A Perfectly Ordinary Coincidence
Cheon Se-ah.
She had cracked jokes in front of Cheon Yujin, carrying on with exaggerated fuss as if nothing were wrong, but that performance had been exactly that—a deliberate show to bury her flustered state. Inside, her feelings were actually churned together into a hopeless, jumbled mess.
And yet it wasn't the accident itself, so absurd that even Cheon Se-ah—the most senior veteran hunter of them all—couldn't help being dumbfounded. Well... granted, the fact that the Lake of Holy Water, a famous tourist spot that had stayed perfectly safe for years, a gate that had never once caused trouble, had turned into this simply because Cheon Yujin came to visit was more than a little absurd. But no matter how you dressed it up as coincidence, once coincidences stacked this many times, they had long since blown past any point where a person could laugh the whole thing off...!
Which was why, after months of incidents and disasters, she had half resigned herself to the conclusion that her brother Cheon Yujin was something like a lightning rod for misfortune. The bewilderment Cheon Se-ah felt now was not about this ridiculous situation itself.
'Our... our brother...'
True, he was an awakener—or, to be precise, a returnee disguised as one—but until only recently he had been capable of producing nothing more than the warmth of a portable hand warmer...!
'Isn't he... a little too strong?'
Cheon Se-ah herself was one of the very first awakeners, strong enough to be called a monster from the day she awakened at seventeen, but this—this genuinely, no matter how she looked at it, soared far beyond a student's level. Measured against hunters counted among the nation's finest, his overall combat power would still fall short, yet every single Baikon Cheon Yujin had swatted away so casually was a high-grade monster. These were beasts that only a top-tier rising star—someone at the level of a solid mid-rank hunter like Namgung Yerin—could even attempt to hunt. And that didn't mean hunting one reliably; it meant, strictly speaking, that they could try.
In other words, it would be entirely fair to say that the current Cheon Yujin had quietly stepped beyond the range of even famous rising stars. It felt as though everything she had guessed about her brother until now was beginning to wobble. For an instant, his past flickered through her mind—the history the doctors had diagnosed as memory impairment, distortion, and delusional disorder—but...
"Oppa."
Cheon Se-ah planted herself squarely in front of her brother, lips curling into a smile—confident, triumphant, brimming over with nothing but joy and excitement. Yes. None of that mattered. Things like that were nothing but stray twigs on the branch. What mattered was her brother, Cheon Yujin.
The mistakes repeated over and over. The priorities mistaken again and again. Always too late, always out of step, always missing the moment through some wrong judgment, until she had to carry her bleeding brother home only after everything was already over. When they were young, there had been a brother who always stood in front of his little sister and showed her his back—and even that back was all he would ever show, never once letting her see the face that went with it, exhausted and bruised and smeared with tears.
Only after ten years of crossing paths without meeting. Only after their reunion, and then several more months of the same. At last... at last! The grown little sister could stand before her brother and shield that back in return.
"From now on, leave it to me."
Cheon Se-ah smiled, burning as fuel a heat that seethed up from the deepest part of her chest—an emotion she couldn't have named if she tried.
Whoooosh— The Baikons' charge sent the wind rippling; a gust surged up and whipped at the hem of her coat. Through her streaming hair, a colorless radiance of mana glittered brilliantly in her eyes as Cheon Se-ah took a single step forward.
"W-wait, Se-ah...!"
Before he was flung into the other world, and again in the ten years after he returned home, his body had changed and his personality had changed, and at times he behaved like a small child—but her brother's essence had never changed. Here was a man who could walk any road alone and yet insisted on shouldering other people's burdens. Because putting family first, always, was simply who Cheon Yujin was. She had assumed, naturally, that he would try to stop her.
"It's fine, Oppa. I'm a first-generation hunter."
The first of the awakeners. A first-generation hunter. Far off to the side, Kim Jinhu had lowered his bamboo sword into a low guard and begun to slide into his footwork. The Baikon pack was charging in a straight line, ignoring him completely, but the Iron Blood Guildmaster—Iron Blood itself—glanced over and sent a signal, as if to say it made no difference to him.
