Sprint, Ill Fate, and the Cult's Den
Yujeong drove her sword with savage force. Gangyu met each strike, turning her blade aside and answering with counters of his own, and neither could cut the other down. The fight ground on.
"What do you think you're doing?! Sheathe your—"
Screams rose from the crowd. The sound of government troops rushing in. But even the soldiers who had come to intervene stopped short and held their breath.
Stepping between Yujeong, who chained sword to sword like a dance, and Gangyu, who received those blows like a boulder and answered each with a crushing counterstroke, was suicide plain enough for anyone to see.
"Pull the people back!! Now!!!"
Someone among the troops gave the one good order that saved more than a few lives in that stretch of street.
It was not long before sword qi began to spray.
"Tch!"
Yujeong clicked her tongue. Her sword qi wavered, unstable.
The reason was obvious enough—her naeryeok had not yet settled.
What was strange was that Gangyu's sword qi was just as unstable. For a fighter of his caliber, that was anything but normal.
No. Not unstable.
Tainted.
"Kh—!"
Yujeong's blade scraped along Gangyu's side. The sword he had raised to deflect it had trembled, and he failed to turn the cut cleanly aside.
Sword qi scattered wildly from both blades, gouging the ground around them and chewing pits into the stone walls of the buildings.
Dust rose in the distance.
Yujeong knew this tainted feeling coming off her enemy.
"So you took the snake."
How they phrased it among themselves was none of her concern.
It was the same energy she had felt from the woman named Sarye—the one she had cut down before.
"Pathetic."
Yujeong spat the word the way she had at Sarye then, as if she were spitting on garbage, thick with revulsion.
Gangyu's face twisted further.
"Kanghui's blood runs in your body, and you learned the sword from that red beast… A mongrel whelped by beasts mating with beasts…!"
Then a voice rang out across the street.
"Yujeong!!"
A voice she could pick out anywhere, anytime.
The beautiful voice of the person she loved.
"Hoeyeon eonni!"
She could not take her eyes off the enemy. She answered with her voice alone, and Hoeyeon shouted from behind her.
"I'll leave that one to you! Finish it and come to the apothecary on the northwest side! You'll know it when you get there!!"
At words steeped in unshakable faith that she would win, Yujeong grinned.
"Yes!!"
And Gangyu's face twisted uglier still.
"One after another, these insolent—!"
"Watch your mouth. Eonni is stronger than I am."
Yujeong sneered.
"Which means she's stronger than you, obviously."
Gangyu ground his teeth.
From a rooftop, watching the two fight, Hoeyeon saw it at once.
Gangyu's swordsmanship was similar to hers and Yujeong's.
The man their master said had stolen her sword—this had to be him. Depending on how you looked at it, you could even call him a grandmaster of their line.
But that was all.
Yujeong was stronger.
She might have been able to pry a story or two about their master out of him, but Yujeong would hear those herself. Hoeyeon could ask later.
Yujeong would be startled to learn about their master's humanity—or lack of it—but she was not the kind of fighter whose blade would waver over something like that.
"Gayul! Arang!"
So Hoeyeon called the other two.
The pair who had been watching the fight from hiding, waiting for the right moment to intervene, looked up at her.
"We move it up a day!"
The day of the decisive battle.
With a fight already breaking out down there, waiting another day would have been foolish.
Grasping her meaning, Gayul and Arang leapt up onto the rooftops. And when Hoeyeon broke into a run ahead of them, they followed hard on her heels.
"The base is a little farther north!"
Gayul called out.
On the day they had been escaping the capital of Sang and Hyeoneum had tried his tricks with paper dolls, Gayul had remembered the path along which she had forced her magic back the other way.
From that, she had estimated the location of the base and already told them it was in a town beside this city.
But Hoeyeon shouted,
"Underground!"
"What do you mean!?"
"These bastards copied the ancient capital!"
She yelled, and dropped down in front of the shabby apothecary she had marked earlier.
"Wha—!?"
"Out of the way!"
The man blocking her path reeked of snake. She kicked him aside, and when Hoeyeon burst into the shop there was a room packed with people.
"What is the meaning of this!? This is nothing but an ordinary apothe—"
Hoeyeon kicked the next man who tried to bar her way and sent him flying. It might have been a rehearsed line, but she had no intention of listening to the whole thing.
She heard Gayul and Arang, coming in behind her, catch their breath. Hoeyeon immediately kicked the door to that inner room off its hinges as well.
"Aaaah!?"
"Kyaa!!"
People tangled and went down in a heap of confusion. From the middle of it, Hoeyeon shouted,
"I knew it!"
In the center of the floor, a door leading underground stood open.
"Stop them! No—don't let them leave alive!!"
The cultists had no idea who Hoeyeon was, but once she had seen their secret, that no longer mattered.
Of the roughly twenty people packing the room, seven drew weapons from their robes. Three of them, daggers in hand, rushed Hoeyeon at once.
Hoeyeon was not gentle enough to spare the lives of people who meant to kill her first.
One sweep of her sword, and two bodies split in half while the third lost the arm holding the dagger, the limb spinning free of the torso.
"KYAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!"
"Aaaah!!! S-spare me!!!"
Those who had lost their minds to the terror of dying shoved one another forward in a scramble to get away from Hoeyeon. One of the armed men used the chaos to try to bolt out of the room.
"Move!! I said move!!!"
