Chapter 34

The voice had no rise or fall in it. Behind that emotionless speech, like a monster doing an impression of a human,

— Krrrik— clack-clack—

— Pshhhh—

the Three-Point Gate opened in a gush of venting steam, and a pale light came pouring out of it.

“Ngh.”

Moyong Rin took a step back before she knew she had done it. Fear and wonder mixed together in her. A strange holiness overwhelmed her, a beauty unlike anything she had ever seen; frightened as she was, she could not hold back her admiration, and awe held her eyes where they were.

It might have been a gate leading up into heaven, or a gate going down into hell. Either way, nothing about it belonged to this earth.

Gwang-seon had been striding toward it without a moment’s hesitation, and now he looked back. His face said it plainly: why aren’t you coming? Then he took in the look on hers, and his smile turned bitter.

He turned away. Through the wide-open Three-Point Gate, he walked in. On he went, alone.

Moyong Rin watched Gwang-seon’s back as he went. She could not have said why. He looked terribly lonely, and the look was one she had never seen on him before. He would go away from her like this, forever. The thought came at her out of nowhere, and it frightened her.

She had felt this once before. Back when that Paeng Dol-hwi boy had tried to lay a hand on Gwang-seon’s earring.

— Do not touch it.

That was the first time Moyong Rin had ever seen Gwang-seon angry. A spirit like a dragon’s had rolled over the whole company, and straight after, an unaccountable fear had made every one of them shy away from him.

Looking at his back as he stood alone in the middle of the crowd, she had thought, suddenly, that he looked lonely. It had felt as though he would go off somewhere if she did not catch hold of him then and there. What she feared was that he would go away from her like that, forever. She had been just as frightened as everyone else, but she was more frightened still of his going somewhere her hand could not reach.

— Why’d you go and get angry like that?

And so she had worked up her courage and gone to him.

Moyong Rin bit her lip. The foot she had drawn back, she put forward again.

“Hey! Wait for me!”

— Patter-patter-patter—

She ran in after Gwang-seon, who had gone ahead of her.

“Hold on, if you both go in—”

Left on her own, Yeon Seo-ha the Plum Blossom Swordsman thought it over a moment…

“Haaah.”

and with a small sigh she followed them in.

— Thud…

And the metal door, having swallowed all three of them, shut fast.

“What did you follow me in for? You could have waited outside.”
“Would you want to wait outside, with that terrifying monster they call the Warden of the Iron Bamboo Forest prowling about out there?”
“Last time we got shut in and nearly never got out again.”
“We got out in the end, didn’t we?”
“There’s no guarantee it’ll go that way this time.”
“You’ll manage something.”
“Who will? Me?”
“Who else, if not you?”
“I’m not feeling confident.”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Anyway, you’re responsible.”
“…”

A hopeless young lady, this one.

So why did a smile keep flickering at the corners of my mouth?

“What are you grinning at?”
“…”

I brought the corners of my mouth down and looked to the side. Yeon Seo-ha the Plum Blossom Swordsman stood there glancing around at everything as though she found it all a marvel.

“So you came in too, Big Sis Yeon.”
“I had no choice. As the guardian responsible for your safety, I can hardly let myself be separated from you.”

Yeon Seo-ha looked me straight in the eye.

“What are you, exactly? Opening the Three-Point Gate like that. No — before that. How did you open it?”
“That’s a secret.”

She must not have expected a straight answer, because she added nothing further. So I decided to add something myself.

“Oh, and — Big Sis Yeon.”
“What.”
“Everything that happens in here is secret. Starting with the fact that we opened the Three-Point Gate and came in. You have to keep it quiet.”

She snorted.

“And why should I do that?”
“Lend me your ear a moment.”
“?”

I put my mouth to her ear and whispered.

“Keep it secret for me and I’ll see about arranging you some time with our Great Hero the Glancing River Sword.”
“!”

Yeon Seo-ha recoiled in horror.

