The Result Of The Ambush

“They are not taking the least notice of the information we gave them.”

At the words of one of her men, the wrinkles at the corners of Yu Yeok-rip’s mouth twitched.

“Not so stupid as I took him for. But he does not know that his little cleverness is digging his own grave.”

The Blood Cult’s warriors let feeling decide everything, so she had tried a goading stratagem on them. Being brushed aside like this had never entered her reckoning.

“What are we to do?”

Yu Yeok-rip watched the Blood Cult’s warriors swarm toward the spring where that scholar fellow was resting. Soon she saw the five concealed Namgung Clan escorts take them from behind as well, and she muttered.

“Since it has fallen out this way, there is no reason for us to step in now. The Namgung Clan’s escorts are strong men. Mok Jin does not know it, so this ambush of his will fail. I wonder whether he will come out of it alive.”

Yu Yeok-rip smiled a little.

“Both sides will take heavy losses out of this fight. We have no choice but to watch for the opening it leaves once it is over. Our object is not revenge but the Ice Sacred Body.”

Even so, she was not without regret. Had Mok Jin only moved the way she wanted him to, carrying the Ice Sacred Body off this time would have been no great difficulty.

“Still, there is no telling which way the fight will turn, so have them all stand ready for battle. They are to move as one at my order.”

“Yes, Elder.”

Yu Yeok-rip’s eyes stayed on the spring, where the fighting had just been joined.

Cheon Tae-san had been watching Song-ran closely when birds went up out of the forest, and he hurriedly set the spirit energy turning. Birds rising on every side at once was no natural thing, so he set all three spirit energies turning. Every flow of water round about registered on him, and the flows that read as human were closing in from every direction.

“An ambush!”

Before the words were out of his mouth the three escorts had their swords drawn and were closing in at his side.

Cheon Tae-san made for where Cheong Yo and Yeo-seol were, and spoke to Namgung Cheol-ung.

“The three of you, guard the women from here on.”

A keen aura pressed in from every side, and Namgung Cheol-ung answered.

“There are a great many of them.”

“Do not trouble yourself. There are five more who are escorting us in secret. They will come.”

Namgung Cheol-ung faltered a moment, then nodded as though he had understood.

“Ah! Understood.”

The martial artists who came out of the forest drove straight for the women without a word. Ten warriors came at Cheon Tae-san all together, sabers and swords leveled.

“Die!”

Cheon Tae-san cut at the man rushing him with Myriad Illusions in a Single Flash, of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.

— Swip!

The man twisted his body aside, and the stroke went wide.

These men are masters!

To dodge Myriad Illusions in a Single Flash as lightly as that was no easy thing.

— Splat!

He had not got clear of it altogether, though, and an arm dropped to the ground. These men had a stronger feel to them than the Blood Cult warriors he had faced when he fought the Red Dragon Demon of Diancang.

Before long the five men of the Emperor’s Escort Corps, who had been guarding the party from a distance, joined the fight at the spring. The moment Cheon Tae-san saw them he shouted.

“You five, protect the women.”

The five escorts were startled that the scholar had shouted at them the instant he laid eyes on them: it meant he had known all along that they were there. Their own clan head had told them plainly that the scholar did not know he had sent them, so the fact that the scholar knew their exact number astonished them all the more.

“Understood.”

The five went to the carriage where Cheong Yo and Yeo-seol were and struck the Blood Cult men from behind.

That scholar fellow had poured his whole strength into protecting the women, which Mok Jin had not counted on, and he muttered, pleased, as though this suited him well.

“Do you think you can handle us on your own! Drive in on him!”

Mok Jin reckoned that if they drove in all at once they could take that scholar fellow. He soon found he was mistaken. Every time the man shifted from place to place like a ghost and struck, another of his own went down.

So there was a reason Wan Bok went down.

Attack him from every side at once and he still slipped clear of it exquisitely. Then one of his men, coming in from behind, had his head burst open.

The scholar had plainly done nothing but point a finger, and the head had burst apart all the same. Mok Jin could not think what it was.

A finger-flicking art?

A man who drove internal qi out through his finger for a finger-flicking art was bound to leave a trace of it behind. There had been no trace of power discharged from that finger.

What the hell is this bastard?

Mok Jin put one of his men in front of him and went in behind him, a method he often used; when the man fell, he struck in like the wind.

