At last, the names of Pung and Namgung Hwi were called side by side.
The murmuring drill ground flared hot in an instant — the sword prodigy that the prestigious Namgung Family boasted of, against a boy who had climbed up through the preliminary screening without even a master or a sect crest. On one side, Namgung Hwi’s victory was taken for granted; on the other, people hoped that Pung, who had overturned expectations twice already, would show them something again this time. As the two different voices clashed across the platform, the reverberation seemed to climb up through the stone slabs underfoot.
Climbing onto the platform, Pung pressed his left collar once, and the scrap of the ledger sewn inside was still there. Today he had to hide even the motion of guarding it. Namgung Hwi had already noticed the distance and the changes in stride Pung left behind when he evaded, and he could not forget Hyeonheo’s warning that the sharp-eyed might have examined even his collar.
Namgung Hwi, standing opposite, wore white martial robes, and at his waist hung a longsword with almost no ornament; unlike yesterday, the family scions who trailed after him were nowhere to be seen. Having climbed onto the platform alone, he looked Pung straight in the eye instead of sweeping his gaze up and down him.
“Did you find your answer last night?”
Pung shook his head honestly.
“I couldn’t find a certain answer.”
“And yet you came up here.”
“Because it seemed I could only find it by coming up.”
The corner of Namgung Hwi’s mouth moved just slightly, closer to the expression of a man who had heard an answer he liked than to a sneer, but he said nothing more and drew his sword. The smooth blade flashed white in the sunlight, and in that moment the clamor beyond the platform receded by one layer.
Pung let both hands fall naturally and steadied his breath, and even as he watched Namgung Hwi’s sword, what rose in his mind was the chain of shifting forms the Jeomchang disciple had unfolded the day before. Something that changed first, outside the sword’s tip. The more he tried to make it out, the fainter it grew — a trace that would surely turn into the wrong answer if he forced a name onto it.
The referee checked the two of them in turn, then dropped his hand.
“Begin!”
Namgung Hwi took his first step.
There was no gap between the moment the sword came free and the moment it thrust in, and the first move of the Blue Sky Sword Art was straight as though it cleaved the heavens, fast yet not light. As the sword-wind pressed against Pung’s cheek, the point aimed precisely at the space between neck and shoulder.
Pung sidestepped half a pace — retreat too far and he would be chased by the next move; stay too close and he would struggle to respond the instant the sword bent. As the point grazed past the front of his collar, he turned his right foot, trying to slip to the outside of Namgung Hwi.
But Namgung Hwi’s sword blocked the path first.
Before the force of the first thrust had even faded, the blade laid over sideways and swept across the front of Pung’s chest. Pung bent back at the waist to evade, but a third sword surged up from below, and the sword-light that fell after it covered even the ground he would retreat to. Each form was clearly connected, yet not one of them was dragged along by the move before it — a series of changes that could be neither cut off nor declared finished.
Pung retreated three steps, then moved sideways, and at that Namgung Hwi shortened his stride. In exchange for the sword growing shorter, the gap narrowed, and when Pung pulled back another half step, this time the point stretched out long.
The words he had heard in the corridor yesterday came back to him.
*I will erase, first, the distance you believe is safe.*
Namgung Hwi was doing exactly as he had said — when Pung evaded wide, he thrust long; when Pung shortened his stride, he drew the sword in and layered close-range changes. At the same distance the sword grew short and then long, and even the instant an attack seemed to halt and end turned into the beginning of the next sword. Though Pung never lost track of Namgung Hwi’s sword-paths, he felt the places to set his feet steadily dwindling.
Knowing the sword in advance was not enough; he could only evade if he was already standing in the right place first — and Namgung Hwi kept changing where that right place was.
Conscious of the platform’s edge, Pung twisted his body to the left, and the crowd’s roar rose all at once, and Namgung Hwi’s sword came rushing, splitting that sound. It was a single thrust at the chest, straight and fast, but it looked simpler than the attacks before it — which meant the change behind it was surely hidden.
Pung watched the point and slipped to the right.
At that moment the thrust stopped.
Namgung Hwi’s wrist bent and the sword flowed sideways, cutting straight at Pung’s flank — a change too natural to have been aimed there from the start. Its departure was identical enough that he could still alter it freely even after confirming which way Pung would evade.
Pung twisted his waist in desperation.
