The God-Possessed Swordsmanship Genius - Chapter 39

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 39: The Swordsman Blessed by a God

Allen couldn’t believe his ears.
Familiar with the sword arts?
In that instant, a form unfolded from Allen’s blade.

Seongsin Style, First Form.
Bora.

Clang!

Ma-in’s legs wobbled as he took the blow. But only for a moment. Staggering on unsteady footing, he hurled a burst of sword qi.
It flashed above his head and came down like lightning. Allen stepped through Baekryeonbo, slipping swiftly backward.

-Seongsin Style. You’re a direct disciple of Bishuken.

‘You know Seongsin Style?’

-You dare call that a question?

The Demon Sword’s voice rang inside his skull.

-Then don’t tell me you have no idea who I am.

‘Who you are…?’

That was when it happened.
The blade that had been sweeping toward him from Ma-in’s hand stopped in midair.
It wasn’t only Ma-in’s sword that stopped.

‘Huh?’

Allen’s blade, his squadmates, and the unknown enemies they’d been fighting, all of it froze.
As if time itself had stopped, everything went still.
The only thing that moved
was Allen’s consciousness, drifting aimlessly.

‘What is this?’

Only a moment ago, he’d been locked in combat with Ma-in, hadn’t he?
And yet now.
A completely different landscape spread out before Allen’s eyes.

While his consciousness floated about.
A battlefield burning on every side stretched out before him.

Hwaraaara.

Blazing fire roared red, the earth was ground to pulp, and the sky was smothered in dark red smoke, hidden from view.
Allen had seen a scene like this once before.

‘Magyeong?’

Aside from the blood-red sky stained by the flames, the scene was familiar.
Magyeong.
Long ago, the land of demonic beasts where Allen had once stayed.
There was no doubt this was that place.

Thud.

And in the middle of it all.
A presence appeared, shaking the ground with a heavy thud.
The tremor was loud, but the figure itself was small.
It was a Demon, half-naked, its skin flushed a fiery red.
He couldn’t sense any aura from it.
Yet Allen could tell that this was no ordinary Demon.

‘At least Ten-Great-Demon class.’

The high-ranking Demon standing on the burning ground looked far stronger than most of the Demons Allen had faced.
And right before that Demon, a young swordsman appeared.

‘…?’

The first thing that caught Allen’s eye was the swordsman’s back.
Broad shoulders. A straight spine. Even the way he held his sword.
The moment he saw that back, Allen’s heart dropped like a stone.

‘Father?’

For a moment, looking at the man, Allen was reminded of his father in his younger days.
They looked alike.
Very much so.
But on closer inspection, they weren’t exactly the same.

‘No. He’s someone else.’

The man was not his father.
Still, the resemblance was so strong that one might have mistaken them for father and son.
In that instant, a row of statues lining the Path of the Sword surfaced in Allen’s mind.
The oldest of them all, standing at the very end.

‘…The First Head of the Family?’

The man was none other than the First Head of the Bishuken, Hekate Bishuken.
The prodigious swordsman who had founded Bishuken fifteen hundred years ago.
And he had appeared alone in Magyeong.

Hekate advanced toward the Demon.
Wherever he had been wounded, his body was covered in injuries.
Yet despite that, Hekate’s steps were steady. As though nothing was wrong at all, he walked on and stopped in front of the Demon.
Hekate and the Demon stood at a measured distance from each other.

“…………….”
“……….”

The two exchanged some words.
The content of their conversation was inaudible.
The Demon’s face was expressionless, and Hekate’s face, turned away, could not be seen.
How long they talked, Allen couldn’t say.

Swish.

Hekate slowly raised his sword.
The tip of his blade trembled faintly. He was clearly not in perfect condition.

Crack!

The ground beneath him split apart, and Hekate’s body shot forward toward the Demon.
Allen studied Hekate’s sword closely.
True to the first head of the Bishuken, he unleashed Seongsin Style. Seongsin Style was the swordsmanship Hekate himself had devised.

But why?
Following the arc of Hekate’s blade with his eyes, Allen thought.

‘It’s different.’

From the very first motion of raising the sword to the moment the technique unfolded.
Hekate’s sword was both similar to and different from the Seongsin Style Allen knew.
It wasn’t simply faster or stronger.

Kwaaaah!

First Form, Bora.

He had performed this form thousands, tens of thousands of times, across both his past life and this one.
Yet it was different.
At first, he couldn’t tell what exactly had changed in the same form.
To his eyes, it looked like the same technique, but his instincts screamed that it wasn’t.
Hekate’s Bora grazed past the demon’s arm.
Then Hekate moved on to the next form.

Second Form, Sonagi.

Sshhaaaak!

Allen’s mouth fell open.
Rain poured down from the sky. But it was not the Sonagi Allen knew.
Sword Qi scattered and fell like rain, that much was the same. But each drop of Sword Qi chased the demon’s movements as if it were alive.
His own Sonagi had poured down in only one direction.

The next form that followed was no different.
Hekate’s Neoul surged forward and pressed the demon back. Just as a wave wraps around a sandcastle, Hekate’s Neoul scattered the demon’s Demonic Energy.
If his own Neoul pushed against a wall, this man’s Neoul was like a tidal wave.

‘What’s the difference?’

Allen did not believe he had learned Seongsin Style wrong.
Even without the ability to use Mana, he had spent his entire life striving to pour the Seongsin Style swordsmanship into his blade.
The same went for the Oral Formulas.
He had memorized them without the slightest error, over and over again. To the point where he could wield the sword with his eyes closed, and recite the formulas even when he woke from sleep.
And yet, why?

That was when the voice reached him.

-The root of the sword is one, but its branches are infinite.

