The Jack-o'-Lantern Subjugation (3)
Clank─ screeeech─
The train pulled into the platform.
It was the express that ran from the Combat Department's main hall. Only two people stepped off the car: the Vice President and her aide.
Eliana Andersen gazed at the magic tower looming in the distance and spoke, her face expressionless. "Shall I tell everyone to evacuate?"
"No need for that. They wouldn't recognize what's happening anyway, and it'll be over soon."
Lee Chung curled the corner of her mouth into a smirk, then swept her chilly gaze across the surrounding territory. The magic tower with one wall blown clean through, the Witchcraft Quarter streets beneath it — and even the hidden face behind it all. She pierced through every layer with a single look, then murmured to herself.
"So it can't be done from here after all."
She would have to get at least as far as the very mouth of that keyhole. Muttering quietly, she rapped her knuckles against the wall a few times before speaking.
"I'll come save you soon."
She looked like she still had time to spare — but even so, that time was running short.
BOOM!
A fist drove deep into the demon's chest.
He had borrowed the sacred from an angel, and a demon steeped in that power could do nothing but writhe in agony.
────────!!!!!
With a fist suddenly punched through its chest, the demon shrieked as if in unbearable pain. Whatever pitch that scream took, the air was thick with ominous demonic power, and the sound set his nerves on edge against his will.
It's gotten way tougher than before.
Part of it was that the demon's mana itself had grown — but more than that, having transmuted into demonic energy, it had developed a resistance to qi.
As a force of pure malice, it now stood opposed to pure qi and mana alike. Unless one wielded the sacred — the absolute counter — the thing barely took damage at all.
So that's the limit, for now.
Once Choi Gangjun confirmed the radiance around his fist had fully died out, he pulled his body back.
Before the angel completely lost her distance from the demon, she finished chanting her holy spell. Light gathered at her fingertips.
"O Lord, grant me the weapon that shall slay evil."
If the elves were nicknamed the mage hunters, the White Wing Race had two great epithets of their own: the lions of heaven who passed judgment in light — angels. And demon slayers.
"───Ur, Methuselah──."
A spear of light was conjured out of thin air in an instant and laid across her palm. Its power rivaled hardened gang qi — or exceeded it. Materializing such a thing was an art only the White Wing Race, bearers of sacred power and light-attribute mana, could perform.
Even as Lucia was flung backward through the air, she rolled her right shoulder for the briefest instant.
BOOM─! A second spear plunged into the demon's chest, right where his fist had sunk in moments before.
"Ughaaaaaargh!"
The demon thrashed more violently than ever, spewing black Kalpa Fire and screams from its maw. The pumpkin-headed demon howled in agony for a long moment — and then began tracing a magic circle in the empty air with its fingers.
The mage drew his circle with oozing, ruined fingers, chanting all the while, until at last he bellowed.
"───Ner!"
Fwoooosh─!
Soot-black torchfire erupted all around the demon. It was an attack that burned anything it touched to death — and at the same time, a barrier that denied all who stood before it. With his minimal defenses in place, Professor Pumpkinhead finally turned his attention to punishing those who had tormented him so.
CRUNCH─!
The demon wrenched the spear out of its own chest with its own hand — then slammed it straight down into the tower's floor.
"───Balak!"
I shall become the one who annihilates all things.
"Collapse."
The instant the chant ended, the mage flooded the spell with mana and ignited it. The target was everything in this place.
KWAGAGANG─!
Black Kalpa Fire spread from the point his hand had touched, devouring the entire floor. Watching him, Cheon Yuha stamped her heel against the air once more, trying to snuff the flames out. BOOM! A gale rose on the shockwave rippling off the ground — but it fell far short of quelling the raging inferno. More to the point, the floor he'd slammed down on was already broken clean through, so smothering the flames was a meaningless gesture.
……Hm?
Cheon Yuha felt a sudden sense of weightlessness. She dropped her gaze to the ground — and found there was no longer anything there worth calling a floor.
