Week 7 Mentoring, PvP Assessment (14)
The tide of the match was turning steadily against her, but Bukgung Han-seol refused to give up.
[Hong Yeon-hwa 100%] vs [Bukgung Han-seol 92%]
[Crystal 51%]
Judging by the time left until the Crystal finished charging, she calculated her opportunities.
I have maybe two or three chances.
Within that window, she had to reach Hong Yeon-hwa at the heart of the enemy's territory. It was by no means easy — but it didn't look quite impossible, either. Until a moment ago, she'd been too busy fleeing from fire pillars erupting all around her to think of anything else. Yet after running for a while, her instincts as a 900-point-tier student began to get a feel for how she needed to move. Her second or third attempt, at least, would go far more smoothly than the first.
Gathering her internal energy, Bukgung Han-seol stepped once more into the zone carpeted with magic circles. Fire pillars surged up as if they'd been waiting for her.
- Kwaooooom—!
She wove her footwork deftly, curving around the pillars and pressing forward. The circle directly ahead flared red, but she slipped past before it could activate. Next, three circles ahead lit up in unison.
- Kwaooooom—!
Three fire pillars shot skyward. Bukgung Han-seol tried to wedge herself into the hairline gaps between them, but her opponent had anticipated the move — a stream of fire arrows came hissing through the openings.
- Fwoooosh,
"!!"
Left with no choice, she fell back and shifted sideways. The fire arrows chased her in relentless succession, forcing her further and further to the side. She flung out a few palm strikes in defiance, but couldn't knock down so much as a single arrow, so she refocused on dodging as best she could while closing the distance.
- Kwaooooom—!
A Fire Pillar erupted from the very ground she was about to touch. Bukgung Han-seol faltered and veered again, and the barrage of fire arrows that followed herded her in yet another direction.
- Fwoooosh,
Threaded between the arrows and the pillars, her footwork light as a leaf, Bukgung Han-seol thought:
Just a little more!
Hong Yeon-hwa's strategy was to chain Flame Arrows and Fire Pillars together with exquisite timing, restricting her movements and steering her in a fixed direction. And just as intended, Bukgung Han-seol kept circling the same stretch of ground over and over. If this dragged on, the Crystal's charge would finish before she ever got close.
But Bukgung Han-seol saw it — a gap slowly opening up each time Hong Yeon-hwa cast another Fire Pillar. A magic circle vanished the moment its spell was used, and it remained empty space until the caster inscribed a new one. Hong Yeon-hwa's casting speed was astonishingly fast, and the blanks filled in almost immediately, but with Bukgung Han-seol churning up the ground across the whole zone, the circles were being spent faster than they could be replaced. The empty patches were only growing.
Almost there.
Feigning that she was still dancing to her opponent's tune, she kept her eyes fixed on those gaps. And at last, the chance came.
- Kwaooooom…….
The instant Hong Yeon-hwa's Fire Pillar began to die down, Bukgung Han-seol kicked off the ground hard and surged forward, stepping only on the circles already spent and empty, closing the distance in a blink. At the same time, she spent the internal energy she had been building up in drips and drabs all at once, unleashing the single strongest technique in her arsenal. A chill so cold it stung enveloped her whole body, converged into both palms, and blasted forward.
The accumulated chill of a thousand snows erupts in a single devastating palm strike.
Bukgung Han-seol was certain this decisive blow would land. Yes, the elemental disadvantage from Aqua Flame existed — but a technique this powerful would incapacitate Hong Yeon-hwa, if only for a moment. And an opponent who couldn't run her magic circles would be that much easier to subdue.
But……
The next instant, what Bukgung Han-seol saw was the corner of Hong Yeon-hwa's mouth curling up, as if to say how laughable. Hong Yeon-hwa swept her wand down toward the ground and pointed at a single nearby circle. Then, drawing a long straight line with the wand as though sketching a stroke, she linked several magic circles together — and they all lit up at once. The rising fire pillars fused into one colossal wall of flame.
A towering rampart of flame, igniting across the linked circles.
- Kwaaaaaaah—!
Where the blazing wall met it, the Ice Extreme Snow Soul Palm melted away in an instant, dissolving into billowing steam. Worse, the wall came pushing toward her, and Bukgung Han-seol had to scramble backward in a daze.
"……!"
Even after retreating, she stood there blankly, forgetting she was still in the middle of a match. Her mouth hung slightly open, betraying the shock inside.
So that was a trap too.
To think I'd fall for something this simple……
Hong Yeon-hwa, meanwhile, was thinking something remarkably similar.
To think she'd fall for something this simple……
Watching Bukgung Han-seol scurry back and forth, she'd glimpsed her own self from a few days ago — the version of her that, sparring with Kim Ho, had been so impatient she stumbled straight into his trivial little traps. The price of that lesson had been paid with a freshly planted lump on her head from smacking into a tree. If Bukgung Han-seol's state of mind matched hers back then, the odds of her taking the bait seemed decent enough — so Hong Yeon-hwa had dug the trap, never actually expecting it to work this perfectly. It bought her a good stretch of time.
