Master of Brawling
Master of Brawling
Striking.
Throwing.
Choking.
Joint-locking.
The four primal categories of unarmed combat. That taxonomy had held firm from antiquity through every stage of evolution, and it held firm beyond Earth as well—here in Geladrion.
Among them, Aslan's true specialties were throwing, choking, and joint-locking.
Striking was never his forte. He managed it only because his hand-to-hand skills had been honed to the absolute limit.
From the ground up, Aslan's entire combat philosophy was built around killing with a weapon. Striking had always been a secondary tool.
And that was precisely why he could feel it. The young man standing before him—Richard—had taken striking to an extreme that ran in the opposite direction of Aslan's own mastery.
A fist crashed into a forearm with a sound like a hammer blow. The impact should have shattered bone, but Richard only clenched his teeth and endured.
Beneath the dull gleam of a crimson mana tattoo, Aslan recognized the design. Even within the vision granted by foresight, the pattern was unmistakable—similar in nature to the ones Frida bore.
They were tattoos that massively enhanced full-body coordination while granting meaningful increases to Strength, Agility, and Constitution. Similar markings probably ran down his torso and legs all the way to his ankles, hidden beneath his clothes.
Does he know Frida?
It seemed likely. The way Frida despised Duke Hilsinger, the way she had reacted when Richard's name came up—there was history there.
But that was a puzzle for another time. What mattered now was that Richard's ability far exceeded Aslan's expectations, and those mana tattoos made it difficult to overpower him through raw damage.
In the foresight, Richard suppressed a sharp breath, twisted his body, and lashed out with a horizontal backfist. Aslan raised his arm to meet the trajectory, letting the blow graze past him by a hair's breadth.
The plan was simple: block the follow-up, then counter. Overwhelm him with speed and damage output.
But Richard closed the distance as if he had read every step of that plan.
He flipped his extended fist and seized Aslan's wrist in the same motion.
Before Aslan could even register the grip tightening around his wrist, his center of gravity shifted. Richard had hooked him and was swinging him like a weight on a chain.
Aslan stood a hundred and ninety-one centimeters tall. Throwing was his strongest suit in hand-to-hand combat. For someone to hurl him like this was not normal.
It was a technique reproducible only by someone who had reached the pinnacle of unarmed martial arts—a feat that defied common sense, using nothing more than a shift of one's own weight and the opponent's momentum to send a man airborne. Aslan's brow furrowed.
He had no absolute certainty yet, but one thing was clear.
Impressive as this technique was, it was only a fundamental.
To confirm it, Aslan forced his eyes to track the world even as it spun end-over-end with sickening speed.
Foresight granted him a second viewpoint, a detached awareness within the vision where every situation was reversible. And yet the visceral sensation was real.
That was the strength of foresight.
It provided the raw, in-the-moment intensity needed to refine the prediction itself, so that when the real moment arrived, he could execute exactly as he had prepared.
The name "foresight" and everything he had experienced using it made it easy to mistake its nature, but the effect it had possessed in the game was straightforward.
Correction—applied to all situations.
Even events he had never lived through were filtered through foresight and granted that correction.
Which meant foresight was never limited to one person's perception.
And right now, Aslan intended to exploit that.
He held the vision steady to chase down his certainty.
The world flipped. The ground rushed toward his skull. As he fell, Aslan twisted the hand Richard had locked around his wrist and reversed the grip.
The moment his fingers closed around Richard's wrist instead, Richard tried to react—but it was too late.
Aslan rotated his body without releasing the hold.
A heavy impact shuddered through the earth as Aslan landed, having thrown Richard down in the same motion. The instant his feet touched the ground, he lunged.
A punch, short and sharp. Richard tilted his body and slipped it.
An elbow strike followed immediately behind the missed blow. Aslan blocked it with his forearm.
A flicker of redirection—an uppercut aimed at the jaw. Aslan crossed his arms to trap it between them and drove forward to shove him back.
But Richard hooked Aslan's leg with the tip of his foot and pushed it aside, then snapped his head forward into a headbutt. Aslan leaned his own head back just enough to avoid full contact—then slammed his skull forward in answer. A wet crunch, the sound of a nose flattening, and Richard let out a choked noise of pain.
