It was a pitch-black night.
There was no moonlight, but the stars took its place, scattering a hazy glow.
Even that light, however, could barely penetrate the towering trees.
RUSTLE, RUSTLE….
Within the rough forest, only the sound of tall grass being pushed aside quietly spread through the darkness.
Four men moved silently along that path.
Two in front, Ja Cheon-gwang behind them, and one unidentified man bringing up the rear.
Ja Cheon-gwang had changed into black clothes and wore a slender sword at his waist.
It weighed barely two geun.
Compared with his great saber, which weighed nearly a hundred geun, it was no different from a feather.
More importantly.
‘Damn it. By now I’d be back home sleeping with my legs stretched out. Why the hell am I suffering through this?’
Before departing, he had watched the other corps members descend the mountain.
Ja Cheon-gwang had looked upon them with envy as they returned home with light hearts.
They were finally going home after three days.
By now, the Ascending Dragon Sect truly was home.
Ever since he became a Golden Dragon Corps member, he had not even been beaten.
Without the beatings, the Ascending Dragon Sect was quite a livable place.
It was no different from home.
‘Where the hell are we going? I’ve never been here before.’
He looked around.
Even though Ja Cheon-gwang was called the strongest martial artist in the Ascending Dragon Sect, he was hardly free to travel outside.
The only places he had ever gone were the Ascending Dragon Sect and the middle slopes of Scattered Gorge Mountain where the battles took place.
He had never been anywhere else.
Scattered Gorge Mountain.
Just as its name suggested, the terrain was composed of many scattered mountains.
It lay along the outskirts of the Greater Khingan Range, but the entire region was collectively known as Scattered Gorge Mountain.
That was how vast it was.
And wherever one went, everything looked more or less the same.
‘Have the Black Dragon Corps come through places like this many times? Everything looks identical, yet they sure know where they’re going.’
The men who appeared to belong to the Black Dragon Corps moved through the forest quietly and swiftly, as though thoroughly familiar with it.
Reconnaissance truly did seem to be their primary duty.
They were quite skilled.
They had been walking for four hours.
By now, they seemed to have traveled a considerable distance from the plain where the battle had taken place.
The path had twisted and turned so much that Ja Cheon-gwang could not tell exactly how far they had come.
Then the man at the front stopped.
“We still have a long way to go. We’ll rest here for a while before continuing.”
He appeared to be the leader of the black-clad men.
-You’ll learn everything later. For now, focus on the mission.
That had been the leader’s answer.
Ja Cheon-gwang had asked several times on the way here, but they refused to tell him either their names or their affiliation.
As a result, he distinguished them by their behavior and builds.
The man who had just spoken.
He appeared to be the oldest and the most skilled.
Since he seemed like the leader, Ja Cheon-gwang decided to call him “Middle-Aged.”
The big one.
His speech was rough and aggressive.
He was simply “Big Guy.”
The small, taciturn one.
He was the man following at the rear.
“Millet.”
‘Hmph. I heard the Black Dragon Corps were arrogant. Seems the rumors were true. They won’t even tell me their names.’
So Ja Cheon-gwang decided to call them whatever he pleased.
Middle-Aged, Big Guy, and Millet.
Millet found a suitable spot and casually swung his blade, cutting down the grass.
“We cannot light a fire during a reconnaissance mission. Keep that in mind.”
Ja Cheon-gwang frowned at Big Guy’s words.
‘Since when does this big bastard know me well enough to keep speaking casually?’
“Do whatever you want. I don’t need a fire to rest.”
He was already in a poor mood.
He did not know how impressive the Black Dragon Corps supposedly was, but he was the strongest member of the Golden Dragon Corps.
Ever since he became a Golden Dragon Corps member, not even Second Elder Jang Woo-geun treated him carelessly.
This was his first reconnaissance mission.
Naturally, his nerves were on edge.
Big Guy’s arrogant attitude only made his mood worse.
Or perhaps his heightened nerves were precisely why something else began bothering him.
‘That’s definitely killing intent. It’s faint, but unmistakable. Aren’t we supposed to be scouting? They should be hiding their presence, yet they’re leaking killing intent like that?’
Ja Cheon-gwang had never performed reconnaissance before, but he understood the basics.
The most important thing was not being discovered.
A scout’s duty was to avoid revealing his existence to the enemy.
Leaking killing intent should have been unthinkable.
‘Maybe we’re still far from the place we’re supposed to scout? Whatever. They said we can rest.’
For now, he ignored it.
Ja Cheon-gwang folded his arms and sat against a tree.
Even though he had slept during the day, drowsiness came over him again.
Perhaps it was because his nerves had been so tense.
His eyelids slowly began to fall.
Crackle, crackle.
What the hell?
He had only just closed his eyes.
Crackle, crackle.
A faint sound tickled his ears.
The sound of leaves being crushed.
It was not nearby.
It was coming from at least roughly ninety meters away.
His closed eyelids slowly rose.
The others had each found comfortable positions and were resting.
