Chapter 25

Chapter 25
## Chapter: 25

### Chapter Title: Canon in Blue

Kim Ji-hyun reacted in a flash, knocking aside the spear tip aimed at her throat.

“Ha… damn it.”

The impact was thunderous, sending her skidding backward. She spat on the pavement and fixed me with a murderous stare. I didn’t give her a second to breathe.

I maintained a fierce offense, stitching azure streaks through the air. Each subsequent blow fell like a crashing tide, relentlessly seeking out her vitals.

Kim Ji-hyun managed to parry and evade, surviving by the narrowest of margins. Even as she was forced back step by step, her expression remained chillingly composed.

“For a guy with such messy reasoning, your technique is actually halfway decent.”

This was a different world compared to that hideous, bat-skulled freak I’d thrashed on the far side of Gyodongdo.

“You prick… you were holding back this whole time?”

“Mind your own business.”

I was tapping into the mana stored in my gloves whenever the situation demanded it. As long as I didn’t burn through the reserve entirely, I felt certain I could stay upright against Lee Se-eun’s lethal charge for at least a little while.

“Nationalistic Taekwondo—what a charming combination.”

She wasn’t merely reinforcing her physique with mana; when she’d deflected my spear earlier, her skin had taken on a silvery glint.

So, she had Metalization too?

“Get that garbage away from me!”

Explosive cracks of sound followed her swinging limbs. Each of her strikes carried the raw, violent force of a heavy truck piloted by a knight who’d downed three bottles of soju.

“Stop playing these petty games with me… gah!”

She slammed her foot down, and the earth detonated like a buried explosive. I was forced to retreat, keeping my movement patterns fluid.

A plume of grit erupted, and fragments of stone whistled through the air. Brushing her mouth, Kim Ji-hyun stepped out from the settling haze.

“You’re a dead man.”

“Hey, watch your mouth.”

I held my spear like a cue stick, swatting the falling debris as if they were billiard balls. The rotating rocks hissed through the sky, striking her forehead over and over.

A sharp, metallic ring echoed.

“Clang?”

I had pelted her skull with rocks, yet the sound was a ring instead of a dull thud.

“Exactly how thick is your head…?”

The atmosphere tore open with a high-pitched whine, leaving a ghost of an image where she had just been. Her heel whipped toward my side.

“Guh.”

The resulting pressure wave blew the lingering dust away in every direction.

I managed to get my arm up just in time to intercept, but the agony radiated straight to the bone. If not for the mana from the gloves, my arm—and likely my skull—would have been pulverized.

“You actually caught that?”

“You thought I’d just stand there and take it?”

Suddenly, obsidian embers leaped from my forearm onto her leg. I seized her limb and hurled her away.

Kim Ji-hyun spun gracefully in the air, stuck the landing, and immediately inspected her leg.

“Curse it.”

I couldn’t be sure, but she seemed to grasp that those persistent flames were bad news.

Under normal circumstances, a prolonged fight would be in my favor. But without relying on the gloves, I couldn’t hold my ground against her.

Even by being stingy with the mana, I had a thirty-minute window at best. She had clearly realized that the fire on her leg put her at a disadvantage.

“You aren’t the only one capable of boosting your mana, kid. And you’re doing it without any real equipment, at that.”

The jewelry pierced into her face began to glow with greater intensity. Simultaneously, a gale of energy began to howl from her body.

If I had to give my honest assessment…

“You can’t even control it, can you? You’re leaking mana everywhere.”

Every one of those piercings acted as a mana reservoir, and she was preparing to vent them all at once.

“That’s none of your concern. If I don’t finish you right here, I’m going to pulverize that Erosion Core.”

“Ooh, making threats you can’t back up.”

She had been quick earlier, but this was a different league entirely—far too fast for comparison. She launched a frantic sequence of detonating kicks.

I clenched my teeth, channeled the gloves’ power, and either parried or dodged every single one.

“Kahak.”

The force of the blows began to accumulate in my frame. However, I couldn’t use Paradox Flame to burn away the exhaustion and shock—not while the fire was still attached to her leg.

I couldn’t afford to waste such a successful hit. Gulping down the metallic taste of blood in my throat, I kept my defense tight, absorbing the impacts as safely as possible.

“It’s over!”

With a heavy thud, her boot slammed into my left leg. My balance shattered, and I took a roundhouse kick directly to the head, flying backward until I crashed into the wall.

“Urp…”

My sight blurred, and a high-pitched whine filled my ears. I couldn’t suppress it any longer and coughed up blood onto the floor.

“You pathetic brat, acting tough when you’re nothing.”

If my goal was just to buy time, I could have used the gloves’ mana recklessly. But that would have drained the supply too quickly.

“Yoo Chan-seok.”

Han Sang-ah darted forward, placing herself between me and Kim Ji-hyun.

“And what do you think you’re doing? Stay down. She’s too much for you.”

“I agree.”

She wasn’t a match for Han Sang-ah either. And I wasn’t beaten yet.

“I’m aware I can’t win. Just focus on healing.”

Then, Han Sang-ah fished something out of her pocket.

“I really didn’t want to use this.”

She clicked a button, and the cap of a vial popped off. Once I realized what she held, my face went slack with shock.

“No way.”

