20. The Road Not Taken (2)

Private sparring centers were thick on the ground near the Hunter Market, the sort of place that catered to Hunters wanting to test out the weapons, or the skills, they’d just bought. Yujin had dropped into one nearby for much the same reason.

“Take it.”

He drew 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, don’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 all too well what a fearsome perception the Fafnir of his past life had possessed.

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

Fafnir had been skilled enough to reach the 9th Stellar Rank, the realm men called transcendence, and he’d done it wielding a sword he had never once touched while alive. Had he not fallen into the Arahan Guild’s trap and died for nothing, an entire 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 the whole time, Fafnir read the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship cover to cover. Since he wasn’t a Hunter, reading it didn’t immediately produce a skill; gaining a skill the moment the conditions were met on opening a skill book was a privilege reserved for Hunters alone.

The reverse held just as true. Grasp the essence of a skill book, and the technique could be wielded even without the awakening system’s help.

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

The Kairak Spear Art Park Seonguk used hadn’t come from a skill book either; he’d learned it from a professional instructor inside the Arahan Guild. A skill book, in other words, was no cure-all. A skill could just as easily be forged through realization and repeated training.

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

While Fafnir pored over the spear-art skill book, grumbling away, Yujin was hardly idle himself.

I should repair the injuries I took in the spar.

Yujin drew out the life force he’d stockpiled from the Orcs in the borderlands and breathed it into Fafnir. The gouged muscle and flesh regenerated, scales sprouting to cover the freshly knit skin, a recovery to rival a troll’s.

A holy spell that even heals the undead, huh.

It came with one constraint: the target of the healing had to be right beside him. Even so, being able to restore the undead on the spot, in the thick of a fight, was no small advantage. Low-grade undead like zombies could be run as consumables, but when something painstakingly built like Fafnir took damage mid-battle, there was no avoiding an immediate drop in fighting strength. Repairs demanded a great deal of resources, catalysts, and concentration, and no enemy was going to stand there sucking its thumb while a broken undead was patched back together.

A holy spell useful to a Necromancer.

Perhaps it was because holy power revered the very concept of defying death, but every last one of the holy spells meshed beautifully with the undead.

He had just finished healing every wound 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 took up practice spears and squared off against each other.

— First, learn the skill.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

— Fssssh.

The book crumbled to powder. One by one, the basic stances of the spear art recorded inside it surfaced in his mind.

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. The rest, taken purely as concepts, seemed simple enough 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 its tip at Yujin.

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

Huh? What was that? Before Yujin could so much as answer, the practice spear in Fafnir’s hand flashed and bored into his gut.

The blunted tip closed in by the second. His alarm lasted only a moment; Yujin had waged more battles than he could count, and he worked the spear in his grip at will.

Held back your strength some, did you?

The gap in raw specs between the two of them was overwhelming. Had Fafnir attacked in earnest, Yujin would have been hit the very instant he registered the spear flying at him. But if this was a speed he could react to, then…

I should be able to deflect it.

Drawing on the knowledge the skill book had injected, he spun the shaft round and round. The more the rotations stacked up, the more a menacing hum bled out of it, and Fafnir’s thrust caught against the spinning shaft.

Good.

The instant he forced in more strength to sweep Fafnir’s attack aside…

“Urgh.”

A groan tore out of him at the shock that slammed into his wrist. His strength drained away, and the shaft he’d held in both hands wrenched loose, spun off wild, and went sailing into the air.

— Thwack!

The blunt blade caught him square in the chest, and his stomach lurched. He braced both legs and barely kept from falling, but he couldn’t choke back the dry heaving.

“Hurk.”

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

Fafnir muttered it under his breath. Once he’d caught his own breath, Yujin asked about 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 wasn’t buying it.

— Again.

The instant Yujin’s hand closed on the practice spear that had spun away, Fafnir stepped in on his right foot as though he’d been waiting for it. The tip drove for the very same spot as before. Fixing his eyes on it without looking away was, at least, familiar ground to Yujin.

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

Strength flooded into his forearms, the muscle swelling to its fullest. He drew up to its very peak the power he had banked: the vitality of goblins, Orcs, and frogmen, accumulated in his body.

