North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 58

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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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58. Retribution

Atop the Western Hill.
The Ssangado caught the light, gleaming. Both blades had already absorbed the dawn’s frost and turned a deep, cold blue, and from the end of the hilt drifted the faint smell of dried leather.
He gazed down at the Plains.
Below, a dark-crimson carpet of corpses spread wide. At its center, near the Rock Crevice Entrance, six figures stood. One pair of grey eyes stared directly up at the hill.
The Lord worked his left shoulder backward, testing it.
A month-old stiffness rasped from deep inside his shoulder blade.
The scar left by that North Sea chieftain’s Beommyeongdo—four exchanges’ worth. The strike hadn’t reached bone, but a nerve had snapped then.
Even now, whenever dawn came, that place woke first.
The Lord spoke to himself.
‘Today I’ll plant my blade in your shoulder. Every dawn, it’ll ache just like mine does.’
There was no frenzy in him. No rage.
Only a simple hunger, the way dry saliva pools in a stray dog’s mouth.
His confidence had grounds. He had endured Aelak’s four exchanges and withdrawn alive.
A stray dog that survives the first bite knows the angle of the second. It remembers where the first wound opened, which way the opponent’s weight shifted, which edge of its own blade came too late—the body remembers all of it.
And hanging from the saddle strap were ears. Twenty-three of them.
Twenty-three he had cut and strung there himself.
The space for the twenty-fourth ear still hung empty. It had been reserved for the North Sea chieftain.
His body already knew: he could not defeat this man. Yet he would not withdraw—it was the stray dog’s nature. Even dying, it bites. It tears off an ear and carries it away.
Beneath the shell of reason, dry hunger stirred awake.
The Lord pointed down the slope with his left-hand Ssangado.
Twenty of the Guard began to descend the slope slowly, following the gesture.
No sound of hoofbeats rose.
Earth already trampled by more than a thousand pressed down in silence. It was the descent of beasts.

Rock Crevice Entrance.
Aelak watched quietly, Beommyeongdo in his grip.
His grey eyes moved from the Lord on the hill to the trail of the twenty Guard descending the slope to the three hundred seventy horsemen reforming their ranks on the Plains.
Three separate movements overlapped into a single map inside his eyes.
A stir came from behind. Four subordinates and Serian.
Taikan opened his mouth low.
“Twenty Guard descending. Main force: three hundred seventy remaining. Regrouping in progress.”
That was all the words there were. The count was exact, stripped of excess. Taikan knew: what took five words could be cut to two.
Aelak did not answer. Only his hand remained still on the Beommyeongdo’s hilt.

Serian stepped half a pace forward from her position at the mouth of the western path.
It was her place now.
She had simply moved one foot further in.
Her grey-blue eyes swept across the twenty Guard descending the slope, then turned back toward Aelak’s back. But she said nothing.
Her right hand shifted the Unseol to a reverse grip.
Palm upturned, blade pressed flat against the inner arm.
The Selyajeom.
The Huku Tribe woman’s rite of the sword—a traditional form passed down through her grandmother’s line.
Along the blade of the Unseol flowed the fine frost-filaments of Binggyeoltugi. The blade’s surface clouded with rime, then cleared again.
A single breath stilled late at her shoulder’s edge.
That exhale—the same one Grandmother Kun had drawn during the rite’s final moment. It came again now, across the Unseol’s blade.
In this instant, Serian was the Huku Tribe’s Number One. The first of their women warriors.
A different temperature settled over her face.
The softness she showed before Aelak folded away, retreating inward. In its place rose the cold, composed face of a warrior woman.
Serian checked the knot at her waist. The metal ornament chimed faintly.
The preparations were complete.

Among the subordinates, Harku made the first sound.
He pressed close against Garkan, baring his teeth. He hefted both Ssangarados at once.
Clang!
Blood dripped.
“Brother, of those three hundred seventy, what’s my share?”
He laughed like a child.
Garkan didn’t answer. The last strand of the Bingcheolsae. He swept away a clot of dried blood clinging to it with the flat of his palm.
The chain links scraped across his lifeline.
That single motion answered for him.
Your share is yours to decide.
Behind him, Arko and Taikan dispersed to their positions.
Arko seized the Dokbi, while Taikan drew his bowstring lightly to his ear and released it.
Neither man spoke.