*Shhk.*
With a thin sound the hem of his robe split open in a long line, and the severed scrap of cloth fluttered in the wind before dropping onto the stone slabs, and a chill sword-wind grazed past the skin of his flank. A moment later and it would have been flesh cut, not cloth.
For the first time since entering the tournament, a sword had come within a breath of touching his body.
Pung fell back two steps and righted his stance; he was unhurt. The left collar where the ledger scrap was hidden was safe too, but cold sweat ran down his back. The noise from the stands grew louder still, and within it someone shouted the name of the Namgung Family, yet to Pung it sounded only like a distant wave.
Namgung Hwi spoke with his sword-point lowered.
“I did not change my sword after seeing where you would evade.”
Pung, steadying his breath, looked at him.
“I did not divide feint from true strike. I made it so that until you moved, it could become either one. So no matter how long you stare at the point, no answer will come.”
There was no elation of a man who had seized the advantage in those words; Namgung Hwi was calm, as though merely confirming that the test he had prepared had worked. Pung felt a greater pressure from that attitude instead — a man with no intention of preening over a trick that had worked once would have layered the same principle over other changes as well.
“Do you still mean to keep watching?”
Pung looked down once at the cut hem of his robe, then answered.
“Yes. There’s still something I haven’t seen.”
Namgung Hwi moved again.
This time the sword-light seemed to split into three, and the sword falling from above, the sword slicing at his flank, and the sword thrusting straight at his chest overlapped at almost the same instant. Pung deflected the first and ducked beneath the second, but the moment he retreated to evade the third, the first sword revived and barred his escape.
Namgung Hwi did not alternate between feint and true strike. When a true strike missed, he made it the next feint; when Pung did not react to a feint, he turned it into a true strike that would cut flesh. Whichever Pung chose, the sword was wielded so as never to be wrong, so the harder Pung tried to sort true from false at the sword’s tip, the later his judgment inevitably came.
Pung raised his arm to push at the back of the blade, then stopped — he could see the change that would follow the instant they met. Stretch out his hand and his wrist would be cut; drive inward into the body and the hilt would come back around to strike his shoulder. In the end he lowered himself and barely slipped out beneath the sword, but Namgung Hwi’s foot had already taken the path ahead.
With every choice the danger grew.
Even so, Pung did not rashly put force into his fingertips. If the threat came closer and he loosed that power without thinking — power not yet thinned down to a thread — it might sweep in not only Namgung Hwi but the referee standing near the platform, and the meridian sight, too, could not be raised carelessly in a place where everyone’s eyes were focused.
The answer he needed now was not the ring.
Namgung Hwi’s sword came at his shoulder again, the same departure as the move that had cut his hem. Pung deliberately fell back half a step in the same direction and watched the point, and Namgung Hwi’s wrist did not turn either way to the very last, and the blade stayed straight as well.
*Waiting for the moment it changes is too late.*
The instant that thought crossed his mind, the sensation he had failed to grasp the day before revived — the delay he had dimly felt outside the Jeomchang disciple’s sword-shadow had not been at the sword’s tip. Just before the sword changed, something had moved first somewhere else, and at the time he had been waiting only for the moment the chain of forms ended, so he had not looked deeper.
Pung widened his gaze.
From the point to the wrist, from the wrist to elbow and shoulder. Below the shoulder was the waist, and there were the hips and feet that supported the waist. But by watching only the movement shown on the surface, he would merely be swayed again by the falsehood Namgung Hwi had deliberately mixed in.
Pung drew a very thin thread of energy up into his eyes.
The world did not slow; Namgung Hwi’s sword was still fast, and the crowd’s movements blurred and smeared. Only, the energy flowing beneath the white robes came into view like a faint watercourse — energy rising in the dantian passed through the hips, twisted the waist, went by the shoulder and flowed to the wrist. The sword-point was still aimed at his chest, but part of that energy was already preparing to turn aside.
Only then did Pung understand. Fingertips could lie, and a sword-point could conceal its course.
But the entire path leading from where the force was born to its destination could not be falsified in a single instant.
To change the sword, the body had to accept that change first, and no matter how small the movement, the energy opened the way ahead of it. The blurred question of the day before had at last become a single answer.
Namgung Hwi’s sword bent, and only then did Pung, instead of evading, step inside.
