The Legend of Red Cloud - Chapter 3

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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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Chapter 3. The Crimson Scholar of Sa Ja Pyeong, Jeok Sa
The man responsible for the carnage before him smiled faintly at Bong Jin’s vacant stare.
“Captain Bong, you’ve got blood in your eyes.”
Bong Jin knew well the man who spoke those words and moved on.
“Rattling Cleats?”
That was the nickname he’d earned—always harassing women whenever he could find an excuse.
People in the Mang Ui Dan had even spread rumors that if this man didn’t harass a woman, she wasn’t really a woman at all.
Such a man belonged to the Jeok Myeol Jo, named after the Jeok Myeol Dae.
Yet no one called them the Jeok Myeol Jo anymore.
Not even the Mang Ui Dan, and certainly not the Cheol Hyeol Maeng above them—they all called that unit the Jeok Sa Jo.
Which meant…….
“It’s Jeok Sa!”
Someone’s cry pulled Bong Jin’s gaze toward the figure.
The Crimson Scholar of Sa Ja Pyeong—Jeok Sa.
No one knew why he bore such a name.
Some whispered it was because of Lee Song, known as the Scholar, who fought alongside him; but Bong Jin knew better.
Jeok Sa had carried that epithet long before Lee Song ever joined the Jeok Sa Jo.
This was the man who had renamed his own unit, now cutting through the battlefield like a scythe.
His weapon—neither quite sword nor spear, something altogether otherworldly—shattered space itself, trampling human lives as easily as insects.
Even knowing that those who fell before him were the Blood Demons who had just moments before threatened Bong Jin’s life and that of his men, he couldn’t help but grimace at the raw, savage ferocity of Jeok Sa’s combat.
It was no accident that those who’d witnessed his style took to calling him, not “the Crimson Scholar,” but rather “that crazed wolf-pup drenched in blood.”
And Bong Jin saw precisely why.
Crimson slaughter.
Wherever Jeok Sa moved, blood sprayed and Blood Demons collapsed.
What was remarkable was the absence of grand gestures or devastating force.
Apart from the peculiarity of his Variable-Length Weapon, whose blade expanded and contracted at will, Jeok Sa’s movements were almost imperceptible.
The wounds inflicted on the Blood Demons were slight.
His combat bore none of the raw power and clean efficiency that Dong Pil—that woman-chaser who’d just saved him—displayed.
No grand sweeping motions.
Jeok Sa fought with nothing but the most fundamental techniques.
And yet his enemies reacted as though struck by something devastating.
The wounds they took were minimal, for all that.
But from those small wounds, Blood Demons across the battlefield simply crumpled, never rising again.
They clutched at their injuries, convulsed, and died.
Bong Jin’s eyes widened further as he witnessed this.
His pupils dilated, consuming the sight before him.
He was close enough to the fighting to see with clarity the precise locations of the wounds Jeok Sa inflicted.
The throat. The arteries beneath the arms. The femoral artery of the groin. The vital points at the base of the skull.
Every single one—places from which, once cut in a battlefield like this, there was no surviving.
And so, despite the modest size of each wound, those who fell did so accompanied by torrents of blood.
“Crimson slaughter…….”
Now he understood why he was called that.
This Jeok Sa wielded his blade with uncanny precision.
‘But is that even a blade?’
Bong Jin found himself questioning the very nature of Jeok Sa’s weapon.
It defied easy categorization.
If forced to classify it, he would have called it a malformed weapon.
Two long blades, each as lengthy as a great sword, had been joined together hilt-to-hilt, creating a strange unified form.
This meant the weapon had a sharp edge at both ends.
In essence, the entire thing was blade.
A hollow iron grip had been fitted onto this long expanse of steel.
Naturally, given its design, the grip could slide along the blade in both directions—or was it left and right?
In any case, the grip traveled back and forth along the length of the blade.
What astounded Bong Jin was how smoothly it moved, as though gliding on oil.
