Because I Am The Demon Of The Sword

A tremendous racket came from behind me. Whether it was One-Eyed Ghost following or assassins who had noticed the attack chasing after me, I had no idea, and I didn’t care.

I ignored every bit of noise pouring in around me and simply kept running.

For the most part, not a single sliver of light reached inside the cave aside from the occasional moonlight seeping in. There was nothing but darkness.

Naturally, I had no choice but to focus on my hearing. I sorted through and analyzed the countless sounds ringing in my ears one by one…….

Shwaaaaaaaaaak!

The instant I heard someone rushing toward me from ahead, I unleashed One Flash and sent out a burst of sword qi.

Then came the sounds of assassins’ limbs, whether arms or legs I couldn’t tell, being severed. The moment I saw crimson blood spraying into the air, I heard mechanisms activating.

Shiiiiiiiiik!

Poison mist? Hidden weapons? Or poisoned hidden weapons?

The answer was all three.

I covered my nose and mouth with my left sleeve, then sent out a sword wind and scattered the thick poison mist.

With my vision much clearer, I felt a chill behind me and immediately spun around, knocking away every hidden weapon flying in from all directions.

Even though I ignored most of the traps and hidden weapons instead of reacting to each one and simply kept charging forward, my hands and feet were still plenty busy.

This was an assassin headquarters for a reason. Facing one sinister, filthy, underhanded attack after another naturally started pissing me off.

‘What the hell am I doing instead of sleeping right now……?’

Once I entered a deeper area that seemed to be the center of the cave, my surroundings finally brightened considerably, and various lights entered my vision.

The moment I saw the sight before me, I couldn’t help but exclaim in amazement.

“Wow…….”

It was something close to a fortress built inside the cave.

They had apparently carved out chambers wherever they pleased, reinforced them with wooden planks, raised walls, and expanded the place over time. It was so large that to my eyes, it looked like an enormous stronghold hidden inside the cave.

Of course, since the bastards living here were assassins, it didn’t exactly give the impression of a respectable stronghold. Just as the utterly bizarre sight stole my attention…….

Shwaang!

Five assassins came charging at me with different weapons in hand, and I had no idea where they’d even come from.

But now that I could actually see, fighting was easier than before.

I calmly stomped down with a firm step while retreating slightly, and the instant the assassins’ stances faltered ever so slightly, I unleashed a horizontal sweep of sword qi.

“Have a nice trip.”

Chwaaaaaaak!

Blood erupted into the air, and the moment the vertical sprays came raining down onto the floor, I started running again.

I figured there weren’t many people inside this cave who could keep up with my speed anyway.

Just as expected, neither the assassins nor the various traps and hidden weapons seemed capable of stopping me while I ran at full speed.

I ignored the bastards behind me and anyone who ran away, giving One Flash only to the fearless fools who challenged me head-on from the front.

There was one strange thing, though. Every assassin here had an eerily similar air about them.

Assassin organizations might train their rank-and-file thoroughly, but because people grew up in different environments, their natural mannerisms were bound to differ.

That was something innate that training couldn’t simply erase. But these bastards were different. Their eyes, their bearing, even the smallest habits in how they held their weapons were chillingly similar.

It almost felt as though they’d taken people with no prior upbringing at all and simply raised them into assassins. A chill ran down my spine as a disturbing possibility suddenly occurred to me.

I had no solid evidence, and most of it was nothing more than intuition, but it seemed entirely possible.

What if this Assassin Order wasn’t an ordinary Assassin Order……but some kind of operation that kidnapped homeless orphans and children and turned them into assassins or slaves?

‘No way…….’

If that were true, then it would explain why they all felt so alike.

If they had learned nothing but assassination techniques from childhood, then instead of learning how to function in an organization or society, the first thing drilled into their bodies would have been how to kill people.

I wanted to dismiss it as impossible, but whenever I thought about One-Eyed Ghost and his younger sister, an ominous feeling kept stirring inside me that it might not be impossible at all.

At this point, I found myself hoping these bastards were just an ordinary assassin organization.

Anything but a group of lunatics who kidnapped innocent children, raised them as assassins, and enslaved them.

Caught up in those thoughts, I kept advancing, slaughtering one or two assassins at a time, then two to five.

Once I entered the stronghold itself, both the number of assassins attacking me and the number of hidden weapons raining down doubled.

And after crossing blades with them directly, I could tell their martial arts were far superior to the bastards I’d cut down outside.

Definitely below One-Eyed Ghost, but roughly around Squad Leader Wi’s level or perhaps a little weaker?

