The Realm of the Sword
Pale-blue moonlight lay across a single fortress. At the heart of the capital a banquet was still raging deep into the night, and countless paper lanterns had yet to go out.
A rustling breeze slipped into a man's cup. Expressionless, he watched the wine shiver, then spoke.
"Yujung."
At the word, the man beside him took one step forward and answered.
"Yes, Right Lord."
"What did the Cult Leader say?"
The man's name was Dohwa. The world did not call him that. It knew him by another name—the Dark Heaven Sword Lord.
"He left no particular word, my lord. From what I hear, however, he places considerable trust in you."
"And you would have me believe drifting gossip?"
"...Forgive me."
The man drew back and bowed his head.
Dohwa set the cup down and lifted his gaze. The night sky was as empty as it ever was. His fingers worried the sword at his waist, and when he spoke there was no strength in his voice.
"...The Cult Leader has laid a truly heavy burden on me."
Dohwa was a swordsman. Politics, sums, calculation—not a scrap of such cumbersome thinking lived in him. He was a man who did nothing but swing a blade. Work of this sort ordinarily fell to that other man, the Left Dark Lord, who was also their strategist. This time, it could not.
The Cult Leader had to attend the talks meant to find common ground with the Murim Alliance. The Left Dark Lord had to mind Heukpaeryeon while he was gone. And so this meeting with the Tang Clan could fall to no one but him.
"...Were the Left Dark Lord's orders carried out properly?"
"Yes. As he instructed, we used the Hao Sect to make your presence known everywhere in the area."
"If further orders come from the Left Dark Lord, carry them out exactly as given."
"Yes."
He had no gift for petty scheming, so Dohwa emptied his mind. Follow the orders. That was enough. He was the Cult Leader's sword, not his head.
Courtesans danced, and a noisy performance clamored on around him. Dohwa sat before that lake of wine and forest of flesh and did nothing but wait for time to pass—stroking his sword, drinking. Each second dragged like dozens, and the boredom gnawed. Time in which he could not unfold the blade was no different from pain.
And yet, what was this? His hand held no sword, and still some sense insisted he ought to swing.
"That is..."
A trick of the eyes? No. Dohwa saw it—a white-faced demon passing through the heart of the capital that Heukpaeryeon had rented in its entirety.
The robes were pure white, the sort that called sacrificial mourning dress to mind. The man behind the white demon mask wore a conical bamboo hat just as white. That was precisely why he stood out, and precisely why he was perfect—for spreading, on a night this deep, the rumor of the rising master who had slain the Dark Heaven Sword Lord.
"Jucheong."
Hwa Baek's shadow blurred, and a man with glowing blue eyes stepped out of it, his frame a little thicker than Juhong's.
"Did you spread the rumor?"
"Yes. As you ordered, we sent the Crimson Blossom disciples out and let word of the man in white leak."
"Good."
No one lingered around the fortress the Dark Heaven Sword Lord had taken over whole. Word of that infamous swordsman had already spread far through the district.
"Set a small fire along the walls. Enough that the common folk can get out."
"Yes."
Jucheong went to light it, and Juhong took her place at Hwa Baek's side. A faint killing intent seeped from her as she drew her sword. He stopped her.
"You don't step in. It would only be a dog's death."
Juhong and the other shadow guards were First-Rate at best, and only the latter half of that. Against the Dark Heaven Sword Lord's elites—masters packed with the Peak Realm and beyond—they would not last a single breath.
"Then what would you have us..."
Juhong's voice sank low, the tone of someone begging to be given something, anything.
"...You evacuate the civilians. The ones I don't kill are common folk. The ones I do are Heukpaeryeon's martial artists."
There were not, in truth, many martial artists he needed to kill. Even so, he chose to give the guards a task of their own. He could not simply leave them standing there, shaking with unease.
"Then I'm going in."
A Peerless Sword in each hand, Hwa Baek stepped forward.
Driven to its absolute limit, the art erased even the sound of his steps.
If someone said a quiet wind was carrying a heavy sword-stroke, would you believe it? Honed killing intent prickled the skin like static.
Dohwa watched a fine crack run through the moon reflected in his wine, and lifted his eyes.
"...That."
A presence was approaching that could not be seen and could not be heard. Dohwa felt it not with his senses but with instinct alone, and for a moment he wondered whether it was only a mistake. It was not. Like a ghost steeped in old grudges, the presence crossed the heart of the banquet. No one noticed but Dohwa. His men never felt a thing. They only kept pouring wine down their throats with stupid, vacant faces—and then—
Thud.
They died without even knowing they had died, eyes rolling white as the life left them.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
One. Two. Three. Four. As the person beside them collapsed without so much as a dying cry, the clamor around the hall slowly went quiet.