With Cheon Se-ah at its center, a colorless storm of mana mingled with the wind and began to ravage the air.
"And," she said quietly, crossing her hands into an X and stretching them out toward the charging pack, "in a large-scale battle, there isn't a single first-generation hunter in this country stronger than me."
Craaack! The palms aimed at the Baikon pack met and twisted against each other, and—Krrrshhhh!—with a sharp roar like an enormous pane of glass shattering against the floor, a vast 'corridor' bloomed into existence across the pack's path.
"Kuhek, kuheeeak...!"
"Kegergek...!!!"
Confusion flooded the maddened eyes of the Baikon pack. A colossal corridor. Fissures carved into empty air. As if to form a single passage, the space along the pack's path had spiderwebbed with cracks like a shattered mirror, warping until nothing beyond could be seen—a corridor that isolated the Baikons and them alone!
Booooom! Mid-charge, a few Baikons still less consumed by the madness slammed their twin horns hard against the fissures to force a way through, but only a hollow boom answered. The cracks in space, fragile-looking as broken glass, did not so much as tremble!
"Prff, prrrf." Black horses rolled across the ground, flung by the rebound from the fissures. Watching the comical sight, Cheon Se-ah laughed.
A physical barrier. Sealed away into a world of their own—if the walls cannot be broken by force, then in the end it is nothing more than a labyrinth.
"Now there's only one road left for you to take."
Her awakening ability: Barrier Master. Hunter Cheon Se-ah's special power as an awakener was remarkably simple—forming barriers. But precisely because it was simple, there were hardly any limits on what that 'barrier' could be. If Cheon Se-ah wished, she could raise a space to seal away sound, or a small rebounding barrier to launch herself toward the sky, and her endlessly delicate control let her move barriers like telekinesis. A maze that dazzled the eyes, cut off escape, and herded its targets down whatever path she chose. And at the end of that trap—
"Right on time, all neatly gathered. Cheon Se-ah-style mob herding really is the best."
Wearing the savage grin of a beast of prey, Kim Jinhu was waiting—dark crimson mana blazing as it coiled around the blade of his bamboo sword. Kuuuuu—
Kim Jinhu and Cheon Se-ah. The Iron Blood sword and the Barrier Master. Blade and shield. The sword-flame coiled around the bamboo blade devoured mana greedily, and before anyone noticed it had shot well past three meters in length, its sinister pressure birthing a natural crack of displaced air and spewing out a chilling bloodlust.
Of all things, the weapon he had brought was a bamboo practice sword. Whether it even counted as a weapon was debatable, but a sword was a sword—except its durability was far too low, and one slip would leave the silver-haired girl's lake-blue eyes soaked in tears for certain.
"...Ngh."
Pouring in finely refined sword qi would snap it for sure, so he had wrapped raw power only around the surface and shaped the sword-flame from that. The result was a deformed sword-flame—nominally sword qi, yet carrying none of a true blade's killing edge. What he had ended up with was a sword-flame like an enormous blunt instrument...
"So what? A bamboo sword's a club anyway."
Heat Wave Lightless Slash
"Weep, Hell Jjinhu-do."
"No! It's Hell Sword Demon Blade—!!!"
Doing his best to ignore the noisy hallucination that had just torn through his mind, he struck. The first slash. From high guard to low, he drew a single line of sword wave downward.
KWAAAAAAAH—!!! The sword-flame surged and crashed down, its blunt roar hammering the air, and the Baikon pack charging in a straight line down the corridor Cheon Se-ah had forced open was swallowed whole by the tidal wave of flame in an instant. Because the flame carried no killing edge—
"Kueeek!"
"Prrrrrk!!!"
—every last one of them was helplessly launched skyward the moment the current caught it, like fallen leaves swept away by a broom! Nothing had been cut, so nothing would die—but by the time they finished falling, at least one or two legs apiece would not be working. Already stripped of reason and unable to cast magic, a rampaging Baikon that couldn't run was useless. Effectively neutralized, every one.