Swinging his blade wildly at ally and enemy alike as he burst out, he ran straight into Arang, who had just leapt in.
"Mo—"
Arang, for her part, was not the sort to spare the life of someone who swung a blade at her first.
Blood sprayed from the throat her sharp claws tore open and painted the ceiling. Seeing the door down into the underground inside the room, Arang let out a low sound.
"Underground…! Of course!"
The ones who had founded this cult were the same people who had invaded the city of the Hoin and stolen the dagger that had crossed over from another world.
That they had taken inspiration from that place and built their own underground city was a story that made more than enough sense.
And to Arang, it was a story so nauseating she could barely stand it.
Hoeyeon dropped through the door into the underground, and Arang went in right after her.
"Wait for me! What am I to do if the two of you go alone!!"
Toward Gayul, last to jump, one of them blew a poisoned needle. But the needle did not fly true—it fell from the tube and buried itself in the shooter's own instep.
It was an instantly lethal venom.
Gayul had not been actively trying to kill the woman, but she had not the slightest intention of saving her either.
Without so much as a glance at the woman foaming at the mouth and turning purple, Gayul followed the others down into the underground.
The city of the foxes had a vast open space at its center, with people living along the edges. So even underground it had been airy, spacious, almost pleasant.
The cult's den, though, was like an anthill.
Nothing but tunnels branching on and on, distinguished only by whether a passage was wide or narrow—a stifling, cramped design.
"Revolting…!!"
Arang, coming behind, took in the layout and ground her teeth. Stay somewhere like this long enough and even a sane person would start to crack.
"Gayul, which way!?"
"Straight on!"
Their targets were the cult leader Hyeoneum and General Cheon—not every last person they happened to run into. And Gayul could roughly sense the direction Hyeoneum was in.
"Kyaaaak!?"
"W-what is this! Halt!!"
People screamed and fled from the three of them; some grabbed weapons and charged, and died.
Inside the tunnels, only grotesque scenes kept unfolding.
A woman with the image of a snake carved into her flesh.
An old man in a tall hat called a sub-priest.
People spinning in circles, murmuring prayers.
A boy who had shaved off every hair on his body, enduring some ordeal in water.
The bizarre face of the cult made curses want to rise to the lips on their own. Arang may well have let a few slip out in earnest.
Leaving occasional marks for Yujeong, who would be following, the three of them tore through those spaces at a run. Then Gayul suddenly cried out.
"He's gone…!"
Whether he had realized his direction was being tracked, Hyeoneum's presence vanished from Gayul's senses. Arang caught on at once and took over the role.
"Intruders! Where is the Cult Leader!?"
"That way—"
The cultist who answered pointed and turned to look—and no one was there.
"Transformation arts. Scary stuff."
Hoeyeon said it as she ran, and Arang laughed. After finding the path the same way a few more times, the space suddenly opened up.
It was a plaza open overhead. And to either side, matching the raised ceiling, stood a pair of enormous doors.
Behind one of them was their enemy, Hyeoneum.
There was no clue which.
"That one!"
Hoeyeon chose the left. Pure instinct. And Gayul and Arang trusted that instinct.
The Ashen Swordsman kicked the door in and smashed it open.
Countless scraps of paper whirled out from within.
An ill fate is something that must be cut away.
But only a bond that refuses, stubbornly, to break can truly be called an ill fate.
The ill fate bound by blood had come down through Yujeong's mother.
The ill fate bound by the sword had come down through Yujeong's master.
Neither of them would have meant to pass that fate on. Yujeong's mother, especially, must have prayed with everything she had not to leave her daughter that inheritance.
And precisely because of that—ill fate.
The sword with which Yujeong meant to sever that bond was merciless.
"Why was my mother a disgrace to your clan?"
"Because she was weak!!!"
The sword Gangyu had honed his entire life could not bring its full power to bear now.
His body's prime was long past, and the power he had gained by becoming an avatar to shore that up was still unfamiliar in his hands.
"So you worship strength."
"Yes! And that is exactly why that weakling was a disgrace!!!"
Yujeong let out a short, cold laugh.
The mockery was as freezing as her blade.
"I see. That explains it. Mother ran from you—from the one who forced strength on her."
The image of her mother, always smiling so gently, flickered through Yujeong's mind.
"You of all people should know! No—you should understand! All of us have a duty! To strive without rest! To grow stronger! Stronger today than yesterday! And to break the strong!! That thing that was weak and never even tried to become strong—that is a disgrace to the clan!!!"
Even as he barely turned Yujeong's sword aside, Gangyu roared.
Unlike Gangyu, who was still unstable, Yujeong's blade was settling into steadiness.
"I don't know. I don't understand."
Yujeong said it coldly.
"What a pathetic reason. For something that pathetic, you tormented her until she left on her own."
"Pathe—"
Gangyu flared with rage, but Yujeong slipped past his all-out thrust with easy grace—needles he had sown across the ground several exchanges earlier and all.
"So obsessed with strength that you neglected the sword, and at the end of it you took the snake…"
For a moment Gangyu could not place the faint emotion mixed into Yujeong's voice, so full of disgust and contempt.
The next instant, he understood. It was pity.
The kind of pity a strong person bestows on the weak. Compassion.
Fury. A rage of a magnitude he had never felt once in his life. The world before his eyes drowned in a vicious, dark-red light.