Attack
Yeom Baek-ha’s finger tapped a single point on the map.
“At today’s council, the First Young Master ordered that we rendezvous with the investment caravan at this location.”
Elder Yeom’s head inclined of its own accord as he studied the spot she indicated. Beside him, No-gunsa stroked his beard and clucked his tongue.
“Hmph. One of these days I’d dearly like to sit down with the First Young Master and talk strategy.”
The chaos of a battle she had never before experienced was more than enough to drive one of the young ladies of Daseonrang into open panic.
“Kyaaaaaah!”
The force that seized the screaming girl from where she had collapsed was nothing short of terrifying. She found herself shoved bodily into the very carriage they had arrived in, eyes going round at the sight of her friends already inside.
“There we are, ladies. Everyone aboard?”
The last to shut the door and climb in was a middle-aged woman none of them had ever seen before.
“All of you, move a little farther from that window, if you please. I’ve already sealed the shutters, but still…”
The young women of Daseonrang reflexively shifted to the opposite side—just as countless arrowheads began to sprout from the inner wall of the carriage.
“?!”
Before they could fully grasp the situation and scream again, the middle-aged woman who had herded them into the coach spoke.
“It’s all right, it’s all right. From what I can see, a carriage this solid won’t break unless someone hauls up a cannon. You girls spent good money on the coach, I see.”
As she spoke she took their arms and arranged them along the safer edge. Sang-gwan Nan-hwa managed to find her voice.
“Wh-who are you…?!”
The woman only cracked the shutter for a quick look outside and answered with something else entirely.
“Here comes the second volley.”
No sooner had the words left her lips than arrowheads once more bristled thickly across the carriage walls.
“Haha. No need to tense up. I’m right here.”
She sat with casual crossed legs in the very spot still being riddled with shafts and introduced herself as though nothing were amiss.
“I am Cheong-su.”
The middle-aged woman tossed her short-cropped hair and smiled like a mischievous child.
“My lord—the First Young Master of the Sword Family—sent me specially to guard all of you.”
“Allow me to introduce the newest member to join Wongak Pavilion.”
At Yeon So-hyeon’s gesture, Cheong-su stepped awkwardly forward. When every eye fixed upon her she managed a clumsy smile.
“Cheong-su…?”
The introduction was so brief that every gaze swung immediately to the First Young Master.
“She has retired from the family’s Agency and has now pledged her sword to me.”
At the word Agency, the assembled company looked back at Cheong-su with fresh astonishment.
“Ahaha. Looking forward to working with you all.”
She was the very same commanding martial artist whom Yeon So-hyeon had invited to join him on the road back from the Supreme Operations Council.
Should you ever leave the Agency, come to Wongak Pavilion. From now on I will have great need of capable people.
Ah… my name is Cheong-su. If that day comes, I will be in your care.
And true to her word, she had left the Agency and sought him out.
Yeon So-hyeon addressed the room.
“Her exceptional abilities will be of great service to us in the days ahead.”
“Hmm. The enemy fire has stopped, and it looks as though Elder Yeom is about to go on the attack. As expected of Sword Peak Mountain Breaker.”
Cheong-su cracked the shutter, peered out, then thrust an arm through the opening and plucked a single arrow from the carriage wall.
“Oh?”
The young ladies of Daseonrang stared as she examined the shaft, but Cheong-su offered no explanation; she simply tucked the arrow carefully away.
Poisoned.
She answered their questioning looks with a bright, almost girlish smile—utterly out of place for both her age and the situation.
“This is getting dull. How about we take turns introducing ourselves?”
“….”
Naturally, no one answered.
“We are not here to guard. We are here to attack.”
With those words Elder Yeom sealed the mouth of the Emei Abbess. Without so much as a glance back he roared,
“Jeong Ryung!”
The commander of the Xi’an garrison troops, the man called Jeong Ryung, answered with a grin at the corner of his mouth.
“Boys! General Yeom wants a reminder of what we’re made of!”
At his shout, forty garrison soldiers who had been skillfully dodging arrows threw off their wind-cloaks as one. Beneath them they revealed light armor of an oddly practical design and unslung the weapons from their backs.
Portable repeating crossbows.
“Silk Road Guerrilla Unit!”
Their commander, Jeong Ryung, raised his own crossbow and bellowed,
“Show the bastards what real archery looks like!”
A merciless storm of arrows crashed down.
The charging cultists, weapons raised, toppled and rolled as though a savage wave had swept them under.
“Raise the shields! Raise more shields, you idiots!”
The vice-leader screamed himself hoarse, yet the enemy shafts punched straight through the shields and tore flesh and bone. Worse, the fire would seem to falter only to surge again with redoubled fury.
At the very rear of the formation the leader barely managed to snatch an arrow out of the air and ground his teeth.
“Iron arrows!”
The shaft he held was black. Even when he poured internal energy into his grip the arrow only bent; it would not break.
“Damn those garrison dogs! The Silk Road Guerrilla Unit of Xi’an?!”