“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what are you talking about? I am a Daoist. I cannot marry, I tell you!”
“Sorry? I only meant it as a suggestion that the masters representing the great orthodox sects build a bit of a friendship. Where does marriage come into it?”

Her face flushed a violent red.

Bingo.

“I— I’m… that is… well….”

I held out a hand to the dithering Yeon Seo-ha.

“So — you’d rather not?”
“…I didn’t say that.”

Yeon Seo-ha clasped my hand, making a show of having been won over.

Yes.

That closed the deal. After a satisfying handshake I turned around to find Moyong Rin glaring daggers at me.

“So I’m the only one you won’t shake hands with?”
“?”
“Hmph. Forget it. Get lost.”
“…”

I’ve no idea why, but I left Moyong Rin behind me with her lip stuck out a mile and looked at the door. Thick fog rolled and surged in the triangular doorway that led deeper into the ruins.

And what kind of trial is it this time.

I picked up the scraps of metal lying around, rested a moment, and then went up to the door.

— Shhing.

Yeon Seo-ha drew her sword and said, low:

“Stay right behind me.”

We went in slowly, through the door and into the churning fog. Yeon Seo-ha took the lead, I took the middle, and Moyong Rin took the rear.

“An enemy could come flying out at any moment, so keep your wits about you.”

The deeper in we went, the thicker the fog became. However you looked at it, that was not natural.

“Some kind of formation?”

Yeon Seo-ha’s brow furrowed.

“…I don’t like the feel of this.”

She warned us again and moved slowly forward. The fog thickened and thickened until we could not see an inch in front of us.

As we pressed on, our guard up as far as it would go, nerves wound tight, I stopped, all at once. And then I realized. At some point, mine were the only footsteps ringing out.

The place had gone quiet. Nothing but a skin-crawling stillness, churning and mixing with the fog.

In the moment when every sound had vanished.

— Tromp—

A footstep broke the silence.

“Big Sis Yeon?”

No answer came back. Only the footsteps, growing louder and louder.

— Tromp, tromp—

Not Big Sis Yeon, then.

I leveled my sword and made ready to receive the customer. The fog ahead of me parted, and a man stepped out of it. A one-armed ghost with a long saber in his hand stood there grinning at me.

“The Smiling Ghost.”

Back from the dead, the Smiling Ghost laughed like a ghost and threw himself at me.

The Moyong Sword Art, the Sword of Flashing Light and Parting Clouds, the Sword of Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon.

I met the Smiling Ghost with every martial art I had learned.

The Divine Cascade Step, the Butterfly Step. Everything I had as of that moment, down to the meaning hidden inside each separate form of it, I dragged out however I could and threw at him. I scraped everything out of myself, right to the bottom.

To think the Sword of Flashing Light and Parting Clouds could be used defensively too.

With death flickering in front of my eyes I stopped picking and choosing and used whatever came to hand.

So this is what they meant, that enlightenment comes on the border between life and death.

And he, as though setting out to prove that the ‘Ghost’ in his byname had not been put there for nothing, swung that saber of his with real savagery. He might as well have been a ghost with a saber in its hand. How was a man supposed to swing a blade like something possessed with one arm gone?

Of course, the saber he swung traced a thin ink line and showed me its route. But seeing it and blocking it were plainly two different things. Some attacks you cannot block even knowing they are coming, and his brush had a way of drawing strange lines.

At first it was so much to handle that I thought this was going to kill me, but the longer the fight went on, the more bearable it got. Had I grown enough to take a one-armed Smiling Ghost by myself? Or was the dead thing risen out of the fog in front of me only a fake doing an impression of him? There was no way to know. What was clear was that for a fake, he swung that saber with a fair amount of savagery.

Ridiculous.

The very fact that I had room for idle thoughts like that was proof it had become fairly manageable.

Well done, Gwang-seon.

Grown again, haven’t you. The view waiting beyond the ridgeline of death was rather fine.