But Namgung Hwi did not stop either. Seeing that Pung had caught the beginning of the change, he released the strength in his wrist and let the blade drop downward, returning his hips and shoving the hilt against Pung’s chest. He had discarded even the change he had first prepared and created a new move.
Pung slid the hilt off with his forearm, and a dull shock rang through the bone, and in the half step he was driven back, Namgung Hwi’s sword came alive again. This time the energy welling up from the dantian seemed to divide into two branches, and the flow heading to the shoulder and the flow remaining below the waist each foretold a different attack.
Which one was real had not been decided.
Pung swallowed a short breath — being able to see the source did not mean every answer revealed itself of its own accord. Namgung Hwi could push one flow through to the end, or abandon it midway and take the other, and which he would choose was still a person’s choice, and what Pung could see reached only as far as the instant the choice became possible.
The sword fell from above.
Pung could bore in to the left, but then the collar holding the ledger would lie close to the blade, and to the right was the platform’s edge, and if he retreated the gap would fall back under Namgung Hwi’s control. There was no time to hesitate.
Pung chose the right.
His heel caught the platform’s rim and a gasp burst from the stands, and Namgung Hwi swung his sword wide as though he had foreseen that path. It was a blow heavy enough that the sword-wind alone shook his balance — evade and he would fall off the platform, block and he would be pinned by the next move.
Pung did not evade.
Just before the sword reached him he lowered his body and stepped one foot toward Namgung Hwi — instead of escaping the point, he had gone inside the sword, into the most dangerous place of all. As the edge grazed over his head a few strands of hair were severed and scattered, and Namgung Hwi at once withdrew the sword and aimed his elbow at Pung’s temple.
In Pung’s eyes, before that movement, came the energy surging from the dantian to the shoulder.
He ducked his head, let the elbow slide past, and laid a hand on Namgung Hwi’s wrist. Rather than seizing it with force, he pushed obliquely in the direction the energy was flowing, and the arm withdrawing the sword strayed half an inch from its original path. Namgung Hwi immediately flipped his wrist and shook Pung’s hand off, but Pung was already riding that force further inward.
Namgung Hwi’s left hand went for Pung’s chest, and Pung took it on his shoulder and extended his palm, and the two bodies came near enough to almost touch. At this distance a long sword was a disadvantage, yet Namgung Hwi did not discard it — instead he turned the butt of the hilt to stab at Pung’s flank.
Pung could not evade that entirely, and the hilt grazed his flank and a heavy pain spread, but to fall back in that moment would trap him in the sword’s range again. Gritting his teeth, he moved as though flowing along Namgung Hwi’s arm and set his fingertips before the man’s chest.
At the same instant, Namgung Hwi’s hilt stopped before Pung’s ribs.
Neither of them moved.
Between Namgung Hwi’s hilt and Pung’s body there remained a gap of about two finger-joints, while Pung’s fingertips hovered less than an inch from Namgung Hwi’s chest, on the verge of touching. Had either extended his force first, the match would already have been over at that distance.
The referee drew a breath, then raised his hand.
“Stop! Victory to Danpung!”
The drill ground shook violently. Some rose from their seats and shouted; some, as if unable to comprehend what had just happened, kept asking the person beside them. Pung heard that noise belatedly as he slowly withdrew his hand, and his flank throbbed and his legs trembled as if the strength would drain from them, but in the end he had not been pushed off the platform.
Namgung Hwi looked down at his own wrist for a while, and after pressing the spot Pung had touched with his thumb, he fully sheathed his sword and asked.
“What was it you saw at the end?”
Pung answered while steadying his breath.
“Before the sword moves — the thing that makes the sword move.”
“Did you watch my shoulder?”
“At first I thought so. But if I had only watched the shoulder, I’d have been caught by the second change.”
Namgung Hwi’s gaze sharpened.
Pung hesitated a moment over how far he should speak of what he had realized. He could not reveal the true nature of the meridian sight, and he had not forgotten that Namgung Hwi had exposed his own observations before the match and thereby created real danger. Yet he did not want to cover the match just fought with a lie, either.
“I tried to see the force that begins in the dantian and continues through the waist and shoulder to the wrist. I didn’t see all of it. Even at the end, I didn’t know which one you’d choose.”
“So that’s why you went to the edge of the platform.”
“It was the only path. If I’d been wrong, I’d have been the one to fall.”
