North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 117

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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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117. Repay with Steel

A final, desperate struggle!
Gwang-jin had no confidence he could win, but neither could he surrender his life. He held on with stubborn ferocity, and Aelak had no intention of letting him go.
The blade’s tip pressed against Gwang-jin’s throat.
Cold steel bit into flesh.
And before that blade, the man who had just been begging for his life began to laugh.
“Heh. Hehehehe. Ha-ha-ha!”
His wet eyes slowly rolled back.
Fear, when driven far enough, transforms into something else.
The pleading drained from Gwang-jin’s face, replaced by a sickly gleam. Madness.
“You’re pressing too hard! If that’s how it is, I won’t go quietly!”
From below the blade to above—he slashed upward with the Beommyeongdo. As the blade aimed at his throat veered aside, Gwang-jin wrenched his body free and opened distance between them.
Aelak did not pursue. He waited.
“I have no guilt!”
Gwang-jin, blade repositioned, screamed until his voice tore raw.
“Bing Gong-ju was doomed anyway! All those self-important fools swarmed in—what chance did she have? What difference does one more blade make!”
From desperation to pleading, from pleading to shrieks—Aelak watched Gwang-jin crumble. Thoroughly. Brutally.
“Who was behind this?”
Aelak asked.
“If I tell you, will you let me live?”
“No. You carry your own debt.”
“Debt? Debt?” Gwang-jin’s voice cracked. “In the Martial World with a blade in hand, the weak die. That’s all there is.”
Gwang-jin’s face twisted.
Breath wheezed from his gaping mouth instead of words. His lips had gone dry—no words would come. His mind raced, but there was nowhere to run.
“That look! What is that look! A human wearing the eyes of a beast!”
His words cut short. The blade shot forward first.

The blade vanished.
The dark-crimson steel that had been before his eyes erased in an instant.
No—before a single breath could pass, it erupted from beneath his left ear.
Gwang-jin’s footwork wheeled in sharp angles.
He was no longer a cornered rat. He was a blade unleashed in full force—the cold blade of an assassin. Neither fear nor panic showed in his movements.
He was still an Absolute Swordmaster of the Central Plains.
This time Aelak did not retreat. His Beommyeongdo met the blade head-on.
Clang!
The struck blade wailed loudly.
Shriiiiek—the metallic resonance crawled along the steel and burrowed into his wrist.
It was not sound entering through the ears. It was vibration seeping into flesh, grinding from within. The tendons in his wrist holding the Beommyeongdo twisted with a numbing ache.
The dying resonance revived. Gwang-jin wrung every last ounce of strength from his body. With this one stroke, he meant to claim Aelak’s life.
“Hear it! The wailing of my blade!”
Gwang-jin’s voice twisted with savage pride.
“Want to know something? That woman from Bing Gong—when she heard this sound, her lips turned blue. Her teeth chattered. She was breaking inside. Kekeke!”
Aelak did not answer.
Shriek!
The Beommyeongdo wailed in response.
Gwang-jin’s blade moved with frantic precision. It rose from the right flank, from behind the knee, from the shoulder near his back.
Each strike targeted where the eye could not see. And with every withdrawal came the wailing. The edge tore the surface; the resonance gnawed at what lay beneath.
Aelak received it all head-on.
He did not twist his body. He turned his head only as much as needed, shifted his blade only as much as was necessary.
Clang! Clang!
Where steel met steel, frost scattered instead of sparks.
Shiiek!
A low blade whistled toward his ankle.
The Beommyeongdo sagged and caught the knife as it flowed downward. In that instant, Gwang-jin’s upper body snapped backward. His throat and chest lay exposed.
Aelak did not strike at the opening. He merely raised his blade back to guard.
“Why won’t you cut? What’s wrong with you!”
Gwang-jin retreated, his voice sharp with frustration.
Instead of an answer, grey eyes held his gaze.
Not the eyes of a hunter appraising prey, nor the eyes of an enemy consumed by hatred.
Those eyes swept across Gwang-jin’s arms, his legs, the wrist gripping his blade—cataloging each one. They were the eyes of someone deciding where to sever him first.
Gwang-jin drew upon his most trusted technique.
He angled his feet to the left, feinting with his blade held high on that side, then twisted his wrist to draw upward from the lower right.
Every opponent he’d used this move against had died the same way—defending the left while their right ribs lay exposed. But this time,
Clang!
The blade was already waiting before the deception even began.
‘How?’
Gwang-jin’s palm grew slick with sweat.
In that instant, his blade suddenly grew heavy. As the steel collided, the Han Ki transferred—and transformed into ice, crushing down on his wrist.
Where the Beommyeongdo met his blade, frost bloomed.
That frost crept along the edge, finger-width by finger-width, climbing toward his wrist. The deep red of his blade paled from tip to hilt, growing white as bone.
The frost that coated his blade’s edge burrowed into the first hole that ran through his weapon. As it sealed that opening, one strand of the resonance that had leaked from it cut off entirely—the hole frozen solid.
But Gwang-jin didn’t notice. His eyes had rolled back in his head, blind to the fact that his blade was being rendered silent from tip to pommel.
The second hole froze shut. The third followed immediately after.
The Do-myeong Blade, which had wailed with nine distinct notes, fell silent to six. Then to four.
With each note lost, the blade itself grew hollow.

