the tonfa come thundering down from the side — and leaned his body toward it. The thrust is a feint. The swing comes from the other side.
Bwoong—
By the limits of human anatomy, no one could swing one weapon horizontally while driving the other into a thrust — the arms would lock together. So in this case, the thrust was—
THUD!
"Ugh…!"
The extended tonfa slammed into his shoulder. From what he'd just seen, it had read his dodge-the-swing body language and put extra force behind the thrust. Whether he evaded the first feint or took it, the machine was forcing a binary choice on him either way.
"…Tch."
Right. The real Pablo could absolutely have moved like that. He'd underestimated it just because it was a machine.
"So you've maxed out its performance, huh? Fine."
So it couldn't reproduce Kyle's full combat strength, but it could approximate Pablo's instincts from raw data? Or maybe the voyeuristic bastard watching right now was puppeting it directly. In that case — he'd just fight it like a real sparring match.
―Always read your opponent. Your eyes are good, remember? Decide your action after you see.
―That works because it's you. If I did that, I'd be too late.
KAHAHAH! Then you'll just have to keep doing it until you get faster. Right?
―What kind of….
"……."
That memory wasn't much help. Easy for her to say.
"Whew…."
He steadied his breath. Still — he had to try. What Pablo had taught him still lived in Lee Jun's body. Sure, it had been less sparring than a disguised beatdown, but it had helped, all the same.
Whung—
The tonfa whisked past his eyes, and a thrust came in right behind it. He retreated backward rather than sideways, accounting for the swing — no. He tried to retreat.
"……?!"
Something yanked him. This sensation — Pablo's unique ability… except not quite. What was this?
THUD!
Unable to retreat, he snapped his head aside instead and took the attack on a graze — but the tonfa still clipped his shoulder on the way past. Even so, the pain was the last thing on his mind. What occupied him now was figuring out what the hell had just happened.
"Ha."
He had a rough idea. Not the mechanism, but clearly the Head of the Engineering Division had cooked up some new wonder-toy again. Just now, attraction had generated from that robot's hands. Electricity or something — either way, some deeply scientific process had apparently been used to simulate a pull. Naturally it produced less than a hundredth of the output the real Pablo had commanded, but it was more than enough to yank a single man named Lee Jun around.
"When the hell did they even retrofit this one…."
He was starting to suspect there was a secret tunnel under his basement connecting straight to the Association building. That level of suspicion. But that was neither here nor there — right now, the problem was how the hell he was supposed to beat this thing.
"Damn it."
The robot slammed its foot into the floor again. No feints, no technique — it simply charged. Watching that movement, Lee Jun thought: What would Pablo do from there?
Paat—
He broke away at maximum speed. Naturally, the robot was faster, and the gap kept shrinking. But slowly. Too slowly. So from here, that thing would use its ability — the pull. Dragging Lee Jun in.
"Ha…!"
He kept resisting the attraction with everything he had and fired his gun toward the robot. Caught in the pull, the bullets flew even faster.
"You copied even this part, huh."
Pablo had always used her power in sweeping, indiscriminate swaths. Not because she'd calculated that her enemy would dodge — she just couldn't be bothered to narrow the range. Which meant she was vulnerable to exactly this: physical, ranged attacks like bullets.
KAANG— KAANG—
The robot simply took the incoming rounds on its body. Even that was identical to Pablo. The only thing that reminded him this was a machine was the metallic clang of bullet meeting chassis.
―Hm? Dodge? Why would I dodge? I just knock them out before they knock me out, that's all.
―That might not work, you know. That's the whole point.
KAHAHAH! Why worry about that? I'm invincible!
And then she'd come home riddled with holes from head to toe, every single time. So even that made it into the data, huh.
"……."
Lee Jun decided it was time to end this. He'd figured out roughly how the reproduction worked — and, more importantly, how to beat it.
Paat—
He stopped mid-sprint. Then threw his body in the opposite direction. At once, a violent attraction seized him and dragged him backward — and as he was pulled in, he extended a tonfa and locked it firmly in his grip.
And now — ram it.
He stacked Styx's Shard's acceleration on top of the pull, building speed the machine wouldn't be able to cancel out in time even if it tried to reverse the force.
"Pablo always used her ability like a sledgehammer."
Gravity Manipulation. Such a devastatingly powerful ability that she'd never once bothered bounding it, just sweeping everything away in wild arcs — a walking human bulldozer. And it had been Lee Jun who layered precision on top of that chaos. Researching efficient ability usage, proposing it to her, finding the flaws, revising the methods, developing new techniques on top. That was the work he'd done as her partner. Since he couldn't contribute in direct combat, he'd contributed with his head instead.
Which was why he was certain. Lee Jun, wielding Styx's Shard, versus this machine with its clumsy imitation of Pablo — when it came to the ability itself, he held every advantage.
KWAAANG!
An impact heavier than an eight-ton truck bearing down on him — all of it concentrated into the single small point of a tonfa — slammed into the robot's chest.
"Haah… haah…."
Gasping against the fierce recoil, Lee Jun surveyed the machine. Shattered, to put it simply. The torso had burst apart from the impact, and its limbs lay scattered across the floor.
"Haah…."
He exhaled deep and long. That was disgustingly brutal. Is this really right?
But he couldn't afford a proper rest; he forced himself upright. He'd only taken down two of them so far. Twenty more to go.
"Who the hell approved this garbage training program…."
Oh, right. That was me.
"…Tch."
Ptoo—
He spat blood-flecked saliva onto the floor and shook himself back into focus. By this order, the next one was… Timothy. Timothy had never fought in melee at all, so the training robot shouldn't have been able to reproduce him in the first place — but given what they'd pulled with Pablo, who knew what else they'd managed.
And the next robot was already rising from the floor. Empty-handed. The real next in line, Siara, also fought bare-handed, so he couldn't tell anything from that alone.
…….
But then — light kindled in the robot's eyes.
And for a moment, they shared something that could only be called a meeting of gazes.
"That's… genuinely creepy."
It's familiar. He couldn't explain why, but he knew exactly whose data was loaded into that thing. It was—
Ding-dong— ding-dong—
At that instant, the doorbell chimed from the ceiling-mounted speaker. Someone had come calling from outside the house.
"……."
And with it, an inexplicable chill crawled up his spine. Call it… pure instinct.
…No way.
Choi Jeong-hyeon looked at the monitor installed just outside the training hall — checking, of course, who had rung the bell.
And all she could do was tilt her head.
"A doll…?"
Lee Jun caught that mutter through the feed — and it clicked. Ah. She said it while it was actually happening.
"You little bastards…."
Yeah. This is what a superstar is. I don't know about grabbing stars out of the sky, but you sure know how to drive a man insane. I said something about stars this morning, and now actual stars are showing up at my door.
"……."
I'm going to lose my mind. Genuinely.