Bears Tear People Apart
One late autumn evening.
Hahh... hahh...
From the training grounds the Red Heaven Squad called its own, someone's ragged breathing spilled into the night. In one corner of the yard, a man built like a bear lay sprawled bare-chested, heaving an enormous rock up above his chest and lowering it again, over and over.
Some time passed...
Thud!
"Haah......"
The moment Dang Yun set the rock he'd been lifting down beside him and paused to catch his breath, someone stepped into the training ground. He turned his head toward the sound at the door, and there stood Dang Muyeong.
"Young Master. What brings you here?"
He must have sensed me coming, because the instant I set foot in the yard, Dang Yun was looking my way, still half-naked. I gave him a wave.
"It's been a while."
Thanks to the timing landing somewhere between awkward and absurd, I had answered his question with a complete non sequitur. Dang Yun blinked at me, dumbfounded.
"Huh?"
"Ah... no, wait... I came because there's something I need to ask you, Squad Leader."
At my words, delivered with a sheepish sort of smile, Dang Yun broke into a wide grin and came over. I stood there marveling all over again at the sheer bulk of him, a man who stood a good two heads taller than me, until he asked,
"So what is it you need? Anything at all, just say the word."
He slapped his own chest for emphasis as he spoke, and I laid out my business at a leisurely pace.
"It's nothing much... it's just that I've been training pretty hard lately, you see..."
"Ah! You've come to have me look over your training?"
He'd cut me off out of nowhere. I shook my head and pressed on.
"Not that either... I came to ask if you'd spare me a round of sparring sometime."
Dang Yun looked at me with open surprise, flat refusal one moment and a sparring request the next.
"Spar with you? Oh... so you're feeling confident, Young Master? Very well. We can do that..."
He seemed genuinely startled for a moment, wide-eyed in a way that didn't suit his face at all. I scratched my head as I answered.
"It's not that I'm brimming with confidence or anything... I just wanted to see for myself how far I've actually come..."
"Well, whatever the reason, you have my answer. Come find me whenever you're ready."
Dang Yun agreed with a booming laugh, and I cautiously added one more thing.
"By the way... would it kill you to wear a shirt next time?"
The height difference between us was substantial enough that I had spent this entire conversation locked in an involuntary staring contest with his pecs, and I found the whole ordeal deeply stressful. That was why I'd brought it up. And yet,
"I'm proud of this body, so I'm perfectly fine!"
As I sighed at a man the conversation simply refused to reach, he asked me another question.
"Young Master. Have you, by any chance, made this same request of the other squad leaders?"
The question came out of nowhere, and I could only answer with puzzlement.
"No? What brought that on all of a sudden?"
"Nothing important. Ah! Young Master, it's about time I headed back myself, so come by whenever you find yourself free."
He handed me a farewell with a strangely satisfied look on his face. I returned a short bow of my own and left the training ground shortly after.
Watching Dang Muyeong trudge away looking for all the world like a mugging victim, whether from another brutal training session with Dang Mulin today or not, Dang Yun muttered to himself.
"He's changed a lot... well, good is good, I suppose."
It had been only two seasons since that absurd incident, and yet the frail black-haired, black-eyed boy of before had vanished without a trace. In his place was a young man with the languid eyes of the Clan Head himself, radiating something distinctly dangerous. Dang Yun found himself astonished all over again.
Of course, whether that impression came from Dang Muyeong's presence or from the dinner the boy had just packed into his stomach, nobody could say.
Another season turned. One winter day, having heard from Dang Mulin, whom he'd run into by chance, that "Muyeong will be coming to see you tomorrow," Dang Yun stood waiting for him in the snow-covered training ground.
Seeing him again after so long, Dang Yun felt as though a black snake were gliding toward him. The boy carried himself with the same air as the Clan Head and his siblings, and Dang Yun filed away the brief thought that blood really does tell before driving a fist straight at Dang Muyeong.
"Hrk!!!!!"
Dang Muyeong batted the punch aside almost lazily, then lunged in and coiled around Dang Yun's left arm like a serpent. The instant it happened, Dang Yun felt as though the seized limb might burst apart from the inside, and hastily knocked Dang Muyeong away.
"Ho... the Internal Heavy Hand Technique?"
Dang Yun muttered as he stared at his left arm, already ruptured within and mottling an ugly red and blue. When he looked at me with that startled expression, I shrugged and answered with a smile.
"If we're being precise, it's closer to Penetrating Force."
"Hahaha... you've grown a great deal. Then I'll come at you properly as well."
"I said go easy on me. What do you mean, properly..."
