The Results of Training
Sooji laughed softly at Ho-jung, who had no idea what was going on, and said, “Hehe. He also told me to multiply that by a hundred.”
“...What?”
Ho-jung’s mind stalled for a moment, but Sooji was too busy showing off to notice.
“Oppa bought me a car yesterday, too.”
“A car?”
Ho-jung assumed he must have bought her a decent domestic car, and nothing more.
“He matched my car and oppa’s car as a couple set. I think he spent about 600 million won on the cars alone.”
“...S-six hundred million?”
“He kept saying safety comes first, so he picked a big car. He said he’d buy me a pretty one later...”
“Hey. Are you insane?! Who gets a car as a present? And 600 million? Are you crazy?”
“Oppa’s assets are apparently over 2 trillion won, so what’s the big deal?”
“....”
Only then did Ho-jung finally multiply the wealth she already knew James had by a hundred and picture the scale in trillions.
James oppa had that much money?
“If things go well, he might even be able to buy a company. Just like you told me, Ho-jung. Hohoho!”
“....”
Ho-jung remembered the fantasy scenario she herself had once spoken aloud.
[If it’s a halfway decent conglomerate, you could easily become the majority shareholder with 2 trillion won.]
It sounded like complete fantasy... but it was actually realistic?
“That’s it. Done. Hehe. Let’s go now. The oppas must be waiting.”
“...Damn it. While James oppa was making that kind of money, what the hell was Colt doing?”
“Maybe studying hard at an Ivy League school?”
“....”
Ho-jung honestly felt like that might be exactly right.
“Let’s go. I need to hear this straight from James myself.”
“Hey, I already told you everything...”
“You said you didn’t hear anything! I need to check whether he really has that money, and hear what he plans to do with it!”
“...He absolutely never tells me.”
“Then you stay quiet. I’ll try to coax it out of him.”
“...Cool.”
The two of them came out of the kitchen, where they had gone in to talk quietly, and headed for the living room, but no one was there.
“Where did they go?”
“...Over there.”
Ho-jung turned in the direction Sooji pointed, and through the living room window she could see James and Colt facing each other in the garden, each holding a huge greatsword.
“...Weren’t those supposed to be decorative?”
“I guess so...”
The two women walked up to the window and watched James and Colt clash in the garden.
Tap. Tap.
The moment they lowered their swords, they sprang forward and raised their blades like lightning.
Clang!
The two swords were knocked back in a shower of sparks, but immediately crashed together again.
Clang! Clash!
Blades were lunging for each other’s bodies. Every sword technique the two of them had learned so far was naturally spilling out in motion. For a while they traded strikes so smoothly it was almost as if they had rehearsed together, but soon they began changing the line of their blades.
Thaat!
Lowering his stance, Colt kept giving ground one step at a time as he took James’s descending sword head-on.
“Hah!”
Clang!
Then Colt’s eyes flashed, and he slid James’s blade off to the left. He immediately stepped into the open space on the right. The movement was as smooth as flowing water.
“!”
James’s eyes widened in shock as they drifted slowly left, catching Colt as he dipped low and came in with the huge sword following behind him. Colt’s blade was heading for James’s upper body and jaw.
A rising sweep! Then this side is a whirlwind strike!
To recover a blade that had already been diverted to the right, he would have to use a Whirlwind Strike, rotating his body to block it.
Whoosh.
Just as James’s sword spun back around to meet Colt’s attack, Colt changed the line of his blade.
Shrrk.
He twisted the ascending motion to the left and tried to cut at James’s waist. Colt’s variation, perfectly harmonized by the force of his arms and waist, gave James no room to respond.
“!”
James instinctively used magic to stop Colt’s blade.
Haste. Action.
His sword, now charged with magical force, snapped back into his hands in an instant and intercepted Colt’s strike.
Clang!
Colt narrowed his eyes and leapt back. “I felt an unfamiliar movement of mana just now... That definitely wasn’t the fierce mana of a knight.”
“...Sorry.”
“Then that’s a foul. Admit it?”
“Tch. I admit it. One hundred percent.”