“…What?”
For the first time, Gwang-jin’s blade faltered.
He needed to cut the surface first, then drive in to pierce the heart—but there was no resonance. No matter how violently he swung, the blade refused to sing.
“Why. Why won’t it sing!”
Gwang-jin slammed his blade against the earth.
Crack!
He meant to shake the ice loose. But the frost wouldn’t budge. Instead, white crystalline decay spread across the ground where he’d struck.
“This ice! Let go! Let go of it!”
From the cold sound holes, not even the whisper of wind escaped.
‘If I don’t touch that blade, I won’t freeze.’
The realization crystallized.
Every collision doomed his weapon. So he’d put distance between them—pivot hard and circle to the far side of the courtyard, and—
But a wolf was already standing there.
“…!”
No footsteps. No Step Technique to speak of—just the raw, brutal speed of a beast overtaking prey.
Gwang-jin pivoted back the other way.
There—the blade was already waiting on his new path.
Clang!
Steel met steel, and ice bloomed with each contact. If he didn’t collide, his body would be rent open. There was no way out.
From that moment, he was pushed back.

Clang!
One exchange, half a step lost.
Clang!
Another half step.
Footwork that had swept in clean arcs began to retreat, step after step driven backward.
A blade robbed of its song was just dead weight—metal against metal—and the wolf’s metal rang truer.
His blade’s edge dulled visibly with each clash.
Duller still, and the wolf’s steel bit deeper.
Gwang-jin felt it in every fiber of his being. Aelak never met any blade with full force. He’d strike just hard enough to shatter, then flow the remainder of his power away through his hand—always holding something in reserve.
“Don’t come closer. Stop coming at me!”
Thunk!
His back struck the corner of the courtyard wall. There was nowhere left to retreat.
And here stood the greatest swordsman under heaven, driven back one step at a time, until his back met stone.
“Hiss!”
Gwang-jin gripped his blade in both hands.
He poured every shred of strength left into a single stroke. Then he brought it down above his head like madness made manifest—no song, no trickery, just the crushing weight of pure descent.
Boom!
The Beommyeongdo received the full force of his blade.
Frost bloomed violently where the two blades locked, spreading in an instant from the sword’s edge to the hilt.
“Uh… uhhh…”
Even straining with both hands, Gwang-jin couldn’t wrench the blade free. Instead, his feet skidded backward. The ground groaned and splintered beneath him.