The Crystal's almost fully charged, too.
The moment Hong Yeon-hwa glanced from her to the scoreboard, Bukgung Han-seol's fogged mind snapped back to clarity, and the fight resumed at once. She worked her footwork as before, dodging the Fire Pillars and Flame Arrows as she tried to close in — but there was a distinct lack of force in her steps now. She couldn't push past a certain distance, reduced to ghosting left and right like a wraith at a seance. Once she realized that what had looked like a gap was in fact a trap, she couldn't bring herself to dive in again. In Hong Yeon-hwa, Bukgung Han-seol saw a towering wall.
She really is a rising star, huh……
Bukgung Han-seol herself had been called a genius all her life, and even after enrolling at Dragon Slayer Academy — where geniuses supposedly gathered — she'd held a top-tier ranking. Because of that, the title "rising star" had never felt like much. It didn't seem so different from her own ability, yet only that handful of students got fawned over with special treatment. When word spread that Hong Yeon-hwa had taken one loss at the Placement Exam and was bobbing up and down in the 600-point tier, she'd even laughed out loud.
600 points? And she's supposed to be a rising star? What kind of rising star can't even climb out of the 600s?
But now she was starting to understand. There was a reason Hong Yeon-hwa had earned that title — a reason her name still carried weight even while languishing in the 600-point tier. Proof of it stood right in front of her: while she herself was wearing down both in body and mind, Hong Yeon-hwa retained every ounce of the composure she'd started with. Her arrogant eyes seemed to ask, that's all you've got?
In truth, Hong Yeon-hwa was thinking along similar lines — though peeking inside her head, it was closer to sheer bewilderment.
……Wait, what? That's it? Seriously? There's nothing more?
She'd expected a 900-point-tier opponent to put up a serious fight, yet not once in the entire match had there been a tense moment. Bukgung Han-seol's footwork was reasonably refined, but her intent was so transparent that every next move read like an open book. On top of that, whenever Hong Yeon-hwa steered her with fire magic, she went exactly where she was told. Fire arrow to the left, she went left; to the right, she went right; light a pillar and she retreated.
Compare that to her spars with Kim Ho. Forget steering him with fire magic — she couldn't predict where he'd move at all, so every instant was a white-knuckle ordeal. He'd weave through the torrent of spells she poured out just to bonk her on the head. She'd build a flawless defensive line, and he'd pry his way in and bonk her on the head. Surely, surely there was no way he could break through that one — and in he'd come, bonk.
"……"
Replaying those memories made the spots Kim Ho had bonked tingle for no good reason, and Hong Yeon-hwa quietly raised a hand to rub her head. And as she did, the thought surfaced:
I really have gotten stronger, haven't I.
Being tormented by Kim Ho, she'd never noticed it — but facing a different opponent made it unmistakably clear how far she'd come. And so, under the veteran's brutal special training, Hong Yeon-hwa too was quietly stagnating into mastery.
As the charge reached its final stretch, Bukgung Han-seol's aimless side-to-side shuffling slowed, slowed — and finally stopped altogether where she stood. In a leaden voice, she declared her concession.
"I lose……."
Hong Yeon-hwa — WIN
Bukgung Han-seol — LOSE
"I'm sorry……."
Bukgung Han-seol was utterly deflated, nothing like the fighter she'd been before the match began. But Kim Gap-du simply patted her shoulder in comfort.
"It's alright, Han-seol. You did well."
He knew she had given everything in a matchup stacked hopelessly against her, so there was no anger, no disappointment. Besides, pitting her against Hong Yeon-hwa had been the mentor's own misjudgment. As far as he knew, her Aqua Flame had been stuck at E-rank with no progress, and at that level Bukgung Han-seol could crush it with raw internal energy alone. Instead, the moment the match began, Aqua Flame turned out to have leapt straight to C — a perfect counter-matchup. If he'd known, it might have been wiser to pit Gwak Ji-cheol against her for an easy win and send Il Gong at Hong Yeon-hwa instead.
Whew…… water under the bridge.
Kim Gap-du shook his head slowly, shaking off the last thread of regret. It was time to think about what came next. The score stood at 1 to 2. One more loss and his team was finished. And yet his face was not cast in despair. Applying such reckless conditions and rushing into a 4v4 PvP had been impulsive, yes — but he'd also had ample conviction. Because he held a powerful card in reserve, one that could fairly be called a guaranteed-win play.
"Sorry I'm late."
A low, gruff voice came from behind him. At the sound of it, the gloom that had begun creeping into Kim Gap-du's expression brightened at once.
"There you are."
He turned, and there stood a student built like a bear, his whole frame corded with muscle — a boy who looked nothing like a first-year. He usually wore the Disciplinary Committee armband, but he'd tucked it away for now, having come for his mentoring. A pillar of the first-year Disciplinary Committee, a powerhouse who stood shoulder to shoulder with the rising-star tier. The Successor of the Fist King, Jo Byeok. He was the final member of the Martial Artist Club that Kim Gap-du led.