Turtle Breathing Technique
Killing intent.
From the moment the hunters' leader had fired his laser pistol, the ones outside had been closing in with murder in their hearts.
If I'd gathered a little more Tushinryeok, I could have spread my energy sense and pinpointed their positions — then shot them right through the walls.
A few more days of accumulating Battle God Power and he would have done exactly that. But Jincheon had no such luxury now.
First things first: he disarmed the one survivor he'd deliberately left alive and pressed the muzzle of his gun against the alien's temple.
Slippery-looking orange skin. A round, hairless head. Eyes with no whites. Stick-candy ears jutting from the sides of his skull.
Judging people by appearance was never ideal — but to Jincheon's eye, this one looked the least vicious of the lot, which was precisely why he'd kept him breathing.
"Tell them you killed the intruder."
"H-huh…?"
"Do that and I'll let you walk. Refuse, and you die right here."
Jincheon poured out a crushing wave of killing intent. The alien flinched in terror, yet somehow still managed a bizarre half-smile as he nodded.
Jincheon shoved him into view of the entrance, then melted into cover nearby with his gun trained on the doorway.
"Talk. Now."
"Uh… y-you bastards outside, get in here already! Boss is pissed!"
Whatever drug he'd been on was clearly wearing off; the orange-skinned alien barked the words in a voice raw with anger, calling to the ones approaching from outside.
"Guotan? What's going on in there?"
"An intruder showed up, you dumb shits! Boss took care of him — lucky for us, or we'd all be dead!"
The killing intent outside softened.
The ones who had been fanning out to surround the building began drifting toward the entrance instead.
But no matter where you went, there was always at least one bastard who knew how to think.
"Hold up. Why are you the only one out here? What's the boss doing?"
Someone found it strange that only the alien called Guotan had come out, and said so.
"Uh, w-well. He said he was sleepy and went to bed!"
"Boss is sensitive to the smell of blood. He can't sleep anywhere near a corpse."
There had been a reason the boss had snapped awake the instant Jincheon quietly finished off the ones who'd been gambling — even without a sound.
Tch. Call that an excuse?
Jincheon clicked his tongue under his breath at Guotan's panicked babbling and checked his surroundings.
Beyond the filthy slaughter room — blood and bone fragments everywhere — a window was visible.
Guotan was starting to flail in pure confusion, and the killing intent outside began to rise again.
Without making a sound, without letting Guotan notice, Jincheon slipped to the window and leaned out.
Huh? The drones are down?
He'd been planning to climb onto the roof without being spotted by the patrol drones and hit them from above — but the reconnaissance units lay crumpled and lifeless. He tilted his head.
Maybe they'd been linked to the dead boss somehow?
But this wasn't the time to figure out why the patrol drones had stopped. He needed to strike. He slipped out through the window.
Their encirclement just collapsed.
The ones who'd been spreading out to deal with the intruder had all crowded toward the entrance, and the perimeter had broken.
Give them time and they'd re-form it. Jincheon judged he had to hit them with a surprise attack before that happened — and moved.
He drew his pistol and flung a knife toward a vehicle that was mid-maintenance.
Kang!
Click!
The metallic clash of knife against vehicle made the mechanics spin their guns toward the rear.
Naturally, they saw no sign of any intruder.
"Huh? What's that?"
A hunter positioned in the direction Jincheon had exited spotted the knife lying on the ground, the one that had gouged a scratch into the car.
Takaaang!
Puff-puck!
In the same instant, a bullet punched through his skull — and through the skull of the unlucky comrade standing in front of him as well.
Takakakang!
Having confirmed the enemy positions with his own eyes, Jincheon didn't stop. He squeezed the trigger in a rapid-fire burst.
Recoil ignored. Spatial perception that had long since transcended ordinary human limits. Every shot drilled cleanly through a hunter's head and nothing else.
In FPS terms, it was the kind of accuracy you could only get with an aimbot.
But Jincheon's expression didn't ease.
One of them is gone.
There had clearly been seven outside.
Yet only six had fallen to his rounds.
As Jincheon rolled his eyes, searching, a fierce surge of killing intent bloomed from inside the entrance.
Takang!
The instant he felt it, Jincheon tilted his torso. A bullet hissed past his face. He scowled.
So one smart bastard made it.
The other hunters had swung their guns toward the sound of the knife. One of them had used that window to vanish into cover.
A hunter with pale green skin leaned just far enough past a container wall to disappear back inside.
Jincheon expected that any clumsy pursuit would put a hole in him, so he took cover as well.
Using the source of the killing intent, he roughly fixed the man's position — and smiled at the long-missed tension coiling through him.
No questions about why I attacked them. No offers of cooperation. He just doesn't want to give away his position carelessly.