When James admitted defeat, Colt put his hands on his hips and straightened his shoulders.
“Heh. JimJim. So, how was it, admiring the stature of a master?”
“I’m not a master yet. Don’t get cocky, ColtColt.”
“Hahahaha!”
Colt was tormenting James with a victory V sign.
“My victory!”
“Again!”
“Nope. Your motion earlier was too large, so your center of gravity got thrown off. I think we should fix that first.”
“I’m not going easy on you this time!”
“I let you face me at the end on purpose. I was planning to add a variation with a rising sweep. After that, I could have changed it again with an upward cut and a slashing cut, or finished with a final change using probing thrust—”
“....”
As Colt went on, James increasingly felt that he might not have been able to stop him even with magic.
Damn it. We were too busy, so I couldn’t practice for a few days.
Just as Colt was about to start sparring again, he spotted the two women pressed against the window.
“James. The two of them are watching us here.”
“Huh?”
“Wave to them. I need to brag that I won.”
Only then did James notice the two women staring in through the living room window. James and Colt waved, but the two of them merely curled a finger in unison, summoning them back inside.
* * *
Srrrk.
Srrrk.
After the two men came back inside, put their swords away, and sat down, the shouting began at once.
“James oppa! What were you thinking, doing something so dangerous?”
“Colt! Are you trying to die?”
“....”
“....”
James and Colt had no idea how to defend themselves.
“Without any protective gear!”
“And with real swords, too!”
Ho-jung tried to lift the hilt of the greatsword Colt had been brandishing, but it was too heavy for her to even budge.
“Grr! Why is it so heavy?”
“Ah. Don’t just grab that. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Why would you do something that dangerous in the first place?”
“It wasn’t dangerous at all...”
“What? Ha!”
Unable to lift the sword, Ho-jung grabbed an apple from the coffee table in the living room and threw it at the sword the two of them had used.
Shhk. Thud.
The apple was sliced in two by the sharp blade.
“Eek! How is that not dangerous?!”
When the two of them trained in swordsmanship, James’s magic completely protected them both the entire time. That was why they could swing blades at each other without restraint. In fact, Colt had even tested a thin magical shield formed just outside the body.
“...James oppa.”
“Ah, no. Sooji.”
The problem was that there was no way to explain that to Sooji and Ho-jung.
“Stop it right now!”
“Stop it right now!”
At the two women’s shrill cries, James and Colt looked at each other.
What now?
Exactly.
“First, to answer you... we can’t stop. I hate lying.”
“What?”
Instead, James offered the alternative he had just thought of.
“We’ll practice with wooden swords from now on. That should work, right?”
“Oh. That sounds good. Wooden swords are a little lighter, but we can always add weight to them.”
“....”
“....”
Even after James said that, Ho-jung and Sooji remained silent, clearly unconvinced.
“...We’ll wear protective gear too. So we won’t hurt each other.”
“Ah. But that’s so cumbersome...”
At Colt’s refusal, Ho-jung rejected it even more strongly.
“ColtColt! Shut up!”
“...Yes, ma’am.”
That was the best James could offer. And the two women had no choice but to accept James and Colt’s sword training.
“Oppa, you really have to be careful. Got it?”
“Yeah, Sooji.”
“Don’t go slashing at other people’s throats so casually! I thought James oppa was going to die back there!”
“...I blocked it just fine, though.”
“ColtColt! Shut up!”
“...Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
After the commotion died down, Sooji and Ho-jung were on their way home from James’s house.
“...So, what did you think of them fighting earlier?”
Sooji was driving, asking Ho-jung the question from behind the wheel.
“Crazy. Completely crazy. What were they thinking, risking serious injury like that...”
“We already talked to them about that part earlier. I mean aside from that.”
“Then what?”
“The way the two of them moved together was kind of...”
“They looked good together?”
“Yeah. I thought they looked amazing.”
Even while driving, Sooji kept replaying the scene in her mind. The two men had fought as if they meant to kill each other, each wielding a massive sword, yet the way their strikes flowed into one another made it feel less like a brawl than a performance. And in truth, it had been strangely dreamlike and fantastical. The greatswords were completely out of place in the modern world, but that only made the swordplay more absorbing.
