The Bicorn Stampede
Black fur covered its body from end to end. Crimson pupils flickered with menace. Its forehead bore the vivid marks of a horn snapped off, and from either side of that ruin a fresh pair of horns curved out in sleek, graceful arcs.
"GRRAAAOOORR!!!"
"Hrk, hrk-kek-kek!"
It was less a roar than a wail, a scream torn from something in agony. A two-horned beast whose every feature seemed deliberately assembled to be the opposite of a unicorn's. If the unicorn was holy, then this creature was, plain and simple, a demon beast. Born of the same root as the unicorn, it had fallen so far into the abyss that it now craved human flesh and blood. This was the demon beast, the Bicorn.
Kicking up an enormous cloud of dust, a horde every bit as vast as the unicorn herd gathered here came surging in, maddened out of its mind.
And Bonjwa was struck dumb.
".........!!!"
The Forged Blood Art had advanced, carrying several of my senses into the superhuman realm, and my ocular power could already pierce a distance of this magnitude. Deep in those bloodshot pupils, a single streak of blue light flashed past, faint and wavering, steeped in demonic energy.
I knew what that blue light meant.
"A D-Demonic Art?!"
No, what in the world.
"Why is a Demonic Art showing up there AGAIN?!"
The aura of a Demonic Art. Above all, judging by that sickening blue glint skimming through their eyes, it was a crude, third-rate one: the Explosion Demon Art. This was the very art wielded by the unidentified impostors disguised as Sungmuryeon hunters during the Indefinite Gate terror attack. It ravaged the body and slashed years off one's lifespan, drowned reason and left instinct at the wheel, and in exchange it multiplied not only the dantian's inner power but one's physical abilities several times over, hurling the user into the superhuman realm.
In the first place, I had no need to rely on ocular power or qi sense. Among the bicorns charging toward us, a storm of demonic energy so dense it had congealed into a tangible black current was raging...!!!
This was no mere ominous aura, no mere tainted mana. The judgment of Bonjwa, once the foremost master of Demonic Arts in all Murim, could not be wrong. This was, without question, demonic energy refined through a Demonic Art. That distinctive feel was unmistakable.
And so, once the shock drained away, Bonjwa could only clutch my forehead and marvel.
"Wow... my homeland truly is the stuff of legend."
It was high time I gave up on common sense altogether. Hamburgers heartier than a bowl of gukbap, awakening registrations at the public health center, a unicorn ranch, of all things.... Thoroughly burned by how much my long-lost homeland had changed, I'd assumed nothing left could surprise me. But this damned world...! A world where even horse-headed beasts trained in Demonic Arts now...!!!
Those unidentified terrorists back then were one thing, but was there some academy for the Explosion Demon Art hidden away somewhere...?
Even Bonjwa had seen a spirit-awakened monkey training martial arts in Murim. Well, the legend of Sun Wukong, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, had existed since time immemorial. Still, a monkey was at bottom a creature with proper arms and legs, like a human, not a mere set of forelegs and hindlegs. Now even four-legged, galloping horse-heads could wield Demonic Arts. Truly, these were the degenerate end of days.
"Neeeigh..."
"Neigh, neigh!"
Unicorn and bicorn. Even granting that they once sprang from the same root, theirs was a relationship that could never coexist. Waving their snow-white manes, the unicorns began pouring out pure mana, and with hostile snorts and hooves pawing the ground, their bodies looked ready to burst forward at any moment. They clustered together like an army forming ranks.
Especially around Bonjwa.
"......?"
Around... Bonjwa?
".........Huh?"
Come to think of it, the armored vehicle, the tourists, the academy students who had been chanting "UNICORN PUNCH" around me, every last one of them had only just begun to evacuate. And yet....
Why was my field of view so wide open, clear enough to trace the bicorn herd's charge from far in the distance...! At some point, I, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, had been ringed in by unicorns and boxed into the frontmost position, on a direct collision course with the bicorn stampede...!!!
"Neeeiiiigh!!!"
The very unicorn whose horn had stabbed my forehead and touched off that insane situation, the one whose mana burned exceptionally mighty, pressed itself tight against my side. The moment of impact drew closer by the breath. Lined up at the very tip of the battlefield like a knightly order resplendently preparing its charge,
"Neeeigh, neigh."
"Hiihiiing!"
the unicorns all turned their eyes on Bonjwa at once. As if demanding their commander give the order to move the army. No, not demanding. Certain, as a matter of course, that the order would be given. Their eyes sparkled so very brightly. For some reason, those horse faces overlapped with the whiskered face of Jjik-jjiki and his kin from long ago, and I had a feeling that was not my imagination....
"You wretches...! Bonjwa was planning to run... no, to countercharge, I'll have you know...!"
I ran the Forged Blood Art to calm a body trembling with the urge to sob at the injustice. And then,
"Teacher...! Yu... Yujin is really.... Ah, shit! Move, damn it! Why won't you move!"
"The unicorn won't budge...! Ahh, please... Yujin! Yujiiiin! Teacher's coming, just hold on!!! Hang in there!!!"
"What do we dooooo...!!!"
"Somebody help over here! There's still one person who hasn't evacuated!!"
And I understood why the unicorns had lined up as though deliberately raising a wall before me. No, "as though" wasn't the word for it. The unicorns had truly stepped forward to become a wall themselves, and in doing so had naturally clustered with Bonjwa at the center.
The reason reached me as my Forged Blood Art-sharpened hearing caught several familiar voices.