Jincheon erased his presence, silenced every footfall, and slipped back in through the window.
Can this gun punch through a wall?
It had gone through wood. Containers were another matter.
Gun tech had advanced — metal tech would have advanced right alongside it.
Jincheon aimed at the source of the killing intent bleeding through the container wall and prepared to fire.
Kaaaang!
But the other man already knew exactly how much punch his own weapon carried.
The speed with which he pulled the trigger — faster than Jincheon, who was still weighing the question — was proof enough.
"Mm!"
Jincheon shifted sideways to dodge the round punching through the container wall.
Kaang! Kang-kang-kang!
But the enemy's bullets kept coming, locked precisely on him.
If the killing intent hadn't been so clear — if he hadn't kept moving — something on his body would already have a hole in it.
He knows where I am!
Wondering why was pointless.
What mattered was how to respond.
Jincheon kept moving, and the motion naturally carried him around toward the back of the building.
Whoosh!
The moment he rounded the corner, a mechanical device shaped like a facehugger leapt up and tried to latch onto him.
Jincheon snapped back to cold focus in an instant, snatched it by the leg, and hurled it behind him.
Puh-oong!
A small explosion bloomed in midair. Screams rose from the surrounding slum-dwellers, followed by the sound of people fleeing.
So he herded me this way on purpose.
The enemy had been trying to hit him while simultaneously steering him into the path of a self-destructing spider-type robot.
Experience and skill in equal measure. A real operator.
Almost a shame that talent was rotting away as some bottom-rung life in a slum.
But how the hell is he tracking me?
The moment the question formed, the words of the ones he'd ambushed in the White Shriek Forest rose unbidden from memory.
Bio-scan.
If his memory was right, it was technology for detecting living organisms.
But how did you scan an unspecified living target at range?
Breathing. Body heat.
Those two came to mind first.
And he had a technique that could control both.
Turtle Breathing Technique.
Suppress the breath. Erase the presence. Lower the body heat until the living become indistinguishable from the dead.
The Turtle Breathing Technique reduced respiration to erase one's presence — a fundamental every spy was required to master.
But in the hands of a grandmaster, it could push a human body so close to a corpse that a single breath sustained the user for dozens of days, and body temperature could be dialed at will.
Ever since ascending to the absolute peak of Murim, Jincheon had polished every martial art he could find to its absolute limit whenever he grew bored. Now he used the Turtle Breathing Technique to drop his respiration and body heat alike.
It worked.
The moment Jincheon's breath vanished and his temperature fell, the attacks stopped.
The other man's footsteps grew slightly disordered — a flicker of confusion.
Now!
Jincheon seized the opening while the hunter was still reeling, unable to grasp the situation. He launched into a sergeant jump, planted a foot on the container's corner, and soared even higher.
His target: the place where the hunter was hiding.
Found you!
The pale-green-skinned hunter spotted Jincheon aiming down at him from the sky and frantically swung his gun upward —
Takakang!
Puff-puff-puck!
— but Jincheon's trigger finger was far faster.
"H… how…"
Holes punched through his body, the hunter sagged, murmuring in disbelief — unable to understand how he had slipped the scan.
Jincheon landed lightly and recognized the voice: this was the one who had questioned Guotan earlier.
"That was pretty fun."
Takaaang!
Acknowledging a man who had fought him well, Jincheon put a confirmation shot through his skull.
If even a slum thug could put up this much of a fight, he was looking forward to seeing what people with proper gear and real armament could show him.
"Haa. When the hell am I going to clean all this up."
Looking over the aftermath of the battle, Jincheon let out a long breath and walked back inside.
A container building riddled with holes. An inner room where blood had pooled into puddles. And one alien crouched in a corner, trembling face-down.
"Huh? You're still alive?"
Jincheon tilted his head at the sight of Guotan, perfectly intact.
To him, Guotan had never registered as anything more than that.
"Y-y-you — what are you? Why did you attack us?"
Guotan couldn't process any of this.
One moment he'd been living an ordinary day. The next, a natural disaster had crashed down on him without the slightest warning.
"Bad luck."
"What…?"
"You were unlucky. That's all."
It wasn't a joke. It was the truth.
Running into the ones who'd tried to use Kunlo as bait. The grudge that had grown from it. All of it had happened for no deeper reason than rotten luck.
"…"
Guotan's face went blank with bewilderment.
Jincheon offered no further explanation. He simply leveled the gun.
"And right now, you're in no position to care about any of that, are you?"
"Ppeuk!"
The hunter made a strange little noise and threw both hands up in surrender.
Just in case, Jincheon checked whether he'd snuck a weapon away during the firefight — but found nothing on him.
He'd probably just been lying flat, trusting his comrades to handle it, trying not to catch a stray round.
"All right. Shall we start talking about something productive?"