North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 112

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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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112. The One Who Breaks the Hermitage

Gwang Jin was alone.

He could spend nights twisting his trail, but Han Ki always clung to his back. Sometimes it even overtook him, standing ahead on the path.
The frost that seeped into him as he parried Aelak’s blade still lingered beneath his shoulder blade, a dull ache.
‘The Blade Song of the Blood-Named Thunder Blade…’
The thought alone made his skin crawl. His own blade crumbled before that barbarian, pitiful and worthless. A sound that had ground through countless lives for decades—it had failed to protect its master for the first time.
This hunt would not end in flight. There would be blood.
Gwang Jin knew it now.
‘Alone, I cannot escape that blade.’
There was one face he’d rather not remember. The old man who had gone to the North Sea with him long ago. The sight of that back made him want to drive a blade between the shoulder blades—that old man, whom he’d sworn never to face across a board again.
He had resolved never to meet him face to face again.
One thing was certain: the man was a master. A master even Gwang Jin had to acknowledge.
He had seen those who died beneath that old man’s palm strike.
A technique so refined it shattered the organs within without breaking a single bone.
He hated the thought of entrusting his back to such an old man.
Yet anything was better than falling to the barbarian’s blade. And now, shamefully enough, that old man was the only path forward.
An assassin’s pride could go to the dogs…
“That old man. I have to catch him.”
A groan seeped through his cracked lips.
Screech!
Gwang Jin’s feet turned reluctantly toward the Northeast. Toward the cave of a hermit.

The North Sea party followed in his wake.
Taikan crouched and pressed his hand to the earth.
“His pace has quickened. He hasn’t changed course. He’s chosen a destination.”
“Nothing but a rat hole, though.”
Garkan hefted the Bing Chulsae on his shoulder with a rattling clink.
“A man on the run always crawls into a hole he knows. Finding a rat hole is inevitable… but the question is, what lives in that hole?”
“If something lives there with him, we catch it too. What’s the problem?”
“…Youngest. You have a comfortable way of living.”
Harku laughed quietly.

Cheok Ha-rin tugged gently at her brother’s sleeve.
“Brother. These men… it seems they’ve never worried about their own lives. To make enemies of the entire Martial Arts World and yet be so at ease…”
“…It’s familiarity, I suppose.”
Cheok Mu-yeong answered briefly.
His words didn’t flow smoothly. His sister didn’t notice, but he himself did.

A large stone appeared, standing by the path like a milestone.
A standing stone that towered over two men’s heights. But across its middle, a palm-print seal was carved deeply into it—unmistakable.
From top to bottom, the shape of a human palm.
A stranger might have called it delicate carving… but they saw it differently. It was the imprint of a bare hand pressing and crumbling stone.
Garkan’s footsteps halted, and he examined the stone.
“…A handprint. Pressed in.”
At the sight of that mark, his hand gripping the Bing Chulsae tightened involuntarily. He could all too well imagine the amount of Internal Energy needed for a human hand to press stone like clay.
No one spoke.
The seal carved into the stone was carved with such mastery that none of them could have matched it.
Aelak didn’t halt even before that mark. His grey eyes merely swept once over the pressed indentation.
“Someone’s warning. A sign: do not enter.”
Taikan spoke.

