20. The Road Not Taken (2)

There are a great many private sparring centers near the Hunter Market.
They cater to Hunters who want to test the power of the arms, or the skills, they’ve just bought.
Yujin had stopped by a nearby one for much the same reason.

“Take it.”

He pulled Fafnir out of the Ring of Black Darkness and tossed him the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship booklet.

— Isn’t this for you to learn, Master?

“You’ve got to grasp the essence of the spear art yourself before you can coach me, haven’t you?”

— Well, now. Analyze a spear art on the spot and teach it to you. You overestimate me.

I wonder about that.

Yujin knew very well just how formidable the perception of his past life’s Fafnir had been.

Even synchronizing with a Skeleton Knight and handling a sword, he reached the heights.

The 9th Rank, the so-called realm of transcendence.
Fafnir had been a man of such skill that he reached the 9th Stellar Rank wielding a sword he’d never once touched while alive.
If only he hadn’t fallen into the Arahan Guild’s trap and died for nothing, a whole Hunter family would have sprung up around him long ago.

Fafnir’s talent is something I can trust.

At the very least, he’d make a far better teacher than Yujin, who hadn’t a single gram of affinity for the Martial line.

— In all my years, I never thought I’d be asked something like this.

“You’re already dead.”

— Don’t you know an idiom when you hear one?

Grumbling all the while, Fafnir read the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship cover to cover.
Since he wasn’t a Hunter, reading the contents didn’t immediately generate a skill.
Acquiring a skill the instant the conditions are met upon opening a skill book is a privilege granted to Hunters alone.

Conversely, if you grasp the essence of a skill book, you can also exercise the technique without the help of the awakening system.

This is why a large guild like Arahan is so sought-after.

The Kairak Spear Art that Park Seonguk used wasn’t acquired from a skill book either. He’d learned it from a professional instructor in the Arahan Guild.
Which is to say, a skill book isn’t a cure-all.
It’s also possible to create a skill through realization and repetitive training.

Just as you can trigger a curse formula even with a low level of alchemy or necromancy, so long as you carve the formula.

And while Fafnir pored over the spear-art skill book, grumbling away, Yujin wasn’t idle either.

I should repair the damage I took in the spar.

Yujin drew out the life force of the Orcs he’d stockpiled in the borderlands and breathed it into Fafnir.
The gouged-out muscle and flesh regenerated, and scales sprouted, sheathing the freshly-knit skin.
Recovery on par with a troll’s.

A holy spell that even heals the undead, huh.

True, the target of the recovery had to be adjacent, but the advantage of being able to restore the undead on the spot mid-battle was fairly significant.
Low-grade undead like zombies could be run like consumables, but when an undead made with painstaking care like Fafnir was damaged mid-battle, there was no avoiding an immediate cut to your fighting strength.
Repairs demanded a great deal of resources, catalysts, and concentration, and if you tried to restore a broken undead, the enemy wasn’t going to just suck their thumbs and watch, were they?

A holy spell useful to a Necromancer.

Maybe it was because the faith venerated the very concept of defying death, but every last one of the holy spells meshed well with the undead.

It was around the time he’d healed all the wounds carved into Fafnir’s body.

— Hmm. I’ve got the gist of it.

“See? It comes quick once you try, doesn’t it?”

— I’ve only acquired the theory, that’s all. To grow accustomed to the spear art, there’s no choice but to learn it with the body.

Yujin and Fafnir gripped practice spears and faced one another.

— First, learn the skill.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

— Fssssh.

The book crumbled to powder.
The basic stances of the spear art recorded in the skill book surfaced one by one.

Six forms in all. Just as I’d heard.

1st Form – Standard Thrust
2nd Form – Quick Thrust
3rd Form – Rotating Block
4th Form – Shaft Strike
5th Form – Charging Rush
6th Form – Full-Power Thrust

Three of the six were thrusts.
Taken just as concepts, the remaining forms felt simple too.

— You’re thinking it’s simple, aren’t you?

“Yeah. I am. It’s good to pick up for self-defense.”

— Learn a spear art skimming only the surface, and that’s the sort of thing you’ll say.

