A Dance of Sword and Blood
"S-student. Are you all right?"
Namgung Yurin had collapsed without warning. She appeared to be a friend of the two trainees who had only just been accepted, and as it happened, Unhak Jinin had already found it unbearable to keep watching the disgrace unfolding on the sparring grounds. She had approached the girl with a worried expression.
"Hee, heehee..."
Slack, dilated pupils and cheeks flushed full of red. A single tear even beaded at the corner of her eye, though it held not the faintest trace of sorrow. The bleached-haired girl was giggling with a face stained scarlet, and for some reason that smile looked repulsive, so Unhak Jinin's fresh, girlish face had no choice but to contort with disgust on the spot.
The situation up on the sparring grounds was bad enough, but this young one, too... was already beyond hope...
"Ah, no... um... look here, child..."
"Hee, heeheehee..."
Shake, shake. Unhak Jinin shook her head. This one and that one alike, none of them were normal. Spar or not, minors or not, for practitioners of the martial arts to make such a spectacle of themselves...
The honor of the martial world had already smashed face-first into the dirt...!!!
Unhak Jinin was of a mind to beat her breast and lament to the very heavens. But at that moment, a shiver ran through her. A sinister energy, the kind that made one's internal force move of its own accord to guard the heart meridians, swept along her spine.
"...That!"
Their auras lay atop one another, so she could not be sure which side was the epicenter. But at some point, the explosively swelling pressure had begun to rise like a heat haze grown tangible...!
"L-let gooooo of me..."
"You let go f-first... let, let go..."
The two girls stood locked in a standoff, pinching each other's cheeks and yanking each other's hair. The legendary exchange between two proud girls worked on the hearts of everyone watching like a saw grinding into their innermost chest, and at a glance it might have passed for a comical stalemate.
'Self-destruction... or mutual annihilation...'
'This has become a nuisance.'
Their eyes had sunk into a cold, level calm. The battle of moves passing back and forth within that standoff, an exchange of blows no outsider could see, was vicious beyond words. The demonic energy coiled in the twin palms pinching a cheek churned with monstrous internal force capable of crushing an entire skull, while the Dragon Claw Hand gripping a fistful of hair carried sharpness enough to pierce head and torso and shred them to pieces.
KWAAAAAAAH!
Blood energy and demonic energy mingled, and formless killing intent rose as a massive storm that swallowed everything around it. The spot where the two girls stood was nothing more than the eye of that storm. This was no metaphor: a terrifying domain of death had formed, one that could burst their heart meridians and hearts in a single instant.
It was a precarious equilibrium born of heaven's fortune and misfortune stacked by chance. The moment that balance broke, whichever way it broke, one of them would have to absorb a fatal blow. So they endured the humiliation and held the deadlocked balance.
Then, a flash. In Bukgung Seol's blue eyes, the gleam of azure demonic energy flickered with fierce intensity.
"...!!!"
At that moment, collars whipped loudly through the wind. Cheon Yujin drove her light-body art to its very limit, spinning through empty air again and again as she retreated. It was Bukgung Seol who had broken the balance first, accepting the cost of the blow, and for what was merely a spar she had taken a minor internal injury, forced to swallow dead blood into her mouth.
"...Ngh."
Cheon Yujin, who had come out ahead instead, hardened her gaze and stared at the blue-eyed girl. And Bukgung Seol spoke in a low, sunken voice.
"If I cannot move this body of mine as I will..."
Her gaze exploded. Her demonic energy surged. Over her clear blue eyes spread the darkness of night, unfurled azure across the sky, and within it a single thread of starlight gleamed cold and blue.
FWOOSH. The crest of power erupting from her body billowed Bukgung Seol's sleeves outward.
Tok, tududuk! The furniture and small fragments scattered around the sparring grounds began to clatter and slowly rise into the air. It was an operation of supreme internal power that bent her surroundings with formless energy alone, but that was not the important part. It lay in the demonic art, where her energy amplified endlessly, as if running berserk.
If the body cannot be properly controlled, then abandon control altogether. Cheon Yujin realized the girl before her had surrendered her entire body, wholesale, to the flow of the demonic art. Had it been done with some crude third-rate demonic art, she would have snorted. But if it was the ascendant demonic art of supreme martial learning, the story changed...!
"...Gulp."
The crimson-eyed girl swallowed involuntarily, her throat tight with tension.
"N-no, this..."
This... no matter how she looked at it... was absolutely not the level of a student...! Even back in her days in the martial world, she had never once seen a prodigy of the later generation who had conquered such a realm at that age!
'Truly, Bonjwa's homeland is a land of legend. It has gone completely mad...'
It was demonic art far beyond the level of any promising talent, one that even Kang Mujin, the Mount Hua martial awakener said to have long surpassed that stage, could not have opposed. But Cheon Yujin, having lost her grip on common sense the moment she returned home, simply accepted it without much fuss.
Tak. Bukgung Seol, in her leather slip-ons, took a single step and leveled her bamboo sword.
Whooooo...
As if the sky itself had been likened to the sea. It was an azure ocean, deep as the bottomless abyss and settling down bleak as the darkness of night. Heavy, ponderous waves crashed, and the field of demonic energy reaching out in the shape of those waves seized every direction. Within the sword domain of her own making, she became one with the blade.
"Now, do you see?"
Having relinquished control of her own body and surrendered it wholly to the flow of the sword path, this was a forced unity of body and sword. Kim Jinhu's judgment had been wrong. Real blade, wooden sword, or bamboo sword, even a mere tree branch snapped carelessly from the roadside: if it was held in Bukgung Seol's hand, no, in the hand of the World's Greatest Sword, Cheongang Geom-ma, it could already transform into a weapon more dangerous than any peerless famous blade...!!!
