North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 94

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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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94. The Formation Stilled

Dawn broke thick with fog.
While the others slept, Aelak slipped from the camp alone.
His feet sank into grass heavy with night dew.
Where he stepped, the earth’s warmth bled cold; the bitter freezing essence split the mist, then knitted it back together.
The wet grass blades made no sound as they brushed his ankles.
Darkness swallowed his outline slowly, deliberately.
Not even a whisper of breath.
The mist itself didn’t register his passing until after he’d gone.
“I go.”
A brief utterance cast into empty air.
The subordinates at his back believed their leader still lost in thought. He shared his mind with no one.
Serian’s precise calculation was simple: leave one guard behind while five tore through the formation.
A sound strategy.
Serian had devised it—a woman of the Fukoo Clan—so there was at least a fifty-fifty chance of success. But Aelak’s mathematics were different. Multiple minds meant movement slowed inevitably. He would not tolerate even a breath of delay. Did they really need five people to dismantle a formation? Serian had said that if you controlled the path itself, one person could be spared. Aelak twisted that principle to its absolute extreme.
‘If one man truly commands the way, one man is enough.’
To send many into danger meant needing comrades to guard your back, to break the illusions. It meant needing the weak.
But a man who would not be shaken by such phantoms? A man who bore no wounds from any blade-wind? Such a creature needed no packmates to guard his flank. To that predator, a formation array was merely a narrow hunting ground.
No one was fit to watch his back.
He saw it not as a weakness but as freedom. For thirty years in that place, he had survived without help from anyone.
Beyond the thick fog, the outer wall of Jeongal Sega revealed itself in eerie silhouette.
Shadow crept slowly across the wall in the early light.
An empty field before the wall.
Frost clung white to the tips of dead grass in the field.
There the Buk Dou Chil Sung Jin coiled like a sleeping beast. Seven energy nodes anchored it like cairns, watching the dawn.

Aelak stopped at the formation’s boundary.
A snare to throttle prey.

His eyes traced the seven nodes of the formation in sequence.
His breathing never wavered. The formation was intricate, but he understood that intricacy itself was weakness.
The sole Path of Life that Taikan had identified days ago.
‘Freeze from within. Halt the circuit’s core.’
Serian’s diagram drawn in the dirt—Aelak now overlaid their thinking perfectly onto the living formation before him.
‘Of course. The Fukoo truly see.’
Serian’s judgment had been sound. The point she’d marked was precisely the formation’s center. Difficult to strike, but…
Aelak’s calloused hand grasped the sword’s hilt.
His fingers slowly pressed into the familiar grip.
Whooooong…!
The Beokryeongdo, sensing its master’s murderous intent, howled like a beast within its sheath.
Shing!
The pitch-black blade tore through the mist and carved the air.
All their theories held merit. But Aelak chose a different method. A formation array… could be pierced without knowing how to break it.
Crack!
The moment the Beokryeongdo scored the formation’s outermost seam, the frost crystallized and the circuit split.
An illusion.
The warriors of Jeongal Sega had actually fallen back, but to Aelak’s eyes, a ferocious gale tore open.
The formation’s energy writhed like a serpent, rushing to seal the break. The dormant killing array stirred—that primal moment of awakening.
Aelak did not sheath his blade.
Boom!
Freezing essence poured from the Beokryeongdo. Intense, uncontrolled cold.
Not deliberately unleashed. The Beokryeongdo simply vibrated and bled it forth. Yet that chill alone was enough—the formation’s pathways began to ice over.

Crack!
Aelak’s eyes snapped open.
Eighteen warriors who had been holding their breath in the shadow of the wall burst forth as one.
The dawn air warmed instantly beneath their ragged breathing.
Each of them raised their weapons and stepped onto the critical nexus points of the formation array. Then—
Whirrrrr!
Using humans as sacrificial anchors, the formation began to spin with terrible force.
“Intruder!”
“The northern seam is broken! Activate the formation!”
“Deploy the Illusory Formation! Choke off his breath!”
Desperate shouts tore through the dawn.
Their voices served as the signal. Seven beams of light plummeted from the heavens.
Boom!
The pillars of light struck seven key points, and in an instant, wove heaven and earth into a taut web. The space twisted grotesquely, and within the formation, a mad tempest of blades began to howl.
Illusion upon illusion layered one atop the other.
Grotesque forms materialized along the wind’s trajectory.
Phantoms taking the shape of man or beast hurled themselves at Aelak from all directions, their wind-wrought blades intent on tearing his entire body to shreds.
For an ordinary warrior, it would end here. Eyes chasing phantoms, lost. Body shredded by blade-wind, dismembered.
A trapped mouse waiting to go mad and die of its own accord.
But this was Jeongal Sega’s fatal pride.
Crack!
Within the mist, Aelak’s gray eyes swept across that overwhelming killing intent just once. It was enough. Enough to move.
His expression was blank as a beast before its prey.
Thud. Thud.
Aelak took heavy, deliberate steps toward the heart of the formation.
Shear!
A blade of wind lunged for his shoulder.
Aelak didn’t so much as twitch. Just before the wind-blade touched flesh, the freezing essence coiled around him crystallized the wind itself.
The sharp wind dulled and crumbled, leaving only frost on his collar as it dispersed.
Screeeee!
A second killing thrust came for his ankle. But the ground he stood upon had already turned to ice, and the attack slipped uselessly away.
The blade of wind glanced off the frozen surface, and in that instant, colder essence gathered even more fiercely at his feet.
Now the illusion placed a figure before him.
Silver hair that shimmered, eyes of pale gray-blue. That sorrowful profile he had seen at the cliff’s edge of the Frozen Sea. Karani.
A formation array tears through the intruder’s depths and summons before him the being most deeply carved into his soul. Ordinarily, the blade would falter here, and in that moment of hesitation, a wind-blade would skewer his back.
But Aelak’s ashen eyes showed not the slightest tremor.
The illusion had drawn forth not someone he ‘ought to cut down,’ but the one he had ‘wished to protect’ until the very end. There was no reason to strike. No reason to draw his blade.
Aelak walked into the phantom.
The phantom’s sleeve brushed his shoulder. But he did not even spare it a glance.
Before that overwhelming indifference, the unbreakable illusion scattered like mist, hollow and weightless.
What should have been the most lethal assault on the mind was nothing but a scrap of paper before Aelak’s absolute solitude.