“It was almost like watching knights from the Middle Ages fighting. Way more polished and cooler than a movie.”
“I’ll admit Colt looked kind of cool too.”
In fact, Ho-jung had felt the same way. The instant the two of them started sword fighting, she had been so caught up in the spectacle that she stood there with her mouth open, unable to look away.
“Right?”
“...How could he move so fast while carrying a sword I can’t even lift? Colt really did look like a knight.”
With his handsome face and massive build, Colt looked exactly like what a knight in the Middle Ages might have been.
“Yeah. Colt ajusshi’s movement at the end was seriously the best. He just slid James oppa’s sword aside and then whoosh, straight in front! Checkmate!”
“James was the same way. It looked like there was no way he could block it, but he pulled the sword back like lightning and stopped it dead.”
Talking with Ho-jung, Sooji finally understood why James had said he couldn’t quit sword training.
...That’s why he can’t stop.
“I think I understand why those two want to keep doing this. If even we, just watching, get pulled in like that...”
“Exactly. It must be even more intense for the ones learning it. Sigh.”
And then Ho-jung remembered the book from which the two of them had learned swordsmanship.
“...You know this is mostly your fault, right, Sooji?”
“Ugh. I’m guilty. I shouldn’t have introduced them to that book...”
Before they had left the house, the two of them had been able to look at the secret manual James and Colt had been studying from, and thanks to that, Sooji realized that the sword techniques the two men were learning had originated with her.
“Fine, they can study from it if they want. But why make us look at it too?”
On the back seat of Sooji’s car now lay two copies of Muyedobotongji Juhae, the book James had given them to read. On impulse, Ho-jung reached back, grabbed one of the heavy volumes, and brought it forward.
“This book is heavy, too.”
Then she flipped quickly through the pages and looked over the contents.
Flap, flap.
“....”
Ho-jung’s first reaction to the illustrations and writing in a book filled with spears and swords was simple.
“How are you supposed to learn this just by looking at it? I’m not even sure you could learn it with someone teaching you...”
At Ho-jung’s words, Sooji tilted her head.
“Then how did James oppa and Colt ajusshi learn it?”
“Uh... good question. How did they learn it? There’s nothing but Chinese characters in here, and even I, a Korean, have a hard time reading them...”
James and Colt were American, and they had only recently learned Korean.
“Maybe they learned it wrong?”
“Then what we saw earlier was just them getting overly invested in the style of it all?”
“I don’t think that’s it, though...”
Ho-jung started to worry that Sooji might be right.
“Men, honestly... they must have just jumped in and learned it without even knowing what it was. Then no one would know whether they were learning it properly or not. It’s not like we can tell, either.”
“...Should I look into it?”
“Into what?”
“Someone who can actually teach them. I guess I should call them a master?”
“You’re going to set the whole mat out for them yourself?”
“If they insist on learning, then what else am I supposed to do? If they’re going to learn, they might as well learn from someone who actually knows.”
“...Just drive properly. I’ll look first. But you won’t find anyone like that. Who would study this stuff just to teach it?”
Ho-jung, sitting in the passenger seat, started searching on her phone and found the answer.
“...Why is there actually someone who teaches this?”
“There is?”
“There’s a Traditional Martial Arts Training Center right here in Korea. And they teach every martial art recorded in this book, too... Ha. Unbelievable.”
The place Ho-jung had found was, in a sense, the very source of the Muyedobotongji James and Colt were learning from.
“Wow. Ho-jung, you’ve got search skills.”
“Now I’m torn. Should I tell them or not?”
“Don’t overthink it. Just tell them. If you found it this fast, James and Colt will find it before long anyway.”
“Tch. Why are those two Americans so good at Korean, anyway?”
“Heh. Especially Colt ajusshi. His pronunciation is seriously good. He sounds like he’s lived in Korea for thirty years.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying! And James is even better, probably because he was Korean to begin with!”
Their complaints continued for quite a while after that, still filling the car.