Groooan─… …CRUUMPH─…
The magic tower was collapsing. The entire building. And she was falling with it.
"……Damn it all!"
Cheon Yuha hastily kicked off empty air, then leapt from falling shard to falling shard of the building, dodging the debris raining down around her head. All the while, she scrambled to find the others — praying no one had been caught in the collapse.
We only just reunited, and I haven't even given him a proper greeting yet!
Twisting her head this way and that, she finally spotted Eleanor. "──You all right?" Thankfully, the nimble elf was already kicking off falling debris, descending at a controlled pace — exactly as one would expect. Choi Gangjun and the white-winged angel were the same.
Cheon Yuha let herself relax for a heartbeat — then looked up, her expression hardening.
……All right, then. What am I supposed to do about that?
A flash of light entered her vision. Nothing like holy radiance — a pitch-black, sinisterly wavering cluster of light. The mana wielded by the demon flying alone through the heavens, for all that it shone, somehow resembled the very nature of shadow.
Demonic energy — the force that devoured every power except the sacred.
"───Burn it all to ash!"
So roaring, the pumpkin-headed demon fired its mana upward, above its own head — where a murky, blood-dark sky hung. The demon curled its fist as if to hammer downward, and finished the chant.
"───Chemosh!"
KWARUNG! KWARURUNG!
The sky, swollen with black mana, unleashed a torrent of fire from the heavens. Dozens of bolts of black lightning crashed down around the point the mage had designated. Cheon Yuha and Eleanor, falling inside their trajectories, paled and kicked off the debris faster and harder. The winged angel slipped gracefully out of the range with agile evasive maneuvers.
Gangjun, dodging the spell, also batted aside the bolts that came flying head-on, one by one, measuring them with his hands as he went. "……So that's the extent of it."
At last, his calculation was complete.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Each bolt of lightning falling from the sky obliterated nearly everything in its path before it ever touched the ground. Cheon Yuha didn't even attempt to block them with her guarding qi — her instinct told her that once she started taking those hits, there would truly be no end to it. With no leeway to conserve her energy, she resorted even to aerial footwork whenever evasion grew difficult.
Soon the moment of reaching the ground arrived — but Cheon Yuha could not let herself breathe easy.
It's burning.
This time, above the demon's head, in the open sky, a black sun was being born. The mana gathering there was even more immense than the beam that had hurled Gangjun away before — which meant that blocking it was out of the question, and even dodging would be no simple feat.
Everything around it was certain to be scorched flat. The demon chanted its long incantation, amassing a monstrous mass of mana above its own head. A host of stars wrought from demonic energy — a black nebula was taking shape, nearing completion.
See? I told you we should have taken it down fast.
BOOM─! Kicking off the final shard of debris and slipping free of the collapsing site, Cheon Yuha immediately gathered qi into both hands. If she couldn't block it — she would intercept it before he could fire. Asura Pacheonmu.
It would be the last technique either way. She fixed her eyes on the demon in the heavens alone, gathering every scrap of her internal strength into her fingertips — preparing her final move.
And so she was late to notice the presence approaching from behind.
"Gangjun?"
The man she had reunited with mere minutes before spoke with grave seriousness. "There's something you absolutely must do for me."
"Oho. And what might that be?"
"Lend me some of your qi for a moment."
"……Is this a jest again, by any chance?"
"Not this time." Choi Gangjun held her gaze steadily and declared, "I need your energy."
At those words, Cheon Yuha stared at him, unblinking. What in the world was he scheming? Normally, the transmission of one's inner strength was something a master on the edge of death performed for a beloved disciple — for no matter how great a master, once one's innate qi drained away completely, one did not live long. The vital energy that sustained the body vanished, and with it came swift, merciless aging; even one's martial force itself was lost. The very root of life. Was he asking her to hand over her life itself?
For the first time since she had encountered him, Cheon Yuha glared at him with murderous intensity. Choi Gangjun accepted that scorching gaze calmly, and continued. "There's a way to take it — without the innate qi."
