360.the air split first.
No Words — The Battlefield Splits First
In the silence, the first man's hand moved—slowly—onto his hilt.
In that instant, the air split first.
Sound followed only after the blade had already slid halfway out.
Before any flash of light, killing intent leapt up and cut the night.
Park Seong-jin shifted his scabbard aside and moved his body one inch.
He spun—whirring—so smooth it felt like sliding over ice.
His torso remained stiff, yet the ground itself seemed to slip beneath him.
A strange footwork.
The first blood burst in the air before steel even met.
Before the first blade fully cleared its sheath, Park Seong-jin's sword slid in from the flank.
The clash of metal came late.
What struck first was pressure—
killing intent and momentum colliding, grinding each other down.
All three men moved at once.
Yet the first trajectory to collapse was the "reaper's" blade.
Where Park Seong-jin had been, only an afterimage remained.
In the next breath, his point pierced the inside of the man's elbow.
Before blood could spray, the second master flowed in like a shadow.
Park Seong-jin stepped half a pace back and struck with the flat of his blade—
cutting breath.
A choking sound, and the body folded.
Then the third—killing wind itself—fell over them like a lid.
Air tore.
Leaves and dirt rose together.
Park Seong-jin planted one foot and twisted his waist,
receiving the killing intent head-on and letting it slide past.
Into the gap he created, he drove his sword.
For a brief moment, the battlefield lost direction in blood and fragments.
Only then did the martial unit exhale.
The speed had already passed.
Now the fight opened into a long, continuous grain—
a battle of maintaining momentum.
The first master, carrying the footsteps of death, did not retreat.
He lowered his wounded arm as if discarding it and raised his blade again with the other hand, setting a new angle of death.
Before that angle could close, Park Seong-jin slipped into his blind spot and laid his sword down.
The tip severed a tendon.
The reaper's blade scraped the ground, unable to find its target.
His body folded from the knees and fell.
In that same beat, the second master moved again.
His blade was unseen; his appearance felt less like an attack than an arrival.
Behind Park Seong-jin, the air sank—
a pressure that crushed breath.
Park Seong-jin did not swing.
He lowered his body, crossed the space where breath was "dead,"
and broke the man's center with his elbow.
From a living body came the sound of dead breath leaking out.
The shadow lost shape and sank into the earth.
Last, the third master stepped onto the battlefield.
With one step, the ground thudded and the air was pressed down—thick, suffocating.
Park Seong-jin did not meet him head-on.
He entered half a beat late,
bypassing the thickest point of killing intent and pushing his blade in.
The blade bounced away.
Instead, the killing wind exploded outward—
and the momentum of the two men collided face-to-face.
Not the sound of steel,
but the resonance of life and death crashing together split the field.
Their methods differed, but the fight continued on a single breath.
Park Seong-jin did not regulate his breathing.
The battlefield had crossed from a contest of speed
into a contest of sustaining grain.
The residue of the three masters' momentum scattered across the field, polluting the air.
And in the instant Park Seong-jin forced a crack into the third master's killing wind—
his unit moved.
Not as individuals.
As a pack.
They poured in through the fissures Park Seong-jin opened, in perfect succession.
The first to enter the rupture was the axe-man.
He did not shout.
He did not hurry.
He stepped into the collapsing pressure and brought the axe down—not at a man, but at the momentum itself.
The blade fell like a weight returning to earth.
Residual killing intent was crushed flat, driven into the ground with a dull, final thud.
The earth answered before blood did.
Where the axe struck, the pressure died.
Behind him, the spearman flowed in.
He did not seek heads or hearts.
He threaded seams.
His spear slipped into the narrow gaps Park Seong-jin had opened—
between shifting feet, between breaths that had lost timing.
One thrust became two.
Two became a line.
Bodies staggered back as if pulled on a string, pierced not by force, but by inevitability.
Then the three swordsmen moved.
Not together.
Not apart.
One pressed.
One cut.
