Week 7 Mentoring, PvP Assessment (16)
...
After the clash, Kim Ho glanced this way as though he had lost interest, then turned his back again and started to run.
Jo Byeok resumed the chase at once, his mind working.
What was that, just now?
He had crossed fists with countless masters in his time, yet being driven back that far in a single exchange was exceedingly rare. Usually an outcome like that came only when he was crushed outright in a contest of inner energy—and this felt nothing like that case.
If there had been a gap in inner energy, he should have taken at least some damage. Yet neither side's health had moved an inch. It was an unfamiliar experience in more ways than one, but—
I'll simply verify it again.
Jo Byeok picked up speed and swiftly closed the distance to Kim Ho once more. And the instant he was right on the man's heels and threw a punch, Kim Ho—who had been glancing back over his shoulder at intervals—turned and thrust out a hand.
- BOOM—!
Jo Byeok's body skidded backward yet again. This time, however, he had widened his field of vision and observed carefully, and he thought he understood what had happened.
Wind.
Wind gathering into Kim Ho's hand and compressing. It erupted in the shape of a vortex and shoved him away like a released spring. Considering that Kim Ho was a caster-type class, it was almost certainly wind magic—but given that it could hurl him a good distance, physical force had to be mixed in as well.
In that case.
Jo Byeok closed in on Kim Ho a third time, and even as he did, he drew up his inner energy and wrapped it around his body like a suit of armor. In his match against Go Hyun-woo, he had answered the Clear Stream his opponent unleashed in exactly this way.
Sure enough, the moment Kim Ho released his wind magic against Jo Byeok's punch—
- WHAM—!
—Jo Byeok went skidding back once more, but the distance was less than half of what it had been before. It had cost a heavy toll of inner energy for a single block, but it had been the right answer all the same.
A flicker of interest entered Kim Ho's eyes as well.
"You figured it out fast."
Even with his trick seen through, there was not a trace of alarm in his expression. If anything, he looked closer to pleased by Jo Byeok's sharp eye. That was a composure no one could wear without plenty of cards still in hand—and without absolute confidence in himself. To think anyone called this man a coward. Rumors really couldn't be trusted.
Jo Byeok grew all the more tense, yet he did not let slip the opening his correct answer had bought him. The distance he'd been knocked back was short—more than enough to keep attacking. He strode forward and unleashed a lightning-fast barrage of punches.
- BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!
Kim Ho tilted and twisted left and right to slip the incoming fists, deflecting a couple by setting his ink-black short spear against them and guiding them off to the side. At the same time, wind gathered and compressed rapidly in his empty hand. The instant Jo Byeok responded by sheathing himself in inner energy—
- BOOM—!
—he himself stood still, while Kim Ho, the caster, went sailing off instead in a graceful arc. Then he touched down lightly on the terraced cliffs, turned his back, and started running.
Jo Byeok was not a man who flustered easily, but at that sight he could only stand dumbfounded for a moment.
...So it can be used that way, too.
Since his opponent wouldn't budge, the man had apparently launched himself instead. But he couldn't just stand there staring like a dog that had lost the chicken it was chasing, so he kicked off the ground and gave chase at once.
A glance at the scoreboard showed:
They had exchanged barely three rounds, and the crystal was already half charged. With the 2.5x condition in play, it was filling at a tremendous rate.
That was bad news for Jo Byeok. Despite burning through half his time, he still hadn't wrested away the crystal or dealt his enemy any meaningful damage. Get close, and he was blasted back by that exploding wind magic—or Kim Ho simply launched himself away.
So Jo Byeok shifted his tactics, holding a fixed distance and attacking from range. His tightly clenched fist shot forward, firing off fist wind.
- BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!
Kim Ho ran without so much as a proper look behind him. Even so, his footwork carried him sliding this way and that, and every time it did, a fist wind would whizz past him by an exquisite margin. He had expected as much to some degree, but this, too, simply wasn't landing.
Jo Byeok kept hurling fist winds as he called out.
"Are you going to do nothing but run until the very end?"
"If I can win without fighting, why would I waste the effort? For the record, I learned all of this from Hyeong-taek."
He had arrived too late to watch it himself, but apparently Son Hyeong-taek had run this exact strategy against Song Cheon-hye. The difference was that Son Hyeong-taek had ended up caught and lightning-grilled, while Kim Ho showed not so much as a hint of being caught.
Jo Byeok asked again.
"You have no intention of fighting at all?"
"Yeah, sorry, but no. At least not in this match."
Quite a lot was riding on the wager, and he meant that winning the match came before proving his skill.
Jo Byeok rumbled deep in thought.
Checkmate.
In raw movement speed, he was actually a touch faster than Kim Ho when he pushed his inner energy to its limit. But the moment he closed in, that unidentified wind magic opened the distance right back up, so it meant little. And fist winds fired from range were useless as well, dodged as smoothly as if the man were made of eel.
