Run, Run, Run
"I'll die."
"You're saying you'll die over a little misunderstanding? All I did was take a special interest because my sworn brother's daughter was in a difficult situation, and somehow that turns into me being head over heels, pining away in unrequited— pfft, hkk!"
Nope. Can't hold it in.
I collapsed right where I stood, laughter bursting out of me beyond all control.
"I'll kill you! You really do need to die!"
Lim Hayeon shrieked, her face so red it was on the verge of turning purple.
"Pfft— d-don't die...... pfft, hkk."
My stomach was about to split open. Somebody save me.
People say qi deviation comes from internal energy running backward and deranging the blood flow, but I was going to achieve it from laughing too hard.
"Are you seriously going to keep laughing?!"
Lim Hayeon glared at me, fists clenched, trembling all over.
Even from your side, it's funny, isn't it?
The very idea that I'd fallen for her at first sight and was suffering through a one-sided crush.
"Let's get down first. I'm, ah, still not confident about descending from this height."
I wrestled my laughter back under control and carefully extended a hand toward Lim Hayeon.
"Do you— do you even know what I've been thinking all this time?!"
Apparently she had no intention of coming down. She bit her lip and shouted, seething.
"And what did you think of me?"
I looked at Lim Hayeon, whose face was an open book of embarrassment and mortification, with an utterly solemn expression.
"......"
"Whatever delusions I may have held about you, Miss Hayeon, and whatever misunderstandings you held about me— those are not what brought us to this place."
What we talked about holding hands just now was no misunderstanding.
I'm not without fault either. Every time I did something for her, I did it with the possibility in mind that she might be the true heroine of a martial arts visual novel.
Call it shared fault on both sides.
Lim Hayeon glanced back and forth between my hand and my face, then finally hung her head low and muttered.
"Wh-who fell for whom first is st-still going to matter quite a lot......"
"Isn't what matters more the fact that right now, I don't want to let go of your hand, Miss Hayeon?"
"You really are......"
"A long misunderstanding can be untangled with a long story. Let's talk about the rest when we get home."
Lim Hayeon shyly took my hand.
What does that even matter. Getting down together is what matters.
Though I do intend to make good use of the fact that Lim Hayeon fell for me first, mind you.
"Skipping dinner to run around has made me hungry."
Suddenly I was starving.
Between worrying over Lim Hayeon, I'd skipped dinner and rushed about all evening, and now the hunger hit me all at once.
"Should we go to that pork soup place from before? I heard they're open at night too."
"And order some boiled pork slices with a cup of rice wine. Perfect."
"You have work again tomorrow, you know."
Lim Hayeon told me, sounding worried.
"Tomorrow's problems are for tomorrow."
After sweating my heart out all evening, I'd earned at least one good cup.
"You really are...... shall I have a cup with you, then?"
Lim Hayeon sighed as if I were hopeless, then smiled pleasantly at me.
"Would I ever refuse?"
"Then let's go. This way."
Hand in hand, Lim Hayeon started leading me toward the soup house.
"Finished your little chat?"
—If not for the armed men surrounding the pavilion.
"Who goes there?"
Every last one of them wore a blade at his hip.
No one wandering around with swords in the dead of night had good intentions, that much was certain.
Sword-carrying thugs out at this hour—who might they be? A rival's dirty work, bandits, the underworld— surely not the leftovers of the Nokcheong Escort Agency.
Don't tell me.
In that instant, thoughts of the people I least wanted to see flashed through my mind.
"The pink-haired girl is with him after all."
"See! I told you he'd be here if we tailed the barbarian!"
Their faces said their troubles were finally over. If they'd come for me, fine. But they'd come for Miss Hayeon.
Only one group came to mind.
"You've come looking for Miss Hayeon?"
"That's right. From the Do Gate. Hand over Im Hayeon and get lost, if you want to live."
So it was the Do Gate after all.
"Do you have any idea how much grief you two have caused us!"
"This farce ends tonight."
In my search for Lim Hayeon, I'd momentarily forgotten something.
That I wasn't the only one looking for her.
That the harder I searched for Lim Hayeon, the more likely I was to stumble into the Do Gate's web of surveillance.
"Come along quietly."
Do Gate thugs, numbering well over thirty. I'd been certain no one was on the pavilion before we climbed it—where had all these men been hiding?
What do I do?
Lim Hayeon and I exchanged a wordless glance for an instant.
"They're thinking of running!"
A Do Gate swordsman who caught the shift in the air shouted at us.
"Im Hayeon. Forget about escaping. This isn't Usan, where you could slip away with your eyes closed—this is Wuhan, the heart of the Do Gate."
"That's right! Every alley you could flee through is already packed with our men! Thinking you can escape is a fool's dream!"
Well, that's for us to check and judge for ourselves, isn't it.
