Five Minutes Within the Circle
What the hell was that just now?
What just happened?
Hundreds of bullets clattered uselessly to the ground.
A soldier put the full power of his battle suit behind a hammer swing — only to rebound off an invisible wall and go flying. A moment later, one of Jincheon's arms vanished for the barest fraction of a second and reappeared, and the man came apart in dozens of pieces.
"I'll give you five minutes."
Jincheon dragged the tip of his sword across the ground, tracing a circle around himself.
"For those five minutes, I will only dodge and defend from inside this circle. Push me outside it, and you win. I'll let you walk away in one piece."
Not kill him — just push him out, and victory was theirs. In other words, the thought that he himself might die had never even crossed his mind.
Jincheon paid no attention whatsoever to the reactions around him and simply kept talking.
"When five minutes are up, I step out of the circle and kill every last one of you. So thrash as hard as you like. It starts now."
Having laid out his private rules, he leveled his sword once more.
"……."
"……."
Naturally, no one answered.
Because it was too absurd?
No. Because they were terrified.
Under ordinary circumstances they would have mocked him to his face and laughed. But Jincheon had not spoken casually. He had poured spiritual force into every word. Their spirits jolted by that pressure, they accepted what he said as absolute truth — reason and logic be damned.
The only people who could resist something like that were high-level masters capable of shielding their own spirits, or the kind of great heroes and archvillains who belonged in legends.
I… I can't breathe…!
We're going to die. We're really going to die…!
For the first time since arriving in this world, Jincheon unleashed his aura without the slightest restraint. Even the renowned masters of Murim could not take that presence head-on; the people of this world, who had no martial arts at all, stood no chance. Crushed under the weight of it — as if they had suddenly been dropped onto a high-gravity planet — they stood there like idiots even as the clock kept ticking.
"K-k-kill him! Kill him already!"
Kahim, seized by a fear he had never felt in his life, screamed like a man clawing for air.
"Hah—hhk!"
"Pour everything into him! Everything!"
Only then did the Zabalcan soldiers and the resistance traitors snap back to themselves and swing their muzzles toward Jincheon.
Tukakakakakakakakaka!
Dozens of people locked onto a single target and squeezed their triggers. But a denser refractive shimmer rose than before, and every bullet bounced away.
"Uwaaaaah!"
Seeing that, the soldiers in battle suits began deploying their built-in weapons. Every suit they wore came standard with a plasma flamethrower and micro-missiles. They had been holding those back because they had known about the resistance betrayal in advance — but the killing intent that rattled their spirits made them empty everything without restraint.
Kuuwaaaaah! Puffung! Puppuppung!
Thick green plasma fire and missile detonations swallowed Jincheon's body whole.
"G-good!"
"That did it!"
"Nothing could survive that!"
"Even mecha armor wouldn't hold up against this!"
They burned through every drop of fuel and every missile, reducing the ground where Jincheon had stood to scorched ruin. Any living thing caught in that would have died without question. Convinced he was finished, they raised a cheer.
Then a single sword burst out of the flames and swept a full circle through the air.
Puhwaaaak!
In the same instant, every fire raging around him snuffed out at once.
Extinguishing flames without water or any firefighting tool was already staggering — but more astonishing still was the fact that the interior of the circle Jincheon had drawn remained completely untouched amid the missile blasts. As if that single patch of ground had been standing somewhere else entirely.
"That one was pretty fun."
Jincheon smiled. Not a drop of sweat on him. Not a single scratch.
"Wh… what…! What the hell is this! What is this!?"
Gronel, who had been dreaming of a rosy future, let out a sound closer to a scream than a shout at the impossible spectacle unfolding before his eyes.
Intelligent life was a contradictory thing. It carried an innate curiosity about the unknown — and an equal terror of it. In ancient times, people offered sacrifices to soothe the wrath of nature gods because they did not understand why natural phenomena occurred, and trembled in worship of deities because they did not know why lightning struck. As science advanced and countless unknowns became mere phenomena and laws, that terror of the unknown largely faded.
