The Knight of the Grand Duke
“Kehk…!”
With a massive explosion, Yoo Sung-wook went sprawling across the arena.
My arm, on the other hand, was completely unharmed — unlike the last time I’d used Flame Fragmentation. That was thanks to the fire resistance I’d gained and the precision fire control that Flame Dominion gave me.
“Uuugh…! Th-this can’t be happening…!”
Yoo Sung-wook coughed up a mouthful of blood-flecked foam as he scrambled to his feet.
“Tell me about it. Honestly, even I found this result a little surprising, pal.”
I’d won, but the aftertaste was so sour it barely felt like a victory at all. That’s how pathetically weak Yoo Sung-wook was. I was almost embarrassed that I’d gone so far as to use the Trait Training Ground just to prepare for a fight against this guy.
His sword aura had decent power, sure — but that was all he had.
Technically speaking, he was worse than a child, let alone an ordinary adult. All he could do was discharge sword aura and swing it around; he had no concept of actually applying it. And even that much was propped up by borrowed power — even with the stat boost from the Otherworldly Fragment, he was only at the level of an upper-mid A-rank hunter.
“You were even more of a mess than I thought.”
I’ll say it again: potential is nothing more than a measure of how far a hunter can grow. It’s true that higher potential means faster growth — but potential doesn’t make you stronger on its own while you sit on your hands. And from what I could see, Yoo Sung-wook had barely grown at all. Those gates he supposedly cleared? Probably cleared by other hunters while he swiped all the credit.
“Getting strong that way just makes you a frog in a well.”
“What… what would you know!”
“A transparent fragment. And that’s all the stronger it made you?”
Transparent fragment.
The moment those words left my mouth, Yoo Sung-wook’s face went pale.
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
“Don’t even think about playing dumb. I came here knowing everything.”
I’d already known he wouldn’t talk easily. Dealing with guys like this is simple, though.
Swoosh.
I reversed my grip on the spear, leveling the shaft at his face.
“Don’t open your mouth too easily, now. That’d be boring!”
“What are you—” Wham!
“Guhk!”
I brought the shaft down on his head.
“AAAAARGH! Y-you crazy bastard!”
“Oh ho.”
So the Otherworldly Fragment had boosted his body’s durability considerably too — he could still run his mouth even while getting pounded.
“I’ll say it once more. Who gave you that fragment?”
“I don’t know anything about that!”
“Great.”
Another installment of love’s rod, duly delivered. I gripped the shaft like a baseball bat and started swinging for hit after hit — the ball, of course, being Sung-wook’s ribs and skull.
WHAM! THWACK! CRACK!
The sound of the beating rang through the arena. Nothing as faint as conversation could be heard from the stands anyway — so it was only right that I finish things here, or at least leave him in a state where he couldn’t bolt the moment the match ended.
“Urgh! AAAAH! Stop! Stop it…!”
“Your! Mouth! Is! Pretty! Heavy!”
Wow, this is more stress relief than I expected.
Come to think of it, I was starting to remember how this bastard had taunted me before the regression. Either way, this was righteous vengeance.
THWACK! WHAM!
After a few minutes of nonstop hammering, the guy finally thrust a hand into the air.
“St… stop it….”
“What’s that?”
“Stop it… please….”
Muffled words slurred out of his swollen lips.
“Speak clearly, or it’s three more minutes.”
“I’ll talk!”
“Such short sentences.”
“…Please.”
Tucking my lingering disappointment neatly away, I flashed him a gentle smile.
“Would’ve been easier if you’d just talked from the start.”
The eyes looking up at me were brimming with pure terror. I’d succeeded in utterly crushing his spirit.
“Now then. Who gave you that fragment?”
“The… the Advent Church….”
“The Advent Church?”
…Never heard of them.
Even before the regression, I’d never heard of an organization by that name. It came down to two possibilities: either Yoo Sung-wook was lying, or they operated with extreme secrecy in the shadows. Judging by his reaction, the latter seemed more likely.
“What do they do?”
“I… I don’t know! …Sir.”
Sticking on honorifics as he watched my eyes, Yoo Sung-wook stammered on.
“I got a letter! It said if I wanted to get stronger, I should come to them… so I went, and they gave me the fragment… that’s everything, I swear!”
“Hm.”
“…That’s everything, sir.”
A letter.
Quite the old-fashioned method for such people. Not the type to leave traces behind, though.
“Where’s that letter now?”
“It disappeared… sir. Right after that day….”
The Advent Church…!
At last, I’d found it. The name of the ones I had to crush.
“Th-then am I done now—”
“What are you talking about, Sung-wook? We’ve still got so much to talk about.”
I lightly gripped the shoulder of the guy trying to inch his way toward escape.
“Why leave so soon? Don’t be a stranger.”
“HIIIIEEK!”
I still needed to hear more details. If it came to it, I might even be able to track down the organization’s location through him. He still had this much use left in him — where exactly did he think he was going?
“Whoa… he’s been beaten into a literal rice cake.”
Baek Seo-ha and Shin Min-woo, having just finished their own cleanup, came walking over. Jung Min-su and Park Yong-chil had already been subdued, their limbs bound in threads of mana.
“You’re not going to hit him too? You’ve been dying to kill this guy forever.”
“I’m good. Any more and he might actually die.”
“That ended a lot more anticlimactically than I expected.”
Shin Min-woo waved the flag in his hand. It hadn’t left his grip once since the match began.
[3:21]
More than three minutes still remained on the clock — but the victor had already been decided.
A called game. The referee’s discretionary termination of a match deemed no longer worth continuing.
[3:11]
Ten seconds left. At this point, everyone had written our victory in stone.