“Has our dear minion already grasped some hidden insight buried inside the basic spear art?”

— As if. I’ve no such gift.

Fafnir raised the spear and leveled the blade-tip at Yujin.

— So from here on, we’ll find out by holding a conversation of the body.

Huh? What was that?

Before he could even answer, the practice spear in Fafnir’s hand flashed and bored toward Yujin’s abdomen.

The blunted spear-tip drew closer by the second.
His alarm lasted only a moment.
Yujin, who had fought more battles than he could count, moved the spear in his grip at will.

Held back your strength some, did you?

The gap in specs between Yujin and Fafnir was overwhelming.
Had Fafnir attacked in earnest, Yujin would have been hit the very instant he registered the spear flying at him.

If it’s a speed I can react to, then I should be able to deflect it.

Drawing on the knowledge the skill book had injected, he spun the spear shaft round and round.
The more the rotations piled up, the louder a menacing sound bled out, and the spear Fafnir had thrust caught against Yujin’s spinning shaft.

Good.

He poured in more force to sweep Fafnir’s attack aside.

“Urgh.”

A groan slipped out at the shock that bit into his wrist.
His strength drained away, and the shaft he’d been gripping with both hands tore loose in a wild spin and went flying into the air.

— Thwack!

The blunt blade struck his chest dead-on, and his stomach churned.
He drove strength into both legs and managed to stay upright, but he couldn’t choke back the dry heaving.

“Hurk.”

— More of a fool than I thought. Our master.

Fafnir muttered under his breath.

After catching his breath, Yujin asked what had just happened.

“I definitely deflected it. What the hell was that?”

— You’re dispersing the force, so of course you can’t sweep aside a thrusting attack.

“You sure it’s not just that your strength’s greater than mine?”

— Heh heh. You know it well enough — that I thrust to match my master’s level.

Tch. He’s not falling for it.

— Again.

The instant Yujin gripped the practice spear that had spun away, Fafnir stepped forward on his right foot, as if he’d been waiting for it.
A spear-tip aimed at the very same spot.
Keeping his eyes on it — that much, at least, came naturally to Yujin.

This time I won’t just take it lying down.

Strength flowed into his forearms, the muscles swelling to their fullest.
He drew up the power he’d raised, the vitality of goblins, Orcs, and frogmen accumulated in his body, to its maximum.

— Crack!

There was a satisfying feel to it.
Without losing sight of Fafnir’s thrust, he kept it in view, and swinging the shaft out wide to match it, he deflected the strike before it reached his body.

If I press on, I can thrust—

As he stepped forward, Yujin’s field of vision went dark.

— Thwack!

Huh? Why am I lying on the floor.

He’d meant to land a blow on Fafnir.
Along with a dull thud, his field of vision had wheeled around in a flash.
A beat too late, he realized that the spear in Fafnir’s hand had struck his back, and the impact had sent him toppling.

“So you used the recoil of the spear bouncing off to aim for my flank.”

— Correct.

“To turn my own strength against me.”

— Deflecting before my attack landed, without spinning the shaft — that part was good.

Fafnir thrust the spear out lightly, as if to demonstrate.
The blade hovered right before Yujin’s nose.

— Feel that?

“That I have to gauge the deflection point well, you mean?”

— You’ve got a decent feel for it, I’ll say. You understand quickly, without my having to tell you many times.

Fafnir snickered, grinning.
Grinding his teeth, Yujin took up the shaft again.

— Again.

Ah. This… I think I’m screwed.

Cold sweat soaked Yujin’s lower back.

“I don’t suppose asking you to take it easy would work?”

Despite his words, Yujin gripped the shaft hard enough to crush it.
Fafnir took in that sight with deep, gleaming eyes.

An hour had passed since the spear training began.

“Haah, haah.”

Hot breath poured out of lungs heated like a furnace.
Sweat fell like rain.
The sweat Yujin shed was scattered across every corner of the sparring field, and the hand gripping the spear trembled faintly.
His flesh had been pushed to its limit blocking Fafnir’s attacks.

Shut it, you useless Constellation.

It wasn’t that he’d merely been beaten about.
He’d watched countless thrusts, and moved his spear in response to them.
He’d failed time and again and suffered Fafnir’s counters.