Taikan’s words were right.
The moment they crossed the stone,
Ku-gu-gu-gu.
Something that had been asleep was awakening.
The air that had drifted in the void suddenly condensed, pressing down with crushing weight.
In that instant, the stone marked with a seal—a menhir as tall as two men—trembled from its roots. Power that someone had locked away inside the stone long ago stirred awake, and the massive boulder was hurled bodily toward the path.
Shadow fell first.
The two-man-tall stone descended toward Aelak’s crown.
It was weight enough to crush a person flat.
Harku, standing behind, reflexively dropped to his knees.
Cheok Ha-rin drew in a breath and held it.
“Clan Leader!”
Harku’s hand shot toward the Twin Curved Blades before he could stop himself. But his hand froze in midair. This was the Clan Leader’s affair, just as the last blow had been. There was no room for a subordinate to intervene.
He did not slow his pace. He did not draw his blade.
He raised his bare hand upward and met the falling stone head-on.
Crash!
The stone and his bare hand collided at a single point.
The descending menhir stopped dead upon his palm. The rock that would have crushed a man could not overcome a single man’s hand.
And then it shattered.
Crack.
Han Ki surged upward from Aelak’s palm, freezing the ancient power that had been locked within the stone from its roots.
The menhir split from above, then crumbled entirely. Frozen stone dust spilled white beneath their feet.
Silence descended.
“…A Martial God… it’s a Martial God.”
The words spilled unbidden from Cheok Mu-yeong’s lips.
A man capable of embedding such force into a stone to push it like that would surely be no ordinary master.
Yet Aelak had received that very attack with his bare hand without breaking stride, and shattered it.
Cheok Ha-rin’s eyes shifted from the broken menhir to Aelak’s back, and could not look away.
“Brother….”
Without thinking, she grasped his sleeve again. Her voice trembled thin and high.
“Is he… is he even human? He caught that boulder with his bare hands and… he destroyed it.”
Cheok Mu-yeong could not answer.
He had seen it too, and felt the same chill run down his spine.

Aelak was not looking at the broken menhir.
With his palm open, he traced the texture of the force he had just met, following it with his fingertips.
It resembled a palm strike descending from above to below.
No—it was not merely a stone thrown down. It was identical to a palm strike executed by a master. If this was a mechanism… it was a mimicry of his own technique.
Five fingers’ weight concentrated at a single point.
On impact, the surface remains unmarred, but the Internal Qi crushes the organs within.
He drew a wooden effigy from his chest.
A figure carved to precisely replicate Karani’s form.
His finger touched the effigy’s left chest. Just above the heart. There—a crushed palm print. The forty-fourth mark.
He overlaid the trace of the palm technique that lingered at his fingertips upon that mark.
They were not merely similar. They were identical.
‘A palm master.’
One who kills with a hand pressed to flesh.
When that mark was carved into the effigy in the North Sea… he had already all but revealed his identity. A grave error for a silent murder.
The opponent had never attempted such covert work.
And yet, by some grotesque irony… at the end of the path where Gwang Jin had fled in pursuit, only to turn away in defeat, sat the very owner of that hand.
The third one pursued had led directly to the fourth one’s door.
‘What expression did Karani wear when that palm pressed against his heart?’
Did he cry out, or did he fall silent as he always had?
Aelak could not know.
Because he could not know… his fingertips lingered longer at that place—above the heart. He wanted to feel the ache of a crushing heartbeat.
A brief flash of blade-light flickered in the depths of his gray eyes, then faded.

Before the broken menhir, Cheok Mu-yeong’s legs had gone rigid.
‘They know each other? How does a heterodox assassin connect to the righteous path’s greatest master?’
He knew many faces in the martial world.
He knew more of those already erased from the world or forgotten than of those currently active. Such was the role of the Inspector-General.
A master of the palm technique.
The kind of Internal Energy that would mark even a menhir.
In all the Martial Arts World today, there is but one master who could meet this condition.
“…If one has reached such heights in the Palm Arts… it would be only the recluse Hyeon Gong-ja.”
His lips moved of their own accord.
A whisper so faint he thought it had remained within his mouth alone.
But he realized at once what he had done and clamped his jaw shut. His hand reached for his sword hilt, then fell away.
He had spoken what should never be spoken.
He had just named aloud, for all to hear, one of the eight men this stranger was hunting.
At least no one had heard. Yet cold dread pooled in his chest.
The letter in his robes grew heavy in his mind—his father’s stern command echoing back: do not entangle yourself with northerners; return at once.