Twenty Guard spilled into the edge of the Plains.
Serian moved first. The reversed blade of Unseol cut upward along the first mounted soldier’s throat, and blood sprayed in a line through the dawn light.
Her hands were ice-cold.
Using the upward momentum of Unseol, her left hand loosened the sash at her waist. Unseol and sash wheeled together, their arcs merging into one trajectory.
Selyajeom Third Form and Seolpyeon Thirteen Chain.
The sash traced thirteen separate paths like snow flakes splitting apart, and Unseol wove serpent-like through the thirteen gaps between them.
The front rank of five Guard fell simultaneously.
One lost his neck, another his shoulder, another his saddle strap.
Martial prowess surpassing squad leaders—the twenty Guard, the Lord’s strongest men, were swept away like withered leaves in a single gust.
Shrieeek! Bang!
Frost descended onto Unseol’s blade and froze the blood that had sprayed up. The metal ornaments of the sash chimed in the air before scattering.
Serian’s expression didn’t change.
‘Whoever raises a blade against Aelak becomes my enemy.’

Garkan’s Bingcheolsae rang out heavily toward the three hundred seventy cavalry.
Whirrrr!
The sound of chain cutting through air. He spoke no words beyond that.
Harku’s Ssangarado carved through the mounted soldiers.
“Brother! This side is magnificent!”
Laughter scattered across the Plains.
As Arko’s Dokbi flowed on the southwest wind, seventeen cavalry lost their reins and doubled over in their saddles.
Taikan’s arrows flew in silence. Then, three hundred paces distant, a single mounted officer commanding the main force tilted silently from his saddle and fell.
The cavalry never knew who had fired.
Four men, four ways of living, laid down four sounds across the Plains.
Aelak heard those sounds only through his back.
He walked straight through the corpse-field. Toward the Lord. In a direct line.

Dust rose slightly around his ankles and settled. A frozen corpse caught against his foot. He didn’t avoid it, merely brushed past.
The Lord was already halfway down the slope.
One judgment passed through the gray inside Aelak’s eyes.
The Lord… not coming to die. Coming to tear at him. Eyes that had lived fifty years, eyes that had seen countless enemies, read that truth.
Forty paces. Thirty paces. Twenty paces.
Behind him, he heard Serian’s Unseol cut through another Guard. To the side, Harku’s laugh. The flowing sound of the Bingcheolsae.
Aelak didn’t look back. His gaze never left the Lord.
Twenty paces ahead, the Lord opened his mouth for the first time.
His voice was parched and low.
“One month, Aelak.”
After a breath, he continued.
“Do you remember the scar you left on my shoulder?”
The Lord tapped his left shoulder. The bone beneath was still healing; the sound came out dull.
“Today your shoulder tastes the blade.”
There was no frenzy. No emotion. Only the dry hunger of a Stray Dog rode beneath his parched voice.
Screech!
Behind him, Serian’s Selyajeom cut sharp and sudden. The sound of snow flakes shattering.
The Lord didn’t hear it. His ears were open to Aelak alone.
His right hand, gripping the Ssangado, trembled ever so slightly.
A technique long waited for was already rising first through his muscles.
Aelak quietly took up the Beommyeongdo.
Crack!
Aelak’s grip was firm, his thumb and index finger locked around the hilt at the second knuckle. His breathing remained steady, his expression unmoved.
Then he touched his left shoulder.
It was a brief motion. Less than a single breath.
Yet a vast span of time was compressed into that one gesture.
A man who had endured four exchanges and escaped. A man who had never stopped weighing Aelak in the balance ever since. All the rancor and hatred he carried, all the weight the Lord possessed—he pressed it into his palm and released it.
The Lord watched that hand.
One corner of his mouth hardened, barely perceptible.
Before that rigidity could reach his jaw, it receded. For the first time, a single drop of a different temperature mixed itself into the Stray Dog’s hunger.
It was not fear. It was acknowledgment of existence.
Acknowledgment of that bitter truth: before this North Sea chieftain, he was nothing more than a fist clenched and opened.
Aelak raised the Beommyeongdo, pointing it at the Lord.

