This Boss Cannot Be Defeated (1)
I never thought it would turn out like this.
How did Junior Sister even hear about that?
The more I thought about it, the less strange it seemed. Even a courtesan, who knew nothing of the murim beyond the nights when second-rate and third-rate martial artists staggered in to drink and make a scene, had already heard the rumor that the harbor was holding medicinal herbs good for internal injuries. If the story had spread far enough for ordinary people to know it, then even a junior sister as ignorant of the world as mine might have grown desperate when I failed to wake, gone hunting for any scrap of news, caught that rumor, and set off for the port.
If I had been awake I would have told her to ask Jegal Yeonji. But it seemed Yeonji had never approached her while I lay unconscious, and had only come to check on me after my junior sister was already gone. So it wasn't impossible.
But why did it have to tangle her, of all people, so neatly into an incident that was supposed to happen to someone else? Is the story trying to drag itself back onto its original course?
My internal energy detonated through my whole body. I cleared two buildings, then a third, in a single bound, and the harbor was suddenly close.
The new moon slid into the clouds, and I dropped into a blackness so complete I could not see a step ahead.
Thud.
"Huuuh..."
Driving internal energy that hard usually left the chest aching and the breath jammed in the throat. Not now. Power circled all the way to the crown of my head and filled me to the brim, and instead of strain my body seemed to wake, as if I had only just loosened up. I could hardly believe I had been unconscious for nearly half a month. I was whole, and light on my feet. Like a beast I dropped to all fours, killed every sound, and crept toward the harbor with my body buried in the dark.
The way things stand, I want nothing more than to charge in and drag her out...
But I still didn't know what the situation actually was, and that meant I had to move in secret. If they were holding her hostage, and if she had fallen into the hands of the organization behind the curtain, then those bastards were vicious enough to cut her throat the instant I stormed in and come for me in the same breath.
Please. Junior Sister... be all right.
I set my palm between the stacks of cargo, using the principle of Seizing Across the Void, and crawled low, pressed to the ground like an insect. If the people of a real martial world saw me like this they would call it ugly and swear they would rather die than hide so shamefully. I didn't care. I had done it so I wouldn't be seen.
There.
I couldn't tell what trick had been worked nearby, but as I followed the layout of the cargo with a hand along the wall, the feel of the place changed. It was like stepping into a room sealed by an air curtain and feeling the temperature shift all at once. The moment I slipped into the space screened off between the crates, a thick reek of blood poured over me and stopped my breath.
Junior Sister!
A slender girl stood hemmed in by dozens of men in black martial robes, a broken sword clenched in her fist. The ground around her was gouged with deep sword scars, the marks of a desperate resistance only moments old, and yet the black-clad fighters facing her bore nothing worse than shallow cuts along the backs of their arms or across their thighs. By pure skill she was more than enough to cut down every one of them and walk away. But she had no experience of a real fight, and her heart was far too kind. She had never steeled herself to cut a person, and so her attacks were stopped cold.
"...Junior Sister."
She looked a little worn, but she was unhurt. A short, hunchbacked man kept darting in with quick, sly steps, probing for an opening, and every time she blocked him by a hair and held the line. Even so, they were grinding her down with numbers, rotating in and out, and the killing intent she had never faced in ordinary days was fraying her focus. This was no time to feel relieved.
The hunchback... that speed, the Emei piercers in his hands, the footwork. Is that the Face-Stealing Ghost?
The balance of the fight was holding, just barely. At her true level she could have put down the Face-Stealing Ghost and the rest of the assassins with ease. But this was the first time in her life she had cut someone and seen blood. Her body had locked up, and she could not bring out what she really had. The Face-Stealing Ghost, for his part, was using his own men as shields. Whenever she swung, he deliberately let one of them take the blow, and that alone was enough to stop her from attacking. She tried to strike with the flat, or to release her internal energy an instant before the edge bit, hoping to subdue them without killing. They only understood her better for it. Realizing she hated to wound them, they threw their own bodies onto the sword and used that revulsion to press her harder.
I'll have to help.
A balance drawn this tight meant one thing. If I broke in and took the Face-Stealing Ghost from behind, the whole thing would collapse at once. Even if she refused to cut them down, she would still be more than enough to suppress them.
Junior Sister. Show them an opening on purpose. Draw them in.
The moment she heard me she went round-eyed as a startled rabbit and spun to look in every direction. Seeing her react like that to an acquaintance's transmission in the middle of a fight was enough to make me wince. At the same time, it was a perfect way of doing exactly what I had asked.
"Keheh!"
The Face-Stealing Ghost saw it. He snatched the assassin in front of him, hauled the man up as a human shield, and rushed her. His back was wide open.
Good...!
I kicked off hard enough to smash the wall of cargo I had been hiding behind and threw myself through the air. The other assassins never even registered me coming. Only one of them did. The Face-Stealing Ghost felt the chill of killing intent along his spine and tried to turn his head, but before his eyes could move my hand had already seized him and driven him into the floor.
"An ambush—kuh!"
Crunch. I slammed his face into the wooden planks of the harbor until they broke beneath him. Only then did the assassins wheel toward me, and I lifted my sleeve and deliberately kicked up a wind.
