Tempering
A month or so must have passed since I began training in this place.
WHAM!
"Ghk—!!"
A wooden dummy's blow sent me flying, and my body slammed into the wall. A few bones had almost certainly snapped.
"...Ptui!"
I spat the blood clear and seized the Peerless Sword once more. Strength detonated through my legs, and I charged the ranked formation of wooden dummies like a thunderbolt.
"AAAAAHHHH!!!"
I drove the blade out on a cry closer to a scream, and the dummies answered by locking into formation and attacking as one.
Clang—clang—clang—clang!
Every last one of them was as strong and as quick as I was. The dummy before me met my two swords with a single blade, turning aside the rapid chain of my Goksan Sword Art with the smallest possible motions—thorough, unyielding, as if I were watching the very ideal of defense.
So this one's the defensive type.
Dozens of wooden dummies took me in turn. I had no idea what principle moved them, but each one fought differently, according to the weapon in its hands. One hefted a massive greatsword and tried to hack me apart with pure aggression. Another held a dagger in each hand and haunted my openings like a ghost. Others, like me, carried a paired set of blades and sought to meet me clash for clash. There were countless kinds.
Hard to ask for a better way to pile up combat experience.
The dummies here were armed with every manner of weapon and every manner of fight. This was a place where I could systematically picture how to answer each weapon, and how a battle against it ought to be fought. And that was not all.
The completeness of the sword art and the movement art keeps climbing.
When I first followed the martial arts out of the manuals, I had wondered what on earth I was looking at. Why force the body into postures so needlessly flashy? Did any of it even work? I had doubted them more than once or twice.
Now, though, I thought a little differently.
Is all that excessive flourish there to load the movements with acceleration?
Facing the dummies, I could see that every flourish planted in the Goksan Sword Art had been calculated. At a glance the form looked full of openings, but an opening I already saw through was no opening at all—because I knew exactly how to kill the opponent who tried to step into it. It was a feat, and a martial art, possible only for a martial artist whose body had already reached the superhuman.
So that's why they call it a martial art.
In my previous life I had dismissed the martial arts and sword forms of murim novels as pure fantasy. A sword art, after all, was nothing more than the method of killing a man with the least motion and the fewest openings, and yet those stories were stuffed with forms and stances beyond counting. Even if someone learned them all, could he actually use those forms and stances in a real fight? That had been my view of every sword art in those tales.
But looking at it now—
It was possible only because they were superhuman.
A superhuman whose very acceleration of thought was nothing like an ordinary person's. In the span of an instant he could call a stance to mind and unleash it, and that was why the forms and stances were so many. Any single attack had dozens of angles, and dozens of ways to answer it. That attainment, and that understanding, were what a month of driving my body to ruin had bought me.
Only—
BOOM!
A dummy that had been hunting my opening ambushed me with a long staff. Pain cracked through the bone, and for a moment I stopped moving.
"...Kh!!"
The dummies did not leave a groaning man in peace. They chained their attacks without pause, driving at the gap I had shown them, at my vitals and my heart. And at last—
"Kagh...!!"
A spear-bearing dummy ran me through the heart, and I coughed up blood. I felt my consciousness thinning and let my eyes close. Even then, a thought remained.
...Failed again, did I.
I jerked upright. Consciousness returned, and I pushed myself up and took the sword in hand again. Was this already the thirtieth time I had died in the chamber of mortal combat?
...No matter how often I go through it, the sensation of dying never grows familiar.
Beheaded by the dummies, heart pierced, limbs torn apart, beaten to death—I had died that way dozens of times already. By now I ought to have grown used to it, and yet my mind had not developed the slightest immunity to the terror of death.
Then again... if I'd had that kind of immunity, I would have died more than enough times in my previous life.
I had survived the battlefield because I thrashed and clawed to live. There were times I had thrashed just as hard toward death, but I knew the truth of it: somewhere beneath consciousness I had still wanted to live, and that was why I had survived.
...It must be past a month of training in this place now.
I looked down at my body as the thought passed. Compared with a month ago, the muscle was unmistakable. I could feel a brute strength in me now that might truly smash rock with bare hands.
The Iron Fiend Body-Sinew Method... it really is an extraordinary art.