Not a single metallic scrape arose as the iron grip ran across the steel edge.
But that smooth motion was not the true marvel.
The true marvel was how perfectly the grip’s movement aligned with Jeok Sa’s intent.
What did that mean?
Normally, if you lowered the blade in one direction and lifted the grip in another, the blade would move in the opposite direction from the grip.
Everyone would expect exactly that.
But the opposite unfolds.
He lowers one end of the blade and raises the hilt upward, and the edge streams upward as if flowing backward.
The Blood Demon, who had charged forward expecting the blade to naturally tip downward, now lies skewered on Jeok Sa’s point—exactly as it perishes.
What happens next is even more astonishing.
As Jeok Sa’s wrist turns slightly, the blade that slips free from the Blood Demon’s body mid-air leaves the hilt entirely, flies through empty space, and strikes down an enemy mid-flight.
That was it.
It was a projectile strike.
The blade, flying like an arrow, met its target in the air and killed it outright.
Bong Jin’s eyes widened in disbelief as an impossible sequence of scenes unfolded before him.
In a flash, Jeok Sa’s hilt glided smoothly along the blade still embedded in the enemy’s chest.
‘From that stance, at that speed—he’s aligning the blade and hilt?’
There’s a saying in common parlance for impossible odds: “A camel threading a needle’s eye.”
What Jeok Sa had just demonstrated was exactly such an occurrence.
On a battlefield where death rained down in rapid exchange, moving at tremendous speed while simultaneously evading the enemy’s incoming blade—his stance completely shattered—he had managed it.
With the hilt aligned to the blade and the hilt’s tip lightly catching, he drew it along the blade’s length, revealing the long edge as it cut through the air in a fierce arc.
“Hah!”
Jeok Sa’s hilt simply slides along the blade’s length.
Of course it does.
It’s merely a pierced metal hilt.
The hilt was forged as a solid, single piece of metal with no locking mechanism to stop the blade.
So it could be used however one wished—threading the blade carefully to avoid cutting one’s hand.
It would require remarkable balance and control, certainly, but it isn’t impossible.
Yet…
‘He drew it out?’
For Bong Jin, one incomprehensible sight followed another.
With the arrival of the Jeok Sa Jo, the entire tide of battle had shifted.
Moments before, the Blood Demons were sweeping away Mang Ui Dan members like autumn leaves in the wind; now the Mang Ui Dan, with the Jeok Sa Jo at the fore, hunted the demons.
The primary architect of this reversal was undoubtedly Jeok Sa.
He hunted down the Blood Demons—each radiating an obviously lethal power—with ghostly precision and eliminated them.
Yet not everything fell to Jeok Sa alone.
The other members of the Jeok Sa Jo who arrived with him wielded considerable strength as well.
Dong Pil, who had saved Bong Jin, was formidable; so too were Jwa Ryang and Lee Song, and even Jang Min Soo, nominally the leader of the Jeok Sa Jo, moved with striking brilliance.
Of course, among the Blood Demons raging on all sides, some possessed greater skill than these men.
Naturally, such demons targeted the Jeok Sa Jo members and charged.
Each time, Jeok Sa moved like a specter, intercepting those demons midway and slaying them.
As this pattern repeated, the Blood Demons’ movements noticeably faltered.
It meant the upper ranks among them were thinning rapidly.
With that, the Mang Ui Dan members, who had been passively enduring, began to mount a counteroffensive.
After all, the Mang Ui Dae, and the Heuk Ya Dae as well, counted among the Mang Ui Dan’s main forces.
These were not soldiers to crumble helplessly as before.
As their counterattack began to take effect, the battlefield transformed completely—a hundred and eighty degrees from what it had been.
Bong Jin was not alone in sensing this shift.
Bu Jeon Ju of the Ma Ga Jeon rushed to Ok Ma Ryong’s side as the latter swung his blade in frantic desperation.
“We must withdraw!”