Screech!
The Lord brought his Ssangado down.
Both blades at once—from upper left to lower right, from upper right to lower left, crossing trajectories. Where the two edges met was precisely the spot where Aelak’s left shoulder wound lay. The Thunder Strike Third Form.
A technique he had been saving for a long time.
His right index finger wound tight around the hilt leather to the very end. The last rational decision of a beast lay concentrated there.
On the boundary between slope and plain.
Dust rose into the dawn air.
Aelak advanced his left foot diagonally, perhaps half a span. In the same instant, the Beommyeongdo flashed.
The first draw.
Bingseom Horizontal Single Strike.
A single line of ice-blue sword light pierced through the gap between the Lord’s crossed Ssangado. Though the space between the two blades measured less than an inch, the Beommyeongdo’s trajectory passed through it with absolute precision.
Thud!
The blade touched the Lord’s left shoulder. Exactly where he himself had provoked it.
The sound of skin tearing was brief.
Crack!
The sound of a single line of bone breaking.
The Beommyeongdo carried the Frost Power of Bingseom. That cold sank deep into the Lord’s shoulder, creating several fragments of ice within.
One fragment shattered inside his collarbone; another fell beneath his Blood Wind Robe and left a thin layer of frost on the earth.
“Ugh…”
The Lord’s left Ssangado tumbled from his hand.
The nerves in his left arm were already severed. The blade embedded itself halfway into the dirt beside his foot, standing at an angle, its hilt rising above.
His right hand still gripped the other Ssangado, but it was already too late to counterattack.
The Lord’s upper body bent forward, his knees striking earth. Yet he revealed no pain. He laughed as though nothing had happened.
“Fast as always.”
The Lord tried to rise using his broken left arm.
He pushed off the ground with his knees, twisting his torso to force himself upright.
“Ack!”
He had barely risen before his mouth opened.
The Beommyeongdo had struck the shoulder, but the Frost Power that burrowed through the shoulder into his energy meridians caused severe internal injury.
A stream of blood that had burst inside his throat spilled outward.
He did not swallow the blood that flowed. He spat it out like saliva, flinging it toward Aelak’s feet.
A crimson drop marked the earth.
Dawn light settled on that red point for a moment.
Then the Lord bared his teeth.
He clamped the Ssangado in his right hand between his teeth. He had judged his hand’s grip insufficient. He bit the leather strap hanging from the hilt’s end.
Hand, teeth, and right shoulder.
He seized the blade at three points and wound the strap around his wrist.
There was no madness in it. Only the savage determination of a starving Stray Dog converting every remaining part of his body into a weapon.
That was right. The Lord did not believe he could defeat Aelak, or kill him. If only he could land a single blade strike…
At that moment his body swayed and a knot in the Saddle Strap came undone.
Twenty-three severed ears spilled onto the earth.
One of them rolled to his blood-stained mouth and came to rest. The Lord did not look at it. His teeth clenched only upon his sword’s leather strap.
Twenty-three ears of others… a symbol of pride that had been.
His eyes never left Aelak’s face.
Then, from the Lord’s mouth as he tied the strap, three characters escaped.
“Wu.”
“Ka.”

“Ra…”
Nothing more came. Before the next syllable could escape his throat, blood pooling deep in his lungs choked off the words.
A flicker of meaning crossed his eyes, then drowned again beneath the hunger of a Stray Dog.
The client’s name.
He knows he cannot finish this alone. So he means to drown everything Karani possesses—even Bing Gong itself—in blood.
Aelak’s gray eyes did not miss those three syllables.
In the farthest depths of those eyes, where dawn’s light could never reach, something stirred and passed.
Too thin to call anger, too heavy to call curiosity.
Aelak lowered the tip of the Beommyeongdo slightly.

