North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 106

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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106. The Turning Gap

Serian’s eyes did not follow the blades. They followed the spaces the blades left behind.
Steel light encircled them from all sides.
The five warriors with their backs pressed together were perfectly trapped. Wherever they thrust their swords, the enemy’s blade was already waiting there.
Everyone saw only the flying blades.
With swords coming from all directions, failing to see them meant death—that much was obvious.
Yet her gaze alone traced not the edges themselves, but the empty darkness between blade and blade. She saw not the sword she must block, but the brief gap that opened after each sword completed its strike.
A swordsman on the left side shifted position, sliding sideways to fill a gap.
In the single moment he moved, the place where he had stood became vacant. Before a new swordsman could step in, there was a fleeting, infinitesimal void.
Serian’s hand did not hesitate.
Clang! Clang!
She raised Eun Seol and parried the onrushing tempest of blades.
A violent impact crashed down her wrist with a ringing shock. Yet her eyes remained fixed on the empty space, never wavering.
Her hand moved—her gaze turned elsewhere.
There. That was it.
The Nine Palaces Sword Formation wheeled as one body. If one position collapsed, the warrior behind would rush in immediately to fill it. Seamlessly.
It was self-rotation following nine separate orbital revolutions.
Yet the position where the swordsman stepped in to fill the gap—the place where he had stood before—remained empty in that fleeting instant until the replacement arrived.
Even the flawless Nine Palaces Sword Formation could not overcome that brief, open void.
Rotation was the formation’s lifeblood.
Then the single step required to fill that emptiness was the formation’s weakness.
Serian had read that one line and turned her gaze away. A weakness is not sought twice. Once seen, it is struck.

She murmured low to Garkan beside her.
“When they move to fill the position. That’s when the opening appears.”
Garkan asked nothing.
Did he not understand her meaning? Hear one phrase, and he grasped two.
Hand pressed against his bleeding side, he focused on the assault as if he had heard nothing. If she said it was so, then it was so.
If she had seen it, the opening was surely there. Since the previous battle, her eyes had never grasped at illusion.
‘Did you see?’
‘I did.’
Silent words passed between them.
Even as they pressed their backs together, parrying the formation’s assault with urgency, the formation’s one weakness passed into the hands of five warriors.
This was no time for meaningless exchange.
One at a time.
Each striking five of the nine positions with their own distinct technique.

The swords of the Martial Alliance’s elite were heavy.
Different in quality from the blades the soldiers of the previous battle had wielded—with each parry, that weight settled squarely onto the wrist.
The Plum Blossom Sword came dancing along the formation’s current, driving in with a single breath and constricting the five even tighter. There was barely a hand’s width left to escape.
Harku bared his teeth and laughed low.
“Elder brother, the encirclement keeps tightening. Soon there won’t even be room to breathe.”
“Watch one thing. Just one place.”
Garkan replied curtly.
Under relentless pressure, the five fixed their attention on a single gap.
That one spot that appeared when someone moved to fill the void.
Strike it cleanly, and they could create space. But miss that fleeting instant even slightly, and the formation’s counter-force would send them flying back without mercy.
Best case: severe wound. Worst case: death.
Striking at an opening was a gamble even for seasoned warriors.

Serian struck first.
At the moment the swordsman on the left moved to fill the collapsed position, at that very threshold, she threw Eun Seol ahead.
She did not wait for him to arrive at the gap—she planted the blade in his path beforehand.
Sharp!
A handful of frozen ice claimed the air of the threshold first.
The swordsman who had been standing in the rear tried to rush forward, but his feet froze. His predecessor had already slipped away to the side.
The blade had arrived at the position first.
Within the Nine Palaces Sword Formation, where gaps could not be allowed, he could not advance another step.
His sword remained intact. No one had blocked it. What was blocked was the position he should have occupied. Not a man had stopped him—the blade itself had barred the path forward.
“Hah!”
The moment the swordsman froze, the Nine Palaces Sword Formation shuddered.
One of the nine positions within the formation revealed an opening for the first time since its creation.
Shock flashed across the faces of the elite warriors moving as a single body. The formation that had deflected every attack had finally faltered.
They too were seeing the Nine Palaces Sword Formation creak and groan for the first time.
One gap trembled the adjacent position. The trembling spread to its neighbor. The discord rippled outward like a storm.
“Don’t let the gap widen!”
Someone cried out.
But it was too late. In the single breath the Nine Palaces Sword Formation fell out of rhythm, five attacks moved faster than any breath could follow.

