North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 93

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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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93. The Eve of Reckoning

One day before the final battle, on the Ridge.
The Dissolution Diagram of the Big Dipper Seven Star Formation that Serian had sketched in the dirt had burned itself perfectly into the minds of every warrior.
Which checkpoint to seal, which gate to pierce toward the heart—they had rehearsed their movement paths dozens of times before closing their eyes, embedding them in muscle and bone.
This final night held only that single task.
The campfire had faded to ash-gray, and the scrub forest below the Ridge lay dark as spilled ink.
Yet the gaze licking down their spines felt particularly heavy tonight.
“They’ve stopped.”
Taikan kept his eyes fixed on the Ridge’s edge, his voice a low rumble.
“Jegal Sega’s people crept right up to the foot of the wall, then withdrew.”
That shadow-like presence that had clung to them for days—as the night of reckoning approached, the enemy’s tail had tightened to a razor’s edge.
Taikan swept the darkened grassland with his Thousand-Li Vision, leaving nothing unseen.
A human shoulder flickered into focus, then melted like smoke into the grass-shade. Chase, and it would vanish. Lower your guard, and it would stick to you again, slick as oil. This one was dangerously skilled at surveillance.
“Lost them again.”
No excuses. The distance was damnably far, and that bastard knew how to bury his presence in dirt like a viper.
Taikan’s hand tightened on the bowstring, then slowly relaxed. The bowstring still slept at his fingertips.
“The range.”
Garkan asked.
“Beyond a mile. Past the scrub forest at the Ridge’s edge. If we chase, he’ll catch our scent and bolt like a fox… It’s impossible.”
Taikan drew the bow from his back and plucked the string taut.
But the target lay far beyond effective range.
An unbearable position—a bow in hand that could not shoot.
This same dance of breath and waiting had repeated for days.
Wounded, Garkan dragged his leg toward the campfire.
Fresh wounds and half-healed scars clung to his body in a patchy mess.
The firelight licked those scars red, then buried them again in shadow.
“He’s been tailing us like a label for days without showing his teeth once. What’s the game? If he was going to bolt when cornered, why crawl right up to the wall in the first place?”
“He’s not here for our necks.”
Taikan’s gaze still bored into the Ridge’s end.
“He’s here to watch. To see how we rip apart Jegal Sega’s people. To steal our method.”
The group’s faces hardened like clay.
A direct blade was easier to face. But a watcher—one who lurked like a voyeur—was a hundred times more vicious. Kill him, and the intelligence burning in his eyes would already have escaped somewhere else.

The battle could not be stopped.
Dawn was already near.
They could not waste the hours meant for breaking the formation on hunting a single spy.
But Serian knew better than anyone how mad it was—crawling into the Four Gates with a blade at your back.
Serian knelt before the campfire.
Her hand, which had been toying with Silver Snow, stilled… and cool words cut through her lips.
“I don’t know what that rat means to see, but we won’t let him see it properly. We could plant a blade in his back the moment we emerge from the Four Gates.”
“True. Inside the Four Gates, there’s no room to worry about what’s behind you. One slip and it’s straight to hell.”
“For him, the moment we stumble out bleeding is the moment his mouth waters the most. It’s always nagged me—shouldn’t we take that bastard’s neck right now?”
Harkoo surged to his feet as if ready to charge out that instant.
Serian shook her head firmly.
“We don’t have the time. He’s watching us even now. The moment we start chasing, he’ll vanish like smoke again. We’ve been toyed with for days already.”
“So we don’t catch the rat, and we don’t break the formation. Both hands come up empty.”
“That’s why we run two games at once. Leave one person behind to deal with him, and the rest crack the formation as planned.”
“If we pull one person out, won’t we be short a piece inside the formation?”
“A formation doesn’t break from raw numbers. If the core that cuts the path stays, one person missing won’t matter. Outside, one is enough.”
Serian’s finger tapped a point on the Dissolution Diagram scratched in the dirt. This passage would hold even if they pulled one piece.
“Catching that spy is just as crucial as breaking the formation. Whoever wove this dirty game, however much he’s seen—that determines who holds our noose next.”
“If we let him slip, we fight with our backs flayed open, even after breaking the formation?”
“Exactly.”
“…The Fukoo Clan woman’s predictions have never been wrong.”
Garkan loosened the Bing Chul Swae and clicked his tongue.
If they didn’t claw out the eyes at their backs, they’d pay the price for breaking through. Whether it was a blade in the spine or a sword across the throat.

Aelak listened in silence throughout.
Sitting alone in the darkness that fell beyond the campfire, he stared into the black with ashen eyes.
From that place where firelight could not reach, he listened to no one’s words—only measured the darkness itself.
Serian looked from one to the next of the four, her gaze finally settling on Taikan.
The warriors’ eyes snapped toward Taikan in unison.
Before a single word was spoken, all of them understood intuitively who would remain at the Formation Interior.
“Taikan. Stay behind.”
“But my role is critical—”
“The plan was to break the formation without the clan leader, but now you must step forward too. Let me explain. Even if you refuse to go, there’s another way.”
“Understood. So be it.”
Taikan’s bow was erased from the final stage where Jegal Sega would be torn apart.
Remaining behind to sever the shadow’s breath in secret—a mission shrouded in darkness.
Taikan offered no protest. The reason he had to stay was buried in that nauseating darkness at the edge of the Ridge.
“Elder brother, can we catch that bastard with a bow?”
At those words, Taikan spoke coldly.
“The distance is far too great. Only one chance. By the time I nock a second arrow, he’ll already be gone.”
The mere whisper of the bowstring would make the enemy instinctively leap away. The first arrow must strike before he detects anything, and the moment it embeds, it must pierce his heart.
“There’s no way to bind him and drag him back alive?”
“At this distance, a live capture is a luxury. Knocking him off the Ridge is difficult enough.”
Taikan cut short Garkan’s words.