Their balance went with it. My junior sister did not miss the gap. She cracked the flats of her sword across their backs and legs, pouring internal energy into every blow, attacking in earnest at last. Caught between the two of us, they went silent one strike at a time and were subdued before they could recover.
"Whew."
These were the sort of men who, in the original story, got hunted down single-handed by Yeon Cheongha even while he was a cripple carrying internal injuries. With the two of us together, they were nothing that could last more than a moment.
"Junior Sister. You all right?"
"Senior Brother!"
Fortunately she had no serious wounds. She only looked worn through, in the heart more than the body.
"What were you thinking, coming all the way out here over a rumor like that?"
"I'm sorry, Senior Brother... You wouldn't wake, and I was so frightened..."
She had only moved because she was worried for me, gathering what information she could in her own way. I couldn't bring myself to blame her outright. If she had been the one who collapsed, I would probably have done the same, chasing every whisper that reached my ears instead of stopping to confirm any of it.
"Nngh...!"
I caught the Face-Stealing Ghost looking for a chance to run and planted a foot, unhurried, on the back of his head, enough to keep him from trying anything clever. The Emei piercers still hung from his fingers. I used Seizing Across the Void and tore the weapons off them before he could swing.
"Aaaagh!"
Ripping free something seated against living flesh bent his fingers, and he screamed. I had no interest in the sort of mercy that would disarm a wicked bastard who flayed the faces off living people without so much as hurting his hands.
Even with a weapon in hand, he isn't much of a threat...
What made the Face-Stealing Ghost notorious was the craft of making human-skin masks, of stealing faces to counterfeit a person's identity, and the cruelty of the peeling itself. Measured by martial skill alone, he was a first-rate expert at best.
Hah... I'm a ridiculous man.
A first-rate expert could serve as sect leader of an ordinary mid-sized sect, and here I was thinking at best. I was still judging the world by the late stretches of the novel, when the story was in full swing. The Ban Gyuseong I remembered had already climbed past the Peak Realm into the Transcendent Peak Realm, and I was measuring everything against the age when the shadow organization's Transcendent Peak officers had begun to move in earnest.
The balance of power hasn't broken yet. Even a Peak Realm master, on his own, could walk through most sects with his head held high.
In truth, when the Wulin Alliance looked at Yeon Cheongha and judged him a Peak Realm master, they had tried to bind him firmly to their side by arranging a political marriage with the Alliance Leader's daughter. That was how formidable such a master was. Of course, the Yeon Cheongha of the story, surprisingly pure of heart, refused the offer and lived on alone as a wanderer. It wasn't that the girl had failed to please him. He had already given so much of his heart to his junior sister that there was simply no room left for another woman to enter. Still, the thought came to me. If he had never lost his junior sister, if he had lived well the way things were now, then perhaps Yeon Cheongha would have ended up with the Alliance Leader's daughter after all.
"I'm sorry for causing you such worry, Senior Brother. Then these people..."
If she hadn't been here, I would have cleaned them up myself. They were the ones who, tracked down by Yeon Cheongha around this point in the story, were wiped out to the last. Dying here suited the novel just fine. But she was here, and with her watching I couldn't bring myself to finish them. I hesitated.
I can't hand them to the magistrate. And I must not hand them to the Wulin Alliance, or to Jegal Yeonji.
Jegal Yeonji and the Jegal Clan could not be allowed to learn who these men were. Kick that hidden hive and chaos would break out all at once, and neither Ban Gyuseong nor the Wulin Alliance was ready. I myself still had no confidence I could fight the shadow organization's Ten Great Officers and win. If their identities were exposed and they were forced into the open all together, we would be finished. I was still turning that problem over when I heard it.
A strained creak of effort. The Face-Stealing Ghost was desperately trying to lift the head I had pinned under my foot. I was just considering whether to stomp down with internal energy and snap his neck, broken or not, when he managed to work his mouth free of the planks and shout.
"M-My lord! You must not reveal yourself in a place like this...!"
My lord?
The Face-Stealing Ghost. An agent the shadow organization had sent to quietly extend its reach through Sichuan, a mid-boss Yeon Cheongha was meant to meet in this stretch of the story. Across the province they stole the faces of Sichuan Tang Clan martial artists and of the nuns of the Emei Sect, meaning to set those disguises to work. Yeon Cheongha happened to come crashing in at the very moment the plan was about to begin. The scheme fell apart, and the man was cut down, but that same incident was what later drove Yeon Cheongha into danger...
Ah...! Don't tell me that at this point in time, the one in charge of Sichuan is here?
A cold killing intent began to close around my throat. From beyond the formation, a thick tide of murderous will and ghastly qi poured out toward me and my junior sister.
"As you say, the situation no longer looks favorable for hiding one's identity and merely watching. Wouldn't you agree?"
It was a young man's voice, pleasant to hear, like jade beads rolling across a tray. I knew at once that the worst possibility I had imagined was the true one.
"I cast aside the name I bore in the past. This is what they call me now."
The man who owned that voice raised his sword and offered an elegant greeting.
This is... fucked.
I had come face to face with a boss I was never supposed to meet.