Chapter 44. Twin Swords of the Wind and Clouds (19)
Because they couldn’t bear facing Baek Jin-Jin again, Dok-Du and the others decided to change their hostage target to Song Woo-Moon.
“Oh! That’s a good idea, hyung-nim. They seem to be some kind of low-level martial artists, but even if they practice whatever martial art, I really don’t think their kid is any hot shit.”
“Good, good. Then our target is him,” Dok-Du said.
As he stood up on shaky legs, the figure of the young man with the rosy cheeks looking at him and clicking his tongue flashed through his mind.
‘You dumb stinky brat! How dare you look at me like that when you’re still sucking at your mom’s breast?’
From the side, Rat spoke cautiously.
“But, by the way, h-hyung-nim. Um, well, how about we just stop here? They’re going to leave anyway, so if you just pretend not to see them for a while...”
“Shut up! I climbed all this way with just my axe! Do you even understand how much the boys will ridicule us if we just let things go like this? No, I can’t give up here. We have to go meet Gwang Ryeok-Gwi hyung-nim.”
“Huh?! Are you sure? Don’t you think this is getting too big?”
A sliver of bloodlust showed in Dok-Du’s gaze.
*
“We’ve found them, hyung-nim!”
“You did?”
Hearing the henchman call out, Dok-Du motioned to a man. “Then let’s go, Ryeok-Gwi hyung-nim.”
“Is there really a need for this? We could just go straight to the inn and fuck them up. What’s the point in getting a hostage?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust your skills, hyung-nim. It’s just that I want to make sure we handle this properly.”
Ryeok-Gwi sighed at Dok-Du’s words and looked over at him pitifully.
“Ha... How did you go and get yourself beaten up this badly by some country bumpkins? You look like a scaredy cat.”
With Ryeok-Gwi following behind, Dok-Du headed to a vacant lot within their neighborhood in Anqing. A henchman had tailed Woo-Moon all the way there, and indeed, as they arrived, they found Woo-Moon practicing martial arts alone.
Since he hadn’t been a match for either Dae-Woong or Jin-Jin, Dok-Du had changed his target to Woo-Moon instead.
“You brainless bastard! You think you can just spit on me when I’m down?!” Dok-Du shouted as he appeared with Ryeok-Gwi.
“How irritating...” Woo-Moon muttered in a low tone.
Still, Ryeok-Gwi heard what Woo-Moon had said, and his eyes suddenly widened in disbelief.
“What? Irritating? You’re right, Dok-Du. They really are crazy. Boys, take him down!”
“Understood, hyung-nim!”
“Are you serious? Why did you have to create more problems for me again, father...”
As he finished speaking, Woo-Moon took a step forward.
He wasn’t in a rush and he didn’t look lightning fast, but with every move of his, one of Ryeok-Gwi’s henchmen would end up on the ground bleeding, with some bones broken.
After a few moments, Woo-Moon lightly patted the dust off his sleeves and left. Behind him, everyone was left unable to stand on two legs and crawling around like babies.
“D-Dok-Du! You bastard! He was a master, you stupid bastard!”
“D-damn it. How was I supposed to know he was a master?!”
While listening to the conversation between the two, Rat shouted in anger, “What the hell is wrong with that damned household?”
Everyone had realized it from the get-go: Woo-Moon was not just a martial artist, but a real expert. No matter their numbers, they would never have been a match for someone like him.
‘Damn it! How did I run into that sort of crazy ass family?!’
Rat asked, “What should we do now, hyung-nim?”
“What the fuck are we supposed to do? Even Ryeok-Gwi hyung-nim couldn’t do anything. We have to give up! Damn it!”
Then, as they limped back, they suddenly encountered the person they had wanted to avoid the most.
“What’s with you all? Why are you all sprawled out like that? Did you get beat up or something?”
A man wearing a red changshan[1] and with a glaive strapped to his back was standing in front of them. Dok-Du and Ryeok-Gwi flinched in surprise.
“W-Wang Pae hyung-nim...”
Hearing Ryeok-Gwi’s weak and pitiful voice, the Gang Leader of the Northern Fox Gang, Wang Pae, snorted.
“Huh? I really can’t believe this right now. Which bastard was it who dared to mess with the dogs of our Northern Fox Gang?”
Even though they had just been called “dogs,” Ryeok Gwi and the others couldn’t say anything. There was no way that they would dare—if they went against the words of the Northern Fox Gang, they would be completely exterminated.
