A New Battlefield (2)
My life could be summed up in a single word.
A weed.
I was a weed straining with everything I had to force a flower up between slabs of parched asphalt. My father died when I was young, and my mother raised the four of us alone in a one-room basement where we couldn't even fire the boiler without flinching at the price of oil—the kind of place that flooded whenever the rain came down hard.
Poverty took our dreams first. My mother cleaned buildings, and a full month of that grinding work brought home all of 1.5 million won. Feed a family of five on that, and you spent the entire month eating rice rolled in nothing but dried seaweed.
So the moment I came of age, I volunteered for the military, staking everything on a single rumor: make it into the special forces, and especially into the operatives who ran the truly dangerous missions, and you could earn a fortune.
Maybe that was why.
Only after I enlisted did I find my talent.
Right flank.
A harsh metallic shriek rang out and echoed.
The samurai closed the distance in a single breath and drove a rapid chain of thrusts at my chest.
Solar plexus.
The red trajectory lines in my sight were no simple gift of foresight. The direction a muscle contracted, the placement of a gaze, the shift of a center of gravity, the faint change in the air as an edge parted it—my brain calculated every one of those split-second facts on instinct, and the line was the result. Where other people trusted nothing but a feeling, I was reading visualized information.
That was how I was pulled into the Unit 9 Operations Group, a posting inside the Defense Intelligence Command that only a gifted few were ever allowed to enter. If the special warfare command had its 707th, the intelligence command had Unit 9: an espionage outfit that, unlike the units assigned to North Korea, ran unofficial missions on a stage that spanned the world. I crossed line after line between life and death there and learned combat in every form it took. Which was why I could hold my calm now, even with a naked blade screaming in at my throat.
The samurai's blade was plenty sharp. His attacks were fast and precise, and above all his fundamentals were sound. He knew how to hold the proper distance, and his breathing stayed steady. His eyes never stopped tracking the flow between my upper body and the tips of my feet. Movements like that only came from someone with real experience behind him.
More fun than I expected.
A sword instead of a gun, and nothing more. The structure in here wasn't so different from the world I'd lived in: a place where time spent forging the body, technique piled up over years, and experience carved into muscle decided the result. A structure that tested one man against another on nothing but an instant's judgment and skill.
I like it.
It was as familiar to me as breathing, and just as comfortable.
Clang!
A heartbeat before the edge could kiss my nape, I turned it aside on the flat of my blade. In the same motion I dropped my weight and drove boldly into the samurai's guard. For the first time since the fight began, I shifted from defense to attack.
"...Kh!"
Seeing an attack as a red trajectory line didn't mean I could avoid everything. The lines never stopped changing, and if my body couldn't answer them, they were useless. A true master of the sword would land blows even I couldn't slip. But—
His reactions are late.
The samurai in front of me, at least, was not fast enough to outrun my response. I twisted my wrist, beat his sword down along a diagonal, and in the gap that opened drove my own point in deep.
Clash—clash—clang!
Three strikes of metal burst out in a single instant. The samurai gave ground in a rush, all his focus spent on staying alive.
The limit of men who've only ever known combat as a game.
I pressed him hard and didn't let up. Experience had already taught me exactly where to touch a man to make him fold.
"...!"
He sensed the danger a beat too late and tried to reset his stance, but the flow had already crossed to my side. I dropped my hips and slid out to his flank. Beyond the sand kicking up in a rough cloud, he flailed his sword as if in a spasm—and the edge cut nothing but empty air, not even brushing my collar.
Checkmate.
The price was fatal.
A wet, parting slice. My blade sank into the nape of his neck, and a chilling texture traveled up through my palm.
"...Krgh. Kh—"
For a moment he looked from my face to the sword and back again. Then he folded and went down. A moment later, something astonishing happened. Cracks raced across the samurai's body as if his flesh were glazed porcelain, and with a sharp electric crackle his whole form scattered into particles of light.
I stared for a while at the floor where the samurai had been, then drew a slow breath.
Survived this one too.
Heat climbing the back of my neck. A heart hammering hard against my ribs. The faint, metallic reek of blood still hanging in the air. Those sensations tangled together and bloomed into a ferocious thrill.
I looked down at the sword in my hand and let out a short laugh. The heavy pulse traveling up my palm to strike my heart was a different order of thing entirely from the dry recoil of a trigger.
This Nova Arena... it's more fun than I thought.
Tokyo, Japan.
Pshhhhhk—
Compressed air bled away, and the capsule's hatch eased open. Inside it, a man in a hakama pushed himself upright with a scowl: Hayashi Goro. He was the samurai who had just crossed blades with Go Tae-min.
