I Don't Have Friends
"That man back there — is he a friend of yours?"
At Ahn Eunchae's question, Lee Yeok shook his head immediately.
"I don't have friends."
It was exactly the answer she'd expected, yet Eunchae found it hard to believe. One of them was a shameless thief, the other a cold-blooded killer. On top of that, both of them were lunatics. It was stranger that the two of them weren't friends than that they might be.
"Then why didn't he kill you?"
"Because I went ahead and signed a contract with his client — your ladyship. That bastard values his principles just as much as I do."
"No, even before the contract — even before that Hyeongje Life Trade arrived, he could have attacked you at any moment."
Lee Yeok clicked his tongue inwardly. This dim-witted girl was sharper than she looked.
"Looking back on it now, he does seem to have been stalling, doesn't he? Searching for an excuse not to kill me. And the moment he found one—"
"He couldn't beat me, that's why."
Lee Yeok ground the words out between his teeth.
Couldn't beat him? He had only watched for the briefest of moments, but the Female Ghost's skill had been every bit his equal.
Even if he couldn't have guaranteed a victory — then why on earth had the man come all this way to appear before them in the first place?
The questions bred more questions, but Eunchae couldn't easily bring herself to speak. There was something about Lee Yeok that was growing increasingly foul-tempered. He changed the subject.
"Anyway, it worked out well enough. Any ordinary riffraff will be handled by that turtle bastard. All we have to do now is run straight to Jinseong."
"He isn't just going to slaughter innocent people and demand money for it... is he?"
"Who knows? Either way, you're the one paying for it."
Eunchae's mouth opened, then closed.
"Don't worry. I told you — he values his principles as much as I do."
She wanted to point out that the as much as I do part was exactly what worried her, but Ahn Eunchae simply kept her mouth shut.
Lee Yeok sank into thought. The cheerful mood had vanished in an instant.
He found himself recalling the words the old man had emphasized a thousand times.
'If a man falls in love, people congratulate him. But if a man of our trade falls in love? They laugh at him and pity him. And before long, he ends up face-down in the dirt, dead.'
He agreed completely. Lee Yeok had seen such cases more times than he could count.
'Emotion turns simple things complicated, and blows trivial problems up into things that can never be solved. I know it's a strange thing for a father to say, but if you ever truly ache for a woman, go to Kiru instead.'
Again, he agreed. Not that he'd ever ached for a woman badly enough to consider visiting Kiru.
Friends were the same. Whatever the turtle bastard thought, he was no friend of Lee Yeok's either.
And family was...
"HYAH!"
Lee Yeok spurred himself out of the endlessly rising thoughts. The Red Demon galloped like the wind. He wanted to reach Jinseong as soon as possible and be done with this headache of a contract.
* * *
Even as dusk deepened into evening, the Red Demon's pace did not slow in the slightest.
Ahn Eunchae felt hunger gnawing at her. But for some reason, she couldn't muster the courage to speak to Lee Yeok, whose face had gone utterly rigid, as if he were in a terrible mood.
Just then, Lee Yeok stared ahead and muttered to himself.
"That turtle bastard isn't doing his job properly. He let one get away."
The moment Eunchae opened her mouth to ask what he meant, she suddenly felt her body lift off the saddle.
CRASH!
Lee Yeok wrapped his arms around Eunchae as she floated into the air. Locked together, they flew several dozen paces.
When Eunchae came to her senses, the scene was a horror. The Red Demon had collided with something of tremendous force and been smashed nearly beyond recognition.
Lee Yeok had already drawn his Flexible Spear and was standing off against someone.
It was a giant of a man armed with an enormous shield and a great saber. He was almost certainly the one who had killed the Red Demon.
"Now you've gone and made me very angry."
Lee Yeok said in a voice like ice.
"I've never been this angry in my life."
"Was that horse precious to you?"
"Of course it was. Do you have any idea how much that thing was worth?"
The giant snorted with amusement.
"Pocket change, compared to the price on your neck and that wench's."
Even drowning in rage, Lee Yeok calmly took the measure of the giant's qi. Late stage of the Five Spirit Realm — a master whose vigorous blood and vigor left him a single step short of the Blood Harmonization Realm. It was no wonder the turtle had let him slip through.
The giant, it seemed, had no habit of wasting words on his targets.
He simply lowered his stance and charged. It was the same terrifying momentum that had shredded the Red Demon into thousands of pieces of flesh in the blink of an eye.
SHRAAAK!
The giant froze, bewildered. He turned to look — Lee Yeok stood exactly where he had been before.
CLANG!
And then the shield in the giant's hands split into dozens of fragments and clattered to the ground. The arm that had held it was drenched in dark blood from shoulder to wrist.
"What... how...?"
Lee Yeok taunted him with a chilly sneer.
"Curious how I did it? Come at me again and find out."
Furious, the giant gritted his teeth and charged once more. Even so, his power and speed were more than any ordinary master of the Five Spirit Realm could have answered.
"GWAAAAGH!"
Where he stood, the giant collapsed with a scream full of horror. His right hand — still gripping his great saber — had flown off entire.
"Come again. This is vengeance for the legendary warhorse Fire Cloud, who has been at my side my whole life."
Eunchae wanted to point out that less than an hour had passed since the Red Demon's death, and that its ownership now belonged not to Lee Yeok but to the Female Ghost. She decided to keep her mouth shut instead.
The giant clutched his severed wrist, heaving ragged breaths.
He was a greenhorn at best — mid-stage Five Spirit Realm, at the outside.
Has some ghost possessed me?
The giant wheeled around and began to flee.
Lee Yeok made no move to stop him. He simply watched the man's back with cold eyes.
THUD!
He didn't make it far before he fell.
Across his throat, a wound the width of a single hair had opened without his knowing, and blood was pouring from it.
"Idiot. Charging around all that time with your throat already cut."
Only then did Eunchae manage to grasp that the giant's throat had been slit long before.
Lee Yeok trudged over to the Red Demon's corpse and spoke with a face on the verge of tears.
"You worked hard all this time. I've avenged you, so rest in peace. Our Fire Cloud..."
Eunchae was dumbfounded. So the man who claimed to have no friends could grieve this passionately over a horse he'd known for less than a day.
Soon after, Lee Yeok walked over to where Eunchae still sat sprawled on the ground and helped her up.
"You're not hurt?"
"Thanks to you... thank you."
"No need to thank me. I was just protecting my client."
Lee Yeok expanded his qi-sense forward, concentrating for a moment.
"There's a village a little farther on. Since we've lost Fire Cloud, let's spend the night there."
Eunchae nodded. Her gaze drifted briefly to the Fire Cloud's carcass.
"That horse... Fire Cloud... is it all right to just leave him here?"
"What else would we do? What, are you fond of horse meat, my lady? I'm no great cook, but... for a suitable fee, I suppose I could manage."
Eunchae screamed only in her heart. You absolute lunatic!
The two of them set off soon after.
At some point, the sun had vanished completely beneath the horizon. The night wind blew through with a desolate chill, lending the dark an eerie, uneasy edge.