Of course, as far as I was concerned, the more numerous and more skilled the assassins ambushing me became, the better.

Because that meant I was heading in the right direction toward the Guild Master.

Truthfully, regardless of the severity of his crimes, the Guild Master’s behavior disgusted me enough to make me sick.

Because instead of fighting himself, he was sending out his subordinates and using them like pieces on a game board.

In my previous life, I had gone out of my way to kill this kind of cowardly villain brutally, while even villains who showed the qualities of a real man received a certain measure of respect from me.

Naturally, the Guild Master didn’t qualify. Therefore……kill the Guild Master horribly. Problem solved. Good.

As I approached the highest level of the stronghold, far more assassins came rushing at me. Precise, aggressive ambushes thick with killing intent and hidden weapons poured in from everywhere.

But none of it was enough against me. As I raced down the long corridor, I knocked aside three or four poisoned daggers flying in from the right with a blast from my palm,

Paang!

then twisted my body this way and that in the next instant and fed the assassins rushing in from the ceiling and behind me a dose of gray sword qi.

Puaaaaaaaaak!

I guess assassins were assassins after all. Most of them went sightseeing in the next world without so much as a single scream.

Even those rendered unable to fight after losing an arm or leg calmly swallowed poison hidden inside their mouths and killed themselves.

‘Assassins, seriously. What the hell did they normally go through for suicide to be such an easy decision?’

This was why I hated assassins. They didn’t seem to feel the emotions any human being should naturally possess, and their faces showed nothing. Assassins were closer to killing machines than people, which made killing them feel especially filthy.

After slaughtering more than I could easily count, I finally reached the end of the highest level. At last, I could see the doors to a modest main hall at the far end of the long corridor.

The Guild Master of the Bloodland Assassin Guild was probably inside that main hall.

Of course, maybe he wasn’t. How was I supposed to understand the minds of bastards who didn’t make a sound even after losing an arm?

I slowly walked to the end of the corridor, and just before opening the doors to the main hall, I swept back my blood-soaked hair and looked around.

Everything around me was drenched in blood. The blood spilled by assassins and their dismembered corpses came together to form a hellish landscape.

Even this cave probably didn’t welcome a sight like this. How had this place ended up becoming hell?

Taang!

Suddenly, hidden doors on both sides of the corridor flew open, and figures sprang out and rushed at me without warning.

I planted my foot firmly and reflexively halted their charge, then swung my left arm out and grabbed the collar of someone flying at me diagonally.

“Kek!”

I had managed to grab them, but I was the one who ended up bewildered.

What the hell kind of situation was this?

For a moment, I’d thought whoever I caught felt far too small. And sure enough, dangling from my hand was a young girl who didn’t even look ten years old.

Before I could even gather my thoughts, I saw the child’s grimacing face and immediately ducked.

Shiiiiiiiik!

Five or six little children came rushing at me with small knives in hand. They looked around the same age as the girl I was holding.

As I dodged the attacks raining in from several angles, I accidentally let go of the girl, and she rolled hard across the floor.

“Careful……”

The warning rose reflexively to my throat before I swallowed it again, because the young assassins were already charging at me once more.

I couldn’t bring myself to stab these children to death, so for the moment, I chose to retreat.

As I backed away, I looked into the young assassins’ eyes.

Judging by killing intent alone, they were hardly any different from the assassins I’d killed on my way up here.

Their eyes, where dreams and childish innocence should have lived, instead held a cold hatred determined to kill me.

I felt my jaw tighten as I asked.

“You……who told you to do this?”

The young assassin who had fallen from my grasp and rolled across the floor met my eyes and spoke.

“Mister.”
“……”

The girl’s expression changed subtly.

“……Couldn’t you just die for us?”

The moment I heard the young assassin’s words and met her eyes, I was left speechless.

For a split second, the serious thought crossed my mind that maybe it really would be better if I simply let them kill me.

The emotion in the young assassin’s eyes was fear. Not fear of me, but a deep fear of what would happen if she failed to kill me.

Before I could answer, the girl tried to stand, stumbled, and collapsed back down.

Her ankle was swollen. It looked like she’d broken a bone when she rolled across the floor.

The girl murmured.

“My leg……”

Puk! Puuuk! Puk!

I watched something with my own eyes that I still couldn’t believe. The young assassins who had been rushing at me turned their gazes toward the girl, and then their knives began stabbing into her entire body. It was like watching ants dismantle another ant that was no longer useful to the colony.

