All That Remains Is You
"Now all that remains is you."
A thin, shearing hiss cut through a breeze that, only a moment ago, had been blowing soft and mild—a sound that had no business being there. Steel raked the air. It stank of blood. It was a sound he had heard to the point of loathing in his previous life.
If anything is different this time, it is only that they call it magic.
A sharp crack split the quiet, and the sword in Cheon Hwi's hand answered before he did.
"Prepare yourselves!"
He struck the incoming arrows out of the air as he shouted it. Hyeon moved first. The hand that had been clutching the edge of her master's sleeve let go, and she went to Cecilia, settling into a guard. Seol raised her sword, and the air around her turned murderous, as if she meant to kill whoever stood in front of her.
It had been nothing more than that brief command, and yet the disciples moved as though they had been given the most exact of orders, each falling into her place and her part. The man who had spoken them took his sword and said nothing else. A moment ago the blade had still been wrapped in its scabbard. Now, before anyone had seen it happen, the scabbard was gone.
"Seol. You will guard Cecilia as well."
If this was an ambush, Cecilia was the one in the greatest danger. However strong Hyeon might be, protecting her alone would be more than she could manage. Seol knew it, and she took the order without a word.
"I know you are still there. Come out."
An assassination, an ambush—such things lose most of their power the instant they are discovered. Assassins who have been found either abandon the place at once or gather whoever is nearby and strike together. He sensed no will to flee. If they had meant to run, they would have run the moment the first attack failed.
Several of them, then?
Ten or so, perhaps. He could not pick out the presence of many. Fifteen at the most. There might be more lying in wait, but the margin of error would not exceed five.
"You still will not show yourselves?"
He asked a second time.
The answer came on another thin hiss: a storm of fire, and blade after blade of magic.
"Courting punishment, I see."
Cheon Hwi spoke as he struck down every spell that flew at him, and the presence rolling off him had gone utterly cold.
"Very well. If you will not come… then I shall come to you."
The instant the words ended, a roar fit to tear the ears apart shook the air, and something hurtled toward the assassin at a speed too terrible to follow.
What?
The sheer force of it snapped his eyes wide. His head whipped around.
Magic?
What he saw was sword qi, forged of internal energy, though he had no notion that such a thing existed. Something had been wrapped around a blade, and so it had to be magic. That was as far as his guess could reach.
Magic is answered with magic. There was no world in which he lost a contest of spells to a brat who had not lived even half his years.
Sensing that his body was about to be split in two, the assassin threw a spell up in front of himself and sealed the way. But the sword qi drove in with a grinding shriek, gnawing through the barrier as if it meant to eat it.
Im… impossible—!
The defensive spell he had raised burst apart. The sword qi did not stop. It ripped his chest open.
"…"
Blood fountained. The assassin stared blankly down at his own chest, split so deep the bone showed—no, deeper than bone, deep enough that the organs gaped into view—then staggered, and fell.
From where the rest still hid, a woman could not look away.
He killed him in a single blow? What kind of absurd magic was this? It was not a truth that held in every case, and yet the longer one lived, the stronger one's magic became, for the longer one lived, the more mana one could gather. That boy, however she looked at him, had not lived half so long as the man now lying open on the ground. When she had been making her name as an assassin, he would only just have been learning to walk.
Her gaze trembled as it lifted to Cheon Hwi. And she saw his eyes. Cold eyes, bare of guilt, bare of any feeling at all, for the killing of a person.
She flinched.
Wh-what is he…?
She could not begin to understand it. Winning against a person with a sword? Even that strained belief. How could a sword overcome magic? But what she understood even less was the other thing.
He killed someone…?
Eyes that showed nothing while they did it. The act of killing itself could grow familiar. Was their own trade not one that lived by assassination? To become like that, they had spent years in training devoted to nothing but the scouring away of feeling. This brat was of a different grain entirely.
It was not a question of strong or weak. To kill a person and feel not the slightest stir—for that to be possible, one had either walked a hell in which murder was nothing, or killed so many that the heart had gone numb. One or the other. Neither belonged to someone of his age, and that was why she was afraid. She could not even sense killing intent.
Cheon Hwi looked with indifferent eyes upon the assassin he had cut down in a single stroke, and upon the pack still hidden around them, and slowly opened his mouth.
"All of you…"
He closed it again for a moment, as if pressing down a surge of rage, and then went on.
"All of you, converge!"
"By your command."
"By your command."
Out of the silence that had settled heavy over the place, the assassins' voices spilled from every side.
"Finished hiding, are you?"
"Arrogant. You think you can beat all of us alone?"
They numbered fewer than ten, yet every one of them was an assassin who had made something of a name. Four brats could not overcome assassins like these. And yet—why? Why did this unease sit in her, this fear?
