North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 118

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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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118. Reclaiming the Third

Aelak did not kill Gwang-jin.
He made sure he could not die.
As Gwang-jin tore his hand from the frozen blade, the skin of his palm ripped away and stayed stuck to the hilt. He had no time to feel the pain.
“Damn it… y-you monster….”
Clutching his torn hand to his chest, he turned his body around.
The collapsed wall stood twenty strides away.
Flight… He had checked over and over, and there was no chance of winning this fight. There was no way out. Whatever happened, he had to run.
Just twenty strides!
The assassin’s feet pushed off the ground with their last strength. Ten strides. Five strides.

A wolf stood at the mouth of the wall.
“Y-you… since when….”
Gwang-jin’s feet slid and came to a halt.
The one who had been behind him a moment ago… there had been no footsteps. No wind, either.
‘Run! Run!’
Gwang-jin swept his gaze across his surroundings.
Left, right… no matter which way he looked, every path was blocked.
“W-wait….”
Swish.
Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, a brief sound rang out. At the same instant, his right arm drooped limply from the shoulder.
The arm had not been severed. Only the tendons that moved it had been cut, with precision.
No blood welled up.
Gwang-jin looked down at his own shoulder.
The place that should have split open was sealed white. Frost had settled on the cut, freezing the torn flesh exactly as it was, fusing it shut.
The pain burned sharp and alive beneath the skin, yet not a single drop of blood showed.
“Aaagh! Aaaaaagh!”
Gwang-jin let out a shriek.
He had been confident he could endure any torture, but this agony was beyond him. To freeze flesh, sinew, and bone like this.
The spurts of blood that should have burst from his body were frozen solid and could not get out.
“Gyaaah!”
Gwang-jin fell onto his back and scrambled backward. His unhurt left hand scraped across the icy ground.
The wolf took another step closer.
“M-Master! That shadowy old man from just now! He went to the North Sea then too! He’s one of the eight you’re looking for! I know where he went! I’ll guide you there!”
The gray eyes did not slow their approach even after hearing this. When a hunter pursues his prey, he never asks the beast for directions.
“I’ll become your slave! If you tell me to be a dog, I’ll be a dog! Please….”
Aelak did not answer. Instead, he severed the left arm.
Snap.
“Gyaaah!”
The right leg went dead.
The left leg followed suit.
The screams tore through the night sky. They were no longer whole human cries. They sounded more like the howl of a beast than the voice of a man.

Aelak did not hurry.
Aelak had learned this blade work from Gwang-jin. Watching the wooden doll.
The same blade was now returning to its master.
There was neither anger nor pleasure on Aelak’s face. He wore the calm expression of a man simply doing what needed to be done.
He knelt on one knee.
A hunter knows the body of his prey. Where a cut kills at once, and where a cut will not.
A hunter of the North Sea learns that sense not with his eyes, but with his hands.
The tip of the Beommyeongdo passed shallowly across his side.
The place it had crossed soon hardened white. The blade-point shifted position. It passed over again, one more layer. Slowly, like rubbing. At the same depth.
Chik.
The sound of flesh freezing hung low in the night air.
The blade-point went to the back, dropped to the inner thigh, then returned to the side. Starting from places far from the heart. Starting from places far from the windpipe.
They only went for spots that wouldn’t kill him.
Gwang-jin’s eyes rolled white, and a dry sound leaked from his throat, bent back at an unnatural angle. The outside was clamped tight by ice, while the inside stayed split open and throbbed.
Cutting through the surface, tearing at what lay beneath — the very pain he had carved into other people’s bodies all along.
“Stop… stoooop…!”
Still, the blade did not stop.

How many layers, how many times he had blacked out… Gwang-jin lost count somewhere along the way.
Each new wound brought death a single step closer. Yet even as he suffered like this, some part of him clung to the hope that Aelak might spare him. Wouldn’t a man feel that killing something worse than an insect was pointless? Wouldn’t that thought surface, at least?
“Aaaaaaah!”
The scream was ragged and desperate.
The night was long, and the blade was longer than the night.
‘He’s not killing me. He’s not killing me…’
Realizing that was more terrifying than being struck by a blade thick with killing intent.

The last one was the shoulder.
Aelak readjusted his grip on the blade, and this time the cut was not shallow.
From the left shoulder down toward the chest, a thick line slowly descended across the collarbone. It was not a fast blade but one that carved deliberately, inch by inch.
“This was the place.”
A low murmur passed along with the blade.

Gwang-jin knew that spot. His body remembered it before his mind did. In the Bing Gong of the North Sea, his own blade had cut across the shoulder of a woman in white in exactly this way.
The woman had not screamed then.
Now he was screaming until his throat tore.
“Aaaaaaaaah!”
The cry cut off there, and only a white plume of breath seeped from his gaping mouth.
That breath rose through the white grove in the courtyard and scattered.
Beyond the wall, all was quiet.
Far off, the lights of the suppression camp hung low.
These were the same men who had surrounded the wall all night, shouting, yet not a single cough came from them now. Only the sound of torches crackling along the top of the wall could be heard.