Whether he had heard me or not, Dang Yun raised his qi in earnest and swung a fist wreathed in crimson inner force at my face. Wrapped in that energy, the fist looked nearly as big as my head. I recoiled in alarm and wrapped my own force around my hands to meet it: left palm spread open to catch his strike, right hand rising from below to seize his wrist.
Against a man of ordinary build, that right hand would have driven straight into his chest. But the difference in reach meant it could do no more than clamp onto his right wrist, and even as it did, I was grumbling inwardly.
What a bullshit reach advantage...
In that very instant,
THWACK!
The crack of his fist meeting my palm was like a leather sandbag taking a full-force blow. The small birds resting on the training ground wall startled into flight, and I went flying after them, straight into the wall they had abandoned.
Before I could gather my wits with my back smashed against the stone, Dang Yun came charging like a maddened bison. I kicked off the ground and threw myself sideways. The moment I moved, his foot slammed into the wall where I had been; I thrust my right hand at his flank, and he kicked it away with his free foot, the one not buried in the wall.
I had no time to marvel at flexibility that defied his bulk. I scrambled back to open the distance and checked my left arm, knocked loose by that earlier strike and dangling at my side, roughly popped it back into place, and said,
"Isn't that a little too 'properly'?"
At my petulant complaint, Dang Yun answered with a distinctly ominous smile.
"Heh heh heh... we've barely even started."
"Ho..."
That was what he said out loud. Inside, he was thoroughly shaken.
Tch... one touch from that hand and I'll burst apart from the inside...
His right arm, which had been caught in Dang Muyeong's grip for barely an instant as he threw that punch, had not merely ruptured within. Poison was now seeping through it, turning the flesh a deep, bruised blue.
Did he train nothing but the Internal Heavy Hand Technique...? It's absurd.
By their very nature, arts that drive one's qi into an opponent's body, the Internal Heavy Hand Technique and Penetrating Force among them, seldom work on a master stronger than the user. No matter how diligently one trained, it was the sort of technique a martial artist of barely First-Rate level could hardly hope to land on a seasoned Peak Realm master.
The problem was that Dang Muyeong's technique, to a frankly bizarre degree, tore through Dang Yun's body as though it belonged there. All he could do was find the whole situation absurd.
I'll have to end this quickly...
The longer this fight dragged on, the more he stood to lose. Dang Yun drew his inner force up even higher, resolved to finish it in one decisive exchange.
Watching him come barreling at me like a bear risen from hell pouncing on its prey, I recoiled in horror and tried to widen the gap, but I had overlooked one thing: an enraged bear is faster than a man. Before I had managed more than a few steps, all I could do was watch his fist, broad as a cauldron lid, come hurtling in.
Ah... there's no dodging this one. Not a chance....
Instinct told me there was no escaping this moment, the moment I was about to take a punch square in the gut. I kept my killing intent smothered as much as I could, drew my inner force up tight, and seized Dang Yun's forearm with both hands, wrapping around it.
WHUMP!
Dang Yun's fist buried itself in my stomach with a sound like a great war drum taking a sledgehammer blow, and I crumpled to the ground.
"Keh-hack..."
Face-down in the snowfield our bout had churned every which way, I coughed dryly where I had been planted, and blood came up with it.
"Huh...? Young Master! Young Master!"
At the sight of me, Dang Yun went white, shouting my title, then promptly hauled me up over his shoulder and sprinted for the Medicine Hall.
The only problem was that running with the stomach of a man puking blood bouncing against his shoulder meant I kept heaving up blood the entire way, until I finally faded into unconsciousness.
How much time had passed?
I opened bleary eyes and looked around to find myself lying in the Medicine Hall. Beside me, Dang Yun was getting his backside whaled on by the Medicine Hall Master...
"You dimwitted fools! What kind of sparring leaves one man's guts ruptured and the other's arms both hanging like wet rags? If you're in such a hurry to die, tell me first... tell me! I've got all manner of experiments I could be running on your bodies!"
"......."
The Medicine Hall Master had hammered his fist down on the head of Dang Yun, both arms wrapped in bandages and exercising his right to remain silent, and now he kept working himself into fresh rages, bellowing at the top of his lungs.
After a while, slightly calmer, the Medicine Hall Master muttered.
"Just you wait until you wake up, Muyeong, you brat... just you wait..."
I had been lying there stiff as a corpse, staring blankly at the scene without making a sound. At the Medicine Hall Master's words, I closed my eyes and tried to keep playing dead, but then,
"Young Master. Why are you suddenly closing your eyes?"
"What the...? You... you snitch!"
"Aack... Hall Masterr... lemme goooo..."
"Quiet! Have you any sense in that head of yours... or none at all!"
Thanks to the Red Heaven Squad Leader's betrayal, I ended up with my right cheek clamped in the Medicine Hall Master's grip, absorbing a scolding of truly generous proportions.