The Uninvited Guest (5)
The place they entered, offering up Chae Geon-wook's wallet as a sacrifice of sorts, was the Chadol Kendo Dojo—well known even in Jungnang-gu.
Stepping inside, Go Tae-min rented the cheapest standard-issue protective gear they had and put it on. They tried to talk him into buying new equipment, but money was already tight enough that he couldn't bring himself to indulge in a luxury like that. From check-in to changing clothes, the whole business took less than ten minutes, and before long his first—allegedly historic—kendo lesson began in a corner of the dojo.
"All right, Tae-min. First I'll show you how to hold the wooden sword. People who start out in Nova Arena usually grip it however feels comfortable, and more often than not their fundamentals are a wreck."
Park Man-seok, head instructor of the Chadol Kendo Dojo, stood before the new student with a kindly smile. A skilled teacher who had spent twenty years instructing at this dojo alone, he had a solid reputation for straightening out Arena hopefuls. But the moment Go Tae-min took the wooden sword in hand, Instructor Park's brow twitched.
"…Huh? Your grip is perfect. Not a wasted motion in it. You don't seem like a beginner."
"Ah, I messed around with one a little, way back. I never properly learned, though…"
Go Tae-min answered modestly and gave the wooden sword a light swing. The hiss of it parting the air was anything but ordinary. Instructor Park smiled, easy and warm, and drew the ties of his own protective gear tight. It was his firm belief that when a new student walked in, you showed them the gap in skill clearly—instruction went much more smoothly after that.
"Good. You seem to have the basics already, so seeing will beat hearing. Shall we have a light spar?"
"With you, Instructor?"
"Haha, it's fine. This is a practical dojo. I'll match you, so come in however you like."
Park Man-seok settled into a relaxed middle guard. In that instant the new student's eyes changed. The young man who had been asking the price of wooden swords and running the cost-benefit numbers was gone, and in his place stood a single sword, its edge cold and keen.
What?
Park Man-seok swallowed dry without meaning to. He had held a sword for a long time and faced more people than he could count, but aside from his own master, this was the first time a gaze alone had stopped the breath in his throat.
Thud! Go Tae-min dropped low and shot toward him like an arrow.
The flank!
Park Man-seok slipped one foot back and let the strike boring into his side slide past. In the same instant his wooden sword whipped down toward the crown Tae-min had left wide open—a textbook counter, evasion and attack as one, sharp as it was orthodox.
Crack—!
A clean, heavy impact rang through the dojo. But Instructor Park's face flooded with shock in a heartbeat.
…He blocked that?
His counter had been perfect. He had read the attack, slipped it, and cut straight down, without an inch of error in the sequence. And yet the new student had already laid his sword flat and stopped the wooden sword cold. The heavy rebound traveling up the hilt numbed Instructor Park's wrist and ran all the way to his shoulder.
Go Tae-min, for his part, couldn't help a stab of admiration.
Whoa. He's insanely fast. This is incredible.
The blow Instructor Park had just thrown was no ordinary thing—a precise line, an unshaken center of gravity, and a speed the eye could barely follow.
Figures. A dojo you actually pay for is on another level.
It was movement every bit as refined as that little blond brat's, and the attacks that followed were much the same.
Crack—!
Go Tae-min stopped the incoming wooden sword and was driven a step back.
Yikes. Focus.
Instructor Park's attacks were fast without waste, simple, and above all accurate as if measured with a ruler. Even with Go Tae-min's gift for seeing an opponent's trajectory, gaps were not easy to find. It was orthodox form taken to its absolute limit, and so he was forced onto the defensive, dragged further and further into the instructor's pace.
Then if I turn his rhythm around and answer like this…
He was a breath away from twisting the wooden sword to use Instructor Park's rhythm against him.
"Stop!"
A shout like a thunderclap came from deeper in the dojo, and both of them froze where they stood.
"…?"
"Haaah."
Go Tae-min let out a long breath and eased out of his stance. He had only just begun to feel out how to take the gap in Instructor Park's form. The fun had been about to start, and having cold water dumped on it made his mouth purse all on its own.
The one who had stopped them was the director of the Chadol Kendo Dojo. At Instructor Park's puzzled tilt of the head, Kim Cha-dol clicked his tongue. His eyes traveled from Go Tae-min's grip all the way to the placement of the foot that had just frozen, and then he offered a bitter smile.
