72. The Most Perfect Future

The underground training ground was strewn with the sword marks of generations of past heads of the house.

I had Eve analyze every one of their styles first, then drilled the contents over and over until they were burned into memory. Once my head had the shape of it, I hammered the whole thing into my body.

Eve, my savage tiger of an instructor, corrected me down to the smallest detail. A single motion was assembled out of the movements of countless tiny parts of the body: how far the elbow had to bend, how the torso should turn once the blade was driven out, even the timing of each breath in and out. If it wasn’t perfect, she wouldn’t move on to the next form.

Back in my own world, I’d never had the chance to test whether I had any talent for the sword or for magic. So this was the first place I ever got to put that talent to the test.

Iffy. That was the first report card Eve ever handed me.

Not that I had the slightest intention of giving up. Grind through the grueling, tedious hours, and at the end of them waited the sweet payoff called success. I knew it firsthand, because I’d finally clawed my way to the clear after more wipes than I could count.

So I took up the sword and swung, no complaints, carrying the goal of one day using this blade to clear the entire world, along with the faintly childish dream of obtaining the single strongest swordsmanship there was.

The longer I kept at the training, the more clearly I could feel the force I poured into the sword turn into something different from before. Driving the blade out and flowing into the next strike grew smoother and quicker. Lean, wiry muscle began to fill out my frail, scrawny frame, and I even grew a little taller.

And just as I was beginning to feel at home with the blade…

“Is this really all swordsmanship that came out of a single house?”

I drew a long line straight down the wall, top to bottom, dividing it in two. Left and right. With the wall divided into two zones, I ran through the techniques I’d learned, one after another.

After a full round of forms, I examined the wall. The results couldn’t have been more different. On the left, shallow sword marks lay strewn about in a chaotic mess, as though a pack of starving beasts had hacked at it at random. On the right, by contrast, just two weighty slashes had crossed each other to draw a single crisp, clean cross.

“Right? It’s like two completely different people made them.”

“Huh? But they all learned the same House Arne swordsmanship, didn’t they? Same roots, no?”

At my answer, Eve cried out as if she found me utterly hopeless.

“That’s just stating the obvious.”

Eve sputtered with frustration, then launched into a heated explanation.

“So the difference comes down to which one you poured more into — Agility or Strength?”

Pour into Agility and you got faster; pour into Strength and your blows landed heavier. In the end, wasn’t that the most self-evident principle there was?

For a good while, as I kept up the sword training, I had to put up with Eve’s endless nagging.

Beyond that, Eve pressed on with her impassioned lecture on the history of swordsmanship. Tales of how, long, long ago, this school had flourished and that house had feuded with the other, and how in the end some great evil had shown up and wiped the whole lot of them out.

Why on earth does she know all this in such ridiculous detail?

It pains me to admit it, but it went in one ear and straight out the other.

A Korean only needs to know Korean history. No need to go memorizing some other country’s history on top of that.

In any case, the gist of it came down to this.

“So what you’re saying is, out of all the countless kinds of swordsmanship in the world, you can’t even pin down which one ours is chasing? Swift blade, heavy blade, shifting blade, phantom blade… you just can’t make out its true nature at all.”

I pointed at the scattershot marks gouged into the wall and added,

“Even looking at this.”

Eve gave a weak little nod, the bewilderment plain on her face.

A question suddenly struck me.

“The famous swordsmen our house turned out in the old days — what kind of sword did they use? Not the heads of the house. I mean the ones people called heroes.”

At my question, Eve knitted her brow and bore down in concentration. But as the seconds passed, her face only grew darker.

“You were just rattling on about Gilhamet this and Sutran that — and now, all of a sudden?”

“But all this time, whenever you talk about the other houses, you describe it like you saw it with your own eyes.”

“Then that’s good news. When you first met me, you were a blank slate — you didn’t even know your own name, or why you were here. Isn’t this proof your memories are slowly coming back?”

But even at my encouragement, Eve didn’t seem the least bit glad. She murmured in a trembling voice.

As if seized by some instinctive dread, Eve hurried to change the subject.

Her proposal was efficient and reasonable in the extreme. By the book, whether you went with the swift blade or the heavy blade, polishing the single style that suited your own weight class was the shortcut to becoming a master. But I had no intention of letting myself be shackled to the rules of the martial path.

“Eve. Out of all the heads of the house who left these sword marks — which one looks the strongest to you?”

At my out-of-nowhere question, Eve couldn’t get a word out for the longest while. And that was only natural. Ranking legendary swordsmen who had each ruled an era of their own, off nothing but a handful of traces laid out in front of you, was damn near impossible. In real-world terms, the question was as childish and unanswerable as asking whether Pelé or Messi was the greater footballer.

But in Eve’s silence, I read a conviction of my own.

Which means they’re all so peerless there’s no telling one above the rest.

There was no need to agonize over it any longer. If not one of them stood head and shoulders above the others, then my choice had already made itself.

“So I’m going to take all of it.”

I swung my sword again.

