Shwaaak!
A straightened hand-blade sliced through the air and came crashing down.
Slender and snow-white, it looked as though it had never been dipped in water. But Jin Taekyung knew how much blood had flowed from that hand. He knew what darkness lurked behind the Southern Heaven Demon Empress’s dazzling smile.
Monster.
Those two words surfaced in his mind once more.
As the blood-red Force fell like a meteor toward the crown of his head, his legs, frozen as though nailed to the ground, moved at last.
Shhk!
The earth split like tofu. Jin Taekyung slipped past the Force by a hair and drove his spear forward like lightning.
Shwaaak!
The spearhead flew toward a single point with terrifying speed, power, and precision. Even a fistfighter who had spent a lifetime honing his techniques and reached the Supreme Peak realm would not have dared meet that strike head-on.
But the Southern Heaven Demon Empress was different.
No. Today, at least, she had the power to do exactly that.
Krrrkkk!
Empty-Hand Seizes the Blade.
She caught the spearhead between her palms as though bringing her hands together in prayer. Hellfire flickered around the blade as it trembled between them. Enough power was concentrated in those snow-white hands to keep them from being reduced to ash.
The corners of her unlined mouth lifted.
“With only this much…”
The instant her voice, filled with mockery, emerged—
Plop. Plip.
Drops of blood fell. The Southern Heaven Demon Empress noticed them and fell silent.
The pain reached her half a beat later. Jin Taekyung gave her a sheepish smile.
“Oh, I forgot to mention. This is Ten-Thousand-Year Cold Iron.”
“…!”
“What were you saying?”
Her delicate brow furrowed. Jin Taekyung let go of the spear shaft and thrust out both arms.
Palm Force?
She was wrong.
Shhk! Shhk!
Two daggers shot toward her throat and chest. They were already too close to dodge, so she released the spearhead and snapped her sleeves.
Whoooosh!
Wind burst from the billowing fabric and sent the daggers flying. At that instant, Jin Taekyung’s foot caught the end of White Flame’s slowly tilting shaft.
No—he kicked it.
…What?
He kicked it? The divine weapon that would have helped him most in this fight?
A flash of light hurtled toward her face.
Shwaaack! Slash!
It happened in an instant. The attack was so unexpected that avoiding it completely was all but impossible. She turned her head on instinct, felt pain flare in her earlobe, and stared.
“How dare you!”
If it had only been her earring, she would not have been so furious. She had liked it, but she could always find another.
Her earlobe had been torn. Worse, her hair had been cut. Half of the thick, glossy hair she had always taken such pride in was gone.
“Die!”
Kraaaaaash!
The unprecedented energy that had faltered for a moment surged through her slender body. The pressure seemed capable of crushing a massive boulder in an instant.
But the Southern Heaven Demon Empress did not know that the young—almost absurdly young—enemy before her had once climbed a cliff with iron balls weighing well over a thousand geun1 strapped to his body.
Crack. Crrrunch!
The earth sank beneath the pressure crushing everything within a radius of over ten jang2, while the limbs of the humans and beasts struggling in the area twisted and snapped.
—Krrk, krrrk!
“Aaaaaagh!”
Amid the blood and dying screams, Jin Taekyung endured the pressure and stamped his foot.
Boom!
A line of flame rose from his toe as he shot forward. At the same time, a spear he had somehow taken hold of swept fiercely from his fingertips and split the air like lightning.
Shwaaaargh! Boom!
The impact sent out a shockwave that shook the world. The Southern Heaven Demon Empress had caught the side of the spearhead with perfect precision. Power surged through her hand.
Crack!
The Scorching Yang Qi surrounding the spearhead, along with the steel that a skilled blacksmith had folded and tempered more than a hundred times, crumbled like tofu.
A smile full of killing intent touched her lips.
Foolish boy.
Jin Taekyung had made the mistake of giving up his peerless divine weapon of Ten-Thousand-Year Cold Iron. Now she would make him pay for wounding her beautiful body—and for cutting her precious hair.
I meant to bring him back as unharmed as possible. That won’t do anymore.
At first, after hearing that the exalted Lord of Heaven had taken an interest in Jin Taekyung, she had intended to act as the Lord’s faithful servant and capture the young man to offer him up.
Now she had changed her mind.
He was no longer a feisty cat in her eyes, but a proud beast. Young though he was, he had teeth and claws as sharp as a great tiger’s. If she was careless, he might leave even worse wounds on her beautiful body.
Jin Taekyung rushed toward her, reflected in her blood-red eyes.
You should be prepared to lose a limb or two. I’ll reattach them later anyway.
She snapped both sleeves.
Papapapap!
The shattered spearhead broke into dozens, then hundreds, of fragments that filled the air. Each one carried Force. Jin Taekyung drove his clenched fist into the wave of hidden weapons without hesitation.
Kraaaaaash!
The Flame-Extinguishing Divine Fist.
A fire dragon burst from his callused fist and swallowed the fragments. Heated red-hot, they melted into liquid iron and spattered across the ground.
Hissssssss.
But beneath the molten iron raining down like a shower, what awaited Jin Taekyung as he shot through the air was the Southern Heaven Demon Empress’s slender, jade-like hand.
