That's Right. I Am Sun Wukong, the Great Sage, Heaven's Equal.
Muyoung's eyes met Namgung Cheonyeong's across empty air.
The two had never once fought as a pair. All they had shared was the rhythm of the chase that had brought them this far. But a single crossing of glances was enough.
They were Peak Realm martial artists who had already ascended to the heights of their art. More than that, they were kin, bound by blood. Meeting each other's eyes was all it took to know the other's mind.
The masked master opened his mouth to speak—
Muyoung moved first, reading the pulse of his partner's breath.
Shrieeeek!
He swept wide to the left and drove a single, piercing point of steel. The masked master ripped his blade free at once to meet it.
That was when Namgung Cheonyeong's sword came knifing in from the right, trailing a streamer of light. Sword qi shimmered as it carved for the man's waist.
A supreme combined assault, one of the few the Namgung Clan possessed. Two thunderbolts drove in from either side.
Even an ordinary combined attack was a nightmare to answer. When the two blades came in from opposite flanks—left and right, a perfect pincer—it was harder still. And this was no ordinary pairing. Two Peak Realm swordsmen, unfolding one of the peerless arts of the Namgung Clan, a house that claimed the greatest swordsmanship under heaven. The two streams of light stretched longer, then plunged like lightning for the masked master's ribs.
He did not take a single step. He stood as if the sudden thunderbolt of their assault had frozen him in place.
It had not.
"How laughable."
At that low sneer, Muyoung's brow twitched. The man's legs stayed planted, his center unshaken—but his hands blurred.
Afterimages!
He had looked perfectly still. In that sliver of an instant, though, the hand clenched around the hilt had been moving. It was simply too fast, and the afterimage had lingered behind.
Five streams of sword-light poured from the masked master's blade-tip. Two of them tore Muyoung's killing point to shreds and swallowed it whole. The force came on as if it meant to devour not only the point but the blade, the hilt, everything—and Muyoung recoiled in spite of himself, stumbling a step back.
Damn—!
The instant he gave ground, he knew he had made a mistake. A combined attack demanded that both partners advance together—and withdraw together.
The masked master's eyes curved into crescents. The moment Muyoung retreated, he spun his upper body without a flicker of hesitation.
KRANG!
"Ghk—!"
A roar of colliding steel, and Namgung Cheonyeong's body shuddered violently as he was driven back. There was no time to recover his stance. In the space of a single breath the masked master unspooled a dozen forms and came flooding in, threads of light lancing across the air to strike every vital point on the body with surgical precision.
"Fall back!"
Muyoung screamed it and slashed for the man's back.
"Tsk. Persistent."
The masked master clicked his tongue. His right hand kept the sword hammering at Namgung Cheonyeong; his left shot backward and unleashed a blast of palm force.
"Ghh—"
Muyoung had meant to cut it down. He couldn't. The collision detonated with a thunderous crash, and the rebound sent him staggering.
His internal energy is overwhelming!
The corner of Muyoung's eye trembled. But the glance he had drawn by striking from behind bought Namgung Cheonyeong just enough time to plant his feet again. Had an attack landed while he was still broken open, it would have been a mortal wound at the very least.
Still locked with the masked master, Muyoung spoke to Geumgak without turning.
"Get clear of here. We'll hold him."
The voice carried a will like iron. Geumgak had trained in martial arts, yes—but at best he sat somewhere between Second-class and First-class. In this fight he would only be a liability. Another life to protect meant neither of them could give the battle their full attention.
"And just where do you think you're fleeing in my presence?"
The masked master came on like a thunderclap. Afterimages seethed around him in a writhing haze. Muyoung and Namgung Cheonyeong clenched their teeth and threw themselves forward.
It was two against one, and it did not matter. The masked master's skill towered over them. Wounds multiplied across both their bodies, and still he found the leisure to fling blades of sword-wind that pinned Geumgak in place. The instant Geumgak so much as shifted a foot, a cutting gust came screaming in. The man did not seem interested in killing him, though. None of those strokes hunted a life.
Namgung Cheonyeong, blood beginning to soak through his robes, flicked a glance at Muyoung and spoke by voice transmission.
"If it comes to it, we pull out."