"I am sorry, Tae-min. I do not think there is anything more you can learn at our dojo."
"Sorry? What do you—"
Go Tae-min asked again, thrown. He had just seen how tremendous Instructor Park's skill was, and now they had nothing to teach him?
"What we teach is form. The work of carving and polishing until a single framework stands complete. But you, Tae-min, already possess a framework of your own. It is not orthodox, that is all. It is still at a level that will hold up perfectly well in a real fight."
"…Is it?"
"Laying our forms over that would be like forcing roof tiles onto a building that is already finished. Far from improving, it would only dull the strengths you already have. That is something a person who teaches the martial way must never do. I will refund you."
Director Kim Cha-dol was resolute. He gave Go Tae-min no room to argue and processed the refund at once. In the end, less than an hour after filling out his enrollment form, Go Tae-min was all but shoved out of the dojo. He dropped onto the steps outside and pulled a miserable face.
"…Ah. What a waste."
The refund, of course, went straight back onto the card Chae Geon-wook had given him.
Meanwhile, at the very hour Go Tae-min sat glum on those steps—
"Master, please. Just this once. You know how rarely I beg you like this."
The room was far too neat, far too old-fashioned, to pass for an ordinary dojo office, and a taut tension hung in the air. Oh Hyun-seok, director of Nova Arena's Korea branch, bent deeply at the waist. The old man seated before him, turning a teacup in his fingers, was Baek Jin-hyeon—the man who reigned as Korea's greatest swordsman. A living legend of Korean kendo, he had set an unprecedented record of three consecutive World Kendo Championship titles and then retired.
Oh Hyun-seok bowed his head low once more.
"This is not a personal favor. It is for the future of Korea. Just one person. His talent is genuinely astonishing. Could you not look at him just once, Master?"
Baek Jin-hyeon slowly set the teacup down, steam still curling from it. Even that small motion held an undisturbed center. In the brief silence Oh Hyun-seok felt a pressure as if he stood at the foot of a great mountain. Ten years had passed since the old man's retirement, and yet a cold-edged sword still seemed to draw breath inside his body.
"Hyeon-seok."
"Yes, Master."
"I am a man who has already set his sword down. I have no wish to entangle myself in the affairs of the world."
"Master!"
"If the child overflows with such talent, he will find his road without an old man like me. Go back."
To Baek Jin-hyeon, a sword was not merely a tool for cutting an opponent down and imposing one's will. All his life he had called the sword a mirror—not the act of facing another, but the process of first facing the ugliness and the hesitation gathered at the tip of one's own blade. That was the essence of the martial way he pursued.
"What do you believe a sword is?"
Caught off guard by the sudden question, Oh Hyun-seok answered.
"…A power that seizes victory, and protects what must be protected. That is what I think."
"Not a wrong answer. But to me, the sword was the aesthetics of shedding."
Baek Jin-hyeon looked down at his thick-knuckled hands through narrowed eyes. Countless people, in learning the sword, pile on flashy technique, hunger for greater speed, and strain to amass greater strength. Baek Jin-hyeon had walked the opposite road and reached the summit. He stripped away unnecessary killing intent, shaved off the desire to show off, and drove himself until nothing remained but a single pure will—that he must cut. When he claimed three consecutive world titles, people praised his sword and called it the Sword of Nothingness. The compliment was that it could not be blocked, because nothing at all could be felt from it.
"People believe that if I teach children, those children will become as I am. But the sword is not something taught. It is something one finds by seeking oneself. The moment I force my form upon someone, that child's mirror reflects only me. And that is no longer the child's own sword."
His philosophy was firm. Artificial refinement only killed the vitality of what was raw. To paint over a talent that had already begun walking its own road, in the name of being a master—that, he believed, was the arrogance a martial artist ought to guard against most.
"Master… but he is truly different. He is like a wild beast. If you would only refine that rough edge, just a little…"
"A beast."
Baek Jin-hyeon murmured.
"A sword in which the wildness still lives. Pleasant to hear. But Hyeon-seok—the moment you teach a beast how to be tamed, it is no longer a beast. It becomes livestock. I have no hobby of raising livestock."