"They couldn't... get out?!"
No, that wasn't it. Not that they couldn't evacuate. That they wouldn't. The thought stunned me for an instant, but soon enough,
"......Ha!"
with a smirk, Bonjwa turned my flushed, burning face aside and smiled, thin and faint.
Voices. Yes, voices!
"So I can hear them. The voices."
The voice of the Namgung clan's sly hunting cat, quietly lecherous in her own way, yet the girl who always doted on me with snacks. The voice of a woman determined to see her duty as a teacher through, even now, with danger closing in at the end of an absurd day. And though they were awakened hunters, though the bicorn was a high-grade demon beast no student could hope to face, and worse, a horde of them, there were the voices of students who, terrified half to death and aching to run, had still not lost their worry for others.
Thump...! Thump...! Thump...!
The Forged Blood Art tempered my blood, and the flowing blood hammered my soul in turn. Yes, this, this was it.
"The moment when the heart pounds and the blood boils...!"
Bonjwa took a single step forward. What I extended was more than a footprint. My horn trembled in resonance with the Forged Blood Art, and at its tip, particles of sacred light began to gather, shining brilliantly.
And then,
"Now. Paw the earth."
A voice carrying the inner power of the Forged Blood Art, tempered to its purest. I was still far from the realm where I could project my voice across a battlefield as the Blood Demon once had with Six Harmonies Voice Transmission, and yet Bonjwa's command spread crisp and clear through the ranks of unicorns.
Thump...! Thump...! Thump...!!! In time with the pulse of the Forged Blood Art, the sound of hooves striking the earth carved its mark vividly across heaven and earth.
"They come...!"
Dududududu. The dust cloud arrived right before my eyes, and the collision began.
"Neeeiiiigh!"
"GRRAAAOOORR...!!!"
Bonjwa's frail body would likely be shredded to ribbons in an instant if it met a horse-shaped bicorn head-on. But then, unbidden, a memory crossed my mind: Unhak Jinin's single strike, slipping into a colossal clash of forces like a breath of wind and gently pouring away every ounce of external power in one motion. That fist art flashed through my mind.
"Now, feel the wind that overturns a thousand pounds."
Bonjwa's soft fist could, with a mere four ounces of force, easily govern the weight of a thousand pounds.
Four Ounces Deflects a Thousand Pounds
Heaven-Turning Whirlwind
What my fingertips conjured was the orbit of yin and yang, a taiji that spun and spun and scattered. The twin fists I extended high stirred a shallow wind, tracing a semicircle, and again, and again, and yet again.
KWAAAAH! The shallow breeze that had done no more than flutter my sleeves had, before I knew it, become a vast storm collapsing the vanguard's formation.
KUGUGUGUNG!!! The lead bicorns caught in the wind collapsed all at once like dominoes, tumbling pitifully across the ground!
And yet. Both unicorn and bicorn were creatures with intelligence rivaling or exceeding a human's. But the Explosion Demon Art had stripped their reason away, and with it their intellect and their purpose should have gone as well....
"GRRAAAOOORR...!!!"
The collision had happened only because I stood blocking the path they meant to charge through. I only understood it after the impact: for some reason, the bicorns paid no mind whatsoever to the unicorns, their natural enemies. Rising again and again on bloodshot eyes, they hurled themselves, instinctively and single-mindedly, at some unknowable target lying beyond me, attempting a single-point breakthrough...!!
The instant I staggered in bewilderment, an ominous energy began to writhe where my hand met the bicorn.
"......Tch! What the!"
Bonjwa hastily withdrew my hands from the unfolding form and steadied my breathing. A demon beast ruled by the Explosion Demon Art: the bicorn. In the moment of collision, the dense demonic energy shrouding its body had blended into my protective qi like water seeping through cloth and tried to burrow into my body!
"Ssssss... haa!"
I hurriedly circulated the Forged Blood Art's inner power, wrapping the demonic energy as it tried to infiltrate my flesh and corrupt my vessels in pure, gentle force, and purged it in a single stroke. The purification itself was easy. The bewilderment was another matter. However singular the Blood Demon Art might be, a Demonic Art, however bizarre, was by nature still a martial art. Which meant demonic energy latching on like a contagion was impossible, unless the art had been devised for exactly that purpose from the very beginning.
"W-wait a moment."
Demonic energy... is contagious?
A bicorn was a demon beast born when a unicorn fell. Even at the Lake of Holy Water, where unicorns numbered in the thousands, the odds of hundreds of them toppling into bicorns simultaneously, in the space of a few breaths, had to be vanishingly small. And yet the bicorn horde, incredibly, looked to number well over a hundred.
"Don't tell me...... hyaat...!"
My qi sense, magnified to its utmost by the Forged Blood Art, felt it. The mana within the lead unicorns who had clashed with the bicorns was being stained by that jet-black demonic energy, falling, helplessly and irreversibly...!
"Neigh... neeeigh... GRRAAAHHK!!!"
Amid a scream of agony, the single horn snapped, and the demonic energy coiled through the body, beginning its fleshly mutation.
"......Ah. Ahhh."
I had thought this was a war story. It was actually a zombie apocalypse...? Even genre drift had its limits...!!!
The unicorns that had dropped like corpses and risen like zombies were now thralls of the Explosion Demon Art. And watching the bicorn horde multiply with every passing moment,
"Ughhhhh...!!!"
Bonjwa, who had finally gotten to strike a pose after so long, could only end it all with a face on the verge of tears.