The Realm of the Sword
Every sword begins with the fundamentals.
However a man comes to the blade, it starts the same way: he simply swings, and he cuts something down. He builds the strength he lacks. He corrects the crooked postures that cannot carry force, and he trains the focus to pour his whole mind into whatever he means to sever.
There is no end to the fundamentals of the sword. Human potential only looks infinite. In truth, it is finite.
Once a swordsman reaches a certain level in those fundamentals, he advances. He memorizes forms. He grasps the principles beneath them. And those stages grow in proportion to the foes he meets. Hwa Baek had always fought men stronger than himself, and so his swordsmanship had already climbed to a realm deeper than any art of past or present.
Steel rang on steel in a rapid, savage chain.
Two paths tangled in the dark. One sword-road glimmered faintly against the night sky. Around it wound a trajectory of white light. Neither gave so much as an inch. Dragon and tiger seemed locked together, and yet the advantage was plain to see.
When Dohwa's Sungu drew a straight line, Hwa Baek's blade answered with a curve. The moment Dohwa tried to open space for a larger form, the other sword came in like a venomous snake, seeking the soft flesh beneath. Dohwa forced his sword-qi up to widen the distance, but Hwa Baek had already read him, and the blade cut the internal energy off before it could rise.
Formidable.
Even a dual-sword art, whose paths were bound to be constrained, moved with complete freedom. The sword that slipped an attack aside carried a tyrannical force that shattered defense, and the swift blade meant to close the gap already held a reverse-grip counter waiting behind it. Nor was that all. Sword-roads Dohwa had been certain would land were severed before he ever reached them. The man in front of him had broken those roads in advance.
To split the space between seconds into dozens, hundreds of branching futures, and predict which one would come—that was a divine art. No human mind should have been able to calculate it.
How in the world does a man train to reach a realm like this?
In the realm of the sword alone, Hwa Baek had left Dohwa impossibly far behind. Had Dohwa not flooded his entire body with internal qi and forced it awake, it would have been nothing strange for him to be carved already into hundreds of pieces of flesh.
No. Even then, it would have been the same.
The only reason he was still alive was that Hwa Baek had not chosen to kill him.
Hwa Baek's sword did only what it always did. Along an elegant path, it took Dohwa's forms apart, piece by careful piece, as if weighing the level of his sword-road—or rather, as if reading the life hidden inside it. That path went on toying with him to perfection, built for nothing but the moment it would take his blade away.
"Krrk—!!"
Blood vessels stood out across Dohwa's forehead as the truth struck him. To be indulged like this, studied as a swordsman and spared, was for him the deepest shame, and a hell. He would rather die to an overwhelming gap in skill, so long as he died having dragged his opponent's full strength into the open.
"Haah—!!"
Accepting that his stance would collapse, Dohwa gave ground and drove his sword in. The thrust that followed was a flash of lightning, unbelievable from a posture already broken, and it aimed straight for Hwa Baek's heart. The Peerless Sword, held in a reverse grip, turned it aside with ease. An opening that should never have come so cheaply yawned at the center of Dohwa's chest, and Hwa Baek did not take it. Seeing that, Dohwa was certain.
"You—!!!"
He hauled up the internal power of the Eight Stars and let it erupt. The immense energy of a master of the Harmonized Realm burst outward, and the air itself grew heavy.
His Lion's Roar, loaded with internal energy near the whole of his strength, shook the fortress and shook the earth. The shock of that sound alone could rupture a man's eardrums and churn the organs in his chest. At the same time a deep black sword bloomed from his blade.
Not qi. Gang—the rigid force. The mark of an absolute master, who with a single stroke could cut anything that existed in the world.
Black sword-gang poured out in a relentless stream and ran along its appointed path. Unlike the agitated Dohwa, Sungu, having accepted that force in full, moved through the air with perfect calm. Watching it, Hwa Baek understood.
It's coming.
Everything until now had been nothing but play. As if to prove it, the black sky around Dohwa was resonating with his heart's image. This was the realm where qi harmonized by the mind alone and took on form. Among even the Hundred Great Masters Under Heaven, only a rare few had ever reached that supreme height, and Dohwa had set his foot upon it.
From the Sungu clenched in his grip, five sword-shadows were born. They looked like formless shades, yet each was a crystal of energy, heavy with dense sword-gang. The dim night seemed to grow darker still. Hwa Baek, turning the sight over, soon knew what it was.
"...Is that Heart Martial Art?"