‘Didn’t these bastards hear it? The sound is regular.’
Sleeping outdoors had become routine lately.
This sounded clearly different from rustling leaves or the movements of wild animals he had heard during those nights.
It was far too regular.
It was not the sort of sound that should be ignored.
And were they not on reconnaissance?
This was precisely when they should be listening carefully for even the slightest sound….
Crackle, crackle.
Even now….
Ja Cheon-gwang quietly stood.
“What? Didn’t you hear us say we were resting?”
“Hey, Big Guy. You didn’t hear that? There’s a sound.”
“Big Guy? Ha, you bastard.”
“Are you actually here to scout? You can’t even hear that?”
Ja Cheon-gwang snapped irritably.
“What did you just call me? Big Guy?”
The oversized bastard was more interested in taking offense at the nickname.
That was when Middle-Aged intervened.
“You hear something?”
Middle-Aged, who had been leaning against a tree with his eyes closed, slightly raised his eyelids.
“Over there.”
Ja Cheon-gwang pointed toward the sound.
Middle-Aged closed his eyes again and concentrated.
Crackle, crackle.
Indeed….
Just as Ja Cheon-gwang had said, there was a regular sound.
It stopped briefly.
Then came again.
“Good. Let us investigate.”
When Middle-Aged stood, the other two rose as well.
It seemed he truly was their leader.
“You bastard, I’ll deal with you later. A mere Golden Dragon Corps member.”
Big Guy glared furiously after being forced to get up.
His body might have been enormous, but his heart was tiny.
Crackle, crackle.
The closer they drew, the louder the sound became.
Yet strangely, the frequency became lower.
Even lower than when Ja Cheon-gwang first heard it.
More intermittent.
Gulp.
The black-clad men swallowed dryly.
Even the arrogant Big Guy.
Apparently, none of them had expected a situation like this.
‘He heard that sound from all the way back there?’
Big Guy thought.
Judging by the distance they had traveled, they had been roughly three hundred to four hundred fifty meters away.
That was far too distant to hear such a faint sound.
“Get down.”
Middle-Aged whispered in a voice barely above a breath.
‘What is this? Now I’m crawling?’
Their voices crawled.
So did their bodies.
The four men slowly crept toward the source of the sound.
At last, they saw what had been making it.
Beyond the grass.
Red clothing.
A man.
He appeared to be middle-aged.
The man was desperately crawling forward.
His legs must have been injured, because he dragged both of them behind him, yet continued pulling himself forward with both hands.
Occasionally, he reached his limit and stopped to gasp raggedly.
Then he continued crawling.
He held a sword in his right hand, but it was so badly damaged that it was little more than scrap metal.
Like his ruined sword, the man himself had already passed his limits and was teetering on the edge of death.
The four concealed their presence and watched him.
Did he have enough strength to stand?
Could he still swing his blade?
Was anyone else nearby?
No.
They sensed no one else around him.
The man himself was already at his limit.
He probably could not even stand.
“Let’s go.”
At Middle-Aged’s words, the four instantly surrounded the fallen man.
“Gasp… Y-You bastards?”
The black-clad figures had appeared without warning.
The man’s face turned deathly pale.
“Y-You filthy bastards…. You followed me all the way here….”
‘Does he know us?’
The four black-clad men glanced at one another.
They had clearly never seen the man in red before.
Yet he spoke as though he had known them for a long time.
Big Guy stepped forward.
“Hey. You know us? We’re a little busy, so tell us everything that happened.”
GRAB.
Big Guy seized the man’s tangled hair.
His head was yanked upward.
‘Huh? Those clothes…?’
Ja Cheon-gwang’s eyes flashed.
As Big Guy lifted the man by the hair, the embroidery on his chest became visible.
Ja Cheon-gwang knew very well what those clothes represented.
Golden dragon embroidery upon a white silk martial arts uniform.
For years.
The men who had sprayed sword energy toward the front lines.
The martial arts uniforms they wore.
It would have been stranger if he failed to recognize them.
The Moyong Family.
Those were undoubtedly the clothes of the Moyong Family.
Though soaked in so much blood that they had turned red, there was no mistake.
They belonged to the Moyong Family.
Ja Cheon-gwang listened closely for what the man might say.
There was no reason for a member of the Moyong Family to be lying here in this condition.
‘For three days. They were facing us for three days. I saw those martial arts uniforms with my own eyes. So why is this bastard bleeding to death deep in the mountains?’
The man had bled so heavily that his white clothes had turned red.
His face was as pale as paper.
There was not a trace of blood left in it.
“Hey. Tell us why you’re lying here like this.”
Big Guy questioned the middle-aged man again.
“You bastard, can’t you understand human speech? Hurry up and talk.”
Big Guy tightened his grip on the man’s hair and shook him roughly.
“Ghk… ghk….”
Suddenly, the bloodless man’s eyes rolled backward.
Then the middle-aged man stopped moving entirely.
“Huh? What’s this? Looks like this bastard died.”
