Genius Martial Arts Trainer

Mukyeong revealed himself in the middle of the enemy command post and unleashed the Golden Rain Divine Art, which spread out in every direction.

The result that followed was nothing short of gruesome.

Beginning with the headless corpse of the Provincial Military Commander, the Assistant Provincial Military Commander, the other officers, and even the guards who had remained with them for protection all had dozens of holes pierced through their bodies and were bleeding from head to toe.

With the command post annihilated in an instant, several of those nearby finally came to their senses and hurriedly shouted.

“Kill him!!”

Led by the man who drew his weapon and charged with that shout, the others who belatedly recovered their wits rushed at Mukyeong all at once.

However.

SLASH.

The first man to charge had his neck severed together with his sword by the Asura Blade Mukyeong swung.

After that, corpses with their throats cut or hearts pierced continued collapsing one after another.

“You bastaaard~!!”

A general who appeared to have learned some martial arts roared and swung a crescent blade wrapped in blue energy.

Mukyeong avoided the strike merely by taking a light step backward.

BOOM!!

The ground struck by the general’s crescent blade burst apart, sending dust billowing upward. As though the dust itself were an inconvenience, the general swung the crescent blade horizontally and blew it all away in a single stroke.

“!?”

But immediately after the dust cleared, not a single living being remained there.

Only the mountain of corpses Mukyeong had created in an instant remained.

***

Using the cloud of dust the enemy had created, Mukyeong immediately performed the Concealment Art once more and moved through the shadows between the soldiers.

He slipped among soldiers who did not even realize that the assassin who had massacred their command post was passing right beside them.

“Maintain formation!”

Mukyeong spotted a general nearby shouting orders from horseback and lightly flicked a finger from within the darkness.

THUD!

The Finger Projectile Art shot from Mukyeong’s hand pierced the mounted general’s head with almost absurd ease.

Even after eliminating another general, Mukyeong continued moving busily from place to place.

'The more of them I kill, the fewer meaningless sacrifices there will be.'

As though responding to Mukyeong’s thoughts, another mounted general in the distance suddenly collapsed.

This time, however, it was not Mukyeong’s work.

Led by Mukyeong, assassins secretly trained by the Zhengmu League’s Flying Dragon Pavilion and several members of Shaolin’s Demon-Subduing Unit who had learned the Concealment Art from Mukyeong had infiltrated the imperial army.

And they had only one objective.

The assassination of the commanders.

Among them, Mukyeong had taken responsibility for the most difficult target of all, the central command post.

As the number of commanders and generals killed by the assassins under Mukyeong’s lead continued to rise, the army of fifty thousand that had moved like an elaborate machine began to creak.

They might have been elite soldiers who had experienced countless battlefields in the north, but the absence of their commanders could only have a tremendous effect.

No, precisely because they were elite soldiers, the absence of commanders was causing an even greater problem.

When tens of thousands of people gathered on open ground, a person could not properly perceive even what was happening one zhang(3m) away.

That was because the obstacle known as another human body blocked their line of sight.

In other words, a person thrown into the middle of a battlefield could understand only what was happening immediately before his eyes. It was impossible for him to grasp the state of the entire battlefield.

He might charge because the allies around him seemed to be gaining the advantage, only to be surrounded and killed, or he might mistakenly believe defeat was imminent because the allies near him were dying even while his side was winning across the battlefield as a whole.

That was why an elite soldier did not mean a soldier skilled at improvisation.

Those who were not deceived by what appeared immediately before their eyes and could calmly and accurately carry out their commanders’ orders even amid horrifying carnage and the madness of the battlefield. Those were true elite soldiers.

And at this very moment.

Those elite soldiers were being engulfed in confusion.

Because the people who were supposed to issue their orders were absent.

Of course, since most of them had spent years on battlefields, the majority had experienced commanders dying several times before.

However, the commanders whose deaths they had experienced had only ever been their direct superiors.

Even if a Hundred Household Officer, equivalent to a centurion, or a Regular Thousand Household Officer, equivalent to a commander of a thousand, died, the next-ranking officer merely had to take over command.

And the reason that was possible was because the central command post continued issuing orders.

But now, that most important central command post had been massacred.