Crash!
Garkan struck the edge of the formation.
The Bing Chulsae, now reduced to a single strand, slipped through the gap that had not yet closed.
Clang!
When the formation had been sealed without any opening, there had been no edge to wrap around. Now that they revealed the gap themselves, at last a point to bind became visible.
The Self-Rotation where they exchanged positions with one another had been the weakness of the Nine Palaces Sword Formation all along.
The chain wrapped around the wrist of the swordsman standing at the edge.
Garkan, pressing his bleeding flank, planted his feet firmly and pulled his waist backward. His side burned with a sharp sting, but his hands did not hesitate.
Whoosh!
One swordsman was dragged out of the formation.
He tumbled onto bare grass with no shield of any kind to protect him.
That was enough to pull one person out.
It took no more than two strikes to tear open one side of the formation.

As one person was dragged away, another filled the front line of the Nine Palaces Sword Formation.
It was a formation without a commander. Nine groups moved on their own understanding. They filled the gaps instinctively among themselves, like a living creature.

Taikan seized the mouth of the formation.
It would be good to shoot arrows now—but he had run through his supply long ago. He gripped two short blades in either hand and methodically stabbed the throats of those giving directional commands one after another.
The blade tip passed through soft flesh and caught once against something hard before slipping free.
Thud! Thud!
Those who had been relaying commands fell.
Now the entire formation lost cohesion. No one knew who should fill which position. The nine groups that had moved as one body now wavered separately.
“Cut off the voice.”
Taikan muttered to himself.

Arko too had found the gap. The very place Serian had spoken of.
Swift!
The Step Technique unfolded.
In that moment, with a practiced gesture, he coated the blade with oil.
He had found the gap, but it was a gap where he didn’t know which of the four swordsmen remaining behind would step forward to fill it.
‘There you are!’
Arko spotted the one among the swordsmen behind him whose fingertips twitched with anticipation.
He approached the gap in a curve. He did not strike forward, but slipped past as though veering to the side, leaving only a long afterimage.
In that instant, his two Poisoned Daggers struck the armpit and inner thigh of the swordsman who was just now drawing his blades.
Stab-stab-stab! Stab-stab!
In the time it took another man to cut down one target, he pierced five points. If swords were weapons that killed by severing, his Poisoned Daggers were weapons that killed by piercing.
“Kgh!”
The swordsman let out a short gasp.
Where the oiled blade touched flesh, the blood turned black and soon stopped flowing. No—the swordsman’s mouth foamed, and his knees buckled.
“If we can catch your speed… then this formation is finished.”
It was a murmur no one else could hear.

Harku stepped into the now-open path.
The Martial Alliance had already laid out a plan to seize the Twin Sabers: they would create walls of blades on both sides to pin the weapons in place.
But now the Twin Sabers went unbound. They were free.
He moved freely through the gaps where the Nine Palaces Sword Formation had grown ragged and loose. Each time he swung his blade, the wound on his flank blazed with heat, but he used that pain as a stepping stone to drive deeper.
Positions emptied, repairs delayed—gaps left unfilled.
The sword dancers only noticed him when they heard someone fall.
Bang!
As the Twin Sabers unfurled like lightning, two of the sword dancers crumpled, their shoulders and knees shattered.
The broken Nine Palaces Sword Formation could not contain him.
The rotation had skipped, the transformation had died, and the Martial Warriors could no longer unleash their full power—the formation was already destroyed.
It needed to rotate sharply, fiercely, for their blades to shine in unison; but now the sword dancers could not be positioned in time where the swords needed to be.
The North Sea warriors were no longer troubled.
Harku’s suppressed chuckle returned to his lips.
“Heh-heh! Now this is fun. Finally getting the hang of it.”