Those containers were definitely high-grade elixirs saturated with mana. The problem wasn’t the quality—it was that they were specially tuned for Han Sang-ah’s body.

Even with a custom fit, the mana wasn’t naturally refined through her own channels. Once the energy was used, it would turn back into basic mana and vanish.

It was a one-time boost.

She produced three of those vials and swallowed the contents of all of them.

“How much did that cost?”

“Roughly the price of an eight-story building. And they’re custom—they take forever to produce.”

She had begun preparing them after getting into the academy, only finishing the process after graduation.

“Long live the chaebols.”

It was no wonder she’d been hesitant to use them. An entire skyscraper’s worth of value in less than 100ml? Normal people wouldn’t even dream of touching such a thing.

“She’s probably in massive debt now. I wonder if she can even settle the bill.”

With that power, Han Sang-ah could likely stall the woman with the piercings for a short duration.

“You want me to pay it back? Then give me proper lessons from here on out.”

“So I’m teaching you how to fish now?”

“You know how to fish too? But that’s not the kind of training I’m looking for.”

Another bizarre remark, but I let it slide for now.

“Burn through it all in five minutes.”

Han Sang-ah countered my instruction.

“If I pace myself, I could last much longer. If I dump it all in five minutes, all I’m doing is stalling her anyway.”

“I’m aware. Just dump it all in five minutes.”

She gave me a lingering look, then gave a firm nod. Pale blue static began to pop around her with sharp cracks.

“If that’s what the situation requires.”

With those words, she lunged at Kim Ji-hyun, pulling her blade. She must have taken my previous advice about her draw to heart—before the steel even left the scabbard, she manifested three energy rails in the air.

Her blade would follow one of those three paths as it swung.

A three-way gamble. No more obvious movements.

“Her talent isn’t half bad.”

I whispered to myself, letting out a dry laugh as I concentrated on my internal recovery. I pulled back the Paradox Flame that had been eating at Kim Ji-hyun’s leg.

I couldn’t keep it up right now; it required too much mental effort.

“Haha, you moron.”

The fire died out on her limb, and even while facing off against Han Sang-ah, Kim Ji-hyun’s face twisted into a look of pure relief.

Without that nagging annoyance holding her back, she was clearly ecstatic.

“I’ll break her first, and then you’re next.”

I offered no retort. I simply watched her. “Next,” my foot.

Han Sang-ah was holding her ground quite well. She was utilizing every scrap of advice I’d given her, parrying Kim Ji-hyun’s strikes and looking for openings.

To be honest, Kim Ji-hyun’s raw power was just too high; my actual combat expertise was far more advanced.

“This…”

Having ingested a building’s worth of energy, Han Sang-ah was venting it without restraint, somehow managing to weather the storm.

If we hadn’t spent that time practicing together, she never would have made it through the five minutes I demanded. But now, she possessed the skill to see the plan through.

“Ah… gak…!”

Finally, at exactly the five-minute mark, Han Sang-ah caught a kick to the midsection. She let out a pained sound, was sent flying, and collapsed while hugging her stomach.

“That’s one!”

Kim Ji-hyun soared into the air toward her.

“In your dreams.”

That heavy axe kick never touched Han Sang-ah. My perfectly timed spear thrust sent her tumbling away, her heel crashing into the empty dirt instead.

“How…?”

“What’s so special about that move?”

A few more pops sounded within my body, then the pain vanished entirely. Kim Ji-hyun retreated slightly.

“You, in such a short window…”

“I owe it to you and Han Sang-ah.”

Kim Ji-hyun had been fighting while bleeding mana she couldn’t govern through those piercings. Han Sang-ah had downed incredibly expensive, one-off mana boosters and burned them all in five minutes.

All of that wasted energy had leaked into the surroundings—and I had utilized it to bolster my own meridians.

To what extent? Enough that I no longer required the gloves to handle her.

I still couldn’t completely dominate Kim Ji-hyun, of course.

But fighting her on a level playing field using only my own internal mana, without the gloves…

“You’re through.”

Now I had the stamina to go the distance without an issue.

“Do you enjoy classical music?”

“What kind of nonsense are you talking about now?”

I guess she didn’t. It didn’t matter if she knew or not—she’d find out the hard way. Understanding the classics wouldn’t help her evade this anyway.

I lunged forward, swinging my spear and leaving a trail of blue behind.

“That same move again?”

Kim Ji-hyun braced herself to counter both my physical strike and the follow-up from the trajectory.

“…What are you planning?”

But the blue streak simply sat there in the air, not moving in tandem with my attack.

Sixteen strikes in total. While staying cautious of the floating trails, she evaded or blocked my hits, counterattacking and pursuing me without rest.

The blue streaks didn’t vanish—they remained suspended in space.

“Theme complete.”

The trails started to strike in a specific order, moving to a steady beat.

“This is no different than before…”

Kim Ji-hyun’s voice trailed off.

Unlike the previous trails that disappeared after a single hit, these maintained their form.

“Crap.”

The speed and power of the trails’ attacks shifted—accelerating, slowing, intensifying, or weakening. It wasn’t just sixteen repetitive motions anymore.

Meanwhile, I swung my spear, now wreathed in Paradox Flame, to fill the gaps in the shifting 16-hit sequence and boost its lethality.

“That’s why I asked if you liked the classics.”

It was a technique modeled after a canon.