Hiding behind another man was of no use against Cheon Tae-san. With the blood flow open to his sight, a man was visible wherever he hid. Two blood flows in one place meant one man standing behind another.

Cheon Tae-san drew the man in instead. Then he stretched out a finger and drew a diagonal line with it.

— Whack!

The dantian flew along after the finger, bored through the heart of the man standing in front, and made for the heart of the leader behind him.

— Pock!

“Hmm.”

Cheon Tae-san let the sound out through his nose. Near the leader’s heart the dantian was blocked, skidded aside, and bored through his shoulder instead.

Body-protecting qi.

Something like a clear heat-shimmer wavered about the man’s body, and Cheon Tae-san understood.

The strongest shield a peak master can put up.

If more internal power had been gathered in my dantian, I could have bored through body-protecting qi of that order easily enough.

Training the hidden-weapon method with the dantian had taught him that the more internal force was built up in it, the greater the power it brought to bear.

“You wretch!”

The leader set his teeth and threw himself in. Cheon Tae-san saw the blood flow in him running fast enough to burst, and drew back rather than meet the blow.

— Kooong!

Sword qi ran wild off the leader’s blade and left everything around him laid waste, as though a typhoon had gone through. At his present level, Cheon Tae-san judged, an attack like that would not leave him whole.

Just as I thought. Good that I got out of the way.

A few fights, he realized, had sharpened his feel for actual combat.

“Die!”

In the same moment he drew his finger toward the men rushing in on either flank. The dantian hanging in the air ran clean through one head and then bored out through the forehead of the warrior on the other side as well.

Even in the middle of it an absurd thought came to Cheon Tae-san.

My dantian has been digging about in a man’s brains — can I really swallow that back down?

In the end ten of his men had failed to finish one scholar and had become travelers who would never return. Dumbfounded at it, Mok Jin burst out every scrap of his true qi with mutual destruction in mind.

I misjudged. It would take a whole corps out of an armed body to kill the man.

Regret comes late however fast it comes.

Mok Jin meant to answer for his own misjudgment. A red blood flow began to run over his body.

“The Blood Cult’s Red Light Blood-Burst Sword.”

Cheon Tae-san had only ever read of the technique in a book at the Murim Alliance, one of the cruel and merciless ones. It drove out the user’s own blood and internal qi to bring sword qi into being, mutilating the man who worked it. Meet it head on and the blood would soak into the body like poison qi and set the internal qi shaking.

Cheon Tae-san hit on a way to win without ever clashing with the Red Light Blood-Burst Sword. Then, meaning to buy a little time, he put a question to the man. Working out what these men were after mattered too.

“Revenge for the Red Dragon Demon of Diancang?”

He said it because the leader was coming for him and not for Yeo-seol.

“Heh heh heh. That’s right. Wan Bok was my sworn younger brother. I’ll kill you and have my brother’s revenge.”

Inwardly Cheon Tae-san was relieved.

And here I thought he had caught on that Yeo-seol is the Ice Sacred Body.

With his mind at ease, a smile came to him of itself.

“The Blood Cult has some loyalty in it after all. Seeing that you mean to go down to the underworld along with your sworn younger brother.”

He soon found his answer to the Red Light Blood-Burst Sword. His eyes settled on the dantian hanging in the air.

Yes. With that.

Worked with spirit energy, the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique did not come out at its proper power. Spirit energy was not internal force.

But with the Nine Nether Dead-Spirit Sword Technique I can give it speed without putting a shock into the dantian.

Cheon Tae-san turned it over in his head, hunting the best way.

Blood Bow Piercing the Sky.

Of the Nine Nether Dead-Spirit Sword Technique, Blood Bow Piercing the Sky was the move that looses spirit energy and bores through the sky.

His own method drew out even his innate true qi, so Mok Jin would not live through it himself, but he was certain he could kill that scholar fellow without fail. The Red Light Blood-Burst Sword had been devised for mutual destruction with an opponent stronger than oneself, for a fight there was no chance of winning.

We die together.

That scholar fellow was raising his sword, and there was not a scrap of internal force in the stance, so it struck Mok Jin that the man’s internal force had run dry. No wonder, after killing ten of his men.

The glittering bead hanging just in front of that scholar fellow’s face did trouble his eye, of course. It had killed more than one or two of his men, and it had bored through his own shoulder even with body-protecting qi wrapped around him. But the Red Light Blood-Burst Sword raised a stronger shield than body-protecting qi, so he let it go.