The master's disciple reeled backward. Aslan did not let him retreat. He grabbed a fistful of collar, yanked him forward, and drove an elbow in.
A dry crack.
"Ghk—!"
The elbow hammered into Richard's temple. His balance shattered. His eyes rolled. A clean, devastating shot to the side of the head.
To finish it, Aslan chose a spinning kick. He shoved Richard away by the collar, released him, took a half-step back, and spun into the strike. From a frame nearly two meters tall, a kick like that was a weapon in its own right.
No way to dodge it. No way to block it. Blocking meant the leg would coil around the defending limb and transition into a joint lock. Dodging meant Aslan would pull the kick short and turn it into a side kick. That was how Aslan had planned the sequence.
Richard's response exceeded every expectation.
He neither dodged nor blocked.
Still staggering, he simply extended his arm to meet the kick.
Aslan expected the arm to snap. Inside the foresight, it did not.
As if clouds reflected on water were trembling apart in the wind, Aslan's high kick deflected along the line of Richard's outstretched arm.
As though Richard were not even there.
There it is.
Richard was Itar's disciple. Itar—Master of Hand-to-Hand Combat, the weakest Master on paper and yet the single best tank-build in the game.
Itar's signature technique was nothing other than damage nullification scaling proportionally with hand-to-hand skill.
In the game it had simply been damage deletion. That it had manifested in this living world as a kind of impossibly effective deflection was startling, but Aslan did not pause the fight.
He needed more certainty.
The moment his deflected foot touched the ground, he twisted his hips and launched a side kick. Once again the high-rising leg carried enough force to shatter bone and pulp flesh on impact.
This was the hand-to-hand combat Aslan had used to silence countless enemies—kicks made lethal through the harmony of Combat Art and Jehaengmusang.
Before the kick could smash through ribs and crush the chest cavity, Richard extended his arm.
He bent the arm and caught the kick with the outer edge of his forearm, tilting so the leg slipped sideways. Without a single sound of impact, the force bled away into nothing.
He trapped the deflected leg between his flank and his arm, then raised his fist. It surged toward Aslan's face.
Recall.
Aslan repeated the word before the fist could land.
The world reversed. Color flooded back through the grayscale as everything rewound.
Like a video playing in reverse—Richard stepping backward, Aslan's body retracing its movements. Aslan watched it all in silence until the world bled back to monochrome, and then he gripped Kal's hilt.
In the vision, Richard's expression tightened, but that did not matter. Aslan rushed him.
He closed the distance while drawing Kal with one hand, the other gripping the scabbard behind his hip to pull it clear. The draw cut used nothing but the waist—a motion so smooth the blade seemed to phase through the scabbard itself.
A single horizontal slash at center mass. The killing intent behind it was faint.
"Ngh—!"
But faint intent did nothing to diminish speed or power. A blade carrying enough monstrous skill to bisect a man tore through the empty air, leaving a gray afterimage in its wake.
Richard retreated to avoid the nearly unavoidable strike. Aslan pursued, turning the slash into a thrust.
A thrust aimed to wound, not to kill. The blade darted toward Richard's midsection, and Richard slipped his body sideways with practiced ease—then seized Kal's hilt.
He trapped Aslan's arm against his side and raised a fist, ready to hammer it down.
A dry crackle of impact.
"Khk—."
Aslan had released Kal and driven the blade of his hand into Richard's throat. Richard staggered back, clutching his neck.
The sword was still pinned against his side, but reclaiming it was simple enough. Aslan grabbed Richard's wrist, yanked him forward, and backhanded him across the face with the other hand.
A wet slap.
Richard recoiled, losing the sword. His expression twisted with confusion and shock, and Aslan watched that expression as he wrapped both hands around Kal's hilt.
White breath bled from his lips. He brought the sword down.
A diagonal slash. It never landed. Richard deflected it with an unconsciously extended arm.
As the blade exited on the opposite side, Aslan stepped forward and kept swinging.
Rising slash, horizontal slash, thrust, diagonal slash, vertical slash.
