“This is ridiculous!”
A man’s anguished howl echoed across the mountainside.
It was just after the spar had ended. I was brushing the dust from my clothes, while the spectators, numbering well into the hundreds, murmured among themselves and immersed themselves in their own discussions.
That was when Instructor Heo, who had been sprawled on the ground, suddenly raised his voice. A small wound was visible on his shoulder, the price he had paid for failing to properly evade the blade of my axe.
Though the actual finishing blow had been something else.
Even after decades of training, the limits of the human body were clear. If you forced your body to twist in order to avoid an axe swinging at you from such close range, naturally, you had no choice but to expose an opening.
And that fleeting instant was precisely what I had been aiming for.
As Instructor Heo had repeatedly emphasized, ‘Pokrin (瀑燐)’ was a heavy-sword technique. Once his stance had properly collapsed, there was no chance I would let that opening slip by.
In the end, my knee slammed into the boy’s solar plexus, bringing the match to a…