Each time another North Sea warrior’s blade passed through, the formation that had moved as one body began to shed its skin. Layer by layer, it grew thinner.
Even when the front opened, no one came to fill the gap. Then another blade would slash through that break, peeling away another layer. Self-rotation halted; orbital revolution could not turn.
The sword dancers could no longer cluster together—they stretched into a single line.
Now only the Aelak warrior’s absolute technique against Central Plains martial arts remained. The formation had vanished.
Serian watched it scatter. This was the moment she had waited for—the moment she could finally unfurl the Ribboned Whip, trapped until now at the heart of the formation where she could not extend it.

The instant the Martial Warriors stood as individuals.
The Ribboned Whip, which had been nothing more than a leather cord at her side, finally found its voice.
Serian drew the whip from her waist.
This time she had the space to cast and snare. The leather cord swept in a great arc above her head, covering the five warriors in the front rank all at once.
Crack!
Thirteen strands of the Whip Flower bloomed simultaneously within that great circle. Eun Seol flowed secretly between the strands, targeting the warriors.
That same whirlwind that had swept through twenty elite guards in open ground—the Ribboned Whip, trapped in the formation and unable to extend even a single strand, now unfurled all thirteen. The same catastrophic wind.
The five warriors in the front row hurriedly retreated.
A rotation-broken formation was no formation at all.

The formation had collapsed.
The Plum Blossom Sword of Hua-shan, the Seven Star Wind-Thunder Sword of Qingcheng, the Returning-Wind No-Flow Sword of Dianzhu, the Cloud-Dragon Sword of Kunlun, the Imperial Sword of the Nangong Family—when bound as one body, those blades had been so heavy; but severed from the formation, they revealed no strength at all.
The elite Martial Warriors of the Martial Alliance had lost their formation for the first time in their lives and scattered. When united as one, they had been so formidable; apart, they did nothing but retreat, again and again.
They were undoubtedly exceptional masters—martial scholars steeped in skill, ranking among their respective schools’ elite, swordsmen with reputations far and wide.
But the Aelak warriors operated on a different plane. Those who locked blades with them felt their wrists stiffen in a single exchange. The swords they raised to parry were pushed backward instead; their feet, meant to step forward, remained nailed to the ground as if rooted.
The North Sea warriors cut down all who faced them without mercy. Yet the blades—even their trailing edges—never touched the merchants who lay prostrate on the roadside beyond, their luggage still bound to their backs.
The North Sea blade distinguished clearly between those who drew steel and those who did not.

One warrior held out to the end, sword still in hand.
He had lost the formation and his comrades both, yet he would not release his blade. The pride of his illustrious school seemed to remain in his grip as he clenched his teeth.
Garkan flicked the Bing Chulsae to bind and spring the sword away.
Ring!
As the blade flipped upward, Harku’s Twin Sabers drove through the opening.
Thud!
The last elite warrior buckled at the knees.
“Without the formation, they’re nothing much.”
Harku chuckled, shaking blood from his Twin Sabers.
No one answered. Until Serian had read the gaps, even their wrists remembered how heavy the Nine Palaces Sword Formation had been—they still tingled with the weight.

Quiet descended once more on the dust-reddened road.
Aelak stepped forward at last.
While the formation had trapped five warriors and those five had peeled it away, layer by layer, his hand had never touched his sword hilt.
Now his grey eyes beheld his subordinates.
Four of them, breathing heavily, recovering their wind. And one woman.
He looked upon them in silence, gathering them into his gaze.
He did not voice praise for their fighting. His eyes spoke that for him, and from that gaze alone, the five received all the words they needed.
Yet Aelak’s eyes did not linger long on the fallen elite.
He turned his head slowly toward the north.
This elite guard was not the true hunt. They were merely a blade placed in his path—not the one he sought. His true quarry lay elsewhere.
Somewhere beneath the northern sky.
In the north, a storm of blood had just begun to rise.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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