The far edge of the Plains.
Serian severed the throat of the last Guard.
Twenty Guard lay as corpses along the edge of the Plains. The Unseol’s blade flickered through the air, shaking off horse blood.
The blood that fell to the earth turned to frost and scattered.
Harku’s mad laughter rang from behind—still crushing mounted warriors. Garkan’s Bingcheolsae flowed heavy with momentum.
The column, robbed of its command rider, could not hold formation. Those trying to retreat collided head-on with those charging forward.
Those who saw the Lord kneel lost their sense of direction.
The black eagle banner snapped and fell to the ground.
The flagpole broke like dried bone. The banner sprawled diagonally across the earth. The eagle’s beak lay turned toward the dust.
Three hundred seventy dwindled to two hundred. Two hundred shrank to one hundred fifty. The last one hundred twenty-seven wheeled their mounts west.
Flight.
His four subordinates did not pursue them.
“One hundred twenty-seven mounted riders remaining. Fleeing west.”
Taikan spoke as though it were someone else’s affair.
Three thousand departed the North Sea. Only one hundred twenty-seven returned—a catastrophic defeat.
The gate had collapsed.
The dawn dust began to settle. In the settling haze, the figure of the Lord balanced on a single knee grew only more vivid.

The Lord still held himself on one knee.
This was not the picture he had imagined. Take a few blade strikes, deliver one cut and it ends. Lose his limbs, and he could still wield one blade. Could the wolf of the North Sea not manage even that?
But then—with that shoulder strike came a Frost Power that broke all his movement.
As if torn apart by a razor-sharp blade, he could not stir.
His left arm, shattered.
The Ssangado caught between his teeth.
Blood flowing from his mouth.
In that posture, he looked toward Aelak. His upper body convulsed once more, desperate to strike back. But his body would not obey.
Aelak did not finish him.
He pushed the Beommyeongdo halfway into its sheath. The blade’s tip caught halfway inside.
He stepped back about six paces from the Lord.
The first white light of dawn began to enter from the eastern edge of the Plains.

Serian walked toward him.
As she walked, she sheathed the Unseol. The frozen fighting power scattered like frost from her arm.
The aura of the Selyajeom settled down one layer.
Her gait was still that of a warrior woman—straight, precise.
But starting five paces away, that gait began to change, bit by bit. The strength drained from her feet, and her shoulders lowered.
The boundary between warrior and devoted wife.
In that half-breath of transformation, her face changed from cold certainty to warmth.
Serian saw the Blood Wind Robe on Aelak.
The left shoulder.
The place Aelak had just covered with his palm. There, a single drop of the Lord’s blood clung to it—spattered from the last exchange of blades.
Her hand rose first.
She smoothed the wrinkle in the Blood Wind Robe. With assurance. Without shame.
It was the gesture of a woman tending to her husband.
Yet before her hand moved, she looked first into his eyes. Shyness rose in those blue-gray depths, lingering briefly at the edge of his ear.
Serian’s hand stilled once more above the Blood Wind Robe.
The power flowing through her fingertips was not the Frost Power of the Selyajeom. The lingering warmth of a Huku Tribe woman seeped through the cloth.
She spoke softly.
“Are you hurt?”
The warrior woman’s face had already vanished.
Aelak looked at her.
Aelak’s grey eyes, too, held a different temperature than usual.
Beneath the shell of an indifferent absolute being, a hairline fracture passed through. He spoke not, his expression barely stirred—yet his eyes were fixed on Serian’s hand.
He did not answer.
Instead, his hand rose without feeling and took hers. A single finger lingered on the back of her hand for one breath.
“Karani.”
The word came from Aelak’s lips.
Just now—Aelak had glimpsed Karani’s visage somewhere within Serian’s form.
Serian did not betray disappointment.
Aelak soon recognized his mistake, and withdrew his hand. It descended, grasping the Beommyeongdo. His grey eyes turned back toward the Lord behind him.
His grey eyes returned once more to the Lord in the rear.

The Lord still held himself up on a single knee. The Ssangado caught between his teeth. Another line of blood trickled from his mouth.
Within that blood, the Lord’s lips moved.
What neither Aelak nor Serian, nor the four subordinates, had yet heard.
“Of Mukara’s…”
Before the next syllable could escape his lips, a white light of dawn spread across the Plains.
Over the black eagle standard. Over the carpet of corpses. Over the frozen shoulders of a hundred silver-grey forms. And over the Lord’s lips.
That white light swallowed the shape of the Lord’s words.
The scene slowly dissolved into white light.

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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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