I chased the trajectory carved into the left wall, a flurry of strikes as sharp and swift as a beast’s claws. Then, twisting instantly to the right, I drove a weighty cross-slash that crushed the very air down into the floor.

I liked it even less than the round before. And yet it made no difference, because I’d made up my mind to keep swinging until I was satisfied a hundred percent.

“Bringing something into being out of nothing is always the hardest thing of all.”

Even if, for now, my swings were neither one thing nor the other.

We reflect in order to make up for the mistakes of our past. Was the choice I judged best back then truly the best one? Was there no other path? These are the questions people commonly hurl at themselves as they look back on the failings of bygone days.

But I was a little different from everyone else. Now that I’ve belatedly come to see a mistake of the past, what should I do? What must I watch out for as I go on living?

I tried not to cling to the past. Every time, I told myself I was a man who lived for today. And so I clawed and scrabbled, and went on living.

“…Ngh!”

The version of me who’d believed he had the sword more or less in hand was no longer here. All that was left was a wild brute loosing off every technique he’d ever learned at random.

A swift blade would suit a spot like this better.

Which isn’t to say nothing was going on in my head, either.

Should’ve put more force behind that one… ah, I should’ve slipped a feint in before the thrust!… ah, I should’ve leaned on him a little harder.

Facing a strong enemy was a genuinely delightful thing.

“…Kgh!”
“You said you could do this all day. Guess not.”
“…Shut… up!”

I could see Beta’s reaction speed dropping, just a hair, but dropping. For all his earlier big talk, I could feel him wearing down. And in a situation like that, an opening was bound to surface sooner or later.

The moment it did, I seized it and drove my blade hard through a gap in Beta’s armor. His body went slack as a puppet with its strings cut, the blade buried so deep it had surely run clean through his heart.

And just as I was about to pull the sword back out of his heart…

“I’ll grant you this. You’re strong. That moron didn’t put your name forward for nothing.”

All at once Beta’s slack body surged upright and flung me off. The next instant it broke into a run with terrifying momentum.

I had no time to wonder how he hadn’t died with his heart run through, because Beta was running straight for the wounded.

I put on speed and caught right up to him, but knocking at him from the side wasn’t enough to stop a Beta already carrying that much momentum. In the end I overtook him and wheeled around to meet the charge head-on.

— BOOM!

We collided face to face, and Beta was slammed into the arena wall. In the very same instant, I was flung the opposite way and smashed into the wall myself.

— KRRSH—!

If only it had ended at being slammed into the wall. From my left arm came a horrific rupturing sound I’d never once heard in all my life. I’d thrown that arm out to brace against his right side and wrench my trajectory aside, and somewhere in the doing the bones of it must have shattered into several pieces.

At Eve’s frantic intervention, the searing agony that had been gouging into my brain vanished in an instant. Drenched in blood, I looked down at my left arm, dangling there limp and useless.

“…Hahh.”

I looked at my right hand, shaking violently. That was the day I learned, for the first time, that feeling no sensation and watching your hand tremble were two entirely separate things.

Beta, who’d been embedded in the arena wall, walked out of it and spoke.

“This is exactly why your sort dies first. You don’t know how to give up.”

I wiped away the blood running from the corner of my mouth and answered him indifferently.

“Figures. You’ve spent your whole life giving up, so I guess you wouldn’t know.”
“One arm’s gone crippled and still you keep flapping your mouth.”
“Well, sure — but mine’s just the one arm. You’re a cripple from the mindset out.”

Even without a single weapon to my name, I didn’t let up on the taunts. If I wanted to carve out even a sliver of an opening, I had to get under his skin.

“Before you die, I’ll tell you how I beat Seraphina Arne.”

Beta pulled my sword out of his own chest and tossed it down carelessly at my feet. It was nothing like the cowardly hostage stunt he’d been pulling only moments before.

“Eligos, the owner of this body, possesses the power to foresee the future. Regrettably, I don’t know how to wield that power myself.”

The black haze that had been swirling around Beta was sucked into him all at once. At that, the red glow leaking from the slit of his helm shifted to an unsettling violet and wavered.

“So I forcibly fed in the data for the single most brilliant moment this body could ever achieve — ‘Peak Eligos.’”

“…What?”

“A height the ordinary Eligos could never reach, not if he died and came back. The pinnacle of mastery he could only barely touch after decades — no, centuries — of miracle-like epiphanies happening to land by sheer luck, and only by honing each of those miracles without letting a single instant slip.”

As he ran his hand along the shaft, violet mana wreathed the spearhead and warped the air.

“This is the very method by which I crushed Seraphina underfoot. Because I summoned that future at its very summit — the one Eligos would normally have had to give his whole life to reach.”

Beta’s presence swelled by the second. This was something different in kind from mana simply growing stronger. The way he gripped the spear, his stride, even the rhythm of his breath were all transforming into the near-perfect figure of a warrior, beyond any comparison to the man he’d been a moment before.

“I’ll show you, too.”

Beta leveled the spear-tip at my throat.

“—the most perfect future the demon Eligos could ever have reached.”