A month of stacking muscle through that method. I did not look especially large, and yet an immense quantity of muscle had been compressed into this frame. Release that compression, and becoming a giant standing over six foot seven would not be impossible.
Compressed this far, every line of muscle stands out sharp.
I studied the body reflected in the stream. Every muscle of my torso and my legs was cut into stark, split definition.
And it isn't only that the muscle never stops compressing.
The speed at which it accumulated was abnormal, impossible by any realistic measure. Even if, back in the real world, I had pumped iron on every drug there was, I doubted I could have matched the muscle this method had built. Even so, I could not feel entirely pleased.
I can't use internal energy. I'll have to go at least this far.
Internal energy—the staple of every martial tale. Strengthening the body with it, drawing forth sword qi: all of that was impossible for me. In a murim world, internal energy was the greatest wellspring of power, and since I could not use it, I had to arm myself with a body this absurdly unfair.
Anyway... what time is it now?
I glanced at the clock set in a corner of the cave. I had no idea why anyone had left a clock here, but I was putting it to decent use, so I had no complaint.
Three in the morning. Time to build some knowledge, then.
By any ordinary measure it was far too late to be awake, but there was no need to sleep here. Physical fatigue simply did not accumulate in this place at all. That was also why a clock could be called unnecessary. In a place where time itself barely meant anything, a clock had almost no use.
I have to replenish nutrients, but I don't need to sleep...
A few things about it were strange, but a month on, I had learned to let them be.
"Huff... huff..."
I still had not stopped working the iron. Splitting each day evenly into three blocks of eight hours, and training in three different chambers, had settled into a fixed routine. Years had passed, and by now it was no different from an ordinary day. Three years was also time enough for something strange to happen to a body that had learned martial arts.
I paused the work and spoke aloud.
"Something's... off. I think my body's gotten thinner."
It was certainly not that the muscle had vanished. An immense mass of it was under compression, and that was all that made me look this way. If anything, the muscle that could not vent its strength writhed with fighting spirit until it was hard to endure.
"So 'it stacks without end, and compresses' meant exactly what it said."
The more muscle I gained, the more it compressed, and the stronger I became. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the toughness of my flesh now surpassed steel. And that was not the end of it. My skin had grown so tough that only a sincere cut or thrust of a sword could wound it, and my bones had reached a point where even a hammer could not crack them.
"Getting thinner might be better than I thought, too."
The Goksan Sword Art, which boasted swift swordplay with two blades, and the Nameless Movement Art, which boasted stealth of motion, both favored a slimmer body. Compression had its limits, so I could not truly call myself thin—but simply growing smaller instead of larger would be an enormous help.
And the more I temper the Iron Fiend Body-Sinew Method, the further my attainment in the Goksan Sword Art and the Nameless Movement Art climbs.
It was not merely that more muscle meant more power. The power had grown, yes, but what mattered more was the precision added whenever I unfolded either art. An ordinary body could not perform the Goksan Sword Art or the Nameless Movement Art at all. The Nameless Movement Art in particular demanded movement without a sound, the body assimilated into nature, and that required exquisitely fine control of muscle. The more I trained that muscle, the easier the control became. That much was only natural. It helped the Goksan Sword Art no less, adding force and stability to every form I unfolded and permanently raising the strength of a man whose chief weapon was the sword.
"But set beside that, the Goksan Sword Art and the Nameless Movement Art..."
It was not that I had made no progress. I simply could not feel how much that progress was worth, and the uncertainty left me uneasy. With the Iron Fiend Body-Sinew Method, I could measure how extraordinary the art was against the man I had been in my original world. The Goksan Sword Art and the Nameless Movement Art were different. I had grasped their principles and their forms, and yet I still could not say whether they would truly help me.
At least with the Nameless Movement Art, I can tell it would help with infiltration or assassination...
The Goksan Sword Art was harder to judge, because I had no true swordsmanship from the murim tales to set it against. Fighting the sword-wielding dummies had at least taught me it was no ordinary art. Whether it could stand beside the swordsmanship of those this world called absolute masters—of that, I had no confidence.
"But even if I'm dissatisfied, it's not as if I have another sword art..."
All I could do was give everything I had to the sword art already in my hands. I gripped the Peerless Sword.