Motion Within Stillness
The pillar of the earth began to heave. It was what men would call an earthquake. The only thing that set it apart from an ordinary quake was that this was no wondrous harmony of nature, but a phenomenon wrung from the will of a single human being.
Crrreak— The feeble ground split apart in great fissures...
THOOM—! A great tree came down without mercy.
They say the deadliest place to stand in any ordinary earthquake is right beside whatever can fall. But around us lay nothing but open ground, the underground grotto excepted, so no great peril threatened from above. Which meant the greatest danger probably waited in the ground itself. To put it plainly: below. I could well imagine the faces of those inside the grotto, drained of every drop of color.
"Hoo—"
Even drawing upon the power of the Empty Blue Stone Milk dissolved through every fine meridian of my body, the quake I had raised had lasted less than ten breaths. An earthquake loosed by nature herself rocks the pillar of the earth for no less than a quarter hour and as long as two full hours — measured against that, my feat plainly still fell short. But it was more than enough to accomplish my purpose.
A short while passed. CLUNK! The grotto's many exits sprang open in an instant. Earthquakes are wont to summon aftershocks, so they would be fleeing the grotto in haste, braced for the worst.
"Found them!"
"Who the hell are you people?!"
"Bwahahaha!"
Again and again, the Walpae's nets of heaven and earth snapped shut. The cunning rabbit's three burrows alone had never been going to slip the snares the Walpae had laid.
CLANG! KRRANG! On the heels of the quake that had shaken the pillar of the earth, the fight between the Walpae and their enemies began tearing the air to ribbons, blow upon blow.
"Some little brother I've gone and got..." murmured Brother Gang Pae, before adding, "Say — want to trade places and be the big brother?"
So he said. For him, it seemed, the ranks of elder and younger were decided purely by strength of arms.
"I'll have to decline." I was, after all, a young man who kept the old law that elder comes before younger, and so I refused Brother Gang Pae's offer. In truth, there was scarcely time even for idle nonsense.
Creeeak.
"...How are you even here?"
Geom Bigak had shown himself at the main mouth of the underground grotto — that was why. Trailing at his back, one of his men came with Yeo Wol carried limp over his shoulder.
Swish.
Without so much as a whisper of warning, a sinister figure surfaced at my back.
"...!"
To be fair, I was running on fumes — I had only just finished unleashing a feat of outright miraculous strength. Even so, for a man who had entered the realm of mastery to catch his opponent's presence only when the fellow stood within arm's reach was proof enough, in itself, that the man's art of concealment had reached a mastery of its own. The old adage had it right: the good do not come unannounced.
Shwaek—
I caught a vicious punch charged with penetrating force as it came hurtling for the vital gates of my body.
'Hm.'
Not good. I hadn't expected the man to open with so headlong an assault. The Eunyeong operatives I knew were men of Sun Tzu's school — the sort who counted running away as the finest of the thirty-six stratagems.
'Dangerous.'
Thought accelerated in the face of crisis. One enemy had taken my rear. Judging by the method of the attack, this had to be the one who had put that crippling blow into Ma Sok. There were differences from Ma Sok's case, though. The weapon was no blade — but between the crushing fist force coiled in that punch and the hard qi layered over its penetrating power, there was no shortage of grounds to read an intent to kill. An attack of this caliber meant that even a body tempered into the Golden Body could not promise survival.
'Tsk.'
The right call, then, was to stop it clean even at some cost to myself. Better, surely, to force the strength out even if it meant wrenching my own qi and blood askew, than to let that penetrating force land on my body.
CLANG—!
But the ambush fell short of its purpose, turned aside at the last instant — and I found I hadn't needed to strain myself after all.
"I don't fall for the same trick twice."
That was thanks to Ma Sok, who had at some point drawn his sword at my side.
Tat!
Blow turned aside, the man sprang well back out of range.
"Tougher than I gave you credit for."
He was saying this to Ma Sok, who had drawn steel less than half a day after eating that penetrating strike.
"Then your fist must have gone soft."
Even at Ma Sok's retort, the man's face seemed utterly unmoved. I say seemed because, in truth, something had twitched. The eye art Myeong-gae had honed to its very zenith — my eye art — caught the subtle shift. There it is. That one stung, didn't it.