A voice belonging neither to the Demon Sword nor to the question mark.
He had never heard it before, yet it didn’t feel unfamiliar. Allen realized whose voice it was.
It was the voice of Hekate, the first head of the family, who was fighting right over there.

-The wind pushes, the water embraces. If you have learned to cut by pushing, know that there is also a way to sever by embracing.

It was an Oral Formula.
The Oral Formula itself shared the same skeleton as the Seongsin Style Oral Formula Allen knew. But there was a difference in the flesh that clothed it.

-Push force from the heart all the way to the sword’s tip, but don’t push it all the way through; let it flow. The body does not wield the sword. Rather, the guidance of upper-stage Mana flows downward…

Allen strained to listen.
Not a single moment could be missed. This was a chance that would not come twice.
His focused mind drew in the Oral Formula. At the same time, his eyes stayed fixed on the fight before him, between Hekate and the demon.
Each time the Oral Formula flowed onward, Hekate’s forms unfolded. It looked as though he were demonstrating the forms exactly as the Oral Formula described them.

-At the end of Bora lies Sonagi, and at the end of Sonagi lies Neoul. Only when they link together without a break does what comes next exist.

Allen shuddered violently.
It was exactly the Oral Formula he needed right now.
A shiver ran down his body. A thrill rippled through him.

In that moment, Allen felt that he had reached the Fifth Stage of Seongsin Style.

But he had no time to savor the joy.
Allen committed the Oral Formula to memory, and then again. He could not afford to lose a single word.
The Oral Formula kept flowing on.

* * *

Ma-in, who was swinging his sword at Allen, felt something strange.
At some point, Allen’s eyes had gone empty.
It hadn’t been a long stretch of time.
Yet it was hard to call that the gaze of someone locked in a fight between life and death.

‘Is he thinking about something else?’

His face looked like his soul had wandered off somewhere else.
He had blocked and dodged on reflex, but that was all.
Allen made no attempt to counterattack. It was as if every nerve in him had narrowed to the single task of protecting himself.
When Main thought about why, only one reason came to mind.

‘He’s worried about the main force.’

The main force that had gone off to find the fake Demon Sword.
Worrying over them had sent his mind somewhere else entirely.

‘A chance.’

Ma-in’s eyes glinted.
At first he had wondered whether this was a ploy to lure him into letting his guard down, but if so, there had been several openings for a counterattack already.
In that case, the opportunity was on his side.

Clench.

Ma-in let go of the hand he had been pressing against his wound.
The sword was gripped in both hands.
In the next instant, Sword Qi surged from Ma-in’s blade.

[Yeoljo Geom]

Whoooosh!

A pitch-black surge of Sword Qi flew at Allen’s head like a set of claws.
Just as the Sword Qi was about to sever Allen’s neck.

‘Got him!’

Fwip!

Allen’s head snapped back, and he moved with startling speed.
Allen slid smoothly backward, away from the strike.
In that instant, Ma-in lost sight of Allen’s movements.
His movements had changed noticeably from just moments before. It was as if he had become a different person.

‘He suddenly got faster.’

Ma-in, who had pushed himself to launch that Sword Qi, winced.
Thanks to the strength of Demonic Transformation, his tolerance for pain had grown, but even so, the agony was far from trivial.
Just holding back the sensation of his torn wound’s insides trying to spill out demanded considerable stamina and concentration.

“Whew, I nearly died there.”

That was when Allen finally spoke.
As though he could only now draw a proper breath, Allen straightened his back and looked up at the sky.
He looked like a man who had only just come to his senses.

‘What’s with this guy?’

Ma-in felt a strange unease.
The more they fought, the more Allen’s impression kept shifting.
When they first crossed paths, he had seemed like a brat whose neck Main could wring and whose eyes he could gouge out at any moment.
But after trading a few blows, Main had sensed a seasoned quality no young swordsman should possess, and even a boldness that staked everything on the outcome.
And yet now?
Without realizing it, he was the one bleeding and feeling fear.
It felt as though death had crept right up to his face.
The sensation of standing before an opponent he could not defeat.

‘He’s grown so much.’

Was it because he had taken hold of the Demon Sword?
Allen had grown stronger than when they had first faced each other.
What was astonishing was that, even so, Allen had not had his soul devoured by the Demon Sword.

“What exactly are you?”

Ma-in asked, unable to hold it in.

“People don’t change in the blink of an eye. And how can you hold the Demon Sword and remain unscathed?”

At first, he had considered Allen nothing more than a gifted swordsman from Bishuken.
But now his perception of him had changed entirely.
The swordsmanship he wielded was of the highest order, and his experience and quick wit in improvisation were, if anything, superior to his own.
Above all, the fact that the Demon Sword had not devoured his mind meant that the opponent truly possessed something the others did not.
That was when it happened.

“So you’re from Amheuksung.”

Ma-in was startled by the words that slipped from Allen’s mouth.

“Yeoljo Geom. It’s the technique Amheuksung swordsmen use for ambushes. Ordinarily it’s used to sever an enemy’s neck cleanly, but you missed this time.”

Ma-in’s eyes began to tremble little by little.
The fact that he named the technique itself showed this was no mere guess.
Allen was certain of Ma-in’s true identity.

“Has Amheuksung joined hands with the demon clans? Or has a spy been planted within Amheuksung itself?”

In place of an answer to the probing words, Ma-in leveled his sword.
He had meant to draw Allen out with conversation and dig deeper into who he was, but the situation had turned against him.
From here on, the more he spoke, the more he would lose.

“Well, I suppose I shouldn’t expect you lot to open your mouths.”

Crunch.

Once Ma-in fell silent, Allen grinned and stepped closer.

“Right?”

Then, in an instant.

Whoosh.

Allen’s figure dissolved into a mirage and vanished from Ma-in’s sight.

Seongsin Style, First Form.
-Bora.

Thwack.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————