In that moment, he sketched a perfect firing solution in his mind.
The wind moves across the Ridge from east to west. The arrow’s impact will drift a half-span to the left—the slope’s angle tilts that way.
Taikan pointed a finger toward the scrubland at the Ridge’s end.
Where the bastard stood yesterday, where he stood days ago. No matter how meticulous he is, he must rely on terrain. He will return to the same place.
Taikan’s gaze dissected the darkness like a blade.
Between rock and shrub, there were exactly three blind spots where he could plant his feet.
‘Once I eliminate the two already exposed positions, only one hiding place remains.’
He selected that sole killing point in advance.
Now he waited only for the bastard to step willingly into the Death Line.
As wind swept through the scrubland once, somewhere in the darkness a dry branch trembled faintly.

The dawn of the final battle closed in, suffocating.
The warriors finished their final checks, honing their weapons.
Garkan gripped his blood-stained leg and rewound the Bing Chul Swae around it.
Each time the cold metal grazed the torn flesh, his temples flared. The iron chain that had wound taut from his little finger hesitated—whether from pain or stubbornness.
Serian pressed two fingers into a pressure point on his leg.
“The flesh hasn’t set yet. If you stumble in the middle of the Formation Interior, that will be your grave.”
“It would be troublesome to speak of graves over one ruined leg. I’m not that fragile.”
“Yes, Garkan.”
Serian withdrew her fingers without pressing further.
She knew this was a man who would not listen to reason.
The Aelak Tribe views retreat from battle as shame. They are warriors who choose death by an enemy’s blade over healing from wounds.
Monsters who forget the pain of flesh itself.
Garkan cinched the Bing Chul Swae brutally tight. A body torn and shredded while raging like a monster through Mazeon. Scars took time to heal, but this warrior could not bear even a moment without a weapon in his hands—that dishonor was unbearable.
“Elder brother, try not to fumble this time. If you collapse in the middle of the formation, I’ll have to carry that massive frame of yours and flee.”
Harkoo chuckled, wiping his Twin Halberd Swords against the grass.
Garkan’s eyes flipped savage.
“There will be nothing to carry. Just keep your own neck intact, boy.”
“But you got carried last time.”
“What did you say!”
He bristled at the jab—yet the youngest’s gaze remained fixed on his brother’s blood-soaked leg.
Serian said nothing more to restrain him.
To tell that madman to rest would be a heavier shackle than death itself.

Aelak withdrew from the campfire and melted back into the darkness.
His gray eyes pierced through the savage formation encircling Jegal Sega.
Beyond that cursed barrier, one of the eight enemies who had silenced Karani’s breath lay hidden.
That terrible wound where eight weapons had been driven into a single point.
How many of them there were mattered little. If his enemy lurked in this darkness, at dawn’s first light he would slit that bastard’s throat and be done.
In his ashen eyes there was neither rage nor urgency—only the Intent to Kill, deep and heavy as a frozen river, settling in their depths.
“Get some rest, even if it’s just a moment.”
At Aelak’s terse command, the warriors lay down on the ground one by one.
“Won’t you sleep, brother?”
Harkoo asked, stretching out on his back.
Taikan still gazed toward the ridge’s end as though he meant to devour it with his eyes.
“I’ll stay awake until dawn. While you tear through the Formation Interior, I’ll guard your backs.”
Only Taikan remained kneeling, bow drawn toward the ridge’s edge. Taut as the bowstring, the Intent to Kill swelled through the night air like it might split the darkness in two.

* * *

In an Isolated Village a horse’s length away from the ridge.
Cheok Ha-rin tossed and turned with a nameless unease before finally venturing out to the courtyard.
In the cold spring night air, she caught a strange whiff of frost that seemed to burrow through her very bones.
Without thinking, her head snapped toward the north.
Toward the ridge where Aelak’s party had entered the Formation Interior.
She couldn’t fathom why that direction kept drawing her attention. It was maddening.
She’d abandoned the eastern path toward Hwashan, yet every night her mind turned to the northern darkness. Where a man with cool gray eyes dwelt.
Cheok Ha-rin wrapped her arms around herself.
Goosebumps rose along her spine and wouldn’t fade, as though the night itself were a living thing.
Thump.
Her chest went cold, and her body was drawn northward as if by a magnet.
In just these few days, those ashen eyes and that biting chill had coiled themselves tight around her heart. And she found herself wanting—constantly wanting—to see him.
Thump, thump, thump.
Her heart beat unnaturally loud and heavy.
A sensation she’d never experienced before, yet somehow as disturbingly familiar as a memory from a past life.
A name—strange, unpleasant—clung to her mind like a leech.
A name she’d never heard spoken, never read in any book, yet merely breathing it aloud felt as though her heart would tear itself to shreds.
“I’m losing my mind. Why is this so familiar?”
Ha-rin murmured toward the darkness.
Her heart thundered once more, and her entire body tensed northward, pulled taut as a bowstring.
“What are you, really? Why do you keep burrowing into my mind? Are you there? Can you hear my voice?”
Questions scattered into empty air. There was no answer.
The north wind tore roughly through her hair and passed on.
Beneath that wind-swept sky, Cheok Ha-rin uttered that cursed name—carefully at first, then with terrible, crystalline clarity.
“Karani…”

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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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