"Miss Hayeon."
Let's get ready. I sent Lim Hayeon another look.
"These bastards can't even understand words! Im Hayeon! Yes, go on, run! If you flee, do you think the man beside you will be spared?!"
"Run."
"Yes."
I released the internal energy I'd been holding ready in the Yongcheon acupoints of my soles.
"That wench—! She really would abandon her man and run, after all——huh?"
The fastest form of the Shadowless Body Art. A burst of ascension that required no preparatory stance at all. Before the swordsmen could even draw their blades, we shot upward.
"Kiyaaaahooo!"
They never imagined we'd leap clear over the encirclement in a single breath, did they?
Seems they underestimated my qinggong.
I did learn under intensive private tutoring from a genius whose footwork no one in the martial arts visual novel world could hope to match!
With a wide grin at the dumbfounded men craning their necks after us, I broke into a full sprint across the rooftops.
"Get them!"
"Damn it! What kind of qinggong do those bastards have?!"
"Wasn't beating the Nokcheong Escort Chief supposed to be a fluke?!"
"Stop yapping and catch them!"
"Don't lose them! Tighten the net!"
Claiming they'd stocked every alley with men hadn't been an empty boast.
As we tore over walls and rooftops, down lanes and through crowds at full speed, the shouts of eyewitness reports chased us a half-step behind.
"Go for the running barbarian's legs!"
"You lunatics—!"
A blade swept through the spot my ankle had occupied a heartbeat ago. The Do Gate man watched it miss with visible disappointment. I have no desire to become Kang Yun-ho-the-crippled, what is this nonsense?
While I hesitated for a moment in shock, more armed Do Gate men appeared ahead, blades drawn.
What now?
"This way!"
Lim Hayeon's voice came from above my head. When did she clear that wall and climb onto the roof?
A path opened up in the direction she pointed. Trash heap, wall, kicking off the wall twice, then the roof.
Good. Let's go. Moving my body wasn't the hard part.
"After them!"
"Run!"
The streets were far too dangerous. Following Lim Hayeon's lead, we raced across the rooftops at full tilt.
Her qinggong really is absurd.
Every time a new roof appeared, I would stall, squeezing out internal energy to make the jump—while Lim Hayeon showed no hesitation whatsoever.
If anything, she kept glancing back at me as I struggled to keep up, apparently choosing the easiest possible route for my sake.
And just as she looked back at me once more and leapt for the next roof—
"Throw the spear!"
A single spear tore through the air, hurtling straight toward her.
"Miss Hayeon!"
No. It's going to hit.
Humans cannot fly.
The spear's trajectory was flawless. No matter how desperately she flailed in midair, that angle left no escape from a fatal wound.
Unless one was Lim Hayeon.
"What?! What on earth just happened?!"
"What, how— it went straight through her?!"
Her eyes had met the spear's.
From below, it must have looked as though the spear had passed clean through her body, without her even having a moment to react.
And yet Lim Hayeon was untouched.
"The Eight Great Cloud Dragon Forms......"
Let a rain of arrows fall upon a dragon sporting above the clouds—it would drift through the drizzle as effortlessly as slipping past a light shower.
The secret art of the Kunlun Sect, stolen by a previous Shadowless Divine Thief. A movement art that moves like a dragon roaming above the clouds.
In that brief heartbeat, Lim Hayeon had snapped her waist midair and changed direction.
"What are you doing?!"
She called to me from the opposite rooftop, utterly composed.
While the men below gaped in stunned disbelief, I flung myself onto the next roof.
"I told you to throw it properly!"
"That woman—she just flew through the sk——"
"Save the nonsense! Throw the spears!"
"Too slow!"
The pursuit was relentless.
"This IS my top speed!"
The Do Gate thugs were just too obsessive!
I get it even so—I spent months playing the fool pretending to be holed up in the print shop, fed the Simun false information, barricaded myself in the estate. But really, are you people being paid overtime for this? You're not on some flat salary scheme, are you?
"Over there!"
"I'm throwing you. Brace yourself."
Finally fed up, Lim Hayeon stopped dead and grabbed hold of me.
"What do you me——AAAARGH!"
In an instant, gravity vanished from my body.
"Men fly through the sky too!"
I'd been thrown.
The ground fell away. The mighty currents of the Yangtze River, too distant to see before, came into view.
I was no longer human—I was a bird. Gugu, my friend, so this is the scenery you see every day.
Wright brothers, you were wrong. Humans can fly through the sky without the aid of machines.
Is this what a human airplane would feel like? No. A human rocket, perhaps? Maybe I should join Team Rocket starting today.
"Once again, I'm soaring todayyyy!"
Regrettably, the successful launch of a rocket reaching Earth's orbit would remain an achievement of a few centuries hence.