The gray afterimage ripped through the air again and again. Sweat beaded on Richard's face as he slapped, deflected, and blocked the onslaught.
Every half-hearted cut, stripped of killing intent, met the same obstacle.
And yet he was closing the distance. Slowly, surely—he was already thinking about counterattacking.
Watching him, Aslan reached his certainty.
Richard was at the level of a Master of Hand-to-Hand Combat. And Aslan could not subdue him without killing him.
Richard backhanded the vertical slash aside and raised his fist. Aslan pulled the rebounding blade in close against his flank.
And then he cut.
A true cut, swung with full intent. The blade, steeped in deep killing purpose, severed both of Richard's wrists and his throat in one motion.
Blood sprayed across Aslan's face—he felt it as a warm, wet sensation—and he slowly opened his eyes.
The foresight lifted. Color returned to the world, and Richard, feeling the killing intent bleeding off Aslan, unconsciously touched the back of his own neck.
Aslan had simply been standing there. But it had felt, in that moment, as if the man had just taken his head off.
Proof of sharp instincts. Aslan noted that Richard's Luck was likely high as well and let his grip on Kal's hilt relax.
Richard stared at him with unsettled eyes.
"You... what the hell are you? I figured you were just some drifter..."
Aslan did not answer.
He only called for Angie, his voice low.
"Angie."
"Huh? What is it?"
The girl trotted over like a dog responding to its name. Aslan gazed at her quietly, then offered a gentle smile.
"Angie, would you mind fighting in my place?"
"What? Me?"
Even under that gentle smile, the girl hesitated, mumbling uncertainly.
"I don't know if I can..."
"...I'm not particularly keen on hitting a girl either. Why not send the big one over there instead?"
Richard pointed at Tiyamal, who responded with an indifferent snort. Angie looked confused.
"What are you talking about? I meant I'm not confident I won't kill you."
Richard's face twisted with bafflement—but only for a moment. The bafflement curdled into scorn.
"Sure you are. Save the bravado and step back. It's not that I can't hit a woman—I'd just rather not."
Blatantly dismissive. Given Angie's appearance, it was a natural reaction.
Nothing about Angie looked strong.
But that was only appearance. In terms of raw physical power, no one in the party could match her.
And Angie had a short temper and hated being underestimated. Faced with a reaction like that, there was only one way she was going to respond.
"You son of a bitch..."
Her teeth ground audibly as she stepped forward. Her eyes twitched, her fists clenched, and she advanced on Richard.
As Aslan watched in silence, Ereta drifted up beside him and murmured.
"Aslan, are you sure about this? If this keeps up..."
She trailed off, but Aslan understood what she was worried about.
If this kept up, the ducal heir they needed to bring back alive might end up with his skull caved in.
There was no need to worry.
Watching Angie stop directly in front of Richard and squeeze her fists, Aslan felt this was the better option.
Aslan had no way to subdue Richard without killing him. Angie did.
Richard was looking down at the girl—she barely reached his sternum—with a faint, amused smirk as she stood fuming in front of him.
"Hey."
Her voice came out as a growl. Richard stared impassively down at the girl glaring up at him with her fists balled.
"Don't regret this."
"What's there to regret? I should be the one saying—"
The moment Richard let out a scoff and folded his arms, the girl drew her fist back.
And then she threw it. A wild, reckless swing with no technique behind it.
Richard had intended to simply absorb the punch. Then he noticed the air screaming around that small fist, and his expression went rigid.
Space wailed. The wind scattered. From a girl's fist alone.
Belatedly, he extended his arm. He deployed the technique Itar had passed down to him—still incomplete.
Catch the punch on the arm and deflect it. Create distance, then subdue her with a strike. That was the plan.
But the situation unfolded differently.
The instant he caught it, Richard's body was hurled violently backward.
He carved a trench through the dirt as he flew. He never had the chance to break his fall. His back slammed into an ancient tree.
Groaning wood, a titanic crack—and the tree splintered as he crashed to the ground.
While the forest itself seemed to shudder with a low, lingering cry from the force of Angie's punch, the girl let out a derisive snort.
"What, that's it? He's nothing."
She looked deeply satisfied.