And yet the people standing here were now confronting an "unknown" that their common sense and technology could not begin to explain. That fear of the inexplicable was devouring their reason at a terrifying speed.
"Three minutes twenty seconds remaining."
"Sh-shit!"
"I'm out of here!"
A calm, unhurried voice updated the time — not even breathing hard. At the sound of it, several of the resistance traitors screamed and broke into a run.
Jincheon watched them flee, then swung his sword in a motion of pure elegance.
Spectral Flash
A razor-edged wind shot from the tip of the blade. It whispered through the forest of bodies. The ones it touched were the ones who had turned their backs to run. The wind scythed across them, and they toppled mid-stride, still locked in the posture of flight.
Chararararak!
The impact with the ground shattered their bodies into dozens of pieces.
"Obviously you're not allowed to run. Do I really have to spell that out?"
Jincheon rested his sword loosely across one shoulder with an expression of pure annoyance.
How the hell did it come to this?
Kahim still could not believe what he was seeing. His mission had been to kill the Fourth Princess, eliminate the resistance, and secure the location of the energy signature from the resistance traitors. On paper it had looked complicated, but the Fourth Princess had no allies whatsoever, and the resistance could be cleaned up easily with the traitors' cooperation. Along the way, because of the White Shriek Forest's notorious reputation, he had hired a convenient guide without thinking twice — just to cut down on variables.
And that guide had landed them in this nightmare.
Should I have brought laser weapons? No — particle weapons in this magnetic field have abysmal accuracy. I have to kill him with what I've got!
Kahim wrenched his thoughts around desperately — then something clicked.
Wait. Why am I overcomplicating this?
"Everyone rush him! Beat him to death, shove him out — I don't care how, just do it!"
"Y-yes, sir!"
The battle-suited soldiers, jolted by Kahim's order, suddenly grasped a single simple fact: the enemy was using some bizarre method, but overwhelming force should still break through it.
"Beat him to death! Whatever shield he's using has to have a limit!"
Kahim had decided the refractive distortion that deflected projectiles was a personal shield. The Zabalcan soldiers swung massive hammers and axes — heavy weapons that battle-suit strength made effortless to wield.
Tutung! Tututututung!
"Kh!"
"Attacks aren't getting through!"
"Shut up and keep hammering! Even a high-capacity personal shield has a limit!"
Their strikes never reached Jincheon's body. They slammed into the invisible wall again and again and bounced away. As someone had said, even the finest personal shield had limits — and with Zabalcan soldiers in the latest battle suits swinging quantum-force axes and hammers, any shield, no matter how strong, should have been drained dry in moments.
And yet—
"It won't break!"
"What!? Why the hell won't it break!?"
Shitshitshitshitshitshit!
Quantum-force weapons capable of damaging even mecha armor, swung at full power by soldiers in cutting-edge battle suits — and still Jincheon's face held nothing but leisure.
Kahim had no idea what ability or shield device the man was using, but of one thing he was certain.
If this keeps up, that bastard is going to kill us all!
What now? Call in the resistance traitors too? No — their gear wouldn't help.
"Thirty seconds left."
Watching Kahim's face, Jincheon rolled his neck left and right and settled into a ready stance. Something seemed to dawn in Kahim's eyes as he took that in.
Is he… smiling?
A smile of pure madness spread across Kahim's face. Jincheon sensed what the man intended and sharpened his gaze with wariness.
"Forced Code EDZ 229S!"
> FORCED CODE EDZ 229S INITIATED
> BATTLE SUIT SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE — ACTIVE
> FUSION CORE OVERHEAT: CRITICAL
Guuuuuung~~~~!
What answered Kahim's voice were the soldiers still hammering at Jincheon — more precisely, something swelling inside the battle suits they wore.
"Lieutenant Kahim!?"
"What is this!?"