The only times a central command post was annihilated on a battlefield were when an army had suffered a crushing defeat.

From the central command post at the very top of the chain of command to the intermediate officers beneath it, they had all been killed one after another. The command structure had literally collapsed.

Those fighting martial artists at the front and on the left and right wings continued battling for the time being.

“W-Where are we supposed to go!?”

“Move aside! I said move!!”

But the soldiers gathered in the center blocked one another’s view, becoming entangled and unable to determine what to do.

By the time dozens of commanders had been killed and complete chaos had descended upon the battlefield.

'It is time to withdraw.'

Mukyeong drew a long rod of some kind from inside his robes, produced the Samadhi True Flame, and lit its end.

***

After confirming that yellow smoke was rising in the distance across the battlefield, Zhuge Jinxi sent a voice transmission to the martial artists trapped within the encirclement beside her.

- Now.

The yellow smoke was Mukyeong’s signal.

It meant the operation had been completed.

After giving the order, Zhuge Jinxi drew heavily upon the internal energy remaining in her dantian, and that tremendous energy raced through the acupoints of her entire body.

Until now, she had conserved her internal energy in order to survive the encirclement and buy time, but there was no longer any need to do so.

Then, when the energy that had raced through her entire body and swelled to its utmost condensed into a white mass upon her fan.

SHAAAAA.

A flesh-cutting winter gale that seemed to have blown from the ten-thousand-year snow mountains of the far north swept across the battlefield.

Hundreds of white snow blossoms bloomed, and the dozens of soldiers surrounding Zhuge Jinxi froze solid the instant they touched them.

The moment they came into contact with the snow blossoms filled with tremendous yin energy, they froze completely.

Immediately afterward, a golden dragon whose appearance seemed more like a child’s scribble than something suited to a battlefield advanced while tearing apart those blocking its path.

“Urgh.”

The moment he performed the Monstrous Dragon Fist, Muyul once again suffered internal injuries and tasted blood at the corner of his mouth. He pouted, then ran down the path he had opened.

“Ookki!”

When someone tried to interfere with Muyul, Lingling had already thrown himself forward and split the soldier’s torso open with his claws.

Once Zhuge Jinxi and Muyul opened the way, the other eight martial artists accompanying them also unleashed their own hidden trump cards and forced open a path.

The encirclement, so densely packed that the phrase sea of people was no exaggeration, finally developed a small opening. Without delay, they moved toward that gap and widened it as they advanced.

The soldiers surrounding them should have restored their formation and rebuilt the encirclement, but all of them seemed bewildered and unsure what to do.

No signal whatsoever was coming from the center, where those meant to command them were located.

In the end, the commanders on the scene had no choice but to make their own decisions.

The conclusions they reached were more or less the same.

They had to pursue, surround, and kill them.

The problem lay in the details of the tactics.

“Damn it!! Block the opposite side!!”

Units divided by hundreds, thousands, or type of soldier moved independently. In some places, troops became needlessly concentrated and the encirclement grew excessively thick, while elsewhere it became as thin as paper.

Since there was no one coordinating them in the middle, the routes of independently moving units frequently overlapped, causing them to block one another’s way.

“This way!”

Amid all that, Zhuge Jinxi calmly found the thinnest part of the encirclement and advanced from the front while freezing the enemies in her path.

And similar events were unfolding on the imperial army’s left and right wings.

The mere thirty or so martial experts who had penetrated the army of fifty thousand began breaking through the encirclements and escaping.

Naturally, the imperial army attempted to pursue them.

The only problem was that they split into those trying to form ranks before giving chase and those immediately running after the fleeing martial artists.

On top of that.

SHAAAAAAA!!

The archery units, unable to properly grasp the situation now that the command structure had broken down, heard only that the enemies were fleeing and began loosing arrows.

“Aaaaaagh!!”

Naturally, screams erupted one after another across the battlefield, but they came from the soldiers rather than the martial experts.

The infantry and cavalry pursuing the martial artists had ended up becoming arrow fodder.

After their attempt to stop the fleeing enemies had instead helped them escape.

A strange situation unfolded in which some abandoned the pursuit while others, unable to let go, continued chasing.

In particular, because they were attempting to keep up with the lightness skills of martial experts, most of those who continued the pursuit to the end were cavalrymen.