"Hall Master—!"
Muyoung's eyes went wide.
"That man has no real interest in us. All he wants is Daoist Hyeonjeong. He will not kill the Young Master here—not if we withdraw. The moment he laid a hand on you, the Namgung Clan would hunt him to the depths of hell, the same way we hunted the Sama Order."
"You're saying… we abandon Daoist Hyeonjeong?"
"To me, the heir of the Namgung Clan matters more than a direct disciple of Wudang."
The ruthlessness of it made Namgung Muyoung bite down hard on his lip. Perhaps that heartbeat of doubt carved itself too clearly across his mind. The tip of his sword wavered. The blade shuddered. A faint tremor ran through the steel.
The problem was that the man whose sword was locked with his was a master who could read even a change that slight.
KR-RANG!
A roar split the air. Thunder shook the atmosphere. The masked master's blade uncoiled exactly like a bolt of lightning—as swift as a thunderstroke, as brilliant as a flash. Sword force surged up on a tide of vast, resonant internal energy.
"No—!"
Muyoung's sword shuddered. A gap opened. The sword force punched through that hairline crack and ripped it wide, shredding it apart.
"Young Master!"
Namgung Cheonyeong's cry tore out of him. Muyoung was going to be swallowed whole. There was no other way it could end.
And then—
A blade of blue sword force drove into the space between them.
KR-RAAAAAANG!
A colossal detonation rocked the clearing, shock slamming through the air in its wake.
"…Kh!"
The one who groaned and gave ground was the masked master himself.
He looked down at his own feet before he could stop himself. Until this moment he had stood with both soles driven into the earth, and not one of Muyoung and Namgung Cheonyeong's relentless combined assaults had forced him to shift so much as a footprint. Now he had been driven a full ten paces back.
A crack—and his mask split cleanly in half and fell away.
White eyebrows. A white beard. White hair. A faint red thread of a line running from the exact center of his forehead, down the bridge of his nose, to the hollow above his lip. A fraction later and his skull would have been split from crown to chin.
The realization settled into the masked master's eyes like a stone dropping into deep water. A man of this caliber. A man who could throw him ten paces. How many such people existed in all the martial world? He had wandered the jianghu his entire life and met their like only a handful of times. To encounter one now, of all moments—the bitterness of it sat in his gut like bile.
Through the hanging dust, a middle-aged man stood planted with a face of iron.
Joy flared in Muyoung's eyes.
"Father!"
"…The Patriarch of the Namgung Clan, then."
The masked master's sunken gaze fixed on the man who had stepped into his path: Namgung Jinbaek.
"I hadn't expected things to grow this complicated."
A thin irritation rose in his eyes. His hand found his own wrist without thinking. Even as he had given ground, a monstrous rebound had come shuddering up through the tip of his blade.
What terrifying physical power.
It was a shock the masked master had felt only a few times in all his years on the road. The man who had delivered it stood with an expressionless face, the point of his sword leveled and still.
Namgung Jinbaek's voice was winter-cold. Irritation climbed through the masked master's face as he answered.
"So the Heavenly Edge Sword Star himself has come."
A star that shone alone, so high that even a hand stretched to the end of the sky could never touch it. The Heavenly Edge Sword Star—Namgung Jinbaek.
His eyes flashed.
The Azure Heaven Corps. The Namgung Clan's most elite strike force, a unit that existed for one purpose: the perfection of martial skill.
The clan's numbers had grown so thin that the Azure Heaven Corps was small as well—a mere ten warriors. But each of those ten was, by any measure of the jianghu, a formidable master in his own right.
The men who had come with Namgung Jinbaek numbered only five, including their commander, Namgung Do.
Namgung Do's brow furrowed.
"Too many."
"Grhk—"
He muttered it under his breath as he tore his sword from a black-clad man's throat. The body folded and slid to the ground. Four already dead on his blade, and every one of them had been genuinely strong. He could only click his tongue at wherever this breed of fighter had crawled out from.
"They're scattered through the trees, hitting us from behind."
Namgung Jinbaek had gone to face their ringleader himself. While he did, Namgung Do and the Azure Heaven Corps meant to cut off every last one of the man's limbs. The trouble was that those limbs were far too numerous, and far stronger than expected.
