Even Without My Signature Arts
Slash!
Schlick.
"Is that all you've got? The Blood Sect's basic Accumulated Blood Sword Technique?"
Do-ha dodged Heo Won-sa's attack with casual ease and sneered at his opponent.
He'd told the man to struggle all he liked — and the best Heo Won-sa could manage was a foundational form.
"Then again. If you'd actually trained your sword properly, you wouldn't be fiddling around with jiangshi."
"Grr!"
At Do-ha's taunt, Heo Won-sa's face twisted.
That damned Baek Do-ha had been running his mouth nonstop, and the irritation was boiling over.
"Stop yapping and attack me already! All bark and no bite!"
"You call that a taunt?"
Do-ha let out a hollow laugh at Heo Won-sa's words.
It was painfully obvious what kind of counter the man was preparing.
"What? Planning to catch my attack with the Burst Blood Sword the second I move?"
"?!!"
Heo Won-sa's eyes went wide.
How the hell did he know that…??
The plan had been simple: wait for Baek Do-ha to strike, then detonate that force clean through and create an opening.
But how had he seen through it?!
He hadn't even taken the preparatory stance for the Burst Blood Sword.
"Look at you, all shocked. Your eyes are about to pop out — and they're tiny as hell already, you little shit."
Turning an opponent's power against them with the Burst Blood Sword wasn't some exclusive trick of Heo Won-sa's.
To put it accurately, nearly the entire Blood Sect did the same thing.
The moment a fight turned against them, they always fell back on the Burst Blood Sword to wriggle free.
"How is it that none of you ever improve?"
Do-ha shifted as if to throw a punch — and Heo Won-sa scrambled backward at once.
Not a measured retreat. An overreaction.
Just as I thought…
Something clicked. Do-ha simply kept moving his feet, content to evade.
"You bastard! You move like a damn rat!"
"You look like a rat!"
"You son of a bitch!"
The instant Heo Won-sa flared up, Do-ha flicked his hand — and once again the man threw himself sideways.
Called it.
Watching Heo Won-sa's behavior, Do-ha nodded to himself.
Right now, the man was hyper-vigilant against Do-ha's martial arts — to an absurd degree.
Being wary of an opponent's attacks was one thing. Heo Won-sa was taking it past the point of reason.
Do-ha hadn't even drawn up his energy yet, and still the man flinched every time a single hand moved.
They must have been warning everyone inside the Blood Sect to watch out for my techniques.
He could understand that much.
When someone had split an entire mountain — the one the Blood Sect lived on — clean in half, how could they not be on edge?
Do-ha came to a sudden stop.
"?"
Heo Won-sa tilted his head.
The man had been dodging his sword this whole time — why freeze now?
Had he suddenly decided life wasn't worth living and meant to offer up his neck?
"Hey. From this point on, I won't use Baek-bo Myeol-hwang Gong."
"…What?"
"Same for the Myeol-hwang Sword Technique. I won't use any of my personal secret arts either."
"What kind of scheme is this all of a sudden?"
Heo Won-sa leveled his sword and glared.
Did the man actually expect him to believe that?
That he would seal away the overwhelming arts that had split seas, cracked the earth, and shaken the heavens?
"You seem to be looking down on me far too much… I am a master of the Hwa-gyeong."
"So what? Want me to congratulate you?"
Hwa-gyeong or not — a man who spent his days tinkering with jiangshi wasn't much of a threat.
Truthfully, even a free-form sword master wouldn't have been a threat to him.
Heo Won-sa ground his teeth.
"You keep looking down on me to the very end."
They said Baek Do-ha's tongue was like a snake's.
He was starting to agree.
"Fine. Fine. You said you won't use your secret arts?"
"Yeah. If I use any of my personal secret arts, I'll kill myself."
"Keh-heh-heh. You idiot."
A vast surge of energy erupted from Heo Won-sa as a vicious grin split his face.
Did this bastard really think so little of him just because he crafted jiangshi and artifacts?!
The Hwa-gyeong was not a realm one simply strolled into.
"That arrogance of yours will be your undoing!"
"What are you even babbling about?"
Looking at Heo Won-sa, Do-ha formed a magic circle.
Hellfire
Gulping heat.
A torrent of dark-crimson flame roared forward and swallowed Heo Won-sa whole.
"Gaaaaah!"
Sizzle.
Struck dead-on by Hellfire, Heo Won-sa hurled himself free of the blaze as fast as he could.
"Th-this… this…"
"This what? Don't tell me you actually thought Baek-bo Myeol-hwang Gong and the Myeol-hwang Sword Technique were the only powers I had?"
"…"
"Come on. Even a total psycho wouldn't make a mistake that dumb, right?"
"Shut up!"
"Wow… you really did think that? Man, the Blood Sect's future is looking bleak. Real bleak, keeping guys like you around."
Do-ha stared at Heo Won-sa with genuine, unfiltered pity.
Honestly, even he had been a little uncertain when he cast Hellfire.
The man had been standing there so completely unguarded that Do-ha had assumed there must be something.
But no — Heo Won-sa had genuinely been that deluded.
"At this rate, they'll wipe themselves out before I even have to lift a finger. Keeping a moron like you around."
"You goddamn bastard!"
Enraged, Heo Won-sa unleashed his poison arts. A thick poison mist billowed out in every direction.
Most martial artists who handled jiangshi learned poison techniques as a matter of course.
Hard to avoid, when crafting the corpses meant handling so much toxin.
Do-ha charged straight into the mist where he couldn't see an inch ahead.
"What the hell is he…?"
Heo Won-sa's eyes went wide.