Jo Byeok had no choice but to admit it.
This is my own failing.
He had no clever means of overturning this stalemate. Having settled nearly all his battles head-on until now, he had never prepared a countermeasure for an opponent dead set on nothing but running. Failing to account for the peculiarities of a crystal PvP match had been a blunder as well. Dragging the match on would be nothing but a waste of time.
And yet he had no intention of ending it like this.
There was still time for one or two more exchanges.
Jo Byeok's aura surged violently.
"Take this. If you withstand it, I'll count myself the loser."
"Sure, why not."
Kim Ho had been about to simply ignore him and keep running—but his opponent had put it that way, and he seemed to decide to humor him. He stopped and turned to face Jo Byeok.
Jo Byeok's aura swelled and swelled, blanketing the whole area in a dreadful pressure. Then his bear-like bulk leapt nimbly into the air, and for an instant his hands blurred as though there were a dozen of them. Enormous palms and fists wrought of inner energy came crashing down in a deluge.
- KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA—!
...
Kim Ho quietly watched it all bear down on him, then idly raised one hand. Pop—a small black cloud appeared, and as he wound it around his short spear, it became a long black cloud on a stick. In that state, Kim Ho stepped forward.
On smooth, gliding footwork he threaded his way through the gaps between the pouring fist force and palm force, twirling the black-cloud stick here and there. At a glance it looked as pointless as a child at play, yet strangely, every bit of fist force and palm force that touched the stick came apart without affecting him in the slightest.
- KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA—!
Under Jo Byeok's ultimate technique, cliffs great and small and every bizarre rock formation were smashed to pieces and came tumbling down. The whole area was flattened into a wasteland in an instant and swallowed by thick clouds of dust. Kim Ho was hidden from view within that dust, but—
—the scoreboard made it plain that he hadn't taken a single point of damage.
Jo Byeok gave a slow, silent nod.
Impressive.
His opponent had done nothing but run all match, so excuses were there for the taking if he wanted them. I lost because of the crystal format. Because of the handicap. But now that even the ultimate technique he had poured his everything into had been perfectly neutralized, there was no room for excuses left.
Jo Byeok spoke to the shadow walking out of the dust.
"I concede defeat. Someday, I would like to face you properly."
"Later. If the chance comes."
And Kim Ho answered with utter indifference. It was the moment Kim Ho's name was added to the list of strong opponents in Jo Byeok's mind.
Song Cheon-hye wore the expression of someone who had watched it with her own eyes and still couldn't believe it.
"...You really did win."
"I told you—it was all planned out."
The Son Hyeong-taek operation had been a resounding success. Just as predicted, Jo Byeok was far more vulnerable to a running chase than his true skill suggested, and I had stabbed at that weakness without mercy. In the end, the match had been decided a touch anticlimactically for the ability he actually possessed.
Still, the man was the real deal.
The perceptiveness to unravel the Wind Force–Twister combo in barely two exchanges. For all his dull-looking exterior, he was remarkably quick on the uptake. His follow-up responses had been excellent as well, which meant that along with the 'Son Hyeong-taek operation,' I'd had to scrap the 'Infinite Jo Byeok Shoving Operation' I'd prepared as backup. Not that I'd had any answer to his trick of launching himself, of course.
Besides, that final technique would have come down on my head whether I answered it or not, so I had simply taken it head-on—and if the shock absorption through the black cloud had slipped even a hair, Distortion would have activated. Which was to say, it had been a technique every bit that dangerous.
"Good work out there."
Dang Gyu-young came over and offered her congratulations. Then she lowered her voice and asked me:
"...But are you sure about this? That was a perfect game against Jo Byeok."
Winning against a Disciplinary Committee–class powerhouse while evading every single attack was bound to draw the attention of everyone reviewing the replays. All the more so given that he wasn't even in a comparable score bracket—he sat in the 500s. Her question was whether that wasn't the exact opposite of my intention to keep my head down wherever possible.
I answered without a care.
"It won't draw as much attention as you'd think."
It had been a crystal PvP match, after all, and it even came with the 2.5x charging-speed handicap. On top of that, I'd had my back turned and done nothing but run the whole time, so even with all those dodges, the 'coward' tag wasn't coming off. If I had to guess at my new evaluation, it would land somewhere around 'a coward who dodges well.'
"I can't hide everything, after all."
Beating a powerhouse like Jo Byeok while revealing nothing at all would have been pure greed. Given that, showing myself as a good runner and a good dodger was far preferable to exposing my spatial trait, Distortion.
Hearing it all out, Dang Gyu-young seemed to concede the point.
"Fine, as long as you're okay with it."
"Now then—shall we go settle up?"
"Hehe, right. Let's go, kids."
Next on the agenda: tearing a fistful of elixirs out of Senior Toad. We left the arena with steps as light as feathers.