It was the stillness Dohwa had wanted for so long, and yet the sword at his waist stayed sheathed. It was shaking—a fine, endless tremor he could not still.
"...Heh."
Was that surprise? Or had fear found him? Caught in a feeling he himself could not name, Dohwa quietly drew the sword.
Vitality surged through his whole body. His heart grew hot, and the heated flesh stood ready to unfold the sword at once.
But Dohwa, a swordsman who had reached the realm, understood. Swing now, and he would die. He could not afford carelessness even in a second split to pieces. Instinct tempered across decades told him so.
"Dark Heaven Corps. Do not step forward."
How long had it been since he last kept his men from going out ahead of him? They were as good as disciples he had raised, though he had never once thought of them as such—and how long since he had last begrudged the spending of their lives? He was certain that if he sent them forward carelessly, they would be slaughtered without ever managing a thing. And in the moment he thought it—
"Good instincts."
From a space where no one had been, a man in white robes and a conical hat appeared. Around him there were only slack corpses and attendants who had fainted, and the lanterns that had filled the place with light were out. It had not taken the man thirty seconds to make the banquet hall like this. Twenty? No—it did not even look like that long. One could have said a ghost had passed through, and it would not have been an exaggeration.
"I meant to end this quietly. It's going to get a little loud."
The man who had made this appalling scene had a clear, fine voice, ill-matched to the vicious demon mask on his face. A thin blade of triangular section rested in each hand, and he seemed at once present and not. Had he learned some peculiar movement art? Possibilities rose in Dohwa's mind, and he shook his head. What did it matter what art the other had learned? Only one thing mattered. The man in white before him was a swordsman—a very strong one, perhaps stronger than Dohwa himself.
"Who are you?"
There was no answer to the question of his identity. The mask made it plain he had no wish to reveal himself. Having read that much, Dohwa asked nothing more. Further questions would only waste time.
"I will take that to mean there is no need for talk."
Sungu cried out in his grip, a deep sword-hum, its light and sound clearer than ever before.
His blade, become one with the dark sky, poured forth a pitch-black energy.
With a shearing hiss, the death match between the two martial artists began.
Flash—! Irregular footwork and superhuman calculation opened the gaps between the swords, and within those gaps lay dozens of answers one might drive home. For a swordsman who had merely reached the realm, those dozens would have been all. The sword-paths a master of the Harmonized Realm could draw numbered several times that. Amid choices that ran into the hundreds, Dohwa chose only one.
The throat.
A jet-black sword-stroke flashed out like lightning and split the air. At the tip driving straight for the center of the Adam's apple lay compressed killing intent and will.
Clang—! Of course the blow was stopped and rendered meaningless, as if it were too crude a stroke to merit a second look. And yet his sword, cut away before it could land, had certainly been thrown off—while the other sword-paths opened by that disruption still numbered more than a hundred.
Kagagang—!! In a single instant, sword-forms beyond counting unfolded. Dohwa's blade traced paths swift and soft rather than strong and heavy. Haloed in moonlight, steeped in mystery, it carried a sword-principle set in perfect order.
Watching him, Hwa Baek thought, Better than I expected. He isn't even using a secret sword art, and still his view of the sword is this clear.
Every form Dohwa unfolded had been born of a different sword art. He wove many arts that could not be defined as one and used them as if they were something new, loosing simple techniques and subtle, intricate ones with equal freedom. To call such a man Sword Lord was no exaggeration.
So this is the skill of the Greatest Sword of the Unorthodox Faction—the man they set beside the Six Kings.
Hwa Baek, sunk for a moment in the thought, came back to the fight. He abandoned the defensive forms that had only been sealing Dohwa's paths, drove his own sword-path into that dazzling dance, and twisted.
Kakak—!
"......!!"
Shoved back by more force than he had imagined, Dohwa's sword flinched. The great difference in their strength left a hairline flaw in the balance he had held perfectly. To keep a body that had lifted ever so slightly, he loaded internal energy into his right foot and stamped a bracing step. He did not retreat. He poured that energy into the sword and let sword Qi erupt.
His balance was broken, yet the sword Qi that burst from the blade had not blurred in the slightest.
Hwa Baek drew his body back. Once he had opened enough distance, Dohwa spoke as if the breath had been startled out of him.
"...Ha. You dodge that?"
It was sword Qi erupted not before his eyes, but right in front of his chest. Even had he predicted it, dodging it on a human reflex was in itself a thing to be stunned by. Dohwa stared at Hwa Baek with a face that said he could not understand it at all. Hwa Baek, for his part, only offered his own appraisal.