Mm?!

The moment he closed to within a pace of that scholar fellow, the man thrust out the sword that carried not a scrap of internal force. And the stroke came down on the bead in front of his own face as though to cut it in two.

What is he doing?

In the instant he thought it, light flashed off the bead. A pain sharp enough to sting came into his eyes, and everything in front of him went red. Strangely, he came no nearer the man. His sight reddened further and blurred.

His head rocked, and he put a hand to his forehead. His forefinger went sliding straight into it, and with it came a pain like a fire-heated iron being worked about inside his skull.

But Mok Jin could not so much as get a scream out. He opened his mouth, and no sound came.

Cheon Tae-san watched Mok Jin’s mouth work open and shut, then saw him push a finger into his own forehead, and his face screwed up. Seeing a whole finger go in to the root of it had turned his stomach.

When the leader stiffened at last and went down, he let out a breath. The man had been no easy opponent.

If I could not see the blood flow, or if I had no dantian, I would never have stood up to this ambush.

Cheon Tae-san raised his head.

And without those five escorts it would have been harder still. I am in the Namgung clan head’s debt.

There were eyes watching, so first he caught the dantian in his hand and put it in his pocket.

Namgung Cheol-ung, Namgung Hwa-jun and Namgung Pyo all wore a kind of elation on their faces, the mark of martial artists who have come by an enlightenment in the middle of a fight.

It seems they have grasped a great deal about the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.

A martial artist was a martial artist, and there was no help for it. A man could be glad of his own attainment even standing among more than twenty corpses. Cheon Tae-san himself, for a scholar, took a fight or a killing like this calmly enough. The Heavenly Martial Sacred Body was a constitution that suited a martial artist better than a scholar.

“Thank you. Had it not been for the five of you, it might have gone very badly.”

Cheong Yo and Yeo-seol had taken shelter inside the carriage and had not seen the fight. Namgung Cheol-ung had driven them all into the one carriage and stood guard over it.

When Yeo-seol went to open the carriage window and look out, Cheon Tae-san spoke.

“Don’t come out. Stay quiet inside the carriage.”

“Brother, are you all right?”

“Mm, I’m all right. Is anyone hurt?”

“No one.”

Yeo-seol’s answer was unexpectedly composed.

Startled by the ambush, the women had been clinging to one another inside the carriage. Eun-bi held Yeo-seol and Cheong Yo held Song-ran, and so they leaned on one another. None of them had ever in their lives heard the screams and the groans of dozens of men dying, and they shook.

Weapons clashed and clattered, and the sound of splitting air and the sound of bone being cut ran wild. Yeo-seol watched the fighting from the carriage window.

Her eyes were taken by the blade-work of Namgung Cheol-ung and the other two as they cut down the crowd attacking the carriage. For the first time she understood properly that men’s lives hung on the sword technique she had learned from her Brother.

What rose in her was less shock than a thrill. A single stroke of a blade took an arm or a leg off, and it did not frighten her so much as brace her.

So that move is what takes a person’s head off like that?

When a Blood Cult warrior’s head came away under Namgung Hwa-jun’s Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, it was almost exhilarating.

“My young lady, don’t look.”

Eun-bi had raised her head and caught Yeo-seol looking at the window.

“I’m not looking. I’m just thinking about something else.”

Eun-bi pressed Yeo-seol’s head down and gathered her into her arms, and Yeo-seol worked her head free again and looked out of the window. She thought she understood now why her Brother told her, every time she swung a stick, not to do it in front of other people.

I could kill a person easily.

Yeo-seol could see them: the flaws in the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique that Namgung Cheol-ung and the other two were unfolding.

Oh dear. There he ought to unfold Myriad Illusions in a Single Flash rather than Myriad Changes in a Single Merging — then he could take the neck at once.

The sword technique of the five Emperor’s Escort Corps warriors, at least, was to Yeo-seol’s liking.

Yes. Bore in like that and Azure Dragon Spiraling Ascent becomes possible. That’s it.

She grinned at the sword technique of the Emperor’s Escort Corps warrior laying a man out with a stroke across the chest. In that moment the move she had thought of and the warrior’s move were one and the same.

Then she turned her head to the side and looked for her Brother.

Yeo-seol’s eyes went round at the sight of her Brother fighting.