I went down in history as a failure, plummeting back toward the earth.
"What are you saying?! Catch him!"
A perfect catch by Lim Hayeon.
"Hah! Hah! I thought I was a dead man!"
Thankfully I turned out to be a reusable rocket, not a single-use one.
"That got us far. Where do we go now? An inn? The estate? Daseogak?"
"Now that we've been spotted, they'll have every one of those places surrounded. Focus on shaking the pursuit first."
Determined not to become a second-stage launch platform, I squeezed out the last of my internal energy and ran.
"Catch them!"
Oh, give it a rest already.
Did every Do Gate thug in Wuhan come crawling out for this?
How badly do you people want to capture Lim Hayeon? Is there really a reason to go this far?
"Anyone who catches that woman gets her gambling debts wiped clean!"
Ah, so it's loyalty you're after.
"Hah... hah..."
Having briefly thrown off the Do Gate pursuers, breathlessness caught up with me in an empty lot.
"What's wrong?! Are you all right?"
"My— my internal energy......"
What I possessed was five years' worth of internal energy. Not nearly enough to sustain the ascension art of the Shadowless Body Art through an all-night chase.
"Ah."
A flicker of dismay crossed Lim Hayeon's face.
"There! They're over there!"
"Get on my back!"
Lim Hayeon crouched down and showed me her back.
"No. Go on alone. I'll flee another way."
"What are you saying!"
"Splitting up to break the encirclement may be the better option."
I'm a liability beyond this point. It might genuinely be safer for her to run alone.
"Do you think I can't see you're planning to play the decoy?!"
"That's not it."
"Save the nonsense and get on!"
Lim Hayeon's desperate voice pierced my ears.
"Im Hayeon. This is the end of the line."
Aren't you all tired? Where on earth do you keep crawling out from?
The Do Gate thugs raised their blades and began slowly tightening the circle around us.
"Run ahead, I say."
"Don't you dare say that!"
"Yes, run. Im Hayeon—the girl who abandoned the courtesans she called her older and younger sisters and fled—what reason would you have not to abandon a man too?"
In the raid on Usan's Gyobang, every courtesan of the Haomen Gi Gate had been killed.
If I fled and left her behind, it would be a Do Gate thug killing me.
"Don't cower. We've caught our breath— we can run again."
"How long do you think your man can keep running? When we catch him, we'll make sure he lives out his life as a cripple. He'll spend it cursing the day he ever 'protected' you."
The Do Gate swordsman bared a slimy smile as he spoke to me.
"Spare me. Don't worry on my account."
I shielded Lim Hayeon behind my back and glared at the man.
"Im Hayeon! Come with us now and you'll live as a fugitive courtesan for life—but we'll leave this man unharmed. What do you say?"
"Don't be taken in by their lies. They cannot touch me."
Do you people truly think you can handle me? Cripple an honored guest of the Tang Clan, will you?
"Barbarian. This is not Sichuan. This is Hubei Province."
The Do Gate man scowled at me.
"Even in Wuhan, there are those who would take your side."
You have the confidence to trample this year's rising star, the one the Simun Branch Master has his eye on?
"Since when was Miss Hayeon the Do Gate Branch Master's property?"
I gripped Lim Hayeon's hand tight, as if I would never let go.
"You......"
Save the honey-dripping voice for later.
Should I needle the Do Gate thugs by asking Lim Hayeon whether she really belonged to their Branch Master, or spin some other line to buy more time?
As I racked my brain for any way to recover my breath and store up the strength to break free—
"Calling another household's child yours and mine. How laughable."
Behind the Do Gate thugs surrounding us, a far larger crowd of figures appeared all at once.
"Who goes there!"
"We wondered why the gamblers were raising such a ruckus in a dead-end alley where they don't belong, and look— we've stumbled upon quite the entertaining scene."
At the center of the crowd that had appeared out of nowhere, a woman with heavy makeup stepped forward to sneer at the swordsmen.
"Huh?!"
"Miss Hayeon. People you know?"
They did seem to recognize each other.
"Whores, and this is neither the place nor the—!"
"Oh my. Selling their very lives to gambling— no wonder the likes of you have never heard the saying, sell singing, not flesh."
"You wenches—!"
"Hmph."
The newcomers met the Do Gate's open hostility without flinching.
Swordsmen were scattered among them, but here and there stood beauties dressed in fine silks.
Who were they?
Undeterred by the Do Gate men, the woman at the head of the late arrivals walked past them and approached us.
As she drew near, a pungent perfume and flowery fragrance washed over me—along with the smell of wine.
Wait.
A force resembling the Do Gate within Haomen, but one built around courtesans—
Don't tell me.
"Have you come from the Gi Gate?"
"That's right, Young Master Kang Yunho. We've come to take back Im Hayeon—a daughter of our Gi Gate."