"Truly?"
"If you're that nervous, go ahead and finish what you were about to do instead."
With that, Gangjun smiled — and let the qi of Yeokcheon, the Defiance of Heaven, ripple out from his grip as he spoke.
"I'll take it as it is."
"What on earth are you all doing?"
Eleanor, who had wheeled around and caught up with them, frowned as she took in the scene before her eyes — a scene the latecomer found utterly impossible to parse. Judging by the halo above her head and the white wings, that was presumably an angel: the salutatorian, Lucia. She had both hands pressed to Choi Gangjun's back, sweat beading down her forehead as she chanted her holy spell.
Perhaps because of it, a crackling radiance surged up all across Gangjun's body. Gangjun, for his part, had likewise extended both hands, wrapping around the Pacheonmu that Yuha had wrought between her palms. Cheon Yuha, drenched in sweat, strained to control the surging sphere of force that looked ready to burst free at any moment.
But to Eleanor, who knew none of the circumstances, it looked for all the world like three people clinging to one another doing… something… while a grand spell threatened to crash down on their heads.
"Eleanor! Get over here and help us!"
At Cheon Yuha's desperate urging, Eleanor had no choice but to summon her spirits. Something, anything, had to be done. "……Nome, go help them, would you?"
The earth spirit, honoring its friend's wish, approached Yuha and Gangjun and reinforced their bodies. Their flesh didn't grow markedly tougher or more limber — but even so, it felt like room to breathe had opened up.
Cheon Yuha drew a deep breath and lifted the Asura Pacheonmu — roiling as though it would detonate at any instant — upward. It was a different lineage from source power or dimensional fragments, but it, too, was a vast wellspring of energy.
"……So. What exactly do you intend to do?"
To that question, Gangjun — for some reason no longer smiling — regarded her quietly for a moment before answering. "Now I take it."
So saying, the man dared to reach out and lay his hand upon the Pacheonmu. Cheon Yuha tensed, bracing for him to lose control of it — but thankfully, no such thing happened.
If anything… it's steadier.
The very moment this man's hand touched it, the energy that had seemed ready to explode began to settle and grow calm. How was such a thing possible? Cheon Yuha found herself wondering, anew, just how deep the martial depths of this man called Choi Gangjun truly ran.
"Say what?"
I want to beat everyone who ever looked down on me. I will become stronger than every last one of them. That was what I'd told her — and my master had thrown a strange question back at me.
"Hah. Then tell me — which comes first: beating them, or becoming strong?"
To me they seemed like the same thing — but back then, when I was still getting tossed around every which way, if I absolutely had to choose, I wanted the victory more. I wanted to beat someone, anyone at all. Hearing that, my master quietly smiled and wrapped both hands around my outstretched fist.
"Then stop flailing your fists wildly at empty air. If you truly want strength — a truly strong fist — then for someone as weak as you are right now, it's still too soon."
Having delivered that harsh verdict, my master gazed at me steadily — and this time extended her own hand. "So from today, let's learn something new."
For instance: the force carried in an opponent's fist, the angle of their torso, the flow of their qi. As though assuming a battle with someone, my master demonstrated her forms in place, cleaving the air itself. Her mysterious, fluid movements were like a dance.
"The soft overcomes the hard. That is no liar's boast — and it is no coward's excuse, either, no crutch for those who fear the strong."
In a sense, it was hegemony by another road — or the martial art of one who truly ruled the world. "Don't try to force power into your fist. Don't cling to the wretched strength inside you. Instead, command everything else."
She was explaining how to truly instruct and steer the world itself. Heaven and earth, water and fire, thunder and wind, marsh and mountain — the eight forces that composed the world. The Eight Trigrams. And the method of commanding them all — that was the martial art my master had passed down to me.
"Its name is Taegukmu. Master it to completion, and you will grow stronger than anyone alive. So carve it into memory, properly — and never, ever give up."
With a face clear of even a single shadow, my master handed down those distant teachings to me — a mere First-rate martial artist at the time. "Don't let them break your spirit — do that, and you can always win."