I'm imagining it. By any common sense, there was no reason to be afraid of a child like that. Yes. It had been chance. The spell had not been cast in time, or the opponent had simply been stronger than expected. Any number of reasons would do. Even if that brat truly were some overwhelming master, it would hardly matter.
One of them, at most. From the others, she felt no great power. A single peerless master could dominate a battlefield, true enough. Kill the other children first, and then kill him. That was all it would take.
"Kill them!"
The one who seemed to lead them gave the order, and every assassin rushed in.
"Disciples. You will watch this fight."
In a moment when fear would have been the only sane response, Cheon Hwi merely addressed his disciples at his ease.
"Cheon Hwi, are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"Kill that one first!"
The three women were not aiding the master. No—the master was refusing their aid. In that case, there was no reason not to attack him. The calculation settled quickly, and the leader went for Cheon Hwi.
"First the caravan master, and now assassins. I cannot fathom why, of late, they are so determined to trouble me. To trouble us."
His voice was not the voice of a moment before. Not a trace of his usual playfulness remained. What stood there carried the grim resolve of a swordsman taking the field.
"Which of you is the leader?"
"…I am. What, are you surrendering?"
"Leave only you alive, and I imagine I'll have my answer to what I've been wondering."
It might have sounded like mercy, the kindness of sparing an enemy. Heard only a little differently, it was no different from a promise to kill everyone but the leader. Perhaps instinct understood it—that the moment a mouth opened, the moment a body moved, the head would leave the shoulders. By all rights this was the moment to call him arrogant. The words would not come.
His footsteps came a little faster. They were aimed, of course, at where the leader stood. The assassins positioned between Cheon Hwi and their chief twisted their faces with strain and poured cold sweat.
"Urgh…"
"…"
The closer he came, the farther they retreated, without quite meaning to. They could not flee. No retreat had been ordered, and to run without one left nothing at the end of it but death.
"Step aside. Your turn comes later."
A chill voice slipped from him as he came to a stop directly before them. For an instant they traded glances, as if they might give way—and then they charged instead.
"Die!"
"Haaaaah!"
With someone's half-mad cry, the assassins hurled themselves at Cheon Hwi all at once. If fleeing meant death and fighting meant death, then fighting at least held some thin possibility. That was what they had decided.
Curious weapons. A vivid energy shimmered along short wooden rods. Was it not said that a person, at the edge of death, calls up strength beyond human limits? The rippling power, and the attacks born of it, looked like the most formidable strikes of their lives.
Against magic so violent and savage, an ordinary human body seemed far too frail. Light and heat. Blood and flesh. Someone was already certain of victory.
"Did… did we do it?"
"Haha…!"
The joy lasted the length of a breath. Then, within the shimmering wreckage of mana, the magic that had swallowed him unraveled like smoke, and a figure stood there.
"Is that all?"
But when had Cheon Hwi ever been an ordinary man? The clothes he wore had been ripped to hanging rags, and yet the body beneath them had not taken a single wound.
"Assassins. Don't insult the name. Is this the extent of your skill?"
He murmured it, and the words drove into their ears far too clearly.
"Vanishing before you can even touch me. That is the level of you."
The assassin who turned to flee first never made the step. Cheon Hwi did not even use the sword. A kick snapped the man's neck. The second took a hole through the heart—not the track of a blade, but a clean opening, as if the air itself had stabbed him.
"Why are you here?"
The question was indifferent, and the indifference was the more frightening for it. The assassins' hands shook.
"…"
"You would hardly answer. Beasts, and nothing more."
Cheon Hwi paused and looked upon him. It was not a gaze that saw an assassin. It was an idle eye, the sort one turns upon an insect.
"As I thought. I'll have to take the leader."
This time there was no warning at all. Cheon Hwi's body merely swayed, and two assassins were severed at the waist, their bodies falling in halves. Blood leapt—and even the blood came apart in the empty air before it could so much as touch the sword qi.
He raised his sword with perfect calm.
"You end here."
A cleaving stroke, as if it meant to split the world. The magic rushing in and the sword qi, blazing like flame, collided. The magic was swallowed without leaving so much as a trace, and then it began to crumble, feeble and undone. But only the magic had lost its force. Cheon Hwi's sword qi, its momentum undiminished, swept over the assassins where they stood defenseless.
"B-block it…!"
Each of them threw up a defensive spell and tried to hold. It was an utterly futile thing.
"Do you imagine that will work?"
This time he did not bother to break them. He simply cut. As if the very notion of defense had never existed there, the barriers parted in a clean half—and the bodies of the assassins behind them parted with them.