They galloped after the martial artists for some time.

By the time they had covered several hundred zhang.

“They are exhausted!!”

A cavalry commander noticed that the martial artists they were pursuing had suddenly slowed down and shouted. His men spurred their horses and increased their charge.

And immediately before the cavalry collided with the martial artists.

“Attack!!”

Nearly a hundred warrior monks suddenly emerged from the surrounding undergrowth.

“!?”

While the commander who had first given the order froze in confusion.

CRACK.

The cavalrymen at the very front, who had been charging toward the martial artists, began falling under the experts’ martial arts, led by Zhuge Jinxi’s Moonlit Fan Dance.

“I shall bear all the killing karma of this day, so release the precept against killing!!”

The cavalrymen in the center and rear could only fall one after another to the warrior monks who had burst from the undergrowth.

These men were the final preparation for what came after the retreat.

Charging into an army of fifty thousand was an act of madness possible only for the greatest experts in the martial world, but cavalrymen or infantry who had separated from the main force like this could be handled by anyone who had reached a sufficient level.

***

After finishing off the pursuing cavalry and the infantry who arrived later.

The key figures, including Zhuge Jinxi, Hyegyeol, and Mukyeong, gathered for a meeting.

“How severe were our losses, Young Family Head Zhuge?”

At Hyegyeol’s question, Zhuge Jinxi answered with a cold expression.

“The losses elsewhere were not especially great, but several of those assigned to the assassinations failed to return.”

Mukyeong and Hyegyeol wore bitter expressions.

Among those other than Mukyeong, who had reached a realm beyond ordinary standards, some had succeeded in their assassinations but failed to conceal themselves again and died.

In addition, five had died while ambushing the pursuing cavalry, and one of the experts who had initially charged the army of fifty thousand in groups of barely more than a dozen had also been killed.

“Even so, compared to the losses inflicted upon the enemy, ours are a drop in the ocean.”

Her words were true.

The number of enemy soldiers killed in a single day appeared to be at least three thousand.

Of course, compared to fifty thousand, that was not even ten percent, but what mattered was the quality of those deaths.

They had killed only three thousand, but that number included most of the generals and commanders.

Mukyeong, who appeared to be thinking about something, spoke with a bitter expression.

“Could you give me the list? There may be some we failed to eliminate, so I will make another trip tonight.”

The list Mukyeong referred to was a kind of death list.

In other words, he intended to launch another night raid, assassinate the remaining key commanders and generals, and return.

They had not fought today merely to secure a single victory.

Hundreds of thousands of imperial soldiers still remained, so there were more than enough people capable of replacing the commanders and generals killed today.

The first reason they had fought in this manner was to buy time.

With their command post gone, the enemy would have to hold meetings to select new commanders or report to the imperial family and wait for replacements to arrive.

And the second reason was the great design created by Mujin and Zhuge Muhuan.

For the design drawn by those two to be completed, a large number of high-ranking officials loyal to the current emperor, Emperor Taiping, had to be purged.

In other words, while the war was underway, they intended to eliminate the military’s key figures at the same time.

'......It seems there will be no day when the blood dries on my hands for quite some time.'

As Mukyeong took the list Zhuge Jinxi handed him, that thought crossed his mind.

The list did not contain only information about military generals and commanders.

Using the intelligence networks of the Zhuge Family, which had some connections with imperial civil officials, the Zhengmu League, and the Beggars’ Union, it contained information on every high-ranking official loyal to Emperor Taiping.

And even if events unfolded according to Mujin and Zhuge Muhuan’s scheme and they won the war, Mukyeong would still have to repeatedly travel at night for some time in order to assassinate the civil officials whose names were written on the list.

However, Mukyeong soon cast aside his bitterness and advanced into the darkness.

'It is better for my hands to be stained with more blood than for hundreds of thousands to die.'

Mukyeong knew why Mujin and Zhuge Muhuan had devised such a plan.

More precisely, it was a plan Zhuge Muhuan had squeezed out of his mind under Mujin’s coercion.

Rather than slaughtering ordinary soldiers who were merely carrying out orders from above, they intended to eliminate only the ringleaders who had started and orchestrated the war.