The old man's voice was low, but the will inside it was absolute. Realizing anew just how high the realm of shedding his master spoke of truly sat, Oh Hyun-seok bit his lip. Even so, he could not give up here.
"Master. You gave your whole life to shedding what was unnecessary. Only after carving away fifty years did you finally leave behind a single, shortest line."
"…"
"What would you do if there were a man who has taken, as his starting point, the very end you reached only by walking those fifty years?"
Baek Jin-hyeon's hand, lifting the teacup, stopped. For the first time the old sword master's gaze pierced straight through Oh Hyun-seok's eyes.
"How can a tree without roots put forth flowers? No such thing exists in the martial arts."
"I believed that too. But that guy's sword… it moved as if he had known the answer key from the very start."
Baek Jin-hyeon's brow trembled faintly. A sword trained for fifty years, and the sword of a green boy who knew nothing, wearing the same shape? To him this was an insult that denied the seeking of his entire life—and a phenomenon he could not possibly ignore.
"If some untrained boy, knowing nothing, is walking the very same noble line you shaved yourself down for fifty years to reach…"
Oh Hyun-seok drove in the last wedge.
Silence fell. Instead of answering, Baek Jin-hyeon rose slowly from his seat. As the old man stood, the air in the quiet room sank heavy, as if it had drawn a vast storm into itself. The sword hanging on the wall resonated with his presence and trembled, ever so slightly.
"The same as the road I have walked, he says…"
There was no anger in Baek Jin-hyeon's voice—only the curiosity of a scholar who had chased truth all his life. No one knew that Go Tae-min could see the Red Trajectory Lines, but what Oh Hyun-seok had said was more than enough to prick that curiosity.
"Hyeon-seok."
"Yes, Master."
I trudged into the office, and the familiar scent of the diffuser came out to meet me. Between the stacks of paperwork piled on the desk, my senior rubbed his tired eyes and looked up at me.
"What? Weren't you going to learn kendo today? Why are you already crawling back in? And what's with the refund?"
Instead of answering, I heaved a sigh and threw myself onto the sofa in the corner.
"They told me not to come back. Said there was nothing left to teach me."
"What are you talking about? That place is famous for being the best teaching dojo in Jungnang. Did you cause some kind of incident?"
"I did not! Why do you always assume all I do is cause trouble? I was genuinely polite today. I bowed every single time I was supposed to, and I did everything the instructor told me!"
Thinking it over again, it was still absurd. He had dragged that lazy body of his out the door, and only because of the outrageous condition that the Miser King himself, Chae Geon-wook, was covering the lesson fees. Who could have guessed he'd be back, practically chased out, in less than an hour?
If I'd known, I would've just watched YouTube and taught myself.
The world had gotten plenty convenient. Slow the footage to half speed, trace the lines, and that was that—and instead he'd gone to the trouble of showing up in person, only to eat this humiliation. The grief of two hundred and fifty hanwoo beef burgers flung into the void rolled over me like a wave until my chest ached.
Then my senior rolled his office chair over with a rattle and stopped beside the sofa.
"All right, all right, quit the melodrama and look at this. There's actually some good news for you."
"What is it?"
"An offer came in from Nova Arena."
"…!"
At that I shot upright like a spring. The world hadn't abandoned me after all. A vein of cash far fatter than that fifteen-hundred-dollar refund had walked in on its own two feet.
"Already? Ha—guess word of my skill really did get around."
Well, of course. Anyone who'd seen the last match had no reason not to like him over at NAA. Even he rewatched his own highlight reel every night before sleep, pleased with himself. The crimson light blazing out from behind the Demon mask gave him chills, and he was looking at his own face.
Yeah. Watching it again, I really did look incredible.
Jamming in those red circle lenses against his senior's objections had been a stroke of genius. The look had to land or the value wouldn't rise, and if the value didn't rise, neither would his price. He was nodding to himself, thoroughly satisfied with his own judgment, when his senior folded his arms, unimpressed, and threw cold water on the whole thing.
"Don't get too excited. The match keyword is a nasty one."
"What kind?"
Nova Arena never announced the mission in advance. All they released was a keyword. Last time, too, they'd only known it was survival—the specific map and the detailed rules couldn't be confirmed until after they connected to the field. His senior swiveled one of the monitors toward him and let the word drop.