Ahead, Aelak’s stride faltered for half a beat.
The murmur Cheok Mu-yeong had uttered escaped even Taikan’s keen ears.
A scrap of sound carried on the wind.
Words swallowed within the mouth—yet the northern hunter’s senses snared them like prey.
Ears that could parse breath and heartbeat even in a blizzard.
Before such hearing, even words meant only for the mind took shape as sound.
‘Hyeon Gong-ja…’
He did not know who this was. Neither face nor martial skill.
But the wooden effigy already bore the imprint of the Palm Arts etched into it, and now upon that surface lay inscribed three syllables: Hyeon Gong-ja.
Among the eight northbound hunters: a master of the Palm Arts.
Gray eyes flicked backward for the briefest moment, then turned forward once more.
Cheok Mu-yeong did not notice that glance.
Only Serian, from her distance back, caught the half-beat of stillness in that figure. She did not know what Aelak had heard, but she knew he had heard something.

At that same moment, there was another who had caught those words.
Crouched in the shadow of a roadside thicket lay a spy of the Martial Alliance.
One who dogged the enemies’ heels, hunting for scraps of intelligence. And just now, something unexpected had reached his ears.
That composed man.
The spy’s eyes recognized his face.
The Martial Alliance’s Inspector General—the Crown Prince of Cheon Geom Mun!
‘The Crown Prince… is in league with those barbarians?’
The spy’s eyes gleamed.
The fact that the Crown Prince of Cheon Geom Mun was traveling alongside them mattered more than the barbarians’ movements. And that the Martial Alliance’s Inspector General should march with the world’s enemies—with the very ones sweeping away the Alliance’s elite without mercy.
He began to rise.
“The Inspector General with the barbarians…”
Before his voice could even fade, a hand from behind sealed his mouth.
Slash!
Eun Seol drew across his throat.
From a throat that had tried to cry out came only the wet rasp of drowning.
Serian pressed her other hand over his mouth, wringing away every last breath.
Not a single leaf in the thicket trembled. Not a bird took flight in alarm.
Silence absolute as death.
None could say when she had slipped into that shadow.

Cheok Mu-yeong had witnessed it all.
The clothes the man wore—they were the garb of a Martial Alliance spy.
In the instant he rose to speak some secret, his mouth closed without sound.
For a heartbeat, Cheok Mu-yeong’s hand went to his sword.
As Inspector General, it would have been right to stop the woman’s hand, to spare the spy. That was his duty as the Martial Alliance’s Inspector General.
But if that mouth opened… his sister would be exposed, his father would be exposed, and his own presence here among these northerners would be laid bare.
His hand, resting on the hilt, never drew the blade. He did not even turn his eyes to look.
He would not see.
By refusing to see, he consented to the spy’s death. No different from the Inspector General himself extinguishing one of the Alliance’s eyes with his own hand.
Today, for the first time, he chose his blood before his oath.
He dared not contemplate what would follow.

Serian laid the limp spy flat in the deeper shadow and adjusted her belt, cinching it tight. Then she turned back, her face as though nothing had occurred.
Her pale gray eyes rested on Cheok Mu-yeong for a moment.
“…One pair of listening ears is enough.”
The quiet words lingered at the corner of her mouth.
Cheok Mu-yeong understood whose ear she was referring to.
‘This woman…’
Serian knew why Cheok Mu-yeong was accompanying them. It was to observe Aelak’s martial arts in their entirety, right at her side.
Even knowing this, she said nothing.
He could not speak a word.

Aelak tucked the Wooden Effigy back into his robe.
He had been chasing a speck, yet the hunting ground was expanding of its own accord. The prey he pursued had summoned another foe with his own feet.
Aelak spoke softly.
“Two gather in one place. Fortunate.”
Harku turned to look at Garkan.
“…Who are the two?”
“No idea.”
Garkan shrugged.
“But when the Clan Leader speaks like that—with that tone, saying something ‘works out well’—it means things have gone very badly for someone else. The hand of Death’s Messenger has touched them.”
Aelak did not answer.
His gray eyes fixed on the far end of the Northeast Ridge.
That place toward which Gwang Jin’s feet were turning. The hunted and the recluse—two souls who had shown each other only their backs—were now converging in one place of their own accord.
“…Fortunate indeed.”

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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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