A man who made his living in this underworld could not fail to know that name.
“What the hell are those bastards doing here when they should be playing near the Jade Gate?!”
The Silk Road Guerrilla Unit’s repeating-crossbow fire was devastating, yet their numbers were few and the enemy many. Moreover, portable crossbows were never built for endurance.
Watching the enemy surge over bodies that had become human quivers, Jeong Ryung shouted,
“Good! Fall back to the second line!”
They had blunted the enemy’s edge more than enough; their part was done. Without a shred of regret the Silk Road Guerrilla Unit withdrew at a run, and through their ranks a giant of a middle-aged man strode forward and planted himself like a mountain.
“Are you satisfied, sir?!”
“Well done.”
Elder Yeom’s praise was brief. He leveled his greatsword toward the oncoming tide and slowly drew a breath.
“Kill him!”
“Rush the bastard!”
The copper stench of blood soaking the earth, the reek of spilled entrails, the thin gasps of the dying, the hate-filled roars of those still trying to kill, bloodshot eyes half-rolled in their sockets, the oily smell of weapons, fear and murderous intent braided together into that familiar perfume of battle.
The scent of war.
The scent of home.
“You son of a—!”
The first to reach him was a man whose left arm had already been skewered by an iron arrow. The giant standing there with his greatsword looked as immovable as if he had been driven into the ground like a stake—intimidation made flesh.
Kill him, kill him, just kill him!
Yet the drug he had taken moments before close combat lent him courage enough.
“Die!”
He brought his iron mace down with every ounce of strength he possessed. He was certain he had struck. Yet somehow, before his eyes, the head of the mace seemed to have become two.
Perhaps he had taken too much of the drug.
Then he felt a hot liquid running down his forehead.
Huh?
He wanted to touch his head and find out what had happened, but the skull that had been split open above the brow could no longer do anything at all.
Am I dead…?
The martial monks of Emei, bound by their earlier words, could not leave the vicinity of the investment caravan. They had expected a fierce engagement, yet once the fighting began the last thing they managed was to bat away a few incoming arrows. Neither could they abandon their duty as escorts and hurl themselves into the thick of the enemy.
In the end their eyes were drawn, almost of their own accord, to Elder Yeom—who stood alone, jutting from the formation like a solitary peak.
Unlike the howling cultists who charged him, Elder Yeom’s bearing was so utterly calm that it bordered on the uncanny.
Then the first enemy reached him.
“Ah—!”
From afar the Emei monks, straining their eyesight, let out involuntary gasps that were half wonder, half disbelief. Not one of them had seen the moment Elder Yeom’s blade moved. Only after the stroke was finished, only by the posture he held, did they understand that it had been a simple horizontal cut.
In that single sword stroke there was no momentum, no fierce wave of energy, not even a shred of killing intent—no presence at all.
And then, amid the enemies who poured in like a wave, Elder Yeom’s greatsword seemed merely to stir a gentle breeze.
The results of that breeze were grotesque enough to unsettle the mind.
There was no clash of steel.
Limbs did not fly in savage arcs.
There were no death-cries.
The attackers simply lost pieces of themselves while still in the posture of their charge and crumpled as if they had merely tripped over their own momentum.
In the space of a few breaths, not a single living soul remained around Elder Yeom.
“….”
Faced with a spectacle they could neither imagine nor comprehend, the monks’ minds went blank.
“Watch carefully.”
The one who spoke, face unreadable, was the Grand Abbess herself.
“When people first lay eyes on Yeom Gwak-chu, they invariably assume he relies on overbearing, tyrannical martial arts. You all thought the same.”
The monks nodded stiffly.
“External martial arts refined to the absolute limit, beginning from a state of pure naturalness. From that external mastery is born a swordsmanship so ruthlessly efficient that it admits not a single wasted motion.”
The old nun’s eyes burned like coals beneath deep wrinkles as she fixed them on Elder Yeom.
“That sword strike is clearly imbued with uncommon internal power, yet its control is so delicate, so exquisite…”
Assassins who had been concealing their presence among the enemy ranks—men who possessed internal energy—suddenly burst forth. The assault unleashed by those who held the title of Master within the assassin guild was perfect, the fruit of thousands upon tens of thousands of coordinated breaths.
“A swordsmanship so strange one cannot even tell whether internal energy is being expended at all.”
They closed in from every direction and poured out every last drop of their power in techniques designed for instantaneous, certain death.
Not one of those weapons ever touched Elder Yeom.
Like the lesser assassins they themselves had trained, they simply came apart and slid to the ground in pieces.
“An opponent can only feel as though he is crossing blades with a boulder made of swords.”
Having crushed the enemy’s core cadres, Elder Yeom stood exactly as he had at the beginning—unchanged, as though nothing had happened. Not a single breath out of place. Amid the flying blood and flesh he alone was a still lake.
“That is why the word ‘Sword Peak’ is part of his epithet.”