One received.
They spoke no words.
When the first blade drove an enemy's guard aside, the second passed through the opening without pause.
As the second withdrew, the third stepped into the empty beat and finished the fall.
Their breaths matched.
Steel flashed, then vanished.
What they left behind were not corpses piled together, but cleanly separated collapses—
each man falling where his balance had already abandoned him.
This was the Goryeo way.
No flourish.
No wasted motion.
Each man held his own line, yet every line leaned toward the center.
They did not look to Park Seong-jin for commands.
They followed the pressure he set,
the silence he maintained.
Where his emptiness expanded, they advanced.
Where his blade sealed a path, they did not trespass.
The battlefield widened—not into chaos, but into structure.
Many fights.
One flow.
One man rode the line left behind by the "reaper's" cut—
slipping along its arc into the flank.
Another stomped into the space where breath had been killed,
shattering concealment by forcing breath to exist again.
Momentum had scattered—yet it remained.
The martial men tore into it in their own ways.
The axe-bearer hammered down on lingering killing intent and pinned it into the ground.
The spear-man pierced through the sticky pressure's seams, threading bodies in a chain.
The swordsmen matched breath—one pushed, the next severed, then another stepped in.
The battlefield split wider.
Small fights erupted at once—
killing intent, blood, steel, and suffocation overlapping in different pockets of darkness.
The outside experts and the remnants of petty sects lost their initial grandeur quickly.
They could not unify.
They fractured like shards of scattered killing intent—each broken separately.
The martial unit did not wait for commands.
Each man became his own front, expanding the battle along the cracks Park Seong-jin had drawn.
From the center, Park Seong-jin felt their momentum spreading in every direction.
This had surpassed a personal duel.
It was a battlefield of a martial unit—
different blades and breaths linked into a single flow.
As the unit fully entered, the battlefield split into layers.
At the frontmost layer, Park Seong-jin and the third master's killing wind crushed the air itself.
The shock traveled outward like ripples.
In the outer layer, the unit's vanguard seized the residue of momentum and ripped it apart, opening separate engagements.
Blades, spears, and axes cut the night in their own rhythms.
Further behind, outside masters and petty remnants tangled and lost direction—
and the unit's rear line cut through them, cleaning the mess as if chewing it off.
Above, killing intent scattered and dimmed the moonlight.
Below, hooves and bodies churned, stacking dirt and blood into layers.
The battlefield became three-dimensional—alive, moving.
Their fights were different, but the flow was one,
because the pressure Park Seong-jin created held the center.
His emptiness became the standard.
The unit's blades did not drift.
They touched each other's timing, each other's gaps.
The battlefield hardened into a living structure—made by the unit.
Then the central killing wind twisted—just once—
and the axis of the field slipped by a hair.
The third master's pressure expanded too far.
Its weight crushed its own grain first.
Park Seong-jin did not miss that micro-shudder.
He stepped inward by half a beat and stabbed the knot of momentum precisely.
No sound.
The air folded inward; the core layer collapsed.
The killing wind failed to explode—splitting instead and flowing away.
All the battlefield's pressure drained out at once.
In that moment, the center stopped being a confrontation—
and became a rupture.
From beneath Park Seong-jin's feet, the field's flow split.
The foremost and outer layers wavered together.
The unit sensed it immediately.
Across their individual fights, they each raised speed by a single beat.
When the center collapses, the standards of every layer shake.
The third master's killing intent could no longer press the field.
It scattered, broke into pieces.
Park Seong-jin's sword followed those fragments in sequence.
The battlefield inhaled—then exhaled all at once—changing direction.
The fight shifted from endurance
to a battle rolling toward an end.
After the center broke, Park Seong-jin's movement became a standard for cleanup.
He did not rush.
He did not overcommit force.
His sword traced only short, exact arcs.
With each step he took, an angle of technique collapsed.
The intent to chain a second move snapped naturally.
A perfected killing form lost direction before reaching completion.