Big Guy shrugged as he spoke to Middle-Aged.
Then he released the man’s hair and slammed his head back into the ground.
His bloodless face sank into the dirt.
‘I see. Now I understand the purpose of this reconnaissance. Something happened to the Moyong Family. That must be why the Grand Elder ordered us to scout.’
That explanation fit.
There was no normal reason for a member of the Moyong Family to die covered in blood deep in the mountains in the middle of the night.
‘The Hegemon Fortress Alliance all went back down. I saw that myself. Then who was it? Who did this to the Moyong Family?’
At that moment, a voice intruded upon his thoughts.
“Shouldn’t we hurry? This doesn’t seem like the time to be resting.”
It was Big Guy.
Right.
This was not the time to rest.
They needed to hurry to the Moyong Family and find out what had happened….
Then Ja Cheon-gwang suddenly felt a strange sense of incongruity.
Not the time to rest?
That was not the tone of someone intending to investigate the Moyong Family.
It sounded more like someone annoyed that something had interfered with the task they were supposed to be doing.
The strange expressions of the Black Dragon Corps members.
Their faces were hidden behind masks, but their eyes made it obvious.
This was something they had not anticipated.
A faint unease that this event might disrupt what they intended to do.
“Something seems to have happened. Let us move quickly. It would be better to put some distance between ourselves and this place.”
Middle-Aged spoke.
He subtly watched Ja Cheon-gwang’s reaction as he did so.
As though desperately trying to appear unconcerned.
“Tch. If one strange bastard ruins everything….”
Big Guy abruptly cut himself off.
Millet remained silent as ever.
“Let us go.”
Middle-Aged lightly patted Ja Cheon-gwang’s shoulder.
A gesture telling him not to worry about it and keep moving.
Big Guy and Millet had already moved well ahead.
There was nothing else to do.
Ja Cheon-gwang slowly followed.
As he walked away, he looked back.
The corpse of the Moyong Family martial artist spoke to him.
Hurry after them.
I’ll be waiting….
The mouth buried in the dirt was unmistakably saying just that.
***
A moonless night.
Following the path revealed by the starlight, Yoo Hwan-geun eventually saw the Ascending Dragon Sect’s old signboard.
“We’re finally home.”
Standing in the very last row, Yoo Hwan-geun stretched his whole body.
It was tradition.
The Silver Dragon Corps always took the rear of the formation.
For three days, the Ascending Dragon Sect had been as silent as a grave.
Around a hundred twenty martial artists had all been camped out at Scattered Gorge Mountain for the battle.
“Damn. Maybe I should’ve just taken another path and run away on the way back.”
“And where would you go if you ran?”
“You think Hegemon Fortress would leave you alone?”
“If it came to that, I could just go over to the Orthodox Allied Forces. Surely those orthodox bastards wouldn’t kill me, right?”
Meaningless chatter continued among the Golden Dragon Corps.
“Hey, haven’t you heard? They say the orthodox faction always keeps unorthodox martial artists alive when they catch them. You have to stay alive long enough for them to pull out your fingernails, tear out your toenails, cut off your ears, cut off your nose…. Then they destroy your qi center and carve your body into slices.”
“I heard that too. They say they’re living demons. If you beg them to kill you, they cut off your wrists and tongue so you can’t beg anymore.”
They were stories about the orthodox faction passed down by word of mouth over many years.
They believed every word.
There was no way for them to verify any of it.
“So we have to exterminate those bastards and bring peace to the common people.”
“Our role sure is important.”
Some even puffed out their chests proudly.
The indoctrination had worked perfectly.
Despite the fact that they were the unorthodox faction.
The training ground was in an uproar.
It was the usual scene after returning from battle, but only now did the place feel inhabited again.
The Golden Dragon Corps threw aside their equipment and immediately busied themselves with relaxing.
The Silver Dragon Corps harassed and beat the Iron Dragon Corps while ordering them around.
Every bit of cleanup fell upon the Iron Dragon Corps.
“Finally, let’s get some sleep.”
“Y-Y-You s-slept for a l-long time t-today.”
“What are you talking about? How is that the same thing? You think grass counts as a blanket?”
“Th-Th-That’s… th-th-that….”
“Bullshit. Hurry up. Whoever lies down first wins.”
Yoo Hwan-geun threw aside his great saber and ran toward the Silver Dragon Hall.
The Iron Dragon Corps members would handle the rest.
The Silver Dragon Hall was on an entirely different level from the Iron Dragon Hall.
Unlike the Iron Dragon Hall, where thirty people lived together, only four people shared each room in the Silver Dragon Hall.
The quality of the meals was different as well.
And aside from the occasional beating from the Golden Dragon Corps, there was hardly any violence.
Yoo Hwan-geun watched the Iron Dragon Corps members bustling around and briefly became nostalgic.
“Poor bastards are working themselves to death.”
That was when it happened.
DUM, DUM, DUM, DUM.
The drums announcing deployment began to thunder.