The Demonic Art That Shouldn't Exist
At first, she had been sure she could wrap this whole mess up in no time. No—if anything, driving back these enemies should have been easy.
Namgung Ye-rin tightened her grip on her fists, cold sweat trickling down the back of her neck.
When the deployment charts for the Indefinite Gate's defense line had come through, the Sungmuryeon side hadn't fielded a single hunter of note besides Kang Mu-jin. It wasn't that the area lacked veteran hunters with some name recognition—but if one of them had shown up, she would have recognized the face on sight.
The four Sungmuryeon hunters now surrounding her were bottom-rung grunts, names she'd never heard and faces she'd never seen. For all her confidence going in, their skills had looked utterly unremarkable.
Which was why, the instant she realized that somewhere along the way the situation had stopped making sense—
KAAANG!
A sword strike came shrieking through the air in the blink of an eye. Namgung Ye-rin caught the blade across the backs of her crossed gauntlets, and faint threads of blood rose along her arms.
H-heavy...!
It was a clumsy strike—the kind she could normally have batted away with the superior strength of a physical-enhancement awakener. But it was heavy. Absurdly heavy. The pressure bore down on her less like a Martial Arts Awakener and more like a mid-tier monster!
Martial Arts Awakeners might not match physical-enhancement types, but their bodies were still dramatically strengthened compared to your average awakener. Which, put another way, meant that in pure physical stats, the enhancement types were, on average, simply a cut above.
And Namgung Ye-rin—specialized, above all, in raw strength—had once caught a descending two-handed sword one-handed while sparring against the Martial Arts Awakeners of Aegis itself.
And yet here she was, straining against a single blade that might as well have been a toothpick beside a two-hander.
But then it struck her.
The sword was already blocked, yet no follow-up came. And the chained attacks four opponents should have been burying her under were lagging ages behind. The moment that wrongness registered—
DRRRRRK!
Namgung Ye-rin gritted her teeth and wrung every last ounce of power from her reinforced body.
"HAAAAAHT!"
She planted both legs like pillars, pitched her weight forward, and shoved her gauntlets out as if driving a shield. The gauntlets, laden with monstrous strength, barreled in head-on and knocked aside the sword of the Sungmuryeon hunter she'd been locked in a test of force with.
"Ugh, that was disgustingly... heavy! Now it's my turn to lighten you up, you son of a bitch!"
FWOOM, KRA-KOOM!
She caught the stumbling hunter's leg in her left hand and slammed him into the ground; the earth split open and a crater of dust erupted skyward. Brought down with that kind of force, even a decent mid-tier monster would have had its bones and organs pulped to paste. The protective coat's durability meant he wouldn't die—but he'd be nursing injuries bad enough for permanent complications.
"Khhk... ghhrrk..."
Just as she'd expected, the Sungmuryeon hunter lay embedded in the ground, coughing up blood.
She'd removed one enemy in short order—but it felt less like a triumph and more like a joke. No matter how she turned it over, something was wrong.
No, seriously.
...What was with these half-baked moves?
A Martial Arts Awakener ordinarily refines the art they awaken with and naturally develops formidable skill. But the Sungmuryeon hunters in front of her were the exact opposite. Their bodies outclassed most physical-enhancement awakeners, yet they swung their swords like children who'd just picked one up, mistaking it for a toy and flailing on pure instinct. The first gauntlet catch had startled her, sure—but once she added a touch of technique to her push, they went tumbling away helplessly. Their joint attacks and combinations were a mess; lean even slightly into defense, and the gaps opened up in a heartbeat.
"What the hell... is with these guys?"
Composure regained, Namgung Ye-rin rapped the dust from her gauntlets and looked over the remaining enemies. And then, as the dust settled—
She flinched.
The corners of Namgung Ye-rin's mouth quivered with sheer bewilderment.
"What... wh-what even is this."
Like beasts warily circling a formidable foe, the Sungmuryeon hunters glared at her without pouncing.
"Krrk... Krruuhhh!"
"Grrk, grrrk."
Their eyes were ruined. Blue veins stood out stark across their faces, and deep in their pupils an eerie blue light rippled as though it were about to detonate. Their clothes hid everything else, but the bodies underneath had to be crawling with the same abnormally distended veins. She'd seen hunters on the receiving end of a psychic-type monster's possession attack before—and this was uglier, more grotesque than even that.
"KYAAAAAAA!"
WHUMP, WHAM-WHAM!
Just then, the very hunter she'd put down with that earth-splitting slam kicked himself upright and came swinging his sword in a blind frenzy. It was, literally, nothing but a wild flurry of strikes without a shred of technique—yet the monstrous strength packed behind each blow made the air itself scream as it tore. A berserker that couldn't feel pain. Worse, he came charging in with his limbs bent at grotesque angles—it was a horror movie frame come to life!
"You crazy son of a—!!!"
Namgung Ye-rin spat the curse on pure reflex and thrust her fist out with everything she had.
CHAANG—KANG!
Her gauntlet shot out with a rough boom of split air, snapping the blade off whole and sending the charging hunter sprawling.
And still, something was off. The hunters she'd been fighting had transformed into something freakish, fine—but the situation itself had been insane from the very beginning. The ham-fisted sealing of the entry routes into the restricted zone. And the communications channels that hadn't been jammed at all.