Whoosh!
Five fingers came at him, sweeping the air aside. They hooked like a rake toward his right arm.
Jin Taekyung twisted as though he had expected it all along.
He was not trying to save the arm she would otherwise tear away. He was putting his own neck in her path.
But at the same time, it was also a lethal move that struck at an opening the opponent had never expected.
This lunatic…!
The Southern Heaven Demon Empress screamed inwardly.
The Lord of Heaven had taken an interest in Jin Taekyung. He absolutely could not die. She had wanted to take him alive as a show of loyalty; the Lord had not even given her a specific order. If Jin Taekyung died by her hand, she might have to face the Lord’s fury alone.
No!
She hurriedly dragged back her surging internal energy. The muscles and flow of qi-blood throughout her body, already committed to the strike, twisted against the sudden reversal. A wave of backflow swept through her.
Urk!
“Kwaaaagh!”
Blood shot up from deep within her and sprayed between her lips. At the last moment, she managed to turn her hand. The Force at her fingertips missed Jin Taekyung’s throat.
Shhk! Spit!
The blade-sharp wind sliced his skin.
Jin Taekyung did not waver. He had never had any reason to.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.
His mind had gone cold. He had already made his calculations.
By his reckoning, the Southern Heaven Demon Empress was at least on the level of the Ten Kings. She might even rival the Three Saints. Her martial arts could be no better than the Western Heaven Demon Lord’s—perhaps worse—but her overwhelming internal energy more than made up for any gap.
And when facing a master of this level, there was only one possible method.
One opening.
He had wagered his life to create it. He would not get another chance.
And now…
I’ll wager my life again.
Inventory Open. Summon.
Along with the commands ringing through his mind, he thrust out his hand like a flash of lightning.
Shhk!
A slender wrist, impossible to believe belonged to such a powerful monster, was cleanly severed.
“Aaaaaaaagh!”
Her scream was louder and more agonized than any Jin Taekyung had heard from the creatures of the Nanman Beast Palace writhing under the demonic qi. No, it was the worst scream he had ever heard.
In a way, that was only natural. People were born to forget, and the powerful, accustomed to causing pain, tended to forget their own.
Even so, she was the Southern Heaven Demon Empress.
“Jin Taekyung—!”
Shhk!
She lunged with a shriek that seemed to tear through the air. Jin Taekyung met her blood-red gaze, now clouded with darkness, and knew instinctively that this time he could neither dodge nor block her attack completely.
The immense Internal Injury had thrown off her stance. The internal energy she had forced up while vomiting blood was wildly unstable. That made her all the more dangerous.
No. The real danger was the killing intent pouring from her.
“How dare you! How dare someone like you!”
His luck had only worked once.
Consumed by pain and fury, forgetting even her loyalty to her master, the monster thrust out a palm packed with power.
The world slowed. Darkness and blood-red Force churned together in the palm strike as it rushed toward him, erasing the space in its path.
Kraaaaaash!
The force was overwhelming, as though the sea and a great mountain had risen to engulf him.
Fear that made every hair on his body stand on end seized Jin Taekyung.
But he knew that if he took even one step back, everything would be over.
He had to go forward, even if it cost him his life.
Come.
He did not know what he was calling to. His foot came down on the blood-soaked earth.
Crush.
The ground sank beneath a step weighted with internal energy as heavy as his life, then burst with heat.
Boom!
Crouched low enough to skim the ground, he shot forward like a cannonball. A snow-white palm filled his vision, carrying power no human should have possessed. Beyond the blood-red flash was a face twisted like a fiend’s.
“Die!”
At that instant—
Inventory Open. Summon.
Jin Taekyung’s hand, spread wide as though ready to unleash a palm strike, closed. A cold spear shaft filled his empty palm, and its spearhead erased the distance between them.
Shwaaaargh! Shhk!
The spearhead tore past the Southern Heaven Demon Empress’s neck by a hair. Faint delight lit her eyes.
I read him. Perfectly.
His technique was astonishing, and dangerous. But amid the chaos of the fight, she had predicted it.
Or so she believed—until, just as she was about to take off his head, a cold draft touched her back.
Shhk.
“…!”
A faint hiss reached her ear. She spun on instinct, but something icy and razor-sharp raked across her side.
Shhk!
Blood burst out like a fountain. She felt muscle and veins sever, her qi-blood tangling inside her.
Th-this is…
Backflow.
A second backflow had struck before she could even settle the Internal Injury she had suffered earlier—and it was more fatal than any wound she had received until now.
This was what he was after… from the start.
The realization flashed through her whitening vision. She swallowed the blood rising in her throat and turned.
At last, she saw it.
Goooooong.
Blue-white flames whirled at the tip of a transparent spearhead that had answered its master’s call.
Beneath Jin Taekyung’s deeply shadowed eyes, his lips moved silently, forming two words.
One Annihilation.
The Southern Heaven Demon Empress’s eyes flew wide.
—Human!
An urgent thought suddenly rang out. With it, a vast vortex unlike anything anyone in Nanman had ever seen erupted.
Kraaaaaash!
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