The soldiers clearly had no idea what he had just done; panic was written all over their faces.
"If we're going to die anyway, we all die together! Glory to the Zabalcan Empire!"
Guuuuuooooooo———!
"N-no! The engine's overheating!"
"Stop it! Stop it, damn you!"
Nuclear fusion was safer than fission. Even if a suit was destroyed mid-explosion, there was no chain reaction. But force the core into artificial overheat the same way you would with fission, and an explosion was still possible. Fusion was simpler to control — cut the fuel feed and it stopped — but deliberately overheating it for detonation produced a catastrophe on par with fission. And if this many battle suits detonated simultaneously, the blast radius would stretch at least a dozen kilometers.
"You son of a bitchhh!"
"I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"
"Aaaaaah!"
Unlike Kahim, who was prepared to throw his own life away for the glory of the Zabalcan Empire, the soldiers reacted very differently.
"Your lives have been spent for the glory of the Empire! Burn gladly!"
In that instant, a translucent green spherical barrier formed around Kahim. For all his talk of dying together, he had raised a personal shield that protected only himself — a shield he had bought by liquidating his own assets, just in case.
The magnetic field will weaken the shield somewhat, but combined with the suit's armor, I should be able to survive alone!
And unlike the others, his own suit's self-destruct code had not activated. His code and the standard soldier codes were different.
"G-Gronel! What the hell is this!?"
"Gronel! Do something!"
"Gronel!"
The resistance traitors knew full well that if the fusion engines went up, even running flat-out would not save them. They screamed at Gronel as if demanding answers.
Dying like this? After everything, dying like this…?
"U… uwaaaaah!"
"Ghk!"
"Kraaagh!"
Gronel shrieked, beat down the comrades grabbing at him, and bolted in the opposite direction.
"Get off me! All of you, get the hell off me, you worthless bastards! I'm going to live! I'm going to live!"
Wearing an outdated nano-suit, Gronel fled at a speed far beyond ordinary human limits.
Tskak!
"Ghk……!"
But as he ran, he heard something being cut — and his consciousness went dark. Even in the middle of this crisis, Jincheon had kept his own rules and simply carved Gronel apart.
It was an almost clean death for a man who had tried to sell out his comrades as sacrificial lambs — but to Jincheon, Gronel and the rest of the resistance traitors were all the same: extras, nothing more.
Kukwakwakwakwang!
At the same moment, the battle suits that had reached their absolute limit erupted in a ferocious explosion.
"Uwaaaagh!"
"Hiiiek!"
"Ueoook!"
The resistance traitors screamed and squeezed their eyes shut. And yet — somehow — they felt no heat at all.
"Wh… wha……?"
"We're… alive……?"
"Wh-what is that!?"
As they all stood baffled by the total absence of blast impact, one of the resistance fighters pointed straight ahead. There, the explosion's flames writhed as if trapped inside an invisible sphere. The sphere steadily shrank, the firestorm compressing into a denser and denser crimson, until at last the ball of contained inferno was no larger than an egg — resting on Jincheon's open palm.
"Quite the blast. Strong enough that even I had to put some effort into it."
"Y… you… what are you……."
As far as anyone could see, all he had was a single sword. A slightly exceptional hunter who had been operating among the slave populations. And that man was performing miracles right in front of their eyes.
"What the hell are you!?"
Kahim screamed in pure terror at the monster wearing a human face.
"This is going to sound like some edgy chuuni nonsense, but I can't think of a better way to put it, so here we are."
Jincheon casually flicked his free hand. The unconscious bodies of Calsira and Heliane rose as if drawn by magnets and flew toward him. He caught them both.
"I am Jincheon, the Lust Emperor."
Then he took the egg-sized sphere and tossed it lightly. It punched straight through Kahim's shield and struck the reinforced faceplate of his helmet.
Kukwakwakwakwakwang!!
The force that had been holding the sphere compressed vanished — and the firestorm erupted.