Even granting they'd plotted and executed this for some unknowable purpose, the timing was catastrophically bad. It had been barely any time since Kim Jinhu of the Iron Blood Guild—the legendary 1st-Generation Hunter himself—had come through on his inspection of the site. Which meant Jinhu was still somewhere nearby, and with comms wide open, he'd come running with reinforcements at his back. Her teammate had already gotten through to her, so Aegis Guild had almost certainly dispatched its support teams by now as well.
And if the Indefinite Gate was the objective—wasn't this the very gate Sungmuryeon had already won the bid on?
Not one piece of it made sense. An attack far too large to be an accident, and far too clumsy to be planned.
"KYAAAAAAK—!"
"Argh, seriously! I'm losing my mind! Somebody tell me what the hell is going on heeere!"
Locked in a head-on clash against an offensive that came surging at her, panting like a predator scenting prey, Namgung Ye-rin screamed.
"What... in the world is going oN."
Bonjwa—the Blood Demon, Cheon Yu-jin. Faced with a sight too impossible to believe, the pitch at the tail end of his words had squeaked a little high all on its own.
Having just seen through the sorrowful moment of farewell with Bonjwa's beloved blade, the Hell Blood Demon Blade, he had been making for the gate as furtively as a weaponless man could—only to stumble upon a battlefield mid-route and taken to watching it with bated breath. This body couldn't bolt at a moment's notice if things went south, so he'd been peering from quite some distance away.
But some things were unmistakable even from afar. A blue gleam surging from the very depths of their eyes as if about to explode. Veins abnormally distended across their faces and their entire bodies. And footwork that had forgotten every form and stance alike, moving on instinct alone.
...Why in the hell is a demonic art coming out of there?
Demonic arts were not solely the province of sublime, heaven-scaling ascension techniques; there existed junky, third-rate arts beloved by the small-time riffraff of the demonic path. The representative example was any art that drew upon the true-origin qi innate to the body—burning lifespan to blow the body's latent potential wide open.
The warriors of the demonic path mostly lived lives with nothing waiting at the end of them. If an enemy was going to kill you anyway, a great many reasoned, then you might as well take him down with you—or spend what little lifespan you had left to win, and call it even.
So among the arts that sent one's latent power skyrocketing, a rare few were refined enough that, used for only a fixed span of time, they devoured relatively little of the user's lifespan—
and then there was the Explosion Demon Art.
Third-rate junk demonic art, through and through. Its level of potential-detonation was superb, but it carried one fatal flaw: the moment it activated, the user all but lost his reason and went on a rampage. And since it was easy to learn besides, quite a few fledglings of the demonic path had shuffled off this mortal coil mid-technique rather than at an enemy's hand.
As hard as it was to believe, what those Sungmuryeon hunters were running was precisely this Explosion Demon Art.
"...How."
All this time, I had simply assumed this world could not possibly have demonic arts. A world where martial arts came only through that bizarre contrivance called 'awakening.' I'd heard plenty about Martial Arts Awakeners, but never once a word about a demonic art awakener. Even online, it never went beyond people farming bait threads for laughs—so why are there no Heavenly Demon Divine Art awakeners?
Right. If demonic art awakeners actually existed, there was no way the rumors wouldn't have spread. The instant you awakened, sooner or later, you became a walking hourglass headed straight off the rails into demonic madness... in which case it wouldn't have been treated as an 'awakening' at all, but as an incurable disease.
Tap. Tap-tap.
Busy reeling from the appearance of demonic arts, I failed to notice that some unwelcome guests had closed the distance right up to me. I immediately rolled myself into a shadowed nook between the alleys and hid.
Coats cut in the style of ancient martial uniforms. Sungmuryeon.
I held my breath and waited for them to pass—forgetting entirely that this was the first time danger had ever come this close, pressed right up against the nose of this body so hopelessly weak to stimulation.
"U, uuwehh... hnk!"
I slapped a hand over this body's mouth just in time, before it could shudder and burst into tears without my permission—
Tap. The footsteps stopped.
"...Seems there's a rat in here."
The cold voice belonged to the sunglasses man—the only one among the wall of Sungmuryeon coats wearing an ordinary protective coat.
Damn this accursed body of mine!
The wall shielded me from a direct line of sight at this angle, yet instinct screamed, for reasons I couldn't name, that the man's gaze was boring straight through to exactly where I crouched.
...It was over.
I had just clenched both fists for one last, desperate struggle—
"By my awakening ability, Scouter, the combat power I'm reading from over there is about that of a newborn baby."
One last, desperate struggle... whuh?
"No newborn would be in a place like this, so it's a rat scurrying around the alley at best."
No, hold on—
"An absolute detection ability that reads combat power straight through stealth and concealment alike. Worth every won of the steep fee they paid to hire me."
"Heh. I'm the only one alive with this ability, so it's hardly overpriced."
The footsteps drifted farther away.
"Ah, but you never know—should I check it out just in case?"
"...S-Squeak! Squeak-squeak!"
"Huh. It really was a rat."
The footsteps receded once more.
So this alley, apparently, had rats that squeaked. Truly, thanks to that rat crying out at precisely the right moment, the crisis had passed.
"...Eep."
Anyway. Anyway, that was how it went.