To unfold martial skill through qi attuned to a martial artist's heart. Most who walked the martial path called it Heart Martial Art. Arts that used it broke their own limits and pressed their will upon the world. It was the ideal a martial artist could aim for, and the end—a destination that might also be a beginning.
"...You recognize it. Incomplete, but I have reached it."
Black light settled in Dohwa's eyes. With his energy fully gathered, he raised the sword and leveled it at Hwa Baek. Killing intent, given form, seeped from every part of him. Fused into the black energy, that killing intent carried a will no man could name.
"I come."
His blurred figure melted into the night. He had wiped himself from every one of his opponent's senses, sight among them, so his presence seemed to exist and not exist at once. Only in the night, and nowhere else, could Dohwa wield a power that surpassed even the Six Kings.
A boom tore along the path of the Peerless Sword. Sungu's blow, wrapped in sword-gang, had grown fiercer still.
Five sword-shadows born of the heart, each a different form, each a crystal of black sword-gang.
Dohwa moved the five shadows that held his mental image and unfolded their forms. Each had prepared a different sword-art, and then all of them rushed Hwa Baek at once.
Hwa Baek's eyes shifted. He could not see them. He could feel them—five black swords loosed from his blind spots. He put more strength into the blow, knocked Sungu aside, and spun hard. For an instant he became a white whirlwind, and he flicked every black sword away.
"...Tch."
He had meant to cut them down completely, and the click of his tongue admitted the failure. Their momentum was worse than he had thought. He kicked off the ground and charged. The Peerless Sword, turning from defense to attack, found its role at once.
The change in Hwa Baek's forms put a crack through Dohwa's expression. In the same breath, a smile bloomed.
"So you mean to fight properly at last!!"
The Black Blaze Five Swords shuddered, resonating with the violence of his heart. Spreading night the way ink spreads through water, Dohwa drove his sword forward. The air tore.
He swung as if he had cast reason aside, mad enough that there was nothing lacking in calling him a demon. Yet the internal art he carried was pure, and the light in his eyes was lucid and bright. The five swords linked like a single cord and struck as one. Dohwa's blade, whipped through the air, opened a shallow wound across Hwa Baek's chest.
Hwa Baek felt the blood and stopped for a heartbeat. Dohwa saw it and thought his breath had finally failed him.
Now!
Into the hairline gap that had opened in that instant, he poured his ultimate technique. The five Black Blaze Swords halted where they were. Answering Dohwa as he drew his internal power to its limit, the black swords swelled. A storm of night-light raged around them. Looking ready to burst, they unfolded the finishing art.
Five sword-strokes closed over him and hid the sky. Stars and moon vanished together, and a choking dark was all that remained. Even the pure white robe was stained black. Trapped inside it, there seemed to be nothing he could do.
"......"
A thought came to Hwa Baek, sudden and unwelcome. It was like that time—the life-and-death duel against the wooden puppets, fought with his eyes already burst and his eardrums already gone. Overhead, and worse than overhead, a manifestation of Gang covered the sky. Cold sword-points that might come from anywhere. A breath thin as a thread, ready to snap at any moment. The memory was not one he missed. It was only horrific, and recalling it left him distinctly displeased.
"......Ha."
A painful memory remains in the mind and torments its owner without end. The worse it is, the more stubbornly it stays, forcing him to live the same vicious thing again and again.
"......."
Hwa Baek let the sword hang. The motion was slow enough to look like surrender. Yet every time the Peerless Sword drew a true straight line, that line shone white.
It was the instant the Black Blaze Five Swords meant to punch through the demon mask and run his forehead through.
The night split.
A silver thread was etched into the dim shadow that had covered the stars and hidden the moon. The light climbed, brighter and brighter, and then—
With a clean shearing sound, the man in white appeared.
Dohwa realized the Black Blaze Five Swords no longer registered to his qi sense. Shattered down to the scale of atoms, they had lost their function completely.
"...Impossible."
The word slipped out of him before he could master the hollow shock. Sweat poured like rain over a body that had spent everything on that one ultimate technique. On the mask of Hwa Baek, walking out of the night at his leisure, a hairline crack had formed. Dohwa's finishing blow had not failed to land entirely.
...And so what? What was he supposed to do with that? Unfold the same ultimate technique again, just to put another crack in a mask?
For the first time in his life, Dohwa asked himself such a thing. An endless cliff, and the sky above it. In the man before him he saw an infinity he had never felt, not even from his own Hegemon Emperor. The moment he felt it, a fear too deep to measure closed over him.