Taikan’s gaze slipped briefly from the courtyard, swept across the dark ridge, and then came back.
He said nothing.
Harku stood with his hand resting on the hilt of his Dual Crescent Blades, lips pressed shut. The man who had laughed at the smell of blood did not laugh tonight.
Garkan stood with his arms folded, as still as stone. Only his eyes moved now and then, following the tip of the Clan Leader’s blade.
Serian watched without turning away.
She had never intended to go in and stop Aelak. She knew what kind of retribution was being carried out within that courtyard.
The Blade Scar carved into the shoulder of the Wooden Doll.
She had watched with her own eyes today how that deep groove had been carved into a living person’s body.
Her hands folded neatly in front of her skirt.
Only the breath leaving her lips bloomed white and then dispersed.
‘Sister.’
Her gray-blue eyes did not leave the courtyard.

Aelak rose to his feet.
Guang-jin’s limbs were dead. Frost had crusted over patches of his torso. Yet he still lived, there in the middle of the courtyard.
He had the shape of a man, but there was nothing a man could do with that body.
Aelak’s blade had ruthlessly raked across Guang-jin’s body, yet it had not touched a single vital point that could have killed him instantly.
“Kill me… please, kill me…”
The mouth that had begged to be spared now begged for death.
Aelak slid Beommyeongdo back into its sheath.
‘You’re not even worth a peaceful death.’
That was what Aelak’s eyes said.
He turned his back and walked away. He did not look behind him.

As he made his way out through the gap in the collapsed wall, no one spoke to him. Harku stepped aside without a word, and Serian’s eyes followed his back.
Aelak went to his horse’s side.
And waited.
The horse snorted low, and Aelak stood with his hand resting on its neck, not moving.

Somewhere in the distance came a sharp crack.
Between the shattering ice, a dark red blade slipped free and fell. It split the frozen ground and lodged there at an angle.
Clang.
Gwang-jin’s blade stood three paces away from its master.
Death did not come. Only the pain did.
Every breath made the torn flesh throb. The outer skin, frozen solid, was clamped tight by the ice. He would not bleed to death.
“Aaaah!”
Gwang-jin screamed as if he had lost his mind.
Whenever he tried to let go of his senses, the torn flesh flared with agony and jolted him back awake. He could neither sleep nor die.
Gwang-jin bit down on his tongue.
Something coppery burst inside his mouth. But before more than a few drops could pool, the blood froze right where it lay on his tongue.
The ice lodged throughout his body ran that deep. Only the tip of his tongue went numb and cold.
The roads to death closed one by one. I want to die, I don’t want to live like this, but… every moment of living would be agony.
One path to death still remained. It stood there, dark red, three paces away.
Gwang-jin rolled his eyes sideways to look at his own blade.
The dark red edge stood catching the ashen light of dawn.
A blade he had lived with his whole life. A blade that did nothing but take human lives. It had to take one more life before the end.
Gwang-jin moved.
Neither his arms nor his legs obeyed him, so he pushed forward like a worm, using only his jaw, shoulders, and torso.
An inch. Then another inch.
Wherever he crawled, a long dark red trail was left smeared across the ice dust.
Gwang-jin stopped halfway through his crawl.
He wanted to lie face down and let his mind slip away, but each time he tried, the pain rushed ahead of him. Only the road forward remained.
It took him the length of a meal to cover those three paces.
No one beyond the wall spoke. No one looked away. They watched him crawl with cold, merciless eyes.

Before the blade, Gwang-jin raised his head.
He clenched the steel between his teeth. The cold tip slid into his mouth. The edge that for thirty years had only received other people’s lives.
Without closing his eyes, Gwang-jin let the full weight of his body collapse forward.
One of the torches leaning over the wall swayed violently.
The ashen light of dawn was settling over the courtyard.
Shards of broken ice caught that light and glimmered faintly. In the middle of it all, a Blade Guest lay face down, the blade still clenched in his teeth.
No more sound came.
Gwihyeoldo Gwang-jin.
The Blade Guest who had ground men down was pinned through his own neck by his own blade and fell face down.
Aelak never cut him down in the end. There was no need to.

The second of the Eight Enemies had fallen that way. By his own hand.

At the Ice Sea Cliff, Aelak had waited for thirty years. At the end of that long wait, what he received were eight blade scars.
He would make them suffer exactly what they had made him suffer, and only then would he finish it.
That vow was no mere words. It came back to him with a far more vicious interest attached.

Only then did Aelak untie the Wooden Doll from his saddle.
The silver-haired woman lay across his two hands.
She was just as she had been, that profile he had seen at the Ice Sea Cliff thirty years ago.
The fan-shaped scars on her back were already covered in white. Beside them, a thick line cut across her shoulder had been carved in. The third scar.
Aelak laid his finger upon it.
Frost seeped out from the tip of his finger.
The frost crept along the carved groove, filling it with white and hardening there. Ice of the North Sea… Ice Crystal. It does not melt.
The line that had crossed her shoulder smoothed over and vanished.
Six scars now remained on the doll.
Aelak lifted his hand from the doll. Then he tied the woman’s wooden figure back onto the saddle.
The hand that pulled the knot was neither slow nor quick.
It seemed the hand of someone who had tied her down that way for thirty years.
His gray eyes lifted.
His gaze swept across the courtyard, past the Blade Guest lying face down with his blade between his teeth, past the collapsed wall, all the way to the ridge brightening gray with dawn.
Between the shadows of the trees on the ridge, a figure must be slipping away. From tree to tree, vanishing for a moment and reappearing again and again.
The old man who had fled first. The owner of the fourth scar.
His gray eyes snagged on that shadow once more.

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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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