— Yet you still don’t give up.

“I’m the one who asked to be taught.”

Yujin grumbled in a vexed voice.
Fafnir had matched both his speed and his strength, yet far from trading proper blows, Yujin had toppled over or been jabbed by the blunt blade more times than he could count.
Yujin had learned the basics of the spear art using a Hunter’s privilege, the skill book.
Fafnir, on the other hand, had merely read what was written in that same book, yet his grasp of the spear art was far higher.

I’m the one who got the skill correction. And I couldn’t land a single proper attack.

How many times had he been clobbered by that practice spear?
His body ached all over. If he didn’t heal it, he might not be able to get up tomorrow.

— Do you understand the essence of the spear art a little now?

“Essence, my foot. All I did was move so I’d get hit less.”

— Heh heh heh. The essence of a fight, in truth, is to get hit less and hit more.

Fafnir spun the shaft round and round.

— In that sense, this spear art isn’t half bad.

“Not half bad, meaning?”

— It means that every technique that looks simple at a glance is faithful to the fundamentals.

Thrust faster.
Bore into the opponent’s openings.
That was Fafnir’s way of winning a fight.
In Fafnir’s view, the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship was more faithful to the essence of combat than the techniques of most Martial-line Hunters.

Ah. So that’s what it was.

Yujin chewed over, one by one, the ways he’d flailed about for the past hour.
The nature inherent in a weapon like the spear.
Exploiting the fact that force concentrates at the blade-tip, you drive power into a single point, or you apply the long shaft to strike across a wide area.
The Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship was simple in its movements, yet it held every method of drawing out the spear’s strengths.

No wonder it was the Spear Ghost James’s mainstay technique.

Yujin’s real aim was a spear art that could only be acquired by mastering the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship.
It was to learn the Verdian-Style Destruction Spearmanship.
He’d started on the basic art as a foothold, but from what Fafnir said, the basic spear art alone was a respectable one.

— To think I’d find a treasure like this while searching for a Common-line skill book. My master has good luck, too.

“If getting clobbered is included in that luck.”

— Sadly, I’ve no gift for explaining things in words.

“Truly a shame.”

Yujin muttered it with genuine feeling.
If getting clobbered by Fafnir had no effect, that would be one thing, but he’d struggled to deflect the thrusts, and thanks to the experience of thrashing about for an hour, he’d quickly come to understand the essence of the spear art.
Ironically enough, Fafnir’s method of instruction suited Yujin quite well.

— Your knack for using your body isn’t bad, either. At this rate, you’d have reached the heights had you set out as a Martial-line Hunter.

“I fought pretty often back when I lived at the orphanage. This much is nothing.”

— I find my motivation for teaching my master welling up.

“It’s not just because you get to beat me legally, is it?”

— I won’t deny it.

That damned bastard. A minion ought to act like a minion and show some respect to his master.

Grumbling inwardly, Yujin sprawled out on the ring.

— Whenever you want to quit, just say so.

“After going through all this?”

— My master has an excellent minion like me at his side, after all.

Singing his own praises.
Yujin gazed up at the ceiling and answered listlessly.

“If I were going to quit this quick, I wouldn’t have started.”

The road not taken.
Class-changing to a Priest had been a gamble he could pull off only because he trusted in the Ring of Black Darkness.
Learning a Martial-line skill was a plan he hadn’t laid out before the regression.

Even so, I’ve made up my mind to use everything I can.

Even if the thing being used is my own body.

Yujin hadn’t a single gram of intention to let a usable tool slip away.
His ability as a Priest would rise automatically as he piled up the rank of his soul and his feats, and as for alchemy and necromancy, drawing on the experience of his past life was enough.

To bring out my Martial-line ability properly, I need more experience.

A body growing robust through the effects of Life Drain.
It would be a waste to just let it rot.
If shedding a little sweat secured one more means of growing stronger, then where would you find a greater gain than this?

— Looks like you’ve no mind to give up.

“Were you sounding me out just now?”

— Even on my end, a client pulling out over a whim would be a problem.

Looking at Fafnir, Yujin let out a short, soft snort of laughter.