The word unavoidable applied to everyone.
To farmers who faced drought before the harvest. To the sick who lay in bed, waiting for death to draw closer by the moment.
And to a woman whose astonishing power made it hard to believe she was human like them.
I should have stopped them.
The Bow Saint let out a low groan.
High atop a sheer cliff, she stared down at a group spewing streams of ghastly blood-red light.
Shhk! Krrrunch!
Every one of them had bloodshot eyes. A thick mist of blood gathered in the wake of their spears and blades as they advanced without hesitation.
On a battlefield where tens of thousands clashed, two hundred people were only a handful. But the Temporary Strength Pills had pushed each of them beyond their limits, making them more dangerous than any other enemy there.
Especially to the Hebei Peng Family’s fighters, of whom only about two thousand remained.
Graaaah!
A harrowing scream rang through the night air.
As the enemy finally broke the Hebei Peng Family’s vaunted Linked Tyrant King Formation, the Bow Saint lowered her drawn bow and bit her lip.
They were not only dangerous. They were clever.
After suffering heavy losses from several of her attacks, they had immediately spread out and plunged into the heart of her allies’ formation to guard against any more.
If I keep attacking like this, I’ll hit our own people too.
Even apart from the two hundred or so Keshiks, she had more than enough enemies to deal with.
The vast steppe army seemed endless, no matter how many she killed. The battle had already gone on for several shichen1, and the steppe forces had surely suffered far greater losses than the people of Shanxi. Yet nearly twenty thousand of them remained.
If she held the high ground and rained arrows down until she had no strength left, she could inflict tremendous damage. That much was obvious.
But she had only one choice.
To gain one thing was to lose another. If she kept attacking, she could bring down countless enemies—but by then, every last fighter of the Hebei Peng Family would be dead.
Her mind was made up. There was no need to hesitate.
I have to go. I have to do it myself.
Click.
She twisted her enormous bow with a sharp wrench, revealing two strangely shaped curved blades.
Their cool grips settled into her hands. The Bow Saint kicked off the cliff and soared into the sky.
Whoosh.
The cold night wind swept over her, setting her long hair streaming behind her.
She stepped through the empty air toward the ground as though descending an invisible staircase. Then she turned to look behind her.
The narrow gorge lay hidden in darkness now, its depths awash with waves of powerful qi. To someone there, she said silently:
Survive. Then prove yourself once more.
The Chosen One.
The Blazing Flame Divine Dragon, Jin Taekyung.
His name weighed heavily on her heart as the Bow Saint plunged toward the distant ground.
Shwaa!
The two curved blades in her hands became razor-sharp winds, carving through space.
The Bow Saint was gone.
She had crossed to the other battlefield beyond the gorge—not to help Jeok Cheongang and me, but to aid the Hebei Peng Family’s fighters.
I watched her disappear across the distant sky without feeling hurt that she’d left. Jeok Cheongang met my eyes and simply nodded, his expression calm.
Someone else here felt differently, of course.
“I expected as much, but it still amazes me.”
The North Heaven Demon Lord spoke up without warning and went on without waiting for a reply.
“Why do you people always make such foolish choices? Every single time.”
He shook his head with a hollow laugh. I answered calmly.
“Of course you’d think that. Bastards like you wouldn’t understand even if you died and came back dozens of times.”
The North Heaven Demon Lord thought of his followers as nothing more than pawns to secure victory. He could never understand that all of us here were risking our lives not to kill someone, but to protect someone.
Or that this small difference was the most important measure of what separated the righteous from the demonic.
“What a rotten age. The Murong Family Head goes and stabs someone in the back, then starts popping pills the moment things get a little rough. Right?”
Jeok Cheongang answered me.
“Live long enough, and you’ll meet things worse than beasts. Creatures wearing human skin and pretending to be people, hiding their black hearts behind pretty words and smiles.”
His voice was cold. His eyes burned.
At that moment, all his anger was directed at the North Heaven Demon Lord.
“I used to think you just had a sly streak… If I’d known it would come to this, I should have killed you back then.”
To me, he was the North Heaven Demon Lord. To Jeok Cheongang, he was Murong Baek.
Unlike me, Jeok Cheongang had known him. They had once fought alongside each other as comrades. Now their gazes met across the air.
“Why didn’t you, Fire King? That was your first and last chance to kill me.”
Jeok Cheongang’s eyes darkened at the mocking reply.
“First and last? Do you truly believe that?”
“You don’t?”
Rrrrumble.
The space around us shook as though an earthquake had struck. A mighty aura rose from the North Heaven Demon Lord, pressing down on everything around him.
An unprecedented surge of qi, rougher and greater than Jeok Cheongang’s.