The Cheongang Sword Art was a supremely transcendent martial learning, and a sword art she could not yet properly control. And so she chose instead to become a sword that raged mad without need of control, and to ride the flow.
"The flow is a mighty raging wave, surging upon heaven's tide."
Heaven Wave Sword Dance
Slowly flicking the tip of her foot, she layered another slash atop the horizontal arc of her blade. To Bukgung Seol's front and back, left and right, every direction, ripples spread rough and wild like a lake struck by a dropped stone, and amid hazy afterimages, duplicates of her were born.
"Now, can you truly see my sword?"
Kicking off the ground, tracing the sword now multiplied into dozens, she raised waves, frost-like cold coiling around her whole body as pure white particles scattered in her wake. It was a dance, and it was also a sword dance. Not sword strikes aimed at Cheon Yujin, but a dance spreading without discrimination, pressing the four quarters with sword energy.
Within the raging waves of ice-cold sword energy, Cheon Yujin was like a little skiff swamped by a tidal wave. And yet.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The crimson-eyed girl twisted the corners of her mouth.
"...Hehe!"
She simply laughed. She laughed with a smile mottled with excitement. The Forged Blood Art had been remade to refine pure, self-generated internal energy, but it was at root a martial art with its foundations in the demonic path, and so it resonated with the explosively swelling demonic art. Her heart climbed higher and higher. And.
Was this not the very moment for blood to boil and the heart to burn hot!
Facing the storm of sword energy, cold as a midwinter cold snap.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
Blood-red energy blazed like flame and coiled around Cheon Yujin's body. For what melted that frozen sword energy was the yang-hardened power of the Forged Blood Art, tempered in blood and heated to a blazing glow.
The Blood Flame Realm. Burning with the flame of blood across her whole body, Cheon Yujin asked.
"Swordswoman. Why do you dance alone?"
Suddenly, what surfaced in her mind was that conversation with Kang Mujin, the man swallowed whole by the madness of the martial arts.
"What is the martial?"
Cheon Yujin. If he were the Blood Demon, he would have answered thus.
"The martial is the dance."
Because martial arts are meant to be contested with a rival, fought, and learned together.
"A dance danced alone has no joy in it, does it not!"
Drunken Moon Ghost Dance
"Come now, let us be drunk in full and lavish bloom!"
Bukgung Seol poured down streaks of sword energy from the storm's center. Taking that Bukgung Seol as the moon of the night sky, Cheon Yujin became a ghost drunk on the moon, circling about, lost in rapture, dancing and singing. Around Bukgung Seol, who spewed forth fearsome energy waves, she circled and circled and circled again as if tracing a ring, her steps endlessly light, swaying like a drunkard, yet she evaded every single wave of sword energy by the narrowest of margins.
And she did not stop at evasion. As if truly dancing in harmony with her, the moment the internal force glowing red-hot in both her hands took on a clear form.
KZZZZRAKA-BOOM!!!
Thunderous roars and explosive blasts erupted one after another, and a field of force engulfed the sparring grounds all at once. Dance met dance. Crimson blood energy rang through resounding knife-hands, deflecting the sword energy one by one, their handwork intertwining as the crescendo of energy waves escalated ever higher.
Surging raging waves. Blazing blood flame. Blue starlight and red starlight collided, climbing to a climax one breath short of detonation, and the moment the two girls, their spirit and concentration gathered to a single point upon the contest alone, moved to cross final techniques.
FWOOOOSH! A single stream of wind blew through.
"Are you two trying to kill each other?!"
Taiji Fist. The extreme of overcoming hardness with softness. In the two hands of Unhak Jinin, who had barged into the very center of the clash, a gentle wind lingered, and before anyone knew it, the raging waves and blood flame, their flow severed, were swept away by that wind and vanished.
Bukgung Seol let her bamboo sword droop to the ground. Cheon Yujin let the strength drain from her fists.
'...What a pair of idiots.'
'...We got rather carried away.'
Her bellow that they were trying to kill each other had not meant they had unfolded their techniques bearing true killing intent.
"Do you truly not know what state your bodies are in right... th-this!"
They had recklessly hurled themselves past their bodies' limits on the power of the Forged Blood Art and the demonic art. Drip. Nosebleeds flowed at the same instant from Bukgung Seol's nose and Cheon Yujin's. Strength left their legs, and their swaying bodies at last pitched forward.
And of all places, where they fell could not have been worse. They had closed in to contest the final exchange that would decide the winner.
KLANG!
The instant they fell, the two girls cracked their heads against each other's.
"...Khek!"
"...Kyeng!"
Nosebleeds streaming, they fainted right then and there. Before this gruesome tragedy.
"This old man... surely I shan't be dismissed before I've even properly begun?"
Unhak Jinin could do nothing but pull a tearful face.
In the darkness, the only thing glowing with a faint light was a monitor screen. Footage played across it, shot by a security camera, grainy enough that only the shapes could barely be made out, and the scene of the white-haired, blue-eyed girl clashing with the black-haired, crimson-eyed girl looped and repeated, over and over.
Click, click! The mouse worked, and the view zoomed in. What filled the enlarged frame was the white-haired girl, wrapped in an azure current, letting loose clear, limpid sword energy.
"...As I thought. Demonic art."
In the darkness, a shadow behind the monitor gazed at the enormous flasks bubbling and seething with foam.
"...Soon, there will be new children."
A low, quiet chuckle.