Chapter 720: When Going Out, Maintain Your Dignity (14)

Qing sensed the entire situation: assassins charging nonstop, punks disguised as commoners springing ambushes, and throwing weapons flying in the middle of it all.

She’d already quickly noticed that there were several people running along the rooftops, tracking her.

But they showed no intention of coming down and just kept chasing from above, so she’d started scratching at them a little, panting on purpose.

I’m tired, you still not coming?

What, are you planning to wait until I completely collapse from exhaustion and then pounce? And what if some other assassins steal your kill first—are you fine with going home empty-handed?

Then finally, the rooftop group split in two and one team surged forward.

Looked like they were planning to hit her all at once from front and back.

But she had no intention of playing along.

Qing had never been the sort to hold back just because the enemy looked easy.

Let alone go along with whatever some mysterious, “important-looking” assassins were plotting.

Because she was a true high master of the Flower Realm?

Please. Even someone in the Harmony Realm dies if you stab them with a sword. Granted, you do have to stab them pretty hard—actually, really hard.

“Lea—leave me. This should be enou—GYAAH!”

Qing clamped down painfully on Mandarlo’s side as he spouted bullshit.

Little bastard, picking up lines from who knows where—what “leave me behind” crap is that.

After all this chaos she’d kicked up, did he really think she’d just leave him to die? Then what the hell had she gone to all this trouble for? Granted, she was having a great time with all the hand-feel, but still.

“Stop, huh, talking nonsense. Hff. I’m the instructor, and you’re the cadet.”

“You’re trying to die with me! GAAHK! Agh, stop, that hurts, that really hurts. I surrender! I surrender!”

“Mind, your manners. And keep, pretending, to be tied up.”

Tuk. Tuk. That was the sound of the hand at her side tearing through the net one strand at a time.

To unravel that ridiculously thick net just by wiggling her fingers—what kind of monstrous grip strength did that even take? It was a staggering feat.

“Did you, get that?”

“...Yes.”

Mandarlo answered.

She’d never heard a reply so untrustworthy.

She was telling him: keep pretending to be tied up in the net and then use it on your own when the moment is right.

Hopefully he really had understood.

As Qing picked at the net like that, tearing it bit by bit, she continued ripping apart assassins that charged in, all while keeping track of the movements of the rooftop runners.

Roughly fifteen? Sixteen? Or fourteen? Whatever—out of a number around that range, all but five sped up and shot ahead.

Qing, in response, let herself falter a little, acting like it was getting hard to handle the assassins, subtly slowing her pace.

Thanks to that, the front squad of the rooftop group pulled farther and farther away, while the rear group slowed down with her, clinging to her tail.

Naturally, the rooftop side had no idea Qing had noticed them, so their behavior made perfect sense.

In that moment, Qing’s Oil-Drill Training–based air-sensing system picked up a miraculous, amazing event: a corpse at her feet suddenly sprang up.

Because it wasn’t a corpse.

It was an assassin who had been lying there pretending to be dead, thrusting his blade as Qing passed by.

You couldn’t underestimate the assassins’ creativity.

They just didn’t know how to hide the red number above their heads. Of course, no matter how creative an assassin was, he wouldn’t think anyone could actually see numbers floating over people’s heads.

If she hadn’t seen it, she might have fallen for it. Too bad. What a waste.

That was what Qing thought as she let out a scream.

“AAAH!!”

The assassin panicked.

His dagger, aimed at Qing’s lower abdomen, wasn’t sinking in at all, like it was trying to push into a boulder.

And yet Qing had screamed. Had it gone in shallowly? But there was no hand-feel of tearing flesh at all.

For a moment, the assassin met Qing’s eyes.

In that instant, not even the dazzling beauty of the leading candidate for number one great beauty under heaven, not even the graceful curves of those enormous eyes that looked like they’d pop out if you flicked the back of her head—none of that entered his sight.

Because of a color blooming at the center of those blue eyes that he had never seen before.

The world’s most vicious malice, a color that was practically pure evil itself, without a single impurity.