Outside the wall, a cheer swelled, then fell silent.
Harku’s laughter crackled in the distance, followed by Garkan’s sharp rebuke. Serian’s low command wove through the sound of clashing steel before cutting off.
Each time the torches guttered, the two shadows on the courtyard floor stretched and shrank in turn.
The space between the walls belonged to them alone.
Aelak’s gray eyes were not fixed on Gwang-jin. They tracked the blade in his hands.
A single thick scar.
The third mark of a wooden puppet.
A blade that had split flesh, and a resonance that chewed through the wound a second time.
Karani had endured that pain beneath this blade.
Now… that sword was finished. Even if the frost thawed, even if the ice melted… that blade would never sing again.
Gwang-jin, too, was as good as dead. One thread of frozen ice through the neck, and it was over.
Aelak cherished that blade.
He didn’t want to end it in a single stroke. To simply kill him now would leave the score unsettled.
Whisk!
This time, the Beommyeongdo struck first.
Rip.
The sleeve and outer skin of Gwang-jin’s left forearm split open.
The wound was shallow—a blade so precise it had severed only flesh, sparing sinews and bone alike. But frost settled into the cut.
“Ack!”
Frost took root in the wound.
It crept inward along the torn flesh. Ice gnawed at the inside of the gash. Gwang-jin’s whole arm convulsed.
A pain that split the surface and bit from within.
“This… this can’t be…”
Gwang-jin stared down at his forearm.
This agony… he knew it. The same suffering his own blade had carved into others’ bodies had now, for the first time, lodged itself deep inside his own flesh.
“That’s what your blade did.”
Aelak spoke quietly, without even anger in his voice.
Next came the right thigh.
Without sound, Gwang-jin saw his leg growing numb first.
Through the gaping flesh, pale frost seeped inward—visible to his eye.
His knee threatened to buckle.
Gwang-jin barely stayed upright by using his blade as a crutch.
Still, he didn’t yield. He poured strength into his sound left leg and thrust the blade forward. His toe scraped the earth, and he lurched half a step. But in that instant, the frost-ravaged right thigh simply gave way.
The blade he’d been driving downward clawed through empty air and tumbled to the ground.
“Kill me! For mercy’s sake, kill me, you monster!”
“Not yet.”
The Beommyeongdo slowly came horizontal again.
“Karani endured eight blades. You have only one to bear now.”
“What—what was that woman? How could anyone possibly—”
Aelak didn’t answer. Instead of words, the blade’s tip rose to shoulder height.
Gwang-jin understood too late that this silence was far more terrible than any reply.

The color drained from Gwang-jin’s face.
“Everyone talks! Everyone who went to the North Sea will talk! I’ll catch them all—I have to!”
“I will.”
The Beommyeongdo moved.
Rip.
On the side holding the blade, the flesh of the right shoulder split open.
The torn shoulder caught the torchlight, exposed and red.
Where the blade had passed, pale vapor rose in a thin line.
“I don’t punish the blade. I punish the hand that wields it. Like this.”
“Aaaahhh!”
The scream tore through the courtyard.
The shouts from beyond the wall faltered for a moment, then surged anew.

Gwang-jin tried to raise his blade.
His blade would not rise.
Looking down, he saw frost coating the back of his hand. The frost had climbed along the blade’s edge, past the hilt, across his palm, and clung to his wrist.
His fingers would neither straighten nor curl.
For a lifetime, his sword hand had obeyed him without question. Now, for the first time, it refused to listen.
‘It won’t come free. It won’t… come free.’
He clawed at his right hand with his left, desperate to tear even a single finger from the hilt. But the frost had fused flesh and steel into one solid mass—each time he pulled, he only tore at his own skin.
His body stiffened. Even his trembling froze.
“If… if you’ll only let go…”
The wolf did not stop. It did not hurry.
Silent, each footfall drew closer—and somehow, it sounded louder than any blade.
He had made his peace with death long ago.
An assassin’s end always came beneath another’s sword, after all. But this—what unfolded before him now—was not death.
The wolf had no intention of killing him.
It meant to repay him. Layer by layer. Carving away flesh until his life drained out.
“Now it begins.”
The low voice settled across the courtyard like a weight.
A wanderer who had lived his entire life without knowing fear—for the first time, dread bloomed in his eyes.

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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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