Explosions Are an Art Form
"Haah... fucking hell..."
Out of a jungle that embodied raw, untamed wilderness came the sound of somebody cursing. I had conjured a crimson blade and smashed everything around me to pieces, and even now the profanity kept streaming out.
"This is genuinely infuriating. Agh... shit!"
Do you know what the second-worst situation is when you've lost your way in a forest, a mountain, or a jungle?
"Young Master, it's still better than before, isn't it? We're not walking in circles anymore, at the very least."
"You call that better?"
Going round and round the same patch of ground, never actually moving forward. So what, then, is the worst situation of all?
"Our heading's been skewing off course this whole time anyway, so at this point we might as well hope we stroll out onto a beach, right?"
Even though we kept checking as we walked, every time we scrambled back up a tree after a short stretch, our warped bearings sent us veering toward somewhere entirely wrong...
"Come on... no way. Surely we won't actually reach the ocean?"
"And what exactly do we do if we do, at this rate?"
We were deep in the jungle, all right — just not deep in the direction we'd meant to go. If anything, we seemed to be drifting farther and farther from our target: the Beast Palace of the Southern Barbarians.
"Then shall I go up and take another look at our heading?"
"Yeah... go on."
Tat-tat-tat-tat-da-daak—
Before I had even finished speaking, Dang Giyeong was already scrambling up the tallest tree in sight...
"Aah... maybe I should've brought that old man along after all?"
I found myself regretting that I hadn't taken a guide with us from the village.
But however reckless I'd been, hauling off the village's only martial expert — with a raid liable to descend on them at any moment — would have been a bridge too far.
"Anything but that! What am I supposed to do if I leave my post and the Beast Palace warriors show up?!!!"
The old man had shrieked back in that booming voice of his, practically choking on his own breath...
In any case, what sort of heartless brute would commit such an outrage? Certainly not an honest, law-abiding soul like me.
Truth be told, I had simply assumed Giyeong knew the way, because he'd been striding along with such confidence.
Unfortunately, the moment Dushik saw me strolling ahead so calmly...
'Ah... the Young Master must know the way.'
...that's what he had thought, and so he had simply fallen in step behind me. Or so I'm told.
And so, newly minted jungle castaways, the two of us carried on — me lamenting my lot and doing nothing but cursing — when...
"Young Masteeeerrr!!!"
"What?! Can you see something?"
When I called back to the voice from overhead,
"Come up and take a look!"
...it bellowed at me to climb up. I heaved a deep sigh and pulled the blood tendrils out of my back.
Clack— cla-clack— cla-clack-ack-ack—
Spider-like limbs took shape, and with them I jabbed into one tree after another, clambering upward.
When I had risen high enough, what greeted my eyes was...
"Huh... there's nothing here?"
"See? I'm telling you, we've come in a completely wrong direction. There isn't a single village to be found no matter how hard you look."
Under normal circumstances, that shameless remark would have earned him a punch...
"Ha... forget it. I don't even have the strength left to be angry."
Maybe I'd grown used to him after all this time spent glued together as a pair, or maybe I'd simply surrendered to his unchanging nature...
Either way, I slid listlessly back down to the ground.
Flump—
By the time Giyeong came down as well, I was muttering with my back against a tree.
"There has to be a way. Ugh... if only we could set a signal fire, it'd make us easy to find, no?"
"Right. Or better yet, we could just turn back for the village and—"
"And do you know the way back to the village?"
"Well, that's..."
"We've been wandering for the better part of a week. How are we supposed to backtrack now? If we're going to talk like that, why not just say let's head home to Sichuan?"
"........."
I was dressing him down in a voice utterly drained of life.
And then, in the middle of that lifeless rest—
"Ah?"
Dushik popped to his feet with a strange noise and said,
"Young Master, can't you find things with those blood-red eyes of yours?"
"Find what, exactly..."
"The eyes that seek people out! If you kept them active and swept our surroundings as we walked, surely we'd come across someone who knows the way?"
"Dushik... I've had them on this whole time. And what am I supposed to do when there's not one soul here who could guide us — hell, not even another lost traveler?"
"Then how about this?"
The plan he tossed out, almost as an afterthought, to me as I pressed at my bleary eyes felt more promising than it had any right to...
"Even if we can't light a fire, if we just raise an absolute ruckus — huge noise, total mayhem — while roaming around, won't somebody come looking for us?"
"Does that even make any sens— hold on a moment?"
"It's a great plan, right? Heh, there's a reason they call me the sharpest of all the squad leaders!"