Wherever his foot fell, the formation’s mechanism twisted grotesquely out of true.
A trap opens and closes its paths to push the intruder inward. But Aelak’s footwork was always half a beat faster than the formation’s calculations. Where it tried to close, he had already stepped through; where it tried to open, he had already vanished.
“His feet are faster than the formation!”
“I said contain him! Block the escape routes!”
“We can’t! That madman is reading the flow of the circuit before we even execute it!”
“He’s breaking through every transformation single-handed! The center is exposed! Fill it, now!”
“I’ve never seen a monster like this! Never heard of one! The formation won’t take hold!”

Four formations made by eighteen warriors each—seventy-two warriors in total—flailed about in panic, desperation naked in their movements.
Their voices collided within the mist.
Not one of them remained composed. Fear thickened every shouted command. Orders crossed; footfalls trampled across each other’s paths.
They moved like madmen, spinning the formation faster than ever before. Yet they could not follow the absolute’s trajectory.

Aelak stopped.
Beneath his feet, he felt the vibration of the circuit thrashing wildly to restrain him—the instant when the knots loosened.
His ashen eyes pinpointed the exact gap in those loosening knots.
Slash!
The Beokryeongdo tore through the circuit’s critical seam.
Crack! Crack-crack-crack! Boom!
A fragment of the Formation shattered, and one of the seven pillars was torn from its roots. Four warriors guarding that junction vomited blood as they crashed into the earth.
It was a perfect dance of slaughter.
The blood of the fallen warriors froze instantly on the dawn frost.
His bladework was spare, without excess—each cut economical and lethal.
The Beokryeongdo sought only the weakest vital points in the circuit, and each time a node was severed, a pillar of light convulsed. Aelak was not cutting through people. He was breaking the Formation’s spine, one vertebra at a time.
The Formation thrashed instinctively, trying to seal the ruptures.
But Aelak was faster.
Before the gaps could mend, a second pillar shattered. The Formation always found itself one step behind him, flailing.

Deep terror settled over the eyes of Jeongal Sega’s warriors.
“Seal it! Seal the north side now!”
“The Formation is—it’s freezing! The nodes won’t connect!”
“We’re finished. He knows the entire pattern.”
“We have to run. That thing isn’t human.”
The Unbreakable Formation was being trampled without mercy.
The trap designed to imprison and strangle an intruder was instead being dismantled piece by piece, a catastrophic reversal as the invader tore it apart.
The doctrine of the Buk Dou Chil Sung Jin—generations of research and refinement, seven stars in concert to exhaust a master through attrition—was being utterly denied.
A single, monstrous force moved through the Formation not lost, but at ease as if in his own home, gutting its very essence.
The warriors could not believe what they witnessed: the Formation Technique refined over generations, the invincible array, crumbling like this.

Aelak finally pressed his blade into the circuit’s center.
Explosive freezing essence flowed from his fingertips, driving deep into the heart of the Formation.
Boom!
Ice flowers bloomed at every junction where the pillars of light should have extended.
Frost spread along the narrow veins of the circuit, bright white and inexorable.
The single Path of Life that Taikan had once held.
With the inner core frozen, the seven currents lost their retreat and became trapped.
A low, terrible rumble…!
The energy with nowhere to go compressed frantically toward the center point. The Formation’s enormous power, confined at one nexus, swelled as if ready to burst, then froze solid and cold.
When the core died, the great fortress collapsed.
A thunderous crash!
The Formation’s suppressed frenzy reversed and erupted outward.
Eighteen warriors sprayed blood as they scattered like falling leaves.
The humans controlling the Formation were crushed instead by the very power they had given it. The seven pillars of light that had soared as if piercing the heavens vanished in an instant.
The lingering echo of the collapsing circuit swept long across the field.
The overwhelming debris of destruction.

Aelak stood alone in the swirling dust.
Cold fog descended again, slowly, over what had become a wasteland.
The severed Formation screamed a terrible cry beneath his feet.
Those who had fallen did not rise, and the other layered, interlocking Formations fluttered like torn paper.
A deep hum…!
The pulse of killing intent fell completely silent.
Even the grinding gears of the mechanism froze with a sickly cold.
Jeongal Sega’s heart, completely still.
Aelak’s ashen eyes cut serenely through the fog that hung in the center of the dead Formation.

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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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