Did the man think the smoke filling this entire space was ordinary smoke?
Or had he recognized it as poison and simply decided he could tank it?
The reason I reached the Hwa-gyeong in the first place was my poison arts.
That was how central they were to him.
Jiangshi. Artifacts.
All secondary.
"Keh… keh-heh-heh. You idiot."
Heo Won-sa snapped out of his daze and burst into laughter.
Calling him a moron — when the real moron was Baek Do-ha himself.
Anyone with eyes could feel the venom radiating from the smoke, and the man had just run straight into it?!
"I should clear this mist sooner rather than later. If I want to watch him thrash around in agony…"
In that instant—
The poison mist filling the space began to funnel into a single point.
"What?!"
Yeokcheon-mudok-ma-gong
First Absolute — Formless Small Fire
The mist vanished — and Do-ha's own poison arts erupted outward.
"Thanks. My poison arts had been stuck for a while — you just made them a whole lot stronger."
"Y-you!! How are you practicing the Yeokcheon-mudok-ma-gong?!"
A top-tier poison art.
An ancient technique, no less — how in the world had Baek Do-ha learned it?!
No one in the Blood Sect had ever mentioned this.
"I learned it ages ago. I only started using it recently, though."
It was thanks to the venom of Kimeries, whom he'd killed some time back, that he'd become able to wield the poison arts at all.
No wonder the Blood Sect had no idea.
"Damn it!"
Hearing that, Heo Won-sa flung himself into motion at once.
If he's using the Yeokcheon-mudok-ma-gong, I cannot face him head-on!
He knew that technique well.
Not just him — any martial artist who studied poison arts would know of the Yeokcheon-mudok-ma-gong.
And they would know its defining trait.
They say that with a single command, the poison moves as if it has a will of its own!
Meeting it head-on would only put him in greater danger.
He had to escape this space by any means necessary.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Reverse Gravity
As the 7-Circle spell unfurled, Heo Won-sa — mid-flight — suddenly slowed to a crawl.
He shook the magic off almost immediately, but that fleeting instant of lag was more than enough for Do-ha.
"I'd love to torture you until you die… but this will hurt even more."
Closing the distance in a flash, Do-ha began to radiate a rainbow-hued light.
Warmth and bone-chilling killing intent tangled together — a truly uncanny sensation.
Ban-ya Geum-gang Shin-gong
Seventh Absolute — Great Net Demon-Subduing Divine Fist
Do-ha stamped his foot into a solid horse stance and drove his clenched fist hard into Heo Won-sa's abdomen.
It felt less like a punch and more like a spear thrust driven deep.
"GAAAAAAAAH?!!"
Struck by that single fist, Heo Won-sa screamed like he never had in his life.
One punch — just one — and this was the pain?!
"Hurts, doesn't it? But this is only the beginning. The Great Net Demon-Subduing Divine Fist inflicts far greater agony on those who carry impure energy."
It had been created for one purpose alone: to shatter the demonic.
The stronger the impure energy a target held, the more the suffering compounded.
"Fall into hell."
Do-ha's fists, breaking the speed of sound, began to hammer every corner of Heo Won-sa's body.
And Heo Won-sa's screams climbed endlessly toward the sky.
"Do-ha, thank you."
In front of the building where Heo Won-sa had been.
Having more or less wrapped up the incidents that had erupted across Britain, Henry offered Do-ha his gratitude.
Without Do-ha, he would have died without accomplishing a thing.
Britain itself would have crumbled.
"No need to thank me."
"I intend to report this to the British Prime Minister. Then, perhaps…"
"No."
"?"
"Don't report it. Or rather — report it if you want, but tell them the ringleader got away."
"Pardon? Why…?"
Henry tilted his head at Do-ha's words.
An enormous surge of energy and a series of thunderous crashes had poured out of the building just now — hadn't he finished off that Heo Won-sa?
Then—
Creeeak.
The factory's iron door swung open, and someone walked out.
It was Heo Won-sa.
"You—!"
As Heo Won-sa emerged looking perfectly intact, face blank, Henry seized his sword in a flash of rage.
"Calm down. That's just Heo Won-sa's corpse."
"A… a corpse?"
"Ugh, I'm exhausted!"
Right behind Heo Won-sa, Canteas came out of the building.
That mad emperor of a master had beaten the body into absolute pulp — it had taken hours just to make the thing look alive again.
"If you're going to use the corpse, could you maybe not beat it to a pulp?! It's hard to fix, you know!"
The man asked for everything and got it, so of course he just went wild without a second thought.
This wasn't something you fixed by waving your hands a few times.
"Got it."
"Ugh, so tired… This was harder than recovering the artifacts."
"Do-ha, do you intend to make use of that corpse?"
"Yes."
"Hmm. I see. Understood. I'll handle the explanation to the Prime Minister myself."
"And Henry."
"Yes?"
"In a few days… or maybe a few weeks — could you help me with something?"
The Heaven-Cleaving Blood Demon Sword he carried.
He meant to use it as bait to reel in the Blood Sect.
For that, he needed Baal.
But it would still take some time before that one was free.
Baal would be released soon enough — until then, he just had to hold out.
"Of course. Just say the word. I'd follow you into hell itself."
"Well, it probably will feel like hell."
"…Pardon?"
Do-ha gave a short laugh, and Henry felt a flicker of unease.
Did he actually mean to go to hell?
Even if he did, Henry would follow.
Thanks to Do-ha, the souls of his friends and neighbors had at least been able to reach the Underworld.
A debt like that has to be repaid.
Watching Do-ha's back recede into the distance, Henry bowed once more in silent thanks.