At this rate we'll be overrun by sheer numbers.
The breathing of the corpsmen was growing harsher by the moment. They needed to punch through and shore up Namgung Jinbaek's rear, and quickly. The rank and file were one thing—but the two who kept ghosting in to sabotage them were another problem entirely.
The pair called each other the Left Guardian and the Right Guardian.
One at a time, Namgung Do's sword could have handled either of them. The problem was their combined assault. That pairing had stopped him cold again and again, and in the gaps the rest of the Azure Heaven Corps were wearing down under the tide of black-clad fighters.
Then the two Guardians appeared behind him once more. Namgung Do swung without hesitation, a stroke meant to sever a life in a single cut.
KANG!
Their palm force shoved the blade aside. Namgung Do bit his lip. The Guardians seeded a sudden killing technique and melted back into cover.
"Think I'll let you slip away?!"
Namgung Do snarled it and launched himself after them.
In that same instant, a thread of presence whispered at his back.
Shrieeeek!
The Right Guardian's palm force, already ripping out of the dark. He could not turn. Directly in front of him, the Left Guardian—who had been trying to vanish—was pouring out a palm technique steeped in a rust-red, ghostly energy.
A perfect pincer, front and back.
The commander of the Azure Heaven Corps was not so easily broken. Namgung Do did not stop. He drove even harder at the Left Guardian, as if he meant to take that one with him even if he died doing it. He closed so fast that a flicker of dismay crossed the Left Guardian's face—
And Namgung Do's waist twisted with the flexibility of a reed in the wind, his whole body canting hard to the side.
"…!"
An empty pocket of air opened between the two blasts of palm force. The Left Guardian's eyes met the Right Guardian's across that space. They snatched their hands back at once, but it was already too late. The two forces had no choice but to collide.
KR-RAAAAAANG!
From the violent burst of energy, Namgung Do's body moved like a thunderbolt. His sword, sheathed in blue light, surged upward as if a dragon were ascending to heaven.
There was nothing on the blade's path.
"Damn—!"
The presence had vanished. Namgung Do spun in desperation—and the Left Guardian, half-soaked in blood, came screaming in with a face like a demon's.
Too late!
The knowledge landed with the weight of certainty. He could not block. He could not dodge. He would have to take it. Namgung Do roared and wrenched up every drop of his internal energy. He would endure it even if it meant a catastrophic inner wound. He set his will like stone as that vividly shining palm force filled his vision—
CRUNCH.
Heat and a thick, copper reek smashed into Namgung Do's face. His eyes flew wide. The world had gone red. Blood. Droplets sliding down his cheeks. Not his own.
"What in the…"
The Left Guardian's savage face was gone. In its place, a staff of dark steel sat buried in the man's shoulder, so soaked in blood it seemed to leer.
A wave of gold surged and rolled. The steel staff drew a dazzling arc through the air, and before anyone could even understand what was happening it smashed into the back of the Right Guardian's skull.
Crunch. The thick bone shattered into pulp. The Right Guardian's arms flew wide, shuddered once, and he dropped like a frog struck by a stone.
"…"
Namgung Do could only stare. The Left and Right Guardians who had been hounding them without rest were both dead, each from a single blow.
His eyes locked on the rippling gold of that hair and went wide.
It's him.
The man he had never once laid eyes on, because his own duties had always kept him in the field. The man Namgung Jinbaek had spoken of again and again, always with that note of wonder in his voice.
"Don't think I've seen your face before."
A smile, vividly white, that had no business existing in the middle of all that blood. Namgung Do's pupils shook.
I can't read him.
He had not felt so much as a whisper of presence. Not when the man appeared. Not when that monstrous steel staff came around. Not while the two Guardians died. He had only understood any of it when the hot blood hit his face.
And if that staff had been meant for him instead of them?
Namgung Do's body trembled in fine, helpless waves. He swallowed a dry throat. His mouth was so parched that the voice that came out of it was rough.
"Are you… Teacher Sun?"
Sun Wukong gave a short huff of a laugh and drew the steel staff back. He flicked the blood and fragments from its end as if they were nothing at all.