In that moment, Cheon Yujin, who had been watching everything from behind Cheon Se-ah, could only stare in shock.
"That technique—!!!"
How could he fail to recognize it? How could he ever forget it! The closest of the close to the Blood Demon, alongside Manoe. Left Protector of Blood Heaven Castle, Cheolmyeon Mujeong. A solitary genius born on the battlefield, who stained his blade with spilled blood and forged an entirely new martial art out of nothing. Cheolmyeon Mujeong's own hand-crafted art. A technique of the Iron Blood Sword Art...!
Cheolmyeon Mujeong, ignorant by birth of the higher orders of transcendent martial arts, could never have reached it alone—the Heat Wave Lightless Slash was a technique that could only be born under the Blood Demon's guidance. That was why, among all the techniques of the Iron Blood Sword Art, this one alone carried such a tyrannical, overwhelming-force philosophy: the Blood Demon's influence.
'As expected... just as Bonjwa surmised, Murim and this world are unquestionably connected—!'
And then Cheon Yujin saw him.
"Whew... you held up well, Hell Jjinhu-do. To think you could withstand my sword-flame."
A man in sunglasses and a coat, toying with a toddler-sized bamboo sword and calling Kim Jinhu by the friendly pet name 'Hell Jjinhu-do'—a man who could not possibly have looked more suspicious.
No, seriously—what in the world was a 'Hell Jjinhu-do' supposed to be? At the very least it ought to be a name as magnificent as that beloved soldier he had once been forced to send off through tears: the Hell Blood Demon Blade.
"........."
In the Blood Demon's memories, unlike Manoe, who had wailed and spun somersaults through the air, there had been one who was always calm and a man of few words, one who knew how to keep the virtue of silence... The only one whose temperament let him flawlessly carry out his duty as the Blood Demon's personal bodyguard. The instant Cheon Yujin recalled that lonely, coldly cruel warrior of the battlefield, Cheolmyeon Mujeong, he set him against the 'pervert' standing over there.
"Tch, damn, this thing's a little singed. Ah shit, she's definitely gonna be mad... I'm so fucked."
Muttering his flippant curses, the pervert pulled out a handkerchief outright and began wiping down the slightly scorched toddler's bamboo sword—
".........Mm."
Cheon Yujin thought. To think the world held a sword art this similar to the Iron Blood Sword Art... What a truly remarkable coincidence...!
Somehow, the name was exactly the same. Somehow, the technique was exactly the same. The dark crimson sword qi it produced was exactly the same, too—but it was all just a very strange coincidence. That was, without question... not the Iron Blood Sword Art...!!!
"In any case... no way...! Bonjwa refuses to acknowledge iiiit...!!!"
"B-Brother?"
Are you watching, Cheolmyeon Mujeong? Your honor has been defended...
Wiping the cold sweat that trickled down his forehead, Cheon Yujin smiled in deep contentment.
And so they succeeded in halting the Baikons' frenzied charge, but...
"...What."
What awaited them when they returned was a situation no one could have imagined.
"Bukgung Seol was kidnapped...?!"
In the darkness, a band of figures draped in black coats, eerie blue light glowing in their pupils, poured out like shadows.
The plan had succeeded. They had known from the start that dangerous elements—first-generation hunters with the power to derail the plan—were inside the gate. Provoke chaos with the rampaging Baikons, pin down the first-generation hunters and the security personnel, and secure the target: a simple plan. Simple, and for that very reason, certain. Just as predicted, everything had proceeded smoothly, and around the target there was nothing but feeble students. Securing her should have been laughably easy...
".........?"
The demon thought. No, hold on—where did the target go?
".........???"
And then, a single voice reached them.
"Bukgung Seol was kidnapped...?! By the Baikon?!"
...By the Baikon.
"..............."
In the darkness, draped in black coats, awkward and mortified, the band with eerie blue light glowing in their pupils reversed course exactly the way they had come and vanished like shadows.