But I’m not the sort to be satisfied here.

Manageable could not be where it stopped. A fight does not end at the point where it merely becomes doable; in this world a fight usually ends when one of the two is dead. And I had no wish to be the one who ended it by dying.

I have to kill him.

Time to put what I had practiced into a real fight.

— Cla-clang!

Trading sword strokes with the one-armed Smiling Ghost, I pushed half a step forward on the Divine Cascade Step, and as I did, I swung the loosely held sword level.

How are you going to react?

He could dodge, or he could block. Whichever he chose made no difference. Faced with a stroke cutting in that deep, the Smiling Ghost chose to spring back.

Gotcha!

I quietly raised my index finger and fired the laser through it.

— Vwip—

Sure enough, he could not react at all to a laser fired at point-blank range. It took him in the side.

Damn.

I had missed. The chest was what I had been aiming for. He had not dodged it; the fault was mine. My timing and my distance calculation had both been off. This was the first time I had used it in a real fight, so it could not be helped.

I’ll need more practice.

A target that moves as it pleases was more awkward to hit than I had thought.

Lucky an appropriate practice partner turned up just when I needed one.

Firing lasers at the dead, who have already gone to their rest, is no way to behave. But the Smiling Ghost had beyond question been a nasty piece of work who tormented waiters in his lifetime, so I decided not to let it trouble me.

Struck in the side, he came at me more ferociously than before. The longer I watched, the more I wondered whether the Smiling Ghost really had come back to life on the strength of this strange fog. He was, after all, the man who only went wilder for losing an arm. It took two or three more lasers into that fiercer version of him before I could bring him down.

Watching him scatter into fog as he fell, I thought:

There — my zero’s finally coming in.

As I pushed on through the fog, leaving the Smiling Ghost behind me, another figure came walking out from between its murky banks.

“…the One-Eyed Dragon?”

That one eye glinted, and there was no mistaking him, though the livid ghostly aura pouring off him did make him look a little different. He came at me without a word, and I set my teeth and swung my sword.

“Hah. Hah.”

Watching the light go out of his one eye and his shape scatter into the fog, I got my ragged breathing back under control. It took three whole lasers before I could finally put him down.

I don’t know how strong he was in life, but the thing that rose out of the fog was distinctly stronger than the one-armed Smiling Ghost. Unlike the Ghost, he was the cautious type, and I only barely brought him down by turning that very caution about the laser from my fingertip against him. Thanks to that, I picked up a way of using it as one more kind of weapon altogether.

That has to be the end of it now.

That thought was smashed to pieces a moment later, when the Bursting Fist Demon appeared.

“Bullshit.”

A little while later, I lay sprawled flat on my back and muttered.

“Haah. Hah… I really can’t do any more.”

This time it took a full five lasers to just barely bring him down. I honestly thought I was going to die. One of those fists the size of pot lids landing on my head even once, and my fate would have been sealed.

But so much for my expectation that this really would be the end. A dozen and more figures appeared out of the fog.

“This is really too much.”

Looking closer, they seemed to be those utterly vicious black-path thugs who used to torment waiters, the ones cut down in the course of my last spot of chivalry.

Half a bar of battery left.

I took the scraps of metal out of my pocket and muttered as I built the tetrahedron.

“Right, then. I’ll kill you the same as last time.”

The moment I breathed ‘chivalry’ into the tetrahedron,

— Vwooom—

the fog around us melted away and vanished in the faint, unidentifiable light the tetrahedron gave off.

So this was it!

I adjusted the chivalry packed into the tetrahedron at once, damping down the explosive force and maximizing the light in exchange. I had only just realized this was possible.

Ignoring the fog’s dead as they came at me from every side, I hurled the tetrahedron out in front of me.

“Flashbang, front!”

— Flash!

In an instant, light covered everything in every direction. For one moment all the fog in the room lifted. Some way off, Moyong Rin and Yeon Seo-ha had been swinging their swords at empty air; now they looked around them with baffled faces. They had the look of people waking out of a dream.