“Hehe, I’ll actually get some highlight footage this time. In the round of 64, all I did was stab the floor.”
“I didn’t even make it on screen at all.”
The two of them chatted idly, their tension completely dissolved.
“What about you, Hyung?”
“…….”
“…Tae-hyun?”
Something felt off. It was all going too easily.
‘This easy, really?’
World-class at everything except one thing — I could boast the number one rank on Earth in sensing impending disaster.
‘It’s not over yet.’
The moment that thought brushed through my mind—
Yoo Sung-wook slowly rose from the floor.
“Haaah… aah!”
Drenched in cold sweat, both hands clutching his chest.
Looking closer, a brilliant cascade of light was pouring out from beneath his breastbone.
“It hurts! It hurts, AAAAH!”
The light spread through his blood vessels, flooding his entire body.
“Is that guy going to be okay?!”
“Something’s wrong…!”
Yoo Sung-wook was being consumed by the light, bit by bit. Something was happening to him.
“AAAAAAAAARGH!”
Steel plating erupted from the surface of his skin. His face morphed into something shaped like a medieval knight’s helm.
And then, fully shed of his old form, Yoo Sung-wook stood before us.
“So it was you.”
I knew that form. The host of the Iron Blood Monarch — the being who had shattered the Korean peninsula, and then the world, before my regression. An entity identical to those hundreds of millions of knights.
[Quest — Guild War]
▷ Win the Guild War.
▷ Reward ① Win: 300 Exp
▷ Reward ② Slay the Knight of the Grand Duke, ‘Yoo Sung-wook’: 300 Exp
▷ Reward ③ (Undisclosed)
As the undisclosed reward condition revealed itself, the creature’s name came with it, unprompted.
The Knight of the Grand Duke.
For such a hateful enemy, it was almost a stylish name.
“…….”
The Knight of the Grand Duke — formerly Yoo Sung-wook — slowly turned his head. Then he condensed some kind of power in his grip.
VMMMM!
Far more abundant sword aura than anything Yoo Sung-wook had ever produced. A blade of pure sword aura formed in that hand.
‘He forged a sword out of sword aura alone?’
One thing was certain: if I fought it thinking of it as Yoo Sung-wook’s body, it wouldn’t leave so much as a bone behind.
“The match timer’s not done yet.”
More than three minutes remained. I had to deal with that thing before the clock ran out.
“Spread out, both of you!”
Giving the order, I created Flame Spears.
Flame Soul Spearcast (Flaming Soul Javelin)
Four spears hurled themselves at the knight all at once. But before a single one could land—
Swoosh!
The knight’s sword discharged its aura and detonated every one of the Flame Soul Spears.
‘The quality of his sword aura is on another level now.’
If Yoo Sung-wook’s sword aura had been a gaudy jewel trinket all surface and no substance, this knight’s was a blade carved from diamond.
FWIP!
The knight closed the distance at an unbelievable speed and swung its sword like a raging storm.
“Tch…!”
Attacks twice as fast as Cheonmagwi’s. If this had been the old me, I’d have been slaughtered helplessly.
‘But right now, I can’t afford to lose gracefully.’
Ten Thousand Streams Beneath the Moon (Ten Thousand Streams Dance Beneath the Moonlight)
Soft, supple, flowing. I slipped past every one of those destructive strikes — and then:
“Flame Dominion. Flame Soul Crescent Moon (Flaming Soul Moon Blade).”
Karma Flame climbed the spearshaft once more, taking the shape of a crescent blade.
Nameless Spear Art (The Nameless Art of the Gun) — Falling Flower (Fallen Flowers)
A crushing spear technique burrowing into the shoulder line. The flame-empowered spear sheared through the knight’s right arm in a single stroke.
“…?!”
But instead of blood, light came pouring endlessly from the wound’s cross-section. Whatever this thing was, it had left humanity far behind.
The knight calmly took its sword in its left hand. Then, little by little, it began raising sword aura. Not just in the blade — across its entire body.
‘A big one is coming.’
My instincts recognized the warning signs. Suddenly, several streaks of wind brushed past my ears.
KUGUGUGUGUGU!
Blades of sword aura erupted outward in every direction as far as the eye could see. A dizzying storm of blades, scattering like leaves whipped about in a typhoon.
“Hyung!”
Shin Min-woo rushed over and raised a barrier of mana.
All three of us made it inside the safe zone in time — but a B-rank skill couldn’t hold out for long. The barrier was already spiderwebbed with cracks.
“What the hell IS that thing?! That’s not a person — that’s like a gate boss monster!”
He wasn’t wrong. From a distance, the sight of it solemnly generating blades of sword aura — no matter how generously you looked at it, the word “human” didn’t apply.
“Match time… about two minutes left. Can we hold out until then?”
“…It’ll be rough, Noona. Thirty seconds and the wall comes down.”
“Even if they call the match and help arrives from outside, it’ll take longer than thirty seconds.”
In the end, the only way out of this alive was to take down the knight ourselves.
‘Perfect, actually.’
It was mine to hunt anyway. And the circumstances had fallen neatly into place.
I lowered the spear to the ground for a moment and spoke.
“No time, so I’ll explain this exactly once.”
The commentator swallowed his words and fixated on the screen.
It looked like the inside of a blender. Razor-sharp blades swept across the entire arena, kicking up a magnificent sandstorm.
‘Can anyone survive in there?’
A chill premonition sent shivers down my spine — through the viewers at home, at least. Then, slowly, the storm began to subside.
“Oh! We have a clear view!”
And the scene that unfolded was enough to plunge everyone into shock.