757.
The next wave was the heavy infantry.
Men wrapped in thick armor roared and charged.
Dozens of armored soldiers shoved forward like enraged bulls, turning their whole bodies into weapons.
Each stomp made the corridor tremble.
Layered plates slammed together, and dull metallic booms burst in succession.
Their armor was a finished structure—overlapping iron scales, leather reinforced at the joints, chains completing the seams.
They trusted the thickness and mass that heavy armor created, and came on.
Park Seong-jin stepped once with his sword raised.
His movement fixed in place.
Qi gathered over the blade.
A line of light, almost visible, drew itself straight along the edge.
A sharp, silent straightness.
The air split first with a thin sound.
The sword came down.
The line of light grazed a breastplate.
The iron split, and the flesh inside opened with it.
Blood burst a beat late.
A shield-bearing heavy trooper drove in with his body.
Park Seong-jin's sword moved across.
The line of light crossed the waist.
The belt fittings of armor, chain, leather, and flesh all cut away as a single resistance.
Then three, four more heavy troopers rushed.
Park Seong-jin cut in a continuous sequence.
The lines of light did not overlap.
They connected.
A line passed toward the throat.
Another touched the shoulder.
Another continued into the legs.
Each contact split the armor, and severed the meat and bone within.
The heavy troopers collapsed.
On their faces remained only the look of trying to understand.
Iron struck the floor again and again.
Blood ran down the cross-sections of severed armor.
The very concept of "heavy armor" came apart on the spot.
At the tip of Park Seong-jin's sword, a thin trace of light still lingered.
A divine technique.
A scene beyond the fighting of men.
The battlefield as seen through Goyongbo's eyes.
He had believed this trap was a complete calculation.
He mixed sword and spear.
He stacked hidden weapons in layers.
He fed light troops and heavy armor in staggered timing.
Escape routes were sealed.
Retreat was guided.
At the center he designed death to remain.
He remembered countless cases toppled by this same method.
But what he saw now broke the premise of that calculation.
The gap the swordsmen made and the spearmen's thrust vanished together.
Swords snapped.
Spears were slapped aside.
Human shapes were erased from the field.
It was not defeat by skill.
It was existence being tidied away.
Goyongbo's eyes shook.
This result had stepped outside the category of technique.
Next came hidden weapons.
Throwing blades and daggers, poisoned sand and powder, flying discs and nested pellets.
Poison darts from blowtubes, thrown darts, and needles overlapped—different speeds, different arcs.
The killing methods were sufficiently differentiated.
Watching it, he predicted the outcome.
His prediction stopped in midair.
The hidden weapons fixed in the air.
Throwing blades and daggers quivered and halted.
Poisoned sand and powder hung suspended.
Flying discs and nested pellets froze without touching.
Blowtubed needles and thrown darts stopped before the eyes.
It was not a wall.
It was order.
Space itself was obeying a rule.
Metal clattered as everything fell, and the corridor rang.
Goyongbo's foot slid back one step.
Any single hidden weapon might fail.
But the combination had been designed to function as a whole.
That design was neutralized here.
So the last choice left was heavy infantry.
Heavy armor was a class that bounced arrows, stopped blades, and turned the body itself into a weapon.
Seeing dozens of heavy troopers shove in, Goyongbo felt certain of the result.
He thought this fight was a matter of force and mass.
Then light was drawn.
A fine line extending from the sword cut through space.
Wherever it touched, iron and flesh separated together.
Breastplates opened.
Waists severed.
Shoulders and legs fell away.
As the armored men fell, traces of trying to interpret remained on their faces.
In that moment Goyongbo understood what kind of fight this was.
This was not failure.
It was an error of comparison.
He had only completed an optimization—combining troop types and weapons.
Park Seong-jin stood above every premise that made such optimization meaningful.
Not even a collar edge was brushed.
Breath remained even.
Goyongbo's hand trembled.
The design he believed perfect, the method proven again and again, the dark stratagems that had swallowed politics and war alike—were being sorted out in front of one man.
At that moment he recognized one thing clearly.
This was not a target to eliminate.
This was a presence to avoid encountering at all.
Park Seong-jin and Goyongbo's final face-to-face.
At last, Park Seong-jin stood before Goyongbo.
Goyongbo backed away until his back struck the wall.
Several spikes had already pinned the hem of his robe into the stone behind him.
They trembled as if they would tear flesh if he moved even slightly.
His breath leaked out in ragged bursts.
Only then did Goyongbo recognize one thing with clarity.
The possibility of escape was gone.
Every option he could have relied on had been erased.
Until now he had never stood with his back to a wall.
He had always put people in front of him.
If he gave an order, someone moved.
If he showed a name, a path opened.
Death was always something he sent outward.
He had never faced it directly.
But the wall touching his back now was not something he had built.
The cold feel of stone pushed away office, the Empress's name, and the many hands behind him all at once.
In this space, none of the power he leaned on could reach.
Each inhale tightened something deeper than lungs.
The fact of being alive itself became fear—
because the direction of the ending waiting one step ahead was clear.
His head tried to deny the situation.
His body had already accepted the conclusion.
What he relied on was the ability to kill people.
But what stood before him now was a being that "sorted people out" without explanation.
Goyongbo's gaze went to Park Seong-jin's hand.
Blood still clung there.
The fact that all the calculations and schemes that had filled this palace ended with that blood showed itself plainly.
His knees shook, and the legs that once issued orders could barely keep him standing.
This was not a scene where power had been stripped away.
Power had never reached this place to begin with.
The emotion filling Goyongbo was not rage, nor resentment.
It was the recognition that nothing could be reversed, and the despair that nothing could be avoided.
He parted his lips and forced out a sound.
"S… spare me."
Park Seong-jin looked down at him.
"The Empress."
Goyongbo's lips trembled.
"She isn't here."
"So it was a lie."
"…I'm sorry."
Park Seong-jin laughed low.
"There's no 'sorry' left between us."
Goyongbo's knees gave way.
He braced on the wall, barely upright.
"How can I make you spare me."
Park Seong-jin watched him for a moment.
"If it were you, would you believe you could repent and live straight."
"I will."
Goyongbo shouted like a scream.
"I truly will."
"Spare me."
Tears and snot mingled down the old eunuch's face.
The last gesture available to a man trying to live.
"I'll give everything I earned as a eunuch in this land."
The words spilled without stopping.
"Silver, ledgers, hidden wealth—everything."
"Just let me live."
Park Seong-jin stepped closer.
Goyongbo's body shrank by instinct.
"If you turn away," Park Seong-jin's voice stayed calm,
"I know your words will change."
Goyongbo's mouth opened, but no sound followed.
Even "spare me" lost its force.
In Park Seong-jin's eyes there was no pity, and no anger.
They were the eyes that look at a man whose conclusion has already been decided.
The bargain had never been possible from the start.