Scouts from the Kagenoha Legion came over to him.
"What's this, Goro? Wrapping up already? You barely clocked in."
Hayashi Goro was not, in fact, a participant chasing a Pro License. He stayed in the Amateur League to find promising fighters and bring them in. At his colleague's question he shook his head.
"No. I got forcibly clocked out."
You could fight in the Amateur League whenever you liked, but a loss locked you out for twenty-four hours. The other scouts' eyes went round.
"Don't tell me you lost."
"I did. To someone absurdly strong."
Goro walked them through what had just happened. Black leather armor. A custom tactical blade with an edge of about fifty centimeters. The man in the demon mask.
"He toyed with the distance. A caliber I couldn't do a thing against."
Once his opponent started fighting in earnest, Goro hadn't lasted a full minute. He added it with the voice of a man already certain.
"We have to sign him. Raise him right, and we might make a star on the level of Oni Blade Toshiki."
"What? He was that good?"
"A fighter like that—doesn't he already belong to a Legion?"
Goro shook his head at his colleagues.
"I don't think so. No Legion mark, and more than anything, his record was zero matches."
A Legion handled everything for its warriors: coaching to raise their level, exclusive gear, strategy, and schedule management included. In exchange it took thirty percent of whatever the participant earned. Find a single talented prospect and raise him properly, and the return could be enormous.
The Kagenoha scouts grew busy at once.
"2,749... here he is. What? There's not a single piece of public information?"
"He even left the email field blank. Going for the man-of-mystery act?"
There was one problem. They had no way at all to contact number 2,749. On the off chance of a lead they tore through the communities and checked every related thread, but all they found was awe at his skill. His information was nowhere.
"Damn it. An A-rank prospect, the first one in ages..."
"We shouldn't have just been standing around."
The scouts sighed and turned toward the capsules. If there was no way to reach him, there was only one method left. Hatches shut, they waited on edge for the next match alert.
"Please let me get matched with 2,749..."
In the end Go Tae-min closed the day's matching at three wins and zero losses, and came back from a successful debut. He pushed himself up out of the capsule and let out a long breath. The sealed hatch opened, and damp heat rushed in with a thick wave of fatigue. His whole body hung heavy as cotton soaked through. Movement in the virtual world had passed through his brainwaves straight into his nervous system, and it felt as if he'd just run a high-intensity infiltration drill for real.
The stamina drain is brutal.
What waited for him was not the high of victory. Go Tae-min frowned at the numbers stamped on the screen.
"This is... everything I made today?"
Wondering if he'd misread it, Go Tae-min checked the screen again. It was only about an hour's work, but by his standards the sum was far too small.
"Come on, hyung. You're messing with me, right? I was out there crossing the line between life and death, swinging a blade, and this is all of it? My day's pay is out here high-fiving a convenience-store part-timer!"
At the complaint, Chae Geon-wook went on wiping down a bottle of twenty-five-year Ardbeg with a cloth, thoroughly unimpressed.
"I told you. You have to climb a certain ways before you start making real money."
"This is still way too much. A hundred and ten thousand won—what even is a hundred and ten thousand won? I'm a guy who used to get paid in the hundreds of millions out in the field."
"Didn't that start around a million won too, at the beginning?"
Faced with Chae Geon-wook offering nothing but irritatingly accurate facts, Go Tae-min let out a long sigh.
"Haa. I should've kept my mouth shut. So how far do I have to climb?"
"Get to Pro, at least, and you won't have to worry about eating."
From the Pro League on, Chae explained, a single match paid a minimum of ten million won. That was the floor and nothing more. Participants with decent results, a real performance, or a following made money in the hundreds of millions.
Only then did Go Tae-min's voice ease as he asked again.
"There's something above the Pro League?"
"Three more. World, Master, and the Super League. Five in all."
"They pay even more than the Pro League, then."
"'More' doesn't cover it. I hear the ones who earn big clear over ten billion a match."
"What? Ten billion?"
Go Tae-min's mouth fell open. Ten billion. A figure he had never dared imagine, not even in the days when he fought with his life on the line. In that instant the disappointment still clinging to him vanished without a trace.
"You said I need a Pro License to move up to the Pro League, right?"
"Right. A minimum of a hundred matches, and a win rate of seventy percent or better, and they'll issue it."
At least a hundred matches. A win rate over seventy percent at the same time. It wasn't as hard a bar as he'd expected. Go Tae-min nodded. The participants he'd crossed blades with today had, on the whole, been only a little better than ordinary people—though the samurai from the first match had been an exception, his fundamentals solid. A deep smile pulled at Go Tae-min's mouth.
"Ten billion... That's reason enough to climb."