“It was an illusion?”
“What in the world….”

But there was no time to stand around dazed, because the fog was slowly welling up again. I pointed at the exit that had appeared on the far side and bellowed:

“Run!”

We threw out the lightness arts in a frantic scramble and got out through the exit. When I looked back, the fog had billowed up and was covering the place where we had been.

“…It was an illusion? All of it?”

I checked Moyong Rin over as she muttered it, dazed.

“You’re not hurt anywhere?”
“Uh — no. Just a bit of a cut.”

Her clothes had been sliced through as though by a keen blade, and she had scratches here and there.

Thank goodness she isn’t badly hurt.

I checked Yeon Seo-ha the Plum Blossom Swordsman over as well. She had scratches all over her too, but she was in far better shape than Moyong Rin.

I’m the worst off of the three.

I could not say for sure, but she too seemed to have met a formidable opponent inside the fog.

A master who could hurt a Plum Blossom Swordsman like that.

Who on earth had she been fighting?

Yeon Seo-ha examined her own wounds and muttered as though she found it remarkable:

“An illusion with substance to it… I can hardly believe it.”
“…Is this really the time to be admiring it?”

We rested a while and treated our wounds.

“Ow-ow-ow. Go easy with it.”
“Such a baby.”

Feeling alive again in the sting of the wound salve Moyong Rin was rubbing on, I asked Yeon Seo-ha:

“Is it really that impressive, that fog?”
“There can be illusions that feel like the real thing. But those, too — once you are released from the illusion arts, you realize they were not real. That fog is not like that. It plainly stands outside common sense.”

I stared blankly at the fog churning beyond the door.

What would have happened if I hadn’t thrown the tetrahedron?

Shut in there, fighting the dead until I dropped, and dying for nothing, perhaps.

— Tap, tap.

I tapped the ring, and the battery was showing completely empty.

That was close.

We rested for a while, and then got to our feet.

Where a trial ends, there’s bound to be a reward.

Time to collect the reward. I set off toward the spot I’d had my eye on for a while. While we were out of the fog room resting, something had risen up out of the floor with a tremor, just like last time at the Phoenix Mountain ruins.

“Careful. It could be a trap.”
“Don’t worry. Even in games with a blond, blue-eyed Hero in them, the reward room and the trial room are separate.”

Leaving Yeon Seo-ha to ask what on earth I meant, I went up to the reward. Moyong Rin, dying to see, came trotting along behind.

Just as last time, a round sphere sat there behind a translucent membrane. I asked, out of curiosity:

“Big Sis Yeon. Do you think you could break this?”
“Stand back.”

— Shhing.

Big Sis Yeon drew her sword. A faint scent of plum blossom drifted around her, and in the moment her sword was wrapped in pale pink light,

— Kraaang!

the sword came down like lightning and was thrown clean off it.

“…!”
“It won’t break even to a Plum Blossom Swordsman’s sword?”

Yeon Seo-ha and Moyong Rin were both aghast.

Not so much as a scratch on it.

No master alive looked likely to break this thing. I eased the statue-stiff Yeon Seo-ha gently aside and laid my hand on it.

— Vwooom—

The translucent membrane dissolved and vanished.

“How…?”
“It just sort of worked. Seems I’m a bit special.”

Waving it off vaguely, I took out what was inside.

An eye?

The round little thing looked like an eyeball. Lifting it and examining it closely, I arrived at the conclusion that it was not.

Ah — a lens.

A thin, pupil-shaped lens sat stuck to a smooth sphere. The lens was the reward.

The moment I carefully peeled it off and brought it up to one eye,

the world stopped.

None of it surprised me all that much, really.

Still, that’s twice now. Suppose I’ve got used to it.

I looked around me with a small laugh. A few blinks and the lens seated itself, melting into my eye with no sense of a foreign body at all.

In a world gone colorless, a low sound of laughter reached me.