A shadow's concealment—requiring attack and hiding at once—found no space to breathe.
Killing wind that tried to build pressure dissolved the moment it touched his radius.
Park Seong-jin kept his tip low, passing only through the junctions where tendons, balance, and breath crossed.
The blade moved along the shortest path.
The elbow's fold was cut.
The foot's shift was cut.
The breath's change—cut, then cut again.
Gaps became a continuous severing.
Techniques changed direction the moment they began.
Follow-up intentions stopped by themselves.
The masters felt it together:
The more they gathered momentum, the more the path closed.
The moment they tried to vary, the place was already empty.
Within Park Seong-jin's radius, everything was cleanly hollow.
That hollow became the standard of the field.
They understood.
Victory was not about how many techniques one had—
but about the depth of maintaining one's breath.
Park Seong-jin did not steady his breathing.
His blade passed through only what was necessary, without disturbing flow.
He cut their currents—thunk, thunk—cleanly, one after another.
Watching, the unit naturally slowed.
Because the center was already being finished.
The battlefield had moved beyond a contest of techniques—
and was being pushed back by one man's non-action, with no answer.
As Park Seong-jin moved, Ming's martial men fell helplessly.
Each of them would have been a master where they came from—
but against a man who had crossed the boundary of realms, they could not become his match.
One by one, they collapsed.
Before wounds came, balance unraveled.
Before balance unraveled, the path disappeared.
At the battlefield's center, Park Seong-jin's sword began to flow—smooth, inevitable.
The flow left only necessary trajectories across the night.
Butterfly Dance.
One step became the fine tremor of folded wings.
A turn etched a lingering echo into the air.
The blade skimmed the grain.
The skimmed grain loosened itself, shifting layers.
Where he moved, the battlefield cleared.
The Butterfly Dance stepped precisely on the nodes of flow.
At each node, time seemed to pause.
Each time, enemy attacks vanished—
as if water were absorbed into sand.
Linked movements continued like nature's breath.
The density of the battlefield settled evenly.
The masters' techniques loosened inside that dance.
Movements sank to the ground.
Options closed one by one.
A butterfly's wingbeat revealed the wind's grain.
Flow took shape—
then returned to flow again.
The unit watched, breath regulated,
as the noise of the battlefield fell away layer by layer.
Under the moonlight, what remained was only the blade's aftersound—
and suppressed breath.
The outsiders were the first to falter.
They had come expecting a duel.
They found a field that no longer answered to individual skill.
One swordsman stepped forward, then stopped.
The rhythm he had relied on—
the half-beat before attack, the breath before release—
was gone.
The space did not accept him.
He swung anyway.
His blade cut clean air,
and the emptiness pushed back.
Nearby, another martial artist raised his weapon, then hesitated.
Too many directions.
Too many pressures.
No clear enemy stood before him, yet retreat felt impossible.
The battlefield had lost its edges.
Orders were not shouted.
Signals were not given.
Yet everywhere, movement closed in.
A veteran assassin realized too late that his concealment had become meaningless.
There was nowhere left to hide.
Where killing intent usually parted the air,
it now dispersed—
broken, thinned, swallowed.
One by one, the Jianghu fighters began to separate.
Not tactically.
Instinctively.
Each man searched for a way out that no longer existed.
Those who tried to force their way through were cut down.
Those who hesitated were surrounded.
Those who ran discovered the ground itself resisted them.
This was not defeat by strength.
It was the loss of footing—
in body, in breath, in will.
Some dropped their weapons without realizing it.
Some fought shadows and found their arms empty.
Some turned, convinced an opening lay behind them,
only to meet silence—and then steel.
The battlefield no longer recognized them as combatants.
They were fragments now.
Scattered intent.
Broken momentum.
What remained was fear.
Not the sharp fear of imminent death,
but the deeper terror of understanding—
This was not a place they were meant to survive.
Under the pale moon, the Jianghu shattered.