The assassin who’d been pretending to be a corpse froze stiff.

His skill was far too low to withstand the killing intent of Ten-Thousand-Slaughters. And really, someone confident in his skills wouldn’t lie around pretending to be a corpse and pray someone walked past him in the first place.

Qing stepped in close, pressing right up into the assassin’s chest.

Then she drew her elbows way back behind her, sticking both palms flat against his body from above and below—

“GYAAAAAH!!”

She screamed at the top of her lungs and slammed both arms forward.

The person who wanted to scream was the assassin himself, but his nerves had frozen in terror, so even as his body lifted and flew backward at tremendous speed, he couldn’t squeeze out a single sound.

His torso flew backward, his limbs snapping wide open in the opposite direction with the recoil. From the side, he looked like a corpse in the character for “death,” blasted away.

He felt a flicker of relief as the figure of Qing rapidly receded in the distance.

It lasted an instant.

“You bastard! Where do you think you’re running? You dare stab me?!”

Qing’s furious shout cracked out.

The assassin could have felt vastly wronged.

You shoved me and sent me flying, and now you’re calling it running away?

But before he could voice that protest, Qing snatched up the net-wrapped Mandarlo and—KWAANG!—punched a crater into the hard cobblestones of the market street, shooting skyward like an arrow.

****

“Tsk.”

At the rear of the rooftop assassin group chasing Qing, the leader of the group, called Youngban, screwed up his face.

It looked like one of the assassins had stabbed Heavenly Flower Sword.

If that were all, it would be the best of good fortune. He’d be thinking that the money he’d splashed on those human butchers had been well spent, that the gold hadn’t been wasted.

The problem was that the assassin had “fled” by launching himself toward a private house.

Qing had shoved him toward the residential houses with all her strength, but from the perspective of the pursuers sneaking looks down from the rooftop, that was exactly how it looked.

On top of that, Qing had kept screaming like she’d been pierced on his behalf, and then, acting all outraged that he’d stabbed her, had launched herself after him.

For Youngban, it was a brutally painful mistake.

Because up till now, private houses had not been a “path” to him.

Why had he assumed Heavenly Flower Sword would keep fleeing along the road? Because he’d considered the houses to either side, spreading out left and right, as obstacles blocking the path, not as paths themselves.

So he’d figured if they opened up one alley and blocked the road front and back, they could naturally guide her there.

The bigger problem was that Heavenly Flower Sword would now have realized that the residential houses weren’t obstacles either, but traversable routes.

If she stopped using the road and started smashing through doors, walls, and windows to flee through houses, their pursuit would become dozens of times harder than it had been.

It was a major mistake on his part—he’d momentarily forgotten that the thug-bastards called martial artists treated smashing through private homes as casually as eating.

Of course, if Qing had known his thoughts, she would have snorted.

She hadn’t kept running along the road because she lacked the imagination to think of anything else. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t that she couldn’t. She just hadn’t.

Because you’re not supposed to go punching holes in other people’s houses, running through them like that.

In her past, Qing had been a member of a highly civilized, advanced social system. Out of all the people of this primitive, ancient Central Plains, she was the single most socially conditioned common-sense citizen. (Seasoned with Ten-Thousand-Slaughters.)

But when there’s no other choice, there’s no other choice.

Collateral damage and property destruction were things that could be compensated with even more gold. Besides, this wasn’t the first or second time she’d smashed through other people’s walls.

One way or another, thanks to that, Youngban was now in a bind.

He had no choice but to stop his hurried run and focus every nerve on watching, alert for which direction that woman would blast out of to continue her escape.

“It’s my mistake. I should have spread a circular encirclement, not blocked front and back. Call the vanguard back. Something that should have been easy is about to get difficult.”

“Yes, sir.”

His subordinate answered and immediately loosed a whistling arrow.

A whistling arrow was an arrow that made noise in flight, shrieking loudly as it shot up into the sky—the primitive, ancient version of a flare.

Then the subordinate put the signal flute to his lips.