“I’ll show you now. You’ll never get a second chance.”
His low words reached everyone’s ears, and the North Heaven Demon Lord vanished.
Swish.
He moved faster than the faint whistle of air left in his wake.
But I could see him, if only faintly. No—I could sense him.
The North Heaven Demon Lord shot forward faster than sound. His spearhead cut through space, and his loyal hunting dog rushed after its master.
Shwaa!
A belated gust of wind followed the descending spearhead.
I swung White Flame up toward the flash driving at my upper body.
BANG!
The roar hardly sounded as though it had come from two spears colliding.
Tremendous pressure traveled down White Flame’s shaft to my toes. The ground split into a spiderweb of cracks.
Beyond the spearhead I had stopped, I met the North Heaven Demon Lord’s eyes for an instant. I could almost hear the question in them.
How can a brat like you…?
I knew that look all too well.
The eyes gone wide. The question mark in them.
And every enemy I’d faced had found an exclamation point in its place before that question had even faded.
Just like now.
Ka-drrrk!
I gritted my teeth and drove my spear shaft upward.
The muscles throughout my body swelled as if they were about to burst. A power no one but me could understand—supernatural powers—surged up and shook off the tremendous pressure bearing down on the spearhead.
KABOOOOOM!
The North Heaven Demon Lord’s eyes widened as the force drove him back.
That was when the hunting dog, arriving a step behind its master, bared its teeth.
Shwaek!
Before the dust kicked up by the shock wave could rise, a blade split through it.
The curved blade flashed through space toward the crown of my head. Just as it was about to strike, the air behind me blazed with heat.
Fwoosh.
A terrible heat. Merely touching it felt as though it would melt flesh and bone and burn even the soul.
Flame Divine Palm.
The instant I felt that familiar energy swell, I ducked without hesitation.
Paaang!
A mass of concentrated flame skimmed past the back of my head.
I looked up again, the back of my head burning as though scorched. The old nomad who had brought his curved blade down like a wild beast was already hurtling backward.
Krrrunch!
His feet gouged deep furrows in the ground. He was driven back nearly three zhang2 before Jeok Cheongang sniffed in his direction.
“Damn it. I was wondering where that horse shit smell was coming from. Turns out it was this barbarian.”
“……!”
“That’s quite a face you’re making. What, now that you’ve had a taste of the heat, are you homesick for a steppe full of horse shit and weeds?”
Style may be temporary, but class is forever.
The old nomad’s face went rigid under Jeok Cheongang’s inspired verbal assault. Then a low voice rang out.
“Still the same. That tongue of yours still knows how to get under people’s skin.”
The remark was aimed at Jeok Cheongang, but the North Heaven Demon Lord’s gaze was fixed on me.
Jeok Cheongang tapped my shoulder.
“When it comes to running his mouth, this brat is several steps ahead of this old man.”
“He’s surpassed his Master in all the wrong ways.”
Jeok Cheongang gave a quiet laugh.
“Come now. You know it isn’t just that.”
The North Heaven Demon Lord said nothing. He looked at me as though he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.
Honestly, that was only natural.
It wasn’t just him. Anyone would have felt the same.
The Blood Lord, the Western Heaven Demon Lord, the Southern Heaven Demon Empress, the Eastern Heaven Demon Lord—and the other enemies I’d faced.
None of them had been able to make sense of me. None had found an answer, and the question had only grown with time.
No. More accurately…
I’d gotten that much stronger.
Looking back, every battle I’d fought over the last two years had been hard. My enemies were always strong, and I was always weaker than they were. I’d had to struggle with everything I had just to survive. Just to win.
But then, one day, I suddenly realized something.
I kept finding myself at death’s door not because I was weak, but because stronger enemies kept appearing.
And somewhere along the way, I’d started catching up to them.
The Head Elder, whose martial prowess had been so mighty. Pung Yang, whom I’d barely managed to defeat in a joint attack with Jin Mukyung.
The Demon Lords and Demon Empresses of Dark Heaven, each of them a nightmare in their own right.
Whenever I thought back on those battles that had brought me close to death, one thought would come to me:
Back then—if I’d moved like this, I could’ve won so much more easily.
Now I understood.
What I’d taken for regret and lingering misgivings was proof that I’d grown. It wasn’t just a change in the numbers on the System window. I’d grown as a martial artist.
And maybe I was still growing, even now.
“Hey. This is just something I’m personally curious about.”
I spoke up out of nowhere, then carefully put my question to the North Heaven Demon Lord.
Like a student asking a professor about a difficult assignment.
“Just now, wouldn’t kicking you in the balls have been a lot better than knocking your spear up?”
The professor’s face twisted beyond description.
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