"I'll have to make sure you never get up again."
The words of slaughter came in a voice with neither rise nor fall, and by the time they had, a weapon had found its way into the man's hand. A bluish dagger, held in reverse grip. The martial art of a killer, beyond all doubt.
And at that, his identity was clear to me.
"The Biyeong Ma Clan."
This time the flinch at the tip of his blade was plain to see — plain enough that even Ma Sok caught it. And... for a master of the Biyeong Ma Clan who had thrown in with Eunyeong, putting a name to him would be no hard task. Naturally, that held true only for someone like Myeong-gae, once a member of Bigak himself.
"I see. Ma Pyeong-sam, then."
Ma Pyeong-sam. I knew the man. A member of Eunyeong's high command who had claimed more of Bigak's lives than any other. A killer of the Transcendent Demon Realm who had even stood as a candidate for the Biyeong Sinma, the clan's Divine Demon. How could I fail to know the man who had reigned as terror incarnate among Bigak's members under the epithet of Puppet Assassin? His uncharacteristically headlong opening must have been the confidence of a man certain of his own martial worth. Whether that made my luck good or bad, I couldn't say — but Myeong-gae had never once met him face to face. And yet so long as one bore the name of Bigak, Ma Pyeong-sam was a man one could not not know.
"...Who are you?"
At my words, emotion finally touched Ma Pyeong-sam's face for the first time. Faint, but more than enough to call shock.
"The second son of the Dancheon Sword Clan. Myeong."
Whether my answer had soured his mood, the reverse-grip stance with its dagger came swinging my way.
"You know things you've no business knowing."
"Then tell people I'm well-informed."
I had my own account to settle with the man besides; it was only right that I be the one to face him. Ma Pyeong-sam was the very name of the man I'd have gladly torn at with my gums alone, had I not one tooth left to bite with.
"Come at me."
Srrk—
I settled into my stance.
A duel to the death is a different beast from a friendly bout. It goes without saying that no one meets one in perfect condition. The right course was not to whine that my dantian lay emptied from raising the earthquake, but to work out, coldly, how this man might be struck dead.
Battles between masters of the highest order are measured in hundreds and thousands of exchanges, victory changing hands over four days of unrelenting combat. And just as surely, everything decided in a single exchange is also a battle between masters of the highest order. Weighing the man's temperament against my own condition, the right wager for this fight was to stake it all on one blow.
Within the theater of the mind's eye, Ma Pyeong-sam and I set our true qi flowing, each hunting for the one perfect sequence of forms that would end the other in a single stroke. In truth it was a ferocious battle of moves no different from a formal debate of swords. The only difference was that at the moment the decision fell, one of us would be crossing the river of the dead.
"..."
"..."
For all that the space between us had gone dense with killing intent, Ma Pyeong-sam and I stood rooted in place like a pair of facing stones. No — rooted was the wrong word. We could not move. Dozens upon dozens of blades, born in each other's mindscapes, had already wound around us like a net of swords.
My five senses, flung wide at the very hem of life and death, drank in everything within the four quarters. In that hair-trigger stillness, I saw Ma Sok's covert glance settle on Brother Gang Pae. In the same breath, Brother Gang Pae's body shot through the air like a loosed bolt.
CRACK!
"Kehak!"
Caught completely unawares, Geom Bigak was subdued before he knew what had happened. He never even got the window to make a hostage of the woman — one half of the battlefield was simply over. Having knocked Geom Bigak cold, Gang Pae made short work of the underlings in an instant and gathered the unconscious Yeo Wol into his arms.
"Sister!"
Which is to say — Yeo Wol was free.
As if Gang Pae's roar had been the signal flare, the situation began to turn all at once.
"Grab them!"
CLANG!
"Kraak!"
"Don't let a single one slip!"
WHAM!
"Got one over here!"
One after another, the Eunyeong operatives spilling from the grotto's secret exits were run down and taken. However capable each individual operative might be, slipping whole from a net of heaven and earth cast by five thousand Walpae was simply beyond them.
Even with the situation racing headlong around us, Ma Pyeong-sam, chief of our enemies, had still not moved an inch.