The Northern Fox Gang was a notorious bandit group that raided the towns in the area and was famous for slaughtering and ravaging everything whenever it attacked a village, down to every last dog.
There were already at least ten villages that had been completely annihilated by their hands.
Although their actions were so heinous that they had caught the eye of the government, the Northern Fox Gang, true to their name in terms of cleverness, managed to avoid the army whenever it was dispatched.
For Ryeok-Gwi and Dok-Du, who refused to rape and murder, the most cruel, terrifying, and unpleasant person for them ever to have to meet was none other than the Northern Fox Gang Leader.
However, whenever the Gang Leader periodically came to visit—in other words, to beat up and threaten them into submission—all they could do was cry with a bitter taste in their mouths as they procured whatever the Northern Fox Gang demanded.
“I-it’s nothing... it really was nothing...”
When Ryeok-Gwi was about to finish his sentence, Wang Pae suddenly thrust out his glaive and aimed it right into Ryeok-Gwi’s open mouth.
“Cough!”
Ryeok-Gwi froze in place, but Wang Pae stopped the glaive right before the tip pierced his throat. He laughed as he spoke with a murderous tone, “I don’t give a crap if dogs like you die, but those who dare to mess with our livelihood should be flayed alive. Who the hell are those bastards? Hurry up and tell me.”
*
There were about a hundred members of the Northern Fox Gang in total, and they hid in the bushes near Anqing and waited for Woo-Moon and his family to emerge.
They all radiated terrifying bloodlust. The feeling was so strong that even the air seemed to smell bloody to Dok-Du.
Although he prided himself on having lived his entire life with naught but an axe in hand, he seemed to wither into nothingness as he was surrounded by the band of bandits of the Northern Fox Gang.
‘I-it was just a bit of an argument... it’s not something to kill over...’
The Northern Fox Gang was a real member of the murim, and it was rumored that even though the Namgoong family had sent out a few squads, the Northern Fox Gang had been able to withstand it so far.
Dok-Du and the others had been beaten black and blue by Woo-Moon and his family, but they knew that once the Northern Fox Gang got involved...things were bound to go bad. Dok-Du’s heart felt truly heavy because of the tragedy that was about to happen.
“Hey, you, um... Dikdik or whatever? Come over here,” called out Wang Pae.
“Y-yes.”
“This is a city under the influence of the Namgoong family. If we do something like this here, the Namgoong family might be angered again and send out another execution squad. I’m taking all this risk just to help you, so you’ll have to double the payment for next month. Understood?”
‘We don’t even want this to happen. You’re doing whatever you please right now! What kind of bullshit is this?!’ Dok-Du thought in his heart.
However, he smiled awkwardly and responded, “D-don’t worry, hyung-nim. We’ll compensate you no matter what we have to do.”
It was then that one of the subordinates of the Northern Fox Gang brought over an ordinary-looking man who seemed to be in his mid-thirties.
“Gang Leader! This bastard was passing by and tried to run away when he saw us.”
The captured man trembled as he looked at the bandits who were staring at him.
“P-please let me live. I won’t tell a single soul that you are here.”
However, there was no way that Wang Pae would show mercy just because someone begged for it.
“Kill him.”
The reason the Northern Fox Gang had been able to evade the government thus far was that they indiscriminately killed anyone who saw them.
“Aaah!!!”
As the man closed his eyes tightly and squealed at Wang Pae’s command, a new voice suddenly cut through the air.
“Huh? Oi, what are you all doing here?”
It was an irritating voice that made one’s hackles rise right from the first word.
Wang Pae looked over at the man in his thirties wearing a dazzling white robe who had suddenly appeared next to them.
“What kind of bastard are you?”
“Me? Haha, just a bastard passing by. What kind of bastards are you, lads?”
Sparks flew out of the eyes of the Northern Fox Gang members.
Almost in unison, the Northern Fox Gang members emerged from the bushes and walked intimidatingly toward the man in white, who just so happened to be Baek Sang-Woon.
Wang Pae’s right-hand man, Soul-Chasing Ghost Archer, who stood at the very front, walked forward with eyes bulging in rage.
“Crazy asshole, where did you get the balls to speak to us like that? I’ll kill you!”
As the Soul-Chasing Ghost Archer drew an arrow in a quick movement and was about to pull his bowstring, Wang Pae raised his hand.
He slowly looked up and down the man in the dazzling white robe, worried that he might be a martial arts expert.