Before I could even react, the girl collapsed to the floor in a spray of blood.

By the time I finally rushed in and knocked the young assassins away with palm force, it was already over.

The girl had stopped breathing. Her body was growing irreversibly cold.

Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I stared at the young assassins with bloodshot eyes.

They had already been blasted away by my palm force, smashed into the walls, and rolled across the floor unconscious.

At this point, I felt as though I was going insane. I swept my hair back as my breathing grew rough and my hands slowly began to tremble.

Why? For what reason did these children have to pick up blades? Who had taught them how to kill people instead of how to laugh?

Thinking that the Guild Master of the Bloodland Assassin Guild was responsible naturally sent my anger surging, and the thought that the assassins I’d slaughtered on my way here might have been in the same situation as these children made me feel like I might truly lose my mind.

I hated assassins, but this was different.

Because those children surely hadn’t become assassins of their own free will.

They must have killed simply to survive, and kept killing until they had stained themselves with more blood than they could ever wash away.

Who had the right to force those young children’s lives down the path of an assassin?
By what authority had they stolen those children’s right to live as human beings?

Looking at the children lying there, with the dead girl already growing cold, I saw the Demon Cult slaves I had killed with my own hands.

We had talked together, laughed together, greeted one another. Then one day, when the order came for us to kill each other, they were the ones I had killed with my own hands because I had to be the one who survived.

Who had made us slaves? What gave them the right to make us kill one another?

As memories I’d tried so hard to erase resurfaced because of an unwanted trigger, I found myself saying the names we had called them once again.

“Number Sixteen. Number Twelve. Number Eight. Number Six……”

After that, I couldn’t remember clearly.

“Ah. I can’t remember. Why is that? I thought I’d only forgotten their voices, but now I can’t even remember their names. We spent so many nights together.”

Anger surged upward from my dantian through my chest until it seemed to clog my throat and fill my head, and with that suffocating pressure building inside me, I threw open the doors to the main hall.

Opening the doors this openly could have invited hidden weapons or an ambush, but I didn’t care.

The moment I opened them, I saw a white-haired old man and several middle-aged black-clad assassins who appeared to be elders of the Guild inside the dark main hall, but now was hardly the time to argue about whether black clothing was the proper way of an assassin.

The old man and the elders began shouting all sorts of things the moment they saw me drenched in blood, but my ears were ringing so badly that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

I remained on the verge of losing consciousness……and with what little awareness I had left, I could just barely convince myself that the old man was the Guild Master of the Bloodland Assassin Guild.

I wedged the Nameless Sword through the door handles to lock the main hall, then took the Demon Wail Sword from my shoulder and gripped it in my right hand.

Before drawing the Demon Wail Sword, I quietly looked over the elders’ faces and asked.

“……Those young assassins outside. Did you raise them?”
“……”
“No answer. I’m asking if you made them that way.”
“……”
“Then that’s answer enough.”

The old man shouted something, and at the same time, the elders moved with sudden speed and rushed toward me.

But to my eyes, they no longer looked like elders. At times they looked like the Demon Cult instructors who had mocked me when I was a slave, and at others like wraiths dressed in the ceremonial robes of the dead, rushing forward to answer a lion’s call.

Of course, I was the one who had beaten those instructors to death, and I was also the messenger of the underworld.

At the same time, they also looked like apostates who had violated the Cult’s laws, charging forward in one final desperate struggle.

Of course, I was also the executioner who extinguished the lives of apostates.

Come to think of it, what was my true nature again? Having forgotten my own essence, I drew the Demon Wail Sword.

I couldn’t remember whether I was the messenger who led wraiths, or the Bishop of the Heavenly Demon Cult who carried out the executions of heretics and apostates. I held the Demon Wail Sword vertically.

In an instant, everything before my eyes went dark, as though I had fallen into a pitch-black sea.

I could see nothing and hear nothing, but it didn’t particularly matter.

I had always been more familiar with darkness. Not once in my life had I ever been close to the light.

And so, once again submerged in deep, endless blackness, I swung my sword, then swung it again.

I didn’t even unleash palm force. I simply swung my sword.

Because I was the very demon of the sword.

My previous life and my current one might have been different, but right now, I deserved to be called a demon.

Fear and worry surged through me at the thought that I might be absorbed into the Demon Wail Sword once again, but I occasionally laughed as I swung my sword and sent the elders’ heads falling.

I only hoped their deaths would bring some comfort to the souls of the young assassins who had gone before them.

Consumed by that single thought, I rampaged through the darkness for a long time.