“But…”
“If we delay any longer, we’ll be annihilated, Leader!”
Behind his mask, Ok Ma Ryong clenched his teeth at Bu Jeon Ju’s warning.
He was no mere figurehead, no so-called Non-combatant Master that the Jianghu spoke of.
He was a genuine master, proven through countless real battles.
Not once in his record had he turned his back on an enemy.
Ok Ma Ryong held this as a point of honor, yet he could not cling to it now.
Though he might die for his pride, his subordinates who followed his command would perish along with his stubbornness.
As Ok Ma Ryong wrestled with this dilemma, Bu Jeon Ju cried out urgently.
“Leader, please!”
At Bu Jeon Ju’s insistence, Ok Ma Ryong finally clenched his teeth hard and nodded.
Confirming this, Bu Jeon Ju cried out again.
“Retreat!”
At Bu Jeon Ju’s command, the Blood Demons—or rather, the Ma Ga Jeon masters who had been driven to the edges—pushed back against their opponents in unison and withdrew their formations.
Jeok Sa and his members simply watched them go.
They made no move to pursue the retreating enemy.
Seeing this, Bu Jeon Ju of the Ma Ga Jeon quietly released a breath of relief and drew his body upright.
It was the moment the Blood Demons began their withdrawal.
“Pursue them!”
The Mang Ui Dan’s leader, who had arrived slightly late, barked the order with venom in his voice, and the members who believed they had seized the momentum roared and rushed forward without hesitation.
Thus the wounded Mang Ui Dan members gave chase to the fleeing Blood Demons.
Watching this, Jeok Sa’s eyes darkened with irritation.
Lee Song, who had drawn near to him, spoke.
“Leaving them to it will be dangerous.”
Lee Song, called “the Scholar” for possessing learning remarkably deep for a swordsman, offered these words, and Jeok Sa’s expression betrayed considerable annoyance.
Jang Min Soo, who held the position of leader of the Jeok Sa Jo, added to the discussion.
“If Dan Ju finds out we left them abandoned, he’ll have our ears.”
‘Our ears?’
Hearing this, Bong Jin found it absurd.
Deliberately abandoning one’s own forces in battle was an Execution Worthy Offense.
It was not something that would end in mere reproach.
No matter that the Mang Ui Dan was a Jianghu organization, the laws of the battlefield were as stern as those of the imperial army itself.
Knowing this, Jeok Sa released a long sigh, and his head nodded in agreement.
And before Bong Jin’s eyes, the Jeok Sa Jo vanished in an instant.
They had surged forward to join the pursuit of the Blood Demons alongside the Mang Ui Dan members who had rushed ahead.
Bong Jin hurried after the Jeok Sa Jo members as well.
As he ran, Bong Jin encountered a long trail of corpses.
At first, to his surprise, the bodies of Mang Ui Dan members were overwhelmingly numerous.
These were surely those who had fallen while pursuing the fleeing Blood Demons during the brief moment the Jeok Sa Jo hesitated.
Running past the Mang Ui Dan dead, the corpses of Blood Demons in crimson Martial Robes and blood-red cloaks began to multiply.
‘It seems the Jeok Sa Jo caught up to them.’
Bong Jin’s assumption was confirmed not long after.
In a small clearing within Sa Ja Gwan, he witnessed a battle between the cornered remnants of the Blood Demons and the Jeok Sa Jo, led by Jeok Sa.
The Mang Ui Dan members who had rushed ahead in pursuit now formed a ring around the clearing, blocking off any possible escape.
What was fortunate was that they merely maintained the blockade without stepping forward to join the fight.
Among those Mang Ui Dan members stood the Mang Ui Dae’s leader, his shoulder bearing a deep wound, the light gone from his eyes.
Within that encirclement, Jeok Sa and his Jeok Sa Jo members unleashed a ferocious combat prowess.
Jeok Sa in particular demonstrated his One-Hit Certain Kill ability without restraint, as he had before.

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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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