— Crack!

It carried a satisfying feel. He kept Fafnir’s thrust in his sights the whole way, and by sweeping the shaft out wide to meet it, he managed to knock it aside before it could reach his body.

If I press on, I can thrust—

As he pressed a step forward, Yujin’s vision went dark.

— Thwack!

Huh?

Why am I lying on the floor.

He’d meant to land a blow on Fafnir. Instead, along with a dull thud, his vision had wheeled around in a flash, and a beat too late he understood: the spear in Fafnir’s hand had cracked into his back, and the impact had toppled him.

“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 flicked the spear out lightly, as if for a demonstration. The blade came to rest 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. Teeth grinding, Yujin took up the shaft again.

— Again.

Ah. This… I think I’m screwed.

Cold sweat soaked Yujin’s lower back, damp and clinging.

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

For all his complaining, Yujin gripped the shaft hard enough to crush it. Fafnir took the sight in with deep, glittering eyes.

An hour had passed since the spear training began.

“Haah, haah.”

Hot breath spilled from lungs stoked like a furnace. Sweat fell like rain. What Yujin had shed lay scattered into every corner of the sparring floor, and the hand gripping the spear trembled faintly, his flesh pushed to its very limit from blocking Fafnir’s attacks.

Shut it, you useless Constellation.

It wasn’t as though he’d simply been knocked around. He had watched countless thrusts and moved his spear to answer each one; he had failed again and again and eaten Fafnir’s counters for it.

— Yet you still don’t give up.

“I’m the one who asked to be taught.”

Yujin grumbled, his voice sour.

Fafnir had matched him for both speed and strength, and even so Yujin, far from trading clean blows, had toppled over or taken the blunt blade more times than he could count. He had picked up the basics of the spear art through a Hunter’s privilege, the skill book, while Fafnir had done nothing more than read the words on the page, and yet Fafnir’s grasp of the art ran far deeper.

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

How many times had that practice spear clobbered him by now? His whole body ached; without a healing, he might not be able to get to his feet 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 whatever opening the opponent left: that was Fafnir’s whole method of winning a fight. To his eye, the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship stayed truer to the essence of combat than the techniques most Martial-line Hunters relied on.

Ah. So that’s what it was.

Yujin turned over, one by one, all the ways he’d floundered across the past hour. Then there was the nature built into a weapon like the spear: because force concentrated at the tip, you could pour power into a single point, or use the long shaft to strike across a wide span. Simple as its movements were, the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship held within it every method of drawing out the spear’s strengths.

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

Yujin’s true aim lay in a spear art you could obtain only by first mastering the Verdian-Style Basic Spearmanship: the Verdian-Style Destruction Spearmanship. He’d taken up the basics merely as a stepping stone, but if Fafnir was to be believed, the basic art was a respectable thing in its own right.

— 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 the beatings from Fafnir had amounted to nothing, that would have been one thing. But he had struggled to deflect the thrusts, and through an hour of thrashing about he’d come to grasp the essence of the spear art fast.

Ironically enough, Fafnir’s method of instruction suited Yujin rather 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 his master some respect. Grumbling to himself, Yujin sprawled out flat 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.

Such shameless self-flattery. Yujin gazed up at the ceiling and answered listlessly.

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

The road not taken.

Switching his class to Priest had been a gamble he could take only because he trusted the Ring of Black Darkness. Learning a Martial-line skill, though, was a plan he’d never drawn up before the regression.

Even so.

I’ve made up my mind to use everything I can. Even if its target is my own body.

Yujin hadn’t a single gram of intention to let a usable tool slip through his fingers.

His ability as a Priest would climb on its own as he stacked up his soul’s rank and his accomplishments, and as for alchemy and necromancy, the experience of his past life was enough to draw on.

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

A body that grew sturdier with every use of Life Drain. It would be a waste to simply let it rot. If a little sweat could buy one more means of growing stronger, where was there a greater gain to be found?

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

“Were you sounding me out just now?”

— A customer’s simple change of heart would put us in a bind on this end too, wouldn’t it.

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