Only decades later did I finally understand. The way to win. Now, I knew it too.
I'll make it mine.
I struggled to claim the bomb of energy touching the tips of my limbs as my own — struggled to master the wave that the young Cult Leader of the Heavenly Demon Cult, Cheon Yuha, had created. No. I dared to dominate it.
The enlightenment is already mine.
This wasn't simply taking it hand-to-hand and firing it in someone's stead. It would only be for an instant — but I meant to wield the already-discharged energy as I pleased. I sought to force my guarding qi into existence through the energy of Pacheonmu itself. I had used it to my heart's content before, after all.
The only thing I lacked now was internal energy. Of the three — mind, body, energy — I was short nothing but quantity. That was why I meant to borrow qi from Cheon Yuha, whose reserves were the deepest among us.
Of course, that's no easy feat either.
I suddenly recalled the method of dominating an opponent that I'd learned from my master, Lee Chung. And I turned over, once more, the experience of watching internal energy transmute itself inside Professor Pumpkinhead's laboratory just days ago — that uncanny sensation of pure external energy flowing in and becoming inner strength.
An instant. That was all I needed. Recalling all of it — and holding on to the vast power I'd wrenched away by force.
─I dismantled the Pacheonmu, right there.
In a flash, I made it mine and coiled it around both hands. The hegemonic energy of the Heavenly Demon lay governed in the hands of a mere Peak Realm martial artist.
Having watched that absurd process unfold before her eyes, Cheon Yuha cried out, hollow with disbelief. "……This is sorcery!"
Well, regression certainly was sorcery, no denying it. The urge to shoot back exactly that nearly pierced the heavens — but I had no leeway to spare either.
The sky had gone black. Whether he meant to crush us dead outright or not, the heavens in my vision were packed wall to wall with mana. The long incantation had bought me time, but that time was now at its end. The pumpkin-headed demon finished its chant and ignited the completed spell.
─Cyrus.
A black sun was falling from the sky. A grand spell of staggering scale — it was as if the heavens themselves were coming down.
Ha. I just wanted to drink an elixir, and look at the mess I'm in.
But what could I do? This was something I had to accomplish — and something I truly could. As it had always been.
I straightened my spine and neck, and exhaled a calm, even breath. I planted both legs firmly into the earth and extended my hands, palms square.
─Pacheonmu: guarding qi.
After so long, the armor of qi wrapping tight around both hands felt welcome beyond words. I couldn't draw up enough to sheathe my whole body — but this alone was enough. Yes. As long as I didn't burn to a crisp in the aftermath.
The martial artist raised both hands against the sun falling from the sky. This time I drew upon the inner strength of my entire body and set it shimmering in my palms.
And I traced the Taiji.
─The Eight Trigrams: Geon, Heaven. My left hand seized the sky.
─The Eight Trigrams: Gon, Earth. My right hand grasped the ground.
Geongondaenayi. This was the secret art that a dullard had scrambled and clawed his way toward over an entire lifetime. The highest summit a mere mercenary had ever reached — and the far shore glimpsed beyond it.
"Come at me, you son of a bitch."
My hands moved.
Grrrrrrrrrrrr─!!! At last, the black sun and a human's hands met.
Yet the hands neither buckled, nor twisted helplessly, nor burned away to ash and vanished. Thanks to the angel's protection. Thanks to the spirit's blessing. Thanks to the guarding qi cloaking my hands. Or perhaps through sheer will — the resolve to prove I could win, this time for certain. I simply traced the Taiji.
The martial artist's hands and fingers, pressed against the sun, continued their uncanny, winding movements. And I murmured the incantation I had repeated to myself countless times across an entire lifetime.
"This time, I win. No matter what."
I twisted both hands.
─Geongondaenayi, the Great Shift of Heaven and Earth.
Moving heaven and earth. The world turned upside down — and the black sun reclaimed its rightful place.
─……Huh?
BOOM!
The demon and the sun collided.