BEEP, BEEEEEP! BEEP, BEEEEEP! BEEP, BEEE—EEP!

Signal flutes were supposed to be gratingly sharp and obnoxious, scraping at people’s nerves.

Because that was the only way people would snap to attention when they heard it and actually process the signal.

The shrill beeping right next to them was enough to make faint wrinkles form between their brows, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Then it happened.

Bweeep!? The flute’s tone suddenly filled with confusion.

Because when you’re blowing a flute with all your might and something suddenly clamps down hard on your ankle, even the manliest man in the world can’t help but gasp in shock.

But the panic only lasted a moment. The flutist immediately drew his sword and hacked down at his own ankle.

KANG!

Then he truly panicked.

Kang? Was that a sound you got when a weapon and a person’s hand collided? And this was a blade infused with sword-qi, at that. Did that mean the grip on his ankle wasn’t a human hand at all, but some kind of solid iron, carved in the shape of a hand?

In that moment of hesitation, his remaining left leg was grabbed as well by a snow-white, jade-like hand that shot up from beneath the roof.

“What’s go—”

Before Youngban’s startled question was even finished, the flutist’s body dropped downward.

If someone standing on a roof has their feet grabbed through two holes beneath them and then gets yanked down, what part of their body hits the edge?

The answer is: below the pelvis.

And since the flutist was a man, he had two very, very precious spheres dangling below his pelvis.

Had being the operative word.

“Ghk.”

If the pain is bad enough, no scream comes out.

Blood vessels burst red in the flutist’s eyes, and all that came out of his mouth was a strangled gurgling sound, like he’d forgotten how to breathe.

Then his body suddenly shot back up.

As if the hands gripping his ankles from below the roof had pushed him back up.

No way. Youngban’s face filled with horror, and before he could even shout—

The flutist’s body dropped again.

SQUELCH—his crotch slammed into the rooftop edge, making a wet, sickening impact sound that was even more horrific for being squishy.

“GYAAAAAAAH!!!!”

Only then did a wretched scream finally rip free.

It was the kind of groan, born of the worst pain imaginable, that made the listener’s hair stand on end, the kind of sound you’d expect to hear only at the deepest pit of hell.

And once again, the man—no, the ex-man’s—torso lifted.

He looked nearly unconscious already, his upper body collapsed limp, like he was just sticking his ass up into the air.

“Stop! Enough! Stop this at once!!”

Youngban shouted desperately.

Qing was Korean.

Koreans are the people of “three times.”

Once is too cold, twice is a little lacking, and you only feel at ease when something’s been done three times.

She was also a denizen of the Central Plains.

People of the Central Plains were the people of “three invitations.”

Accept on the first invitation and you’re a shameless bastard who knows nothing of face. Accept on the second and you’re a fool whose panting haste proves you’re unfit for great deeds. Only those who accept on the third invitation are recognized as proper, broad-minded, whole men.

“G—grrk...”

The eyes of the man who used to play the flute rolled back, whites showing, and fine bubbles foamed from his mouth like he was trying to mimic a crab.

Jong Baekho, your face really lit up when you said you were getting married. You’re that happy? Raving about how pretty your future wife is—you’re really going to be whipped for life.

Heh heh, Youngban, so what if you’re whipped or the one cracking the whip? If you meet a good person and spend a hundred years together, isn’t that the blessing of life in this world?

The awkward laugh of his subordinate flitted through his mind.

He was the man who’d said that once this mission was over, he’d hold his wedding, the one who’d been brimming with zeal, urging them to finish quickly.

Youngban hurriedly slid his hand under his subordinate’s shoulders and yanked him up.

It seemed the hands below had already let go; his subordinate’s legs came free easily. But from the knees down, his ankles were completely pulverized, and his feet hung limp, dangling uselessly.

“This... this vicious...!”

Youngban’s words stuttered with swelling rage.

How dare she. How dare some lowborn Martial World bitch lay hands—how dare she lay hands on who, exactly! How dare she! How dare she!!

Whether she was actually lowborn or not would take measuring to know, but in any case—

Youngban was enraged!