Namgung Hwi looked in turn at Pung’s severed hem and at the platform’s edge, and after a moment a short breath escaped his lips, hard to tell whether laugh or sigh.
“So it isn’t that you read my sword entirely — you staked your body on the moment you *could* read it.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you won.”
Namgung Hwi closed his eyes and opened them, and the sting of defeat remained on his face, but the cold contempt of their first meeting was not to be seen.
“I’ve lost.”
When that single word fell the clamor of the drill ground swelled again, and Namgung Hwi, without looking around him, saluted Pung with cupped fists.
“I will not make excuses for today’s defeat. But next time I will come prepared with so many swords that even if you see where the force begins, you will not be able to choose.”
Pung returned the salute.
“Then I’ll see better than I did today.”
“That answer I do not like. It means things will only get harder for me.”
This time a clear smile brushed the corner of Namgung Hwi’s mouth, very faint, but Pung did not miss it.
When he came down from the platform A-yeong ran up first, and A-yeong’s face hardened at the sight of the split hem, and only after confirming there was no blood on it did she let out a long breath.
“Where are you hurt?”
“I bumped my flank a little.”
“Whether it’s ‘a little’ or not is for me to judge. You’re the sort who’d call a broken bone a hairline crack.”
Even while scolding him, A-yeong first examined his left collar, and after confirming the ledger scrap was not exposed she overlapped the split part and pressed it down, and only then did her eyes soften. Makdong kept waving his hands beside the two of them, pretending to block the surrounding gazes, but his mouth did not rest for a moment.
“When you were driven to the edge I really thought you’d fall. I’d already rewritten half the tale I’ll leave behind at the Beggars’ Sect, I tell you. And then you bored *inside* it!”
Hyeonheo was waiting for Pung a little apart, and when Pung approached, Hyeonheo examined his eyes before his flank.
“Did you find it?”
“Yes. What I felt yesterday wasn’t outside the sword. It was already connected inside the body before the sword came out.”
Hyeonheo was silent for a while, and it was not praise Pung had been waiting for, yet he found himself clenching and opening his fingers for no reason. Hyeonheo’s gaze passed over those fingertips, went to Namgung Hwi up on the platform, and came back.
“What you gained today is not a single answer. It is knowing what you must look at. The two are greatly different.”
Pung recalled the moment Namgung Hwi had abandoned a change midway and created a new move, and even having read the source, he could not have known the final choice. Had he been one beat later, or chosen a different path, the victor would have changed.
“I won’t forget.”
“And as much as you saw, there are many who saw you.”
At Hyeonheo’s words Pung looked back at the stands, and Jegal Soso, with an unopened fan against her chin, was examining in turn the platform’s edge and Pung’s footprints. It was the look of someone measuring where Namgung Hwi and Pung had come to a stop at the end. A little apart, several participants and elders were speaking in low voices, and Songjin was scanning the seats even farther behind them.
Among them, one wily old elder in the highest seat was watching Pung.
The moment their eyes met, Pung felt a chill brush the nape of his neck, and though it was not the same as the poison he had smelled beneath the ground at Nohachon, there was something of a kindred grain to it. Before Pung could even gather energy into his eyes, the elder turned his head toward the person beside him, and no emotion at all remained on his face.
“Master, who is that person?”
Hyeonheo did not answer at once.
“Do not look for long right now.”
It was a short warning, and Pung withdrew his gaze rather than ask further, but he could not erase the chill that lingered at his back. What he had revealed today was neither the power of the golden ring nor the whole of Hyeonheo’s arts, and yet the eyes watching him had plainly grown more numerous than yesterday.
Just then Namgung Hwi came down from the platform and passed by Pung, and he stopped a few steps ahead and spoke without looking back.
“Don’t lose meaninglessly in your next match. It would be unpleasant to hear that the one who beat me was merely lucky.”
A-yeong narrowed her eyes.
“That’s quite a grandiose way to cheer someone on.”
“It is not cheering.”
“Then what is it?”
Namgung Hwi did not answer; he only tilted his head once toward Pung, then walked off to the family scions who had been waiting. Pung watched the receding white figure and smiled without realizing it.
More than having beaten one arrogant enemy, it felt like he had gained a friend who would come find him next time with a better sword.
Now, before Pung, only the final four remained.
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