A Delightful Parent-Teacher Conference
Blood in every direction — a sea of it. Look where you might, the whole world was drowned in red, and there, at the heart of it all, someone stood alone...
"FIRE!!!"
At the signal — a bellow and a sweeping gesture from a man in heavy armor — countless spells came pouring down upon that lone figure like a meteor shower.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-BOOM—
The instant that deluge struck him dead-on, a thunderous roar split the air and black smoke boiled upward...
"Did... did we get him...?"
A boy who still looked barely grown murmured it, hope threading his voice.
But that hope went unanswered.
Whooooosh—
A wind swept through, the smoke scattered — and where the smoke had been hung a sphere made of blood. And when at last even the sphere dissolved away, the creature showed himself once more, boredom written across his face as he spoke.
"Still at your meaningless games, I see."
He had absorbed the subjugation force's full-power offensive without a single scratch, and at the sight of him standing there untouched, every last one of them could only freeze in mute despair.
"That's... that's impossible..."
"It can't be... O God, why would You loose such a monster upon the world....."
"Hah... how utterly laughable. What did you imagine you would accomplish with trash like this..."
The monster watched them mutter — despair they could not hide written across their faces — and spoke as though in mockery.
"You might have brought holy relics... or, at the very least, people who could wield the power of demon-dispelling. Then you might have managed a single wound... How foolish."
At those words the man commanding the subjugation force flew into a rage, veins standing out on his neck as he roared—
"You cursed wretch... just because you've got a mouth on you, you dare spew such lunacy!!!"
Unable to swallow his fury a moment longer, the commander drew his sword and charged. But just as the old cliché goes — even in zombie movies, the one who loses his head is always the first to die — a single gesture from that monster was all it took: he brought up every last drop of blood in his body and crumpled.
I let my gaze drift across the faces there — faces burning with fury, faces sunken in despair, faces drowned in terror — and murmured:
"Choose. Die here... or run, and buy yourselves a brief reprieve from death."
CRACK—
"Thinking of other things with me standing right in front of you, were you?"
"Huh...? N-no... it's not like that..."
After the spar had ended, the enraged Sword Queen had seized me and hauled me off to some secluded spot. If you summon a person, you ought to at least say something — but she simply stood there glaring at me for the longest while, and so, half my brain gone dark, I had drifted off sifting through old memories.
And of course, right at that moment of wandering through the past, she had to pick it to say something to me. When she found me staring back at her with glazed eyes, sunk in thought and ignoring her words entirely, the Sword Queen finally brought her hand down on the poor, innocent tree beside us and roared. It wasn't as though she were some department store, but she demanded to know how I could possibly be thinking of anything else with her right in front of me — and an excuse came spilling out of me on pure reflex.
It was annoying, sure. But what was I supposed to do about it? If she was that sore about it, she was welcome to come back and complain once she could hold her own against a Profound Realm master.
Anyway, having heard my excuse, the Sword Queen put the question to me once more.
"Then answer me."
"Answer... what, exactly?"
"Hah... why you did what you did just now."
With no idea what exactly she was referring to, I broke into a slow, creeping sweat.
Damn it... did she catch me? No... that makes no sense. Do you have any idea how good my acting is? There's no way she saw through me.....
No matter how I turned it over, the only reading I could wring from her words was: 'Since the demon-subduing power worked on you, that makes you a demon, doesn't it?'
But within the bounds of my long experience and plain common sense, there was absolutely no way I'd been caught.
"Um... Elder Sword Queen?"
"Elder?"
Lest a careless tongue wring a false confession out of me, I asked her with the utmost courtesy:
"When you say 'just now'... what exactly might you be referring to?"
"El...der?"
"Yes?"
"Did you just... call me 'Elder'?"
When a person asks a question, answering it is the bare minimum of decency — but the Sword Queen, as though a seizure button had been pressed over the strangest imaginable thing, turned to me with an eerie smile.
"Er... then... big sis Sword Queen?"
THWACK— In the end, I took her scabbard square across the head.
And so I came to know, firsthand, what Dusik must feel on a daily basis.
Damn it... the very first thing I do when I get home is land one on him.
So I resolved to vent this injustice upon Dusik. While I was inwardly forming that resolution — call it punching down, call it pass-the-parcel — the Sword Queen spoke, her face a shade clearer than before.
"Why on earth did you draw sword qi just now? With your skill, you could have made it a sparring session where you took it easy and taught Harin a thing or two."
Only then did the speaker's buried meaning finally come into view.
Oh... and here I thought...
I heaved a sigh of relief and gave her my answer.
"Well, you see, what happened was, Auntie Sword Queen—"
WHACK—
"ARGH!!!!!"
Convicted of letting my mouth run loose, I added one more lump to my head and pressed on.
"That Harin girl stepped onto the stage with such a resolute look on her face that I figured if she meant to face me in earnest, then I ought to answer her in earnest. So I did."