Sang-Woon simply matched his gaze. “I say, did you all come all this way to have dinner or something? Hey, you over there. What are you all about?”
The person Sang-Woon pointed to was Dok-Du. All he wanted right now was to shout ‘You crazy bastard, if you want to live, flee immediately!’ The moment he saw Sang-Woon’s smiling gaze, however, he found himself unable to say anything.
‘Huh?’
Although he was confused, he found his mouth moving as if it had a mind of its own.
“W-we are waiting to kill that massive dunce and his fam...ily...incredibly strong...”
Wang Pae glared over at Dok-Du with eyes that seemed to say, ‘Since when the fuck are you so honest?’
“Ah! Really? Hmm, some big dunce, family, incredible strength... Makes sense. But, hmm, for some reason, it seems you’re talking about someone I know?”
In the meantime, Wang Pae finished his inspection of Sang-Woon.
No matter how he looked at the man, Wang Pae couldn’t find a single sign to show that Sang-Woon was stronger than he was. With that in mind, he gave a curt command.
“Kill.”
However, it wasn’t his subordinates who responded, but Sang-Woon.
“Huh? Kill? Okay. Even if you didn’t say so, I was already planning on killing you all, haha.”
The moment his words ended, Sang-Woon waved a hand dismissively, as if he was waving them goodbye.
At that moment, Wang Pae’s eyes widened.
Palm wind blasted forth with unimaginably vast force, flipping the heavens and the earth.
“RUN!!!”
At the same time as he shouted this command, Wang Pae stirred up his qi and gathered as much strength as he could to withstand what was coming.
“AHHH!!”
After barely fending off the palm wind, Wang Pae could not believe his own eyes.
Half of his men had disappeared, all that remained were fragments of severed limbs and blood.
One person had just killed fifty people in a single casual move.
Wang Pae had never imagined that such martial arts skill existed—he hadn’t ever imagined that a person capable of such feats existed.
‘Wait...What if he was one of them...’ he thought.
“There’s no way...”
Wang Pae couldn’t bear to say what he was thinking out loud, and Dok-Du had also completely lost his spirit.
“T-that’s not a human. How could such power be...”
As the random man who had unluckily been dragged into the mess ran away screaming, someone who was somewhat familiar to Dok-Du walked into the area.
‘It’s that brat!’
Woo-Moon walked over with a frown as he looked over at Sang-Woon.
“Grandfather, how come you’re here? Why bother with minor things like these?”
Even though he had just seen dozens of people die, he didn’t look particularly concerned. He assumed that if his grandfather had killed them, he probably had a very good reason.
Flabbergasted at the sight, but also strangely relieved, Dok-Du muttered to himself without realizing it, “Grandfather? So that man is his grandfather? That lady’s husband, the lady herself, and even their son is a master too... and the grandfather is somehow even stronger? What the hell is with that household?”
In the beginning, Dok-Du clashed with that dunce they called Dae-Woong. He wanted to teach him a lesson, but Dok-Du ended up being taught a lesson instead.
Thus, he tried to take revenge by taking his woman hostage. But somehow, that lady, who was so pretty and slender, turned out to be even stronger than her husband!
Still, he couldn’t give up on it, so he tried to catch their young brat, who had laughed at him. However, even their son turned out to be a master!
At that point, the situation had gotten so twisted that even the Northern Fox Gang had gotten involved.
But then, at that time, some bastard in his thirties, seemingly around the same age as Dok-Du himself, appeared out of nowhere and killed about fifty people in a single move.
And every single one of those ridiculous people was a member of the same family!
Moreover, why did that bastard who was being called “grandfather” look like he was in his thirties? What sort of fucking household was this? Were they all actual demons?!
Dok-Du shook his head as if to clear his confusion.
Sang-Woon had a bitter taste in his mouth as he saw the bloodlust emanating from the Northern Fox Gang.
“Tsk, tsk. That bastard Lust Emperor just had to start the Black Hand. There really are too many of these dirty bastards around. Mountain bandits, marauding bandits, sea bandits, even horse bandits... I mean, I don’t even know how many of these bastards I’ve killed, but no matter how many I kill, even more appear. Are they fucking rabbits or something?”
Sang-Woon clicked his tongue, shook his head, and turned to Woo-Moon.
“Kill all of these bastards. They stink of blood so badly that every single one of them has probably killed hundreds of people. These gu—things don’t deserve to live. Break every last one of them and don’t feel bad about it.”
1. A traditional long gown worn by males. The male version of a cheongsam. ☜