Motion within stillness, as the phrase goes. To all appearances he hadn't stirred — because he was already deep in a ferocious battle with me. In truth, it was much as if I were the one holding him bound.
The turn in fortune bought me a sliver of ease, and I let the pressure of his killing intent slacken by a hair as I spoke.
"How about surrendering?"
Ma Pyeong-sam shook his head without a flicker of feeling.
"The numbers do not balance. I will have to collect at least one head."
"In that case, there's no deal to be had."
I was just gathering my momentum once more when—
Shff.
Ma Sok took up position in front of me. In front — not at my side. That meant this was no offer of a joint assault. It was a declaration that he would stand into Ma Pyeong-sam's life-or-death duel in my place.
"Please give me this chance."
I looked at Ma Sok's back as he said it. The back of a stalwart warrior. Why did the afterimages of my father, Dancheon Gang, and my aunt, Baek Yeo-hae, rise together behind Ma Sok's shoulders? Perhaps because he stood to Yeo Wol as parent and the guardian of her very person, both at once.
At any rate, I knew one thing for certain: no man bars the road of a warrior with a back like that.
"Take care."
Ma Sok's chin dipped, the smallest of nods.
A warrior, now and then, must go forward without bending his spirit even before a stronger foe. For Ma Sok, it seemed, this was that moment.
Back in the carnage of the great Orthodox–Demon War, the beings the warriors of the orthodox murim found most repellent were, without question, the ghouls of the Yin-Blood Clan. Vile-hearted creatures wielding a notorious sorcery called the Essence-Draining Method — how could anyone hold such things in kindly regard?
And yet...
Ask who was the most feared of all, and seven in ten or better would have named the devils of the Biyeong Ma Clan. The death gods of the battlefield — the Biyeong Ma Clan, whose name meant Flying Shadow. For more warriors had died to their martial arts than to any other school's.
Their house-exclusive arts, which the people of the orthodox murim had come to call the Killing Arts, reigned over the battlefield as terror made flesh. Their martial arts, after all, were little different from an assassin's craft. The reverse-grip dagger, which gripped like the fangs of a fierce tiger and never let go once it bit — that was so. And their light-body art, stealthy enough to stand beside the art of hidden assassination — that was so as well.
Such was war. It bore little resemblance to the death-duels of the Central Plains, where even a coordinated two-man attack was held taboo. Those bastards slipped unseen through the chaos of the battlefield and drove daggers into the backs of necks — truly, they were death gods of the field of war.
But there is a thing worth knowing. If the killers' arts were truly that mighty, why has no sect of assassins ever come to command the murim of the Central Plains? The reason is simple: the moment a killer is exposed, he can no longer bring his full strength to bear. On a chaotic battlefield like a war, their unseen handiwork is as good as a death god's — but a one-on-one, face-to-face duel to the death is not the assassin's trade. A killer who steps out under the open sun differs little from any other warrior. No — it would be no lie to say that in the open, he falls somewhat short of the very realm he himself worked so hard to attain.
The master who had reached the Transcendent Demon Realm was Eunyeong's own Ma Pyeong-sam. There was that reason, too, behind my permitting Ma Sok to face such a man. Beneath a blazing, unclouded sun, Ma Pyeong-sam of the Transcendent Demon Realm was a fighter without any great gap in strength from Ma Sok.
"Come, then."
Ma Sok provoked his opponent.
Setting aside the supreme realm of moving second to command the first move, first strike, first win — such is the common sense of the gangho. Ma Sok had just treated Ma Pyeong-sam as his lesser.
"You can't be in your right mind."
"I'm man enough to stand in your way."
"So I'm being underestimated, it seems."
With Yeo Wol rescued and his ease fully restored, the corner of Ma Sok's mouth curled up of its own accord.
"What's the matter? Feeling scared?"
Banter calibrated to scrape, just so, at the man's nerves. Truly a masterstroke of goading. Whatever genteel, elder-like courtesy he might show, one would do well not to forget that Ma Sok was a master of the heterodox path.
Creak.
Ma Pyeong-sam's composure — the same placidity he had kept even when his identity came to light — cracked at last.
"Looks like you were the scared one."
It was a moment that taught me, once again, that the goader's art was the true point where the masters of the heterodox path settled the matter of life and death.