Ignoring Dang Giyeong as he preened and puffed out his chest beside me, I turned the idea over in my head.
'We didn't need to find anyone. All that mattered was that someone found us.'
When I finished thinking it through, I spoke.
"Dushik, you remember that fellow Mikhail from the Dragon-Phoenix Clash a while back?"
"The one who split the sky open? Of course I remember."
"Really? Then shall I show you something fun?"
"F...fun? I have a bad feeling about this..."
Leaving him to his vague unease, I began my explanation — and then, as though some dead spirit had taken hold of my tongue, I kept right on going.
"It's a long story, see... I mean, to explain it properly, it all goes back to when I was a snot-nosed little brat..."
My tale ran on for the better part of two hours...
"...and that's why I still can't forget the chicken skewers I had back then, so..."
"Young Master — what are you actually going to do?"
The story had drifted further and further off course — rather like the two of us, come to think of it — until Giyeong finally cut me off.
"Ah, right. Look at my head... Anyway, just watch closely. It's a crude knockoff of an old technique of his."
Two pairs of crimson wings erupted from my back.
Whiiiiish—
I climbed high into the sky — high enough that the enormous jungle fit more or less within a single sweep of the eyes — and raised my hand into the open air.
And when the full moon hanging in that night sky seemed, to my eyes, to have been seized square within my grasp...
"κρίσις, εως, ἡ"
A second moon rose into the jungle's sky.
A moon burning with a red so deep it bordered on sinister.
And thanks to the tantrum Dang Muyeong had thrown earlier — wailing on everything within arm's reach — Giyeong now had a wide, unobstructed view of the heavens...
"Ha... what part of that looks like the Transcendent Realm? Fine, he's not human, but isn't that a bit much even so...?"
In his eyes, the newborn second full moon was steadily descending.
I let those words slip from my lips as I tipped my raised hand ever so slightly.
And the colossal sphere of fresh blood rolled slowly from my palm...
Shweeeeeee—
"Wow, it really is a magnificent sight, I'll give you that... Young Master?"
The sphere of Judgment plunged earthward faster than any free fall, and I snatched up the still-prattling Dushik and shouted,
"Hold on tight!"
"Khekh... can't... breathe..."
With the back of his neck clamped in my grip, Giyeong wheezed and clutched my hand for dear life as I shot back up into the sky...
"Aaaahhh! Young Master, ahead of us!!!"
Skimming just past the very sphere I had dropped, I streaked for the night sky at maximum speed.
At last, with a safe distance secured between us—
"Dushik. Look down."
"Down...?"
The massive crimson sphere touched the earth.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA—BOOM
The instant it struck, crimson tendrils burst outward from the sphere...
and with a sound that threatened to split our eardrums, the ground itself blew apart.
In a single instant, every tree and boulder nearby vanished as though vaporized on the spot.
The technique known as 'Judgment.'
Originally, it was Mikhail's move: countless colossal blades dropped from that high sky, flattening everything around them with sheer mass alone.
But by flying up myself, forming a sphere in place of swords, and then manually detonating it a second time, I could manage a decent imitation of the real thing.
The shockwave of the drop, layered on top with the shockwave of the second blast...
At a force that shook the jungle to its very roots, Giyeong could only gape at the spectacle, mouth hanging open.
"Well, Dushik? Feeling a little respect yet?"
I asked him with a snicker.
"Y...Young Master... but this way, if there'd been a small village anywhere nearby, they'd have been caught up in..."
"It wouldn't reach the village we stayed at. And besides, name one village around here that might still have people living in it."
"W...well..."
"The Beast Palace bastards hauled them all off, didn't they? If a village were big enough to repel that raid, we'd have spotted it from the treetops ages ago."
Watching the blast rock the dark night, and the vast crater that slowly came into view beneath it, we drifted gently back down toward the ground.
The moment my feet touched the earth, I said with a grin.
"We just wait here, and somebody's bound to come find us all on their own. Right?"
When the man who had just razed the entire landscape with a single flick of his hand asked this with a smile, Giyeong managed an awkward laugh and...
"Ha ha... but, Young Master..."
At that, I tilted my head and answered,
"Hm? You're asking how to use this? You can't. You'd need to drain the blood of, oh, ten thousand head of cattle at the very least before you could even try."
"That's not what I meant. What I'm curious about is..."
"Quit stalling and spit it out already. What could you possibly be curious about?"
The guy was wearing a strangely unfulfilled expression as he spoke.
"You could fly?"
"I... suppose?"
"Then couldn't you have simply flown up and scoured the area from above?"
"...Ah."