"Haah... and so a Transcendent Realm warrior swung his sword qi about to frighten a Peak Realm warrior? And you believe that makes sense?"
"Then does it make sense for a Profound Realm warrior to drag a lousy Transcendent off to some deserted spot and beat him black and blue?"
Her attempt to pin an incident born of her own disciple's failings onto me — the words simply tore their way out of me. And once they were out, I watched her expression harden by degrees, so I crossed both arms above my head and braced for the impact.
"..........?"
But when nothing came down, I lowered my arms a careful inch at a time and stole a read of her face.
"Right... this, too, is not a righteous thing to do. Whatever the height of one's realm, what am I doing, laying hands on a child who is still nothing more than a late-stage Peak Realm fighter..."
Perhaps because everyone around me was such a bizarre specimen, the sight of the Sword Queen speaking like an ordinary human being struck me, if anything, as stranger still.
"Oh dear, I'm sorry. Harin is the disciple of my old age, you see — I couldn't help but overreact."
"Yes, I'm glad we've reached an understanding. Do be more careful next time."
THWACK—
And so I duly added one more lump to the collection. Having gone and reminisced for no reason and worked myself into a strange fullness of confidence, I had done nothing but let my mouth run — and as the price, only after gathering three lumps on my poor, innocent skull did my once-stiff confidence finally wilt and droop.
"Ow, ow, ow....."
Whether or not I was busy rubbing my bumps, the Sword Queen gazed into the empty air with distant, wistful eyes and murmured:
"So the years truly have piled up, it seems. Back in my day, standing at the very edge of Peak Realm... no, merely stepping into Peak Realm's middle stage was enough to contend for the championship... and now there are three Transcendents alone....."
"Well, given the Senior Sword Queen's venerable years...? I mean... three Transcendents?"
I simply nodded along to the Sword Queen's back-in-my-day routine — and then, a beat later, a question mark went up and I asked back.
"What did you say? What sort of man keeps sneering at a woman's age?!!!"
"You mean there's another Transcendent besides that Jinmu fellow?"
"That muzzle of yours is going to bring you grave calamity one day. If you wish to live long, you would do well to keep it leashed."
"Not Myeongwol, then... so it's the Sword Saint's disciple who's a Transcendent...?"
A conversation, as a rule, is supposed to travel back and forth — and between the two of us, each talking only to ourselves, no true dialogue ever managed to connect.
"Th-this brat! Ignoring your elders again?"
"Ah... would you kindly be quiet for a moment! I'm trying to think, so why do you keep talking at me!!!"
THWACK-THWACK—
In the end, I finished the day with a pseudo-crown of five lumps enthroned upon my head.
In any event, my head had by then reached the state where, shaved bald and judged by silhouette alone, no one could have told whether it was a human head or a jaw with every last molar pulled — and at the sight of it, the Sword Queen spoke.
"The Sword Saint's disciple is not a Transcendent."
"Then..."
"The one who won the bout held before yours and Harin's — whether he was a vagrant swordsman or one of those mystical sect types, I could not tell — was a Transcendent."
"And that would be... who, exactly?"
"Very likely your next opponent... In any case, the matches are held tomorrow, so go and see for yourself."
Being someone who had to prepare for a match every single day, I never sought out other people's bouts to watch — though, truth be told, the far bigger reason was plain laziness... In any case, a Transcendent had popped up out of absolutely nowhere, and my head grew more tangled by the minute.
Transcendent — and he's not from the Nine Sects and One Union or the Five Great Families? That makes no sense.....
What does it take, do you suppose, to break through to a higher realm at a young age? Talent? Secret arts? Elixirs? A master?
In this world called Murim Conqueror, talent and masters ranked near the bottom of the list. On Nightmare Difficulty above all, the single most important thing was elixirs.
At its heart it was a game where you rerolled your stats like dice at character creation, spinning again and again before you ever truly began — and even so, on Nightmare Difficulty, a handful of late-stage Peak Realm fighters from rival factions had rolled close to the theoretical maximum. For the better part of a month, while I honed my Heavenly Demon build, what I had hunted to the ends of the earth were precisely those elixir-type fortuitous encounters.
Talent, all of it much the same. Techniques, all of it much the same. Masters, all of it much the same. So in the end, the ones who broke through fastest were the ones who guzzled elixirs in place of water.
Which was why I had been dead certain that, at least at this point in time, not one vagrant-born fighter or heir to some single-lineage mystic sect could possibly have set foot in Transcendence — and yet...
"...I couldn't tell whether he was a vagrant swordsman or one of those mystical sect types — but a Transcendent, he was."
The Sword Queen's words had cracked the bedrock of my conviction — the fundamental premise that this world was the game I used to play.
Having seen the parent-teacher conference through to its end, I returned to the inn, lay down on my bed, and set about untangling the mess inside my head... At length, I let out a long sigh and murmured:
"Hah... so is this really game possession after all.....?"